The High Medieval

The great flowering of Jewish mysticism in medieval Provence and Spain — a map of the hidden God as ten emanations on a Tree of Life, and a universe spoken into being out of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. From the widow of Ávila and the Zohar's true 13th-century authorship (Moses de León, per Scholem, not the 2nd-century sage it names), through the Sefer Yetzirah and the Bahir, Ein Sof and the ten sefirot, the four worlds, the theosophical and the ecstatic (Abulafia) streams, and PaRDeS; with a deep symbology section on the Hebrew letters as the raw material of creation, gematria, notarikon and temurah, and the divine names — keeping attested medieval technique honestly distinct from later Christian Kabbalah, Hermetic Qabalah, and the modern 'Kabbalah Centre.'

The mystical heart of Islam — a path of love, remembrance, and the annihilation of the self in God. From the whirling sema of the Mevlevi and Rabia's torch-and-bucket to burn heaven and quench hell, through the tasawwuf ascetics and al-Ghazali's great reconciliation of Sufism with orthodox Islam, the high-medieval flowering of Ibn Arabi (wahdat al-wujud) and Rumi's Mathnawi, and the founding of the tariqa orders; with a symbology section on the 99 Names, the wine-and-Beloved code of Sufi poetry, and the dance as cosmology — keeping saint-miracles as faith, the origins and Salafi–Sufi debates open, and the popular de-Islamized 'universal Rumi' flagged as a modern distortion.

The great medieval marriage of faith and reason. From Aquinas laying down his pen on the unfinished Summa ('all I have written seems like straw'), through the recovery of Aristotle via the Muslim commentators and the birth of the universities, the disputatio method and Abelard's Sic et Non, Anselm's 'faith seeking understanding' and ontological argument, Aquinas's Five Ways, and the later nominalist turn of Scotus and Ockham; with the parallel Jewish and Islamic projects (Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes) and a symbology section on the four senses of Scripture and the Gothic cathedral as a 'summa in stone' — recording the great arguments as arguments still contested, not settled proofs, and correcting the 'Dark Ages' myth without overclaiming the reverse.

The rainforest civilization that built the only complete writing system in the ancient Americas and a religion of blood, maize, and precise time: the Popol Vuh and the Hero Twins of Xibalba, the pantheon of Itzamna and Chaak and Kukulkan, kingly bloodletting and the Vision Serpent, the calendars and the 2012 non-apocalypse, and the Sacred Cenote — with the archaeology kept distinct from conquest propaganda and modern myth.

The religion of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan: the cosmos of the Fifth Sun and the debt of blood, the pantheon of Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Tlaloc, the Templo Mayor and the Coyolxauhqui stone, the calendars and the New Fire Ceremony, and the poetry of Nezahualcoyotl — with the reality of sacrifice held carefully apart from the conquerors' impossible numbers.

The religion of the largest empire the Americas ever knew: the divine sun-emperor descended from Inti, the Coricancha and the ceque-wired sacred landscape, the royal mummies who still ruled, the capacocha children of the frozen peaks, and the knotted quipu — reconstructed from stone, cord, and the chronicles of the conquerors, with a steady eye on how much we can actually read.

The devotional revolution of medieval India — a religion of passionate, personal love for God, sung in the mother tongue by weavers and washerwomen and untouchables, needing no priest, temple, or Sanskrit, only the heart. From the flowers under Kabir's shroud, through the Tamil Alvars and Nayanars, Ramanuja's philosophy of devotion, the saguna/nirguna divide, and the great company of saints (Basava and the Lingayats, Jnaneshwar and Namdev, Kabir and Ravidas); with a symbology section on the vernacular song, the divine name (nama-japa), Kabir's upside-down language, and the Lingayat ishtalinga — keeping the movement and its poetry distinct from the saints' hagiography, and meeting the Sufism of the same age. Closes the High Medieval era.

