A New History of Humanity, 592 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Thanks to Beast O’Neal for the gift of this book, who said, “I noted many similarities in Native American sources to your work, and, since its such a big book, I thought perhaps you could read it instead of my finishing it!”

Thanks, bro, and thanks.

These two learned and prolific authors, both academics step into the perpetual debate between the disciples of Hobbes and Rousseau, all of who miss the point, as do these two authors. The subject is the fantasy of rights and of social equality, both notions that are entirely Utopian and modern. They do find the first use of the term “equality” in a debate between the French soldier, and a Huron diplomat, penned by the former when he was on the run from the service he had deserted. It seems that the idea of equality as a social good is born of an Indian trying to explain to a European why he is a slave. This creeps into the discourse just about 1700 in Canada, at the Governor’s dinner table, at about the same time the term white, denoting a human economic unit with no racial distinction other than light skin, creeps into European language. The authors fail to investigate the French soldier’s slavery.

The inquiry into the all important question of equality of social outcome, a most stupid idea that no human with real life experience could possibly buy into, is abandoned as infantile by the authors who switch to a discover of when the odd notion came into European thought. They focus on later French, German and English thought and seem ignorant that the idea of the pre-Christian human being intruding on European Christian thought was hundreds of years older than North America, and began with the invasion of the Canary Islands, in which a fully heathen, fully European race of people were discovered and dealt with. [1]

I suspect this book to be a deeply honest attempt at the truth, and shall use it to explain how a specific American Amnesia is perpetuated which bars occupants of this continent from understanding anything about its past.

The authors employ the Jesuit Relations which I have skimmed. I shall use my gradual examination of this book in the Plantation America Project.

Omission #1

They do not mention that one of the Jesuits, Lajeun, described the Indians as naturally “white” and appearing like French peasants, although they read him more completely than I did.

Corruption #1

They disagree with Jesuit descriptions of Indians holding slaves. Whenever a scholar tosses primary sources out on post conceived notions the reader is being subjected to the Holy American Gaslight, the burning bush of Modernity, of the worship of THE LIE.

Omission #2

Use of Indians as galley slaves is noted, without context that the vast majority of such slaves were, and logically had to be, European. Combined with Omission #1 above, reinforcing the notion that only Europeans could hold slaves, and that only non Europeans could be slaves, despite the origin of the term slave having the greatest internal European antiquity.

Corruption #2

Warriors are describes as being primarily recreational hunters only dabbling on occasion in war, contrary to all period evidence, reflecting the feminine takeover of Native American identity politics over the past 50 years. This is a bald faced lie. A man had to KILL, capture a man to be a man!

Omission #3

The universal high regard that European multilingual debators who learned Indian languages to conduct religious debates with them, that tribal orators were better than Europeans and that tribesmen were generally smarter than Europeans, is presented as being based on daily leisure discussion. This omits the fact that such daily discussion was often concerned with how to kill and/or not be killed by enemy tribes, and that the counsel of war, as demonstarted by the autobiographies and biographies of Pontiac, Turtle, Blue Jacket, Tecumseh, Black Hawk and Geronimo, was the real genesis of tribal eloquence, as opposed to the bickering of civilized folk.

Corruption #3

Chiefs are described as being followed by warriors only as they fancied, omitting the fact that chiefs only gained power through results, by winning in battle, or making a beneficial logistical decision.

Omission #4

The French who were in contact with the tribes were described as consisting only of Priests, Trappers, Merchants and Soldiers. Omitted are the slaves that kept the priests alive, the slaves used by trappers as lackeys, the numerous slaves owned by each merchant, and the fact that nearly all soldiers were enslaved, rounded up at the point of a bayonet and forced into service.

Corruption #4

The omission of the majority unfree French, generally a 3 to 1 majority in woodland frontier settings, causes the corrupting idea that when Indians called Europeans slaves that they referred to self slavery, of money hunting and voluntary toil to keep from poverty in a world where the poor were allowed to freeze and starve, when in fact most Europeans were driven to work by the lash and the rod, not be greed. [2]

Omission #5

When the Indian diplomat Kandiaronk, debated with the French soldier Lahontan, an officer and volunteer, who had to flee service over jealousy and died in poverty and exile writing books of his experience, and who influenced the German thinker Leibniz, the tribesman points out that violent punishments within a tribe were alien to them. The foolish authors suppose that this was due to lack of violent action in general, when it was strictly interior to the tribe, and imply by default that the European criminal code was just. A brief look at French and English laws in the period under discussion would find more than 200 capital crimes, including theft of food, fishing, hunting, foraging, homelessness and being without a job, a master, a freedom pass or a coin. Most people remain invisible to inquiry due to the refusal to acknowledge that all races of humans are capable, by using force and by submitting to force, of holding slaves and of being enslaved. This omission dominates the unrevealed subtext of this well-meaning and quite naive book.

This takes us back to a reference in the introduction of the book, from a letter by Benjamin Franklin, who they neglect to point out was once a runaway slave, ran thousands of adds for the recovery of his racial fellows, and invented the term “Indentured Servant” as a way to imply the agency of an enslaved person in response to the habit of servants electing to go off and fight highly successful Indian warriors rather than continue toiling for Englishmen.

Corruption #5

Franklin relates that tribesman gone English prefer to return to tribal life and that children abducted by tribesmen never wanted to return to English life and would runaway to the tribes. This was obviously an expression of servitude and enslavement in English society, with many so-called abductees actually being runaways to groups who were racially mixed, with half of the Delaware chiefs having Gaelic names. The authors agree that many Europeans found high positions in eastern woodland tribes, and fail to note that they did not in western tribes. Overlooking this fact permits the authors t negelct to mention that racial distinctions were rarely mentioned in the eatsern woodlands. [3]

The Pre-Columbian Nordic/Gaelic migration hurdle cannot be crossed by academics, so will not be addressed here. What should have clued the authors in was this clause by Franklin:

[First, let us recall that Isrаel Potter mentioned being enslaved by “his friends,” in about 1770. I will comment in brackets.]

“...tho’ ransomed by their Friends [Franklin’s high case usage indicating a religious fraternity who collectively owns the individual.], and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life [weekly beatings, imprisonment, travel restrictions, not being permitted to marry until 21 even for “free” men], and the care and the pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again [escaping again, being an indication that these people had been liberated by the Indian ‘abductors’] into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” [Reclaiming is not loving, familial action, but re possession of property.]

[One must pay attention to capitalized words of this period. “Woods,” being capitalized implies it as a refuge for runaways, not simply a land yet to be tilled, but a place where the people who would be forced to till the land already taken from the forest might run and hide.]

This final passage below went right over the daft academic heads:

“Once instance I remember to have heard, where the person was to be brought home to possess a good Estate; [therefore a member of the planter class] but finding some care necessary to keep it together [beating the lazy and reclaiming runaways, paying taxes, fending off real estate lawyers, etc.], he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and a match-Coat, with which he took his way again into the wilderness.”

The authors seem to assume that the man merely had to tend a garden to maintain an estate, when he would have had to ride heard over probably dozens of unfree people bound to his service, the most able of which would seek their freedom, those too lazy to run staying behind to vex him with their poor standards of achievement.

Conversely, the authors fail to point out that most of the inhabitants of that wilderness would be that man’s enemies eager for his scalp. Hence the gun, and hence the even greater desperation of women and unarmed youths who ran away again without lethal means, indicating that slavery among Indians was preferable to slavery among English. No understanding penetrates the ivory tower heads that simply staying alive in that wilderness was harder physical work than what a planter did on his Estate. He left an Estate!

One thing unknown to the authors, was that the laws of The Province of Pennsylvania where Franklin became so highly placed after escaping from the daily beatings administered by his elder half brother who owned him as an apprentice, stipulated that when a crime was alleged between an Indian and a Planter that a jury of 6 Indians and 6 Planters was convened. Among these Indians were Chiefs with Irish names. The English laws extended to the Indians, as free men, and to the Planters, and granted ZERO consideration to Europeans who did not own other Europeans, for planter meant nothing more or less then the owner of other men to be planted on the work site. English freedom could only be had by two means: of owning humans, and by bearing arms for those power brokers who owned humans, these two facets of Plantation life central to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 and the American Revolution in 1775.

I shall maintain this book at my Portland residence, where I live with Anglicized Indians, and work over a section of this useful and hopelessly naive attempt to understand humanity from the viewpoint of those whose ethos it is to deny our shared humanity.

…

Notes

-1. For the interested reader, a better and thinner book, with much less modern feminist intrusion, is titled The Discovery of Mankind, by a man whose name begins with an A, and who wrote in the 1990s.

-2. The Huron had outlawed money as the prime corrupting agent of social decay, similar to how Germanic Odinists of about 100 B.C. outlawed money and maintained this ethic until the A.D. 200s. See Tacitus, Germania.

-3. Red Skin referred to war paint, not pigment. Names for Europeans included: wearers of leg coverings, wearers of hats, takers of fat, long knives, and most commonly French, English, Dutch, Spanish and American. Names for tribesmen from most to least common were Savage [dweller in the sylvan, woods], Heathen [non Christian], the name of the tribe, and gradually, generally and ultimately Indian.

A week ago I boarded the Coastal Starlight at 8:30 PM in San Jose. A man who was older, nicer, and larger than I by three good measures, waited for me to board ad then offered to assist with my tactical pack, which, at 28 pounds was almost too much for this runty bone rack to stow overhead. One travels alone on the train and finds himself bumped out of seats by couples, or, at better run stations, assigned a seat with another singleton. For this reason I meet new folks.

If it is a big man or a nervous woman, I leave and spend the trip in the cafe car. This fellow was six feet or more, so I spent the night in the main car. Feeling bad for my rudeness the night before, I bought us each a cup of coffee. His accent was Australian, modified for U.S. ears. I informed him that he was the second Australian in my life, and that the first one, John Byrd, was my employer some 40 years ago and hated me, declaring that I was a white aborigine. Andy spoke about the raw deal the Abos had got in his country and had some questions about my aboriginal existence before becoming a Tramp. I learned a lot and was pleased for such good company. I cannot reconstruct Andy’s words from memory. Below, I will note what I can recall of Andy’s story.

I will append Andy’s tail to Bob Johnson’s memoir, “I Could Not Kiss Ass!” as these men are mirrors of a masculine kind.

