Exclusivity

There are some writers who have hated Shakespeare, including some writers I admire such as Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw. Voltaire was another of the Shakespeare haters, and I used to be a great admirer of Voltaire. However, the more Leibniz I read, the model for Voltaire's ridiculous and useless Dr Pangloss, the more difficult it becomes for me to summon any enthusiasm for Voltaire.

I do not share this loathing, but I think I understand it, or at least a major component of it: the attention given to Shakespeare's work is so extraordinarily great that it robs attention from other, worthy authors. 

 

In an episode of "Boardwalk Empire," there is a flashback showing Jimmy Darmody, played by Michael Pitt, in his time at Princeton, reading aloud from -- what?! What was that?! Immediately the viewer could hear that it was a play in English written around the time of Shakespeare, but not Shakespeare, and even if the language of the passage were not so beautiful in its own right, the fact of it not being Shakespeare would've made it interesting, because most of us never hear anything written in English near Shakespeare's time except Shakespeare. To be sure, we hear anecdotes about Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe, but only in connection with Shakespeare, and we never hear a passage read from one of their plays, let alone actually seeing one of their plays from start to finish.

Just that snippet of Webster in "Boardwalk Empire" made me extraordinarily curious. I am no expert on English literature --  I'm more of a dilettante: I have a very weak grasp of a very great many languages -- but I can very easily imagine how someone with a great and detailed knowledge of literature in English, someone like George Bernard Shaw, could have been driven quite deeply and regularly batty by the way that Shakespeare has blinded us to so many interesting writers in or near his time, like the sun hiding many interesting stars from view: Ah, so we're going to discuss an English masterpiece written around 1600? Let me guess: Shakespeare, for the 10,000th time in a row? 

The knowledge that it was going to be Shakespeare for the next 10,000 times as well, at least as far as any broad public was concerned -- yes, I can easily see how that would drive an expert crazy, quite apart from any appraisal of Shakespeare's own merits. 

I know a bit more about Latin literature, where Cicero is not only widely -- very widely -- considered to be the finest writer ever to have written it, often enough by readers who have read little enough Latin written by anyone else. Not only that, and not only that many people consider him the best Latin author to emulate. No, over and above that, for a number of centuries now, a not inconsiderable faction has insisted, with the unbending assurance of the blind art critic, that the ONLY correct way to write Latin is to imitate Cicero.

Even before I ever suspected that anyone had ever insisted such a strange thing, I was tired of Cicero. By volume, about one-fifth of all surviving Classical Latin literature is that written by Cicero. From its beginnings in the 3rd century BC to the end of the Classical era in the 5th century AD when it gave way to the Christian Medieval era, about one-fifth of all that people thought well enough of to hold on to, has been Cicero's rhetorical and philosophical works and his speeches and letters. From the 3rd century BC to the 5th century AD many fine Latin authors survive only in paltry scraps. Hundreds more we know only from the admiring comments contained in the surviving scraps of their contemporaries and colleagues, and who knows how many thoroughly deserving ancient Latin poets, historians, philosophers and others have disappeared so thoroughly that no one even knows their names, all to make more shelf space for, ugh, Cicero? 

I've come to grips with the possibility that I may have always drastically under-estimated Cicero. I'm not here to insult him, nor to insist that he's the last Latin author you should read. I've gained a little more humility than that, at last, and acknowledge that I may have been, and may remain, pretty much blinded in my assessment of Cicero's writings, because of all of those other, relatively neglected authors. 

I AM here to insist, gently but firmly, that Cicero is not the only Classical Latin author worth reading, nor even the only one worth emulating. Latin, just like English and French and other languages, offers a variety of ways to skin a cat.

The attention which Erasmus holds at the expense of his contemporaries may be even more extreme than Shakespeare versus other Renaissance authors in English and Cicero vs other Classical Latin authors. Just as wide swaths of the public, when asked to name as many luxury watch brands as they can, will say, "Rolex... Uhhhmmmm..." so many Latinists, when asked to name some of the finest Latin authors who lived after the Classical period, will reply, "Erasmus... Uhhhmmmm..."

