|
Post by Babylon Enigma on Jul 26, 2015 20:09:31 GMT -5
Christianization of Scandinavia
The Christianization of Scandinavia took place between the 8th and the 12th centuries. The realms of Scandinavia proper, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, established their own Archdioceses, responsible directly to the Pope, in 1104, 1154 and 1164, respectively. The conversion to Christianity of the Scandinavian people required more time, since it took additional efforts to establish a network of churches. The Samis remained unconverted until the 18th century.
Although the Scandinavians became nominally Christian, it took considerably longer for actual Christian beliefs to establish themselves among the people.[1] The old indigenous traditions that had provided security and structure were challenged by ideas that were unfamiliar, such as original sin, the Incarnation, and the Trinity.[1] Archaeological excavations of burial sites on the island of Lovön near modern-day Stockholm have shown that the actual Christianization of the people was very slow and took at least 150–200 years,[2] and this was a very central location in the Swedish kingdom. Thirteenth-century runic inscriptions from the merchant town of Bergen in Norway show little Christian influence, and one of them appeals to a Valkyrie.[3]
During the early Middle Ages the papacy had not yet manifested itself as the central Catholic authority, so that regional variants of Christianity could develop.[4] Since the image of a "victorious Christ" frequently appears in early Germanic art, scholars have suggested that Christian missionaries presented Christ "as figure of strength and luck" and that possibly the Book of Revelation, which presents Christ as victor over Satan, played a central part in the spread of Christianity among the Vikings.[5]
Recorded missionary efforts in Denmark started with Willibrord, Apostle to the Frisians, who preached in Schleswig, which at the time was part of Denmark. He went north from Frisia sometime between 710 and 718 during the reign of King Ongendus.[6] Willibrord and his companions had little success: the king was respectful but had no interest in changing his beliefs. Agantyr did permit 30 young men to return to Frisia with Willibrord. Perhaps Willibrord's intent was to educate them and recruit some of them to join his efforts to bring Christianity to the Danes.[7] A century later Ebbo, Archbishop of Reims and Willerich, later Bishop of Bremen, baptized a few persons during their 823 visit to Denmark. He returned to Denmark twice to proselytize but without any recorded success.[7]
In 826, the King of Jutland Harald Klak was forced to flee from Denmark by Horik I, Denmark's other king. Harald went to Emperor Louis I of Germany to seek help getting his lands in Jutland back. Louis I offered to make Harald Duke of Frisia if he would give up the old gods. Harald agreed, and his family and the 400 Danes with him were baptized in Ingelheim am Rhein.[8] When Harald returned to Jutland, Emperor Louis and Ebbo of Rheims assigned the monk Ansgar to accompany Harald and oversee Christianity among the converts.[9] When Harald Klak was forced from Denmark by King Horik I again, Ansgar left Denmark and focused his efforts on the Swedes. Ansgar traveled to Birka in 829 and established a small Christian community there. His most important convert was Herigar, described as a prefect of the town and a counselor to the king. In 831 the Archdiocese of Hamburg was founded and assigned responsibility for proselytizing Scandinavia.[10]
Horik I sacked Hamburg in 845 where Ansgar had become the archbishop. The seat of the archdiocese was transferred to Bremen.[10] In the same year there was a pagan uprising in Birka that resulted in the martyrdom of Nithard and forced the resident missionary Bishop Gautbert to flee.[11] Ansgar returned to Birka in 854 and Denmark in 860 to reestablish some of the gains of his first visits. In Denmark he won over the trust of then-King Horik II (not Horik I, who was murdered in 854 and opposed Christianity) who gave him land in Hedeby (proto-town to be replaced by Schleswig) for the first Christian chapel. A second church was founded a few years later in Ribe on Denmark's west coast. Ribe was an important trading town, and as a result, southern Denmark was made a diocese in 948 with Ribe as its seat, a part of the Archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen under its first bishop, St. Leofdag who was murdered that year while crossing the Ribe River.[12]
The supremacy of the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen over ecclesiastical life in the north gradually declined as the papacy, from the pontificate of Pope Gregory VII onwards, involved itself more with the North directly.[13] A significant step in this direction was the foundation of an archbishopric for the whole of Scandinavia at Lund in 1103-04.[13]
Both the accounts of Willibrod and of Harald are semi-mythical, and integrate mythical and legendary themes from the Nordic pagan tradition into their Christian stories. A syncretized variant of the story of Harald, that has him battling Ragnar Lodbrok to establish Christianity in Denmark, appears in Book Nine of Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum. Ebbo is the name of a mythical Nordic figure, Ibor, also known as Egil or Orvandil, who is an archer, elf, and smith who turns against the Aesir gods and wages war upon them, and the story of Ebbo of Rheims integrates themes of the divine Ebbo's story, including peasant (non-Aesir) birth and migration. Harald's usurpation and his efforts at Christianization are related to several stories of "usurpation" and "changes in sacrifices", including the usurpation of Mithothyn and the introduction of the worship of Frey at Uppsala, in that they utilize similar motifs and mythical figures.
Denmark
The spread of Christianity in Denmark occurred intermittently. Danes encountered Christians when they participated in Viking raids from the 9th century to the 1060s. Their contempt for Christian teaching, sites, and those who lived a religious life was notorious. Danes were still tribal in the sense that local chiefs determined attitudes towards Christianity and Christians for their clan and kinsmen. Bringing Christian slaves or future wives back from a Viking raid brought large numbers of ordinary Danes into close contact with Christians for perhaps the first time.
As the chiefs and kings of Denmark became involved in the politics of Normandy, England, Ireland, France, and Germany, they adopted a kinder attitude toward their Christian subjects. In some cases the conversion of the chief or king appears to be purely political to assure an alliance or prevent powerful Christian neighbours from attacking. There were instances when the conversion of a powerful chief (Danish: jarl) or one of the kings was followed by wholesale conversions among their followers. In a few instances conversion was brought about by trial by ordeal miracles wrought by saintly Christians in the presence of the king or other great men of the time.
Christian missionaries recognized early on that the Danes did not worship stone or wooden idols as the north Germans or some Swedes did. They could not simply destroy an image to prove that Christ was a superior god(Christianity=ISIS). The great religious sites at Viborg, Leira, Lund, and Odense were also the location of Denmark's great assembly places (Danish: landsting). Religious sites in Denmark were often located at sacred springs, magnificent beech groves, or isolated hilltops. Missionaries simply asked to build chapels in those places. Over time the religious significance of the place transferred itself to the chapel.
Even after becoming Christian, Danes blended the two belief systems together. Families who lived close to the earth did not want to offend the local spirits (Danish: landvætter), so offerings were left just as they had been in pre-Christian days. Sacred springs (Danish: kilder) were simply consecrated to one of the local saints associated with the spring and life went on much as it had before. Christian missionaries were able to help the process along by locating churches on or near sacred places, in some cases actually using wood from the sacred groves for church construction. Thor's hammer sign was easily absorbed by the cross.