First, Andy is a fine figure of an old hand, still fit, with an easy way. He expressed a desire to finally take on a female retainer. Andy has a 34 foot ocean going boat, which he would like to staff with a crew of one, who, I reckon, based on his evident eye strain peering across the aisle at the lovely thing ensconced there in form-fitting white sweats, that an athletic, slightly plump, brunette who would like a real Captain in her life, will do nicely.

Send applications to jameslafond@proton.me. If you are not accepted by Captain Perry, never fear, some courtesy will be arranged by Andy’s talent scout.

Andy was born on Tasmania, the West Virginia Down Under, up in the mountains in very primitive conditions favored by his father. His father had fought the Japanese in Indonesia. He was also deployed, previously, I think, to Tabruk as it was taken by the Axis, to Greece as it was overrun by the Germans, and Crete as it was subject to the largest airborne invasion to date. He was the last man to leave Crete as it was taken. He then served in North Africa in numerous battles. As a veteran of the overused and mistreated ANZAC Corp, Andy’s father learned to distrust the government. Andy recalls as a boy that while hiking through the snow above Hobart to fetch supplies with his father, that the old man turned and told him he was making too much noise.

“My father moved in total silence—you could not hear him step.”

As a teen Andy had been driving illegally, to take his brother to Boy Scouts. The sheriff told his father that Andy needed to leave Tasmania or he was destined for jail. Andy went to sea in various capacities. He described himself as “a big lump o’ lad,” who was good for fishing vessel work and that he did not ever sail to Antarctica when the work was made available.

When he was old enough he joined the Australian Navy and became a helicopter pilot, after qualifying to be a fixed wing aviator. The Australian Navy “got rid” of their planes, so helicopters it wa. He was assigned as a Liason Pilot. His conditions of service can be accessed via:

www.HueyVets.com, official website of EMU, Operators of EMU 309.

Andy was attached to two U.S. Army helicopter units, one being a cavalry troop. He saw one of his American colleagues shot in the head and the copilot lift him from his seat, put him behind, and save the craft. That fellow ended up becoming a forestry firefighter in California where Andy had the honor of reuniting with him after having worked as a bush firefighter in Australia. He described Australian firefighting as a joke compared to American methods and that the ability for Americans to throw huge amounts of money at a problem makes them very effective. He also described Australia as “the 51st State,” discussing the fact that USG dictates his nation’s foreign policy.

Andy was thrilled to be tapped for missions by a U.S. Special Forces Colonel and irritated to be chewed out and removed from a mess for having an Australian Navy regulation beard by a lesser Colonel. That colonel was Andy’s job for the next day and expected that Andy would ferry him about despite the hierarchical acrimony. Andy said, “Colonel or not, I was the captain of that [helicopter],” and then played a game of what is the matter with the plane with his crew chief. Disgusted, the colonel stamped off and the men had a free day to “repair” the craft.

In Vietnam Andy discovered that some officers were trying to win a war and others were simply concerned about points of decorum. He informed me that the Navy could not grant permission to “grow a beard,” that being God’s call. Rather, the sailor was granted “permission to cease shaving.” Some time later, a week, I think, the resulting growth was inspected by an officer, and if it was not some weak affront to beardliness, nature was permitted to take its bristly course.

After combat service in Vietnam with U.S. warfighters, Andy and his mates returned to peacetime service in, Perth, I think. Here they were informed that their wild tales of combat were lies, that they had learned nothing, that no lessons were learned in combat that could possibly improve upon Australian Naval Aviation. The war vets were targeted as pariahs, and as he put it, the Navy was such a small place, that an enemy made of one officer was made of all. Andy and his fellows were shunned and shunted and he ended up not completing his hitch and went into private service flying in Southeast Asia.

Since his younger days Andy has worked as a pilot, a fire fighter, as a fishery hand and sport boat captain, has a great boat made of painted gum wood which he and his son and some other fellows operate out of a balmy inlet in the tropical north of his nation, Queensland I think. He is proud to have a son who has not joined the military and is “a real hard man,” who lives by a code of honor and “sorts out,” those lesser sorts of men who insist on trouble. Andy’s son actually built a bunk over top of the engine so that he can wake and go right to work on the motor when at sea.

Andy was a gentleman, and even made certain his seat mate for a night and a day made it off the train platform in Portland on, “those sticks,” and swore that my inability to stow my pack was the fault, not of my decrepitude, but of an obstinate can of Spam.

Andy Perry spends a month at a time touring America, hosted by U.S. Aviators he met in Vietnam, who are a true family to him.

Upon meeting James in 2022, or late 21, I think, he gifted me this university paper he wrote, in 18 point lucida unicode, so I could read it! I have finally taken the time to read his work. I have read Norse sources, but have not studied any of them. This reading has been a learning experience for me. Below I will note some of his major themes and offer some similar examples from other Arуan literature.

Gifting as the core to the privilege a tribal headman enjoys in leading his kinsmen, peers and loyalists is addressed early and continues as a theme. In civilization, the lower status people give to the higher status people. In tribal society, the flow of giving descends rather than ascends across warrior cultures.

Drinking as a social bonding action serves multiple purposes. Tacitus informs us that Germans never made a treaty unless over drink, and then ratified it soberly the next day. This practice survives among military men to this day, who do not trust the man who they have not seen drunk, when the affectations peel away. The place of the mead cup lady of the hall is predicted in Gilgamesh when the breweress bars the door of her tavern to the hero until he reveals himself of goodwill. This tradition was continued directly by the pyrates who revolted against Modernity in its early phase and wrote their constitutions and had trials over a bowl of punch.

Lineage, expressed before personal signification in Beowulf, is noted in the discussion of combining Viking funeral wakes and the feast of assumption of leadership by the dead chief’s successor, remains as important as it was to the heroes of Homer. From the earliest date it was important to declare one’s bloodline before a duel.

Bragging, so disgusting in modern, Christian-influenced society, is discussed as an actual necessity in a pre-literate age, so long as it is prefaced by a declaration of lineage, placing one’s father first. This is rock solid Arуan ethics and is most permanently reflected in the epigrams of Agon victors of ancient Greece.

Renown is actualized by the holding of a feast, the giving of gifts and the demonstration of a chief’s willingness to bring armed, drunken warriors together, even to conduct poetic insult contests. Not only is the chief showing his willingness to spread the wealth of success, he is conducting himself from the high seat of the hierarchy in a manner reflective of command over the chaos of battle, when cool heads direct hot actions at the best place, angle and time. In the Rage of Achilles, Agamemnon has violated this most ancient precept.

Death of a chief and internment in a barrow reflects a reciprocal trust that extends beyond life, that the chief who recognized and rewarded the acts and honor of his men, would be so recognized in death. These barrows are of the greatest antiquity, described in the first poem of heroic tradition from ancient Greece, Hesiod’s The Shield of Herakles. I contend that this work was more ancient than Homer’s work, though academia disagrees.

From the internment of the kings of Scythia to the funeral ships of the Vikings, we have physical evidence of this bond, as well as Hesiod’s notation that a river god might obliterate such a barrow, if a chieftain violated the precepts of piety.

Below are some select quotes:

“… the chieftain’s longhouse, itself the sun around which all the activities of the feast orbit. The food for the feast is hunted, fished, or grown within its domain, much of the alcohol is brewed nearby if not stored inside, many of the utensils and serving dishes were no doubt manufactured by craftsmen from the surrounding villages, in short, the longhouse was the center of the local world to which everything and everyone contributed.”

“The extent of Viking trade can be demonstrated by the fact that Sweden is a better source for obtaining silver (but not gold) Samanid coins than Afghanistan, where the coins originated.”

“...braggot (unhopped beer sometimes mixed with mead or other herbs for flavor) or ale, along with mead, often mixed together in a sort of beer-fruit wine and honey cocktail.”

“…the practice of flyting, i.e., ritualized exchanges of insults in verse, is well documented.1 A wide variety of games are known to have occurred, including board games2. Wrestling and tests of strength among men were equally popular, and meeting solely for the purpose of engaging in games was not unheard of.”

Odysseus among the Phaceans, and as the beggar in his own hall, both demonstrate the great antiquity of hall feasting as a social sorting mechanism.

“The organization of seating in the Viking Age hall was based on one´s position in the dominance hierarchy, where a seat closer to the chieftain was more respectable.”

Odysseus at the Door with the errand runner, who he must box to establish his place at the foot of his supposed masters, is a prelude to his slaughter of the men who had violated the sanctity of his hall when he was at war, as well as the favor of his queen, Penelope, who offers the most extensive portrait of the chief’s wife’s place as a logistical and confirming force in the ritual of the men’s hall, where women were active.

“The mediation of this tension is the purpose of the lady of the hall, who partly through her reassurances to less successful warriors prevents violence within her husband´s retinue.”

“…people of the pre-Christian era of the Viking Age viewed feasts as sacred rites, not mere earthly political undertakings.”

The Three Feasts

“…towards winter for a good season, one in the middle of winter for the crops, and a third in summer; that was the sacrifice for victory.”

There is an ancient legend that Simonides, the famous epigramist of Ceos, who immortalized the Spartans who fell at Thermopyle, was a guest at a chieftain’s hall in Thessaly. The chief held him captive under threat and his hall was leveled by an earthquake. The poet survived, some claiming that two angels, Polydeukes and Castor rescued him. Note that while Germanic and Viking feasts involved armed men, that Greek hospitality had evolved to the giving over of one’s weapon at the door, and that citizens of classical antiquity were generally unarmed in their own community.

“…drinking rituals are the focus of the literature. This may be because they were the most significant and unique events and those which were associated with bonds…”

“What is unique about the feast is not the feast itself, but the variations of it. From the feast, a variety of other events were associated. The feast was the cultural highlight of the Viking Age…”

James closes with a section from Beowulf which shows the feast in the great hall at its most cohesive, revealing the discord that the depredations of Grendel had caused in antithesis.

Timocreon, a boxer and butcher, was accused of hall treachery by none other than Simonides! Milo and other Olympic Victors engaged in feasting after the agons they contended in, always as a scared rite, and sometimes as a contest. The agons of Hellas, with the focus on sacrifice and truce, along with the prohibition of weaponry, seem to represent, not in infection of civilized enslavement of the warrior, but a method for scaling up friendly competition among many cities, consisting each of 2 to 12 tribes, by way of truce. It is no accident that the Macedonion hero king, Alexander, who exemplified the war chief like no other, attended the Olympic sanctuary at Elis.