I recall shaking with rage in the stacks of a major US university library, upon seeing that the several very large editions of Erasmus, plus the books about Erasmus, covered several times as much shelf space as the rest of ALL Latin literature past the Classical period: Medieval, Renaissance Latin except Erasmus, more recent Latin... I stood there with my dilettante's weak grasp of those other categories of Latin which I felt worthy of attention, and shook with the outsider's powerless rage. 

I'm less enraged now. Those other categories of Latin, as far as I can tell, have begun to rebound in the amount of attention paid to them. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just that I'm beginning to find the nooks and crannies where they're appreciated. And as far as Erasmus himself is concerned, I've found it impossible to dislike him nearly as much as before I stumbled across his dialogue "Ciceronianus," which pokes fun quite mercilessly at people convinced that the only proper way to speak Latin is to imitate Cicero.

I laughed until I fell off of my chair, and then I lay on the floor shaking with laughter. Laughter may be the best cure for rage over things like this, which aren't actually matters of life and death. 

There are circles in which Lingua Latina per se Illustrata (LLPSI), a Latin-language course by Hans Ørberg, is the favorite course for beginners, and the one most often recommended. 

There are circles in which it is the ONLY Latin course recommended to beginners, and in which those who mention other routes are angrily shouted down. What has been seen cannot be unseen, and just recently I suddenly saw the resemblance between this level of exclusive support for LLPSI, and those who insist that one must imitate Cicero, or who have never read anything written in English between Shakespeare and Swift, or in Latin between Gellius and Erasmus...

"Be angry at the sun for setting," Robinson Jeffers advised those of us who get all worked up over the way things are. "Yours is not theirs," he added. Like many others, I first read that poem because Hunter S Thompson reprinted it in one of his books.  I am not required to feel superior to the others who read it there and did not, like me, go on to read many more of Jeffers' poems. 

There are various forms of exclusivity, and if I am going to be consistent and regret that John Webster and Ausonius and the ENTIRE Carmina Burana and Jeffers' long poem Dear Judas and Leibniz are not more widely read, I must be consistent, and not resent Cicero and Erasmus and Shakespeare and Dr Thompson simply because they are more popular. For one thing, snobs are singularly unpleasant and make very bad advertisers. 

But more importantly, although Shaw may have been right to be exasperated at all the fine authors who go unread, he may have been wrong about Shakespeare. I may have been wrong about Cicero, and, as I have hinted, I'm already beginning to see that I was wrong about Erasmus. Let's not stop trashing Dan Brown. He deserves it. But not everyone who's extremely popular is a bad writer.

Forgeries, From Antiquity to the Present

Constantine the Great and Sylvester I, Pope from 314 to 335, were not close friends. They did not, despite Dan Brown's repeated insistence to the contrary, re-write the Bible together at the Council of Nicea. In fact, Sylvester was not AT Nicea. These and other basic facts of history, which were never well-hidden, caused many people, when a document surfaced in the 8th century, purporting to be a letter from Constantine to Sylvester granting him and his Papal successors spiritual and temporal sovereignty over the Western Roman Empire, to see it for the cheesy forgery it was. Nevertheless, this purported letter, known as the Donation of Constantine, was used from time to time by Popes and their allies as an argument in various power struggles, and has occasionally fooled people down to the present day, including, of course, Dan Brown. 

Although many people knew from the start that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, it was Lorenzo Vallo who proved it in 1440, by demonstrating that its Latin was that of the 8th century. This was a great milestone in textual criticism.

 

In the 17th century some scholars, notably Spinoza with his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, began to take a similarly critical view of the Bible and the Classics, investigating their authorship and time of composition. Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish Community of Amsterdam for suggesting that Moses might not have authored all of the Pentateuch. 

