Take pity on those in need; be kind, generous, and humble…. Spare him who yields, whatever wrong he has done you…. Be manly and gay. Hold women in respect and love; this increases a young man’s honor. Be constant—that is manhood’s part. Short his praise who betrays honest love.
—Medieval writer Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Chivalric Code1
You must fast every day, pray every day, work every day, read every day. A monk must live under the rule of one father and in the society of many brethren.
—St. Columban, A.D. 5852
An intergalactic observer sits alone in a darkened theater watching the human drama unfold. On stage, the flamboyant pageantry of the Roman Empire is on display. Characters dressed in togas and habits, laurel wreaths and mitered crowns move through the spotlight, center stage. In A.D. 410 the dramatic sacking of the Eternal City occurs. The stage progressively darkens as successive waves of barbarians break down and obliterate the glory that was Rome. The last discernible image is a burned-out shell of a city in which roving bands of mangy dogs outnumber the ragged human survivors. It is A.D. 476. The theater is plunged into darkness. Despite the blackout, the observer is aware of movement on stage. Props are being shifted about; the unmistakable sounds of human grunts and whispers suggest considerable activity. The intermission lasts five hundred years.
When the lights come up again, the stage is completely rearranged. Gone are the elegant architrave and soaring cupola. Roads and aqueducts have fallen into ruin. Cramped, semi-isolated cities and towns have replaced the sweep of Roman hegemony. Commerce is all but nonexistent. Travel has become exceedingly dangerous; bandits roam the countryside. There has been a near-total breakdown of civil authority. Everyone appears dirty and everything seems grimy. The characters no longer speak Latin or Greek. Instead, a polyglot of immature vernaculars impinges on the ear.
The dramatis personae are dressed in costumes of red, black, and brown. The Church has become the dominant institution and reserves black—like the ink of its vellum books—for itself. Red is for the nobility, who rule their petty fiefdoms that checkerboard the land. The vast mass of drab serfs who labor for a meager living wear brown shapeless shifts. They depend on the warrior aristocracy to protect their lives in this world and the clerics to save their souls in the next, and to each of these benefactors/oppressors, the serfs must tithe a hefty portion of their modest yield.
To the historian, the Dark Ages, as they are called, are dark for only one reason. A most unexpected turn of events occurred after the fall of Rome. The simple seeds of the ABCs, sown wherever Roman standards had flown, had somehow failed to root in the freshly turned minds of the intelligent people of western Europe. In secular culture, wracked by ceaseless invasion and chaos, alphabet literacy withered. Only the Church preserved the written word. Kenneth Clark speculates that for five hundred years, no king or nobleman could read.3 While there were occasional exceptions in lay society, a lampblack illiteracy descended over most of Europe, unbalancing culture.
The Dark Ages was a black hole out from which not a single significant scientific, literary, or philosophical idea emerged. Without a written record, historians have had to piece together a sense of what life was like in the Dark Ages largely by inference and deduction. The diorama they have assembled is most unsettling. Barbarous practices, ignorance, and superstition apparently ruled. In the words of Thomas Hobbes, life was “nasty, brutish, and short.”
One might expect that the strong subjugated the weak and that feminine values would have been suffocated in those churlish times. So it is all the more remarkable that when literacy finally reilluminated (albeit dimly) the stage of history in the tenth century, poets, bards, jongleurs, and troubadours were singing the praises of womanhood. From out of the pitch-black womb of the Dark Ages emerged the Age of Chivalry, in which the highest aspiration of a man was to protect and serve “the fair sex.” In Germany, Frauenlob, “women’s praise” informed the songs of the earliest minnesingers.4 In France, knights in chain mail pledged themselves to uphold the honor of the women of their kingdom. The oral code, which was preserved later in writing, urged men to “serve and honor all women” and “spare no pain and effort in their service.”5
There have been other turbulent times in Western history, but none in which concern for women’s welfare was such an abiding priority. Despite the extreme disorder and gloom of the period from A.D. 500 to 1000, equality between the sexes reached near equilibrium. As historian Doris Stenton noted, “The evidence which has survived … indicates that women were more nearly equal companions of their husbands and brothers than at any other period before the modern age.”6
Inspired by the Chivalric Age, a new mythology arose. Transmitted by song by traveling minstrels, the story of King Arthur and his gallant knights expressed the morality of the age. Chretien de Troyes in the twelfth century and William of Malmsbury in the thirteenth passed along segments of the myth, if indeed it is a myth. In the fifteenth century, Thomas Malory organized the many episodes of King Arthur’s reign into a unified fable.
