Default fear settings have been achieved by creating internal hysteria, in the form of fetish fear cults.

-5. Serial Killers

There have always been prolific killers, firstly of animals for the group, then of humans, inflicted against members of an enemy group. These were heroes. Once a wide variety of mutually antagonistic races, religions and ideologies were forced to live together through necessity of competitive scale or via conquest, the core promise of civilization, of disarmament of the MAN [1] in exchange for a promise of state protection or at least punishment, came under threat. Some mass killers would naturally arise within civilization. Ironically, women predominantly, have come to fetishize these killers in the ancient way of heroes.

This has been cultivated by all law enforcement agencies as a form of scapegoating, with killers often willingly admitting to slayings they could not and did not commit, in return for increased infamy. This feeds the need for false murder clearance rates by the law, the need to feel intimately endangered of the denatured and remotely confined woman, and the need for fame of the terminally alienated killer. For 30 years movie and TV have literally worshiped the lone mastermind killer, almost always a Caucasian man.

The need for worship in a post-traditional society is easily harnessed, such as the recent Cult of Dead Politicians, with the current, two-week-long ascension of Jimmy Carter into the heavenly pantheon of USG Imperial gods under progress as I write. The old peanut farmer and failed president’s body is being carted around like Ptolemy once did with the body of Alexander the Great.

Cater gets two weeks of worship. But the serial killer cults do not expire with the re raising of the post office flag. We worship that which strikes fear in our hearts. God-fearing folk shorn of God by the cult of Science yearn to fear, and fear deeply, in their homes. The Serial Killer, largely a fabrication, with mass deaths of prostitutes and abducted teens committed on behalf of political cabals who induct one another through shared sex crimes, assigned to one or another of the undertakers serving the sex fiends that inhabit USG. [2]

-6. Lone Wolf Celibates

Cultivation of fatherless mental patients and their use to commit mass killing in single events with cars, bombs and guns, much of which had to be supplied and coordinated by military operatives, and in many cases where multiple shooters were seen, is a sophisticated branching of the serial killer complex, which was developed at the same time along two converging tracks, by two different federal agencies.

-7. War on Drugs

The infusion of massive amounts of opiates, cocaine and weed by USG agents, to include two presidents, multiple governors and the Central Mind, constituted an opium war launched by USG against America just as Britain did so against China in the 1840s. Creating a specific army, the DEA, and transforming police forces into Isrаeli style armies of occupation, put a counterpart of the internal Soviet Army of political control in the US. The lifting of the Drug War at the very time that the War on Terror looked inward away from Islamic enemies to internal white enemies, freed an army to put boot to American necks.

-8. War on Terror

Every single terrorist organization, internal and external to USG will be found to have been trained, equipped, supplied and positioned by deep agents of USGs central brain. The only “evidence” against this fact is that USG would not act against its own people’s interest, when in fact the people of USG, are, by nature, the ultimate enemy of USG. For 5 million agents to keep 350 million in fear and self hatred and bipolar feud, an external enemy must be cultivated and propped up. The War On Terror, ignited by agents of USG attacking NYC and blaming it on a band of sissy playboys who were not only captured but released just prior to their supposed crime, was ultimately aimed at Americans. It began with the killing of Americans, and will end so.

-9. Semantic Terror

The distortion of language, the transmogrification of words, the misapplied use of terms for mas peril, like “Pandemic” which continued to be used in 2021 after the disease in question was downgraded to an epidemic, is an evolution of internal terror policy. Use of the terms fact checking, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and as yet unseen attacks on the rational mind and irrational emotions of the modern mind [for which America is the clinical study] through the corruption and weaponization of English, has reached mid stride.

-10. Internal Enemies

I have observed that most “internal enemies” caught making plots against civil rights and the power structure, turn out to be made of of 20% dupes and 80% USG agents. Virtually the entire and now utterly defunct “white nationalist” movement was inhabited by federal informants and agents.

New internal enemies, usually “white” men will be generated at a steady rate. Speaking with white criminals who have done prison time, I have been informed that obvious undercover cops, posing as racial militants are forever recruiting and only catching the most stupid, naive and drug addicted in their weird plots.

-11. Political Terror

Generating fear and unease in every individual about things happening hundreds and thousands of miles away to other individuals and selling this as collective peril, is a means of maintaining constant baseline fear and anger. For instant, most women I know are afraid and angry about a woman in Texas not being able to abort her baby.

-12. Medical Terror

News continues with a constant litany of new medical perils, most of which fail to ignite to “pandemic” status. This is a way of keeping us in constant subfear and alert for the next big scare. The greatest and most successful American general had two axioms: “Be the first with the most,” and “keep up the scare.”

-13. The Next Big Scare

News terror and USG attacks on Americans have long been predicted via revelation of the method on movies and TV. Most law enforcement TV is written by FBI screen writers. Most action movies are written by CIA screen writers. The FBI has long floated the peril of serial killers and sex offenders. That is their constant wheel house of peril. Movies, though, tend to focus on god like killers, lone wolf masterminds of nearly superhuman powers: Jason Bourne, The Bee Keeper, The Sniper, The Gunman, The Gray Man, John Wick, who have fallen from system grace and are now killing on their own. Expect to see continued activation or scapegoating of veterans of USG military service as Lone Wolf mass killers. The importance of this, long term, to system stability, is to inoculate Americans from sympathizing with military veterans who might turn on their diabolical, blood drinking, soul eating arm chair handlers.

The final installment will be written as the afterword to this book in:

Afterdark

On Terminal Steerage

Notes

-1. This necessitated a change in the definition of manhood, as a man, from the earliest times, was only such if he were a warrior, otherwise he was merely a slave or a man/woman.

-2. The book Eye of the Chickenhawk proves this clearly, even pedantically, and is reviewed in the appendices of this book.

The American Fear Trajectory

How does Evil work in the world.

It works most powerfully when it is conducted:

-1. under false pretenses

-2. while directing the subjects of the evil intent

-3. supposedly for the benefit of the actual subjects

-4. by members of the same race,

-5. same nation,

-6. same faith,

-7. while pitting those subjects of evil against the supposed enemy of both the Evil worker and its subjects, completing the fiction of the false pretense and igniting a conflict that will feed upon itself so that the evil worker may step back and glean the results. I shall return to this at the end of this book with an ancient example.

The promise of security of civilization over the liberty of rural life must be undermined in order to harness the resulting fear to the passive impulse of the hopefully “secure” in order to work evil internally upon the very society also used to work evil externally. People who prefer liberty over security are not desirable mind slaves but are best used as mercenary actors to be turned upon later. [1]

An example that illustrates this completely and is #1 below “Making Enemies,” comes from the dawn of the nation’s history, in 1791. Two means of using the hated western front-tier folk to pay for the war debt incurred by the eastern planters against Great Britain were both implemented in the Northwest Territory:

-Taxing whiskey, which caused the Whiskey Rebellion

-Selling lands belonging to Indian allies, belonging to tribal nations which, in the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation and Constitution, were recognized as sovereign nations which USG wished to be allied with. This latter scheme was well known and opposed by many Americans who pointed out that vast tracts of virgin land unoccupied by tribes were already at hand for development.

Washington denied diplomatic overtures from Turtle, the Miami leader, and picked a fight, sending an army of 800 hastily assembled men to fight 900 warriors. This army was abandoned by its officers, who returned mostly safe, their men mostly dead. The entire standing army of 96 artillery men was wiped out. The disaster was used to convince a half million armed and able American men that 900 savages would sweep them and theirs into the sea. This gave Washington the clout to form a temporary American Legion under Anthony Wayne, who forced men to serve. When victory was his, Wayne declared that it was won only by the officers, and that it was won for “The United States Government!”

The Whiskey Rebellion, started for the same debt payment to foreign nations and banks of no nation, was put down with the aid of this Legion, which then became a permanent army, against the promise that it would not. Men forced to serve in this army died in large numbers from illness and exposure. When these men deserted, they were hunted down and scalped by Shawnee warriors, now in the pay of USG, the same warriors who had wiped out Sinclair’s men and had later been chastised by Wayne at Fallen Timbers. Ironically, Turtle, the man whose genius and character led 900 men who could agree on little other than they wanted to defend their ancestors’ graves, was honored by Washington with a sword for his service in killing 800 Americans and terrorizing millions, would retire to a white picket fence house and marry his daughter to an American.

USG would continue to break treaties over the next 100 years in large part to generate a public need for an army, when, at any time, non-military frontiersmen were more than capable of taking down the tribes. Indeed, Tecumseh and the Shawnee would be wiped out by Kentucky Militia. In many cases USG forces protected tribes from armed Americans. This is the primary American means of exterior fear mongering.

Methods of Fear Cultivation

-0. Population Replacement began with bringing in Africans to replace European slaves and freedmen between 1678 and 85. Forcing people who are born in a place to accept neighbors with different customs and allegiances has been the primary means of building internal social fear, upon which other fears are built on.

