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Chapter 5: Mutual Aid in the Mediæval City

Growth of authority in Barbarian Society. — Serfdom in the villages. — Revolt of fortified towns: their liberation; their charts. — The guild. — Double origin of the free mediæval city. — Self-jurisdiction, self-administration. — Honourable position of labour. — Trade by the guild and by the city.

Sociability and need of mutual aid and support are such inherent parts of human nature that at no time of history can we discover men living in small isolated families, fighting each other for the means of subsistence. On the contrary, modern research, as we saw it in the two preceding chapters, proves that since the very beginning of their prehistoric life men used to agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes, maintained by an idea of common descent and by worship of common ancestors. For thousands and thousands of years this organization has kept men together, even though there was no authority whatever to impose it. It has deeply impressed all subsequent development of mankind; and when the bonds of common descent had been loosened by migrations on a grand scale, while the development of the separated family within the clan itself had destroyed the old unity of the clan, a new form of union, territorial in its principle — the village community — was called into existence by the social genius of man. This institution, again, kept men together for a number of centuries, permitting them to further develop their social institutions and to pass through some of the darkest periods of history, without being dissolved into loose aggregations of families and individuals, to make a further step in their evolution, and to work out a number of secondary social institutions, several of which have survived down to the present time. We have now to follow the further developments of the same ever-living tendency for mutual aid. Taking the village communities of the so-called barbarians at a time when they were making a new start of civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire, we have to study the new aspects taken by the sociable wants of the masses in the middle ages, and especially in the mediæval guilds and the mediæval city.

Far from being the fighting animals they have often been compared to, the barbarians of the first centuries of our era (like so many Mongolians, Africans, Arabs, and so on, who still continue in the same barbarian stage) invariably preferred peace to war. With the exception of a few tribes which had been driven during the great migrations into unproductive deserts or highlands, and were thus compelled periodically to prey upon their better-favoured neighbours — apart from these, the great bulk of the Teutons, the Saxons, the Celts, the Slavonians, and so on, very soon after they had settled in their newly-conquered abodes, reverted to the spade or to their herds. The earliest barbarian codes already represent to us societies composed of peaceful agricultural communities, not hordes of men at war with each other. These barbarians covered the country with villages and farmhouses;[156] they cleared the forests, bridged the torrents, and colonized the formerly quite uninhabited wilderness; and they left the uncertain warlike pursuits to brotherhoods, scholæ, or “trusts” of unruly men, gathered round temporary chieftains, who wandered about, offering their adventurous spirit, their arms, and their knowledge of warfare for the protection of populations, only too anxious to be left in peace. The warrior bands came and went, prosecuting their family feuds; but the great mass continued to till the soil, taking but little notice of their would-be rulers, so long as they did not interfere with the independence of their village communities.[157] The new occupiers of Europe evolved the systems of land tenure and soil culture which are still in force with hundreds of millions of men; they worked out their systems of compensation for wrongs, instead of the old tribal blood-revenge; they learned the first rudiments of industry; and while they fortified their villages with palisaded walls, or erected towers and earthen forts whereto to repair in case of a new invasion, they soon abandoned the task of defending these towers and forts to those who made of war a speciality.

The very peacefulness of the barbarians, certainly not their supposed warlike instincts, thus became the source of their subsequent subjection to the military chieftains. It is evident that the very mode of life of the armed brotherhoods offered them more facilities for enrichment than the tillers of the soil could find in their agricultural communities. Even now we see that armed men occasionally come together to shoot down Matabeles and to rob them of their droves of cattle, though the Matabeles only want peace and are ready to buy it at a high price. The scholæ of old certainly were not more scrupulous than the scholæ of our own time. Droves of cattle, iron (which was extremely costly at that time[158]), and slaves were appropriated in this way; and although most acquisitions were wasted on the spot in those glorious feasts of which epic poetry has so much to say — still some part of the robbed riches was used for further enrichment. There was plenty of waste land, and no lack of men ready to till it, if only they could obtain the necessary cattle and implements. Whole villages, ruined by murrains, pests, fires, or raids of new immigrants, were often abandoned by their inhabitants, who went anywhere in search of new abodes. They still do so in Russia in similar circumstances. And if one of the hirdmen of the armed brotherhoods offered the peasants some cattle for a fresh start, some iron to make a plough, if not the plough itself, his protection from further raids, and a number of years free from all obligations, before they should begin to repay the contracted debt, they settled upon the land. And when, after a hard fight with bad crops, inundations and pestilences, those pioneers began to repay their debts, they fell into servile obligations towards the protector of the territory. Wealth undoubtedly did accumulate in this way, and power always follows wealth.[159] And yet, the more we penetrate into the life of those times, the sixth and seventh centuries of our era, the more we see that another element, besides wealth and military force, was required to constitute the authority of the few. It was an element of law and right, a desire of the masses to maintain peace, and to establish what they considered to be justice, which gave to the chieftains of the scholæ — kings, dukes, knyazes, and the like — the force they acquired two or three hundred years later. That same idea of justice, conceived as an adequate revenge for the wrong done, which had grown in the tribal stage, now passed as a red thread through the history of subsequent institutions, and, much more even than military or economic causes, it became the basis upon which the authority of the kings and the feudal lords was founded.

In fact, one of the chief preoccupations of the barbarian village community always was, as it still is with our barbarian contemporaries, to put a speedy end to the feuds which arose from the then current conception of justice. When a quarrel took place, the community at once interfered, and after the folkmote had heard the case, it settled the amount of composition (wergeld) to be paid to the wronged person, or to his family, as well as the fred, or fine for breach of peace, which had to be paid to the community. Interior quarrels were easily appeased in this way. But when feuds broke out between two different tribes, or two confederations of tribes, notwithstanding all measures taken to prevent them,[160] the difficulty was to find an arbiter or sentence-finder whose decision should be accepted by both parties alike, both for his impartiality and for his knowledge of the oldest law. The difficulty was the greater as the customary laws of different tribes and confederations were at variance as to the compensation due in different cases. It therefore became habitual to take the sentence-finder from among such families, or such tribes, as were reputed for keeping the law of old in its purity; of being versed in the songs, triads, sagas, etc., by means of which law was perpetuated in memory; and to retain law in this way became a sort of art, a “mystery,” carefully transmitted in certain families from generation to generation. Thus in Iceland, and in other Scandinavian lands, at every Allthing, or national folkmote, a lövsögmathr used to recite the whole law from memory for the enlightening of the assembly; and in Ireland there was, as is known, a special class of men reputed for the knowledge of the old traditions, and therefore enjoying a great authority as judges.[161] Again, when we are told by the Russian annals that some stems of North-West Russia, moved by the growing disorder which resulted from “clans rising against clans,” appealed to Norman varingiar to be their judges and commanders of warrior scholæ; and when we see the knyazes, or dukes, elected for the next two hundred years always from the same Norman family, we cannot but recognize that the Slavonians trusted to the Normans for a better knowledge of the law which would be equally recognized as good by different Slavonian kins. In this case the possession of runes, used for the transmission of old customs, was a decided advantage in favour of the Normans; but in other cases there are faint indications that the “eldest” branch of the stem, the supposed motherbranch, was appealed to to supply the judges, and its decisions were relied upon as just;[162] while at a later epoch we see a distinct tendency towards taking the sentence-finders from the Christian clergy, which, at that time, kept still to the fundamental, now forgotten, principle of Christianity, that retaliation is no act of justice. At that time the Christian clergy opened the churches as places of asylum for those who fled from blood revenge, and they willingly acted as arbiters in criminal cases, always opposing the old tribal principle of life for life and wound for wound. In short, the deeper we penetrate into the history of early institutions, the less we find grounds for the military theory of origin of authority. Even that power which later on became such a source of oppression seems, on the contrary, to have found its origin in the peaceful inclinations of the masses.

In all these cases the fred, which often amounted to half the compensation, went to the folkmote, and from times immemorial it used to be applied to works of common utility and defence. It has still the same destination (the erection of towers) among the Kabyles and certain Mongolian stems; and we have direct evidence that even several centuries later the judicial fines, in Pskov and several French and German cities, continued to be used for the repair of the city walls.[163] It was thus quite natural that the fines should be handed over to the sentence-finder, who was bound, in return, both to maintain the schola of armed men to whom the defence of the territory was trusted, and to execute the sentences. This became a universal custom in the eighth and ninth centuries, even when the sentence-finder was an elected bishop. The germ of a combination of what we should now call the judicial power and the executive thus made its appearance. But to these two functions the attributions of the duke or king were strictly limited. He was no ruler of the people — the supreme power still belonging to the folkmote — not even a commander of the popular militia; when the folk took to arms, it marched under a separate, also elected, commander, who was not a subordinate, but an equal to the king.[164] The king was a lord on his personal domain only. In fact, in barbarian language, the word konung, koning, or cyning synonymous with the Latin rex, had no other meaning than that of a temporary leader or chieftain of a band of men. The commander of a flotilla of boats, or even of a single pirate boat, was also a konung, and till the present day the commander of fishing in Norway is named Not-kong — “the king of the nets.”[165] The veneration attached later on to the personality of a king did not yet exist, and while treason to the kin was punished by death, the slaying of a king could be recouped by the payment of compensation: a king simply was valued so much more than a freeman.[166] And when King Knu (or Canute) had killed one man of his own schola, the saga represents him convoking his comrades to a thing where he stood on his knees imploring pardon. He was pardoned, but not till he had agreed to pay nine times the regular composition, of which one-third went to himself for the loss of one of his men, one-third to the relatives of the slain man, and one-third (the fred) to the schola.[167] In reality, a complete change had to be accomplished in the current conceptions, under the double influence of the Church and the students of Roman law, before an idea of sanctity began to be attached to the personality of the king.