More recently, scholars have determined that of the 13 books of the New Testament traditionally attributed, 6 were written by someone else: Colossians, Ephesians, 2nd Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus.

Less famous than such investigations into the Bible, but at least as interesting to some readers, are those examining traditional attributions of ancient "pagan" texts. Platonic dialogues certainly or almost certainly not written by Plato include Second Alcibiades, Hipparchus, Minos, The Rival Lovers, Theages, Clitophon, About Justice, About Virtue, Demodocus, Sisyphus, Eryxias and Axiochus. Homer, Vergil, Caesar, Sallust and Ovid are just a few of the ancients whose oeuvres have been whittled down in the estimate of textual critics.

The Historia Augusta are somewhat the other way around: until rather recently they were regarded as a collaboration between six historians, a collection of the biographies of the Emperors and those around them from AD 117 to 284. They tended to be regarded as very poor history. Gibbon and Burckhardt, noticing many of the errors, angrily condemned the shoddy work of the authors, which made their own work much more difficult,

Then in the late 19th and early 20 centuries Harmann Dessau asserted that they are in fact the work of one author, a position which has steadily gained support. This of course raised questions such as: why would an author do this? and, What sort of work is the Historia Augusta? Ronald Syme took up Dessau's work, and in 1968 published a volume entitled Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, which suggests that the work is a parody of historical writing, for which modern readers still need to develop the necessary sense of humor. It seems possible that the author had never intended to deceive anyone into thinking that his work was to be understood as history. This case is very interesting, and most definitely still open. 

It's not always texts per se which are under investigation by textual critics. Take the curious case of the Vinland Map, first published in 1965 together with the Tartar Relation, a 13th century text describing a Franciscan mission to the court of then Mongols. This copy of the Tartar Relation seemed to present no great mystery. There was no doubt that this was a genuine 15th-century manuscript on parchment. But then there was the Vinland Map, bound in the same volume, also on 15th-century parchment, and presenting a view of the route from Scandinavia to Canada. This was a map purporting to show the route of Viking voyages to the Western hemisphere, a map supposedly made in the MID-15th century, a few decades before Columbus. 

The parchment really was from the 15th century, but this proved nothing about the map. Blank pieces of 15th-century parchment can be had, and can be used to produce various faked things.

Well, if this was a forgery, it was at the very least an above-average forgery, keeping experts busy assessing it for decades. Samuel Eliot Morison immediately declared it a fake, because it included a very accurate representation of the west coast of Greenland. Morison pointed out that the west coast of Greenland had not been navigated before the 17th century, and that until then Greenland had been considered to be part of a continent, not an island. 

As soon as I read that, years ago, I assumed that Morison had solved this puzzle, and wondered what was taking the others so ling to catch up. Then, literally just a few days ago, it occurred to me that someone, after Greenland had been navigated, could have altered a genuine 15th-century map to include the west coast of Greenland, not realizing that this would make the map seem obviously fake and not more impressive.

So for a few days I was once more very excited about the Vinland Map -- until today, when I read that, along about 2018, chemical analysis of the ink had finally convinced everyone that the map was a forgery.

Still, having taken more than 60 years before the public to be conclusively exposed, that is definitely an above-average fake. 

Although some will find it to be off-topic, I cannot end this essay without a salute to journalistic fact-checkers and their battle against the tide of lies. Because I do not find it to be off-topic.

Someone Said Dan Brown Was Right About Jesus and Mary Magdalene Having Been Married