The guarded faiths — three small, ancient, closed traditions of the Near East that the great monotheisms could neither absorb nor destroy. The Mandaeans, the last living Gnostics, who revere John the Baptist and reject Jesus, and baptize endlessly in living water; the Yazidis, whose Peacock Angel (Tawusi Melek) refused to bow to Adam — the source of the false ‘devil-worshipper’ libel and centuries of persecution, to the 2014 genocide; and the Druze, the esoteric 11th-century offshoot of Ismaili Islam venerating al-Hakim, teaching reincarnation and guarding secret Epistles of Wisdom, who accept no converts. A symbology of the Mandaean darfash and living water, the Yazidi peacock, and the Druze five-colored star — with the anti-Yazidi libel firmly refused and the guarded secrets respected.

Europe’s last old gods — the Slavs Christianized by the 12th century, the Balts (Lithuania, 1387) the last pagan state on the continent. Perun the thunder-god thrown into the Dnieper at Kiev’s conversion; his opposite Veles the serpent of the underworld and their storm-versus-serpent myth; Vladimir’s 980 pantheon and the four-faced Svetovid of Arkona; the Baltic Dievas, Perkunas (whose name means oak), and the beloved sun-goddess Saule; sacred oak groves and the eternal fire; the ‘double faith’ and the folk survival, above all in the Latvian and Lithuanian dainos; and the modern revivals (Rodnovery, Romuva, Dievturiba). A symbology of the oak and thunder-mark, the eternal fire, and the four-faced idol — with the heavy reliance on hostile and reconstructed sources (and outright forgeries like the Book of Veles) flagged honestly.

The sacred in all things — the vast, diverse, living religious world of Native North America (some 300 languages, no single religion). Cahokia and the mound-cities; the pervasive sacred power (Lakota Wakan Tanka, Algonquian Manitou, Iroquois orenda) and an animist cosmos; earth-diver and emergence creation and the trickster (Coyote, Raven, Nanabozho); the vision quest and the medicine person; the great ceremonies (Sun Dance, the sacred pipe of White Buffalo Calf Woman, potlatch, kachina, Green Corn); the monuments (Hopewell earthworks, Cahokia’s Monks Mound, Chaco’s astronomy) — with the racist ‘Mound Builder’ myth rejected; and the movements born of catastrophe (the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, the Longhouse religion, the peyote Native American Church). A symbology of the medicine wheel, the cross-in-circle and birdman, the sacred pipe, and the mound as world-axis.

The good men and good women of Languedoc: two principles, souls as fallen angels, the consolamentum with the Gospel of John laid on the head, and the few Cathar texts the inquisitors missed; the Albigensian Crusade, Béziers and the pyre at Montségur; the inquisition and the Montaillou register; and the other dissenters, Waldensians, Marguerite Porete, the Spiritual Franciscans, Wyclif and Hus. With the great historians’ quarrel over whether the Cathar church was real or built by its persecutors, and the Grail legends and ‘Cathar castles’ sorted from the record.

The Eternal Blue Sky of the steppe peoples: Tengri in the Old Turkic Orkhon inscriptions, Chinggis Khan on Burkhan Khaldun and the shaman Kököchü, the ‘by the power of Eternal Heaven’ formula on Mongol letters and seals, and a religious policy of tolerance that was pragmatism more than creed, as William of Rubruck’s 1254 debate at Karakorum shows. Then the khanates choose: Ghazan’s Islam in 1295, Kublai and the Tibetan lama Phagpa, Altan Khan’s title ‘Dalai Lama’ in 1578; the purges of 1937–39 and the post-1990 revival and neo-Tengrism. A symbology of the ovoo, khadag, sülde banner, milk libations, scapulimancy and the soyombo, with modern revival kept distinct from the medieval record.

Why nearly every people who kept records remembers the world ending in water — the Mesopotamian lineage from Ziusudra to Utnapishtim, its relationship to Genesis, and what the archaeology will and won't support.