Denmark has several saints, canonized by local bishops as was the custom in early Scandinavia or revered by locals as saints. Often these saints derive their veneration from deeds associated with the Christianization of Denmark. Viborg has St Kjeld, Aarhus has St Niels (also called St Nickolas), Odense has St Canute (Danish: Sanct Knud). Others include Canute Lavard, Ansgar, St Thøger of Vendsyssel, St Wilhelm, St Leofdag of Ribe, and others gave their lives and efforts to the task of making the Danes Christian.
King Gorm the Old (Danish: den Gamle), who was known in his lifetime as Gorm the Sleepy, was the first king of all of Denmark. Until his day, Danish kings were local kings without influence over all the Danes. Denmark consisted of Jutland and Schleswig and Holstein all the way down to the Eider River, the main islands of Zealand, Funen, Langeland, the nearby lesser islands, and Skåneland. Gorm was said to be "hard and heathen", but Queen Thyra's influence permitted Christians to live more or less without trouble. Gorm and Queen Thyra's son, King Harald Bluetooth, boasted on one of the stones at Jelling that he had "made the Danes Christian".
The first Danish king to convert to Christianity was Harald Klak, who had himself baptised during his exile in order to receive the support of Louis the Pious.[14] Rimbert reports that he set out to return home, accompanied by missionaries;[15] however, Sanmark regards it as "unlikely" that he actually returned home and thus considers his impact on the conversion of Denmark as "probably minor."[14]
Christianity only gained a strong hold in Denmark following the baptism of Harald Bluetooth.[14] Initially, Harald had remained pagan, although he had allowed public preaching by Christian missionaries as early as 935. Around 960, Bluetooth converted to Christianity,[14] reportedly when the Frisian monk Poppo held a fire-heated lump of iron in his hand without injury. Harald's daughter, Gunhilde, and his son, Sweyn Forkbeard were baptized, too. There was also a political reason for conversion. German histories record Harald being baptized in the presence of Emperor Otto I, Sweyn Forkbeard's godfather. One consequence of his conversion is that Danish kings abandoned the old royal enclosure at Jelling and moved their residence to Roskilde on the island of Zealand.
Sweyn rebelled against his father, who spent an inordinate amount of time and money raising a great stone at Jelling to commemorate his accomplishments. One day King Harald asked a traveller if he had ever seen human beings move such a heavy load. "I have seen Sweyn drag all of Denmark away from you, sir. Judge for yourself which of you bears the heavier weight."[16] Harald left the stone lying in the path, realizing at last that Sweyn had nearly succeeded in stealing the whole kingdom. Several battles brought the rebellion to stalemate, but in 985 Harald was mortally wounded by an arrow. Later his remains were buried in the little timber church at Roskilde, then Denmark's capital. His remains are supposed to be walled up in one of the pillars of Roskilde Cathedral.
Sweyn Forkbeard tried to wrest control of the church in Denmark away from the Holy Roman Empire and as a result was slandered by German historians of his day. He has been accused of relapsing from his Christian beliefs and persecuting Christians in England. In fact Sweyn gave land to the large cathedral at Lund to pay for the maintenance of the chapter. His army destroyed Christian churches in England as part of his invasion following the St. Brice's Day massacre of Danes organized by Aethelred. But when Sweyn became King of England and of Denmark, politics required that he show a kinder face toward the church which had opposed him.
Another Christianizing influence was the mass emigration of Danes to England and Normandy in the Viking years. Thousands of Danes settled in east central England and in northern France displacing or intermarrying with the locals who were Christian. Once part of a Danish clan became Christian, it often meant that the rest of the family's view toward Christianity softened.
By the early 11th century, certainly during the reign of Canute IV, Denmark can be said to be a Christian country. Later known as St. Canute, Canute IV was murdered inside St. Albans Church in 1086 after nobles and peasants alike rebelled at his enforcing the tithe to pay for the new monasteries and other ecclesiastical foundations which were introduced into Denmark for the first time during his reign. Both the institutions and the tax were considered foreign influences, and Canute's refusal to use the regional assemblies as was customary to establish new laws, resulted in his death and that of his brother, Prince Benedict, and seventeen other housecarls. In many ways the canonization of St. Canute in 1188 marks the triumph of Christianity in Denmark. When St. Canute's remains were moved into Odense Cathedral, the entire nation humbled itself with a three-day fast. Although he was not the first Dane to be made a saint, it was the first time for a king, the symbol of a more or less united Denmark, was recognized as an example worthy of veneration by the faithful.
From that time until 1536 when Denmark became a Lutheran country under the King (or Queen) of Denmark as the titular head of the Danish National Church, (Danish: Folkekirke) the struggle between the power of the king and nobles and the church would define much of the course of Danish history.
Faroe Islands
Sigmundur Brestisson was the first Faroe-man to convert to the Christian faith, bringing Christianity to the Faroes at the decree of Olaf Tryggvason. Initially Sigmundur sought to convert the islanders by reading the decree to the Alting in Tórshavn but was nearly killed by the resulting angry mob. He then changed his tactics, went with armed men to the residence of the chieftain Tróndur í Gøtu and broke in his house by night. He offered him the choice between accepting Christianity or face beheading; he chose the former. Later on, in 1005, Tróndur í Gøtu attacked Sigmundur by night at his yard in Skúvoy, whereupon Sigmundur fled by swimming to Sandvík on Suðuroy. He reached land in Sigmundargjógv in Sandvík, but a farmer in the village killed the exhausted Sigmundur and stole his precious golden arm ring.
Norway
The first recorded attempts at spreading Christianity in Norway were made by King Haakon the Good in the tenth century, who was raised in England. His efforts were unpopular and were met with little success. The subsequent King Harald Greyhide, also a Christian, was known for destroying pagan temples but not for efforts to popularize Christianity.
He was followed by the staunchly pagan Haakon Sigurdsson Jarl who led a revival of paganism with the rebuilding of temples. When Harold I of Denmark attempted to force Christianity upon him around 975, Haakon broke his allegiance to Denmark. A Danish invasion force was defeated at the battle of Hjörungavágr in 986.
In 995 Olaf Tryggvason became King Olaf I of Norway. Olaf had raided various European cities and fought in several wars. In 986 however, he (supposedly) met a Christian seer on the Isles of Scilly. As the seer foretold, Olaf was attacked by a group of mutineers upon returning to his ships. As soon as he had recovered from his wounds, he let himself be baptized. He then stopped raiding Christian cities and lived in England and Ireland. In 995 he used an opportunity to return to Norway. When he arrived, Haakon Jarl was already facing a revolt, and Olaf Tryggvason could convince the rebels to accept him as their king. Haakon Jarl was later betrayed and killed by his own slave, while he was hiding from the rebels in a pig sty.