I disagree. I'm not certain that either Jesus or Mary Magdalene existed, let alone that they were married, let alone that they had children and that their descendants survive today. And even if they did I don't assign any special qualities to anyone just because of their ancestors. And the Grail was invented in the 12th century by Chretien de Troyes. And a grail is a cup or chalice. And the business about "san graal" ("holy grail") being a misreading of "sang raal [sang royal]'" ("royal blood") which Brown borrowed from Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, although it's miles more clever than anything Brown will ever think up on his own, is still just clever silliness. And the Priory of Sion was invented in the 1950's by a Frenchman trying to pass himself off as a descendant of the Merovingians and a figure prophesied by Nostradamus. And besides the factual errors Brown insists are facts and which are crucial to the plots of his stories, his books are riddled with errors which are unimportant for his plots. For example, there actually is no academic discipline called symbology, which is practiced by Brown's protagonist Professor Robert Langdon. There is, however, an academic discipline which studies symbols. It's called semiotics, and, ironically, there is an actual Italian professor of semiotics named Umberto Eco who writes fanciful novels, often having to do with wild speculations about the history of the Roman Catholic Church, which are much, much, much better than Brown's, and although Eco's fiction is infinitely more realistic and informative about the reality of both the present and of bygone ages than Brown's, he doesn't have the bad taste to try to pass any of it off as factual, as Brown does with his unfortunate piles of awkward sentences.

Just in case this wasn't already clear: I think Dan Brown's books are badly-written and that people could get a lot more entertainment as well as lot less misinformation from books written by -- well, from books written by just about anyone else.

Is That You, Dan Brown?

No, actually this is someone else. But It may be someone who has read some of Dan Brown's stuff and thought it was non-fiction.

Let's see how many mistakes we can spot:

"The NT is not written evidence, its a compilation of writings/myths from much later than the supposed historical Jesus lived that were picked over by 4th century Italians combining pagan rituals and newer Christian beliefs into one unifying state mandated religion forming the basis of the Roman Catholic church that has been the center of greed, power and corruption in the world ever since and has spun off over 30,000 sects of Christianity that disagree with each other about the details."

Help Me Defeat Dan Brown's War On History

As Randall Munroe famously pointed out years ago, someone was WRONG on the INTERNET! Tell me about it, Randall! And despite years' worth of heroic effort on the part of Munroe and other well-informed and occasionally sleep-deprived people, someone is still wrong! Several people are wrong! ...Well, let's face it: many people are wrong.

And it's usually Dan Brown's fault.

A few days ago, within the space of an hour or so, I believe I contradicted four people separately, each of whom had asserted that the Bible had been altered at the Council of Nicea. Even if I wanted to, even if I had nothing else to do, I don't think I could correct every single person who makes that mistake in a reader's comment on the Huffington Post alone, let alone the rest of the Internet. Even if I corrected that one mistake every time it appeared in the readers' comments on HP, even if I hung in there with multiple replies, I doubt I could convince all of those readers all by myself that they were wrong about even just that one thing. If I'm going to convince everyone in the world about even just this one thing, I'm going to need help. And of course it's not as if this is the only thing that people are wrong about on the Internet.

Who's with me? Who will stand up beside me and shout, "I'M SPARTACUS!" ?

Dan Brown's Inferno

Okay, Dan Brown is going to publish a novel about Dante. I suppose it's the duty of The Wrong Monkey to do something, to not merely take this lying down. And so I'm going to suggest some authors you might want to consider reading instead of Brown. (Search for posts labelled "dan brown" to see reasons not to read Brown.)

First of all, Dante comes to mind. Preferably untranslated. Part of the reason such a fuss is made about him to begin with is that his writing really sings. It's beautiful in ways which can't be translated. And I'm talking about the Latin works as well as the Italian ones. I was lucky enough to find a volume in a second hand book store years ago, containing Dante's complete works ("Tutti le opere"), edited by a certain Dr Moore, published by Oxford in 1897, pre-acidic paper, for seven freaking bucks. Or maybe that was just normal, not freakishly lucky. I'll probably never understand book pricing. Anyway, "tutti le opere" is what yr lookin for, happy hunting.

