Chapter Four the World Beyond the Picture Frame
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CHAPTER FOUR THE WORLD BEYOND THE PICTURE FRAME There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Hamlet, Act I Scene V. It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths In the previous chapter we discussed certain events that took place during the period centered about the year 1600--events which turned out to be the opening guns in the Scientific Revolution. However, as a description of the Human Experience peculiar to that time, our story remains incomplete, for it lacks a vital ingredient. By way of analogy, consider a history of that same era, written a hundred years later, during the 18th century. It would have been a chronicle of popes and kings, and their battles, with an occasional genuflection to great literary works of the past, such as those of a Shakespeare or a Milton. History, then, is a matter of taste, a tale about what someone considered to be important. And the power structure of a civilization is always the principal patron of the historians, and therefore also the arbiter of taste. Since such an arrangement is, figuratively speaking, somewhat anaerobic, it might be useful to "challenge the dominant paradigm," thereby letting in some fresh air. Included in the following pages, are three instances of human experience that are clearly discordant with The Myth of Modern Civilization. There is no reason to believe that all of these testimonies were necessarily falsehoods. But first, in order to understand the background for these stories, we need to examine the events that took place in Italy as a result of the Protestant Reformation, which had begun in the year 1517. It was not until the year 1545 that the Catholic Church, finally realizing the seriousness of the Protestant challenge, convened a General Council in the city of Trento, in Northern Italy. The Council of Trent, as it was called, lasted until 1563, and resulted in a poorly considered decision: namely to circle the metaphoric wagons, and fight with every available resource. The Church's arsenal included the Roman Inquisition, with its time-tested final argument: torture of heretics by means of “waterboarding”, followed, whenever necessary, by burning at the stake. While conducting their interrogations the inquisitors had been instructed to take careful notes of all the proceedings, in order to ensure that no one would be executed by mistake, and that the entire sadistic procedure would be carried out in a manner in accord with the very highest standards of professionalism. These records were duly filed away in the archives, and subsequently forgotten, until around the year 1960 when some of them were placed in the hands of the historian Carlo Ginzburg1. The stories should be read now, before going any further into the chapter, for they are fascinating, and their implications are immense. TheU Benandanti: What Were They Doing? By their own testimony, at night the Benandanti (those who walk well) were traveling in a kind of spirit world, doing battle with witches and goblins, and curing the sick--for the sake of their neighbors, members of their community. This experience may have really been the product of deranged minds, but remember: there were scores of them. So, is it really explaining anything to dismiss this phenomenon as a kind of folie à plusieurs? First Story: It is March 21 1575 (Galileo was 9 years old). We are at the monastery of San Francesco di Cividale, in that mountainous region of Northern Italy known as Friuli, where Slavic, German and Latin cultures meet. It was at that time that the astonished inquisitors learned about the existence of a peasant named Paolo Gasparutto, who claimed that he could cure bewitched people; he also claimed that he roamed about at night with witches and goblins. In addition, he claimed to be “one of those who walk well”, I benandanti, and that at the four seasons of the year his troop of benandanti would go in spirit to do battle with the witches, for the purpose of securing the fertility of the fields. So who were these, I benandanti? They were those who were born with a caul2 over their faces, who fell into a trance or a deep sleep on certain nights of the year. At such times they “journeyed,” and later they remembered--remembered traveling on the backs of cats or dogs, armed with fennel sticks against the witches, fightingU for the fertility of the crops and the harvest. The Church officials interrogated these peasants mercilessly, trying to bend their testimony until it agreed with categories with which they felt more doctrinally comfortable, (such as sorcery, Witches’ Sabbaths and copulations with Satan— the routine, day-to-day humdrum stuff of Christian diabolism), but all to no avail. Revelations of the kind supplied by Gasparutto multiplied, and for a hundred years the Inquisition exerted all its powers on the benandanti, to get the kind of confessions that sat conformably upon the convolutions of the ecclesiastical mind. However, many of the benandanti held out to the bitter end, and it is their testimony that has come down to us. Second Story: In 1692 (Newton was 50 years old at the time, and his Principia had been already published), an eighty-year-old man named Thiess in Jürgensburg (in what is now Latvia), confessed to the judges interrogating him, that he was indeed a werewolf! Three times a year, at night, he and his fellow werewolves would fight, armed with iron whips, with the devil and with sorcerers. What was at stake? Again it was theU fertility of the fields. Third Story: At the end of the 14th century two women of Milan confessed to having experienced episodes of “night-flying” while in a state of ecstasy. It seems that they had been having periodic meetings with a certain mysterious lady, whom they called Donna Oriente, who was always surrounded by a troop of animal attendants. And again, in 1457, the learned bishop, Nicolas of Cusa, sermonized against two old women of Val di Fassa, who confessed to having been visited by una bona domina3, whom they referred to by the name of Richella. They had touched her hands, which turned out to be covered with hair, and in turn she had stroked their cheeks with those hairy hands. To the bishop, they were merely witches, linked with The Evil One4. HowU Can We Interpret These Stories? It would appear as though we are confronted with the collision of three disjointed World Views, probably arising from the invention of the phonetic alphabet--views to which we need to give the labels: Type One: The Scholars, those who had access to printed books; The world of Type One, that of Kepler, Galileo, and later of Newton, could not even have existed without the invention of the printing press. Type Two: The Priests and Bishops, who tried to mold the testimony of the peasants to fit their own peculiar cosmology (i.e., the Devil, diabolical possession, the Devil’s Sabbath, etc.). The theology of the Roman Church, although purportedly a transmission of the inspirations of the early patriarchs, is still, as we have pointed out, a corpus that had been originally set down by hand, in writing. Type Three: The people of the non-literate world, who depended upon the existence of a living oral tradition. But in compensation for this lack, they remained more intuitive, and more in contact with the workings of the Unconscious Mind. The Type Three World was effectively a medieval one, at least half- pagan--even in Italy, the heartland of Roman Catholicism. ButU the position we are taking in this book is this: We shall try to to be fair-minded, rigorously empirical. U Thus we cannot dismiss a consistent body of testimony out of hand, solely on “rationalistic” grounds— you can’t prove it false, “by actual conjecture.” That would cause the discussion to degenerate into “Argument From Theory.” The criterion for a good argument is that it must be based on Observed Facts. Only these can be said to constitute a body of data. Arguments based only upon theory are as sand castles on the beach. Two things are impressive here. The first is the fact that dozens of these benandanti, over a period of a century, confronted by the intimidating power of the Roman Inquisition, stuck to their story. This is also quite surprising, since it is well known to experts on “enhanced interrogation” that, when confronted with a threat of torture or death, any normal person will tell his/her tormenter whatever cock-and-bull story he wants to hear. The second thing concerns a certain thread, one that unites the three stories into a grander framework, one that is internally consistent, but also totally inexplicable in modern terms. I was so astonished that I couldn’t resist the temptation to tell you about it. So here is the question: What was it that these three stories had in common? Answer: In all three cases the protagonists, in some unknown manner, journeyed. Not as you or I would travel, not in the flesh, that is, but rather during what you might call an out-of-body experience. Also, (1) They fall into Altered States of Consciousness, (2) They “journey” to The Other Side, the Beyond, and (3) While in an altered state, they perform feats for the benefit of their community. All of this connects to a very ancient practice: that of Shamanism, a practice that dates back at least to Upper Paleolithic times, some 40,000 years ago.