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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A standard axiom is presented:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Inhibition is no good provider for a needy man,

Inhibition, which does men much harm and much good.

Inhibition attaches to poverty, boldness to wealth.”

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

“Be a friend to a friend,

keep company with he who seeks it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

begin the reaping; the plowing when they set.”

“For forty nights and days they are hidden…”

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

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

We're farther in the Future than you think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"History is written by the Victors."

"Everything comes out in the wash."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aliens, nigga.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

Golden Race/Age

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

Silver Race/Age

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

Bronze Race/Age

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

Heroic Age/Race

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

Iron Race/Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

Hesiod continues his overture:

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

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

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

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

The Eight Primal Powers in Order of Advent

-1. Chasm/Chaos [male] pre exististing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-1. Strormshield

-2. Cloudgatherer

-3. Thunderer [his name is Thunderchief.]

-4. Allknowing

-5. Allseeing [widebrowed]

-6. Almighty

-7. Allfather

-8. Deliverer

-9. Of Oaths

-10. Of Safe Landings

-11. Lord

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

-13. God [see Seneca and Arrian]

-14. The Father

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

-1. See Burton, The Book of the Sword

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

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

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

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

The Sources:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For who are the majority of All Mankind?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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.

“My oath to Hypocrates” declared the clinical psychiatrist who had actually worked with Freud, Jung, and Professor Oigon Boiler, the dean of that dubious medical field in the 1920s and 30s, required him to try and convince humanity that it shared a collective subconscious. He, Velikovsky passed on November 17 of 1979 at age 84, this work still unpublished. He had wished dearly to have his work on collective amnesia published in advance of nuclear war. “Mankind in amnesia has not only to do with the past, as in my other books, but with the future.” The Inability of people to consider the overwhelming evidence and catastrophe, he suggests is a defensive mechanism of the mass mind, of “suppressing racial memories.”

Velikovsky discusses dervishes, auto hypnosis, hypnosis, telekinises, remote viewing and even man’s “house he calls soul,” from the perspective of physical sciences. This began when, as a post-doctorate student in Berlin and Zurich in the 1920s and 30s, he posited that such conditions as epilepsy would be found to have physical causes. Velikovsky’s theories on the brain were proved correct when means to measure these things with instruments were developed.

Another foundation of this thinking was a primitive collective mind in man’s primitive stages, similar to the migration of young birds, the collective work of bees and ants and the actions of animals herds and packs, also in “the human herd, the mass.” Velikovsky further discusses shoaling of fish and the stampeding of normally antagonistic species of animals, together from natural events, which was discussed by Hesiod in Works and Days [2], writing at the time of one of the cosmic disasters Velikovsky charts in Worlds in Collision.

V cites his correspondence with Freud and Jung, who both lost their minds in various ways, with Freud seemingly bat-shit crazy from the outset. As in his other latter book, In the Beginning, in which he has letter exchanges with Einstein, who proves himself a fraud in that exchange [indeed the theory of relativity was ripped off of a German scientist of the late 1800s], Velikovsky’s records of discussions with the recognized fathers of 20th Century Science are enlightening. [1]

Freud descended into depraved cave man theories of incest and patricide, and Jung went the Far Eastern cosmic rout, both side-stepping the uncomfortable question of racial memory, Jung orbiting the truth and Freud putting his head in the sewer.

Propaganda: The Public Mind in the Making [0] published in 1928 by Freud’s nephew, which disgusted Freud, was close to Velikovsky’s collective subconscious. Vee would have been better served consulting Spengler in university, [1] but that scholar was passed by the time he was making his ranging inquires.

“If we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors,” that our powers of reasoning are just tools, often employed to protect us through diverted understanding from a truth we cannot handle. Religious and ideological “dogma is a way of replacing the natural collective unconscious… a protective wall of sacred images.”

A reading of Hesiod has taught me that V’s investigation, which fried the brains of many modern scientists and caused a crusade among frustrated skeptics, was well understood by the ancient poet, who spoke directly of the powers that modern religions and ethos’, to include “science” obscures with and without intent.

V goes on to discuss the fact, that he knew, as demonstrated in the first edition of World’s in Collision, that his charting of the world of cataclysms past would cause an emotional backlash from the scientific establishment, which it did. What surprised V, was that people who had, and had not, read this work, immediately occupied two warring camps: one the modern doctrine of Uniformity, the gradual world evolution, and the other the traditional view of cataclysmic action. He had expected to be called a heretic, knowing what scientists have generally denied, that they were the collective architects of a mechanistic religion, a faith in a Promethean becoming. What surprised him was how believers in his theory, even those who had not read his book, took up his cause with crusading zeal!