Another thing I stumbled a cross in a used-book store is Guido Da Pisa's Commentary on Dante's Inferno. Written in the 14th century, published for the first time in its entirety in 1974, and according to its editor, Vincenzo Cioffari, it was in 1974 "by common agreement among Dante scholars" the most important commentary on the Inferno which hadn't yet been published. I'm not a Dante scholar, I'm just telling you what Cioffari said. For myself I can only say that I found Guido's commentary (written in Latin) to be quite fascinating. Lots of detail about the political and social background of the Inferno, many edifying references to ancient and Medieval Latin authors who were always in the air which bookish lads like Dante and Guido breathed. Good stuff. Really helps you enjoy the Inferno more.

Unfortunately, as I said, I'm not a Dante scholar and I only stumbled upon that volume of his works and upon Guido's commentary. So I don't have much more to tell you about Dante. I can't even tell you who would be some of the best people to tell you all about Dante. So instead I'm just going to leave the subject of Dante now, and instead just list a bunch of authors who have nothing in common except that I think they're all miles better than Dan Brown, and beg you -- beg! -- if you are planning to read a novel by Brown, to just consider looking at at least one book by at least one of these other people instead, and who knows, you might just be glad you did. I'll list them by genres of writing and by their native languages and by other categories. And if you haven't already discovered the joys of multiligualism I'll just mention that it's great, and urge you to try to learn new languages. (It's a really great thing to do in so many ways. Very difficult, for most of us -- but so worth it!)

Writers of fiction, either contemporary or recently-deceased, writing in English: William H Gass, Walter Abish, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood (also a poet), Richard Powers, Barry Unsworth, Evan Dara, Salman Rushdie, William T Vollmann, Steven Bollinger, William Gaddis, Padgett Powell, Barry Hannah, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Cormac McCarthy

Writers of fiction in English further back in the past: Henry Fielding, Herbert Melville (also wrote poetry), Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Flannery O'Conner

Poets writing in Engliah: Alexander Pope, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, W H Auden, Wallace Stevens, Allan Ginsburg

Historians, English: Edward Gibbon, Steven Runciman, Samuel Eliot Morison

Historians writing in German: Leopold von Ranke, Theodor Mommsen

Wrote in German, partly an historian, partly an essayist, partly a philosopher, partly an art critic, entirely awesome: Jacob Burckhardt

Wrote in English, even harder to classify than Burckhardt: Edmund Wilson

Philosophers writing in German: Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W Adorno, Elias Canetti (Canetti also wrote novels and several volumes' worth of autobiography and published fascinating diaries), Herbert Marcuse

More novelists and/or playwrights writing in German: Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Lessing, Goethe (also a philosopher, geologist, biologist, discredited writer on optics and publisher of slightly-fictionalized memoirs), Doeblin, Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Ingeborg Bachmann

An Italian novelist: Italo Svevo

Philosophers writing in French: Leibniz (also wrote in Latin. Underrated mathamatician and possibly not a liar as is often claimed by fans of Newton), Voltaire, Sartre, Derrida, Barthes, Gorz

And, well, I could go on, but you get the idea. Just let me point out: I'm vouching for each one of these guys and gals personally. I've read their stuff and liked it, I'm not just copying names from lists of famous authors. Okay, that reminds me: I've read a few famous authors whom I recommend you don't read. Overrated, and not sorted by language: Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Augustine of Hippo, Aquinas, Robert Grosseteste -- okay: every theologian I've ever had the misfortune to read, with the exception of Kierkegaard, who wrote brilliantly in genres besides theology but who also became unspeakably dull whenever his theological tendency emerged -- Hegel, Thomas Carlyle, John Updike, Ernest Hemingway, Christa Wolf, Lord Byron

There's no need to read Dan Brown. Honestly, you'd be much better off even reading any of those overrated schmucks in the preceding paragraph.