Olaf I then made it his priority to convert the country to Christianity using all means at his disposal. By destroying temples and torturing and killing pagan resisters he succeeded in making every part of Norway at least nominally Christian. Expanding his efforts to the Norse settlements in the west the kings' sagas credit him with Christianizing the Faroes, Orkney, Shetland, Iceland and Greenland.
After Olaf's defeat at the Battle of Svolder in 1000 there was a partial relapse to paganism in Norway under the rule of the Jarls of Lade. In the following reign of Saint Olaf, pagan remnants were stamped out and Christianity entrenched.
Nicholas Breakspear, later Pope Adrian IV, visited Norway from 1152 to 1154. During his visit, he set out a church structure for Norway. The Papal bull confirming the establishment of a Norwegian archdiocese at Nidaros is dated November 30, 1154.[17]
Sweden
The first known attempts to Christianize Sweden were made by Ansgar in 830, invited by the Swedish king Björn at Haugi. Setting up a church at Birka he met with little Swedish interest. A century later Unni, archbishop of Hamburg, made another unsuccessful attempt. In the 10th century English missionaries made inroads in Västergötland.
Adam of Bremen's historical treatise Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum mentions a pagan Temple at Uppsala in central Sweden.[19] "The reliability of Adam's description of the cult site at Gamla Uppsala has been seriously questioned."[20] Although Uppsala's status as a pre-Christian cultic center is well documented, Adam's account could not be confirmed by archaeological findings.[21] The "presumed cult buildings which have been excavated do not resemble Adam's description of a temple 'totally covered with gold."[22]
The supporters of the cult at Uppsala drew a mutual agreement of toleration[21] with Olof Skötkonung the first Christian king of Sweden who ascended to the throne in the 990s. Presumably Olof Skötkonung was not in a powerful enough position to violently enforce the observance of Christianity in Uppland.[23] Instead he established an episcopal see at Skara in Västergötland, near his own stronghold at Husaby around 1000.[23] Another episcopal see was established at Sigtuna in the 1060s,[23] according to Adam vom Bremen by King Stenkil.[24] This seat was moved to Gamla Uppsala probably some time between 1134 and 1140.[24] This might have been because of Uppsala's importance as an old royal residence and thing site, but it may also have been inspired by a desire to show that the resistance to Christianity in Uppland had been defeated.[24] By papal initiative an archdiocese for Sweden was established at Uppsala in 1164.[24][25]
What may be one of the most violent occurrences between Christians and pagans was a conflict between Blot-Sweyn and Inge the Elder in the 1080s. This account survives in the Orkneyinga saga and in the last chapter of Hervarar saga where the saga successively moves from legendary history to historic Swedish events during the centuries before its compilation. The reigning king Inge decided to end the traditional pagan sacrifices at Uppsala which caused a public counter-reaction. Inge was forced into exile, and his brother-in-law Blot-Sweyn was elected king on condition that he allow the sacrifices to continue. After three years in exile, Inge returned secretly to Sweden in 1087, and having arrived at Old Uppsala, he surrounded the hall of Blot-Sweyn with his húskarls, and set the hall on fire, slaying the king as he escaped from the burning house. Hervarar saga reports that Inge completed the Christianization of the Swedes, but the Heimskringla suggests that Inge could not assume power directly, but had to dispose of yet another pagan king, Eric of Good Harvests.[26]
According to M. G. Larsson, the reason why the Swedish core provinces had coexistence between paganism and Christianity throughout the 11th century was because there was a general support for the transition towards the new religion.[27] However, the old pagan rites were important and central for legal processes and when someone questioned ancient practices, many newly Christianized Swedes could react strongly in support of paganism for a while.[27] Larrson theorizes that, consequently, the vacillation between paganism and Christianity that are reported by the sagas and by Adam of Bremen were not very different from vacillations that appear in modern ideological shifts.[27] It would have been impossible for King Inge the Elder to rule as a Christian king without strong support from his subjects, and a Norwegian invasion of Västergötland by Magnus Barefoot put Inge's relationship with his subjects to the test: he appears to have mustered most of the Swedish leidang, 3,600 men, and he ousted the Norwegian occupation force.[28]
Although Sweden was officially Christianized by the 12th century, the Norwegian king Sigurd the Crusader undertook a crusade against Småland, the south-eastern part of the Swedish kingdom in the early 12th century, and officially it was in order to convert the locals.
Christianization of Iceland
Iceland was Christianized in approximately 1000 AD. In Icelandic, this event is known as the kristnitaka (literally, "the taking of Christianity"). The earliest Christian observance in the country in all likelihood began with the arrival of the first settlers during the settlement of Iceland in the 9th and 10th centuries AD. Some of them were from the British Isles and had adopted Christianity through their contact with the Irish. However, the vast majority of the initial settlers were pagan, worshipping the Æsir (the Norse gods), and organized Christian observance probably died out within a generation or so.
Missionaries
Beginning in 980, Iceland was visited by several missionaries. The first of these seems to have been an Icelander returning from abroad, one Thorvald Konradsson (Old Norse: Þorvaldr Konráðsson inn víðförli). Accompanying Thorvald was a German bishop named Fridrek, about whom little is known. Thorvaldur's attempt to convert Icelanders met with limited success. He was the subject of ridicule and was eventually forced to flee the country after a conflict in which two men were killed.
Kings of Norway exert pressure
When Olaf Tryggvason ascended the throne of Norway, the effort to Christianize Iceland intensified. King Olaf sent an Icelander named Stefnir Thorgilsson back to his homeland to convert his fellow countrymen. Stefnir violently destroyed sanctuaries and images of the heathen gods – this made him so unpopular that he was eventually declared an outlaw. After Stefnir's failure, Olaf sent a priest named Thangbrand (Old Norse: Þangbrandr). Thangbrand was an experienced missionary, having proselytized both in Norway and the Faroe Islands. His mission in Iceland from c. 997–999 was only partly successful. He managed to convert several prominent Icelandic chieftains, but killed two or three men in the process.[1] Thangbrand returned to Norway in 999 and reported his failure to King Olaf, who immediately adopted a more aggressive stance towards the Icelanders. He refused Icelandic seafarers access to Norwegian ports and took as hostages several Icelanders then dwelling in Norway. This cut off all trade between Iceland and its main trading partner. Some of the hostages taken by King Olaf were the sons of prominent Icelandic chieftains, whom he threatened to kill unless the Icelanders accepted Christianity.