-1. Making Enemies

This is the means by which USG became Leviathan, the most successful system of rule yet devised, by supplying, even training, then estranging and attacking weaker nations and sub-state peoples such as tribes and religious militants. From yellow journalism starting the Spanish American War in 1898, to American banks funding the Third Reich in the 1930s as USG bullied Japan into war, then the American manufacture of the Vietnam War by shipping in French troops to retake a colony which had been sponsored against the Japanese by USG, the development of various regional attack dogs to include the financing and training of their armies by USG in Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, then declaring war on those client states, to the intentional training and arming of three terrorist organizations by USG, and most egregiously USG feeding the Soviet Union, its supposed enemy, so that nation could afford to wage The Cold War which terrorized billions with the prospect of Nuclear War. USG has never abandoned Washington’s grift of making an exterior enemy into a viable threat so that the subject population could be driven to support war and the increase of state tyranny.

-2. Women’s Suffrage placed the most fearful, security prone, safety seeking portion of humanity in the democratic driver’s seat. Women have consistently voted for war more often then men, across all cultures and time frames, to include the disastrous Sioux war against the Crow. Likewise women vote for internal armies of social control, being police, consistently, in order to insure that they, rather than their husband, father or son, are true masters of the household.

-3. Denying Freedom of Association began with elevating women artificially to masculine status via the thews of the State. This has spread to the point that masculine and ethnic fraternities, traditionally over the ages the bulwark against tyranny, may not be formed except against explicit state laws, effectively necessitating a declaration of war against the host nation in the womb.

-4. Predatory Psychiatry or mind control was implemented initially based on consumption and the selling of extraneous goods to people, primarily women, propelling men, under the thumb of the police state to scramble for money like never before in order to maintain their servile security under the consumer matriarchy, which, was always managed by manipulative men. See Bernays, Propaganda, 1928. By transferring the power of the ancient oracle, which were devices of national and international manipulation, pretending to serve “the Gods” but in actual fact serving the bankers who embezzled the precious metals from these temples, to electronic media, the individual human of every modern society may be gaslit, incited, terrified, angered and even driven into quiet lonely insanity, by constant exposure to the manipulative overmind that was once only sought in season and ceremony.

In Nightfall, Steerage #3, fear inculcation methods 5 thru 13 will by discussed briefly. These are based on the precepts of USG, being false hyperbole that threaten the debt slave’s bargain with his evil master, that his ultimate lack of liberty is rewarded with security. These rest on such false testimonials as are common in news reporting and were present in most counts of the Declaration of Independence. See my book The Greatest Lie Ever Sold for a breakdown of the falsehoods embedded in the foundational documents of USG, mankind’s mightiest golem, yet still, just a tool, if inhabited by millions of agents and overseers and hundreds of millions of gaslit subjects, who, according to the most brilliant conspiracy in modern times, fancy themselves not only free, but the masters of mankind’s most ravenous collectivity.

…

Notes

-1. Roman generals were the prime examples of this. I usually cringe at citing movies. But the movie Gladiator gave an accurate picture of the hatred of the system manager for the system actor. See Victor Davis Hansen’s Savior Generals for an intentionally naive examination of this hatred of the system for its apex actors.

Having deep Arуan roots and meaning bad, harmful, and related to ill and vile rather than devil and villain, evil is a word I try not to use lightly. The Christian use of the term as a form of bad thought, of bad beliefs, has stayed with us in forms of secular ideology. This has further attached itself to race, with some people regarded as in capable of large scale evil and other peoples regarded as in capable of not doing evil, even unconsciously. This ironically brings us full circle to the fact that evil is subjective, that the harm a lion does to a hyena is good for lions and bad for hyenas, and what a hyena might do to a lion is likewise a matter of perspective. Any attempt to establish a doctrine of what is evil, that applies to all people or all beings, will naturally result in creating artificial categories of evil, with all omnivores who elect to be meat eaters perhaps evil.

I attempt only to establish the parameters for my use of the term evil below and choose harm as the base criteria. In considering acts of nature, I am reminded of God speaking to Moses about doing evil to God’s people. This was categorized as punishment, moving me to consider punishment as evil visited upon a doer of evil.

In considering harm, let’s consider breadth and depth. For instance the emotional trauma of being injured is a factor in addition to, and sometimes exceeding, the mechanical injury. Likewise an ambush by a friend, a traitor is more upsetting than at the hands of a dedicated foe. This brings me to an example from my life, expressed in my rare feelings of anger towards aggressors.

I faced three types of aggressors, from most to least common:

-1. Violent criminals of enemy races, whose forefathers had been brought to the land of my birth long after my ancestors settled there, many in my life time, who hunted me like an animal on the streets of my home town. Hundreds of attacks by my hereditary enemies never triggered anger on my part. These yo’s and spics were doing their job, honestly, openly.

Never once did I show anger at these Negroes or sandlings.

-2. Police, whose activity angered me, an anger that burned with an especially hot brand as it was bracketed by the lies that they only attacked my enemies, whose allies they actually were, and by the HOLY LIE that they protected and served me, their prey?

My simmering anger was well hidden under a mask of badge-kissing terror.

-3. Other white trash, who were like me hunted by blacks and cops, chose violence against me was a means of soothing the hurt of domination and displacement.

I had a very hard time swallowing this anger, because it was amplified in depth by the cowardice and betrayal of men like me in class, race and predicament choosing me as prey, some even sniffing me out as human blood hounds for their black masters.

I will use this as my guide: how broad is the harm, and how much deeper is it driven into the human soul by aggravating factors?

Little Evil

Donnie went to the bar yesterday and intentionally coughed in the barmaid’s face to spread his cold. He did so either for joy or company in suffering. That is evil, and in a world without laws, I might have slain him with good cause. But laws protect evil doers far more than they protect the innocent.

Great Evil

A company develops a virus to infect people so it can sell a bogus cure.

Greater Evil

The people charged with protecting our health are in on the grift and pass laws, mandates and such and make management decisions that increase the illness and cause economic and social distress.

Greatest Evil

Media, medicine and government conspire to lie about all of the above, driving millions of people insane, into drug addiction, booze, violence and depression, all of these needs profiting the corporations and governing bodies that deal in these issues, from liquor and weed taxes, to homeless incarceration and removal and ultimately medical treatment.

These two higher levels of evil multiply sorrow, reducing the subject population’s resistance to its farming.

I wonder, aside from betrayal and alienation, is their a higher form of evil?

Killing is terminal harm.

Killers though, do not regard it as the worst form. To killers, torture, to include needless suffering inflicted through lack of skill, is worse than the act of killing.

Worse yet is the sadist, the person who inflicts suffering for pleasure.

Worse still is defamation of the dead, the reduction of the action of killing to something as base as cutting grass or spraying weed killer, divesting the terminal actor of any honor, at once debasing the killed and the killer, as in postmodern remote warfare.

There is also this question of the remote. Among the few shreds of human culture which still value Honor, there is a sense that remote action, of pure management, of the “shot caller’ having no “skin in the game,” must cultivate an increasingly evil setting, a worse world.

So, the ultimate actor would naturally be a being with no skin in the game, a supra-natural entity who may only profit by suffering through the sadistic pleasures of devouring innocence, of crushing hope, of drinking tears, of swallowing the sorrows of the departing and the deserted and farming that suffering as a sustainable well of harm.

I believe that such supra-natural beings exist.

I also believe that among their more capable earthly servants are those who mimic them, by farming suffering, not just for gain, but for the pleasure of imbibing sorrow.

Debt creation and management has long been believed by various moral authorities as evil, as this process creates vast fields of want and suffering where there was none, in order to benefit the few, under the pretext of benefiting the many. Therefore, THE LIE, deceit, particularly in the guise of aid, as put forth by Satan in Job, Luke and Mathew fits the infliction of the broadest and deepest hurts.

Doing harm increases when done:

needlessly

broadly

cruelly

deceitfully

in betrayal

remotely

for pleasure

These are my guide for the inquiry into the Enemy of All Mankind.

Who are the fiends that, as on Hesiod’s Shield of Herakles, drink not only men’s blood but dine upon our earthly torments and eternal hopes?

If we cannot identify them, who are their earthly servants?

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 discovery 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, or 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 demonstrated 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 to neglect to mention that racial distinctions were rarely mentioned in the eastern 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:

“One 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 herd 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.

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.

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.

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.

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…”

“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 Aryas 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 Aryas title, not this work on conspiracy, but on Arуan patrimony.

Letters and Illustrations Edited by Peter Matthiessen

Catlin lived 1796 thru 1872 worked as a painter of tribal peoples and their environments from 1831 through 1867.

Two days ago, just before walking to the used book store, I took a call from a young Texan, whose family is related by marriage to the Comanche. He was curious about any more findings in this area of paleface Indians. I quipped that anyone who denies paleface Indians, has not been to a Powwow. The next day, I found this book.