This polarity, of action and reaction, is the collective emotional axis along which the making and management of the modern mass mind is based on. It is the logic of movie narratives and of military and law enforcement indoctrination, of good guy vs bad guy, us versus them, and the denial of a gray area between the white and black divide. The American two party system is evolved from this emotive male/female split in the mind which has been nurtured by the psychotic American obsession with spectacting at team sporting events and the splitting of the electorate by sex and race, contrary to the fabric of traditional democratic societies, which evolved as and maintained themselves as ethnically homogeneous bodies of voting men. This collective unconscious, which flinches at the prospect of recalling ancient disasters that nearly wiped out the race, has been harnessed by our masters for our herd management.

The Good Earth

“The dogmatic opposition to the heliocentric view of the earth,” proposed by Aristotle was maintained by the Christen Church for a thousand years. V’s chilling overview of the solar system, and a view of the galaxy, which causes the author to actually consider divine protection for earth, is postulated as too fearful for most of mankind to confront directly.

Aristotle on Poetics, where the architect of the earth centric cosmology, discusses the desirable structure of a tragedy, gives Doctor V a fine point of discussion. Aristotle, who lived only 300 years after meteor storms, fire storms and hurricanes changed the very orbit of the earth and lengthened the year, “the huge earth groaned” sang Hesiod at the time of this disaster. Yet Aristotle on tragedy, suggests that when bad things happen to a protagonist, that the character should not be overly innocent, or overly bad, but normal, not having caused through their actions the terrible happening. This, V points out, seems to have been an emotional shield, an aegis [storm-shield] of play composition.

Fate and Will [1] are not compatible in most individuals and rarely in the mass mind, which is more of the vegan herd mentality, where the Willful action tends to be a more predacious impulse. Hence, mass movements predicated on the triumph of human will, have been doomed from early times.

Once by Water, Twice by Fire, [2] the human world was nearly extinguished, yet the mass mind has developed “delusions” which are varied emotional states of mind, in terms of their character. For instance, modern man suffers from a delusion that rights are real, that rights exist and have power. Hesiod in Works and Days discusses how violent actors are often suffering from delusions, this being the delusion that they have ultimate power, when in fact their petty violations against even weaker persons were merely cloaking their own powerlessness before the powers of heaven and earth.

When the Cyclopeans agree to help Prometheus help Zeus in his battle against the Titans, Prometheus, Forethought, is credited by them with their deliverance from ruin and their reemergence under the sun. We are not Promethean but Epimethean; Afterthinking.

“We were brought up in a deception—in the self assurance that nothing earth-shaking can happen to us.”

Our forgetting it collectively, according to Doctor V, is in part a collective repression of a terrible racial memory.

The Five-Pointed Star worn by the millions of soldiers of the three competing nuclear powers of China, Russia and America, is suggested as a meditation on the nuclear brink, for that five-pointed star was a symbol of power ever since a comet or planet caused great havoc in about 1400 B.C. and again in the time of Homer, Hesiod and Hezekiah and Isiah.

We shy from the numerous accounts of antiquity by reflex, and so are of a nature that begs to be misinformed by the current makers and shakers of our public mind.

Notes

-0. ‘Our Minds Molded’: On Steerage: Impressions of Propaganda by Edward L. Bernays

-1. The Idea of Destiny and the Principle of Causality: The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler

-2. Hesiod Theogony, Works and Days, the Shield of Herakles

“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 Arуas, The Beasts of Arуas, 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

Apparently there has been some confusion on how to best be human. Channeling a highly rare mood to write, I present a streaming takeoff from one of the world's most atomized webmasters, me. I have no goal with this writing, just some content to think on.

“Nothing in life is free.”

“If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.”

“Information is power.”

“Eat or be eaten.”

If these morals are true, it means you're responsible for seeking the truth, concerning each and every last thing, all by yourself, or suffer the consequences. A huge project. To attempt it requires more than a resolve to strive, but a complete willingness to start over with a renewed spirit to be Right. Be prepared to be turned on-end, right up to your last day. Seeking the truth means Preparing to be wrong and having the courage to change as needed, totally. Call it a lifestyle.