In the 11th century, three Armenian bishops, Petros, Abraham and Stephannos are recorded by Icelandic sources as Christian missionaries in Iceland. Their presence has been explained in terms of the service of King Harald Hardrada of Norway (c.1047–1066) as a Varangian in Constantinople, where he had met Armenians serving in the Byzantine Imperial Army.[2]
The Icelandic Commonwealth's limited foreign policy consisted almost entirely of maintaining good relations with Norway. The Christians in Iceland used the King's pressure to step up efforts at conversion. The two rival religions soon divided the country and threatened civil war.
Adoption by arbitration
This state of affairs reached a high point the next summer during the meeting of the Alþing, the political hub of the Commonwealth. Fighting between adherents of the rival religions seemed likely until mediators intervened and the matter was submitted to arbitration. The law speaker of the Alþing, Thorgeir Thorkelsson, the goði of Ljósavatn, (Icelandic: Þorgeir ljósvetningagoði), was acceptable to both sides as mediator, being known as a moderate and reasonable man. Thorgeir accepted responsibility for deciding whether Iceland should become Christian, with the condition that both parties abide by his decision. When this was agreed, he spent a day and a night resting under a fur blanket, contemplating.
The following day he announced that Iceland was to become Christian, with the condition that old laws concerning the exposure of infants and the eating of horseflesh would remain, and that private pagan worship be permitted. These sticking points related to long-established customs that ran contrary to the laws of the Church. Horsemeat is a taboo food in many cultures, and Pope Gregory III had banned the Germanic custom of its consumption in 732. Likewise, infanticide used to be widespread around the world, and the practice of exposing "surplus" children was an established part of old Icelandic culture. It was strongly believed that there was a limit to the number of people the island could support and that rearing too many children would bring disaster for all.
Thorgeir, who was himself a pagan priest, took his pagan idols and threw them into a large waterfall, which is now known as Waterfall of the Gods (Icelandic: Goðafoss). The problem of changing religions was thus solved, as people abided by Thorgeir's decision and were baptised. Civil war was averted via arbitration. Iceland's peaceful adoption is in many ways remarkable, given the decades of civil strife before Norway became fully Christian. A likely explanation is that the major goði chieftains of Iceland preferred religious change to civil strife.
Once the Church was firmly in control in Iceland, horsemeat, infanticide, and pagan rituals practiced in private were banned.[3]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Scandinavia
|
|
|
Post by Babylon Enigma on Jul 26, 2015 20:29:38 GMT -5
Afterthoughts on Afterlife
by Revilo P. Oliver
WE DO NOT KNOW when or how or by whom the notion of a life after death was invented. All mammals instinctively fear death, but if they escape their natural enemies and survive to senility, they seem to acquiesce in a quiet extinction of their enfeebled consciousness. We cannot suppose that the Australopithecus or any species of Homo erectus imagined a possible prolongation of life, and, despite some very recent claims, it is highly improbable that the Neanderthals did. The remote ancestors of our own race, the Cro-Magnons, must have had the capacity for such imagination, but we have no means of knowing what they believed.
We are often told that burials are evidence of some belief in an afterlife, but they may be no more than a manifestation of an instinctive respect or affection for the dead man and an unwillingness to see his corpse devoured by beasts. When a man’s possessions are buried with him, there may have been some notion (as is attested in Egypt, for example) that the equipment would be useful to him in a post-mortem existence, but it is equally possible that some or many instances of this custom may indicate the emergence of a strong sense of private property: the spear or the beads or the golden drinking-horn were the dead man’s, and no one should steal from him when he dies.
However men came to imagine a survival after death, it is probable that the very oldest form of the notion was a belief that the corpse in the grave retains a certain sentience. Numerous inscriptions attest the survival even to Roman times of a belief that wine poured through the opening of the tomb would rejoice the spirit of the dead and even induce drunkenness. And this most primitive belief survives poetically today, as in Tennyson’s My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead. When men imagined ghosts, shadowy and tenuous, but not absolutely immaterial, simulacra of the dead in which their consciousness persisted, at least for a time, the phantoms, now detached from the grave, were given a realm of their own in an underworld, far beneath the ground, or, more poetically, in a misty land beyond the sunset. There the dead man, whether hero or peasant, was automatically and inexorably doomed to a miserable life-in-death, a helpless and almost voiceless shade, whose umbratile consciousness is embittered (as in the Homeric Nekyia) by the knowledge that it is better to be a dog among the living than a monarch of all the dead.
It is hard to account for the origin of the really revolutionary idea of a divine discrimination between ghosts, so that the afterlife of the ghosts will correspond in some way to the degree of moral excellence attained during life or, what is only slightly different, the special favor of some god. In his play, Critias (Plato’s uncle) explained it as a device to enforce the doctrine that the gods sustain human society by rewarding right conduct and/or punishing the reverse: when experience had made it only too obvious that Hesiod’s Zeus does not act on the reports of the invisible spirits he sends to observe even the most secret acts of men, i.e., that just men do suffer unjustly while scoundrels flourish throughout long lives, it became necessary for lawgivers to invent the notion of a life after death in which Zeus will at last give effect to his judgement of men’s morality.
What is certain is that if a large populace really believes in the inevitability of justice after death, fear of condign punishment will to some extent inhibit crimes against society, and that the social utility of the myth commended it to many thoughtful men who did not themselves believe it.
A meaningful concept of immortality always includes more than existence after death. No one wants the immortality of Tithonus.
If there is a divine justice, it must do more than discriminate among ghosts and allocate post-mortem residence according to moral criteria. Although the dead in Hades are usually in the form they had at the time of their death (e.g., Deiphobus and others in Vergil), the favored dwellers in Elysium or the Beatae Insulae seem always to have the bodily form that was theirs at the time of their greatest excellence: the warrior is in the prime of his physical prowess, regardless of when or how he died; the sage has the maturity of his wisdom, but is exempt from the effects of old age; and a woman who has earned such immortality reverts to the age at which she was most beautiful.
One of the Christian apocalypses composed under the name of John has Jesus promise that, come the resurrection, all the Christians, whether they died as infants or of old age, will pop out of their graves exactly thirty years old. I think there was a comparable doctrine in the gospel of Zoroaster, although it is hard to elicit anything specific from the gathas or to be sure of their respective dates. Immortality must be at the prime of life.
“Immortality” generally means only survival after death, with an indefinite perdurance thereafter. The concept of eternity is rarely thought out to its logical conclusion, for merely an assurance of continued life in some comfort after death suffices to content most minds.
The concept of a perpetual deathlessness created difficulties even when applied to gods. In some mythologies, diuturnal life suffices even for them: the Norse gods themselves die, at least in the Ragnarök, some (Balder) earlier. When Cronus was overthrown by Zeus, he really perished from this world, but since the di immortales were, by definition, immortal, it was necessary to suppose that he was either imprisoned in the darkest depths of the underworld or transported to the Isles of the Blest. One of the quirks of the inconsistent religion of the Egyptians was the provision of a heaven for dead gods, Duat. And in the mystery religions, chiefly Oriental, some gods (Tammuz, Osiris, Mithras, Christ) are slain but are resurrected, being thus both mortal and immortal! And in every religion, all gods (except a first one, for whom it is impossible to suggest a parentage without embarking on an endless regression) are born, so they are not really eternal, and their existence is assumed for only a few thousand years at most, leaving their future indefinite.