Catlin has much to say of this obliquely. His portraits are only of leading persons of the tribes. He does not generally name the mixed-race persons who he illustrates as such, it seeming taboo even then, with hateful whites and romantic whites both seeming to want to believe in a pure alien race being displaced by them. He avoids naming Anglo-Indians but will name Spanish Indians. The true evidence though, is in his art.

As a member of the academic establishment, he was bound by the 1840s to go along with the Exclusive Bering Land Bridge Theory and only permitted to note occasional European infusions, namely Welsh and Jеwish, the latter which he does not assign a great antiquity, inferring that Jеws might have fled to the New World and assimilated with tribes in the time of Columbus, when Jеws were being drive out of Spain and forced to convert. Columbus himself was the son of a converso from Italy. Catlin was a good friend of the Mandan Indians, who were genocided by the Lakota during his lifetime. He noted light complexions, green, gray and blue eyes, and provided a list of comparative words in Welsh and Mandan, as well as their legend of an ancestor, a “first man” bringing knowledge of God from the east.

I first conducted a survey of the small portion of Catlin’s work included in this collection. He was on the scene as recently defeated tribes were driven across the Mississippi in defeat, to suffer from disease and be preyed upon by the most powerful western tribes, while the weaker western tribes, many having few men left, banded together with the refugees.

General Survey of Illustrations

Western Tribes

28 persons, by name

15 pure-blooded with strong Asiatic features

13 mixed-race in appearance

0 European in appearance

The trend above was west to east, with the tribes from the Pacific to the Rockies showing no European characteristics, but those in the plains showing increasing evidence of interbreeding.

Eastern Tribes

These tribes were a combination of recent immigrants from east of the Mississippi and tribes located on the west side of the Mississippi, such as the Mandan, who maintained a history of having eastern ancestors or of being driven to the banks of the Lower Missouri and Upper Mississippi by stronger northern plains tribes.

9 persons by name or station, wives typically unnamed “slaves”

0 pure-blooded/Asiatic

1 mixed race person

8 persons with European features, possibly mixed, but with dominant European faces

Among the pure bloods, the Blackfeet were the most impressive specimens. There was one woman, who I quite liked, whose name was The Thighs. These features were tragically not illustrated.

Catlin names these people as individuals and describes elsewhere the practice of marrying captive women and adopting captive children among the tribes. He was present for hostage exchanges at Indian agencies. He does not name obvious white men as such outside of the case of a murdered chief of the Seminole, suggesting, in light of his vocal affinity for these tribesman as being morally superior to civilized men and being naturally honorable and God-fearing, that he may have been politely protecting some of these men from scrutiny.

Impressions of mixed-race persons

pg 286, Man of Good Sense, Konzas, English?

pg 304, Clermont, Osage, certainly part Negro, [what exactly Clermont means in Osage, is not explained]

pg 305, Clermont’s wife, wavy hair, Scottish?

pg 331, Bow and Quiver, Comanche, wavy hair, Spanish, high caste

pg 333, The Spaniard, Comanche, wavy hair, Spanish peasant stock with huge thighs, the best warrior and horseman who came to prominence after being placed in the most dangerous spot in every battle by his Comanche brothers who attempted to have their enemies kill him off

pg 373, Red Jacket, Senecas, English/Asiatic/African mongrel, quite a thugish looking brute, could be a skinhead leader of the 1980s

pg 400, He Who Drinks the Juice of the Stone, Choctaw, Scottish/African mix with near-fro hair, looks like the quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, 20-inch neck, outfitted for lacrosse

pg 453, Cloud, Seminole, stocky, mustached, big workman hands unusual for warriors indicating that he was a true Seminole, the word meaning runaway, Anglo-Asiatic.

Impressions of European Tribal Persons

pg 362, The Foremost Man, Kickapoo, Irish

pg 363, Cock Turkey, Kickapoo, French

pg 366, He Who Stands Alone, Wee-ahs [tribal text note “with intelligent European heads,” Anglo-French

pg 371, Bread, Oneidas, wavy hair, English, what does Bread mean in Iroquois? Oh, it means Bread?

pg 376, The Thinker, Iroquois, wavy hair, tanned high caste Anglo-French if I ever I saw one

pg 390, The Open Door, Shawnee, mustached brother of Tecumseh looks, like a Scotsman

pg 441, The Running Fox, Sacs and Foxes, nephew of Black Hawk, Anglo-American, looks like actor Tom Hardy with bull neck, most masculine of the chiefs

pg 451, Black Drink AKA Powell, Seminole, “white” father and Cree mother, looks so white that his mother must have been Irish, as his father was probably Scottish, as they ran the southeastern frontier, wavy hair, Irish face

Epilogue

To finish this brief survey, I should quote Catlin from among 497 pages of letters and entries he wrote. It is doctrine to dismiss the impressions of any “white” on the subject of the tribes. But in that period, when most tribes battled their neighbors even to extinction, investigators such as Catlin, met and befriended more tribesmen from a wider range of tribes and regions, than any tribesman could, in light of the barriers of tribal animosity. Catlin saw entire tribes wiped out by smallpox as he toured, and two tribes wiped out by war.

“Their rights invaded, their morals corrupted, their lands wrested from them, their customs changed, and therefore lost to the world; and they at last sunk into the earth, and the ploughshare turning the sod over their graves, and I have flown to their rescue—not of their lives or of their race (for they are doomed and must perish), but to rescue their looks and their modes, at which the acquisitive world may hurl its poison and every beam of destruction, and trample them down and crush them to death; yet phoenix-like, they may rise from the stain on a painter’s palette, and live again upon canvas…”

Thank you George Catlin.

“The viper may no longer hiss.”

-A German Warrior, after removing the tongue and sewing shut the mouth of a Roman Lawyer in 9 A.D., after the slaughter of Varus’ Legions

Intended as a discussion and meditation index, sub-title lists not addressed in full. This is an odd history of Arуan horse warriors, many of whom, especially Alexander, deserve an extensive treatment of their own.

I have undertaken this overview of the Arуan horse lords having never sat a horse. Not even riding a motorcycle or driving a car, I do not assume to understand the haughty feeling of mastery that must come with controlling a thousand pound beast or a machine with the power of 300 such beasts under its hood. My perspective must be of the boy who was afraid of horses, the youth who was coursed like a hair by older youths who harried me from their cars, of a stock clerk who was chased and hunted by night through the streets and alleys of Baltimore city by three different young men, in a red pickup (Belair), in a white 71 Chevelle (Greenhill), and in a yellow 72 Mustang (Belair), by five different cops in cruisers (Riverside, Harford, Belair, Fort, Loch Raven) by a pair of rednecks in a black pickup (Sefton), by three carpenters in a small green pickup [Stemmers run), by four high school jocks armed with bats in a blue Ford escort (North Boundry), by four thugs in a large sedan (Sefton), by three thugs in a two-door sedan [Eastern Avenue), and yes, by one wicked little woman in a small sedan (Belair), and a black man in a blue sedan who tried to run me over for sport in June of 2021(Taylor & Loch Raven).

How the foot soldiers of antiquity must have feared the thunder of hooves, I understand.

( ) = street/road

In the faces of all of these would-be masters of my fate I saw haughty arrogance, hate, derision and a thirst to deny me the simple freedom of two feet. As I undertake this overview I will try and recall those narrowed eyes, those aggressively confident aggressors, as they eyed me not as a rival, but as my terrier Buddy used to regard rabbits before he brought them to me with sad head dangling from broken neck.

As for the nature of horses, the character of the horseman and the relationship of the two, I have relied on:

-1. An aggregate year spent over 6 years with Bob, who grew up in a rodeo town, hunted from horseback for some 14 years, and has a severe view of the mule.

-2. Four winters walking Major Wolf’s dogs past Kenny’s mules, one of whom, Samson, stood 9 feet at the ears, and nuzzled me for treats.

-3. Sitting on Arla’s swing as she recounted the deeds of Dutch, her long gone husband who was a bull rider and horsebreaker. She once rode a bad cow, who threw her, compelling her father to kill the bovine and serve her for dinner to his darling daughter.

-4. A month spent with Paul BingHam, farrier, equine foot doctor. I attended Paul while he worked on various horses of varied breeds in Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. I had the experience of handling the paper work and of watering the dogs of Ronnie, a real cowboy, at a cattle yard horse auction where he was unable to sell a certain mule. Returning at dusk to Ronnie’s ranch, I was left alone in the gathering dark with the black mule, who eyed me with bad intent, having been bullied by humans all day and now in the presence of one who feared him. Fortunately, a horny white donkey produced a stupendous erection, and in his attempted rape of the larger, darker animal, saved me from whatever the neurotic mule had in mind.

Brazen Sky

Advent: 0

Cimmerians, Jockeys, Amazons, Scythians, Slaves, Sarmatians, Getai, Isidri, Masagetai and Sacai

From 3,000 B.C. horses were raised for meat beside the rivers north of the Black and Caspian Seas. These could not be herded over open range, but were penned, being to small for men to ride.