King Arthur’s reign was portrayed as one based on justice and good deeds, and Camelot as a place where egalitarian customs prevailed. The Arthurian ethic is implicit in the identifying phrase: King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. No one, including the king, can sit at the head of a circular table because there is no head: all seats are equidistant from the center. Concerning the code of conduct expected of men, we learn in Chrétien de Troyes’ story of Lancelot that “he who is a perfect lover is always obedient and quickly and gladly does his mistress’ pleasure …” Above all, this oral culture taught its men how to be courteous. Arthur’s most trusted adviser was the wizard Merlin. Wizards are shamans and they were held in high regard during the time of orality. After the return of alphabet literacy wizards were demonized and their gender transposed into the much-feared witches of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
To become an Arthurian knight required long and rigorous training that included the martial arts and self-mastery. But one also had to learn how to dance and play a musical instrument well. When not in battle defending their liege and the ladies of the realm, knights were expected to engage in acts of kindness, gallantry, and noblesse oblige. That not all knights lived up to this shining ideal does not diminish the uniqueness of this feminine-affirming military code.
The unlettered noblemen’s love and admiration for women was expressed symbolically in the many Grail quest myths. The Grail was the cup from which Jesus drank wine at the Last Supper and in which His blood was collected at his crucifixion. The Grail excited the imagination of the illiterate Christian nobility of western Europe. Neither the literati of Byzantium (Constantinople) nor the literate hierarchy of the Church expressed enthusiasm for this object of devotion. After the Medieval Age passed, Christian culture as a whole lost interest in it.
As containers that hold liquid, cups and grails are archetypal symbols of the female. In Sumerian times the libation chalice, often in the shape of a vulva, was one of the most sacred votive objects of the Goddess; Her priestesses used it to pour offerings to Her.7 The archaic Greeks believed that the gods had used Helen of Troy’s breast to mold the first cup.8 Unconsciously, mother’s milk and female genitalia are associated with hollowed containers of any kind.
During the Dark Ages, the Grail replaced the fish as Christianity’s most potent symbol. The male obsession to retrieve a lost cup reveals a reorientation in the illiterate segment of the population. Before the lights of literacy went out, the Christian Orthodox leaders—Paul, Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine—had hammered together a religion whose central themes were sin, guilt, and suffering. When the lights came on again in the tenth century, Europeans had leavened these with an increased respect for birth and womanhood. This revised ethos changed the character of Christianity and is best illustrated by the sharp and unexpected ascendance of Marianism.
Mary was an unlikely candidate to become the fourth major figure of Christianity after the Trinity. Paul never mentions Jesus’ mother, and the Gospel writers make only a few references to her. None acknowledge either her birth or her death, and in Mark 3:31–35 and Matt. 12:46–50 Jesus rebukes her. Only Matt. 1:18–25 unequivocally mentions a virgin birth. Like the Earth Goddesses before her, Mary plays a crucial role in only two events in Christ’s life: His birth and His death.
By canonizing the written word in the fourth century, early churchmen were convinced they had insulated Christianity from the siren song of pagan polytheism. The triune religion as conceived by Paul consisted of a Son, a Father, and a Holy Spirit. Subsequent Church fathers were determined to crush the power of pagan goddesses. Augustine considered the worship of Earth-mother deities “obscene,” “monstrous,” and “wicked.”9 The creed of Christianity was decidedly not about a divine woman. Yet beginning in the Dark Ages, devotion to Mary blossomed throughout European Christendom. The Parthenon of Athena was rededicated to Mary ca. A.D. 600, as were almost all the other extant temples that had honored Pagan goddesses.
Every Mediterranean-based religion prior to Christianity built major monuments to honor its chief deity. Marduk’s Ziggurat, Aton’s City of the Horizon, the Temple of Zeus at Herculaneum, and Yahweh’s Temple Mount in Jerusalem exemplify this seemingly universal impulse to honor the preeminent god with outsized stone structures. The signal accomplishment of the entire Medieval Age was the erection of great Gothic cathedrals that pierced the skies of Europe with a forest of spires. Nothing encapsulates the medieval Zeitgeist better than these immense stone edifices. But the great cathedrals were not dedicated to any of the three male Trinitarian divinities; instead, the four most magnificent cathedrals in Frances—Paris, Chartres, Reims, and Amiens—are all called Notre Dame: Our Lady. So too is Santa Maria del Fior in Florence, Saint Sophia in Constantinople, and the Frauenkirche in Munich. Civic and church leaders dedicated these churches to the mortal mother of the Christian deity. In France alone, over a hundred churches and eighty cathedrals were raised in Mary’s name.10 While most were completed after the eleventh century, the initial inspiration to build them arose at the end of the Dark Ages. While Mary may not have a gospel extolling her virtues, her rise in stature is eloquently expressed by her highly visible Bible of stone dotting the European landscape.