Sincerely,

Your Pal

A Couple of Points About Judeo-Christian History and Some Reasons it's So Poorly Understood

It has been pointed out before that many New Atheists spend a lot of time talking and writing about the history of religion, most of all the early history of Judaism and Christianity, while at the same time betraying a remarkable ignorance about that history: referring to the authors of the Bible as "Bronze Age goat herders," talking about how Constantine and "the Vatican" supposedly wrote or re-wrote the Bible at Nicea in 325, insisting that a Christian doctrine of celibacy was unknown before around AD 1000, and so forth. Lately, in discussion centering around Karen L King's presentation of a piece of papyrus she refers to as the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife," I've run into a meme which is very popular but was entirely new to me: the belief that "all" Jewish men in the 1st century AD were required to be married. An amazing number of people seem to take for granted that this is so. I asked many of them where they had gotten this notion, without getting a straight answer. Finally yesterday I found out that the "all Jewish men in Jesus' time were required to be married" meme is another mistake presented in that huge pile of mistakes, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

A few days ago I was talking with some people about the widespread, thoroughly unscientific belief that vaccinations cause autism. A psychotherapist, a specialist in autism, pointed out that the people asserting the vaccine-autism link and attempting to treat autistics with crystals and pyramids are extremely mistrustful of the medical establishment, thinking that doctors and pharmaceutical companies are primarily interested in maximizing their incomes, at the expense of the best possible medical care. I replied that they were partly right, that many people in health care are primarily motivated by greed -- but that those people were working side by side with the people capable of providing the best care, the people who were by far the most expert in the field of medicine. That in fact sometimes one and the same doctor or Big Pharma exec must have both of those motivations, fighting against each other. There's a similar situation with the established academic community in the study of religion: there's a cozy relationship with rich and corrupt religious institutions, with apologetics who are not always sincere, with people who abuse children and/or protect child abusers from prosecution, etc. But these corrupt individuals are working side by side with those who know the most about the history of religion, indeed they're sometimes the same individuals.

Just as the business of medicine and pharmacy must address corruption within its ranks if it wishes to reach people who, for example, die unnecessarily early from cancer because they don't trust doctors and don't take prescription medications, so we who grind our teeth and clutch our heads in agony at the widespread notions of history which have far more to do with authors like Dan Brown than with any sort of rigourous historical study must address the corruptions and crimes of Christianity if we wish to get through to people who think that Constantine and "the Vatican" re-wrote the Bible, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a Christian, and is lying if they say they're not a Christian. Let's face it, the great majority of the people who are taking the trouble to correct Brown's mistakes are Christians. The great majority of people who are familiar with a lot of the actual history of the early Church are Christians.

Just in case someone's reading along here who's familiar with Brown's take on things, but still willing to consider the possibility that I can present a more accurate depiction of events, and that I have no secret agenda here, let's just take the one Brownian mistake about Constantine and the Pope re-writing the Bible at Nicea in 325:

1) Pope Sylvester wasn't at Nicea, he sent two representatives in his place.

2) In 325 the Bishop of Rome wasn't generally referred to as the Pope, but simply as the Bishop of Rome, and wasn't thought of as a higher authority within Christendom than the Bishop of Alexandria or of Antioch. The Pope's position of power in the Western Empire only began to establish itself after the Western Empire disintegrated in the 5th century, and the Church stepped into the power vacuum left by the Empire.

3) The contents of the Bible weren't on the agenda of the Council of Nicea. Constantine's main reason for calling the Council was to address the constant bickering between the Bishops. The two biggest competing factions in Christendom were the factions which eventually defeated the others and became what we now know as Orthodox (including what we now call Catholics); and the Arians. The Orthodox Bishops far outnumbered the Arian Bishops at the Council, and the Council adopted the Nicene Creed, which was first and foremost a rejection of Arianism. It's not clear that Constantine cared which side won, as long as unity was achieved, and that he wouldn't have backed the Arians if there had been more of their Bishops at the Council than Orthodox Bishops.

4) Constantine created a second capital of the Empire at the city which became known as Constantinople. This of course greatly weakened the power and prestige of the city of Rome, and along with it the power and prestige of the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. This does not sound to me like an Emperor who was conspiring with the Pope.

Dan Brown and the Templars and the Grail

For at least a few years now, due to Dan Brown, very many people have been thinking about the Templars in association with the Holy Grail. Whether Brown alone is responsible for the dimensions of this current fascination, or whether he has just been riding a wave of great popular interest before him, I don't know.