But for clarity and specificity: You must be prepared to accept the fact that everything you know is a lie and that you must immediately become a new person with the proper facts, not the wrong ones, as this is the primary imperative for salvaging your freedom and preserving your humanity.

Opt out, and you are participating in a comfortable lie upon yourself, handing over Power over yourself, accepting Sloth and Dependence as your base condition, and keeping lies and gaslight your regular diet forever. It's at this point that the volunteering have accepted a fate they probably weren't aware of - disenfranchising themselves from being any sort of contender in that economy of scale, the one driven by information and by power. Perhaps worse, if invisible forces (or converged interests to the sensitive) are intent to weaponize information or use power against you (gee in what world??), you're really gonna want that power back.

Where do you turn for the truth? What channel on cable TV is it? It's not. Wherever it is, it won't be served on a platter, by people with power or capital. Remembering that it quickly becomes the duty of those who have conserved their wealth/power to defend it, one may trust they will effort to dis-inform, confound, depress. I would. Actually, every entity in modernity does this automatically. "Public relations"... "Politics"... Governments and corporations and churches and unions and all other parties exist to:

1. conserve power

2. get power

3. avoid getting crushed by power

So why in the hell do you think that you ALONE have some implied agency with these other actors? Why would they ever tell you the whole truth? They don't. Power 101. I don't pride in it, it is simply the way of the world; it can be counted upon. Even dumbass criminals maturated by the degenerative culture of today understand the mission:

1. lie

2. lie

3. lie again

It allows the person to diffuse obscurely into the myriad non-truths enveloping the body like rushing storm-water currents.

You instead will have to be:

1. your own source of strength

2. trusting of yourself, in fact, a peddler of trust

3. your own judge of information, referencing all sources possible—no one else

3. defensive

4. offensive

You will have to be quite different than your peers; to them you will appear excited, driven, mad. Most others will stay inside the House of Cards as it provides just enough sunshine to cultivate the pansy or the lotus. Your way will break hearts and disturb the inner peace of atomized lives.

Mericans, particuarly boomers, got sold really hard on the idea that your TIME is YOURS, and if you really want to take possession of it, you need to keep a strong disposition against working [outside of employ], as that takes TIME - which you need to conserve in order to be free. Life economics 101. If the boss has to rent your work, then you need to be sellin' and not givin' it away (to NO ONE goddamnit, I'm in control!). Does this couple well with the human need to sit or lie down? Or bend over? You tell me.

This is not to say Mericans, particulary boomers, don't work. They certainly do, measurably more than most of the Western world in fact, and probably more than their remotest cousin. And that's where the grifty exchange ends dammit; the game just came on and it's Miller™ time.

Back from the game. We lost. Oh well.

Most of my countrymen get the message loud and clear: work, and when not working, do nothing that looks like work (reading, exercise, spirituality, independent life). To do otherwise sets you against the Grain. What do they have to prove? The rest of us normies ought keep our distance, as these types must be lazy or have poor intentions. Everyone knows if you're wealthy you're winning. If you're poor, you're a loser.

Get a job loser.

There is an observable awareness amongst these proles that their careers and civic lives are a waste of collective fruit, flavored into cliches and addages we've all heard and are self-oriented to keep alive the un-purposed spirit.

“They got you comin and goin”

“Everybody's working for the weekend”

“It's all about money”

There is an awareness, but it is fashioned into a governing force that imprisons the person by maintaining the ego in limbo. Isn't that wild? ... the Inability to take basic and aged observations, catalyze them with Logic and Initiative, to alter one's behavior, to fix your predicament. They've provisioned just enough chalance to work and consume with distinction.

The failure is simple: you can't tell you're not free, because you're spending all your mustered faculty on material success and survival, and ignoring your soul, that stupid thing shooting anxiety laser beams into your conscience whenever your life story, designed for obsolescence, shatters along with your ego. (see 'Midlife Crisis')

We're not talking about leaps and bounds in physical toil to acquire spiritual release, I'm saying remember when every last Native American culture got turned out? Remember the big wars and the Great Depression? Remember when gods chosen were foresaken and exchanged for real estate? Remember Omaha beach? Remember the twin towers? Remember covid? Well, don't believe so hard. This generation or the next, your bloodline's gonna get rescheduled homie.