No one really believes in an eternal existence after death. The mind staggers before the concept of infinity in either time or space. Even the Hindus, who have calculated that the present age will end precisely, in terms of our calendar, on 17 February 428,898, when the universe (with all its gods except the Trinity) will perish in a cosmic conflagration, believe that the senior member of the Trinity, Brahman, will create another universe and yet another in a process that will continue for another 311,035,680,000,000 years, after which, they modestly admit, they do not know exactly what will happen, except that the creative force itself cannot perish with the total destruction of all things, including the supreme gods. Even they draw back before the horror of infinity!
The eternal, like the infinite, is really a mathematical concept and involves, of course, the well-known Kantian antinomy. Has anyone tried to determine whether the notion of immortality takes a special form in the Aryan mind, corresponding to the characteristic drive of what Spengler terms the “Faustian soul,” with is passion for what is unlimited and infinite? And is it true that only the Aryan mind (which, I take it, is what Haas calls the philosophical mentality) really perceives the difference between eternal and diuturnal life?
A belief in life after death is by no means an Aryan characteristic. In all ages of history, many Aryans of reflective minds have been convinced by observation of the processes of organic life that perdurance of the individual after death is impossible, and have accepted that conclusion as fully as did Lucretius, for example. Although the Stoics were primarily concerned to establish a rational basis for morality, some of them, notably Panaetius, who did the most to make Stoicism acceptable to the Romans, categorically denied the possibility of survival after death. Even for rational Christians, when not in a mood of emotional exaltation, life after death has been le grand peut-être, a possibility, a hope, rather than a certainty. And although the exceptions may be numerically negligible, even a desire for immortality is not universal:
We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never . . .
When an hypothesis of life after death is entertained by a rational mind, its grim consequences become at once apparent. Generations of men have for millennia come and gone, like the leaves of the trees, and each dead man, if his ghost survives, goes “to join the greater majority” in some realm of which the population must be increasing at a fearful rate. “O Earth! art thou not weary of thy graves?” And to the Aryan mind, there is something repellent and horrible about the prospect of becoming a mere unit in some vast proletarian mass, packed together in some afterlife, like bees in a hive or Jews in a vast ghetto. To endure after death only to become lost among billions and billions of swarming rabble would be a Hell in itself(Who the hell wants to spend eternity with Christians, LOL).
The Aryan mind is natively aristocratic: if life after death is a reward, it must be won by some kind of personal excellence, some achievement, not by the merely passive virtues of a timorous slave. The Classical mind could not conceive of Elysium or the Isles of the Blest as a refuge for a multitude of merely harmless wights: they were reserved for the few who had risen above the herd to make themselves illustrious for courage or wisdom. The Norse Valhalla admitted warriors who had proven themselves in battle under the eyes of the gods, with whom they would dwell until all went forth, foredoomed, to fight the good fight in the last battle and perish in the Götterdämmerung. What happened after death to the villains and knaves, no one cared.
This racial sentiment led naturally to a concept of a selective and limited immortality, most familiar to us from its statement by many of the Stoics (Chrysippus et al., but not Panaetius): the souls of ordinary men evaporate at death, but the souls of men who have attained distinction as heroes or sages endure in some celestial region (most clearly portrayed in the Somnium Scipionis) until the ecpyrosis, the universal conflagration. Thus, in a sense, a man who is highly endowed genetically may create his own limited immortality, i.e., a diuturnal but not eternal existence. One need not remark on the social advantages of a belief that inspires great men to serve their nation and race.
The most reasonable theory that offers immortality to all is metempsychosis [reincarnation — Ed.]. It avoids all the absurdities and the repulsive immorality of such cults as Christianity, and, by a doctrine of karman, yields the only rational theodicy. It assumes no childish miracles or divine meddling with the immutable laws of nature, but instead presents itself as natural law that operates uniformly throughout the universe as precisely as do the forces that determine gravity, chemical combinations, or optical phenomena. So plausible and reasonable a doctrine, which cannot be shown to be inconsistent with ascertained facts, naturally appeals to our racial mentality. There is the difficulty, of course, that the reincarnated individual does not remember his previous lives, but it is assumed that his subconscious being persists through all his lives, and it is usually provided that he will at some time remember all his previous lives, at least those in human form, when “the veil of ignorance” drops from his eyes. In many forms of belief in transmigration, one also avoids the embarrassing question why an afterlife is the perquisite of a limited number of species of anthropoids, to the exclusion of mammals, e.g., dogs and horses, that are often morally superior. And, most persuasive of all, one can construct for each individual a neat evolutionary sequence from the lowest forms of organic life to the human, from the lower races to the higher, from the morally mediocre to the morally superior, and then onward to superhuman beings who reside, perhaps, on other planets in the vast universe in which our earth is but an atom. Metempsychosis could be called a psychic Darwinism, the evolution of spiritual species.
It is possible, of course, to combine the two doctrines, metempsychosis and an Elysium. The most beautiful conception of immortality of which I know, and certainly one that by contrast shows the utter vulgarity of Christian ideas, is set forth in Pindar’s second Olympian: after three or six lives in which a man has lived with strict justice and perfect integrity, he passes beyond the tower of Cronus to the fair realm that cannot be reached by land or sea, where gentle breezes from a placid ocean blow forever on the fields of asphodel. For a description, see Pindar. If the beauty of great poetry can commend a religion, here you have it.
A radically different and, to us, very strange conception of immortality has been evolved by the Jews. Originally, as is obvious from almost all of the tales in the collection Christians call an “Old Testament,” their racial god, Yahweh, who fought other gods to help them prey on the more civilized nations of the Near East, could do nothing for them at death, and a Jew’s ghost went to a ghastly life-in-death in Sheol, which, of course, is simply the Irkalla of the Babylonians, from whom the Jews took all their cosmogonic myths. This conception, however, attained a fine literary expression in the older parts of the diatribe called Ecclesiastes. When the Jews thought of appropriating the monotheism of the Greek Stoics and thus promoting their Yahweh from a tribal deity to the sole god of the entire world, some Jewish sects took from Egyptian and Zoroastrian cults the notion of a Last Judgement, at which the dead, reassembled and repaired, would pop out of their graves, and pious Jews, thus resurrected and reanimated, would be rewarded with a new life on an earth that had been vastly improved by the butchery of most of the goyim and the enslavement of the rest to their divinely-appointed masters. All this, however, was secondary to the real sense of immortality, which transcends the mythology and is thus felt with equal intensity by the many Jews who are privately or admittedly atheists. As candid Jewish writers explain to us, a Jew feels himself a part of a superorganism, his race, of which the god is merely a personification. His criterion, therefore, is what “is good for the Jewish people,” and his immortality is that of the superorganism of which he is but a small and ephemeral digit. There can be no doubt but that this conception of immortality is innate in the racial mentality, although it escapes the comprehension of our race, for whom an immortality in which the individual, with all of his personal character, thoughts, and memories, does not survive seems a contradiction in terms.