Although the New Testament is filled with detailed episodes of Jesus’ life, not a single Gospel writer provides even the most minor detail of His appearance. We do not know if He was tall or short, thin or heavy, fair or dark, nor does this left-brain text offer any raw material to aid the right brain in imagining Jesus’ facial features. Like Amon and Yahweh before Him, Jesus became the God-With-No-Face. Something as crucial as a physical description, an image of the God Incarnate, could not have been omitted by accident. Christians were forced to know Him only through black inked words arranged linearly on white paper.*
But the character of the Mary who emerged in illiterate Europe differed from the assertive woman who admonished her Son at the wedding at Cana in the New Testament. Unlike Jesus, the Dark Age Mary rarely speaks: no pithy parables or aphorisms have been attributed to her. Her subjects came to know her through her image that led every procession and adorned the walls of homes, shops, churches, and crossroads. The likeness of the Blessed Mother became ubiquitous throughout western Europe.
And a new phenomenon accompanied this change—one that had been absent during Christianity’s first four centuries. People reported seeing visions of Mary, though she rarely spoke. Ignorant shepherds and unlettered peasant girls seem to have encountered the spectral Mother far more frequently than learned churchmen.* It seemed that the farther removed a person was from alphabet learning, the more likely was the Church to authenticate the sighting. In the Old Testament, Yahweh’s select few heard His voice or read His words; in the Medieval Age, people visualized her in apparitions. Despite the profusion of Mary sightings during these dark centuries, there were no sightings of the Father or the Holy Ghost and only rarely of the Son. Alphabet cultures know gods through their words; non-literate cultures see goddesses’ images. I propose that Mary’s rise was related directly to the collapse of alphabet literacy.
At the onset of the Dark Ages, secular art had all but vanished. Since imagery was forbidden by the Second Commandment, Pope Gregory the Great (590 to 604) confronted a vexing problem. How could he, as the chief priest presiding over a vast enterprise, ensure that Christian doctrine would be disseminated in a society where people could not read and illustrations were forbidden. Over the strident objections of many strict literalists, but to the immense relief of future art lovers, the Pope declared the Second Commandment null and void. “Painting,” he said, “can do for the illiterate what writing does for those who can read.”11 Aware of the power of images, in 787 the Church authorities revised Gregory’s edict: “It is for painters to execute; it is for the clergy to ordain the subjects and govern the procedure.”12 The very first painting that the Church commissioned was a portrait of the Pope receiving the symbols of his station. The personage bestowing these insignia of power was not God, Jesus, or Peter, but the Blessed Virgin, robed and crowned in the regalia of an empress.
Images of the adult Jesus who strides through the pages of the New Testament speaking wise words and doing courageous deeds are rarely found in Christian art. The Jesus of Catholic art was either a helpless infant or a dead man. In both cases, His mother cared for Him. As birth and death had been the province of the Goddess, so were they Mary’s.
During the medieval age, the growth of a mother cult transformed the very character of Christianity. The devotion to Mary and to the saints undermined the masculine Orthodox creed set forth by Paul, Jerome, and Augustine. The empyreal regions of Greco-Roman religions had been filled with accessory deities; in the age of Mary, Heaven became crowded with saints. By the tenth century, people turned to saints who numbered in the thousands. Monotheistic, albeit triune, Christianity had struggled earlier against the polytheism of pagan religions and by the fourth century appeared to have triumphed, but in the age of illiteracy, polytheism reclaimed the popular imagination. In front of altars, the literate, all-male clergy prayed to the masculine Trinity; behind them, the illiterate folk, resonating to the cadences of mass, sat lost in contemplation of the images of the saints and the Mother.
A Black Madonna, from France
At some unconscious level, the Church fathers recognized the threat Mary posed, for they denied Mary essential attributes possessed by previous goddesses: she did not preside over the functions of fertility and was split away from the soil. They granted her the honorific “Queen of Heaven,” but not “Queen of the Earth” or “Queen of the Underworld.” As Yahweh instructed Adam, the power to name is the power to control. The male Church hierarchy reverently hailed Mary as the Mother of God, but never as God the Mother. To further divorce her from sex and procreation, the Church emphasized two antithetical aspects of Mary: she was the Virgin Mother.