Evolving out of being a powerless neoslave with all sights downward will have to be the work of some real John Connor types (see the movie The Terminator) as it seems nearly everyone warms up to the prosperity gospel in time, or the secular wheel of fortune, complete with wonderful items unfathomable. Let's not forget, the Afterlife has been foregone for Superbowl Sunday.

Your time is yours, all the time, dummy. You could spend time on developing yourself and truthseeking (same thing), but if you're not careful (sarcasm) that might quickly reveal your current arrangement is a scam and you're Stockholming yourself, using the very language your de-landed ancestors used to enter the city and receive their promised rewards of convenience, leisure, health, and wealth (sarcasm again).

You can build a career, but can you build yourself? You're a teamplayer, but is it your team? Not speaking in terms of where you work or what you own, Who are You?

I've started to nickname my dog Doppelzahn (doppel-tsan) as it means DoubleTooth in German. He's a mini-schnauzer (which I believe means he originates where half of my ancestors are from, until some know-it-all asshole informs me the breed was concocted in the eastern regions of France or 1920s America). He's a good shit. It's a small gesture to the college-dropout inside that nonfluency doesn't have to be mean irrelevancy. His real dog-name is Loki hehe, and he has some double-teeth, something dogs acquire more often than humans. I'm thinking about taking him to the vet for a look, and possibly a procedure if need be.

Loki has no fucking idea what's goin on. I exist in the shadows all the time, but he only sees me when he wants to see me, or more specifically, when I want to be seen. When I feed him, engage his playfulness, and pickup his defecations I am there in full glory. But the rest of the time he's in his own world, taking possession of his schnauzerbody as he should, his off-species papa a distant unknown.

If I please, I will have him anaesthetized, his dentistry modified, and when he wakes up he'll have no idea it even happened. Perhaps while he's under, I'll have his testicles removed. Smart money. 2 birds 1 stone. Gotta prepare for my future, that of my family. Not his, his is whatever I say it is. Then again maybe I won't have him surgered. Maybe it's not worth the money. Decisions, decisions.

We're DoubleTooth Loki. We are leashed, managed, fed, reproduced, and put down at will. But not our will. Someone else's. If we look back at the rather simple and rudimentary social pyramid created by the willing and the unwilling, as constructed by the economics mentioned in the paragraphs above, it is a owner-slave arrangement clear as day. We humans gradually lost our autonomy, to be handled as the wolf was husbanded to Man so many epochs ago. We were set to work, like cattle to the plow. Worker beattitudes were propagated and disseminated. The goals of breeding were applied to accomplish: industriousness, passiveness, apathy, violence—whatever ya need we got it. Inclinations to resist have been, apparently, converted to vibrant acceptance and pride over sparse millenia.

Sometimes you need a Schnauzer.

Sometimes you need a German.

The right tool for the job, ya know.

When I slip the high-quality blue harness over Loki's head, he beats me to the chase, inserting his furry head like an eager projectile. Not just acceptance, but exuberance. He's going outside to be free, he's full of love and is loved. I like to think he becomes an entirely new character, König Doppelzahn des Schnauzers, sniffer of dirty creeks, committed questioner of bus transfers, sworn enemy of short-hairs.

His entire reality is a farce.

We're more than tools, and we don't have to die according to script.

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.

September

-1. 1243, visit sister and niece,

-2. 1617,

-3. 1437, schedule weekdays out to New Year's Eve, Pittsburgh to Lancaster by car, Mister Grey to Erique

-4. Lancaster to Baltimore by car, Erique to Brickmouse, square away quarters, set up writing stations, refresh and back up two local computers, answer 118 emails, dinner with friends

-5. convert book files for publishing, meet with webmaster, schedule training,

-6. 1658, to Harford County by bus and car, dinner with son, cards with brother,

-7. 6 emails, paypall, edited and posted Nat Star #2, training and visiting with James Anderson and Incognegro,

-8. 1154, arrange publishing agreement with Casting Darts Publishing, 1285,

-9. 1177, post 3 periscope articles, 1026, 1670, finished off emails box,

-10. to Baltimore County by car, to Baltimore City by bus, weed back yard, back up files, proof NS #3, eye blew, 1054,

-11. 1301, yard work, resset patio blocks

-12. 1177, yard work, weeding, yard tennis with the Brickmouse, 1495, train operator, arrange fight brain meet

-13. 552, 1197, to Megan’s on the east side,

-14. 1 hour badmitton, read 175 pages in The Babylonian Woe, seizure lost a day, slept 14 hours

-15. brain fog, outlined 5 thru 14 of Conspiracy Against Mankind, relax

-16. 857, 781, 1359, weed Georgia’s yard, editorial call, 597

-17. 1620, scheduled posts, back to Brickmouse House, yard work, meet Big Ron

-18. 1317, worked on publishing with Jeth, visited with webmaster, lost in dominoes to Guila Girl

-19. weeded, 1800, watch fights,1787

-20. wash clothes, 1185, back up files, pack, To East Side, 1224, insane nightmares busting road blocks with Mesc Frank, knife fighting in Pittsburgh against skin heads.