I need not remark that Christianity is merely a Judaized rifacimento of Zoroastrianism, as is, indeed, symbolized in the well-known myth that the nativity of the avatar of one-third of its god was attended by Zoroastrian priests (Magi). The Zoroastrian-Christian notion of an afterlife is based on the radical religious innovation that imagines a conflict between a good god and an evil god who is the master of all the other gods in the world. A prudent individual will enlist on the side of the good god, since he is certain to be victorious in the end. When a person has professed faith in the good god, his first duty is to weaken the forces of that god’s competitor by seducing (“converting”) the votaries of all gods but his own or slaughtering them in holy wars. He is also obliged to respect most of the rules of conduct that are common to all organized societies and a few peculiar ones in addition. He thus acquires credits in heaven, but contracts debts when he indulges himself in forbidden pleasures. When he dies, his discarnate soul comes to a bridge or gate, where the celestial bookkeeper consults the entries in his ledger and admits the man with a credit balance to heaven, throws debtors into hell, and, according to some accounts, provides a limbo for souls that have just broken even on his books. One of the joys of heaven will be that of delightedly watching the torments that will be inflicted on the luckless debtors and the persons who did not even open an account in the right god’s bank. The other joys are endless idleness, a great attraction for born loafers, who, presumably, will not have their immortality terminated by being bored to death.
Christianity as we know it must have originally been a cult confined to members of Yahweh’s race, but in the Second Century they began to peddle it to the multi-racial proletariat of the Empire that had been Roman. Although a veneer of talk about Love was added for sentimental women and timid men, the underlying sadism and malice that makes the religion so repugnant is evident in its conception of an afterlife. Admission to heaven is won by an unquestioning and mindless Faith in inherently improbable tales, and the seething proletarian masses that will throng the celestial streets will principally enjoy the bliss of watching for all eternity the sufferings of their betters — the rich, the cultivated, the wise, the learned, the well-born, the aristocrats of birth or intellect, the rulers of nations — who, not having had the unthinking faith of mustard seeds or sparrows, will have inflicted on them, forever and forever, every agony that can be devised by diabolic ingenuity.
Christianity was basically a religion for the proletariat, standing in sharp contrast, for example, to the Norse religion, which was frankly aristocratic: Valhalla was reserved for heroes, and it was only an afterthought that provided for women, even if well-born, the rarely-mentioned Freyja’s Bower. And we must never underestimate the influence of women. In the last days of the decaying Empire, Christianity’s principal competitor was the Mithraic cult, another derivative of Zoroastrianism. That cult, which was no more plausible but was more virile, simply excluded women; and although females could have a cult of their own, that of the Magna Mater Idaea (whose shrine was sometimes conveniently located just across the street), they probably felt themselves the victims of “discrimination” and worked zealously for the cult that, as Anatole France remarked, exalted women by making them a sin.
After the collapse of the Empire in the west, Christianity became useful to ambitious kings in the northern nations. Very few Norse kings were as honorable as Hakon the Good (note the appreciative epithet) of Norway, who, although a Christian in his youth, renounced the alien cult rather than impose it on his subjects. During the critical period, few Norse kings overlooked the advantages of a religion that provided a specious pretext for extending their own power by destroying the independence of the aristocracy. It is also noteworthy that the Christianizing kings introduced the practice of torture, which was and is so repugnant to our racial instincts. There is a long and bloody record of men who were forced by physical torture to become “converted” or who obstinately refused that humiliation and honorably perished amid abominable torments inflicted on them by the monarch’s real or assumed piety: even more moving are the records of men who became Christians to save their sons from being blinded, mutilated, or killed(Christianity was ISIS). When one remembers that the pagan hero kills, but never tortures, one has a certain measure of the corruption of morality wrought by the Oriental superstition.
It is noteworthy that in all meaningful conceptions of immortality, the soul, though perhaps composed of more tenuous matter, is corporeal: it feels bodily pains and pleasures. In every hell that the various religions have invented, the dead suffer physically: darkness, hunger, thirst, wounds, fetters; in some cults, they are roasted in flames or congealed in ice. In every heaven, the fortunate enjoy sensuous pleasures: sight, hearing, balmy climate, beautiful landscapes, choice viands, good conversation, and the like; urban cults provide golden streets and jewelled edifices. The sensuous pleasures may become sensual. There is extant a sepulchral inscription on which the dead man depicted the rewards that he is confident he will enjoy for his righteousness: the sexual organs of, as I remember, thirty-two women. For that matter, if the author of one of the tales in the “New Testament” knew enough Greek to write it correctly, his Christians expected to enjoy the bliss of unlimited promiscuity in their heaven, although our salvation-hucksters naturally think it expedient to claim, as usual, that the words do not mean what they say. (Current tendencies in the churches, however, may make them revert to the literal meaning.)
Various religions, of which we have mentioned a few, offer conceptions of a life after death that are either more or less plausible than others and more or less attractive. If we abstract from them the fundamental question of the possibility of some kind of afterlife, we can draw no conclusions from the prevalence of a desire to live beyond the natural span of human life. Whenever men hear of anything that pleasures their fancy, they naturally desire it. And they may long for what is in fact unattainable, as in the famous example of Alexander’s pothos. Indeed, they usually do, and, significantly, they commonly long for what is not only physically, but also psychologically, impossible, given their own nature. The common ending of fairy tales, “and they lived happily ever after,” not only implies that the protagonists will never grow old, but also that they, like Christians in their heaven, will be content with an unchanging and static existence.
No weight can be given to claims by individuals that they sense or feel they are immortal. If we except the Jews, in whom the feeling is probably biological and refers, as we have noticed, to something that is not a personal survival, we cannot dodge the epistemological problem. If there is life after death, the ghost can say to himself, cogito, ergo sum, and thus he will know than an afterlife is possible. But only the dead can know that. The living can never know they will exist after they die. They may try to convince themselves of immortality by reasoning from some reported phenomena, much as some persons now convince themselves that there is life on the hypothetical planets of other stars, and they may attain an emotional state called faith, in which they gratify themselves by assuming the reality of what they like to imagine. Their only “proof” of immortality is Unamuno’s dictum, “Si el alma humana es inmortal, el mundo es bueno; y si no lo es, es malo.” But good and evil do not exist in the physical universe, which is unaffected by human predilections. Reality cannot be deduced from desire: Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit is certainly true, but proves only that a man who despairs of other possibilities of survival will excogitate (as did some of the ancient Stoics, long before Nietzsche) a theory of die ewige Wiederkehr (which, by the way, is quite sound philosophically, if one postulates that time, like light, is composed of quanta). There can be no knowledge of immortality; only a belief, held with greater or less emotional conviction.