From 2,000 B.C. horses were used to haul chariots and revolutionized war along with the composite bow. Boys would be used to ride individual horses like a donkey, seated on the butt, for round up. The small size of jockey’s to this day hearkens back to the need for a light horse wrangler. This technology appears in China, The Near East and India by 1700.

From 850 to 750 B.C. horses had become large enough for men to ride. An exodus from the river valleys of the Danube and Don as the Four Scythian Nations become fully nomadic, seems to have been triggered by an astronomical event that, according to myth, cast four brazen objects down for mankind. Not only do the tribes divide in four, but there are four castes, including Slaves, who are the grain tenders and artisans who stay behind as the free men may now herd horses across open range. It seems the legend of the amazons has the practical source of using women, who put less strain on the still small horses, to lead remounts and exchange tired mounts for their men, as illustrated on the cover of The First Horsemen, Time Life Books [?]

…

Son of God

Classical Antiquity: 1

Xenophon, Phillip & Alexander

The horsemen of Classical antiquity had no stirrups and either fired bows or threw light lances from the backs of their mounts, finally using their swords to cut down fleeing footmen or fight one another from horseback. As Xenophon became 2nd in command of the fugitive 10,000 around 400 B.C., the need to deal with mounted enemy and swarms of archers, slingers and dart throwers, resulted in converting heavy infantry in some cases into horsemen who fought like infantry, and also into missile troops who again, were better at hand to hand than the typical peltast. Xenophon describes in Horsemanship how the cornel wood spear is stronger than the traditional light horseman’s spear, with advice on padding blunt staves and sparring in the saddle.

Phillip of Macedon combined these reforms with close combat doctrine for horsemen who now fought exclusively “like infantry” close on the foe. The abandoned role of mobile missile troops was taken up by using archers and peltasts at point-blank range, taking these traditional forms of skirmishers from the flanks and drawing them across the enemy line of battle to kill men and break formations.

Alexander would develop his father’s doctrine with increased aggression and caused a combined arms military shift similar to the introduction of Blitzkrieg in WWII, granting military supremacy to Macedonians for 125 years until Rome revolutionized infantry tactics.

Terror of the World

Late Antiquity Scythian Descendants: 2

The Jujun, Huns, Heruli, Gepedi, Alans or Alani, Sciri, Tartar Peoples, and the persons, Munjuk father of Attila, Eanak, Uldin, Rugulus, Bleda, Attila and Eslaf

For 2,000 years the blond Huns preyed upon Northern and Eastern China, depopulating numerous regions repeatedly, which were restocked by their civilized foes. The main article of plunder was Chinese women. This is illustrated in Chinese poetry and tapestry and in the graves of the Royal Scythians in Siberia. There was a long period of this type of interbreeding. There also seems to have been the use of Tartar, Turkic and Mongols as allies or slaves, resulting in a sharing out of the Arуan/Scythian horse technology, similar to the relationship between the Nordics and the Finns.

By about 200 A.D. a Chinese expedition to exterminate the Huns marched into Manchuria, lost 270,000 men, raised a monument, and returned with 30,000 troops. This caused a collapse of Hun cohesion and drove them west, where they intermarried with the blond Alans or Alani. Note that the Poetic Eddas express no alien racial difference between Goths and Huns, that the tribes mixed, and that, while the name of Attila’s father was Asiatic, as well as his appearance, that the names of his uncle Regulus, an earlier Hun King Uldin, and his ambassador, Eslaf, were Germanic. Attila was recognized as overlord by the Germanic Kings, even in Sweden.

It seems that the explosion of the steppes people at this time, and the expansion of horse warfare technology across many races, had to do with a cooling cycle and the invention of the stirrup, which made horsemen more effective and more easily trained. The Huns, an entirely mongrel nation with very little social cohesion, would dwindle and disappear from history. It is my suspicion that the Huns, mixing with their successors and with disaffected Germans, became the Cossacks. Hungary would be conquered by the Avars and Magyars, the latter accounting for the modern population. I suggest the Huns were of a similar mix of Asian and European stock.

A Chinese military base was established near Alexandria the Furthest in Central Asia, from where Mango, a giant mercenary warrior, would desert to become the companion of the King of Armenia circa A.D. 300.

Wake and Ready

Chivalry: 3

Avars, Magyars, Cumin, Pechenegs, Roland, William, Timur, Soto & Gustavus Adolphus

Increasingly Asiatic horsemen, culminating with the fully purely Asiatic Mongols and Turks, would push into Eastern Europe even as Arabs and Berbers pushed into Western Europe. The terrible combat described in the Song of Roland, composed in Normandy by Teraldus, just before the life of William of Normandy, once again joined the Nordic thirst for close combat with the horse Wake and Ready, one with his heroic rider. William of Normandy developed 3-rider wedge teams for shock, scaling down and simplifying Alexander’s flying wedge and romboid formations.

Timur, who was a Tartar and an ethno-warrior, was described by his Arab slave of 20 years, who was his Chronicler as “White,” and had the most remarkable career of any horse lord who began in such poverty, with only a horse, a woman and five men, to become the most feared man on the earth, vanquisher of the Khans, Rajahs, Sultans, Kings and countless chiefs. His grandsons would found the Mogul Empire in India. He appears to have used Chinese slaves to employ explosive weapons and died of old age as he marched on China. His tactics were identical to that of Forest in America’s Civil War.

Soto slew more men on a single day with his own hand than any horseman and wiped out numerous civilizations in a four-year expedition in Florida, where he lead 240 horsemen.

Adolphus, warrior King of Sweden, “Lion of the North” perfected the combined arms team, employed leather canon, and died victorious in the saddle.

The First With the Most

Modernity: 4

Cossacks, The French Colonel, Rangers of Virginia, Kentucky & Texas 1644-1890s, Morgan, Forest, Mosby & Custer, Imbolden, Wheeler, Chalmers, Quantrill, Joe Shelby, Phil Sheridan, Custer & Crazy Horse—Turk & Russian Parallel

Cossacks would harry Napoleons beaten host from Moscow to France 30 years after a mad French cavalry colonel lit the fuse for the largest massacre of Americans in Frontier history. Mounted rangers in Virginia came into being based on a suggestion in 1622 by Captain John Smith, that cleared land would facilitate riding down savages from horseback. The 1644 Third Anglo-Powhaton War made mounted rangers the tool most used to clear the toughest tribes of the American frontier, from the Shawnee in 1813 to the Apache and Comanche at the closing of the frontier.

Mounted ranger tactics were used to such great effects by Confederate Commanders that they became the model, along with the Mongols, for German War Studies ultimately resulting in Blitzkrieg doctrine.

These tactics would be answered by cavalry Army tactics of Sheridan and imitated by Crazy Horse at the Fetterman Massacre and the Little Big Horn against Custer. Crazy Horse was said to have blue eyes, possibly a white mother, and used a Winchester, his men armed with much better shoulder fired guns than Custer’s cheap carbines with copper casing that jammed. Ironically, a decade later, a Turkish riders armed with Winchesters sold by America inflicted heavy losses on a Russian force armed with obsolete weapons. To crown this, in 1944, when a Cossack force allied to Germany, of some 20,000, made a fighting winter retreat through Austria to surrender to the Allies, tracing the invasion rout of Attila, American commanders turned them over to the Soviets to be executed and sent to Siberian gulags.

Notes

-0. By the Wine Dark Sea, The Sons of Aryas, The Beasts of Aryas, LaFond, Histories by Hedodotus, The Horse by Strong, 1933

-1. Xenophon Horsemanship, Anabasis, Arrian’s Alexander Anabasis, Alexander of Macedon by Harold Lamb

-2. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 34, Poetic Eddas, Jackson Crawford

-3. The Song of Roland by Teraldus the Norman, The Crusades by Harold Lamb, Tamerlane, Conqueror of the World, Harold Lamb, Paradise Lost by Milton, Hernan De Soto, Savage Quest in the Americas by Duncan, The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz, The Thirty Years War by C.V. Edgewood, The Devil’s Horsemen by Chambers

-4. A Sorrow in the Heart by Allen B. Eckert, A Battle From the Start, Brian Steel Wills, Bust Hell Wide Open [?], Crazy Horse by Mari Sandoz, The Devil Knows How To Ride (Quantrill)[?], Mosby’s Rangers [?], The Civil War by Shelby Foote

From the 370s thru the 470s Rome’s fortunes waned continuously. The lively, pleasing and entertainingly footnoted History of Edward Gibbon, has risen to be my very favorite work of investigative narration. [0] I recommend Gibbon’s narration, either in the 1990s Literary Guild slip cover edition of 8 books, or, the reading by Mister David Timpson. I would like to confine my treatment to impressions of:

Ethnicity,

Personality,

Masculinity,

Cruelty,

Degeneracy,

Piety,

Primacy,

The World Stage…

In inverted order, in something like Gibbon described as a “disquisition.”