-21. 1434, 1111, Meet Damien,

-22. To Harford County, visited grandchildren, who agreed to publish outstanding history proofs,

-23. 1348, clean ground floor, 1097

-24. bad brain fog, spent 2 hours writing 1 brief email

-25. proofed last item, 498, frame 3 nonfiction articles, dinner with The Operator, listen to Arrian,

-26. 1316, clean kitchen, 1536, met with head coach at Towson Karate,

-27. bad back spasm, cant stand or walk, working on floor exercises, 1226, pack and go to Lancaster, PA with Mister Grey, kitchen stag discussion over beer with Nero the Pict

-28. 891, cleaned apartment, to Erique’s, entertained Princess Ruby, pushed Ruby in the swing for 90 minute, which helped my back, weeded around the gazebo, who painted my nails and skull,

-29. shopped with Ruby and Erique, tore vines off of two trees, sank 12 small trees and found a coal bed, probably the remnants of an old coal shed, back to Mister Grey’s, made corned beef chili

-30. 1471, record 5 videos

Articles/Chapters = 34,

Books = 0

October

-1. 1471, cleaned, cooked, sparred, 5 videos, to Eriques

-2. to Baltimore, 1244, emails,

-3. emails, coached from 5 to 11 pm

-4. 1453, visit by bus Cousin Michael, walk to meet Charles, begin John Harrower’s diary

-5. publishing emails, comments, 1795, cut grass weed 4 hours, 1269,

-6. 1818, 1008, spar with Charles, to Megan’s on East Side, 1032, shopping for groceries with Megan, 1374, can now haul weight

-7. 2008, 1554, 2745, 2569, editorial call, 2443, legs and abs, walk to store, tight back, nerves in legs flaming cut squats short

-8. woke with locked up back, 90 minutes mobility exercise, wrote too much yesterday, 1816, 2467, vacuumed house, 2684, completed annotating Diary of John Harrower, must return to fiction tomorrow.

-9. could not walk, barely made home form Megan's, listened to Arrian, 2 emails, sick, stretched 6 times for 7 hours therapy, weird baccanal at Esoteric Cafe,

-10. tight, steep temp drop on old bag of bones, 11 emails, 454, 743, coached from 5 to midnight

-11. very tight, extreme eye seizure, nausea, listen to Arrian’s Alexander Book 1 23rd time, expand The Son of God Alexander project, chapter 1 to be 12 sections, to Harford County clean Mom’s windows,

-12. bad eye and locked up back, 1277, clean windows, train with Incognegro, cards and rum

-13. wake up drunk, clean shed, patio, clean rest of windows, to Lancaster with Nero the Pict, work on yard, train with Erique

-14. fast day, weed, move rose bushes, plant arbor vidas, to Denver, PA with Mister Grey, record videos, beer, 1 shot rum, make chili

-15. chili and coffee for breakfast, 1666, make videos, train, to Erique’s

-16. to Baltimore with Erique, lunch with Man in the Hat, dinner with Doc Dread and Brickmouse, got incredible drunk on Taquila and blacked out, need to get a handle on this lest I erase a book in my head before its written

-17. begin Babylonian Woe notes, 1435, star concluding Banjo Timejack, rake yard, spar with Charles, coach boxing, dinner with The Operator

-18. begin I Miss Them So, 1290 Son Of God,1330, to eastside,

-19. badmitton 100 minutes continuous, 1708, finished reading Pill City,

-20. 1528, shopped at markets, 1343

-21. visit Doc, interview Michael, 1621, 1095, 1,072, repaired porch lattice, stored tools and parts from plumbing job, dinner with three happy hens, crab soup, eggplant, shrimp, meatballs

-22. 902, 1948, shop for Megan, 1537,

-23. 449, 1662, entomb rats under porch with beer bottles and bleach/ammonia gas, 1169, dinner with Charles, to Brickmouse House

