Ugh… 
Moderating
Please keep politics out of The Cafe. Especially a non-political like this.
Jean Shepherd, author, broadcaster, raconteur, and source of the stories that were made into A Christmas Story, wrote about “The glorious past, the wonderful future and the crummy now.”
I don’t believe that I referenced the topic?
Sorry, I should’ve included a
to separate that from my question to you. It was more of a general observation.
However shamanism is a subset of magic, which is present in most religions.. Your cite from wiki says:
Various scholars have debated the nature of seiðr, some of them have argued that it was shamanic in context, involving visionary journeys by its practitioners.
without attributing any sources. Later there is this:
Author Jan Fries regards seiðr as a form of “shamanic trembling”, which he relates to “seething”, used as a shamanic technique, the idea being his own and developed through experimentation.
which is… well one guy linking shamanism to the Norse pantheon (my bolding).
Wiki’s page on shamanism lists this, since there is no real consensus on what exactly it is:
*To refer to “anybody who contacts a spirit world while in an altered state of consciousness”.
*Those who contact a spirit world while in an altered state of consciousness at the behest of others. In an attempt to distinguish shamans from other magico-religious specialists who are believed to contact spirits, such as “mediums”, “witch doctors”, “spiritual healers” or “prophets,” this definition suggests that shamans undertake some particular technique not used by the others.
*However, scholars advocating the third view have failed to agree on what the defining technique should be.
*“Shamanism” referring to the Indigenous religions of Siberia and neighboring parts of Asia.
This sure is nitpicky, but I asked the question because I’ve never heard of shamanism connected to Norse beliefs. And following your link I still think it’s a stretch.
It was a sophisticated economy able to support a large urban population through long distance trade of staples (including not just the ultra rich elite but also a fairly well off literate urban artisanal and merchant class). When that economy collapsed with the western Roman empire it was utterly.devestating for huge swathes of Europe. No one is talking about it the way Gibbons did (as the best time to be alive) but there is no doubt it was definitely “better” before the collapse for an awful lot of people not just a few ultra rich who lost their nice villas.
I don’t get this. The dark ages were 100% definitely not a myth. The dark ages refers to the period in western Europe, after the collapse of the western Roman empire, when written accounts became incredibly scarce. The dark bit refers to the lack of written records not the quality of life or the Europeans of that era. And that massive reduction in written records absolutely happened its a crazy thing to deny. Society went from a urban literate one (or relatively so) to a rural illiterate one. No one denies that.
I think this is missing the point of the “golden age” myth a little. It’s not just about stuff being better, as in more prosperous and peaceful in the past. It’s about people and society being more heroic, brave and moral in the past, compared to the money grabbing, fractious and petty people nowadays. People in the past did great deeds whereas people nowadays are lucky it they can decide which overpriced fancy garment they are going to purchase today.
In fact in some examples of it the problem is all the peace and prosperity that’s making people lazy, money grabbing and petty. The classic example being the Romans of their imperial golden age looking back at the Republic (during the objectively worse days of the punic wars, etc ) and the bemoaning how much more brave, hardy and unified Romans were then
There is even a theory that everything we think we know about the golden age of Sparta (the infanticide, the brutally tough child rearing, etc) was invented by the Romans as a way to convince their compatriots to be tougher and more like Romans (and Spartans) of old.
The golden age idea is huge in western civilization because of the belief in the Garden of Eden and Man as a Fallen Being due to our sin.
Though as mentioned it even antecedes the christianization of the Greco-Roman world. Many of our predecessor cultures have the myth of a glorious “Age of Heroes” when the gods walked the Earth.
Perhaps I didn’t express myself thoroughly. I was questioning the validity of the myth, not its background causes. Perhaps I should have asked “Was this myth based at all on actual history, or only on wishful thinking?”
I don’t get this whole dark ages being a myth either. And you’re exactly right. The years 500 - 1000 CE in Europe don’t have anywhere close to the amount of literature that there was in the days of Ancient Greece and the Roman Republic and Empire, even taking into account that the latter period was longer. Where are all the equivalents in the dark ages to people like Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras, Cicero, Cato, Pliny, Ptolemy, Galen, Hippocrates, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil, Marcus Aurelius, Tacitus, Epicurus, Julius Caesar, Suetonius, Josephus, Sextus Julius Frontinus, Cassius Dio, Livy, and numerous others representing numerous fields including astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, poetry, history, engineering, and drama. The dark age doesn’t have anywhere close to the number of equivalent writers.