The World Stage was increasingly cool and harsh, with frequent earthquakes, increased famine and disease and intensified migrations of barbarians from east and north. Coinage had been devalued and the economy had devolved into a scramble to cannibalize the accumulated art and architecture of Antiquity: relics, even guilt roof tiles, church chalices and temple eves were melted into bullion as the coinage was debased, and the lack of ability to quarry stone turned the eye of the degenerate civic architect on the monuments of a superior past as a source of ready stone. Whatever economic undercurrent, whatever network of nameless and faceless bankers and soul drivers who had trafficked in precious metals and human property since the Bronze Age, remained implicitly intact. For the only social mechanics that yet functioned as they once had was liquidation of gold, silver and people into movable assets.

The rhythmic use of the sorrowful quip in the face of hideous politics and religious hysterics serves the author as a light balm:

“Arcadius, in the thirty fifth year of his age, after a reign—if we can abuse that word…” gives a nice example of Gibbon’s sense of humor that makes his work so pleasing.

Primacy

Emperors served increasingly as disposable puppets for conspiracies. Generals are murdered for their success as often as in the pagan Roman past, with the key civic trait of the Roman government maintaining itself as the hatred of the successful military man. The quickening heart of the collective soul, and its cancerous body, came increasingly to identify and look to barbarian warriors instead of Roman soldiers, heroes and chiefs as agents and of Kings as protectors. The ancient Arуan ideal of the King, after an absence of 1,200 years on the shores of the decadent Middle Sea had returned. The Medieval and Early Modern ideal of the King [Arthur being the ideal] came only from the barbarians, even as the modern idea of the puppet executive is an obvious resurrection of Roman corruption.

Piety

Pious pagans remained in intellectual and military service to Christian Rome more than 100 years after Constantine stamped the Christian brand on the empire. Many of the barbarians were Christian, and were no less cruel than their heathen relations. Christian piety chiefly expressed itself in the persecution of rival Christian sects, with pagans receiving better treatment then “heretics,” whose doctrines were often so similar to that of their orthodox and heretical foes that one would “require a theological microscope” to discern the difference. Mass conversion of rural pagans, which included monks employing gladiators to slaughter rural folks for maypole ceremonies and such, resulted in a mass swelling of church membership. Not coincidentally, the worship of the physical remains of saints, martyrs and apostles became a rage at this time, so morbid that one newly deceased bishop’s body had to be guarded, lest the faithful tear it apart for relics.

Degeneracy

The switch to Christianity did not, halt, slow or accelerate the increased sexual perversion of Late Antiquity, or the decreased birthrate. When the Vandals sacked Carthage in 429 there were many Roman men dressed as women, complicating the sorting of slave girls. Romans of Latin, Greek and other blood, any Roman by name it seems, lacked a healthy desire to procreate as well as to fight enemies. Nearly all military affairs were conducted and directed by barbarians.

Cruelty

Christianity likewise did nothing to change the cruel nature of Roman collective consciousness, with delight in torture, mob murder and the slaughter of the innocent relations of any man who fell from public favor remaining the status quo. Attila the heathen Hun and Odaca the barbarian-Christian Heruli King both showed much more mercy than Christian Romans. Indeed, the storied cruelty of the Christian Barbarian Vandals, seems to be due to their alliance with Donatist Christians paying off scores against Catholics in and around Carthage. Overall, the cruelty once reserved by pagan Romans for the slaughter of the women of foes, was now transferred to the slaughter of barbarian women and children by Romans, and of Christian by Christian over doctrine. The protection of the Church was strictly limited to upper class, Christian, Roman women.

Masculinity

At the midpoint of this period, three women ruled the Roman world as regents to sissy emperors, either sons or brothers. Some strongmen did rise to power, a few Roman soldiers, who were murdered, especially after becoming emperors, and numerous barbarian kings. These barbarian kings were the only protectors of women on the world stage. Even after Attila killed his brother Bleda, Bleda’s widow was an honored matron of that nation. Placidia, a conniving bitch, if a beauty, would be rescued by and married by two barbarian kings and one soldier king. The daughter of Eudocia, disgraced empress of the Eastern Empire, was twice rescued by Genseric, King of the Vandals, who married one of her daughters to a son of his. The only masculine figure permitted in Rome, as a defender of the weak and innocent, was Jesus Christ, with women who would have been killed in the pagan period permitted to live on as a nun. But Roman men themselves, had lost along with the desire to procreate, the instinct to protect even their own wives and daughters.

Personality

Attila, King of the Huns, only man to rule the Scythians and the Germans, managed to put together the biggest battle in pre-gunpowder warfare at Chalons, in which most barbarian nations and some skittish Romans fought. He was like a force of nature, destroying 70 eastern cities and a dozen or so cities in Northern Italy, resulting in Venice, birthing by his rapine a Republic as the people of that region fled to and settled on estuary islands. Of the four kings to bring the City of Rome to its knees, he is the only one who did not rape, burn, loot and destroy it. Asiatic in appearance, he was culturally Scythian, living and dying in all the traditional manners described by Herodotus and dscovered in Scythian burial mounds in Siberia.

Aetius, a friend and rival of Attila, was one of the last true Roman statesman/soldiers and was involved in an early lance duel with Saint Boniface, which he won by using a longer spear. Genseric the Vandal, born on the Baltic, adventured through Germany, Gaul, Spain and into North Africa, which he conquered and held against superior forces. [2] An Arrian Christian, he became the first “Barbary pirate” terrorizing and ravaging from Spain to Egypt, raiding Italy annually. This ally of Attila used the King of the Huns as a capital piece in his chess match to destroy the Roman world, and keeping his own council, even declining to give his navigators targets, trusting to God to send winds that would bring his fleets, which transported horses for inland raiding, to “the guilty.” Attila was the most powerful, Aetius the most crafty, but Genseric was a king for some 50 years, leading his men in war into his 80s, having played his foes and allies off against each other masterfully.

Ethnicity

Some Asiatic races such as the Turkalingi, Uigars and Avars were already in Europe raiding, serving as mercenaries and even attacking the Huns and Germans. The Huns were certainly the Scythians of Classical Antiquity having interbred extensively with as many races as possible. Such names as Uldin, Onagesius, Scota, Erlak [1], Dengezik [1], Edacom, Eslaf, Eonak [1] and Attila’s father, Mujuk, show a mixture of Tartar, Turkic and Germanic names. As with the tribes of North America, adoption of valiant men and the acquisition of varied slave women and wives suggests the Huns as an actual force of interbreeding nature.

By 476 to 479, Rome had been raped three times and submitted once since 405, and was now utterly gone, but for the memory of its 1200 years of rule and its remarkable reputation for being, among nations, the most systematically cruel.

…

Notes

-0. While discussing the physical fate of the city of Rome, Gibbon admits that his history began as an inquiry into that much smaller subject, this great history having radiated out from that urban inquiry.

-1. Three slain sons of Attila, who had two short lived and one moderate terms of tribal kingship after his passing. It seems that the mothers must have named Hun sons according to the conventions of their people, and that these people were varied, for Attila actually fought wars to attain choice brides of various races.

-2. Gibbon confidently declared, in 1777, that no barbarian would even consider the wasted effort of conquering the black regions south of the Torrid Zone! He would have been horrified to know that Europe would lose 100 million souls in two wars that began over the scramble for possession of Sub Sahara Africa.

After the death of Theodosius, the last emperor to take the saddle, his two degenerate sons, ascended to the thrones of The East and West. Honorious in the West was the caged dove of Stilicho, his artful minister. Honorius was married to a beautiful bride and, after 10 years was unable to make love to her, was unable to have sex, had no desire other than feeding birds. His younger brother, Archadius was managed by a rapacious minister who looted the Eastern Empire in an attempt to have his daughter married to Archadius. Saved by Stilicho, tyrant of his older brother, Archadius would die in palatial obscurity.

The Moorish Civil War

The 7 leading legions, including the Jovians and Herculeans, once 5,000 strong, reduced to 1500 strong in the late 200, were now in the final decade of the 300s reduced to a force of only 5,000, seeing a seven-fold reduction in strength. This war ends in the maiming or death of one standard bearer.

Thrice the minister of Honorius, Stilicho, defeats and encircles Alaric and his Goths, to have the Gothic king and his men slip away. Gibbon considers that the two men, with informers in each other’s mercenary camp, are in some kind of communication.

Stilicho, the Roman Christian, attacked Alaric and the Christian Goths on Easter Sunday, entrusting the battle to a pagan Goth, unnamed by history, who fell in the attack! This seems to have been a bloody battle, with the Gothic camp captured at Polentia. The last combat of Gladiators in Rome was given after the driving of the Goths away from the palatial retreat of the emperor at Milan in Northern Italy. Gladiators were used in Syria by fanatic monks to wipe out pagan temples and slaughter pagans. In 404, Telemachus, an Asiatic monk, went into the arena to stop gladiatorial combat, was stoned by the mob and percipitated the final enforcement of the Theodosian Code that forbade all pagan rites.