Alexander & Attila

While Alexander attempted to expand the feast, gifting away everything and refusing to entertain betrayal at feast to the point of falling victim to poison, Attila simply scaled up the hierarchy and multiplied the frequency of feasting to the point where that indulgence seems to have killed him. This would be the fate of many Mongol kings. Tamerlane used the feast, without participating, as a management device, keeping all his plans to himself. In the light of these examples, I suggest the Viking Feast as very conservative, reserved for three seasonal events and for victories, mindful of resource limitations. The acceleration of alliance, acquisition, submission and distribution of power that propelled steppes conquerors seems to have exceeded the feast’s capacity as a social concord event.

Homer & Hesiod no doubt served in such halls as poets, as did Teraldus the Norman composer of The Song of Roland and the unknown and probably ancient composer of Beowulf. The poet seems to emerge as a third party replacement for the direct bragging and insulting of the more primal hall, exemplified in The Iliad, the Odyssey and Beowulf. It is likely, that Hesiod was murdered while following this capacity, eschewing the subtextual objections of corrupt rule favored by Homer for a blunt indictment of lords as “bribe-eaters.”

Christendom replaced the hall with the church, where God ruled, and removed the chief to his mostly empty hall, divorcing the people from the ruler and adding dozens of feast days for the people, who congregated with their lord on Sunday, in God’s Great Hall. This facilitated larger scale war-making and social control and was eagerly accepted by both classes. In The Song of Roland feasting is gone and is replaced by the Council of Peers.

The Drawing Room and the Fancy descend from the feast of the great hall and formed a refuge in modern times from the counting house and courtroom. The Fancy culture, which brought the disenfranchised urban nobility and rural working class together under the ceilings of inns and taverns and even in the drawing rooms of great men, emerged to support the heretical activities of gambling, prize-fighting and dueling across the Anglo World in a multi-class manner that exceeded the aristocratic reaction to the loss of the ancient hierarchical hall across the rest of the Arуan world. I suggest that this was due to the more complete victory of merchant ideology that emerged doppelganger-like thru Christianity in England. The church never prosecuted boxing and other masculine rites so much as the middle class and their police.

Thank you, James Anderson, who my webmaster calls “James the Innocent,” as a mirror upon some tarnished namesake.

I had the pleasure of meeting a man who has been a captain, a captain of a boat in the south seas and a helicopter pilot in Southeast Asia in the conflict that has often been known as The Helicopter War. He is more than ten years older than I and offered to help me with my small pack, which I was having a hard time stowing. Too proud by half, I extracted the can of Spam that was holding up the stowage and said, “This is the offending party, Sir—I’m weak, but too proud to be outwitted by a can of meat, as well as bullied.”

“No offense. But I see you on sticks and with one eye…”

And this lesser geezer talked to that old hand for a good 10 hours. He made many friends among U.S. Army and Marine aviators, who he is currently visiting, in Vietnam when he served as an Australian Navy Pilot and Liason. Andy Perry, has assured me that some of his war stories are in a book titled Too Bold To Die, for which he was interviewed. I will write my recollections of his reflections in another article. I have noted him here, because his view of life as a captain of his own boat and of a government flying machine, as well as piloting for private companies, jives with everything that every military man has told me about modern military service—that the officers who do not go into combat, which is most of them, are far less concerned with “winning” the war they are in, than they are with hamstringing the warriors under their command. Soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines and such are fine, as long as they are as obedient as a whipped dog. But men who are warriors at heart, from top to bottom, are treated as full-time traitors to the system they serve.

Major Wolf, who was a major and acting colonel in the U.S. Army Rangers, told me that “colonel and up are political officers—management.”

Soldiers in recent wars have told me how they were not permitted to go after the enemy but instead shuttled women around who worked for government agencies so that they might insult allied patriarch warlords, or guarded opium supplies. A man currently in service has confided in me that in his elite tactical unit he cannot find a single sparring partner for unarmed or knife training, and that close range killer instinct is all but extinct among his fellows, that they are “just distance killers.” That phrase is key to this inquiry.

Distance.

Andy was among a small group of Australians who were “patched-in” to serve with U.S. forces. He told tales of how he and his men were harassed by a rear echelon colonel and tapped for unconventional services by a special forces combat colonel. Many acts that got things done were against the rules. Then, after a year of being in actual combat, he and his mates returned to the stay behind fellows in their naval aviation units. These combat veterans were “shunned,” “spat upon,” told that the experiences they claimed to have had were lies. None of the valuable combat lessons they learned were applied to training. They were drummed out of the service one at a time for being warriors.

This reminded me of the fate of successful Roman generals, who were hated by their masters. It also reminded me of what law officers have told me about the political controls that prevented them from protecting anybody. As well, the combat arts world in which actual fighters, men who have fought, let’s say with a stick, knife, bat, fists, are shunned and excluded by instructors and entire systems of “combat” for the very fact that they are combat experienced.

I had packed these notions of distance from reality being favored by our systems of delusion perpetuation away in the back of this dinged wrong think sink of a brain.

Then, with the perspective of distance, putting on my shaded distance glasses in the Dive Bar, I enjoyed quite a good NFL game, Chargers verses Broncos. An historic event occurred in which an interference with a fair catch of a punt, resulted in the choice of kicking a field goal from that deep distance, a kick that succeeded for the first time since 1976!

The ancient arena was a distraction for the mob, as well as a meditation on death in close combat which was the foundation of Roman social success imposed on some 39 nations.

Likewise Football is a mimic of American industrial might and management. It is not just a distraction for the idiot mob. Football is a genius construct, a veritable Enchidna, a titanic subtextual monster at one with the system. The NFL was supported by military ads when it turned on its rural fans in 2020, 21, 22, losing its base advertising, even serving as poling places for the 2022 vote that focused on urban over rural concerns.

Yes, there is much social conditioning built into the advertising, the rules changes, the carefully scripted off-screen management of commentator dialogue. There are now 8 opinion/editorial talking heads on every NFL telecast, all reading from scripts handed down from management! This is huge, a tripling of same time editorializing of the actions in the past generation. The constant audio management of the viewer is, from a social perspective, HUGE.

The benefits of conditioning Americans to see everything from an “us verses them” my team against their team, taking the focus off of the fan farmers who point the rival herds of animals at each other like politicians, is obvious. Yet, this false duality construct is better than politics, as the controlling hand is more artfully kept from view. The real “us versus them” construct, in the minds of free people, would be fans against team owners. But the team owners increase their troves by farming our herd instincts through the use of avatars. This suppresses our pack instincts, as the pack instincts that made man what he once was, are acted out and satiated on the false field.

After speaking with Andy and reflecting on the Roman Arena, I saw the use of football in a nation whose business is starting wars that it does not wish to be won, in a deeper light.

The obvious fact that NFL quarterbacks are natural captains leaps from every game. These are high functioning American-style captains, men whose actions are directed by audio commands and wrist-mounted doctrine options by genius level managers in the high boxes, who make the actual decisions. A captain acts in crisis according to a code in free situations [frontier/piracy/etc.] and according to his orders, in military and football settings. For every man on the field there are 10 on the sidelines and in the command posts, very much like WWII American warfare. [0] Quarterbacks and defensive and special teams captains are the kind of men that would have been the centurians of Rome, who were once the actual captains of ships that peopled the world, the captains of frontier stations, the men who rose through the ranks in all-in wars that once mattered to become generals that won battles and conquered nations. NFL quarterbacks are all college graduates. They’re specialty is winning in close perilous situations, and of obeying and amplifying their genius masters pulling their mental strings from unseen vantages.

Winning is winning. A brilliant masculine mind, who has been assigned a map of the battle, who is appraised of values of the combatants, and is educated in the rules of the conflict that must not be breached less his master’s goals concerning the post-war peace advantages that are the goal of the contest, is the best man for that task. If, Earth was attacked by aliens, the existing combat officers would best be replaced by NFL quarterbacks, advised by the sergeants. The higher officers, everybody in management up to the Joint Chiefs, would be replaced by coordinators, coaches, scouts, managers, owners taken from the NFL—if, the goal was to win.

If you want to win, you tap winners for the task, not the task specialists, who should assist the winners. America fights its wars, since 1946, in such a way that would be like boxing bouts decided by the cut men battling it out while the prizefighters gambled on the outcome.

But, the goal is not to win.

Winners are instinctively drummed out of every civilized military establishment as soon as the system they serve is no longer subject to a terminal threat. [1]

Since the time Andy Perry flew to the rescue of American warriors in an alien land, over 50 years ago, it paramount that the Seattle Seahawks win their game today, with players valued at the cost of tanks and planes. But USG war fightes have been denied the taste of victory, and the people they supposedly represent care more about what goes down on the human chessboard called a gridiron then in any of the wars fought by “their” nation between 1946 and 2024? [2]

The aliens are here, above us, the enemies of all mankind, who use our very best winners to play games rather than lead an escape from the prison farm where they harvest our bodies and souls for their unsavory feast.

…

Notes

-0. WWII remains in book shelves as 90% of military history in American stores. 6% is civil war, 4% the other 10,000 years. This is evidence of a deep, frozen retardation of current American curiosity and perspective.

-1. Victor Davis Hansen’s Hero Generals is a good study of this, as well as my parallel project The Son of God, posting at:

-2. As football has overtaken baseball in popularity, American public attention to USG wars has declined along an opposite arc. In the age of Baseball, before 1946, Americans cared about the wars its soldiers and sailors fought. There is a corresponding, perhaps corollary reflection of this in the incline of aviation warfare alongside the decline of public attention to war.

The curators of this poem decry it as “spurious,” written by another, later, poet under Hesiod’s name. And perhaps it was, perhaps too was the Odyssey composed by a son or assistant of Homer, such like Plato wrote the dialogues of Solon and Socrates, Theophrastus the works of Aristotle, and without Arrian’s pen we would not have the works of his teacher, Epictetus. Yet, this briefer, and in some ways better, poem concerning a shield decorated according to the life of a classical community, speaks less to every day life and more to strife then did the work of Homer in the Iliad under The shield of Achilles. The curators also name the shield of Herakles as a mere imitation of this work, yet both were composed by contemporaries of the 700s B.C. the city described on the shield is that of Thebes, of Seven Gates, the principal city of Hesiod’s home region, the city of Antigone.

