For those intrigued by theories I have before shared regarding how the Dark Ages comprise the largest coverup of the largest atrocity in human history, and of a bound demon clandestinely proffering the source of Israel’s global political influence, have I got a doozy for you.
We can give name to the very stars, but this doesn’t give us power over those stars, being as they are such things of incomprehensible distance alone. Yet a variety of myths assert that giving name to an evil is to claim authority over that presence, regardless of how removed it might be from us all, physically or metaphysically. Like magic itself, evil is merely a thing unknown. And as the stars were around long before our immodest attempts at defining them, one would imagine the same might apply to mythos as well, with good and evil existing fully-realized beyond our scope long before our lot even had a language more developed than blood rites.
And, the same could go for history as we know it, or as we don’t know it. (Apologies to Umberto Eco.)
I do believe that a pivotal turning point in the development of our civilization rests in the abrupt transition of the Dark Ages to the Crusades. There is an incredibly unspoken and quite convenient curiosity in how the Christian church, centuries of unrecorded history after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, reasserted itself onto the world stage with the resources for declaring war left and right across Eurasia. The fabled Knights Templar, super-soldiers of the Holy See, seemed explicitly hellbent on retreading the Silk Road of old, re-appropriating that pathway to spread the dominance of their faith. And while their dramatic accumulation of pillaged wealth incidentally led to the world’s first banking system, what if seeking out riches was merely a ploy, a smokescreen to itself fund the exploits, but with the ultimate aim being to seek out something other than the grail, something else entirely? Or what if, like the assorted sordid activities of the modern Google corporation, their true purpose was to catalog all that they met with among the diverse spaces between the five corners of the established world at large? Consider how the holy sacrament of individual confession was added by the church, who apparently found its omission from the bible to be lacking, though a rich opportunity for blackmail and extortion nonetheless.
After all, to say the Crusades were about conversion is like saying the USA only takes up arms when its liberties are threatened. Which is categorically the opposite of how things really operate. The victors of war are free to explain themselves with any cover story they might muster, and they always do so with broadly sympathetic flourishes in their war-painted makeup.
Just as abruptly of a historic transition was the betrayal of the Templars by the Christian church, expressly for ownership of the afore-mentioned wealth accumulated, leading indirectly to what historians call the Age of Discovery, where Christian leaders obliged European royals to continue crusading, with the Holy See’s full condolence, where the Templars left off. Only this next phase was purportedly focused with spreading Christian dominance south into the Horn of Africa and west to the Americas. The unimaginative royal dynasties sought riches to compensate their expenditures on such exploits with interest, but still a more subversive design could easily have been that continuing quest for god knows what, and a cataloguing of every peoples of every foreign shore. But as is the fundamental case with any and every greed-based collective, they would all eventually turn on one another’s enterprises. Empires are balloons that way, expanding til they burst and collapse in on themselves, flustering every which way as they’ve no actual grounding.
It’s never publicly expressed this way, but I suspect the various royals, in realizing that the Inquisition was in fact an ongoing affair, objected to having outside interests peering so closely over their own well-ornamented shoulders. So, I feel that the Western Schism truthfully grew from this, especially against undoubtedly frustrating economic implications caused by the backdrop of the Black Death, with European landowners desperately objecting to the Holy See’s eyes being exponentially bigger than its supposedly fasting stomach. And thus, dissenters finding in themselves the willingness to invest in rebellions, to reshape the growing infrastructure of the expanding boundaries of the world for private gains; an exceedingly old trick from the geopolitical handbook. Getting one’s enemies to undo themselves is so much easier than sacrificing one’s own tithe-payers.
The Reformation, a tom-ay-toe/tom-ah-toe divide within the church itself, grew from these matters, as did a surging number of anti-popes, and notably the Church of England. All of which in turn prompted the Counter Reformation, and the “soldiers of Christ” Jesuits purposed with picking up the slack of costly Hessian mercenaries who responded better to Europe’s family jewels than to religious mandate. Offended by the violence of early Jesuit priests, another splintery thorn fell away from the crown of Christianity, called Jansenism, which was immediately outlawed by the Holy See. And the more the church turned on its own, the more splinters arose.
While famously having already destroyed the greatest libraries of the world, the Vatican library was created in this era, undoubtedly curated from its growing collection of pillages the world over. And perhaps as a projection of its own predilections, its sins and truer leanings, it commissioned authorship for a tome called the Hammer of Witches; a work which strove maniacally to name all manner of evils in the middle ages. Essentially, it made possible the franchising of torturing people to death over any perceived lack of adequate belief in Christianity.
By the year of our lord 1600AD, the Black Death had run its course, as had the Crusades and the Inquisition. That year, the scholar Giordano Bruno was sentenced to death by the Vatican, and promptly burned at the stake, for the crime of being a vocal advocate of the scientific Copernican theory. That same year, Cardinal Filippo Spinelli, the Vatican’s ambassador in Prague, wrote to the Pope that the notoriously insane Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II was actually bewitched by the devil. But somehow his reign lasted another dozen years beyond that weighty complaint, probably due to false idols being cool then as well.
Elsewhere however, yet also in that year, the East India Tea Company was signed into legal existence. Arguably the world’s first NGO, as well as the first multinational corporation, the company enjoyed a colorful history of its own over the next three centuries, from importing/exporting silk to trading saltpetre and opium to leasing slave ships, to building the largest fleet of sea-going vessels the world had ever known. Under its dissolution in 1873, the entire fleet was incorporated into the British navy. But states Wikipedia:
The company employed many junior clerks, known as “writers”, to record the details of accounting, managerial decisions, and activities related to the company, such as minutes of meetings, copies of Company orders and contracts, and filings of reports and copies of ship’s logs. Several well-known British scholars and literary men had Company writerships, such as Henry Thomas Colebrooke in India and Charles Lamb in England. One Indian writer of some importance in the 19th century was Ram Mohan Roy, who learned English, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Greek, and Latin.
So it would seem that the company was just as interested in the cataloguing of everything under the sun, defining and redefining the world at large on its own terms and under its own authority. Indeed, its very existence seemed poised to continue the crusading in direct competition with the Vatican, only without the religious charades. The growing regional dominance of the Church of England had that bit enshrouded. With a very British nationalism at heart and expansive profit margins in mind, the East India Tea Company otherwise held the same ultimate pursuits as did the Vatican of the Middle Ages, planting its sigils wherever new colonies might be grown from the debris of whatever casualties of progress had lived there before.
To be continued…