Honorius, who in 28 years as emperor, did nothing but shelter in place and evacuate to a safer shelter, was the archetype of the captive puppet monarch. Ravenna, on the shores of the Adriatic, became the last refuge of the effete Roman emperors, was a naval base, military supply depot, a city of canals surrounded by vineyards, which still throve in Gibbon’s day. This city had a better supply of wine than water.

The Chinese annals reveal the secret and remote causes of the fall of Rome, which was the rise of the Tartars who drove west the Huns with their own methods and held Northern China for a time until one of these Tartars went over to China and conquered from Korea to the Caspian Sea, defeating the Huns and Alans and sending them west into Eastern Europe. The fugitive Sarmations drove out the Swabians, Vandals and the Burgundians, who were joined by the horseman of the Alimani “Allmen” who were the residue of various German tribes wiped out by the earlier Roman power. These were lead by Radigast, king of the confederate Germans. Much of Northern Italy, already taxed into poverty by the civic structure of Rome in the 300s, were now pillaged. The incompetent siege of Florence marked the birth of that city as a republic of the Middle Ages, as recalled by Machivelli. Radigast was a hero king campaigning under Thor and Odin. This desperate invasion was stopped by Stilicho with an army raised by the following means:

In A.D. 406 a law offering 2 pieces of gold to any slave who would enlist in the legions, permitting Stilicho to “painfully collect,” an army of only 30,000 men, compared to the much larger armies of Volunteers in the 300s B.C. These were combined with a large force of German mercenaries.

Stilicho besieged the besiegers of Florence as he had numerous times the Goths under Alaric. Radigast was beheaded and his starved warriors were sold at 1 gold piece each, and most died quickly. Something like 100,000 of these Germanic refugees from the Baltic scattered about Italy and Gaul. [1] The invaders fought the Franks, who defended the empire. 20,000 Vandals were slaughtered by the Franks, their survivors rescued by the Alans, the blond horsemen out of Asia who Arrian fought about A.D. 130, and had recently intermarried with the Huns, both driven west by the Tartars.

“Smoking ruins alone demarcated the solitude of nature from the desolation of man.”

The last legions had been recalled from the Rhine and Britain a decade earlier to satisfy the needs of civil war. It seems, that despite the use of the stirrup and the introduction of the pressure of the Huns from out of the hinterland, that the Germanic peoples were still hard put to finish off the Roman Power that had for 400 years ravaged the German nations. It seems that Alaric’s demand, when he was comically given a military post in the Eastern Empire after ravaging Greece, devoted his Roman authority to having Roman factories produce shields, spears and swords for his men. These, it is surmised were used to arm poorly equipped able-bodied men yet in German territory.

It does seem that Scotsmen from Ireland invaded what was left of Roman Britain. The remaining garrison elevated a Marcus as king and then killed him, then a Gratian was crowned and killed by these rear echelon soldiers. They then elevated a common soldier named Constantine, who was wise enough to realize he would be murdered in Britain and invaded Gaul. This marks the motivation of the British soldiers as a desire for plunder of the falling empire. Constantine, being a common thug, did better than his predecessors until he became the target of the imperial army. Constantine managed to invade Spain at the head of a mongrel 9,000 man host including Germans, Gauls, Moors and Scots, slaughtering an army recruited from slaves by the descendants of Theodosius. This Common Constantine fled perfidious Britain and grifted his way to rule of Gaul and conquered Spain with a mob of pirates and bandits. The bones of Rome were being picked over.

Alaric, once the Master General of Eastern Rome, renounced that title and became Master General of the Western Empire. Alaric played the fence and seems all along to have been in league with his foe and friend in conspiracy, Stillicho, both of them leading armies that teamed with conspirators eager to kill them for gain. Victory had at too high a cost could coast one his head at the hands of a rival from his own army. Alaric now pressured Stilicho for more benefits in order to march against Constantine. The many “dark transactions” of power players picking over the ages of hoarded Roman treasure, is very similar to the scheming, looting and double-crossing of the pirates of the early 1700s.

Finally, sycophants and women about Honorius, who had been the actual prisoner of Stilicho for decades, directed him to murder the friends of Stilicho, the eight or so richest and most powerful ministers of the West, including the four top military commanders. Since the 180s, some 220 years earlier, this had been the Roman way, not changing a bit under Christian faith, to wipe out the political opposition by murder, to disable political retribution while looting their personal fortunes and murdering their wives and children. Roman politics in Late Antiquity had become some what more than the squabbling of pirates and something less than the feuding of drug cartels. This massacre at Pavia saw Honorius, naked and trembling without his regalia, wandering the streets in a state of recompense, having given in to his “favorites” in a conspiracy that seemed to be more about loot than power. Again, the sinking ship of Rome was a battle between sailors and rats over the last scraps of food, rather than some revolution motivated by faith, hate or even power.

In Bologna, Stilicho assembled his war chiefs, who insisted on marching to Pavia and avenging this insult. Stilicho hesitated, with distrust of his barbarian allies. Carus, a mighty Goth, invaded Stilicho’s camp, “cut in pieces the faithful Huns who guarded his person,” and got into the Minister’s tent. Stilicho, managed to escape the Goths, then warned Italy to shut the gates of the cities against his former instruments, and fled to Ravenna, having committed three patriotic acts in as many days, something unlikely to be forgiven by cruel Fate, even as she glared from behind her Christian veil.

What seems to have been Stilicho’s immediate undoing, was a sudden, rare, and now consistent interest in preserving the remains of the race and culture he had compromised across a career of self-interest and practical power politics.

Stilicho sought refuge in the Church of Ravenna and was lured fourth and executed on the steps of the Church, at his final hour, honoring former Roman generals by dissuading his supporters from civil war and giving his neck to the blade. Maniacal church ladies, such as Olympias, were now thick into the murderous politics of torture, rape and child murder at Ravenna, now placing the Christian but still barbarian Goths, in the moral ascent. Also, the infrastructure of military management had now been gutted for good. Rome, to the extent it existed in the East and the West, would be increasingly dependent on barbarian men and methods.

Stilicho, had only enough virtue left in him to assure his own demise, last of the skilled military men to serve his nation with a shred of conscience. Any praise of this slain minister, who got rid of no fewer than four barbarian armies from Italy, was, by law, punishable by death. The death urge of the collective Roman mind was in the ascent.

The “peculiar merit” of Claudian, the poet and chronicler of these sorry episodes, is addressed in an extensive footnote by Gibbon in a compassionate balance of criticism as the closing statement on the fall of Stilicho.

Notes

-1. Gibbon notes that he was composing this section of his work in 1777, and had been working on the section since 1771, demonstrating that the context of this project was his involvement in British Imperial Government at the very time that empire was fighting to maintain the bulk of its imperial possessions, in America.

42 chapters of this, the oldest book written to appear in the Bible, is placed before Psalms, which are largely prayers for social affliction. Social collapse due to various natural disasters: astronomical, earthquake, drought, flood, blizzard, famine, disease and warfare are addressed. The sections break down roughly into 4 sections:

-1. God and Satan afflict Job, is the briefest section.

-2. The Three Wise Men Debate Job in his Distress, the most extensive section.

-3. The Young Man Exhorts Job, the second most extensive section.

-4. God Answers Job and the Wise Men, Blessing Job, which is slightly longer than the tail of Job’s affliction. God's power shown in creatures is a delightful sketch of the monstrous.

I happened to read this book in light of Hesiod, which I have read four times this past month, and The Babylonian Woe, the book on ancient financial conspiracy by David Astle. There are many aspects of Job that bear on the perennial suffering of the bound working class, of the various cults of experts that control the values of society expressed in Edward Bernays’ Propaganda: The Public Mind in The Making, which I am currently rereading while reading Job. In fact, the plight of job and the young man who exhorts him, is well reflected in the puppet aspect of the Public Man by Tiziana Matarazzo in the 2024 Martino Fine Books edition.

I offer a brief representative list of quotes from Job that seem to bear upon the individual and mass cognition under conditions of social affliction. The one phrase that appears most often outside of normal verbal convention of cadence and affirmation is the concept of Deep Shadow, of the under girding of reality known only to God. The arrogant wise men, faithful Job and God all use this phrase in relation to exclusive understanding or the impossibility of understanding. The dialogues remind me much of the bipolar bickering over pervasive social issues from 2016 thru 2024, a time of great psychological social affliction, characterized by previously unknown levels of mass hysteria and delusion.

2: 1-2: Satan is among “the sons of the [true] God [who] entered into their station before Jehovah, and Satan also proceeded to enter right among them to take his station before Jehovah.”

Satan is shone to be a disliked but tolerated administrator of God’s will on earth and is also permitted to debate with God before the other unnamed minor gods. The general denial of this relationship by modern Christians seems largely to be related to a notion of unified singular creation imposed by atheists in humanistic debate. I see the resulting ignorance of all parties on this question to be instrumental in the modern secular and religious belief that there can be no conspiracy against humanity, among us, or above us.