-24. 16 emails, 4 emails, 1347, skyped with Jeth Randolph, rake lawn

-25. 1376, was clothes, 1488, rake, begin level spring house bed, patch up eroded side slope, proof morning writing, cut grass shower, to karate school with gear, meet Sean and crew

-26. trained from 11 to 4:30, concussion, black eye, 9 bruises, 1 cut after 1 hour boxing, two hours stick, 1 hour blade, 2 over 1 against James Anderson in LPR machete duel, 0 and 5 against James with bastard sword wasters, dinner with the crew at Raven Inn, to PA with Erique, bad headache, eye seizing bad, legs held up, hips did give when I got rocked

-27. feel like I was hit by a car, cleaned house, closed down pool, water transplanted shrubs, news that Kelly passed, to Mescaline Franklin’s, 2 video beer reviews

-28. 1189,

-29. comments, emails, to Erique’s, yard work

-30. to Baltimore, 7 emails, 227, wash clothes, to pharmacy, 449, meet Big Ron, try to learn majon

-31. 1634, 1274, pharmacy, boxing, knife training

Articles/Chapters = 44

2nd month in a row with no book completions. Unacceptable

November

-1. to cousin Mike’s by bus, 1495, to Harford County by car, clean house, 1163,

-2. clean kitchen, set up for party, play cards for lunch, 1444, serve the eaters,

-3. birthday for relative

-4. back to Baltimore, not feeling well, video and text archives with Guillo Girl, 1238, 932,

-5. 894, walk to pharmacy was closed, hit snake, 1545, 947, dinner with operator, drinks until 2:30 on election night

-6. read Eye of the Chickenhawk, 1023, dinner with Chuck, 1582,

-7. 1447, posted February nonfiction, pharmacy, coach boxing 55 minute sparring round with Leo, dinner at the esoteric cafe,

-8. 1169, pharmacy, to east side,

-9. 1161, bull roast

-10. 1188, over to the Brickmouse House for a Myth 20 podcast,

-11. 1367, 1164, wash clothes, to east side,

-12. 1261, read Works and Days, 1588, back to Brickmouse House, 1779, meet Big Ron and Charles at bar,

-13. 1278, 490, arranged text and completed Banjo: Timejack 28,800 words, emails, update site essentials, rake lawn, 1614, 2264, arrange Nat Star text

-14. arrange Moses Roper text, read Nat Star, 1181, Skype Jeth Randolph, work out plot and roster for Vunak of Antares coach boxing, train The Operator until midnight,

-15. 1246, back up files, check site, meet Mister Grey and to PA, three videos

-16. edit yesterday’s chapter, emails, to Erique’s plantation, framed Vunak of Antares, cleaned house, baby sat, yard work, movie

-17. 1671, removed 4 stump with Erique, sparred, dinner with Erique and Yakubiton, 1608, 1597, 3,376, finished annotating Moses Roper, videos with Mister Grey, drank until 3:30 am

-18. exercises, read Theogony, emails

-19. 1355, 31 flights of stairs, fast, to Erique’s,

-20. to Baltimore, breakfast with Ezz, 904, lunch with Mom, dinner with Doc

-21. 1160, Miss Ezz brought dinner, 1035, Jeth skype, last boxing session with Towson Karate, coffee and whiskey with Jason, all canceled for illness

-22. snow and rain, feel 80 years old, proof an ode, mail to Jeth, 1646, to Eastside

-23. 1545, strength exercises, format 10 part review of Bernays for Conspiracy against Mankind, 699, read Book of Job

-24. 1449, 1178, completed Nat Star: Timejacker! At 20,237 words, 1036, Wake Christopher in print

-25. to Rosedale to interview Mike, Harford County, train Operator in Baltimore county

-26. up at 6:55 AM disoriented, brain fog, emails, website updates, finish packing, lunch with Man in the Hat, train with Brett bruised sternum, drinks with Big Ron, Charles, Brickmouse, Jason, in bed by 6:00 AM

-27. up at 8:30, bad hangover, eesh!, exercise, physical therapy final check by Brickmouse, post office, deliver present to little Emma, to Harford County, played cards

-28. up at 5:50 AM, clean house, sort gear for short stay, set up desk, proton emails, Thanksgiving with family in Harford County, conversed with X wife until 5:00 AM over Barbados rum