The poem begins with Herakles and Iolaos, his heroic companion and chariot driver, about to travel through a sacred precinct on diplomatic business, with full knowledge that Kidnus, a vicious bandit and demigod, a son of War [1], and his father, War Himself, would waylay them. Herakles orders Iolaos to avoid combat and leave the enemy to him, his companion agreeing to act as his squire in this affray. The lead horse is a black-maned stalion.

This alone, shows Herakles as a past master of War, as he recounts how he laid War low once, placing him as something of an Alexander, a Nathan Bedford Forest, a Patton, who throve on the battlefield that ruined most and did so in protection of those not so completely designed for battle. As an allegory, we are possibly being treated to a case of war cause, where a simple visit to an ally, brings about the jealousy of a minor war chief, who brings in those who he owes fealty to by his own rash demise. Herakles does try a parlay and is attacked by Kidnus, which assures that the heavenly sire of the bandit will seek revenge.

Gray-eyed Athena, who wields the storm-shield, “equal in Might to Zeus Almighty” and therefore the angelic agent that assures the reader that “all-seeing” Zeus whose least favorite heavenly son is War, is focused upon this act of his half-human son Herakles being attacked like a bastard by a jealous older step-brother. As the listener to Homer knew that Achilles had long ago died at Troy, the listener to Hesiod knew as well, that Herakles had been hated by most of the heavenly powers, had slain monsters, helped, tricked and aided gods, served kings, fathered a human line, committed some atrocious act upon his own wife, and in madness cut down a forest as his own funeral pyre, and mounting it, sent his own smoke up to heaven, where the immortals agreed he had earned a place in their ranks.

Achilles and Herakles, whose son and grandson would fight each other at Troy [2], were both doomed heroes with merely enough of the divine in them to dominate men in battle, but not to outwit the honor-skulking lords of men, but only to outwork them. These heroes appealed to the working man, the fighting man of low rank, and to those few war chiefs who lead rather than directed men in war, like Alexander, who sacrificed to Herakles after every battle. Their shields, both wrought by the arts of Hephastius, armorer and tinker of the gods, who used robot assistants, represents scenes of strife and concord on their faces. The shield of Herakles has a stronger focus on strife. The shields themselves have various metals and other arts used in their composition, which is a way of declaring man’s use of fire that had been taken back once by Zeus, and then stolen and gifted to man by Prometheus. The shield, along with the rage of Achilles who went to the underworld, and the dogged prowess of Herakles who was admitted into the overworld, represented a divine acceptance, even assistance, in man’s challenge to both metaphysical realms.

Made by one god, permitted by the Almighty, brought by yet another god, and used to battle rival men and extra-human powers on earth, the shields of Achilles and Herakles were the ancient equal to the swords of Roland and Arthur, of the horn of Roland. From a Christian perspective the minor helper gods are angels and the monsters and evil gods are demons and devils. The shield represents war threatening and defending humanity, the favor of heaven in war, and of the imperiled community protecting the mind and supporting the efforts of its hero. Where the modern hero is outcast for the crime of fighting and is sent to the margins in disgrace, resented most of all by his military and political superiors [3], the ancient hero, if slain is honored by some immediate construction, not by some belated guilt-inspired monument a generation or more later. If victorious, after a purification rite, to make certain he has not been infected by the terrible essence of war to his core, he is accepted back into the community. Thus, the god-given shield in myth is an affirmation of the hero. [4]

“Or like her… from her head and her dark eyes was a blowing grace,” begins the story of Herakles, with the plight of his mother, Alcmene, Electrion’s light-stepping daughter.”

“Meanwhile, the father of gods and mortals was weaving another design for both gods and men, who eat bread… That very night he [Zeus] lie with Electrion’s fair-stepping daughter.”

Zeus impregnated the wife of Amphitrion, shepherd of the men of Thebes of Seven-Gates with Herakles, who fathered a lesser brother. Iolaos, Herakles nephew, is the son of Herakles’ half-brother.

Herakles comes upon Kidnus in the precinct of Apollo, the god of arts and far shooting dooms, who brought Herakles upon the “high-hearted son of Ares” who was using Apollo’s sanctuary to ambush wayfarers. Ares s a mad god, a maniac rushing and roaring.

Below I shall note some of the aspects of the shield of Herakles:

“A wonder to look at for all about the circle of it with enamel and with pale ivory and with electrumn it shone, and with gold glowing it was bright, and there were bowls of cobalt driven upon it.

“In the middle was a face of Panic [6] not to be spoken of, glaring on he beholder with eyes of fire glinting, and the mouth of it was full of teeth, terrible, repulsive, glittering white.

“While over the lowering forehead hovered a figure of dread, marshaling the slaughter of fighting men, cruel spirit, who took the senses and the perception and the will to fight out of warriors who faced Zeus’ son, the War God. [7]

“And the souls of these went under the ground to the house of Hades, and lie there, while the bones with the rotting flesh festering upon them remained above on the black earth, under the sun star’s withering…”

This begins a brutal, graphic picture of war worthy of Hieronymus and other artists of the Reformation who depicted men as nihilistic ciphers afflicted by witches, devils and demons. Snake-haired furies collect the bodies of the dead, death herself leading off a dead man and one living to. Tin worked in the face of the shield provides various scenes. The most telling scene is of a pack of boars and a pride of lions battling, one lion having already slain some boars but pig kind not giving back, but fighting on. This recalls the boar tusk helmets of the Homeric heroes and also of Beowulf, a symbol of stubborn defiance against greater force. Likewise, the lion’s mane is the model for the medieval crown, based on the ancient snake-inspired diadem of rulers, which gave way in the heroic age of Feudal Christendom to the leonine crown.

“The figures of Onrush and Backrush, on it the figures of, on it Battlenoise and Panic and manslaughter were blazing, and Hate was there, with Discord among them, and Death, the destroyer…”

Yet, beyond this, was a seven-gated city, outside o which old men prayed to Heaven to spare their community. Within the walls men and women went about workaday tasks, and also enjoyed boxing and chariot racing contests. This presentation is less extensive than that of the Shield of Achilles, with Hesiod’s emphasis on the superhuman powers which afflicted those men who were out afield protecting this city.

Athena attends the battle, advising War against the combat with Herakles, “wearing the gloomy aegis.” Hesiod’s various descriptions of the aegis assures us that it originated with a concept of storm and the shielding of man from storm, related both to the shield and the origin of the shield, the animal hide, draped over the left arm.

“Well-versed in the toil and sorrow of battle,” Herakles kills Kidnus and wounds War, who is born off by his demonic attendants, Fear and Rout. Herakles and Iolaos stripped Kidnus of his amr and drove to the Citadel of Trachys, which had been their destination. Kyex, “who was a friend to the blessed immortals,” was buried by the various inhabitants of the local cities in solemn ceremony.

The poet, Hesiod, concludes, with compassionate tones:

“But the river Anatus, swollen with winter rain, obliterated the barrow and the grave, for this was the will of Leto’s son, Apollo, because Kyex had waylaid and robed the offerings as men brought them to Pytho.”

Pytho was the sanctuary of Apollo, the Shining One, whose oracle would one day demand that Hesiod’s grave, near where he was murdered in the sanctuary of Nemean Zeus, be moved to a better place.

Hesiod proved to be a prophet of numerous events after his life, and in this, his neatest effort, closely based on Theogony and Works and Days, takers of other men’s work by force, and Robbers and Murderers, in the person of Kyex, even with the sanction and aid of War, are punished by the acts of a hero under the sanction of the better angels of Heaven.

Notes

-0. “Arion of the Black Mane”

-1. Ares is also wounded by Diomedes in the Iliad, and stands alone as the god most often wounded by mankind. This reader takes the plight of Ares, monster child of heaven as a sign of a higher indulgence for our kind.

-2. Quintus Smyrneus, The Fall of Troy, Book 8, Alexander was descended from Neoptolomas, son of Achilles, who sacked Troy and killed and grandson of Herakles. He therefore sacrificed and atoned to the deities offended by his ancestor after battle and at Troy.

-3. Rome was very modern in this, with victorious generals almost assured of being murdered by those they served, in the same way that Patton was done away with by USG and the general fear of combat veterans by USG subjects. Note how every western hero in movies must ride into the sunset and may not stay in the community he served. Latinus, son of Odysseus and Circe, twice bedding goddesses, was called by Hesiod powerful and thoughtless, a characteristic that that nation would carry down through Late Antiquity.

-4. While Samson is the best Biblical counterpart of Herakles, it is David, poetic hero king, who in his psalms recognizes he has been provided a shield from heaven. As well, the minor angels are said to bear swords at gateway places.

-5. Gold alloyed with a small part silver

-6. Or Rout, One of War’s attendants, along with Discord and Fear.

-7. Herakles is about to fight War, with War’s own mirror upon his arm.

Some months ago Ruben and his family were tragically burned out, losing everything, including the death of their pets. There is a link below in case you have the ability to help out. Ruben was texting me while he and his family were sleeping on the ground this winter. They are trying to rebuild.

April 8, 2025

James,

I hope all is well. I was enjoying your recent podcast with Jeth about berserkers, not only for your flattering words about myself which soothed a head still aching from sparring. I found your investigation of the ‘Berserk’ state throughout antiquity fascinating. I think there is a lot to be said for the ‘trance’ being achieved in multiple ways, and your description of the realm of time and measure which fighters enter in this state was poetic. I was inspired to offer what I know about the Norse Berserker to enrich the conversation.

In Old Norse Berserker can mean “bear shirt” or “bare shirt”, either referring to the totemic animal cult of the indo-europeans or to their habit of going into battle bare-chested. I see no reason that it didn’t refer to both meanings to the people of the Viking Age, who tended to be much less rigid about definitions than moderns.

The cult of the bear is very old in Scandinavian mythology, and one of the greatest heroes of the Saga of Hrolf Kraki is one Bodvar Bjarki,who was able to enter a trance like state and become a bear in battle (I particularly enjoy this depiction of him).

The bear is not the only totem of the berserks, the wolf and potentially the boar are attested by archaeological and saga evidence. It is interesting to note that warriors who we would call berserkers but who wore wolf skins are sometimes called ulfheðnar (wolf-skins). I doubt they were considered differently from the bear-skin warriors; the Germanic warriors depicted on Trajan’s column wear both wolf and bear pelts.