I do know that at least partly due to Brown, and to people like those at the History Channel riding Brown's wave, many people have gotten the idea that the Grail, or at least the idea of the Grail, goes way back in time into the early Dark Ages, if not actually into antiquity, if not actually all the way back to Jeebus Himself, when in fact the Grail originated in 12th-century fiction. Dingbats like Brown and the folks working for and consulted by and associated with the History Channel are spreading the notion that the Grail is nonfictional, whether it's a jeweled chalice as in the popular Arthurian stories, or some sort of magic stone, or Jesus' great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. There's all this awful bullshit about the Mysteries of the Grail, when there's no mystery, and therefore also no need for any self-described genius to come along and solve the mystery. Any decent introductory course in Medieval French literature solves the mystery by informing the student that Chrétien de Troyes invented the Grail in his epic poem Perceval. There ya go, folks, Grail mystery solved, yr welcome.

Lately it occurred to me to wonder how many people may have been mislead in the opposite direction: they already knew that the Grail was fictional, either because they had attended a competent class in Medieval literature or because they generally pay attention, and now, having never heard of the Templars before this aside from their mention in fiction, the widespread hoopla about the Grail and the Templars has led them to assume that the Templars are fictional, that they also never existed.

I get the impression that a large portion of the public, and of the reporters of the mainstream public, have first heard of mythicists via Bart Ehrman's recent book-length attempt to discredit them. If this is correct then it may mean that Ehrman's attempt has in fact been quite successful.

But it's so hard to really know what the general public thinks. Public-opinion polls, even when they're done well, and Lord knows they aren't always, have serious shortcomings. Presidential elections less so -- but wait, how do I know that? Well, of course, I don't. I'm just guessing and speculating and poking around in the dark all over the place here, as is anyone who tries to gauge public perceptions. At least some of us know we're just guessing. Above I assumed that mainstream-media reporters had been pretty ignorant of the historicist-mythicist debate until Bart Ehrman recently succeeded in leading them astray -- but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the publishers and editors of mainstream media deliberately keep the sharper reporters far away from any stories about religion. That would be both bad and good news: bad, of course, because it would mean that media bosses are deliberately misleading us more than we might imagine, and good because it could mean that their nefarious attempts to keep us in the dark are not as successful as they or anyone else thinks.

Sometimes public opinion is suddenly and surprisingly revealed, in a good and reassuring way. When I was in the 8th grade it was assumed that either a certain rich girl, daughter of a physician, my primary-care physician as it happened, although the term "primary-care physician," to my knowledge, was not yet in use, would be elected homecoming queen, or one of two other members of her clique. Because they were the popular girls. Or so everyone assumed. But no, the other girl surprisingly on the dais with them as a finalist, not a rich girl, dressed much more like the rest of us because she couldn't afford to dress like the rich cliques, none of us could, was announced the winner and the place went nuts. Conventional wisdom was proved wrong.

Don't accept conventional wisdom just because it's conventional. And don't assume that the assholes and idiots have quite as tight a hold on public perceptions as Time magazine and The New York Times may have you believe. I'm not denying that things are often awful, just suggesting that maybe, maybe, good sense is more widespread than it may appear. bubbling under the surface. For goodness' sake, vote to re-elect President Obama.

A List of Some People I am Not Like

Anyone who thinks that Harrison Ford is the star of The Fugitive,and not Tommy Lee "gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and dog house" Jones. But then, I am unlike Harrison Ford fans generally. Ford looks uncomfortable. That's his entire acting repertoire. (I know: sometimes he grins, but that's not acting, that's just -- icky.)