-29. skyped with Jeth Randolph over Vunak of Antares

-30. 1387, surprise dinner with Nero the Pict and Cutie Homesteader, 434

Articles/Chapters = 41

Books = 2

Novels = 2

December

-1. 1777, emails, updated site, visit with family, to Lancaster with Uber Joe, visited with the princess and the queen and watched a movie with Erique

-2. 1332 VU #1, to Pittsburgh by train,

-3. breakfast with reader, edit VU#1, strength training, record videos

-4. record videos

-5. 1414 VU #2, skype with Jeth, to Chicago by train

-6. #3 train to LA, read Hesiod’s Theogony, Stan is my seat mate, crossed the Miss at Port Madison, Iowa, sleep, fast

-7. woke in Dodge City at 5 AM, edited VU#2, 1283 VU#3.1, outline VU#3.2, typing difficult on rails, read Hesiod,

-8. wake in LA, switch trains, nodding on the train, in San Jose coaching Eddy,

-9. listened to Hesiod, 459 of amplification to VU#3.1, 1576 VU#3.2, listened to Hesiod

-10. woke with bad eye, VU#3.3 1600, explore San Jose on foot, VU#5 1067, used book store, read North American Indians by George Gatlin, listened to Hesiod thrice, read Hesiod,

-11. bad eye attack, 895, listened to Mankind in Amnesia

-12. listen to Hesiod, edited yesterday’s article, 1150, 1435, outline Pale Riders, listen to Spengler, Hesiod, 1151, 1275, listen to Gibbon

-13. listen to Gibbon, 28, 29, 30, 1743, listen to Hesiod, 1083, buy Greek Lyrics by Latimore and The Fall of Troy by Quintus Smyneus, 1052, listened to Gibbon 31and 32

-14. Listen to The Shield of Herakles, 1962, Listen to Mankind in Amnesia, Listen to In the Beginning, 1389, two tall beers and to bed

-15. listned to Gibbon, 2240,

Winter begins for the Crackpot, 12 books in 12 months is enough.

Articles/ Chapter = 21

Books: 0

Expenses

Train: 75, to Pittsburgh,

Bus: 4, 4, 5, 5, 4, 5, 5, 2, 5, 2, 2, 4

Hotel: 200, 200, 200, 700

Food: 57, 20, 14, 16, 38, 18, 10, 20, 20, 50, 24, 10, 30, 50, 20, 29, 20, 40, 12, 23, 5, 10, [December food and drink taken care of by Mister Gray, Rick and the Operator]

Medical: 32,

By Friday 22nd I was shaken with migratory nerves. I do not travel well, have never had wanderlust, never thought to leave the evil place that hatched this twisted mind, until it drove me out in June 2018, the very day that The Brickmouse and Guilo Girl invited me to stay with them on any return to Baltimore. But there I was in the cozy Brickmouse House where I have been so welcome. I was already homesick for it and was having bad brain fog trying to pack bags. I was losing things, washing clothes and forgetting where they were.

Monday Night the 24th into the early midnight hours of Tuesday, I trained The Operator, sparring in a street light lit basement alley. He paid me with a bag of big mac burgers and fries. Back at the Brickmouse House, with an introductory letter in hand to one of his colleagues, I cut up the fries, tossed out the buns, put meat around the fries, covered all with left over cheese, and nuked it for 2 minutes—a feast.

The blackout curtains admitted just enough light to warn me awake. My last week in a longtime location, I am unable to sleep past dawn. I answered emails, checked the back end of the site, and packed, unable to write.

At 11:00 AM, The Man in the Hat picked me up to meet his son, Brett, at the Valley View Inn, an old roadhouse bar and eatery in Baltimore County. When I was his age I walked past this six mornings a week headed home from the night shift at the supermarket that has changed hands a few times since. The young fellow looks great, showed us the pic of his gorgeous girl in Southern Maryland and paid for our meal and beer. He then said, “James, you look so much better then when I took you to Doc last year. Can you spar?”

“Sure, the Brickmouse has extra gear you can use.”

“Oh, I have my sticks and gear in the truck.”

“What kind of psycho drives around for four years with gear in his truck?”

The Man in the Hat answered, as the stud grinned, “The one that just fattened you up for the kill! James, here, you better have one more beer to kill the pain.”

As he went to get me a fourth beer, Brett smiled, “Dad’s an animal. He still plays hockey. I remember when his teeth got knocked out and he skated over to us and handed them to me and went back to play.”