Berserkers are also closely associated with the cult of Odin, the god of fury and frenzy (which dovetails nicely with your idea of the head-god granting special glory to those he has doomed to die, Odin also being the lord of hosts to whom captives were often sacrificed). Berserkers are referred to as ‘Odin’s men’. I believe that Odin was the patron god of Berserkers, and that there was some belief that he gifted them their fury. What allows some men to achieve this versus others I think may have something to do with heritable traits, which would explain the berserks' unique status.

By the viking age berserkers appear in several roles, as elite shock troops, pirates, champions, and marauders. They often show up at a farm challenging a man to a duel over his land or wife, an impossible choice since he will most likely lose to the berserker. It is unclear how much later writing is tainted by Christian animosity for this intensely pagan cult. Berserkers were even outlawed in Norway and Iceland, adding credence to the theory that they were distinct from other men.

The best modern portrayal of the Berserker is in the fantastic film “The Northman”, where they are shown performing a ritual dance where they assume their beast forms, and after the raid are completely drained by the effort of their exertion.

This is largely how I think they must have been; exceptional warriors who exalted a totemic animal cult mixed with the cult of Odin and his frenzy, who through ritual were able to intoxicate themselves into an ecstatic fury in which they did not feel pain or fear bodily harm. Certainly the men you want on your side!

I feel that I have been able to access some lesser version of this in the mosh-pit of death metal concerts, when I have for hours hurled myself at other men without fear of injury, entranced by the furious music, only to wake up the next day unable to move.

Why they do not exist today I sometimes ponder. The nature of modern conflict is not very conducive to a berserk state, where stealth and discipline are key. But I know that elite warriors today have to attune their mental state before they go into combat.

Hopefully you and your readers found this interesting and useful. I look forward to the rest of the podcast series.

James,

Thank you for this.

Last week in Costa Mesa, CA, I coached at the American Gym under the eye of Coach Drexler, an MMA pro who fought in Japan some time ago. In another time, he would have been one of these types. If you are in that area, I’d suggest seeking him out for a private. He’s trained champions.

After this discussion with Jeth I began listening to Xenophon repeatedly for the Alexander project, the Odyssey as well. When sacrificing to God in his manifestation of The Deliverer or the Oath Binder, often based on an earlier promise to that God before battle, the sacrifice was of: a boar, a ram and a bull. In Tarlantia, for a pre-battle curse against Alexander, it was three boys, three girls and three black rams. The Athenians promised Artimus [an angel in Christian parlance] a goat for every Persian killed. But “The Father of Gods and Men,” demanded masculine offerings in the same context.

Odysseus, in consultation with a deceased prophet visited in the Land of the Dead, must make the same sacrifice after traveling so far inland with an oar over his shoulder that some man identifies it as a threshing pole. This indicates an inland origin for the warrior nations who became pirates. Of interest is that the afterlife is found “in The Land of the Midnight Sun,” being Nordic or Arctic, where the Kimmerians have their city. The Kimmerians were the first blond Huns of perhaps 900 B.C. to ride horses rather than use chariots.

There continued depredations in Greek Asia inspired Kallinus of Ephesos to poetry for the men of his city:

[of 21 lines, untitled, adapted from Lattimore]

“How long will you live in ease, and when will you find courage, young men...”

“A man as he dies, should cast his spear for the last.

It is a high thing, a bright honor...”

“When it is ordained that a man dies, there is no escape from death, not even for one descended from deathless gods...”

“Great and small mourn the slain hero...”

“He acts as an army, though one man.”

This came true for Promachus of Pellenes in about the 390s B.C. when he broke the Corinthian shield wall, though he lived. But to accomplish such a thing, being resigned to die is a precondition for success. Letting go of life in combat is like slipping a leash, to be unleashed from social and mortal concerns, and set upon those still fettered to their petty desires and safety. This is the subtext of Odysseus and his few loyalists slaughtering hundreds in his wine hall, for which he sacrificed the three masculine animals. The boar tooth helmet of the Iliad and Beowulf echo this, as do the dreams of Charlemagne involving a greyhound defending him against a leopard and a lion. And, do not forget the aegis, the storm shield, stylized as a gray fleece, probably of a ram, rather than a simple goat. The aegis may well have been inspired by cataclysmic events. However, the storm shield is employed by blue-eyed Athena [a Valkerie/angel] who alone among the minor powers of heaven does not need instruction from God but knows his will, therefor being an aspect, a “daughter” power. I suggest bull hide shields, boarhead helmets and fleece cloaks as intermediate artifice adopted by the semi-domesticated but still heroic descendants of the first Arуans, something between the lion skins worn by Herakles, Polydamas and Dioxiphos [all murdered by dastard plots] and the red cloaks of their more civilized descendants.

I am inclined to read Norse source translations for congruent threads with the Hellenic.

For now I must concentrate on the functional artifice in Xenophon’s Anabasis for clues to deeper things.

I cannot shake the feeling [not a thought] that the Agrianes, Alexander’s most loyal troops, though allied, some 60 times, attacked more numerous and often heavy armed enemies, head on, though light troops themselves. Against a tribe that had remained unconquered they were reported to have “yielded nothing.” Their use by Alexander was like that of Messach Browning with his dog, circa 1800. With a single loyal dog, Messach would slay wolves, bears, cougars and panthers with a knife, mounting their backs while his outmatched dog locked jaws with the beast. Semi-barbarian troops of their time typically wore fox caps and wolf skin mantels. These, I think, were not mere ornamentation.

“Work foolish Perses, do the work that the gods have decreed for men…”

So continues the brow beating by song, as if a country music singer scolded and instructed his drunk, womanizing brother at the saloon…

Hesiod is lucky he made it out of Ascra alive. One wonders if reciting this poem to the wastrel sons of a host down in Lokri is what got him killed?

Hesiod admonished Perses to stop begging from his neighbors, who will eventually turn away. This conversation has been overhead by me many times as I have stood among dusky Baltimoreans.

“I suggest you reflect on clearing your debts and avoiding famine. First, a household, a woman and a plowing ox—not a wife, but a slave, one who could follow the flocks. The tools in the house must all be made ready… A man who puts off work wrestles with Blights.”

The latter condition of Blights, is capitalized to emphasize these as manifest heavenly powers, sendings, like the plagues of Egypt in Exodus, divine punishments for sloth.

“Holm-oak” is the best wood for fashioning a plow tree to be fixed with dowels to poles by a carpenter. Bay or elm are the best for worm free poles and oak the stock.

Two nine-year old male oxen are the best, and behind them should be set a slave of 40, who is still young enough to plow but too old to be capering with other young slaves when he should be down to business. Eight ounces of bread are to be his ration, it seems for breakfast.

“And no younger men is better besides him to sprinkle seed and avoid over-sowing,” indicating two mature bondmen are needed for plowing and sowing, with “A slave boy just behind with the mattock should make it hard work for the birds by covering up seed.”

“Command your slaves, ‘It will not always be summer,’ build your huts.’”

Of Lenaion, the depth of winter, Hesiod is at his lyric best, with 53 lines devoted to winter preparations and descriptions of the severity of the climate:

“...the North Wind blows, coming over horse-rearing Thrace, he blows over the sea and stirs it, and earth and woodland roar… The immense forest cries aloud and animals shiver and tuck their tails… he makes an old man bowl along… horned and hornless forest beasts, gnashing run off through the windy glades, all those, in want of shelter, seek deep lairs in caves, no other thought on their mind… as they try to avoid the white snow…”

“At that time oxen should have half, a man the full ration…”

The slaves and wife are beasts of burden with their food dolled out by the same hand. This puts the farmer at the mercy of those local barons who have armed men to round up slaves and discourage uprisings.

Hesiod leads Perses out of winter, through spring and into summer, “The slaves, drive them to thresh Demeter’s holy grain in a well ventilated place… When you have stored all of your crops, engage a man with no household [an overseer] and a woman without child, a bondwoman with child at her side is of less use. And keep a hound with sharp teeth, well fed, lest the lazy man steel your food. Bring in hay and rubbish so that your oxen and mules have enough to last. Then the slaves can unyoke the oxen and rest their poor legs.”

A nice paragraph on summer making the wine and milk sweeter, women more amorous, and men weaker, is a balanced piece of coping for the farmer, that encouraged the hardworking homesteader to stop in the heat of summer and enjoy a few days.

This is followed by brief advice on wine making, extensive advice on shipping and sailing, cautioning Perses that their father, “One day came here, making the long crossing from Aeolian Kyme, in his dark ship, not running from riches, not from wealth and prosperity, but from evil poverty, which Zeus dispenses to men. And he settled near Helicon, in a miserable village called Ascra, bad in winter, foul in summer, good at no time.”

Discouraging sailing, Hesiod realizes his brother would be tempted to be a merchant, gives what knowledge he has, warns against the perils of the sea, and notes, “But men do even that in their folly, because property is like life to wretched mortals.”

As with farming, family is still to be in season.

“In season bring a wife home,” [at about age 30, she on her fifth year into puberty, a virgin from nearby]… “For a man acquires nothing better than a good wife, nothing worse than a bad one, the food-sneaker, who burns a man without a fire, strong though he be and consigns him to premature old age.”

“Beware the punishment of the immortal blessed ones.”

What follows is an extensive work of taboos, witch tales, superstitions and common sense, to include holy days and lucky days. Perses, at this point was certainly yawning, restless with this lesson, looking at some slave girl’s plump butt. So, for his case, let us pass to the end of this pleasing poetic almanac of life lessons for surviving the accursed world of the Age of Iron:

He advising never mocking the poor, keeping a close tongue, and that speaking ill of folks invokes the evil goddess Gossip.

“These are the days best for men’s acts on earth. The others are days of changeable omen, doomless, yet not fortunate. Different men commend different days, but few know that among those chosen days, ‘sometimes a day is a stepmother, sometimes a mother.’”

“Well with god and fate is he who works with this knowledge, giving the immortals no cause for offense, observing the bird signs and avoiding transgressions.”

Hesiod was a wise, hard working, middle class man, who knew the fix was in, but hoped in his own words that heaven would not turn away and would enforce right over wrong on earth. He was not the first or the last good man to be dead wrong, for Hope remained in Pandora’s jar.

Thank you, Ode-singer, for keeping me company this week. I will finish with your brilliantly brutal The Shield of Achilles.