That the people persisted in honoring Mary as the reincarnation of the ancient Goddess worshiped by all preliterate agrarian civilizations is evidenced by the phenomenon of the Black Virgin. Many medieval churches, extending in a wide arc from Russia across Europe to Spain, had as their most sacred object a statue of a black Mary. The current official papal explanation posits that these representations were blackened by centuries of candle smoke. But close examination reveals that this could not be true, since the statues’ clothes are not similarly stained. If soot is not the answer, what is? Why would a Caucasian population, many of whom were blue-eyed and fair-haired, depict the Mother of God as incontrovertibly black?
The colors of nature dazzle us with their infinite variety, but black is the one color missing from the spectrum. It is the color of night and the shade of soil. It cloaks midnight and blankets the depths of caves and grottos. In previous cultures, the most popular totem for a chief male divinity was the sun and, by extension, light; goddesses have been associated with the moon and, by extension, night. The words matter, matrix, and mother all derive from the Latin material, which means “substance.” Earth is the most primordial substance and sunlight, its antipode. In ancient Egypt, Isis personified the black loam lining the banks of the Nile Delta; Apuleius, the second century Roman dramatist, portrayed her wearing a black cape. The earthly incarnation of Cybele, the great Roman Tellus Mater, was a huge black stone. The statue of Artemis at Ephesus, the most famous shrine of a goddess outside of Egypt, was also black. As with many other aspects of the feminine, the black Mary appeared predominantly in unlettered times and among unlettered populations. Once alphabet literacy regained its hold over human communication she all but disappeared.
Water, aquafemina, has long been the quintessential symbol of female-ness. In virtually every Creation myth that informs the dawn of civilization, a mother goddess representing the undifferentiated waters created the universe, including Nammu and Tiamat in Sumeria, Vritas and Danu in India, and Tehom and Rahab in several Old Testament psalms. One of Isis’s most popular names was Star of the Sea. Mary’s name, Maria, means water. La mer (French), maritime (Latin), and marine (English) are just a few of the words that refer to the sea and share the same root.
The Church had to acknowledge Mary’s rapidly rising popularity among the common folk. In medieval times the Vatican proclaimed August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, in her honor—by coincidence the same day pagans had honored the goddess Artemis in pre-Christian times. In both France and England, medieval calendars were recalibrated to begin each new year on the Day of Our Lady, March 15.
In a development contrived to counterbalance the beneficent Mary’s burgeoning popularity, Church leaders subconsciously conjured up a figure to express pure malevolence—the devil. He cannot be found in the bulging pantheons of the Sumerians, Egyptians, Cretans, Greeks, or Romans. Their deities may have had a dark side, but none personified evil alone. Nor was he mentioned in the Torah’s earliest books. The New Testament’s Beelzebub was peripheral to both Jesus’ prophecies and Paul’s writings. Gospel writers refer to him sparingly. The patristic fathers began to invoke his name, but his diabolical appearance did not stabilize until the end of the Dark Ages. Since no one had actually ever seen the devil, his form—red color, horns, tail, tri-ton, and cloven hooves—provides insight into the mind-set of his inventors.
Red has been the color of female sexuality ever since primates climbed the trunks of trees. High off the ground, they supplanted smell with sight as the premier sexual sense. Alone among myriad species, female primates signaled to males the onset of estrus by developing a swelling suffused with a flaming red color in their buttocks and vulva. The sight of this particular wavelength set off a cascade of neurotransmitters in the male primate’s brain, exciting him with tumescent anticipation.
These atavistic sexual trip wires remain buried deep within the male human brain and are triggered by the color red. Throughout all ages and across all cultures, women overwhelmingly have preferred red for their lipstick to all other hues. From scarlet letters to hymenic defloration, red has consistently been the color associated with sex. It is also the color of blood, vitality, and passion. The only other Western deity consistently portrayed as red was Dionysus.
Horns are emblematic of animals such as the bull and the cow, and craniums with horns are a schematic for the uterus and fallopian tubes of all mammalian females. In most medieval depictions, the devil’s sinuous tail has a peculiar, wedge-shaped swelling at its tip, evocative of a serpent’s head.
Prior to Christianity, tritons had been associated with Poseidon and the sea (and prior to Poseidon, water had been the domain of mother goddesses). Tritons had been used for eons to spear fish. Putting one in the grip of the devil, who spends his time attending to the fires of Hell, is an awkward attempt to conflate a water symbol with flame imagery. More recently the Devil’s triton has been described as a pitchfork, but the devil would have very little need for a hay-farming tool in Hell*
The devil’s cloven hooves were the masterstroke as the male propagandists who envisioned him attempted to execrate the symbols of female power. Pigs were sacred to the Goddess. The swine family’s milieu is mud: their hooves make a distinctively shaped print that is a three-quarter oval, interrupted at one end by a cleft that runs up from the bottom.