However, it lies beyond the scope of these essays to follow the gradual development of authority out of the elements just indicated. Historians, such as Mr. and Mrs. Green for this country, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, and Luchaire for France, Kaufmann, Janssen, W. Arnold, and even Nitzsch, for Germany, Leo and Botta for Italy, Byelaeff, Kostomaroff, and their followers for Russia, and many others, have fully told that tale. They have shown how populations, once free, and simply agreeing “to feed” a certain portion of their military defenders, gradually became the serfs of these protectors; how “commendation” to the Church, or to a lord, became a hard necessity for the freeman; how each lord’s and bishop’s castle became a robber’s nest — how feudalism was imposed, in a word — and how the crusades, by freeing the serfs who wore the cross, gave the first impulse to popular emancipation. All this need not be retold in this place, our chief aim being to follow the constructive genius of the masses in their mutual-aid institutions.

At a time when the last vestiges of barbarian freedom seemed to disappear, and Europe, fallen under the dominion of thousands of petty rulers, was marching towards the constitution of such theocracies and despotic States as had followed the barbarian stage during the previous starts of civilization, or of barbarian monarchies, such as we see now in Africa, life in Europe took another direction. It went on on lines similar to those it had once taken in the cities of antique Greece. With a unanimity which seems almost incomprehensible, and for a long time was not understood by historians, the urban agglomerations, down to the smallest burgs, began to shake off the yoke of their worldly and clerical lords. The fortified village rose against the lord’s castle, defied it first, attacked it next, and finally destroyed it. The movement spread from spot to spot, involving every town on the surface of Europe, and in less than a hundred years free cities had been called into existence on the coasts of the Mediterranean, the North Sea, the Baltic, the Atlantic Ocean, down to the fjords of Scandinavia; at the feet of the Apennines, the Alps, the Black Forest, the Grampians, and the Carpathians; in the plains of Russia, Hungary, France and Spain. Everywhere the same revolt took place, with the same features, passing through the same phases, leading to the same results. Wherever men had found, or expected to find, some protection behind their town walls, they instituted their “co-jurations,” their “fraternities,” their “friendships,” united in one common idea, and boldly marching towards a new life of mutual support and liberty. And they succeeded so well that in three or four hundred years they had changed the very face of Europe. They had covered the country with beautiful sumptuous buildings, expressing the genius of free unions of free men, unrivalled since for their beauty and expressiveness; and they bequeathed to the following generations all the arts, all the industries, of which our present civilization, with all its achievements and promises for the future, is only a further development. And when we now look to the forces which have produced these grand results, we find them — not in the genius of individual heroes, not in the mighty organization of huge States or the political capacities of their rulers, but in the very same current of mutual aid and support which we saw at work in the village community, and which was vivified and reinforced in the Middle Ages by a new form of unions, inspired by the very same spirit but shaped on a new model — the guilds.

It is well known by this time that feudalism did not imply a dissolution of the village community. Although the lord had succeeded in imposing servile labour upon the peasants, and had appropriated for himself such rights as were formerly vested in the village community alone (taxes, mortmain, duties on inheritances and marriages), the peasants had, nevertheless, maintained the two fundamental rights of their communities: the common possession of the land, and self-jurisdiction. In olden times, when a king sent his vogt to a village, the peasants received him with flowers in one hand and arms in the other, and asked him — which law he intended to apply: the one he found in the village, or the one he brought with him? And, in the first case, they handed him the flowers and accepted him; while in the second case they fought him.[168] Now, they accepted the king’s or the lord’s official whom they could not refuse; but they maintained the folkmote’s jurisdiction, and themselves nominated six, seven, or twelve judges, who acted with the lord’s judge, in the presence of the folkmote, as arbiters and sentence-finders. In most cases the official had nothing left to him but to confirm the sentence and to levy the customary fred. This precious right of self-jurisdiction, which, at that time, meant self-administration and self-legislation, had been maintained through all the struggles; and even the lawyers by whom Karl the Great was surrounded could not abolish it; they were bound to confirm it. At the same time, in all matters concerning the community’s domain, the folkmote retained its supremacy and (as shown by Maurer) often claimed submission from the lord himself in land tenure matters. No growth of feudalism could break this resistance; the village community kept its ground; and when, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the invasions of the Normans, the Arabs, and the Ugrians had demonstrated that military scholæ were of little value for protecting the land, a general movement began all over Europe for fortifying the villages with stone walls and citadels. Thousands of fortified centres were then built by the energies of the village communities; and, once they had built their walls, once a common interest had been created in this new sanctuary — the town walls — they soon understood that they could henceforward resist the encroachments of the inner enemies, the lords, as well as the invasions of foreigners. A new life of freedom began to develop within the fortified enclosures. The mediæval city was born.[169]

No period of history could better illustrate the constructive powers of the popular masses than the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the fortified villages and market-places, representing so many “oases amidst the feudal forest,” began to free themselves from their lord’s yoke, and slowly elaborated the future city organization; but, unhappily, this is a period about which historical information is especially scarce: we know the results, but little has reached us about the means by which they were achieved. Under the protection of their walls the cities’ folkmotes — either quite independent, or led by the chief noble or merchant families — conquered and maintained the right of electing the military defensor and supreme judge of the town, or at least of choosing between those who pretended to occupy this position. In Italy the young communes were continually sending away their defensors or domini, fighting those who refused to go. The same went on in the East. In Bohemia, rich and poor alike (Bohemicae gentis magni et parvi, nobiles et ignobiles) took part in the election;[170] while, the vyeches (folkmotes) of the Russian cities regularly elected their dukes — always from the same Rurik family — covenanted with them, and sent the knyaz away if he had provoked discontent.[171] At the same time in most cities of Western and Southern Europe, the tendency was to take for defensor a bishop whom the city had elected itself; and so many bishops took the lead in protecting the “immunities” of the towns and in defending their liberties, that numbers of them were considered, after their death, as saints and special patrons of different cities. St. Uthelred of Winchester, St. Ulrik of Augsburg, St. Wolfgang of Ratisbon, St. Heribert of Cologne, St. Adalbert of Prague, and so on, as well as many abbots and monks, became so many cities’ saints for having acted in defence of popular rights.[172] And under the new defensors, whether laic or clerical, the citizens conquered full self-jurisdiction and self-administration for their folkmotes.[173]

The whole process of liberation progressed by a series of imperceptible acts of devotion to the common cause, accomplished by men who came out of the masses — by unknown heroes whose very names have not been preserved by history. The wonderful movement of the God’s peace (treuga Dei) by which the popular masses endeavoured to put a limit to the endless family feuds of the noble families, was born in the young towns, the bishops and the citizens trying to extend to the nobles the peace they had established within their town walls.[174] Already at that period, the commercial cities of Italy, and especially Amalfi (which had its elected consuls since 844, and frequently changed its doges in the tenth century)[175] worked out the customary maritime and commercial law which later on became a model for all Europe; Ravenna elaborated its craft organization, and Milan, which had made its first revolution in 980, became a great centre of commerce, its trades enjoying a full independence since the eleventh century.[176] So also Brügge and Ghent; so also several cities of France in which the Mahl or forum had become a quite independent institution.[177] And already during that period began the work of artistic decoration of the towns by works of architecture, which we still admire and which loudly testify of the intellectual movement of the times. “The basilicae were then renewed in almost all the universe,” Raoul Glaber wrote in his chronicle, and some of the finest monuments of mediæval architecture date from that period: the wonderful old church of Bremen was built in the ninth century, Saint Marc of Venice was finished in 1071, and the beautiful dome of Pisa in 1063. In fact, the intellectual movement which has been described as the Twelfth Century Renaissance[178] and the Twelfth Century Rationalism — the precursor of the Reform[179] date from that period, when most cities were still simple agglomerations of small village communities enclosed by walls.

However, another element, besides the village-community principle, was required to give to these growing centres of liberty and enlightenment the unity of thought and action, and the powers of initiative, which made their force in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. With the growing diversity of occupations, crafts and arts, and with the growing commerce in distant lands, some new form of union was required, and this necessary new element was supplied by the guilds. Volumes and volumes have been written about these unions which, under the name of guilds, brotherhoods, friendships and druzhestva, minne, artels in Russia, esnaifs in Servia and Turkey, amkari in Georgia, and so on, took such a formidable development in mediæval times and played such an important part in the emancipation of the cities. But it took historians more than sixty years before the universality of this institution and its true characters were understood. Only now, when hundreds of guild statutes have been published and studied, and their relationship to the Roman collegiae, and the earlier unions in Greece and in India,[180] is known, can we maintain with full confidence that these brotherhoods were but a further development of the same principles which we saw at work in the gens and the village community.