John C. Wright: 

Tom Kratman: 

Larry Correia: 

Vox Day: 

Castalia House blog (Morgan Holmes): 

Castalia Library: 

Having described the doom cloud mankind lives under as he prays for the storm shield to tun its face away, Hesiod continues to sing to his brother, Perses. He is in the town of Ascra, which will be wiped out by the Thespians at a later time, as Hesiod will prophecy, that a town ruled by crooked judgment will suffer the wrath of Zeus, by the news from his daughter, Justice. This does indicate an allegory that right flows down the social latter from might.

“Now I tell a fable for the barons, who will well understand it. So the hawk addressed the dappled nightingale as he carried her high in the clouds, grasping her in his claws; impaled on the curved talons, she was weeping piteously, but he addressed her sternly as master:

“Why ever do you scream? You are in the grasp of a greater power, and you will go where I will, singer that you are. I will eat you for dinner if I like, or let you go. He is a fool that contests a power greater than his own: he both looses the struggle and suffers injury on top of insult.

“So spoke the swift-flying hawk, the long-winged bird.”

“But you, Perses, must seek Right and not promote violence. For violence is bad for a low man; not even the higher man can carry it easily, but he sinks under it as he runs into Blights.”

Hesiod does not just place his brother in a morally compromised position requiring reform, but places himself in the talons of the hawk, he being the “singer” in the avaricious clutches of the barons. His fable predicts his fate, murdered by young noblemen, as well as the fate of Ascra, wiped out by the heroic Thespians, these men perhaps citing Hesiod’s prophecy and fate as justification.

Hesiod reminds the listener that the spirits of the Golden Race watch over man from the earthly mists and report to Zeus, who will judge transgressors harshly.

“Beware of this, barons, and keep your pronouncements straight, you bribe-swallowers, and keep your judgments.”

Whistle blowing has never been safe bet, let alone a viable Iron Age strategy.

A standard axiom is presented:

“A man makes ill for himself who makes ill for another, and the ill design is most ill for the designer.”

Hesiod has presented an indictment and judgment, clothed in holy piety, of the local barons, who themselves might have included priests, and certainly numbered armed horsemen with armed bullies. He further, obviously due to this work’s preservation, sang this song far and wide, to neighboring sanctuary keepers at the Helicon Museum and perhaps in the market place, where he accuses Perses of spending too much of his time. Such a place would be frequented by people from neighboring towns, perhaps Thespia?

Hesiod had come to the attention of the Delphic Oracle, nearby navel of their metaphysical world. Twice he had been subject of a conspiracy, and once again, he would be killed by a third conspiracy, perhaps because he could not stop from “naming the wrong-doer,” who, like the hawk over the songbird, held all of the power between them. It is little wonder that Ovid, in exile from Rome, writing of fishing, and etching into his Metamorpheses numerous fables which seemed to beg for a savior of men on earth, adopted Hesiod’s metaphysical outlook despite their class division.

Despite his own example that hard work makes a man a target for the liar and the baron, Hesiod continues giving advice to his traitor brother:

“Inferiority can be got in droves, easily: the road is smooth and she lives near. But in front of Superiority, the immortal gods set sweat; it is a long and steep path to her, and rough at first.”

Perses, if lazy before, will now be steadfast in sloth, closing his mind before his brother sings of how, once achieved, Superiority supplies ease. In case Perses has been convinced, the following should wake him up to the fact that if he takes his brother’s advice, he will become like his brother, the target of liars and bandits:

“Work is not shameful, not working is shameful; and if you work it will come to pass that a workshy man will envy you.”

A common axiom is related, which does somewhat contradict Hesiod’s advice and would find favor with Achilles, who would certainly appropriate Hesiod’s surplus to feed his Myrmidons:

“Inhibition is no good provider for a needy man,

Inhibition, which does men much harm and much good.

Inhibition attaches to poverty, boldness to wealth.”

Advice on neighborly behavior is extensive and leads to another proverb:

“Be a friend to a friend,

keep company with he who seeks it.

Give to he who gives, and not to he who gives not:

to a giver one gives, to an ungiver none gives.”

Give is good, Snatch bad, a bringer of death.”

Giving is regarded as a masculine act, and taking a feminine act. Snatch is a minor Goddess, a child of Night that is the act of impulsive greed.

Hesiod brings out a passage pointed at whatever woman is gobbling his brother’s ill-gotten gains, by a method calculated to appeal to the wastrel man and bring him into hardy misogyny:

“At the uncorking of a jug, and at the dregs, take your fill, in the middle be sparing: parsimony at the bottom is mean.”

The other case in which men are “mean” is when they change friends often.

“Let the agreed wage for a man of good will be assured; and even with your brother, smile and bring a witness.”

Here, at the very dawn of Classical Civilization, in small town rural Hellas, honor is utterly gone from public life.

“Trust and mistrust alike have ruined men. Do not succumb to the charms of some shapely woman—it is your barn she is after; he who trusts a woman trusts cheaters.”

Hesiod suggests a single son for building family wealth and that having many sons may bring the blessings of Zeus, for “more, hands, more work, and greater surplus.”

This section transitions to homestead management with another proverb, as Works and Days transitions from a homily on right and wrong to something like a farmer’s almanac:

“When the Pleiades born of Atlas rise before the sun,

begin the reaping; the plowing when they set.”

“For forty nights and days they are hidden…”

I'm certain you've had that moment at work when you've said "This is a complete waste of my time." You've said it 10,000 times. I bet you've pondered the 10,000-mile pilgrimage tomatoes make from nursery soils to destination markets. Think of all the fossil gases persons-we-care-about must inhale! Damn you Big Oil!—you say with intended humor. But you're on to something, big.

The inefficiency of every last thing around us utters a simple truth we can all appreciate: that keeping busy is the primary purpose of our toil, not the other stuff. How or where it all went wrong I am not researched enough to answer, but it looks like we got conquered sometime in the past and turned into segregated Worker-Consumers. I formally grant you, wise reader, the right to decorate your cell with as many inspirational posters and wall-doodles as you'd like. Your sentence has begun.

We're farther in the Future than you think.

A horse with a gasmask, first world war, was apocalyptic looking. But a Prius that's been rapid-oxidized and melted into the ground next to an intact tree, that's next level.

Genetic code written on a computer and transcribed by your own mitochondria, that triggers regular creation of a toxic protein in vivo, that's pretty darn novel huh? Or a living virus that does the same?

Rockets landing in reverse? Low-altitude satellite meshwork being put in place above our heads... almost done!

Phones that listen to your ovulation cycle, decipher your words, even by 'accident'—Go away, Siri!

Governments that cycle their predator and prey populations in-and-out with ease and without detection.

Fun Factoid 1: Someone has already sat down and programmed the value of human lives in terms of floating integers, needed for the math done by AI drones in targeting and killing people.

Did You KnOw? Robots will soon metabolize flesh... Tee-hee!

Convinced yet? What do you think comes next? Have our works of art given us any advance preview ...

We are in the future, but it doesn't feel like it. When you open up a window and feel the thousand-year-old air and thousand-year-old sun, it pulls you back to a simpler time. It's an unfortunate trick that lends to the veil.

"History is written by the Victors."

"Everything comes out in the wash."

These two things I was told in Government class. They are incompatible. Catholic school ain't it.

The first statement is true. The second is what slaves say while being tricked into sucking the ass that feeds them.

If you're here, and this mandatory civilian work arrangement persists, then it was probably intended by the most powerful of historical forces, the architects of our archetype, the Victors. This is important. We are here because we are willed to be here, for those with the power and the pen can have it any way they like, and this world is that way.

Doesn't matter the strings of power, not here. We come after the great prophets and their trials of faith, after the dark ages and ensuing rebirths. We come after the great thinkers, who turned the world upside down, and paid with their lives. We come after the rebels, who shouted their shrill cry for freedom, fought hard and fell fast. We come after the great battles, the great ideas, the fantastical show-offs that puttered into obscurity. Truly, hasn't it all been done and written? How many more tragic heroes do you need [to sit down]?

The world we inherited is the one forged after a million reckonings. Whatever it is, whatever its true purpose, its structure has been perfected to stand the test of time, the tests of Men. It survives, and the people it has consumed are forgotten. The drive of their souls become tiring fables. Their purpose washed-out.

We are left with little to do, little to complain about. We are left with things, and work.

I look at my very working-class neighborhood and I see many taking leave of the moral life, patronizing instead the arts of death. I turn on the hypnoscreen and I am told of celebrity sex crimes, suicides, and broken families, where we would never suspect. If both the top and the bottom of the social pyramid are corrupt, then how can we be so sure its middle parts are safe haven?

Can one do a proper accounting of the lethality of our culture en masse? Is there a most-categories death statistic published that lets you risk-assess the tolls of civic participation—stress, toxin, spiritloss? How many people make it comfortably to old age outside captivity? The Amazonian senior in the loin cloth seems rather content, not broken and afraid.

What if everyone's dying? How many of your apparent community would have to pass away before you said "Hey, wait a second. That's a little more than it should be. I need to pay attention to this." How many? Ever thought of the number, or the percent? If 7% of my people disappeared on Year-1, then another 11% on Year-2, then another 12% on Year-3... How long until you can read between the lines? Maybe you'd never notice, especially if endless calamaties cascaded-in during those years, perhaps with overwhelming casualty, perhaps alternated with mind-boggling Newscrap. Or, maybe you never took stock, because it's unusual to do so.

There is an extra-terrestrial element I think, to those that call themselves our masters.

Beyond their endless schemes that ring unearthly, observe firstly the influential imbibing the message to metamorphize their appearances to that of Freakazoid. You say, but Webmaster, this is the stuff of humanity, that in turns that may be measured academically, men and women committ to fighting their nature, markedly after centuries of civic captivity. To that I say, observe secondly, how at the end of Earth's many rainbows there is always a Leprechaun hard at horde, a person you never thought would exist, actually holding down the polar extreme inferred, or if you prefer - a terminus - one the casuals can't stomach and refuse to.

Jeff Epsteen & Friends were doing exactly what you know they were doing on that island. The Inquisition really sat people down on spikes. At the end of Orwell's 1984, (Spoiler Alert!) the main characters are executed. In other strange words: you don't need to just play with the answer like it's a gift of contention, or wait for permission to accept it. Have it. Have the answer like cake. It's yours. It's right in front of you. Say it.