Long ago, when humans were emerging into ego-consciousness, Paleolithic peoples painted on rocks and cave walls their universal symbol of the female; archeologists call it “the vulva sign.” In its most common form, it is an oval with a cleft running up from the bottom. This sign has been identified in the cultures of Old Europe, early Mesopotamia, Harappa, and Crete. In an uncanny coincidence, the most evil deity that alphabet religions have ever conjured leaves a mark in the earth that closely resembles the ancient symbol of the Earth Goddess. The devil, although male, conflated symbols previously associated with the Goddess. A foil for Mary was now in place. I propose that during the medieval period, the Church played on the male fear of women’s rising status by piecing together a thinly camouflaged, transsexual, diabolical Goddess.
Women played a central role in religious life in medieval society. In many regions they, rather than men, wielded authority in the local parishes. In the time of darkness women often officiated over the major sacraments. From the fifth to the twelve centuries Cathars and Waldensians routinely appointed women clergy. The issue of priestly celibacy, paramount in the fourth century, evaporated with the onset of the Dark Ages. Priests routinely had wives and children. During this period, the Church was quite tolerant of heresy: punishing witches or heretics in these supposedly barbaric times were rare events.
During the first four centuries of Christianity, extreme asceticism had been associated with the fringe elements of the religion. The Anchorites, for example, escaped the temptations of the flesh by retiring to remote sanctuaries in inhospitable climes to live contemplative lives.
In sixth-century Italy, a woman jilted the young noble Benedict of Nursia. As a result Benedict resolved to live a simple and celibate life on the slopes of Monte Cassino near Rome. Pope Gregory I tells how Benedict fought valiantly to forget the woman:
the memory of whom the wicked spirit put into his mind, and by that memory so mightily inflamed with concupiscence the soul of God’s servant … that, almost overcome with pleasure, he was of a mind to forsake the wilderness. But suddenly, assisted by God’s grace, he came to himself; and seeing many thick briers and nettle bushes growing hard by, off he cast his apparel, and threw himself into the midst of them, and there wallowed so long that when he rose up all his flesh was pitifully torn; and so by the wounds of his body he cured the wounds of his soul.13
Benedict soon attracted others of like disposition and, in 529, he founded the Benedictine Order. This was the beginning of what was to become the distinguishing social movement of the next thousand years.
As his Order grew, Benedict realized that he could channel the energies of the large group of males he had at his disposal. Monks were unencumbered by wives or families and, unlike ordinary workers, they did not demand wages. Upon entering the Order they pledged obedience, accepted poverty, and promised to work as well as pray. All across Europe, cooperative labor pools of young, vigorous non-military men gathered. “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,” wrote Saint Benedict, ordering all monks to perform at least six hours of labor a day.14 Nothing like it had ever occurred before.
Julius Caesar recounted the tale of a man who told him he had walked from Poland to Spain without seeing direct sunlight; so carpeted with dense forests and swamps was Europe of the first century B.C. Small farmers could never hope to marshal the resources necessary to clear this dense foliage. At the start of the monastic movement, most of Europe was unsuitable for agriculture; by the end of it, the horizon was visible in many places. The monastic movement was responsible for deforestation on an unprecedented scale. Within a few hundred years, Benedict’s spare aesthetic had gained an enthusiastic following. Men flocked to the monasteries, and monasticism transformed the social landscape as well as the physical one.
During the early years of monastic orders, monks were primarily motivated by spiritual considerations. Older men, weary of the grind, sought refuge in a place where they could dedicate their lives to quiet contemplation. But as the monastic movement gained influence and prestige, would-be brothers began to heed the call for different reasons. In the absence of effective secular authority, monasteries in many regions assumed the paternal role formerly played by government, and having a family member in the local cloister was politically advantageous. In the past, parents would seek arranged marriages to ally themselves, through their children, with another family; medieval parents, in effect, encouraged some of their offspring to marry an institution.
Shortly after the founding of monasteries, women asked for permission from the Church to establish similar institutions. Nuns became Brides of Christ, and nunneries flourished, often in conjunction with monasteries. The majority of these “double monasteries,” especially in northern Europe, were headed by abbesses rather than by abbots.
As the patriarchal custom of providing a dowry for each daughter gained acceptance among feudal families over earlier practices that were the reverse, parents realized they could avoid this economic burden by pledging a daughter to a convent shortly after her birth. Nunneries were soon flooded with so many supernumerary daughters that the Church had to issue edicts against the practice. Parents mandated a celibate life for their offspring before the children understood the implications of the oath. Many nuns, cloistered against their will, found it impossible to behave as saints.