Nothing illustrates better these mediæval brotherhoods than those temporary guilds which were formed on board ships. When a ship of the Hansa had accomplished her first half-day passage after having left the port, the captain (Schiffer) gathered all crew and passengers on the deck, and held the following language, as reported by a contemporary: —

“‘As we are now at the mercy of God and the waves,’ he said, ‘each one must be equal to each other. And as we are surrounded by storms, high waves, pirates and other dangers, we must keep a strict order that we may bring our voyage to a good end. That is why we shall pronounce the prayer for a good wind and good success, and, according to marine law, we shall name the occupiers of the judges’ seats (Schöffenstellen).’ Thereupon the crew elected a Vogt and four scabini, to act as their judges. At the end of the voyage the Vogt and the scabini abdicated their functions and addressed the crew as follows: — ‘What has happened on board ship, we must pardon to each other and consider as dead (todt und ab sein lassen). What we have judged right, was for the sake of justice. This is why we beg you all, in the name of honest justice, to forget all the animosity one may nourish against another, and to swear on bread and salt that he will not think of it in a bad spirit. If any one, however, considers himself wronged, he must appeal to the land Vogt and ask justice from him before sunset.’ On landing, the Stock with the fred fines was handed over to the Vogt of the sea-port for distribution among the poor.”[181]

This simple narrative, perhaps better than anything else, depicts the spirit of the mediæval guilds. Like organizations came into existence wherever a group of men — fishermen, hunters, travelling merchants, builders, or settled craftsmen — came together for a common pursuit. Thus, there was on board ship the naval authority of the captain; but, for the very success of the common enterprise, all men on board, rich and poor, masters and crew, captain and sailors, agreed to be equals in their mutual relations, to be simply men, bound to aid each other and to settle their possible disputes before judges elected by all of them. So also when a number of craftsmen — masons, carpenters, stone-cutters, etc. — came together for building, say, a cathedral, they all belonged to a city which had its political organization, and each of them belonged moreover to his own craft; but they were united besides by their common enterprise, which they knew better than any one else, and they joined into a body united by closer, although temporary, bonds; they founded the guild for the building of the cathedral.[182] We may see the same till now in the Kabylian çof:[183] the Kabyles have their village community; but this union is not sufficient for all political, commercial, and personal needs of union, and the closer brotherhood of the çof is constituted.

As to the social characters of the mediæval guild, any guild-statute may illustrate them. Taking, for instance, the skraa of some early Danish guild, we read in it, first, a statement of the general brotherly feelings which must reign in the guild; next come the regulations relative to self-jurisdiction in cases of quarrels arising between two brothers, or a brother and a stranger; and then, the social duties of the brethren are enumerated. If a brother’s house is burned, or he has lost his ship, or has suffered on a pilgrim’s voyage, all the brethren must come to his aid. If a brother falls dangerously ill, two brethren must keep watch by his bed till he is out of danger, and if he dies, the brethren must bury him — a great affair in those times of pestilences — and follow him to the church and the grave. After his death they must provide for his children, if necessary; very often the widow becomes a sister to the guild.[184]

These two leading features appeared in every brotherhood formed for any possible purpose. In each case the members treated each other as, and named each other, brother and sister;[185] all were equals before the guild. They owned some “chattel” (cattle, land, buildings, places of worship, or “stock”) in common. All brothers took the oath of abandoning all feuds of old; and, without imposing upon each other the obligation of never quarrelling again, they agreed that no quarrel should degenerate into a feud, or into a lawsuit before another court than the tribunal of the brothers themselves. And if a brother was involved in a quarrel with a stranger to the guild, they agreed to support him for bad and for good; that is, whether he was unjustly accused of aggression, or really was the aggressor, they had to support him, and to bring things to a peaceful end. So long as his was not a secret aggression — in which case he would have been treated as an outlaw — the brotherhood stood by him.[186] If the relatives of the wronged man wanted to revenge the offence at once by a new aggression, the brotherhood supplied him with a horse to run away, or with a boat, a pair of oars, a knife and a steel for striking light; if he remained in town, twelve brothers accompanied him to protect him; and in the meantime they arranged the composition. They went to court to support by oath the truthfulness of his statements, and if he was found guilty they did not let him go to full ruin and become a slave through not paying the due compensation: they all paid it, just as the gens did in olden times. Only when a brother had broken the faith towards his guild-brethren, or other people, he was excluded from the brotherhood “with a Nothing’s name” (tha scal han maeles af brödrescap met nidings nafn).[187]

Such were the leading ideas of those brotherhoods which gradually covered the whole of mediæval life. In fact, we know of guilds among all possible professions: guilds of serfs,[188] guilds of freemen, and guilds of both serfs and freemen; guilds called into life for the special purpose of hunting, fishing, or a trading expedition, and dissolved when the special purpose had been achieved; and guilds lasting for centuries in a given craft or trade. And, in proportion as life took an always greater variety of pursuits, the variety in the guilds grew in proportion. So we see not only merchants, craftsmen, hunters, and peasants united in guilds; we also see guilds of priests, painters, teachers of primary schools and universities, guilds for performing the passion play, for building a church, for developing the “mystery” of a given school of art or craft, or for a special recreation — even guilds among beggars, executioners, and lost women, all organized on the same double principle of self-jurisdiction and mutual support.[189] For Russia we have positive evidence showing that the very “making of Russia” was as much the work of its hunters’, fishermen’s, and traders’ artels as of the budding village communities, and up to the present day the country is covered with artels.[190]

These few remarks show how incorrect was the view taken by some early explorers of the guilds when they wanted to see the essence of the institution in its yearly festival. In reality, the day of the common meal was always the day, or the morrow of the day, of election of aldermen, of discussion of alterations in the statutes, and very often the day of judgment of quarrels that had risen among the brethren,[191] or of renewed allegiance to the guild. The common meal, like the festival at the old tribal folkmote — the mahl or malum — or the Buryate aba, or the parish feast and the harvest supper, was simply an affirmation of brotherhood. It symbolized the times when everything was kept in common by the clan. This day, at least, all belonged to all; all sat at the same table and partook of the same meal. Even at a much later time the inmate of the almshouse of a London guild sat this day by the side of the rich alderman. As to the distinction which several explorers have tried to establish between the old Saxon “frith guild” and the so-called “social” or “religious” guilds — all were frith guilds in the sense above mentioned,[192] and all were religious in the sense in which a village community or a city placed under the protection of a special saint is social and religious. If the institution of the guild has taken such an immense extension in Asia, Africa, and Europe, if it has lived thousands of years, reappearing again and again when similar conditions called it into existence, it is because it was much more than an eating association, or an association for going to church on a certain day, or a burial club. It answered to a deeply inrooted want of human nature; and it embodied all the attributes which the State appropriated later on for its bureaucracy and police, and much more than that. It was an association for mutual support in all circumstances and in all accidents of life, “by deed and advise,” and it was an organization for maintaining justice — with this difference from the State, that on all these occasions a humane, a brotherly element was introduced instead of the formal element which is the essential characteristic of State interference. Even when appearing before the guild tribunal, the guild-brother answered before men who knew him well and had stood by him before in their daily work, at the common meal, in the performance of their brotherly duties: men who were his equals and brethren indeed, not theorists of law nor defenders of some one else’s interests.[193]

It is evident that an institution so well suited to serve the need of union, without depriving the individual of his initiative, could but spread, grow, and fortify. The difficulty was only to find such form as would permit to federate the unions of the guilds without interfering with the unions of the village communities, and to federate all these into one harmonious whole. And when this form of combination had been found, and a series of favourable circumstances permitted the cities to affirm their independence, they did so with a unity of thought which can but excite our admiration, even in our century of railways, telegraphs, and printing. Hundreds of charters in which the cities inscribed their liberation have reached us, and through all of them — notwithstanding the infinite variety of details, which depended upon the more or less greater fulness of emancipation — the same leading ideas run. The city organized itself as a federation of both small village communities and guilds.

“All those who belong to the friendship of the town” — so runs a charter given in 1188 to the burghesses of Aire by Philip, Count of Flanders — “have promised and confirmed by faith and oath that they will aid each other as brethren, in whatever is useful and honest. That if one commits against another an offence in words or in deeds, the one who has suffered there from will not take revenge, either himself or his people... he will lodge a complaint and the offender will make good for his offence, according to what will be pronounced by twelve elected judges acting as arbiters, And if the offender or the offended, after having been warned thrice, does not submit to the decision of the arbiters, he will be excluded from the friendship as a wicked man and a perjuror.[194] “Each one of the men of the commune will be faithful to his conjuror, and will give him aid and advice, according to what justice will dictate him” — the Amiens and Abbeville charters say. “All will aid each other, according to their powers, within the boundaries of the Commune, and will not suffer that any one takes anything from any one of them, or makes one pay contributions” — do we read in the charters of Soissons, Compiègne, Senlis, and many others of the same type.[195] And so on with countless variations on the same theme. “The Commune,” Guilbert de Nogent wrote, “is an oath of mutual aid (mutui adjutorii conjuratio)... A new and detestable word. Through it the serfs (capite sensi) are freed from all serfdom; through it, they can only be condemned to a legally determined fine for breaches of the law; through it, they cease to be liable to payments which the serfs always used to pay.”[196]

The same wave of emancipation ran, in the twelfth century, through all parts of the continent, involving both rich cities and the poorest towns. And if we may say that, as a rule, the Italian cities were the first to free themselves, we can assign no centre from which the movement would have spread. Very often a small burg in central Europe took the lead for its region, and big agglomerations accepted the little town’s charter as a model for their own. Thus, the charter of a small town, Lorris, was adopted by eighty-three towns in south-west France, and that of Beaumont became the model for over five hundred towns and cities in Belgium and France. Special deputies were dispatched by the cities to their neighbours to obtain a copy from their charter, and the constitution was framed upon that model. However, they did not simply copy each other: they framed their own charters in accordance with the concessions they had obtained from their lords; and the result was that, as remarked by an historian, the charters of the mediæval communes offer the same variety as the Gothic architecture of their churches and cathedrals. The same leading ideas in all of them — the cathedral symbolizing the union of parish and guild in the city, — and the same infinitely rich variety of detail.