Dan Brown fans, believers in Bible Codes, people who think Merlin is more than a fictional character, (People who think Geoffrey of Monmouth wasn't an a-hole.) people who like that new McDonald's commercial in which the kid who just got his driver's license is sadistically tormented by his family, (At the very least, some McDonald's executives must have liked it, and presumably some people are under the impression that it is going over well with large segments of the population, otherwise why would it be airing so often?) (Why would anyone want a kid who just got his driver's license to snap while he's behind the wheel?) fans of McDonald's generally and anyone who doesn't at least wince at most of their commercials, people who don't think they have enough crescents, if there actually are any such on Earth, (People who don't watch a lot of TV.) people who like Celine Dion, Kenny G, Air Supply, Milli Vanilli, Heather Locklear, Angela Lansbury, Micky Rooney, James Cagney, Frank Capra, Milos Foreman...

People who don't listen to what scientists have to say about crystals, pyramids, psychics, ghosts, huge ancient alien construction in stone on Earth, global warming, the history of the Jews and of the Old Testament and of the Holy Grail and the Merovingians and the Priory of Sion and the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Catholic Church in general and the Masons -- in short, there are many who walk among us than whom I am quite different. In a word: morons. The Earth is rife with them, like Newman with fleas. I must keep in mind that they are everywhere: on the highways and byways and the sidewalks, in the bookstores and publishing houses and in the TV networks and on the editorial boards of periodicals and web presences, in the United States House of Representatives and on my block.

Corrections

I was talking with some people about Dan Brownlately, and it occurred to me that I might want to correct a few misconceptions he's spread.

*sigh* I know: around 600,000,000 people eagerly read everything Brown publishes, and as little as 5 or 10 may read this blog post, and as many as 4 to 8 or so of them may already be way ahead of me. Still. It ain't right, what he's doin'!

The Priory of Sion

In The Da Vinci Code,which, as Brown strenuously asserts whenever it suits him, is after all only a work of fiction, after the Acknowledgments and before the Prologue, on a page carrying the bold capitalized headline FACT: Brown states that the Priory of Sion was founded in 1099 and that its member included da Vinci, Newton and Victor Hugo.

In fact, the Priory was established in 1956, established and then described as being centuries old, by a man named Pierre Plantard, as part of his attempt to pass himself off as a descendent of the Merovingians, and therefore, he alleged, a descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

The Merovingians

Okay, this one is not so much a matter of fact as a matter of WTF. Why would someone choose precisely that dynasty, as their ancestors and as the descendants of Jesus? Why, that is, unless they had not heard the prevailing description of the Merovingians, taught in countless Intro to Western Civ classes, namely that they were horrible, disgusting, shockingly evil people, personally responsible for much of the Darkness in the Dark Ages?

However...

...the prevailing, horrifying picture of the Merovingians comes mostly from one contemporary author, Gregory of Tours. And while I know of no particular reason to assail Gregory's reliability as an historian, historical spin was by no means unknown to ages before our own, and it is possible that our main historical source for the Dark Ages had some personal or professional feud with the Merovingians.

Now, regarding the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were a couple and had a child...

...I couldn't care less if this is true or not. Nor do I have any particular reason either to support this theory nor to throw doubt upon it. I got nothin'. Sorry, you'll have to look elsewhere for help on this one.

Concerning the Grail, however, which according to Brown and to Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh,who gave Brown the idea, was the bloodline of Christ:

The Grail was first mentioned in the late 12th century in the epic poem on Percival by Chrétien de Troyes. If you attempt to establish the existence of the very notion of something called the Holy Grail earlier than Chrétien, then, I am sorry, my fellow scholar, but you must do so without my support. It's fictional, and it's mostly likely either a fictional chalice or a fictional stone, sought by the fictional knights of the fictionalized King Arthur's fictional Round Table.

But, but, the History Channel...

I know. I may write posts in the future similar to this one, dealing with stuff put out there by the History Channel.

So why d'ya watch the History Channel if you think it stinks so bad?

Because I'm weak. Often the subjects they cover are interesting to me, even if the treatment of these subjects tends to be excruciating, and they show lots of pictures of pretty paintings and medieval illuminations.