Monasteries, too, had their share of young boys called “oblates” whose parents had pledged them as infants to the monastic life. Some, raised entirely within the monasteries’ walls, had never even seen a woman. Caesarius of Heisterbach tells of a young oblate who was a teenager before he first ventured outside the cloister. While riding through the countryside accompanied by his abbot, he nearly fell off his horse, so transfixed was he by the sight of a young maiden walking along the road. He turned to his chaperon in wonderment and asked, “What is that?” “Pay no attention to her,” the older abbot replied, “for she is a demon.” Turning wistfully in the direction of her vanishing form while pondering this unexpected reply, the youth muttered, “Strange, I thought she was the fairest thing I ever saw.”15
For the lower classes, monasteries provided an escape route from the drudgery of the serf’s life. Many peasant men joined orders to avoid conscription into the local militia. But there was still one other very significant incentive monasteries offered to men who were willing to give up the pleasures of the secular world. Lowly birth denied the most intelligent serfs the possibility of upward mobility. The aristocracy owned all the land, and the moat separating the classes was all but uncrossable. The Church, however, was a meritocracy in which ambitious young men could advance.
Literacy was the indispensable key to advancement in the Church hierarchy and a monastery was the only institution capable of conferring literacy, because monasteries possessed all the books there were in Europe. The price for acquiring literacy, then, was celibacy—a strange tuition indeed! Nowhere is the antithesis between the written word and sexuality better illustrated than in this peculiar quid pro quo.
The most creative force in the world is the one that commands living things to strive to continue their species. Salmon swim thousands of miles upstream and leap high rapids in order to spawn. Male elephant seals engage rivals in near-mortal combat over the right to copulate with the cows of the herd, and the male praying mantis will urgently mate with a female even as she is busy devouring him. The sexual drive powerfully influences human behavior too.
Buddhist monks were celibate but lived as mendicants. The Old Testament ostracized those who remained celibate; the Greeks frowned on the practice, and the Romans legislated against it. Among the barbarians, celibacy was considered repugnant. The vast majority of medieval priests and bishops were not celibate. By all accounts the medieval age was a lusty age. Nonetheless, the literate in monasteries demanded celibacy of initiates.
From a eugenic point of view, the Church’s decision to prevent its brightest and most curious members from passing on their genes was a calamity that ensured the Dark Ages would remain dark for much longer than they would have if the Church had encouraged its intelligentsia to “be fruitful and multiply.” Nature had tinkered for untold eons to develop a harsh but extremely sophisticated system that ensured the most intelligent humans would survive in order to pass along their superior genes. The principal premise of the monastic movement, celibacy, nullified the system. By culling out of the gene pool the noblest, most altruistic, and most intelligent men and women, this anti-evolutionary, eccentric social engineering scheme undoubtedly delayed the Renaissance. Nineteenth-century male Victorian anthropologists condescendingly referred to archaic goddess civilizations as “fertility cults”; twentieth-century female anthropologists, in an appropriate riposte, have characterized the medieval monastic orders as “sterility cults.” The harsh patriarchy and anti-sexuality of the monastic movement can be seen, however, as the alphabet-literate minority’s response to the illiterate majority’s extreme feminism, embodied in the myths of King Arthur, the devotion to Mary, and the ethic of chivalry.
Four defining aspects of monastic life—time, speech, laughter, and hair— underscore the left brain’s role in the monastic movement. The Fourth Commandment sacralized the sequential nature of time. Monasteries went further and created the most characteristic feature of Western culture— repeatable, linked segments of time. It was in Christian monasteries that the seamlessness of a day first fragmented into hours and minutes. By spacing prayer services at precisely punctuated intervals, abbots compelled their monks to acclimate to man-made units of time.
Most animals can use the angle of the sun as a reasonably accurate guide for the time of day. Night is more problematic. Monasteries divided the night up into identical segments, training monks to calculate the exact hour without the aid of daylight or starlight. With Pavlovian precision, midnight matins and 3:00 A.M. lauds summoned sleepy-eyed monks from their cells, reinforcing the left brain’s time coordinate.*
Monasteries’ vows of silence neutralized the right hemisphere’s contribution to communication. Ostensibly, this rule prevented novitiates from dwelling on mundane matters so they might redirect their thoughts toward the divine. But silence, combined with reading and writing, encouraged new monks to rely on left-brain faculties. Also, novitiates were required to lower their eyes during the rare conversations they were allowed. To further repress the right brain, novitiates were forbidden to laugh. Jesting, jokes, mirth, or playful behavior were banned.