Since immortality is, by its very nature, unknowable, a belief in it is not irrational per se, as is, for example, belief in racial or other human equality, which is made patently false by everyone’s quotidian observation of reality. To maintain a belief in spite of indubitable evidence to the contrary is a symptom of irrationality; to accept a belief on the basis of fallacious evidence and in the absence of proof that it is false is to err, but not to be irrational. Some persons, for example, believe in an afterlife because numerous individuals claim to have seen or heard ghosts; they are deficient in critical judgement, since they allow neither for the prevalence of fraud, mendacity, and hallucinations, nor for the perturbing influence of their own mammalian fear of death, but they are not irrational in their reasoning from the data they have credulously and imprudently accepted as genuine.
We regard immortality as a superstition because there is no cogent evidence of life after death, and what we know of organic processes and of the power of the human imagination makes any hypothesis that the individual can survive the disintegration of his body extremely improbable. But, at the limit, we cannot conclusively refute the sophistic analogy that just as there are invisible and normally impalpable forces, such as radio waves and subatomic radiation, perceptible only by their effects, so consciousness may be produced by an invisible force that is separable from the biological organism on which it impinges under certain conditions. We may think that highly improbable, but we cannot prove that it is flatly impossible. Like Aristotle, we cannot prove that the psyche or some part of it, such as the power of ratiocination, cannot be more than the functioning of organic life. We can never disprove an hypothesis that is, by its very terms, not subject to empirical verification. But we can be prudent enough not to mistake an unverifiable conjecture for a fact.
A recent article in Instauration offers an acute and cogent explanation of one of the most drastic and puzzling effects of Christianity on our race and civilization.
The Nordic peoples accepted Christianity for several reasons, of which the most important, in my estimation, was the Bible, which, unlike other mythologies, so simulates an historical record that it seems to be an account of events that actually happened; and if its tales are historical truth, they prove the existence and power of a capricious and ferocious god whom mortals must dread and strive to placate. This god, furthermore, offered to his votaries, under conditions that it was painful but not impossible to meet, an assured and comfortable life after death. Our ancestors naturally desired an afterlife, if it was to be had: who (except a world-weary and over-civilized décadent) would not long to extend his existence far into the future? And the new religion, distasteful as it was in many ways, offered what seemed to be a certain way of attaining what all men desire.
A theory of metempsychosis was not unknown to the Nordics, but it was unsystematic and seems to have provided that a man would be reborn as his own grandson or great-grandson, as obviously did not happen in some observable instances. For this or some other reason, there is no trace of a real faith in reincarnation in our earliest sources. Valhalla was accessible only to heroes who died in battle, and it was no paradise: it was a military encampment of an army that intends to die honorably, fighting for a lost cause. And, for that matter, no man, however valorous, can be certain that he will die in battle. If Norse ladies heard the faint rumor that their souls would dwell in the halls of the Vannic goddess, Freyja, the prospect cannot have pleased them. Everyone knew, furthermore, that the myths were myths, based on no authentic information and subject to alteration, within very wide limits, by the fancy of the skalds, whose songs were poetry, not revelations. Some of the Norse quite frankly admitted they were atheists; the majority believed or thought it likely that Odin, Thor, and the other gods existed, but no one could claim to have any certain and definite knowledge of them, let alone of what might happen to their worshippers after death. There is no evidence of a confidence in any kind of afterlife among the Nordic peoples when the Christian salesmen arrived with what they claimed to be an historical record and a guarantee of immortality — to be had at a price, to be sure, but what would not a man pay not only to survive death but to enter on a life free of the striving, the toil, the sorrow, and the eventual failure of a life on earth? For many, the temptation must have been irresistible.
So much, we may take for granted. The price to be paid for this immortality, however, was conduct that was in many ways unnatural, even inhuman. As the writer in Instauration perspicaciously observes, the alien cult’s doctrine of “original sin” had a certain plausibility in that men are always tempted to violate the code of their society, whatever that may be, and not infrequently do so. But it was enforced by the Aryans’ subconscious sense that, for the sake of obtaining the immortality promised by a god whose existence seemed to be an historical fact, they were betraying and violating their own inner nature by imposing on themselves conduct that their instincts rejected. They thus had a sense of guilt without understanding why. By not sinning in the eyes of the god, they were sinning against themselves. They were biologically guilty.
From this inner discord, the author of the article concludes, — from the subconscious mind’s reaction to the perpetual conflict between the innate nature of a healthy Aryan and the conduct that his superstition requires of him, — comes the maddening sense of guilt that has been for fifteen centuries, and is today, a black and monstrous incubus on the minds of our race.
This explanation seems to me psychologically sound and cogent. The feeling of guilt would have increased proportionally as the new religion began to affect the conduct, as distinct from the superstitions, of the Norse, as it did only gradually. The holy men who sold immortality to the Norse shrewdly concealed from their customers the price that would eventually be demanded. They not only did not try to change the established norms of social conduct, but they even invented miracles to sanction those Nordic standards, e.g., Jesus restored the sight of a blind man so that he could split the skull of the enemy who had insulted him. It was only when Christianity had been firmly established, by fire and sword where necessary, that the religion began gradually and progressively to tighten its noose about our throats, as its dervishes discovered that more and more of the natural conduct of healthy men had been forbidden us by the Jewish god. The Christian concessions to the Aryan ethos were gradually eliminated — some only quite recently — and the subconscious perception of biological guilt was proportionately exacerbated. And the menticidal poison was the more deadly in that its virulence lay below the level of cognition.
This explains much that was puzzling in the history of Europe — and much that is puzzling today. It explains, for example, the frenzy of “Liberals” and “Democrats” as they try, ever more furiously, to impose on their race the Christian myths about “all mankind,” the equality of races, and “one world,” — as they impose on themselves the Christians’ maudlin or malicious doting on whatever is lowly, inferior, debased, deformed, and degenerate. The modern “Liberal” cannot even promise himself that Jesus has reserved for him a spacious condominium in a heavenly metropolis, but as he phrenetically tries to impose Christian superstitions on the world, he knows, at least subconsciously, that he is a member of a superior race that he is betraying in violation of his racial instincts. Hence his frantic sense of guilt; hence the subconscious death-wish of our Christian-dominated people today. Vicisti, Galilaee? – August 1980
www.revilo-oliver.com/news/2012/06/afterthoughts-on-afterlife/
|
|
|
Post by Babylon Enigma on Aug 1, 2015 19:43:46 GMT -5
The Saxon Wars
The Saxon Wars were the campaigns and insurrections of the more than thirty years from 772, when Charlemagne first entered Saxony with the intent to conquer, to 804, when the last rebellion of disaffected tribesmen was crushed. In all, eighteen battles were fought in what is now northwestern Germany. They resulted in the incorporation of Saxony into the Frankish realm and their conversion from Germanic paganism to Germanic Christianity.