Self-jurisdiction was the essential point, and self-jurisdiction meant self-administration. But the commune was not simply an “autonomous” part of the State — such ambiguous words had not yet been invented by that time — it was a State in itself. It had the right of war and peace, of federation and alliance with its neighbours. It was sovereign in its own affairs, and mixed with no others. The supreme political power could be vested entirely in a democratic forum, as was the case in Pskov, whose vyeche sent and received ambassadors, concluded treaties, accepted and sent away princes, or went on without them for dozens of years; or it was vested in, or usurped by, an aristocracy of merchants or even nobles, as was the case in hundreds of Italian and middle European cities. The principle, nevertheless, remained the same: the city was a State and — what was perhaps still more remarkable — when the power in the city was usurped by an aristocracy of merchants or even nobles, the inner life of the city and the democratism of its daily life did not disappear: they depended but little upon what may be called the political form of the State.

The secret of this seeming anomaly lies in the fact that a mediæval city was not a centralized State. During the first centuries of its existence, the city hardly could be named a State as regards its interior organization, because the middle ages knew no more of the present centralization of functions than of the present territorial centralization. Each group had its share of sovereignty. The city was usually divided into four quarters, or into five to seven sections radiating from a centre, each quarter or section roughly corresponding to a certain trade or profession which prevailed in it, but nevertheless containing inhabitants of different social positions and occupations — nobles, merchants, artisans, or even half-serfs; and each section or quarter constituted a quite independent agglomeration. In Venice, each island was an independent political community. It had its own organized trades, its own commerce in salt, its own jurisdiction and administration, its own forum; and the nomination of a doge by the city changed nothing in the inner independence of the units.[197] In Cologne, we see the inhabitants divided into Geburschaften and Heimschaften (viciniae), i.e. neighbour guilds, which dated from the Franconian period. Each of them had its judge (Burrichter) and the usual twelve elected sentence-finders (Schöffen), its Vogt, and its greve or commander of the local militia.[198] The story of early London before the Conquest — Mr. Green says — is that “of a number of little groups scattered here and there over the area within the walls, each growing up with its own life and institutions, guilds, sokes, religious houses and the like, and only slowly drawing together into a municipal union.”[199] And if we refer to the annals of the Russian cities, Novgorod and Pskov, both of which are relatively rich in local details, we find the section (konets) consisting of independent streets (ulitsa), each of which, though chiefly peopled with artisans of a certain craft, had also merchants and landowners among its inhabitants, and was a separate community. It had the communal responsibility of all members in case of crime, its own jurisdiction and administration by street aldermen (ulichanskiye starosty), its own seal and, in case of need, its own forum; its own militia, as also its self-elected priests and its, own collective life and collective enterprise.[200]

The mediæval city thus appears as a double federation: of all householders united into small territorial unions — the street, the parish, the section — and of individuals united by oath into guilds according to their professions; the former being a produce of the village-community origin of the city, while the second is a subsequent growth called to life by new conditions.

To guarantee liberty, self-administration, and peace was the chief aim of the mediæval city; and labour, as we shall presently see when speaking of the craft guilds, was its chief foundation. But “production” did not absorb the whole attention of the mediæval economist. With his practical mind, he understood that “consumption” must be guaranteed in order to obtain production; and therefore, to provide for “the common first food and lodging of poor and rich alike” (gemeine notdurft und gemach armer und richer[201]) was the fundamental principle in each city. The purchase of food supplies and other first necessaries (coal, wood, etc.) before they had reached the market, or altogether in especially favourable conditions from which others would be excluded — the preempcio, in a word — was entirely prohibited. Everything had to go to the market and be offered there for every one’s purchase, till the ringing of the bell had closed the market. Then only could the retailer buy the remainder, and even then his profit should be an “honest profit” only.[202] Moreover, when corn was bought by a baker wholesale after the close of the market, every citizen had the right to claim part of the corn (about half-a-quarter) for his own use, at wholesale price, if he did so before the final conclusion of the bargain; and reciprocally, every baker could claim the same if the citizen purchased corn for re-selling it. In the first case, the corn had only to be brought to the town mill to be ground in its proper turn for a settled price, and the bread could be baked in the four banal, or communal oven.[203] In short, if a scarcity visited the city, all had to suffer from it more or less; but apart from the calamities, so long as the free cities existed no one could die in their midst from starvation, as is unhappily too often the case in our own times.

However, all such regulations belong to later periods of the cities’ life, while at an earlier period it was the city itself which used to buy all food supplies for the use of the citizens. The documents recently published by Mr. Gross are quite positive on this point and fully support his conclusion to the effect that the cargoes of subsistences “were purchased by certain civic officials in the name of the town, and then distributed in shares among the merchant burgesses, no one being allowed to buy wares landed in the port unless the municipal authorities refused to purchase them. This seem — she adds — to have been quite a common practice in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland.“[204] Even in the sixteenth century we find that common purchases of corn were made for the “comoditie and profitt in all things of this.... Citie and Chamber of London, and of all the Citizens and Inhabitants of the same as moche as in us lieth” — as the Mayor wrote in 1565.[205] In Venice, the whole of the trade in corn is well known to have been in the hands of the city; the “quarters,” on receiving the cereals from the board which administrated the imports, being bound to send to every citizen’s house the quantity allotted to him.[206] In France, the city of Amiens used to purchase salt and to distribute it to all citizens at cost price;[207] and even now one sees in many French towns the halles which formerly were municipal dépôts for corn and salt.[208] In Russia it was a regular custom in Novgorod and Pskov.

The whole matter relative to the communal purchases for the use of the citizens, and the manner in which they used to be made, seems not to have yet received proper attention from the historians of the period; but there are here and there some very interesting facts which throw a new light upon it. Thus there is, among Mr. Gross’s documents, a Kilkenny ordinance of the year 1367, from which we learn how the prices of the goods were established. “The merchants and the sailors,” Mr. Gross writes, “were to state on oath the first cost of the goods and the expenses of transportation. Then the mayor of the town and two discreet men were to name the price at which the wares were to be sold.” The same rule held good in Thurso for merchandise coming “by sea or land.” This way of “naming the price” so well answers to the very conceptions of trade which were current in mediæval times that it must have been all but universal. To have the price established by a third person was a very old custom; and for all interchange within the city it certainly was a widely-spread habit to leave the establishment of prices to “discreet men” — to a third party — and not to the vendor or the buyer. But this order of things takes us still further back in the history of trade — namely, to a time when trade in staple produce was carried on by the whole city, and the merchants were only the commissioners, the trustees, of the city for selling the goods which it exported. A Waterford ordinance, published also by Mr. Gross, says “that all manere of marchandis what so ever kynde thei be of... shal be bought by the Maire and balives which bene commene biers [common buyers, for the town] for the time being, and to distribute the same on freemen of the citie (the propre goods of free citisains and inhabitants only excepted).” This ordinance can hardly be explained otherwise than by admitting that all the exterior trade of the town was carried on by its agents. Moreover, we have direct evidence of such having been the case for Novgorod and Pskov. It was the Sovereign Novgorod and the Sovereign Pskov who sent their caravans of merchants to distant lands.

We know also that in nearly all mediæval cities of Middle and Western Europe, the craft guilds used to buy, as a body, all necessary raw produce, and to sell the produce of their work through their officials, and it is hardly possible that the same should not have been done for exterior trade — the more so as it is well known that up to the thirteenth century, not only all merchants of a given city were considered abroad as responsible in a body for debts contracted by any one of them, but the whole city as well was responsible for the debts of each one of its merchants. Only in the twelfth and thirteenth century the towns on the Rhine entered into special treaties abolishing this responsibility.[209] And finally we have the remarkable Ipswich document published by Mr. Gross, from which document we learn that the merchant guild of this town was constituted by all who had the freedom of the city, and who wished to pay their contribution (“their hanse”) to the guild, the whole community discussing all together how better to maintain the merchant guild, and giving it certain privileges. The merchant guild of Ipswich thus appears rather as a body of trustees of the town than as a common private guild.

In short, the more we begin to know the mediaeval city the more we see that it was not simply a political organization for the protection of certain political liberties. It was an attempt at organizing, on a much grander scale than in a village community, a close union for mutual aid and support, for consumption and production, and for social life altogether, without imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but giving full liberty of expression to the creative genius of each separate group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce, and political organization. How far this attempt has been successful will be best seen when we have analyzed in the next chapter the organization of labour in the mediæval city and the relations of the cities with the surrounding peasant population.

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dorokora · 1 year

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Chapter 14 Episode 1 Part 1:

We start with Oscar as he introduce himself and address the “audience” along with a masked Nyarl. He goes over a short version of the Jack the Ripper story. Saying no one enjoys reading a mystery novel if they know the ending and wondering who the killer is. So “knowing everything” means losing all pleasures. We transitioned to Christine’s backstory.