1:17: The Chaldeans, who later are placed over the Hebrews exiled in Babylon, and who seemed to operate a financial empire from 1850 B.C. to A.D. 1240 when the Mongols waste the city, are depicted as rapacious actors.

7:2: “Like a slave he pants for the shadow,” perhaps meaning the shade from labor, is couched in the contexts of lunar confusion of the reordering of months.

13:4-5: “...you men are smearers of falsehood; all of you are physicians of no value,” claims Job of the wise men who have come to judge him in his affliction, easily assigning the cult of experts who rule us to this day the greatest biblical antiquity.

13:27: “You also keep my feet put in the stocks,” declares Job, against the modern Christian and secular experts who declare stridently that no slavery existed in the ancient world, despite the prevalence of bondage equipment.

15:5: “For your error trains your mouth,” gaslights a wise man taking the afflicted to task for failing God and deserving his misery. This is behavior that has been rife since 2020 in our time, serving to blind and therefore bind both arguing factions.

15:7: “were you the very first man to be born, or before the hills were you brought fourth with labor pains,” is a clear statement that must make ancient astronaut theorists thrill with joy.

16:11: ‘God hands me over to young boys, and into the hands of wicked ones he throws me headlong,” is a statement to earthly life as a test of the soul, as a crucible.

17:10: “as I do not find anyone wise among you,” calls out to tormentors as ignorant dupes of an unseen hand, that being Satan whom God charged with working evil upon Job.

18:10: “A cord for him is hidden on the earth, and a catching device for him on his pathway,” presents the ancient mind as aware that the world is ruled by conspiracy.

19:15: “… my slave girls themselves reckon me as an outsider,” is a measure of the fallen man of power’s woe, a harvest elsewhere in Job compared to the harvest of ripe wheat, and of great value to international money systems, which are referenced in Job. Slave girls are again noted in offense to our modern view of the ancient world.

19: 23-24 “Oh that now my words were written down!

“O that in a book they were even inscribed!

“With an iron stylus and with lead, forever in the rock O that they are hewn!’” suggests this, the most ancient book of the Bible, placed curiously near the end of the Old Testament, as having been written at some point after the introduction of Iron, yet still in the Bronze Age, making the recording of that entire sacred document younger than international banking by thousands of years, and younger than the Chaldean Inception in Babylon by very little, as Iron might be reckoned as in special use by about 1750 B.C.

Job has many lessons to learn for the modern seeker into the past, most having been skipped in this light treatment. An extensive use of Job as a reference to faith in times of earth changes is present in my omnibus science fiction trilogy, Who Writes the Songs of Night, in Volume 3: Night Song of the Nords or Eye of the Dictor.

Thank you for considering this inquiry.

-JL, East Baltimore, 11/24/2024

Chapter 8

Tyrant And Trapezitae

The expansion of mining, coinage, checking, banking and slavery into more tradition settings, would, from 750 B.C. to 250 B.C., from Homeric culture to Hellenistic civilization, change the very name of the slave from a word based on the house, to one based on the coin, with people, over the course of 500 years being reduced to a unit of exchange. The tyrants rose as an early indication of this trend. These were men of the traditional nobility who used alien financial baking, mercenaries & slaves to overthrow their own class, who had refused the “landless traders and manufacturers” membership in the ruling class.

In addition, the landed elites abused the peasants [small free holders] who “were oppressed by the rich and encouraged to get into debt and then were reduced to slavery and exile; slaves began to compete with free labour. Ambitious individuals capitalized on this discontent to overthrow the constituted government and establish themselves as tyrants in all the Greek cities with the notable exception of Sparta.” The later state used monetary abolition, dual kingship, and a council of elders, along with a myopic warrior ethic and xenophobia to avoid tyranny. [0]

Deep parallels between Planter England in the 1500s and 1600s, which permitted international agents of banking and shipping houses to enslave its poor—indeed employed these agents of misery to remove the hungry, homeless and needy—are drawn from pages 112 through 126 to focus almost exclusively on banking politics in Modern England, through 1920. This will be treated in the Plantation America omnibus In This New Isrаel: Volume 1: The Sowers.

To return to 600s B.C. Greece:

“If the land itself they did not own and control, it mattered not; for there were those voices that told them that land too was but a trade and a tool in the new order. As their factories and slaves were the capital investment that produced those textiles (as at Megara[1]), or pottery (as at Corinth), that every ship leaving the harbour carried to the ends of the earth, so the land of the great lord was but the capital investment that grew the food that he the manufacturer purchased for himself and his slaves or the raw materials needed for his particular trade; and he himself, in the money creator’s kingdom on earth, was as assessable in coin as was potter, weaver or armourer.’

The economy of the traditional home based manufacture of goods, by children, wives [2] and household slaves, was now taken to a house that was no home, where people slept before the tools and on or under the tables of their trade. This economy was directly replicated in early Modern Europe and America, with work houses at once prisons and factories. Ominously, the name of Megara—and there may be no foundational link—where textiles were manufactured, meant “Chambers.”

These chambers of purely muscle driven industry were staffed by the poor, “needless to say, soon returned to being poor again… The word “poor” having existed, of course, long before the crafty banker, standing in the shade beside the ways of life, arranged it that poverty and riches was in that number of (privately issued) units of exchange in which a man could be assessed according to success or failure in the conflict of life as he the banker had established it.”

The status of freeman or slave was, as in later ages that sowed America, established by the merchant class. The King of England in the 1700s would be unable to help Jemmy Annelsey from the clutches of his defrauders who sold him, in the return of what had been taken, and later advised a humbled gardener, Isrаel Potter, on avoiding the clutches of man hunters and soul driver, by hiding in London, for the KING could not protect his gardener from bounty hunters, jailers or creditors. The ancient petty king and tyrant as well, was in no position to disobey his financier.

This reader is reminded of Glaukus, Gray-fish of Karystos. He was a peasant’s son, scion of a free farmer. He would use the same hammer fist that he had once employed to straighten a plow blade, to win victory in boxing at Olympia. As an older man, he become a parasite, a side by side banquet friend with, of one Hiero, a Tyrant in Sicily. Glaukus was appointed as governor of a small city by this Tyrant. When revolution came to, Gela, I think was the name of this town, Glaukus was slain in an uprising. Just as tyrants and their “creatures” were elevated through the backing of financiers, the fomenting of uprisings, and the employ of paid professional soldiers, so were they disposed of.

When I advise fighters I train with to avoid political entanglements and work for money alone, I am thinking of being the paymaster’s man, not the man, of the paymaster’s puppet, a puppet, as they all are, which will eventually tatter on that duplicitous stage, to be cast into the rag heap of discarded social avatars.

…

Intermission of Inquiry

Having adopted Astle’s view of lateral, anti-social, capitalist coordination as an ancient economic factor, I am compelled to set aside this fine, heavy, cloth book until my return to this writing retreat in May, 2025. I will now focus on the ancient writings of Hesiod, Arrian and Tacitus, as well as an academic review of the latest physical and linquistic evidence concerning the ancient Scythians, before returning to Astle’s starkly shadowed view of antiquity.

-JL, Baltimore City, 11/6/24

…

Notes

-0. It is of interest to this reader that warrior ethics and fear or suspicion of alien immigration are among our strongest taboos in our postcultural monetary matrix.

-1. Megara and Corinth occupied the Isthmus, being trading cities on the east and west ends of the narrow strip of land that linked Redfaceisland with the rest of Greece.

-3. See Agamemnon’s statements as to the fate of captive women in the Iliad and, in the Odyssey, Penelope, a minor queen, weaving upon her loom.

Chapter 7

Phrygia, Finance, And Front Man

The Assyrian conquests, culminating in the looting of Egypt from 671 thru 661 B.C., despite seeming a revolt by an ethnonationalist empire, come back from near extinction, soon to gain that full honor, fed the very banking networks that it sought to stamp out. For instance the loot from the temple of Amon at Karnak, would have been in 1974 dollars, worth $186,648,000. A description of the sacred metals in their old temple context is given by Diodorus in 57 B.C., writing of times ancient to him:

“So that there was no city under the sun so adorned with so many stately monuments of of gold, silver, and ivory, and multitudes of colossi and obelisks, each cut out of an entire stone…”

Electrum is listed as an alloy of 75% gold, 22% silver and 3% copper.

Phrygia, in northwestern Asia Minor had been an earlier, possible Hittite source of iron and steel. It remained after the vanishing of the Hittites as a “peasant kingdom” with a strong iron craft artisan class. As late as the battle of Cannae in the late 200s B.C. one Roman writes to another, “Who was not wounded there with Phrygian steel?”