Monastic authorities were also aware of the associations between hair and sexuality. Upon entering an order, male novitiates were immediately tonsured. This strange hairdo shaved only the top of their heads, leaving tufts at the sides. The effect was to rob a vital male of his virile crown and all young men now resembled old men whose baldness nominally (but with many exceptions) signified their failing sexual capacity. Nunneries treated hair more repressively. Outlandish designs were employed by various orders to disguise a nun so that it appeared she did not have any hair at all. A starched, white, angular, stiff wimple not only completely hid her hair, its characteristics were the antithesis of a feature of humanhood that is naturally soft, dark, wavy, and lustrous. The extremes to which monastic authorities went in neutralizing the sexuality implicit in hair is an indication of just how dangerous exposed hair is to the controlling left hemisphere. Behavioral psychology came into its own in the twentieth century. And yet, almost a thousand years earlier, those in charge of monasteries had developed sophisticated techniques that revealed a deep understanding of split-hemispheric functions.
Monasticism did more to undermine the position of medieval women than any other social institution. Nature has meticulously titrated the birth ratio of females to males to be equal. This ensures that each could find one of the other. Wars removed from circulation a large number of eligible men. Mothers’ deaths in childbirth grimly but efficiently rebalanced the equation. The proliferation of monasteries added an unexpected new drain. For every male who opted for the religious life, a female could not form a family. But the sexual urge was too strong to be simply subordinated to mere oath. Many who entered monasteries did so for uninspired reasons, and not all had the fortitude to forego sex. Monks frequently formed clandestine liaisons with local women whom they euphemistically called their “cleaning ladies,” provoking clerics to write strident rebukes castigating the uncontrolled “venery” of the monasteries.
Putting aside the question of sin, these new living arrangements made a mockery of the sanctity of Christian marriage. Women were still cohabiting with men, and the sexual urges of both sexes were still being satisfied. Children still played on the stoops of doorways as they had in all previous human societies. However, these “cleaning ladies” differed from homemakers in every other culture since the dawn of time because they had no rights. A monk who sired a child out of wedlock had no legal obligation to provide support, although many did, and since the rule of monastic orders prohibited a monk from owning personal wealth, his concubine was not entitled to an inheritance if he died. Monasteries spawned so many illegitimate children that, in exasperation, the Council of Pavia decreed in 1018 that all children born to clerics were to be condemned to perpetual slavery and disbarred from any inheritance.16 “From this practice,” said Photius, a chronicler (820–891), “we see in the West so many children who do not know their fathers.”17
If concubinage was commonplace in the institution that was supposed to be the model of virtue for the rest of society, commoners felt few qualms imitating the practice. The institution of marriage suffered a disastrous decline. Further, the presence of vast numbers of illegitimate children destabilized medieval culture. Born without legal status, many misbegotten boys who grew into manhood felt they had no other option but to try to seize power by force. Medieval history is filled with the names of bastards: Arthur, Gawain, Roland, William the Conqueror, and many a knight in Froissart’s Chronicles among them. Many became brigands or, like their fathers, joined monasteries. For girls born out of wedlock, menial jobs, poverty, or slavery was their lot. Some emulated their mothers and became concubines; others turned to prostitution, creating a social malaise that frequently overwhelmed local authorities. In the penitentials preserved from the late Dark Ages there were no penances for prostitution. One may infer from their absence in the roster of sins that prostitution was not a significant problem for Dark Age society. Then in the Middle Ages, many towns including Toulouse, Avignon, Frankfort, and Nuremberg, were forced to legalize the practice. Without some controls, one churchman opined, “good women could not venture safely into the streets.” In 1177, Henry, the abbot of Clairvaux agonized, “Ancient Sodom is springing up from her ashes.”18 Like many other indignant prelates, he failed to connect the Church’s austere position on celibacy with the problem of prostitution in society. Prostitution and bastardy subverted public morality.
In the centuries after the fall of Rome the role of the image in society changed profoundly. By the sixth century, Christendom had fissured into an eastern Orthodox branch led by a Patriarch centered at Byzantium, and a western Catholic Church headed by the Pope in Rome. The two camps eyed each other with increasing suspicion, finally rupturing in the Great Schism of 1054. While Western Europe languished in the Dark Ages, Byzantium continued the literary and artistic traditions inherited from Greece and Rome. In the eighth century, a sect arose from within the ranks of its highly literate clergy that so despised images that its members declared an all-out war against statues and paintings. They called themselves the iconoclasts, which means image-destroyers. One of its sympathizers became the Patriarch in 726. Leo III ordered all church murals covered with plaster and all likenesses of the Virgin effaced.
