Breaking the Master Narrative, Part 3

In order to fully understand what it means to break a narrative we must understand the narrative we’re breaking. As the old saying goes, the past is a foreign land. They do things differently there. So it should really come as no surprise that the world we inhabit today is different from the world inhabited by the people of the medieval period. I’d even go so far as to say it’s shockingly different. We live in a world where we can find our home or place of business on Google Maps. We live in a world where we can easily find out exactly how far it is between, say, London and Beijing, and then find a flight and make that journey in less than a day. We live in a world where a war can break out in a tiny nation a thousand miles away and we can know about it almost instantaneously. We live in a world where the collected knowledge of civilization can be found with a quick internet search. In what might possibly be the most important change, we live in a world where north is up. If you really think about it for a moment it turns out that north as up is a fairly arbitrary distinction. The only reason we orient the world in that way is because we’re aware of the poles and the Earth’s rotation. It also helps immensely that the majority of world maps were created in the northern hemisphere for the simple reason that there are more people north of the equator. Take yourself back, for a moment, to a world before the magnetic compass. Does north as up make as much sense in that world? Now, before you answer that question, think of one other detail: this is also the world before Galileo and Copernicus. So you are also unaware of the fact that the Earth is rotating while traveling around the sun. Earth is, instead, the fixed center of the universe. There is one thing that you are aware of. You know the Earth is round. The idea of a round Earth was common knowledge in Europe from the time of the Greeks onwards. It just didn’t mean quite the same thing. It meant the world was designed in such a way that it told a story. The Medieval European world was built around the Christ story. More to the point, it was built around the cosmology of the Bible, at which Jesus was the very center. In what might be the hardest point to grasp, the maps of the time were not designed to aid in navigation, but to tell the story of the world from Genesis to Revelation. So for this we must move to a world where east is up.[1] The earliest maps of the medieval world were simple constructs known as T and O Maps. They separated the world in to three parts: Asia, Europe, and Africa.[2] Asia was a half circle that took up the upper half of the map and was separated from Europe and Africa by the rivers Don and Nile respectively. Europe and Africa, meanwhile, were quarter circles separated from each other by the Mediterranean Sea. Asia was the top of the map because that’s where the sun rises. This wasn’t so much a geological fact as it was a cosmological issue. For as the sun advanced across the world from east to west and day to night, history advanced from east to west and from creation to apocalypse. At the top of the medieval world, far to the east in Asia, was located Eden and the point where the world began. At its center was Jerusalem, the world navel and the fulcrum of all history. The western edges of Europe and Africa were the bottom and the place where history itself was destined to end. Or, at least, that’s how the medieval scholars saw it. Man was created, in their minds, at dawn in the east. The story of mankind was then an inexorable march westward to the place where the sun set. The interesting conclusion the European Christians drew from this particular map of the world was that they were standing on the verge of the apocalypse. As far as they were concerned there was nothing much in Asia worth thinking about and the enemies of Christ were gathering to push the Christians out of the Holy Land. Therefore the Christ story was about to reach sunset in the west and the world was about to go dark. Given the context, medieval apocalyptic hysteria makes a lot more sense than the alarmist messages of Jack Van Impe and the people over at Rapture Ready do today. This becomes especially true when you add in an unexpected variable. See, one of the central points of the recent ideas of the end of the world, as advanced especially by Hal Lindsay, is that the role of the mythical Gog and Magog who Satan would gather to fight against god at the end of the world was to be played by Russia. Let’s wander over to After the Flood for a moment[3]. In the Genesis Table of Nations Magog is named as one of the descendants of Japheth. Ezekiel 38:2 refers to “Gog of Magog” while Revelation 20:8 switches it to Gog and Magog. In both cases they are regarded as enemies. Due to the work of Josephus, meanwhile, Magog was placed in the land of the Scythians, a people who lived north of the Black Sea in, roughly, the modern day Ukraine. The story, though, isn’t quite complete. Before the idea of Magog in the medieval period makes sense we must first meet someone who never existed. Yes, I did just write that. Christian legend of the medieval period told of a great priest/king known as Prester John. He was, it was said, a descendant of the Magi who came from the east to worship