Lydia was a minting center near Phrygia, where the grifter agent of Babylon Sadyattes, latter dispossessed and executed by Croesus, who in his turn is disposed of by Cyrus, managed a regional mint. This mint, close to quality weapon manufacture, would be the target of various barbarian invasions, from the Cimmerians circa 750 B.C. to the Gauls circa 260 B.C. With chariot production transferred to Egypt and steel a thing of far western Asia Minor, empire divorced from national presumptions were required to dominate, and also encouraged by the financial class. The scramble for lost knowledge and the touring of learned men such as Solon and Anacharsis of this period, reflects a mature international class of scholars. There is little indication if this is related to finance and may simply be a parallel trend.

The looting of temple gold and silver, along with the increasing abundance of iron and growing obsolescence of bronze, Astle indicates, served the wicked ends of inflation. For gangs of slaves could strip bronze and iron from the dead on battlefields and their masters could then use this to adulterate coinage and extract bullion to an area with a shortage of money, perhaps a new region for financial development where the ruling class had long used pure silver and gold as jеwelry/money and would not accept alloys.

Pheidon, King of Argos in 680, arch enemy state of anti-money Sparta who reigned in the age of Lucurgus, the money abolisher of Sparta, established a 400 to 1 silver/ iron alloy coin as his national standard to match international metrics. At about this time, the Egyptian kopish sword is adopted as the Argive side arm, eventually to evolve into the Nepalese kukri. Naturalized “Greeks” who had immigrated from eastern financial centers to work in manufacture and finance were beginning to establish true international interests in internal city state politics. This person was typified by the trapezitae who sat on a small stool in the agora, the center of each Greek polis, save Sparta, which had as its focus the sacred grove and the military barracks. The “progressive” activities of sell out kings and tyrants like Pheidon is summarized by Astle as a growth of deposit banking, something we are familiar with in modern America.

He sights two banking house, which each lasted at least 100 years, having done work under the Assyrian King Nabopolassar, father of Nebuchadrezzar and the Persia Darius Hystaspes. These houses are evidenced by clay checks and deeds found in an earthenware jar by Arabs. The houses were Egibi Sons and Murassu.

Astle is in his own groove here with the moral vision of ancient finance, convincing me he must have hated that awful movie its A Wonderful Life.

“...the systematic spreading of money madness amongst the landed aristocracy of Greece, thus separting them from their peoples… For their peoples and their labours had now become but cyphers; desirable wealth assessed as according to the figures in the banker’s book.”

But the banker is doomed as well by his own grift.

“They are but pudgy and sly little men as much overwhelmed by the monster they have raised, as are the foolish nations that permitted them to do so.”

Western financial methods were not invented in the 12th Century A.D. but were there a mere colonial adaptation of an ancient near eastern practice. The many poor laws and criminalization of poverty in the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods in Western Europe had a deep antiquity and ere not the innovations we suppose. Just as William Moraley, Petter Williamson, Golieb Mitterberger, John Harrower, Davvy Crockett and William Garrison would discover, it was the same in antiquity, save for the language:

“Behind the Aramaic speaking banker came the slave trader, and it was not long before the poor people found that the king’s law was no longer for them…”

Citizenship would always be easy to obtain for those with money. When the banker no longer needed the king, or the cabal of oligarchs, revolution would be funded and a more malleable rabble would be given a voice, bought by the same agents that supplied the weapons:

“...stirred active resentment against their former leaders… and who, of course, had no more understanding than themselves of that force by which they were both being manipulated…”

One wonders, was this the point of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?

[Half of the work or more in this chapter is from my reading of the primary sources, and constitute ancient corroboration of Astle’s case, particularly on Alexander and Solon and the Persians.]

Chapter 6

Babylon, Banking, And Bullion

The first big bad guys of standard history, the Assyrians in their 900s B.C. conquests, seem, on Astle’s consideration, not so much oppressors of small states, but as rebels against international banking, using small states as branch offices. The front men for the banking operations were primarily Arameans, an Arуan people whose written language was the source of both Greek and Hebrew writing. Aramaian and Greek would be the two languages the New Testament was first recorded in, which in this context brings to mind Jesus driving the money changers from the temple, not so much as correcting a blasphemy as we assume, but affronting an ancient financial faith. The banking network extended from India to eastern Anatolia. Use of the term Phoenician applied to the Aramean refugees from the Assyrian ethno-national revolt, is something like describing the Norman British ruling class as Anglo-Saxon, which they are manifestly not.

The coinage reforms in Athens under Solon [1] in the 590s B.C. were a form of regional standardization by international weight via local mintage establishing community authority, related to large scale bullion movement, due in part to local mining and in part to removal of treasure from Assyria banking centers. After reactionary local politics rocked the banking establishment, Solon seems to have been a front man for the bankers who, in order to continue basing their operations in Greece, had to stop enslaving its people through debt, labor and fraud, and needed to import slaves into Greece to work the mines. Some free Greeks did join the gangs of mining slaves for a time.

The basis of Greek coinage would now be the drachma, “circulated at par with the shekel” of Babylon due to weight reforms. This extended the common market into the Greek sphere and would bring with it reform in Athens, severe reform in Sparta, [2] and war from the east.

Solon, the philosopher Archon [mayor] of Athens reformed the “the old noxious contracts” that were “a mere snare for the liberty of a poor free man and his children.” This was called “shaking-off-of-burdens,” which established them as an enemy of the Babylonian system and its Persian puppet kings, who then extended their military occupation into Europe in 512 B.C., above Greece, in Thrace, where rich mines were in operation.

That 512 invasion of Europe by Darius, the invasions of Greece by he and his successor Xerxes in 490 and 480 B.C., viewed in our murky mirror, begin to take on some of the proxy aspects of an American Petro-Dollar war racket. The improvement of the Laureion silver mines controlled by Athens, very close to where the Persians landed in 490 at Marathon [3], positioned Athens as a regional rival to the Persians. That class of international brokers who handled the affairs of the King of Kings who must tax some 30 captive nations, seem to have also helped improve Athenian mining and minting. Athens now had a dictatorship under Solon that discouraged slavery of its people, and granted citizenship to rural folk from other nations willing to relocate to work as artisans in Athens.

These brokers are only hinted at in Herodotus’ account of the great war between Persia and Athens. An Asiatic Greek, Herodotus had as much access to the Persian camp as to the Greek, largely through interviews with the train of Greek exiles that worked as advisors to the Great King. Spies, secret police, torturers and executioners are referred to vaguely as “those whose task it was,” to do such terribly necessary things as punish a river god by flogging it, slay the sons of the subject King of Lydia and loot his entire treasury along with all movable resources such as beasts, hay, slaves and food.

Astle has an inkling, and I expect he is correct, that being expelled from Sparta for promoting degenerate consumption and debt slavery, these faceless, nameless brokers would work with the Athenian rivals of reactionary Sparta, promoting conflict with the King of Kings, who was also dependent upon their system of exchange, their shipping and their consequent control of the slave trade.

“Out of war could only come good to them and theirs. Whether the Great King remained great, or Athens took his place…” The term “hand over fist” for making loads of low investment money seems perfect for this war monger activity. They would provide financial services, to include turning captive slaves into money, the measure of their gain determined only by the ruin of war—the more terrible and destructive, the higher their profit. It is clear form my study of the Greco-Persian Wars that Xerxes gathered the better part of the military of 30 nations, even dismounting the Scythian horse archers, and marching them to the edge of the world to be marooned. The grain of Egypt was heaped in great depots by thousands of ships. The lands, people and treasures of Anatolian and European vassal kings were pillaged on the way to Greece. The great army was marooned and the Great King returned with his Persian troops, to be King Supreme. For he had sent the flower of the warriors of 30 nations to die by war, hunger and thirst on the door step of an upstart power with a seat at the money table. Napoleon used the same strategy in his invasion of Russia, with most of his manpower not French.

The Macedonian invasion of Persia 150 years later by Alexander had been planned for so long as a known, and long frustrated, necessity. For mines dotted Northern Greece and they must be got or kept. After Alexander gained the agreement of all of Greece save Sparta, who had come back into the power of the bankers, hopeless revolts popped up in mining areas to the north which Alexander had crushed when he was a prince of 16. As well, Thebes, which Alexander and his Father had crushed 2 years earlier, rose up in hysteria, having been convinced by returned exiles that he was going to kill them anyhow, so they might as well die defiantly. Those folk who were not killed by their vengeful neighbors were sold into the same international system by the hand of the man that system secretly opposed, for he could not do without money to pay his troops. I have skipped ahead here, as Astle does not take us to Alexander and will declare the death of freedom before the rise of that money power’s greatest foe. [4] These extinguished Thebans were, ironically or not, the scions of the Arameans under Cadmus who had fled the wrath of the Assyrians.

The Laws of Lycurgus rejecting money in Sparta pressured the refugee bankers, a multi-ethnic network of socio-economic parasites, to cooperate with Athens rather than follow the normal course of undermining the social structure and extracting slaves, silver and gold from the host society.

…

Notes

-0. seisachtheia

-1. Solon would advise Croesus of Lydia, who did nationalize his banking, and was then crushed by Cyrus, seemingly on their account.

-2. see part 12

-3. Fennel field

-4. this will be covered under Arrian