The people of Byzantium revolted against these arbitrary edicts and armed conflict broke out. Pious Christians attacked the soldiers desecrating their cherished images of the Holy Family, and many soldiers mutinied rather than carry out their orders. The iconoclasts regrouped into roving bands, their ranks swollen with hoodlums who relished vandalism. At first, they sought out only religious images to smash. Church mosaics, painted icons, and stained-glass artistry fell to their savage assaults. Later their targets also included painters, sculptors, and craftsmen. They even murdered those whose crime it was to love art. Monks who resisted were blinded and had their tongues torn out. The iconoclasts beheaded the Patriarch of the Eastern Church in 767 for refusing to support their cause.
The iconoclast movement never spread to illiterate western Europe; its madness consumed only the segment of Christendom that boasted the highest literacy rate. Artists fled for their lives from Byzantium, heading for the western court of Charlemagne whose largely illiterate courtiers welcomed them with open arms. The iconoclast movement raged for fifty years and was finally extinguished when Irene became empress in 797. With popular sentiment firmly behind her, she reversed Leo Ill’s edict.
A few years later, on Christmas Day in 800, Charlemagne, the most powerful monarch in Europe, was crowned king of the hastily cobbled together Holy Roman Empire. This event marked the beginning of the end of the Dark Ages. Of Teutonic origin, Charlemagne was a fit, tall, handsome paragon of regal virtue. Besides being a courageous fighter, he was an intelligent statesman and a judicious administrator. Although personally opposed to divining and prophecy, he decreed that no sorcerers could be harmed in his kingdom. He established poorhouses for widows and orphans. He hired many of the artists fleeing from the turmoil in Byzantium and decorated his kingdom with their labors. Not wishing to be parted from the daughters he loved, he encouraged them to indulge their sexual desires rather than marry (he himself had several wives), as long as they did not leave his side. They consoled themselves accordingly and presented him with many illegitimate, well-loved grandchildren.
Charlemagne differed from all the Dark Age kings who had preceded him in that he alone recognized that his kingdom was held hostage by a priestly class who kept secret the arcane skill of writing. He brought from faraway York one of Europe’s most learned men, the monk Alcuin, to institute educational reforms. For the first time since Roman rule, secular schools opened their doors and the bright sounds of children trooping to the schoolhouse filled the morning air.
Believing that he should set an example for his lay subjects by becoming literate, Charlemagne managed to acquire a cursory knowledge of reading, but the skill of writing eluded him entirely. An apocryphal story relates how each day when he finished his court duties he retired to his chambers accompanied by his most esteemed clergy with instructions to teach him the art. But after many frustrating attempts he threw up his hands and declared the task impossible. If Charlemagne could not learn literacy, how was he to convince his less motivated subjects that they could? He ordered the clergy to convene an assembly of the most educated minds in Christendom to reform writing. The result was the Carolingian reforms, which fundamentally simplified and clarified reading and writing.
Our English word text comes from the German textura, meaning “tapestry.” Early medieval manuscripts bear a closer resemblance to a medieval tapestry than to a modern page of writing. Gothic writers scrunched all the letters of all the words together in one mass of script. The Carolingian reforms called for placing a single space between each letter, two spaces between each word, and three spaces between each sentence. Paragraphs were to be indented, and punctuation marks, such as the period and comma, signaled the reader when to pause and when to breathe. The committee also invented lowercase letters, which contrasted with and set off capital letters. The Carolingian reforms, instituted twelve hundred years ago, were the last substantive modifications to the alphabet.
These improvements made reading easier and stimulated a renewed interest in literacy throughout Europe. Unfortunately, Viking raids in the ninth and tenth centuries destroyed most of the fledgling institutions of learning, and unusually severe climatic variations led to extreme cold, floods, and drought that all but erased the Carolingian renaissance that had been slowly building after Charlemagne. Meanwhile, a perturbation occurred in the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean that was to affect Western history momentously. Its tale must now be briefly told.
*Despite its many vivid metaphors and rich word imagery, the Gospels do not employ color terms. This is another omission that reinforces the left hemisphere’s agenda over that of the right.
*The Church has authenticated over twenty-one thousand sightings of Mary.
*Hell is derived from the name of a Germanic goddess named Hel.
*The first cog-and-gear clock that could divide an hour into minutes was installed at the Monastery at St. Albans in 1348. It was used to call monks to prayer.