She lost her family at a young age and was all alone for most of her life left with only the dream of theater. The one who made her dream come true was Mr. Mononobe. He gave her many "roles" and stages. He gave her hope to live. After a performance, he always gave her a bouquet of roses. When she embrace it, she forget about her loneliness and is filled with joy. But she didn't understand why he was so kind to her. She asked him about the rose. He said that he was "just a substitute" for “that person”. However, that Mononobe is always watching the stage alone from afar. Someday, she wants him to see the play. She want him to tell me that he enjoyed himself. If only he could see her play and enjoy it. And if she could console his loneliness with her play. And before she knew it, she was called a great actress, and she wanted to be famous. Now she can play any "role". All her dreams came true, except for one. She is Christine. The apostle of King Solomon. She have acted only just for him. The only person who has watched her stage for a long time. She wants to show him a stage never seen before. Will the city burn? Will the island sink? Will the world fall apart? Will the stars shatter? She wants to dedicate a performance that goes beyond even the future. That’s the only hope and joy she has left.

We cut Ose who is being held prisoner in the basement of the opera house. But he’s not the only there. Loki is there with him. Ose becomes angry telling Loki he’s been looking for him. Loki remembers Ose and that he was given a fragment of Odin’s memory and is Odin’s substitute. Loki knows his profile thanks to using the app while being on the management side. Loki ask Ose why he’s looking for him. Ose tells him he’s looking for him because of his crime of enclosing the entire world of Yggdrasil in a wall. Yggdrasil was suppose to experience ragnarok but because of Loki putting the walls up that never happen. Just like he did to Tokyo, he turned Yggdrasil into a enclosed space. The future of the human in Yggdrasil have disappeared now that Yggdrasil is stuck in a loop just like Tokyo. He stole their futures. Only Loki is capable of doing something like that. Loki uses him tongue to break through Ose’s sacred artifact. His tongue breaks through all deceit, vanity, and disguise. That's why he’d too dangerous here in Tokyo and a prisoner of war. Loki ask why Ose doing all this. Simple, because there’s nothing else to do, you can’t find anywhere to go. Odin used to be the same when he received the ability of being all knowing. This is a dead end. Loki tells Ose he’s just a soldier who can't find anything else to do but accomplish the goals he's been given.

We cut to the Rulemakers drones hunting down Wanderers members. The mob catmen intercept them. One ask them are they trying to capture and brainwash them. The drone tells them some propaganda about how they are just leading people down the same terminal. This terminal reads your individual circumstances and guides you in making decisions more efficiently than you yourself. They believe they will know that you will live happier if you follow the same thing together. This terminal is a artificial intelligence made by Curren. It understands the characteristics of the individual and immediately returns an answer that is better than that individual. It doesn't have to be a perfect solution. It's enough if you can give "an answer that is better than what you give yourself". This is "Plan C". It is the answer to lead mankind to the next evolution. This plan is different from that of Isaac and that of Bertro.

Back to Loki and Ose. Loki tells Ose that’s his limit is that you can't "understand". It’s a "dead end". Because you can answer anything with that power, you can't feel any pleasure in doing what you want to do. While drowning in wisdom, you lose sight of where you want to go. Individuals that should be revitalized in this way will eventually lose their vitality. And just like Odins, drowning in the omniscience given to you, you are bound by our own ropes. Loki says Odin should be grateful rather than standing still, it's better to run around and still feel like you've done something. To keep it simple, his motive for putting the walls up, is entertainment. Back to Oscar, that’s why the Entertainers and Rule Makers are working together. To fill in the holes in Curran’s Plan C.

We cut back to where the prologue left off. King Solomon stands before them. But presence is empty, there’s nothing in there. A new exception introduce themselves as Overlord, the Zero exception. The embodiment of “dead end”. Overlord says there is no future ahead of us. There is no future for our evolution. It does something to MC and MC disappeared leaving only Lil’Sal behind. Lil’Sal freaks out about MC disappearing but notice King Solomon standing in front of him. He’s confuse about why who is that.

Back to MC, who is falling somewhere, it felt like they been falling forever. They open their eyes to see the horrific place in front of them. They bump into the cat girl, Quantum. She tells them this is the place where those who may be alive or dead end up.

#Housamo spoilers #Chapter 14

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strykingback · 9 months

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BLCK: The Story So Far Part 1

Volume Minus One-

In the beginning there was nothing except for a lone being called Soliphet, they would create the universe with a single snap of their fingers. Yet, while doing so they would create their own world for themselves naming it Remnant. Thus upon completing their world the fused being split itself into two new beings. Solis the God of Light and Baphomet the God of Darkness. Solis would create life while Baphomet would create the destruction through the Grimm. Thus out of jealousy towards his brother he created Imperius the first Grimm Titan of Malevolence and declared war against his brother, while Solis in retaliation created Exaltia the Grimm Titan of Benevolence. Thus the War of Light And Darkness begun and ended with Imperius being sealed away, but his influence would be well known. As an ultimatum both Baphomet and Solis would create mankind.

Mankind would call this era of birth The Age of Antiquity, due to them receiving blessings from the Gods one of these blessings being magic. However, over the course of time some magicks had been outlawed and those who broke those laws and disturbed the Balance received severe punishments. Still a major threat was the Grimm and with many wars breaking out this created a problem for mankind. To which the Gods would crown a Champion every few hundred or thousands of years to face off against the Grimm Champion or The aggressor of a war. The first being Shaka Ishvalda... and many more following after.

The Age of Antiquity would come to an end when Salem became immortal by diving into the Pool of Life in order to become immortal and to become a Champion of Remnant after Ozma Ozymandius would be chosen as a de-facto champion. Which she manipulated all kingdoms to commit a war against the Gods of Light and Darkness to which out of fury at mans betrayal, Baphomet would unleash his Ultimate Technique: Ashes to Ashes. To wipe out all life around Remnant.... leaving the God of Light disappointed his brother had to choose this route and leaving Remnant out of shame along with Baphomet leaving out of grief as well and in the process accidentally destroying the moon shattering it. Out of shame for what she did and as a means tor attempt to join her fallen as well.. she attempted suicide into a Grimm pit but it failed as out came the first Grimm Human Hybrid.

However.. this led to the Clash of Titans as Imperius was freed from the meteor shower and Exaltia and him fighting which both wounding each other. However, before the two could continue their clash they noticed one thing.

Humanity was returning..... and like their forefathers... they too agree that their war would not grant a rebirth for humanity. Thus they ended the war as Humanity returned from dust....

Volume Zero-

With the return of mankind, they were immediately thrusted into a war of bloody evolution as they had to learn how to survive on their own without the help of Gods or magic. Instead they had to fight in order to survive but with the Grimm torturing them constantly it seemed that humanity would be rendered to extinction were it not for the discovery of dust crystals. These elemental crystals would later be key for creating the Hunters. Warriors born and bred by pure skill and training which led to the creation of the Five Kingdoms.

Vale, Vacuo, Mistral, Mantle (Later to be Atlas), and Brumel.

Through these four kingdoms came their ideals and what they stood for. However, what they were unaware of was that danger also lurked. As Salem was recruiting many hunters to her cause originally calling it the Cult of Salem. To which the Gods would revive Ozma giving him the objective of seeking out four relics of Remnant and using it to put an end to Salems wrath. However despite this, Ozma would use this time to start a family and ignore his tasks.

Yet, Salem used this as an opportunity to attack his family while he was away on business, only to return to see Salem standing over the corpses of his wife and four children. Which he cursed her and now remembered what he was revived for as he was "killed" only to take place of another body. Over time Ozma now going by Ozpin entered a deep depression until he encountered four sisters, which he used the last vestiges of what remained of the original magic within Ozma to bless them based around the lessons he was taught by them. For Salem she now learned of a great fear of her possible death by a Silver Eyed Warrior which was nearly ordained by Masamune Shinba a faunus.

Which the legacy of the Maidens of the Seasons were created, thus they along with the Hunters would bring upon the Age of Rebirth. However, over time these legacies would change as time marched forth with Ozpin taking his responsibility seriously and leading many Hunters with the creation of the Hunters Guild after the Great War and the forging of the Hunters Academy as he would meet Team STRQ, Hideyoshi Phalanx, and Jack Stryker. He then gave them the mission to eliminate the Scions of Salem as Summer Rose through her fame of being a Silver Eyed Warrior and a Hunter..... and led a force of hunters and a military force against the Scions of Salem.. only for her to sacrifice her life in order to save millions of lives against Salem, sending the Champion of Darkness into a fifteen year hibernation at the cost of Summers life as she fades away into nothingness....

Thus ending the Age of Rebirth and starting the Age Of Peace

Volume One-

Enter Team BLCK which consists of Blade Stryker, Louvel Shinba, Corona Borealis, and Kazura Rojas Verde. A Team as described by their classmates as a Ragtag crew of Mercenaries with ideals, but with incredible teamwork.

Their story begins with how they were chosen by Ozpin and sent to Beacon Academy.