Aliens, nigga.

If you understand how information is handled, you have a really special tool.

Remember the movie Men in Black? Society already hosts countless galactic neighbors right beneath our nose, and the state has been dealing with them ever since at least the ol' discus-crashing days.

Remember the movie Planet of the Apes? Slaved, by a smarter race, ages before now.

How about Contact? That one had Jodie Foster. Earth is beamed blueprints to build a spaceship capable of joining a high-roller time-share presentation but we're a few millions years too late. Damn.

How about that one with Charlie Sheen where martians are greenhousing the Earth hotter while creating clones of dead people? (The Arrival)

Oh yeah, remember Invasion of the Body Snatchers? ...There's a creepy scene where a person is getting jabbed and says 'Why are you doing this to me?'

I could go on and on with great scifi flicks that infer cosmic-grade conspiracy. You can probably name a few. What if all of this is the same narrative, and we convert all perspectives thereof to imitations that invalidate it? Humans constantly project the apparatus they feel strapped upon them, the one covered in slime, oozed by sons of bitches from a fouler planet than mine.

In global faiths is manifested a very old and respected intuition that the social ladder continues up and off this planet and into the Heavens. The Pharaoh was God on Earth, so was Christ, able to enjoy dual-citizenship of the terrestrial and the Extra. Thanks to them we are able to access the Divine, the only sensible place where the social ladder may continue its rungs, bathed in the astronomical powers necessary to facilitate fathers of greater magnitude. It appears to me that only the semantics are fought over here. I suggest that the Earthly majesty of pain and pleasure colors is reflected Above in-scale. Good actors and bad, Drama, leverage of power and exploitation, as an extension of what we experience on soil, natural and logical.

The 'dust-keeping' skills I figure, are at least as brutal as the ones at our scale. I admit I spray indiscriminately at ants with the biggest baddest bottle of bug spray I can find. But ants I'm-a-killin!

Choose your Highers as you will, but no matter where you park your flying car, keep in mind someone made you, someone saved you from the others, and someone gave you a working visa.

     

“Muses from Pieria give glory through singing, come to me, tell me of Zeus your father in song. Because of him men are known and unknown, according to great Zeus’ will. For easily he makes strong and easily he oppresses the strong, lightly he diminishes the great man, uplifts the obscure one, he makes the crooked straight and withers the proud—Zeus of the towering thunders, [0] whose house is highest. O hear and see and judge righteous Lord; as I seek to sing to Perses of truth.”

Imagine, reader, lazy Perses, coming to beg and threatening to take Hesiod, his brother, to court to take again from him his livelihood so that he can squander it, being confronted by his brother with his lyre, who insists on singing to him for 49 minutes!? It was certainly a show for the neighbors, slaves and women.

Two types of strife are here declared, good strife in terms of competition between men engaged in parallel arts, and bad strife, meaning aggression, war and law suits. The “bribe-eating” judges, named as “fools” in public were certain to side with Perses again after this outrage.

The tale of Prometheus [Forethought] giving back the fire to man that Zeus had once taken from mankind as punishment, is told, and will be retold in Theogony. This, or the common source Hesiod was working from, certainly informed Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. This feud between the Almighty Zeus and Prometheus results in Zeus punishing the forward thinking Titan and his backward thinking brother, and the human race they were acting on behalf of.

The story of Pandora, “All-gift” or “All-endowed,” is related as the cause of the successive miserable ages of man. Like the second act of creation in Genesis, Pandora is made of water and clay, like a golem. Once this beautiful woman is created by a joint effort of the gods, even educated in lying by Hermes and seduction by Aphrodite, she bears a jar full of calamity, and also Hope, though Hope is the only force that remains trapped within the jar when she restores the lid.

The calamities of Pandora trigger the fall of the first race or age of man. This seems to be the basis for Ovid’s 4 ages, though Hesiod has 5 ages, the fifth combined with the 4th by Ovid about the time of Christ, some 700 years later.

Golden Race/Age

The mortals who lived even before the rise of Zeus, when Time ruled, were made of gold, need not work, did not suffer disease and when they died it was as if they went to sleep. This seems like a memory of a fallen technological civilization. This is the race wiped out when the brother of Prometheus, known as Afterthought, opened Pandora’s jar. Hesiod assures his brother that the souls of the Golden Ones have remained on earth as “watchers over mortal men,” for Zeus.

Silver Race/Age

This second race, made by the gods, were pampered, stupid and violent and soon killed each other in their agitation. This sounds much like a decline cycle from a high civil state. The silver men were hopelessly criminal. They were also not pious and were done away with by Zeus, either by flood or fire. They were left as a lesser blessed haunting on earth, undertaker spirits.

Bronze Race/Age

Zeus made this race of ash trees [spear wood] and bestowed them with bronze weapons, before the advent of “black iron.” These were brutal warlike men who did not eat bread and eventually fell to each other’s bloody hands. This cycle sounds like the Bronze Age Collapse in half-memory, as meat-eating warriors using brazen weapons and tools, “were laid low by their own hands,” and came to inhabit “chill Hades.”

Heroic Age/Race

The god/man hybrids of the race of demi-gods or heroes were then made by Zeus and other gods and goddesses breeding with humans, who seem to have never been entirely wiped from the earth. These men too, “our predecessors on the boundless earth,” suffered too, “ugly war and fearful fighting destroyed them.” Ovid was certainly right in compressing the heroes into the final age as the fathers of the present. These men who were not killed were granted a place apart in the Atlantic on some blessed isles by Zeus. This final portion indicates a part memory of the upper class migration away from a suffering land into the unknown, with the working classes largely left behind to fend for themselves. It is mentioned here that Time, Khronos, father of Zeus, was released from his prison by his son, to preside over some indistinct, peripheral realm. Zeus had a common cult title of Time-holder.

Iron Race/Age

Hesiod outlines the advent of the Iron Age, which would not change in character for another 2,000 years and the age of gunpowder and industry. “Would that I were not among the fifth men, but dead before or born after! For now it is a race of iron.”

Hesiod gives up the metaphor of the metal races as a half memory of technological incline alongside cultural decline, as he points out that life is now hard for all, that both kinds of strife, work and war, require iron, and as he told Perses earlier, that war is not a pursuit that favors the poor man and is apt to ruin even the rich man.

Hesiod sang of the world he lived in as having been five times the suffering subject of heavenly conspiracies, and that the men of the latter ages were all prone to conspire against one another unto a general decline. This, certainly was the frame of his own life, he and his father impoverished despite hard work informed by wisdom and buttressed by faith, and his wastrel brother a mere pawn of corrupt tax farmers.

“Then away from the wide-pathed earth, veiling their faces with white robes, [1] Decency and Moral Disapproval will go join the immortals, abandoning mankind; those grim woes will remain for mortal men, and their will be no help against evil.”

To close with Perses’s probable response to this sermon, “Brother, you say we are doomed to get screwed by the bosses, and you still want me to work, and hard?”

I am really beginning to like Hesiod, the original Calvinist, ranting at his libertine brother.

Notes

-0. See Exodus for parallel images of The Almighty.

-1. When Christianity became the Roman State Religion under the pagan patron of the church, Constantine, 1,000 years later in A.D. 325, a convert was granted 20 pieces of silver [looted from pagan temples] and issued a white robe. The failure to succor humanity at the core of classical paganism would trigger the Christian reaction, which returned “Decency and Moral Disapproval” to earth in the form of a civic collective. The Church Fathers had certainly studied Hesiod.

“From the Heliconion muses let us sing, who hold the great and holy mount of Helicon and dance upon lithe feet around the deep blue spring before the holy altar of Zeus…”

Hesiod, shepherd, in sorrow and frustration, in a crisis of faith, would have carried and worn a fleece or goat hide over his shoulders, and to be used as a shield draped over the left arm. His most common attribution for Zeus is aegis-holder. The aegis was sometimes borne by Athena as well, the gray-eyed goddess. It is equated with a shepherd’s cloak/shield. It is gray and Zeus numerous attributions as cloud-gatherer, thunderer, storm-bringer, lightning-hurler, who was aided by his gray-eyed daughter as well as three cyclopes, speaks of storm. The cyclops were named after the cyclone, the wheel, either the eye of a storm or the cycle of storm, with a single wheel-shaped eye within their forehead. It seems that the most accurate translation of the aegis would be Storm-shield. A shield, as well known by any ancient warrior, was not purely, or even primarily, a defensive item. It was a weapon, more offensive than the sword, partner of the spear, king of battle, to the sword’s queenly rank. [1]

Hesiod’s own aegis would protect him against wolves and men while his sling and staff kept them at bay. I surmise that the deep debt of antiquitous faith to the aegis was related to the fact that surviving peoples migrated with flocks, where crops must be left where they are. Just as Isrаel were shepherds, so Jason was a shepherd of men. I imagine that aegis-holder Zeus being the most common attribution of the Almighty God in Hellenic faith was related to a foundational crisis migration which shepherds survived and farmers did not.

Hesiod continues his overture:

“And once they taught Hesiod fine singing, as he tended his lambs below holy Helicon. This is what the goddesses said to me first, the Olympian Muses, daughters of Zeus the aegis-holder:

“Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as though they were true, but we know to sing true when we will.”

These daughters of Zeus despise eaters. They also possess the arrogance of the modern media influencer, the pretty face behind the news desk who lie to we the follower with cruel regularity. The muses then plucked and gave Hesiod a rod and set him upon his holy education concerning the higher powers.

Before continuing with notable quotes, I will avoid naming the more than 100 deities listed in a dizzying array and according to various branches. There are original primary powers that far predate Zeus, creator of mankind, father of gods and men. Only these I will list here before entering into a discussion of The Creator in Hesiod’s eyes.

The Eight Primal Powers in Order of Advent

-1. Chasm/Chaos [male] pre exististing

-2. Earth/Gaia [female] “mother of us all” who births Heaven and Ocean without a sire, of her own power, as Chasm appears to have brought her into being

-3. Eros/Love [male] out of Chasm

-4. Erebos/Darkness [male] (not night, but deeper and outer darks, like Tartarus and Hades) out of Chasm

-5. Night [female] Bride of Darkness, mother of Bright Air and Day, out of chasm, born in the first sexual union between Erebos and Night, with, it seems Eros as the match maker of the primal powers.