Not disagreeing with you, but a lot of people do. Example.
Rabbit season!!!
I was pointing out the myth wasn’t just about the world being “good” in the past but “bad” now (there are countless times and places that has been true) but that people were “good” in the past but “bad” now, that’s much harder to claim that it has any basis in fact.
I think Tolkien thought it was true about the age he was living in. He wrote at the start of the industrial revolution, a time when craftsmanship was being replaced with shoddy manufactured goods, factories were belching coal smoke into the air, and the social structure was breaking down as people moved into the cities. And yes, there was money to be made in the cities, but there was also a lot of filth and poverty and disease, and no social safety net outside your family, who were probably still in rural noplace, and couldn’t help you.
It probably began with agricultural people looking back to their idealized hunter-gatherer past, when you didn’t have to go bust your ass all day every day just to survive.
I did say that there are fewer written records from that era. And do we define “Western Europe” as Christian Western Europe? Because the Iberian peninsula is certainly in the west, in fact it’s hard to be more to the west and still be in Europe. And Al-Andalus certainly wasn’t dark. I’d argue that after throwing out the rulers (and the Iberians converting from Islam and Judaism to Christianity), as far as culture goes, Iberia went into a decline.
So that takes care of parts of Western Europe.
Decamerone was written in the 14th century, so a bit later. Dante lived in the 13th. The University of Bologna (being the first uni) was founded in 1088, so that’s 88 years after the bracketing 500-1000, but it didn’t pop into existence in a dark age vacuum.
From Wiki:
Paul Grendler writes that “it is not likely that enough instruction and organization existed to merit the term university before the 1150s, and it might not have happened before the 1180s.”
And let’s continue:
From that link:
The 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch is the best-known medieval source for the idea that the period in Europe from around 500–1500 was “dark.” But that phrase was a specific gripe. Petrarch was complaining about the general quality of literature in his own specific time and place: Italy in the 1300s
Wiki again, specifically about The Dark Ages:
The term “Dark Ages” was increasingly questioned from the mid-twentieth century as archaeological, historical and literary studies led to greater understanding of the period, In 1977, the historian Denys Hay spoke ironically of “the lively centuries which we call dark”. More forcefully, a book about the history of German literature published in 2007 describes “the dark ages” as “a popular if uninformed manner of speaking”
There was a push back:
Robert Sallares, commenting on the lack of sources to establish whether the plague pandemic of 541 to 750 reached Northern Europe, opines that “the epithet Dark Ages is surely still an appropriate description of this period”
but
it is questionable whether it is ever possible to use the term in a neutral way: scholars may intend it, but ordinary readers may not understand it so. Secondly, 20th-century scholarship had increased understanding of the history and culture of the period, to such an extent that it is no longer really ‘dark’ to modern viewers.
And finally, on the origin, as used by historians, of the term Dark Ages:
Between 1588 and 1607 Cardinal Caesar Baronius published his multi-volume Church history, the Annales Ecclesiastici ; which was in part a response to the Protestant version of history found in the Magdeburg Centuries (1559-74) produced by a group of Lutheran scholars.
Baronius found that the period between the end of the Carolingian dynasty in 888 and the church reforms of Pope Gregory VII [late 11th century] was difficult to research because of a lack of source material
So, the lack of clerical source material for a portion of the time.
I'm hesitant to argue with an esteemed mod, but:
Tolkien started writing around the end of WWI. I don’t think that the industrial revolution started at that point. In fact, I think you’re about 150 years off the mark.
I beg your pardon, i guess i should refer to the second industrial revolution, which was going on right up until WWI. Tolkien was not alone in disliking the industrialization of England at that time; I’ve read a lot of other authors bemoaning it. And they generally draw a connection between industrialization and the horrors of the war: trench warfare, poison gas, etc.
I really do think that Tolkien looked at the past as better than the present.
Wordsworth was no fan of the first Industrial Revolution, nor was William “satanic mills”Blake. Did they have any idea what life was for laborers in the country?
I doubt it was worse than it was in those “satanic mills”. Being crippled or killed is the same whether you’re in a factory or the countryside.