Brett took me to buy the Christmas booze for my son’s Thanksgiving dinner, the well rum, well tequila and cheap whiskey. Home to the Brickmouse abode we went. As we gloved up in the yard he said, “James, the Brickmouse will be home soon—he can spar too, I’ll take it easy.”

“Bro, he won’t go anywhere near you with a stick.”

An hour of moderate stick sparring in the yard, was bisected by the Brickmouse walking by in route to some after work errand, chuckling as I was stiff armed into the turf like some secondary punk trying to slow James Brown. We moved to the patio and gloved up for boxing for a ten minute round. I noted Big Ron was now sitting on the picnic table drinking a Budweiser. At a certain point I ate ten straight punches and decided it was time to stop assaulting Brett’s glove with my face. I do think my mouth piece and saber mask should file a class action lawsuit against me for willful neglect.

Big Ron grinned, “You were doing pretty good while your foot was on the outside of his—but he figured it out.”

Brett then gave me a $20, “Here James, for the training.”

“Bro, you bought lunch and drove me around.”

“James, you trained me for free for ten years when I was a kid with no money.”

$20 bucks for the honor of making him work me over, two bruised hands, two bruised forearms, a bruised sternum, a bruised bicep and other warmly retained sensations five days later that tell me I am still alive.

That’s a deal.

We repaired inside for drinks and were joined by Charles, his bride, Guilo Girl and the returning Brickmouse. Brett does not drink. He did eat canned corned beef with me, as the others drank espresso. I am so lucky to be blessed with such fine young friends.

At 9:30 it was time for Brett, the last pirate on board the goodbye ship, to head home. I had dispensed all of the area training contact phone numbers in my phone in hopes that these fellows will train together in my absence. That would make this feel worthwhile in the cracked rear view mirror.

Jason’s place is on the way. The manager of the Esoteric Cafe has lost a lady and is stuck between books, overthinking his next two writing projects. Brett dropped me off three miles north out in Baltimore County, wished me well, and pulled off.

I had only drunk 10 Miller Lite beers over 9.5 hours. With me was 2 shots of over proofed rum, 3 beers, and 6 shots of Bird Dog salted whiskey. Jason does not drink such garbage. As befits a man with four languages under his hat band, he drinks wine. He had just finished fabricating and welding door pins for an antique sports car he is working on out back. He drove us in his beater to the liquor store and bought two bottles of dark wine. On the way home there was what appeared to be a fatal three-car collision at Joppa and Perring.

Finally back in his eccentric mansion, an old dentist office house, with the entire first floor strewn with books, stalked by his attention-hungry, hypoallergenic, teacup creature demanding a seat at the table, Jason heated up slices of spinach pie. We sat, spoke, drank, discussed writing, drank, spoke of the wrong turns in or life, then came upon the subject of writing once again. Jason read passages from his most recent book, and I had to honestly inform him that his prose is better than mine. He does understand how languages are built. The beer, rum and whiskey were gone, the rum grinning up at me with a wry twist of grin. Jason was halfway through the second bottle of wine He looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was 3 AM.

“James, thank you so much for this inspirational conversation, for this book [Can]. I think I have drunk too much and am fading, night creature that I am. How can you still be up and lucid?”

“I worked night crew for 38 years. It’s almost quitting time.”

“Please, finish the wine and take a couch.”

I downed the half bottle of wine—against Rick’s rules—and said, “The Brickmouse will be up and about in one hour. I’d like to see him off to work. The rum bottle can be used to discipline my errant chattel.”

The stagger down Harford Road, for a few miles, took me up and down three good hills. I had miles, over an hour, utterly alone except for blinking lights, buzzing light poles, a rat scampering crookedly across the street. I did not feel too drunk—indeed was able to get the key in the door on the FIRST try. When I entered, my young friend was making breakfast. We sat and he regaled me about some world military news—a high speed missile I think.

At last, dawn was tinting the sky as he locked himself out.

I nodded pleasantly in the decommissioned gamer chair they save for my back.

“James, James,” spoke rose-fingered Dawn, some fresh goddess voice prodding me awake.

I looked right and saw Guilo Girl, “James, time to go to bed.”

Embarrassed that I only lasted 23 hours, I slunk off to bed for my last turn there, to wake three hours later, realizing that I stumbled home along the same road that stretches endlessly in my rebooted nightmares of being late for work from missing the bus, afraid I’d get soaked in the rain.