Despite repeated setbacks, the Saxons resisted steadfastly, returning to raid Charlemagne's domains as soon as he turned his attention elsewhere. Their main leader, Widukind, was a resilient and resourceful opponent and accepted a peace offering from Charlemagne in a perilous situation, not losing his face and preventing Charlemagne from continuing a bothersome war. This agreement saved the Saxons' leaders' exceptional rights in their homeland. Widukind (ahd Waldkind, "Child of forest") was baptized in 785 and buried in the only German church without a spire.
The Saxons were divided into four subgroups in four regions. Nearest to the ancient Frankish kingdom of Austrasia was Westphalia, and farthest away was Eastphalia. In between these two kingdoms was that of Engria (or Engern) and north of these three, at the base of the Jutland peninsula, was Nordalbingia.
First phase
In mid-January 772, the sacking and burning of the church of Deventer by a Saxon expedition was the Casus belli for the first war waged by Charlemagne to the Saxons. It began with a Frankish invasion of Saxon territory and the subjugation of the Engrians and destruction of their sacred symbol Irminsul near Paderborn in 772 or 773 at Eresburg. Irminsul may have been a hollow tree trunk, presumably representing the pillar supporting the skies—similar to the Nordic tree Yggdrasil. Charlemagne's campaign led all the way to the Weser River and destroyed several major Saxon strongholds. After negotiating with some Saxon nobles and obtaining hostages, Charlemagne turned his attention to his war against the Lombards in northern Italy; but Saxon free peasants, led by Widukind, continued to resist and raided Frankish lands in the Rhine region. Armed confrontations continued unabated for years.
Charlemagne's second campaign came in the year 775. Then he marched through Westphalia, conquering the fort of Sigiburg, and crossed Engria, where he defeated the Saxons again. Finally, in Eastphalia, he defeated them, and their leader Hessi converted to Christianity. He returned through Westphalia, leaving encampments at Sigiburg and Eresburg. All of Saxony, except for Nordalbingia was under his control, but the recalcitrant Saxons would not submit for long.
After warring in Italy, he returned very rapidly to Saxony (making it to Lippe before the Saxons knew he left Italy) for the third time in 776, when a rebellion destroyed his fortress at Eresburg. The Saxons were once again brought to heel, though Widukind fled to the Danes. Charlemagne built a new camp at Karlstadt. In 777, he called a national diet at Paderborn to integrate Saxony fully into the Frankish kingdom. Many Saxons were baptised.
The chief purpose of the diet was to bring Saxony closer to Christianity. Missionaries, mainly Anglo-Saxons from England, were recruited to carry out this task. Charlemagne issued a number of decrees designed to break Saxon resistance and to inflict capital punishment on anyone observing heathen practices or disrespecting the king's peace. His severe and uncompromising position, which earned him the title "butcher of Saxons", caused his close adviser Alcuin of York, later abbot of Saint Martin's Abbey at Tours, to urge leniency, as God's word should be spread not by the sword but by persuasion; but the wars continued.
In summer 779, Charlemagne again went into Saxony and conquered Eastphalia, Engria, and Westphalia. At a diet near Lippspringe, he divided the land into missionary districts and Frankish countships. He himself assisted in several mass baptisms (780). He then returned to Italy, and there was no Saxon revolt. From 780 to 782, the land had peace.
Middle phase
Charlemagne returned in 782 to Saxony and instituted a code of law and appointed counts, both Saxon and Frank. The laws were severe on religious issues, namely the native paganism of the Saxons. This stirred a renewal of the old conflict. That year, in autumn, Widukind returned and led a revolt that resulted in many assaults on the church. The Saxons invaded the area of the Chatti, a Germanic tribe already converted by Saint Boniface and firmly in Charlemagne's empire. Widukind annihilated a Frankish army at the Süntel while Charles was campaigning against the Sorbs. It was in response to this setback that Charlemagne, at the Blood court of Verden, ordered the beheading of 4,500 Saxons who had been caught practising paganism after converting to Christianity, while Widukind escaped to Denmark again. Upon this Blutgericht, some historians have stated the massacre did not happen, or that it was actually a battle, but according to Alessandro Barbero, none of these claims are credible.[1] The action led to two straight years of constant warfare (783-785), with Charlemagne wintering in central Saxony, at Minden. Gradually, the Franks gained the upper hand. The turning point came in 785, when Widukind had himself baptized and swore fealty to Charlemagne. It was with the conclusion of this war that Charlemagne could have claimed to have conquered Saxony, and the land had peace for the next seven years, though revolts continued sporadically until 804.
Final phase
In 792, the Westphalians rose up against their masters in response to forcible recruitment for wars against the Avars. The Eastphalians and Nordalbingians joined them in 793, but the insurrection did not catch on as previous ones and was completely put down by 794.
An Engrian rebellion followed closely in 796, but Charlemagne's personal presence and the presence of loyal Christian Saxons and Slavs immediately crushed it. The last insurrection of the Engrian people occurred in 804, more than thirty years after Charlemagne's first campaign against them. This time, the most unruly tribe of them all, the Nordalbingians, found themselves effectively disempowered to rebel. Charlemagne deported 10,000 of them to Neustria and gave their now vacant lands to the loyal king of the Abotrites. It is constructive now to quote Einhard, Charlemagne's biographer, on the closing of such a grand conflict:
The war that had lasted so many years was at length ended by their acceding to the terms offered by the King; which were renunciation of their national religious customs and the worship of devils, acceptance of the sacraments of the Christian faith and religion, and union with the Franks to form one people.
Towards the end of the wars, Charlemagne had begun to place more emphasis on reconciliation. In 797, he eased the special laws, and in 802, Saxon common law was codified as the Lex Saxonum. This was accompanied by the establishment of ecclesiastic structures (including bishoprics in Paderborn, Münster, Bremen, Minden, Verden and Osnabrück) that secured the conversion of the Saxon people. The last Saxon uprising was the Stellinga, which occurred between 841 and 845.
Religious nature of the war
Alluding to the Saxons, the contemporary poet of the Paderborn Epic praises terror as a means of conversion: "What the contrary mind and perverse soul refuse to do with persuasion, / Let them leap to accomplish when compelled by fear."[2]
One of Charlemagne's famed capitularies outlines part of the religious intent of his interactions with the Saxons. In 785 AD he issues the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae which asserted that "If any one of the race of the Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_Wars
|
|