Blade Stryker is a Vacuan native who was also part of the Desertwalkers operating underneath the codename of the Burning Thunder Demon Lord or Burning Thunder. However, after a mission gone wrong which resulted in the loss of his brother in arms Flare. he would go full vigilante and even to the point where he would do this after school hours at Signal Academy, despite being scolded by police whenever he got caught doing so. However, after graduating he would date Tessa Clyde and using her to get close to Desperado Joe which he would think he would get fame, instead he became infamous and for his safety Blade was requested to leave Vacuo and go to Beacon Academy upon request by Hideyoshi and Theodore Saladin....as bandit tribes affiliated with Desperado Joe would aim for his head.

Louvel Shinba a Menagerie Native hails from the mountains where the Shinbaori is located, a once mistralian clan of Faunus that believed in building bridges between man and faunus, only for it to be torn down by humanity and exiled by them, leading to their new home. Despite their affiliation with the White Fang during its peaceful years it would change after Sienna Khan believed it was now time to use violence instead of peace. To which the Shinbaori would no longer affiliate themselves with the White Fang. Yet, they would unleash missions targeting the White Fang and other anti-faunus or . For Louvel he sought the secrets of the Shinbaori and the legacy they left behind in Mistral as he planned to enroll in Haven Academy only to be stopped by business by his brother in arms Orochi as the two along with Yang Xiao Long would intercept a White Fang commander and bringing them to justice.

Louvel would then receive a letter stating that he was approved to go to Beacon Academy and to report to Vale to further his application process along with Yang as the two talked together.

Corona Borealis a Mistralian native who was once underneath the gang led by Lil Miss Malachite named the Spiders. she would betray the spiders and mostly going on an assassination spree, leaving behind the mark of the Dark Eagle who would mostly target gang members seeking out information on others especially those who were innocent. After an assasination gone wrong she was arrested by the Mistralian police as Ozpin would interfere giving Corona a choice. To either rot in a cell for the rest of her life or to join Beacon Academy and become a Huntress and then return to Mistral to finish what she started with Lil Miss Malachite as she begrudgingly agreed.

Kazura is of the fifth kingdom, Brumel. As he came from a long line of kings. Yet, he wondered about the world outside of his kingdom as he was a Prince and wanted to be as kind and understanding as his father Rodrigues, who killed his father after he was preparing to declare war on Atlas and make Brumel into an empire. As he traveled to Atlas Academy studied there and passed before moving onto Beacon Academy and meeting his comrades there.

As how they all met, Blade and Louvel would meet after assisting Ruby Rose in defeating both Roman Torchwicks lackeys and Deadshot Gunnars gang as well. While they were arrested but Ozpin would ask of them why they wanted to join Beacon thus they would explain their reasons why and thus gain access to Beacon Academy, as they would train and meet the rest of their teammates.

BLCK would have a rocky start with Corona and Blade as the two were at wits with eachother and their teamwork with Corona telling him that his laidback "Vacuan Style" will one day get him killed and with him telling her that just hiding in the shadows wont do any good. Thankfully Professor Oobleck and Professor Goodwitch would grant the duo some words of advice as they looked at eachother with understanding.

Louvel would have to deal with Weiss in a combat class as she was excited to let her know his place as he was nothing more but a low-class faunus. Despite his teammates helping him Louvel feels as if he will always be a third-rate hunter due to his semblance Wolf Arts and how he has only unlocked four so far. Which thanks to Professor Peach and Sun Wukong, he unlocks his fifth art: Crushing Jaws of the Wolf and defeats Weiss. This loss alone would make Weiss enraged as she would later on curse him for being better....

Deadshot Gunnar would then escape jail and rejoin with Torchwick as the two would capture Kazuras friend as he feels as if its his responsibility to face off against this threat himself, as he was the only one to fight this opponent himself. However with his friends trying to help he angrily refuses stating how this was his responsibility and his alone as Weiss on the other hand calls Blake a dirty faunus and calling them out for being thieves and murderers as both walk out angrily and joining Sun as the trio go to face Torchwick, Deadshot Gunnar, and the White Fang by themselves. Only when their back is against the wall to be rejoined by Louvel, Corona, Blade, and Penny who assist them.

In which it is revealed that Kazuras friend was none other than Professor Merlinda Morgana who states that she is grateful and will keep them in mind as she goes with Ozpin and Penny and when in private she states. She has a key mission for Team BLCK and stating that its urgent.

Volume Two -

At the start of Volume Two, Team BLCK is excited for their huntsman shadowing mission, albeit despite some new "friends" such as Cinder Fall in which Blade and Cinder having a sparring match as it ended with a draw, Louvel and Mercury having a conversation about their birthplaces, and Emerald and Corona bonding over their love of jewelry. When the dance happens Blade and Ruby intercept Cinder as he calls her out saying. "I KNOW THOSE SKILLS ANYWHERE!!!!!" while Cinder is taken aback that he has such a good memory with Mercury saying that he's Vacuan equating them to idiots. As before he could explain to Ozpin, Goodwitch, and Ironwood his team are sent on their "huntsman shadowing mission" only to find out it is a literal mission as they all play out every phase correctly and as possibly as it was against a PMC that is planning on violating the PMC act.

Which Team BLCK would intercept only to find out that they were led into a trap by an unknown source claiming himself to be a Scion for a higher power. In which Icarus PMC and bribed Atlesian soldiers would attempt to intercept the team however, they escaped from the target building but the consequence of it was that the fighting was spilling out into the streets. With Ace Ops moving to intercept them as they all split up to meet up at the rendevouz while fighting Winter, Clover, Elm, and Vine of the Ace Ops. Team BLCK would then escape as soon as they defeated their opponents leaving Atlas behind but even when Atlas was counting the injured or dead innocents caught up in the fighting...

Many of them praised Team BLCK as they went out of their way to save as many as they could while others in Atlas sought their arrest. Despite it now being public information as a team of young hunters Stopping a horrible event. Was unheard of thus when whispers about was going around they became. Remnants Most Infamous Team. As a further surprise they receieved Outsider the Grimm Velociraptor a rare-type Grimm as a new member of the team.

Volume Three-

The Vytal Festival has arrived and Brumel is now hereby a fifth kingdom to now participate in the tournament. As Team BLCK deals with CRDL in the team matches, then Louvel and Corona handles a duo from Mistral. However, before they can enter the finals Eros Ahab an Atelier Paladin hands them a mission coming from the top.

Which the team is conflicted about as they wanted to participate in it, but they agree that if it is another threat that will end Remnant. as a whole then they cannot ignore it. Accepting they ask team RWBY to take over for them as Weiss and Yang were eliminated by a draw against Neon and Flynt to take over for the finals in their stead. Which Team BLCKOUT would discover Professor Merlots hideout as they discuss about how Ruby and her friends dealt with Merlot before.

Only for the bastard to escape and start over again. But this time they discover that they Grimm there are captured rare-types and became cybernetically enhanced creating Cyber-Grimm, and of these cyber Grimm came Outsiders father Alpha, who the young raptor thought was dead was alive. Thus, Team BLCK would make more terrifying discoveries about an old world before this time and about Salem. More or less Cinder Fall being part of this "Cult" as Blade calls it. Yet, one key thing catches their eye...

The Destruction Of Beacon Academy.....

Immediately, Team BLCKOUT is about head out to stop Cinder only to be stopped by Professor Merlot as he calls them out for being threats from earlier. Which Team BLCKOUT deals with him and frees the Cyber Grimm and heads back to Beacon Academy which was under attack as everyone splits up to deal with a certain area....

Louvel would watch with horror as he sees Yangs arm getting sliced off by a powerful Grimm that the White Fang had captured. In which out of rage for his first friend outside of the SHinbaori he would slaughter it, and take Yang to safety.

Corona would come across Blake as the two face off against Adam and Melenia and Miltia of the Spiders as both are pressed to their very limit to the point Blake rolls the dice with a gamble on her semblance helping her and Corona escape as they go to assist in other areas and soon.. out of fear break off with their friends.

Kazura would witness the death of Jaune (Because I hate his ass SO MUCH.) along with Pyrra and Sun who notices how he fought against multiple amounts of Grimm defending the entrance to the chamber of the Fall Maiden who was wounded at the time and died standing up. This enrages Kazura, as he promised to not let anyone else die as he fights so hard he ends up getting a brutal wound from a Grimm that destroys both his shield and armor sending him into a coma.

While Cinder below fights and defeats Ozpin while also claiming the rest of the Fall Maidens power as Blade and Ruby move to intercept her along with Penny as the trio fights her only for the Grimm Titan locked within Mt. Glenn to awaken and escape causing more trouble as it forces our heroes to fight differently as Penny is "killed" by Cinder with Ruby unleashing her Silver Eyes ability for the first time ever.....

Thankfully the two would awaken in Patch after two weeks, which Louvel and Tai Yang filled them in on the situation as Yang is in a deep depression, Blake and Corona are traveling together, and Weiss and Kazura were sent back to their respective kingdoms. As Ruby, Blade, Outsider, Sun, and Pyrra all gather together to travel to Mistral to Haven Academy to continue their training as hunters while Louvel hangs back with Yang to help her.

Yet those this event along with the last one REVIVES SALEM Thus beginning the Age Of Darkness

Volume Four-

Thanks to the two events both being the Founding Crisis and the Fall of Beacon it was enough to awaken Salem from her hibernation, as she plans out the next steps and that was to find the other Maidens of the Seasons and find the relics. As Tyrian is sent out on his mission while Cinder who had recently lost and arm and an eye, because of both the combined efforts of Ruby and Blade. Which team SPNL, Ruby, Blade and Outsider travel along Anima meeting new friends and new enemies along the way.