How the world began, told side by side: the watery chaos of Tiamat, Nun, and tehom; the combat myth (chaoskampf) in which Marduk, Baal, and Zeus win order by battle — and Genesis's pointed refusal of the fight; the world built from a slain primordial body (Ymir, Purusha) and the contested Indo-European 'cosmic giant'; creation by word from Ptah to 'let there be'; the later doctrine of creation from nothing and the Genesis 1:1 translation debate; and the astonishing Nasadiya Sukta, the ancient hymn that looks at the beginning and admits it cannot be sure. With a symbology of the cosmic egg, sacred number, the dividing line, and the creative word.

The descent to the land of the dead — one of the oldest and most widespread of all sacred stories — and what a civilization reveals when it weighs its dead. Inanna stripped at the seven gates; the Greek katabasis (Odysseus, Orpheus, Aeneas, Persephone); Egypt’s Duat and the Weighing of the Heart against the feather of Maat; the judged afterlives (Zoroastrian Chinvat bridge, the Tibetan bardo, Chinese Diyu) set against the un-judged pits of Sheol and Norse Hel; the god who goes down (Izanagi, Baldr, the Harrowing of Hell); and a symbology of the gate, the ferryman, the scale, and the guidebook written for the dead.

The divine feminine — and the modern myth built on top of it. The goddesses we can actually document (Inanna/Ishtar, Isis, Asherah and the ‘Yahweh and his Asherah’ inscriptions, Cybele, Demeter, the living Mahādevī of India, Guanyin, Amaterasu); the ancient temptation to unify them into one; and Marija Gimbutas’s Great Goddess of a peaceful Neolithic matriarchy, reported honestly as largely rejected by mainstream archaeology. The sublimation of the goddess into Wisdom/Sophia and the Virgin Mary; the 20th-century Goddess movement and thealogy; and a symbology of the figurine, the triple moon, and the Black Madonna — a study in keeping what is revered separate from what is proven.

The ruler as a holy figure between heaven and earth — god, god’s son, god’s chosen, or god’s hostage. Frazer’s priest of Nemi and the dying-king thesis; the king as god (the Egyptian pharaoh, the Sapa Inca son of the Sun, the Japanese emperor, the deified Roman emperor); the king answerable to Heaven (the Chinese Mandate of Heaven, the prophet-checked king of Israel); the documented dying-king rites (the Shilluk reth, the Mesopotamian substitute king); and anointed kingship in Christendom (divine right, the royal touch, messiah/Christ). A symbology of regalia, anointing oil, and the king’s two bodies — with Frazer’s grand unifying thesis flagged honestly as rejected even where the specific cases hold.

How the world ends — and the deep divide between the line and the wheel. The Qumran War Scroll and the apocalyptic mind; the Persian blueprint (Zoroastrian dualism, the Saoshyant, resurrection, and Frashokereti, the ‘making wonderful’); the apocalyptic turn in Second Temple Judaism (Daniel, Enoch) and the contested question of Zoroastrian influence; the Book of Revelation, the Antichrist, and the millennium; the Islamic Day of Resurrection, the Mahdi, and the Dajjal; and the cyclical counter-vision — Norse Ragnarök, the Hindu Kali Yuga and Kalki, Buddhist Maitreya, the Aztec Fifth Sun — where destruction is one turn of an eternal wheel. A symbology of 666, Armageddon, and the world made new.

The gift of blood — one of the most universal and most troubling of religious acts. What sacrifice was (korban, ‘drawing near’; yajna into fire; thysia, ‘making smoke’; do ut des) and the gift/communion/feeding theories; blood on the altar; the substitution of animal for human (the Aqedah, the Passover lamb); human sacrifice reported honestly (Aztec, the contested Carthaginian tophet, Shang retainers); the scapegoat of Leviticus and the Greek pharmakos; Girard’s mimetic scapegoat mechanism and Burkert’s Homo Necans (flagged as contested); and the sacrifice that ends sacrifice — the Lamb of God and the Eucharist, the bloodless turns of Judaism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. A symbology of altar, smoke, substitute, and shared meal.