at the birth of Jesus. The Magi had returned home and taken the story of Jesus with them and, as a result, there existed in the far depths of the Indies a powerful Christian nation led by Prester John who had dedicated his life and resources to protecting Christians in the east. It was believed that if Prester John could be found he could be enlisted to fight against the Turks and bring a final conclusion to the Crusades. At roughly the height of the legend of Prester John a powerful army did arrive out of the east. This new force did not bring hope with it, but terror. Europeans came to refer to this terror from the east as the Tartars, which possibly came from a misunderstanding of the word “Tatar,” which was a tribal name, but had a much deeper, more symbolic meaning, as Tartars come from Tartarus, the location below Hades in the Greek underworld. They were, quite literally in the medieval European mind, the sons of Hell. We know the Tartars better as the Mongols. When they invaded Europe they came around the northern edge of the Black Sea through the Ukraine and headed towards Hungary. To the medieval European mind the Mongols may as well have been Magog, riding from the east to signal the end of the world. Try to think about this world for a moment. To the medieval European mind the entire universe was structured with the intent of telling a single tale: the creation, fall, redemption, and ultimate destruction of the world. Distances were so vast and information so scarce that it was possible to believe there was a vast and powerful kingdom off to the east with an army a million strong that could come to the aid of the Christian world at any time. It was also possible that when an army did come out of the east it was a previously unknown, completely terrifying force that represented the end of the world rather than salvation.[4] And I haven’t even gotten to the monstrous races, the Torrid Zone and the antipodes, and the legends of what lay to the west of the end of the world.[5] Did I say that something lay to the west of the end of the world? Why yes, yes I did. But I’ll have to get to that in a little while. In the mean time, you might want to refresh your memory of this particular 1421 post. Because I’m kicking myself over the simple, amateur mistake I made when I wrote that post and how it lead to me drawing a completely erroneous conclusion. So stay tuned… ---------------------------- [1]I am extremely happy I picked up The Fourth Part of the World. Lester, the author, realized – quite correctly, might I add – that in order to understand the Waldseemuller Map we must first understand what a map is and how the idea of the purpose of the map were changing at the time it appeared. It is those moments of discovery and understanding that make the study of history exciting. [2]Hence the appellation “the fourth part of the world” for the Americas… [3]Interesting, isn’t it, that these things are joining together? This is in no way intentional on my part. It just turns out that the master narrative of 1421 and the master narrative of After the Flood share common (and deeply esoteric) origins, so in understanding one it helps to understand the other. [4]This actually created an entirely alternate set of realizations for me. I used to play BattleTech and was deeply aware of the story built around the game. To be as short as possible, the BattleTech universe focused on the Inner Sphere, a roughly circular area of space. At one point the Inner Sphere was dominated by the Star League, centered on Earth, which was also, conveniently enough the center of the Inner Sphere. After an insurrection the Star League disintegrated and Aleksandr Kerensky, the commander of the armed forces, took them beyond the Inner Sphere. Shortly thereafter the Inner Sphere descended in to chaos and the only place that was still able to command technology to the level of the old Star League was ComStar, a quasi-religious organization based on Terra. Eventually the descendants of the Star League army came back as the Clans, a fanatical warrior culture with higher technology, better armies, and a desire to conquer Terra and re-establish the Star League. At first it was believed that the Clans were a separate, alien force and that Kerensky would return to save them. Those hopes were, of course, dashed. I'd always gotten most of the allusions of the set up. The Star League was analagous to Rome, ComStar to the Catholic Church, the Successor States to the squabbling feudal kingdoms of Europe. It only occurred to me while reading up on the Mongol hysteria that the Clans filled the role of the Mongols in the BattleTech universe while Aleksandr Kerensky played the role of Constantine taking the Roman Empire east to Constantinople while his hoped-for descendants played the role of Prester John and his mythical kingdom. Meanwhile, the map of the Inner Sphere prior to the arrival of the Clans is, itself, a T and O map. The Clans came from the top, between the Lyran Commonwealth and the Draconis Combine. You could think of them as coming in from the east in a medieval T and O Map. Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I have no idea if this was intentional. It's just interesting to contemplate... [5]Which isn’t quite the same as the edge of the world. Just something to keep in mind…