In Brumel, Kazura awakens after a four month coma as he regains his strength and decides to go back to Atlas and Mantle only to see things have grown worse across Remnant over time as he has to make a massive decision along with Weiss as the two are both heirs to a family... with Weiss losing her heiress status after arguing with her father, and Kazura realizing that he may not be welcome in the Solitas Region if he reactivates the Atelier Agent Program which he does stating that Remnant needs heroes now more than ever.

as he goes to Mistral to rejoin his friends at Mistral believing that they are heading to Haven or Sanctuary Academy.

Louvel and Yang would start training together after Yang finds the courage to fight again after realizing that even with a disability she can still rise above. As the two would grow closer throughout their training as she learns a little more about Louvel. Only for a screecher to tell Louvel that his brother Orochi was killed in action, leaving Louvel depressed and saddened that he lost another close friend of his...... as Yang would do the same thing he did for her, to help him rise above...as in Menagerie Corona and Blake discover a controversy about the White Fang now joining forces with the remnants of Icarus PMC to destroy Haven Academy but furthermore discovering that someone else is playing a puppeteer towards the White Fang.

Back with SPNL, Ruby and Blade and Outsider. They would encounter the Scion of Poison, Tyrian as they all fight him but with struggle as he calls himself the second ranked Scion amongst the Scions of Salem. Despite this... Qrow would come to assist and in turn getting poisoned as Hermes an Atelier Agent also comes to assist as well which shocks Tyrian noticing how Hermes continously heals even after "killing" him.

Afterwards, Rubys gang would encounter the Grimm Terror the Banshee Nucklavee as they struggle to destroy the beast. Only for Lie Ren and Nora being the ones to finish it off as they too had encountered it years ago. Thankfully they were rescued by the Mistralian Defense Force as they were taken to Mistral.

Louvel would receive an urgent request from the Shinbaori to return to Menagerie as White Fang activity there has increased with Louvel saying his farewells to Yang with one final training session and a botched confession.

Volume 5-

Blade and the gang arrive at Haven Academy meeting with Professor Leonardo Lionheart and his assistant Frankurter Van Gogh. Which Qrow and everyone believes that the Scions of Salem are planning on targeting the Spring Maiden and that it is key to find them and claim victory over the Scions of Salem. In which they attempt a search party both in and out of Mistral, but with Ruby and Blade, Qrow talks about how Professor Lionheart was more rambunctious and extroverted back when he was younger. Which Ruby and Blade asks questions about him and one about Summer and him. Which Qrow says that he and Summer were firm friends as she gave him courage and in return he gave her bravery.

Meanwhile, Yang and Kazura arrives in the Anima Region running into eachother when they notice bandits are attacking a village which they fight as hard as they could until getting overwhelmed until they counter the Spring Maiden, Vernal who is part of the bandits and later on reveals that it is Ravens bandits. As Yang is shocked to see her mother after all this time at first she is ready to become lethal with her but Kazura stops her as the trio talks about Ozpin and what he is not what they think he is and how Summer was a great individual despite her shortcomings. In which as a promise Raven would open a portal up as Yang would agree to ask Raven about where she was all this time only when the time came.

Thus reuniting with Blade and Outsider along with Ruby.

Next, back in Menagerie, Louvel would reunite with Corona and Blake, as the trio go up to the mountains to consult with his father and to recieve instructions. Which he would be surprised as Louvel would discover more about his grandfathers illness worsening as he was unaware of it. Which he feels he is about to lose someone else as they start to recruit people to make a stand against the White Fang and to intercept the strike force planning on attacking Haven Academy.

Yet while this is going on Adam "kills" Sienna to warn the Shinbaori about the attack as they were paid off by Icarus PMC and being manipulated by the Scions of Salem in order to awaken ANOTHER Grimm Terror in Mistral. This leads into the joint-force of the White Fang and Icarus PMC remnants attacking Menagerie and destroying homes along the way... but this enrages Louvel as he slaughters them without mercy entering the Violent Wolf State

Thankfullly he would be forcefully exited out of thanks to his grandfathers semblance, in which Louvel would embrace his grandfather apologizing to him tearfully as he holds him in his arms. Stating about how he has worsened things, but his grandfather reminds Louvel that mistakes are a plenty and that they are lessons to be learned. In which Louvel understands as he is granted permission to utilize his rage against the White Fang and the Scions of Salem.

In which Blake and Ilia would finally talk and end things between them and finally join forces to go face off against the White Fang and the Scions together. Back in Menagerie the Scions of Salem had already found the Spring Maiden, but Raven returns from Menagerie after a chat with Lionheart reminding him of his pride and how he once was a proud warrior and that there is nothing to fear when he is surrounded by allies.

In which Lionheart understands and when the day of the attack comes he joins forces with the Guardians of the Light (Ozpins faction) and explains he sent the Hunters away from Mistral in order to save their lives in which he not only collaborated with Salem but went against her as well. Shocking Cinder and her crew as the battle of Haven Academy begins.

Thankfully with both forces being intercepted this leads to a final showdown between Raven, Louvel and Yang versus Cinder who killed Vernal but discovered that she transferred the power of the Spring Maiden to Raven. As Raven reveals that after the death of the former Spring Maiden Twelve Years ago.. and with one of the Scions stating that Yang was only but a child, Raven had no choice but to leave and kill any Scion of Salem who had plans to abduct or kill Yang until she learned how to defender herself. which is what Taiyang feared about talking with Yang as he did not know how she would react. To which Yang understood Ravens fears hugging her mother and thanking her for protecting her even if she didnt know it was her.

As the two make up with Raven, Louvel, and Yang taking the Relic of Knowledge and successfully claiming a key victory for the Guardians of the Light as, Louvel passes out from being pushed to his limit combined with using the Violent Wolf State.

#[The Lore Of BLCK- Lore]#[Random Talking In The HQ- Dash Commentary]

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popitdontdropitwrites · 2 years

Text

"The Mantis" Medic/Sniper - Chapter 1

Summary: Ludwig Humboldt, a renowned geneticist with an unconventional understanding of ethics, begins an ambitious project to evolve mankind through genetic modification. With the help of his lab assistant, Mick, he introduces praying mantis DNA into his body, eventually transforming him into a exceptionally powerful and highly intelligent human/mantis hybrid.

This does not come without costs, however, as in time, the cold, efficient ideology of insects – being to survive, thrive and breed – takes over completely. His once noble goal of improving the lives of mankind distorts and twists within his altered mind into something far more sinister...

You can also read the fic on ao3 here

This fic is co-written with Murder_Media on ao3. All chapters from Sniper's POV have been written by them. I have written all of Medic's POV.

All I will say is, monsterfuckers this is for you.

Her prodigious size alone could have easily dwarfed the rest of the collection, but it was her beauty that transformed her into a fearsome, tyrannical queen amongst mere servants. Her emerald skin, complemented by a pleasing cerise blush speckled on her limbs shone as though it had been lovingly polished by dutiful, worshipping hands. Her eyes, marbled with lush greens, followed his own with miniscule pupils imbued with predatory focus, as if she lusted for him with the same lethal passion. He put on his best smile – which was often enough to frighten even the most fearless men – and brazenly reached out to touch, expecting her to cower in fear, but if anything, she doubled down. The praying mantis reared up tall, raising her scythelike forelimbs as her wings opened wide to reveal fine, lacey wings adorned with beautiful vermillion eyes, beckoning and challenging him in one carefully constructed expression.

At his corrupt, rotten age, Ludwig often thought he was incapable of love beyond his unprofessional interest in the human form and all of its gloriously efficient organs but this creature made his heart flutter so violently that it seemed to bleed with love. He felt a sort of kinship with this slave of ruthless instinct and baser desire, one he had never quite experienced with another man. He decided then that she would be his bride, a match made in heaven, or perhaps hell – it did not matter either way to him, for the only smile that he cared for was his own, not those of the gods.

He was not referring to matrimony in the traditional sense, rather, he was intending for a marriage on a genetic level, a fusion of Ludwig’s own DNA with that of this fantastic creature to construct an entirely new being, one that would be knighted with the prestigious title of progress or better yet, evolution . From his stately example, a new species would emerge, irrevocably changing the course of humankind’s history from perniciousness to greatness, until the old, pitiful definition of men fell into obsoleteness.

He would be heralded as a genius, one worthy of being a leader of the scientific community rather than just another dreadfully average pawn. His past work, though many swore on its brilliance, had merely got his foot in the door. This ambitious project, should it succeed, could grant his name the respect and awe it deserved, landing himself alongside the greats and in time, perhaps with a fine vintage in hand, he could bear witness to the fruits of his hard labour; an ideal, utopian world, inspired by his vision.

His assistant let out a wolf whistle, treating their subject as if she were any other pretty thing, yet to realise her true importance. “She’s a beaut, isn’t she?” He lauded, turning his hand over to demonstrate the fearlessness of the creature hanging from the hands of a figure she would likely consider a god from her small, unknowledgeable eyes.

“She’s perfect.”

“Thank fuck for that, eh?” Mick replied, kicking up more of a huff than he truly meant, as betrayed by the slight but perceptible levity in his tone. “Here I was thinkin’ you’d send me back to the forest again to find ya more bloody bugs.”