-6. Uranus/Heaven [male] son/mate of Earth, who sire Time/Khronos in union with her, born by earth without a mate

Here the first power is preexisting and powers 2 thru 7 are asexually brought into being.

-7. Ocean [male] born by Earth and then, like Heaven, also sprung from her, mating with her to sire a multitude of powers

Time is the youngest of 11 powers born of the second union with Earth and Heaven, the third Union being Earth and Ocean.

-8. Khronos/Time [male] born of Heaven and Earth, castrates his father Heaven then mates with Mother Earth, and is in turn unseated by Zeus, who does have the decency not to mate with his mother, but with his sisters instead. The 11 brothers and sisters of Khronos, including Hyperion, continue as sources of generation.

From these 8 powers various generative powers, such as Zeus, who came increasingly to be referred to as God in late antiquity, were credited with Hesiod of weaving a living world, which included every river being a masculine god, except for Styx, the river of the Underworld, who is female. The variety of minor deities is as dizzying as the angels, devils and demons of Christianity, which were, under the early Church, explicitly named as an empire of the demons.

These are reflective of the implicit powers of creation that that God in Genesis activates with his will.

Zeus would create man numerous times as the Hebrew almighty did in Genesis. He would also afflict mankind with plague and calamity, with the help of various lesser powers, as Jehovah did to Job with the aid of Satan, his agent. As with Jehovah in Exodus, Zeus does good and evil to mankind and is jealous of man’s regard for Him.

Zeus’ most common cult titles in Hesiod and beyond to historic accounts of Xenophon and Arrian include:

-1. Strormshield

-2. Cloudgatherer

-3. Thunderer [his name is Thunderchief.]

-4. Allknowing

-5. Allseeing [widebrowed]

-6. Almighty

-7. Allfather

-8. Deliverer

-9. Of Oaths

-10. Of Safe Landings

-11. Lord

-12. Timeholder [The Christian God is said to reside outside of Time]

-13. God [see Seneca and Arrian]

-14. The Father

-15. Heavenly Father [currently used in Western America]

There are more, even in Hesiod, with half of them congruent with Norse and Biblical notions of the Lord of Heaven.

“Though a man have sorrow and grief in his newly troubled soul, when a singer recounts the deeds of men of old and of the blessed gods, at once he forgets his heaviness and is relieved of sorrows, reflecting again on the gifts of the goddesses who turn him away from affliction.”

Though Hesiod is said to have composed Works and Days first, that remains a deeply religious work constantly pleading with Zeus for Justice. Thus, I thought an overview of Theogony was here due as a preface.

This pleasing poem I have enjoyed near 40 times alone in the dark and at this keyboard, ends abruptly, and according to the poet’s pledge to begin and end each work with mention of the Muses who empowered his song. The following is the end of Theogony and leads to an incomplete list of the semi-divine persons.

“Farewell now, you dwellers in Heaven, and you islands, and continents, and the salt sea between. But now, Olympian Muses, [3] sweet of utterance, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus, sing of the company of goddesses, [4] all those who were bedded with mortal men, immortal themselves, and bore children resembling the gods.”

Notes

-1. See Burton, The Book of the Sword

-2. The painted, enthroned statue of Zeus at Ellis in the Olympian shrine has served as the original model for portraits of Jesus Christ down to this our time.

-3. This might better be presented to the present audience as “heavenly angels.” For the post Christian mind yet retains an ideal of angels as female, though in the Bible they are male, this female image of the angelic having here its first poetic source.

-4. Lesser gods, taken to be angels or demons, are referred to in Psalms and Exodus. See also Jakob wrestling with the angel of God.

I have had a great deal of difficulty fathoming Hesiod and his works and times. It has likewise been difficult to decide if he belongs in Norns of Arуas or Enemy of All Mankind. At last, after a week in a room with the old poet’s recordings, I have been convinced by him to place his work at the very head of the latter work which attempts to trace the common thread of anti-human conspiracy.

The Sources:

The primary audio is of Hesiod’s three major works, of Richmond Latimore’s translation, with an introduction by James Davies and John Henry Freeze. This is an Audible production replete with music and read by the excellent voice artist Charlton Griffon, who also reads Arrian’s Alexander Anabasis as translated by Aubrey de Selencourt. That rich work has kept me company for some 20 recitations of the 3.41.09 hours. This work is recorded in order of composition, beginning with Works and Days, then Theogony, and concluding with The Shield of Herakles.

I have listened three times each to another reading, of another translation, of Theogony and Works and Days.

There is also a reading of Theogony, woodenly done, by a third, lesser reader, from yet a third translation, which I have listened to over ten times, only twice this week though.

The print translation of M. L. West has been my constant companion for three months and has been read six times, the final reading being done while listening to the Latimore translation. This final method, pen in hand, was instructive. West corrupts the text by misrepresenting slaves as workmen, laborers and a boy.

Davies and Freeze have the curation knives out against Hesiod in favor of his contemporary, Homer. Though Homer obvious represents a clan of Homerids who made their family business the preservation of the one greatest hero tale, this is not mentioned as Hesiod is accused of imitating and being indebted to Homer. Hesiod might have predated Homer. No effort is made to understand that Hesiod “Ode-singer” and Homer [0], may have been independently recording common and well-known traditions at one and the same time. The modern academic can only think in terms of creative debt and theft, not congruence of art.

Ovid and Plutarch, of later times were surely working from Hesiod, but also probably of other, since lost, sources.

Only the Latimore translation of The Shield of Herakles on audio has come to me, which I have only listened to five times. Hesiod is charged with ripping off Homer’s The Shield of Achilles, though there are sharp differences. I mention here the repeated stabs at Hesiod’s character as an introduction to Enemy of All Mankind.

For who are the majority of All Mankind?

Yes, the working man, not the baron, judge or academic.

Herodotus, impugned also in this edition, has been attacked by modern scholars in favor of his appreciative reader, Thucydides. This is transparently due to Herdotus’ habit of recording folk tales. Though the recording of folklore by anthropologists from recent tribal races is regarded as a work of history, ancient Arуan folklore is universally impugned. I see this largely as class prejudice.

Hesiod was a working man, a man who just got by, whose father had been impoverished, migrated and left a moderate inheritance for Hesiod and his brother Perses. Perses squandered his half, then bribed local judges to be awarded Hesiod’s flocks and goods. Squandering these ill-gotten gains, once again Perses begs his brother directly, who is yet generous while facing a second lawsuit.

Hesiod, working his way out of poverty twice, having won a poetry prize and dedicated it to the muses [still on display in about A.D. 200 when Pausanius visited], left the poor town that their father had fled to in poverty. Hesiod inherited a deep fear of the sea based on his father’s flight from Asia before what was probably a climate change disaster.

Hesiod’s life was bracketed by two astronomical disasters described in Hezekiah and a half dozen later Biblical prophets. These events are also described by Hesiod and Homer. The first of these events in about 750 B.C. corresponds with the beginning of true horsemanship and migratory life among the Arуans of the hinterlands. Herodotus mentions this event as a heavenly shower of brazen artifacts. The second event in about 685 B.C. around the time of Hesiod’s death, corresponds with the foundation of the Pythian games at Delphi.

Near that holy sanctuary, close to his model city of Seven-Gated Thebes, away from the sea that gripped him with such terror, Hesiod, possibly preaching about governmental and priestly corruption and perhaps reciting prophecies of Zeus’ wrath, which would come to pass at about the time of his passing, sought sanctuary. He may have simply been pursued by creditors hunting debt generated by his wastrel brother. Astle cites this land near Thebes as the regional hub of financial capitalism based in distant Babylon. [1]

Hesiod went on the run as a despoiled bachelor, son of a woe-befallen father. Both made at least one hard-working bootstrap comeback into the ranks of the peasantry, that is the FREE working class of antiquity. Hesiod left his native land and migrated to Naupactus and was murdered by the sons of his host in the sacred enclosure of Nemean Zeus. His remains were removed by command of the Delphic Oracle, thereby casting judgment that his death was against Justice, a goddess he often appealed to, who was ever silent in his case. His consecrated grave at Orchomenus was still intact in about A.D. 200 when visited by Pausanius.

Hesiod was the father of Didactic Poetry, that is instructive verse. He is one of only two poets surviving from the Hellenic world from this heroic age of epic, where the Bible preserved many more voices of this period. [2]

As an actual writer of numerous works, and having listened to the three works in the likely order of composition, I HEAR the voice of a common composer, recorded, I should think, by listeners in his time, rather than written by his hand. I envision the poet writing with the lyre string as a copyist wrote it on lambskin. I take the Shield of Herakles as having been incomplete, lacking the final battle scene, at the poet’s death. This work the most, and the other two to lesser degrees, certainly had some reworking in the hands of later copyists and rhapsody men.

The life of Hesiod, Ode-singer was begun in sorrow and poverty, progressed in hard work as the poet was robbed and defrauded, had a high point during a spiritual crisis herding sheep on a holy mountain, Helicon, when angelic beings came to him and imbued him with a prophetic voice, and continued in spiritual harmony as his patrimony and work were taken completely, and ended with the murder of a tramp musician who sang of right and wrong and of heaven, hell and earth between.

In the end, faithful and pious Hesiod ended up like the nightingale clutched in the talons of the pitiless hawk he sang about when he committed our eldest animal fable to song.

750 B.C., and the fix was already in, of corruption over production, of debt over faith, in the hands of powers in heaven and on earth, which Hesiod had sung of being in league against the honest man.

Notes

-0. Homer is of Greek origin and means “security,” “pledge,” “hostage,” which in the case of a hostage taken for security of loyalty on the part of relatives, was a common practice in antiquity. Might Homer have been held by a King or Tyrant as a POW, debtor or exile? Might he, like the slave girl composer of the Arabian Nights, have performed for his captor, for the hawk who held him dove like in its claws? Despite the modern academic thirst to set these poets at one another, they were probably more brothers than Hesiod and Perses. I would be moved to name Homer in English “Pledger,” for he was quite a witness as well. Also, his status as a possible hostage does explain how he wrote the subtext of the Iliad as a war protest, even as the main text was of kingly glory in war.

-1. Conspiracy Against Mankind #0 thru #14: The Babylonian Woe by David Astle, 1975, a core portion of this work.

-2. The Homerica, idylls and other fragmentary works attributed to Hesiod, shall be investigated under the Norns of Arуas title, not this work on conspiracy, but on Arуan patrimony.