His lip twitched in disapproval at Mick’s flippant attitude, but quickly forgave it; he was just a boy, after all. “Can you really blame me for being particular? You are forgetting that it is my body being subjected to this experiment.” He rebutted, raising a brow to his assistant. “We are not toying around with lab rats and bunnies anymore.”

“Right, of course.” He straightened up a bit, his body apologising in the place of words. “I’m glad you like her. I nicked a bunch of pretty sheilas for ya, but I think she might’ve…” Mick crouched down beside Ludwig, looking inside of the makeshift habitat. “Yeah, she’s eaten ‘em, so it’s her or nothin’.”

“Excellent!” He exclaimed with inappropriate enthusiasm. “It saves us from having to pick out the inferior specimens ourselves.”

“Survival of the fittest and all that.” Mick ran a hand through his overgrown hair, picking a stray twig out from his umber locks, the minute tremor in his fingers making the task far more difficult than it should have been. “Do you want to hold her?” Mick outstretched his hand to him and the mantis tensed, ready to strike if he dared to come any nearer.

Ludwig humoured Mick, if only to bite into his boyishness and savour the taste. “Please. It would be a little rude of me to harvest our subject’s DNA without properly meeting her first, don’t you think?”

He encouraged the insect to climb onto the back of his hand and after some protest, she did, curiously crawling all over his arm, her feet sticking to the dark hair. Ludwig pushed up his glasses, getting a better look at her most intricate features – her delicate antennae, the coarse spikes on her raptorials, the leaflike pattern of her tegmina, the softness of her underbelly…

“You made an excellent choice. She is… hah, I don’t even have the English words… Schön, Prächtig, Königlich… And gott, I can’t even begin to imagine the end result!” He grinned, suddenly overexcited, as if a fire had been ignited from under his skin. “We should get to work at once. Prepare her for the procedure, bitte.”

He offered their subject back to Mick, and she scurried back to the safety of his knuckles. “Right now?”

“Yes, right now. We have far too much work to do and to be honest with you, I am much too excited to delay it any longer.”

Mick tried to hide it, but his hesitation was as obvious as the stubble he had neglected to shave this morning. He glanced down at the praying mantis, his downturned lips laden with pity.

“Getting attached already, are we? I thought I taught you better than that.”

“I can’t help it, I’ve always had a soft spot for these little guys.”

“Don’t be such a baby.” He chuckled, finding his sudden softness to be endearing, if not a little aggravating – he did not have the time for this. “You have done far worse before and have never had a problem.” He did not consciously intend for it but his voice fluttered playfully, demeaning the younger man. “What’s the matter with you today, hm? Normally you’re so good for me.”

“Nothin’, it’s just a bit… cruel, isn’t it?”

“I assure you, my dear boy, it’s anything but.” The scientist replied, dismissing his concerns with a casual wave of his hand.

Mick opened his mouth, whether he was about to interject or agree was inconsequential; Ludwig was not yet finished.

“It is relatively quick, and remarkably painless. For a mindless, simple insect, I would go as far as to say she won’t feel a thing.” He licked his lips, detecting the comforting familiarness of those words. Perhaps Mick did too. “Go on, say your goodbyes if you must and be done with it.”

The bushman averted his gaze. “Yes, doc.”

“Good boy.” He patted him on the back, offering him a single honeyed drop of comfort to whet his appetite for when he would inevitably return for more with woefully bitten, bloodied lips, chewing them even still, burdened by it all. “Meet me in the laboratory when you are finished.”

Mick grabbed the jar and eased the insect back inside, effectively sealing her inside of her soon-to-be coffin, devoid of the energy he had arrived with. He wordlessly headed towards their makeshift walk-in freezer, disappearing behind its hulking metal doors.

He breathed out the last of his irritation and collected a lab coat from the rack beside the staircase. Ludwig slipped into it with habitual ease, feeling far less bare than before. He scowled at a purplish bloodstain on one of the sleeves and thought to gently remind Mick of it later, once he was in a better mood.

He strode upstairs, bounding up each one and tapping at the railing, unable to wait any longer. It would only be a few minutes before their specimen was ready for the procedure, but in this state, time would crawl along, much like the hours, if not the days prior to this moment.

Ludwig flicked the switch and the dazzling, almost blindingly white lights of the laboratory stuttered to life, emphasising the pearliness of the tiling, the sleekness of the slate countertops, the glint of oiled machines and the pristineness of his tools. If he did not adore the disgustingly excessive cleanliness and sterility, he would surely be driven mad by it. There was a comfort to be found in seeing one’s own reflection in every freshly sanitised surface, the smells of latex and chemicals, the blissful quiet away from the apartments below. For Ludwig, this place may as well have been a personally tailored paradise, even if others considered that sentiment unusual.

Unlike their humble living quarters, the laboratory sported the finest, latest technology, most of which had been especially designed for his use. He had called in a few favours with a good friend of his, a fellow visionary of the future who only asked for a public endorsement for his company when the time came to speak to the press in return for his work. As promised, a fine leather case rested on the workbench, complete with handling instructions for the courier, demanding the utmost care and attention as to not break the device within – he sincerely hoped Mick too, had abided by them when taking it inside. Ludwig placed his hands on the case, his fingers hesitating on the golden latches, tempted by their heavenly shine.

He told himself to wait, and instead, he made the necessary preparations for their experiment, snapping on a pair of red gloves as he did so. He wanted Mick to be there as he unveiled their brilliant machine to light stars in his tired, once hopeless face. Ludwig remembered the sadness tainting his distractingly vibrant viridian eyes all too well, the very same misery that had carved deep lines into Mick’s once youthful visage. Upon meeting the Australian on those squalid, filthy streets, he had initially believed the man to be only a few years his junior, but deceptively, a life of outcastment and misfortune under the Australian sun had left the poor thing to wither away into a disgustingly haggard, rapidly ageing derelict.

It seemed absurd in retrospect but he had been uninterested at first, even when the boy struck up conversation as he passed him by on the way to work, excited by a familiar, friendly-looking face, or perhaps more accurately, a well dressed, wealthy man. It was upon learning that he was only twenty-six that Ludwig stopped to spend his change on him for the opportunity to discreetly assess him. Day by day, coin by coin, he had interviewed him during their short talks, asking questions as they came up. His education; as minimal as the system allowed, his housing; a quiet bench usually safe from the elements, his relationships; profoundly harmful to all parties involved, his prior work experience; odd jobs, physical ailments; nothing he cared to admit, ideal job; anything that would take him.

He had offered him just that, and the stench of urine and grime had been enough to make him weep when his new assistant hugged him, praising him endlessly for his kindness. Many of his colleagues questioned his choice and his competency, whispering of his proclivities to one another, like a flock of talkative, prying birds. He never cared to argue the fact that they were all fools, not out of the kindness of his heart, rather, in the interest of preserving his reputation. They did not see that he had found the perfect candidate for the job – a man who would nourish his creativity and respect his decisions rather than hold him back with conflicting opinions and moral boundaries.

Mick returned minutes later, clutching the jar in his hands, which had frosted over. His fingers, like strokes of paint on the glass, revealed artful glimpses of the carcass within as they unwittingly wiped away the ice. He brushed by the older man, looking at him for approval as he opened the jar and carefully positioned their specimen on the prepared tray. The scientist leant down, looking closely at the mantis, expecting the resilient creature to spring back to life any moment but she remained motionless, defeated by the cold hand of death at last, unaware that she would soon be defying it, or at least, her DNA would be.

He rested a hand on Mick’s shoulder, the touch startling him, though it was not unwelcome. “I have something to show you.” He met Mick’s eyes, smiling warmly at him. “I think you will like it.”

It intrigued him, as evidenced by the parting of his lips, just enough to reveal the tips of his yellowed front teeth. “I’ve been wonderin’ about that thing.” He nodded towards the box, its lid still closed tight, withholding its mysteries from the world.

He pulled away from the younger man, gently stroking the leather surface with his fingers. “Oh, I imagine you have.” He unclipped the latches, deliberately taking his time with each one. “Would you like to see what’s inside?”

“That’d be good, yeah.”

Ludwig slowly lifted the lid of the case, revealing its embroidered silk lining and it took his breath away to see the machine of his own design resting regally on top. The medical professional’s attention landed on the sleekness of the handle and the elegance of the trigger, while the sadist’s eye went directly to the collection of sharp needles of varying shapes and sizes, their gleam as dangerous as the radiant smile of the moon.

He couldn’t help but hold the ingenious device, running his hand along the barrel, the handle, and finally to the glass chamber on the end, feeling its immense power at his fingertips. He peeked inside of the glass, noticing the blocky, jagged shapes of mechanical components inside, which worked in perfect harmony to turn bodily fluids into pure, usable genetic material before they were stored in the canister to be injected into the desired host.

He hoped it would function as he had outlined. His associate, as brilliant as he was, was no geneticist and from time to time, things got lost in translation from frantically muddled English and German to idiomatic, colloquial American English. This time, he had exhaustively explained every aspect of it to prevent such a mishap from occurring. They could not afford errors of any kind – a faulty machine could be replaced, but his body and mind could not.

“Are we gonna give it a crack or are we just gonna stare at it all day?”

“My, my, someone’s eager.” The scientist crooned, not daring to look away from the wonderful contraption for a second. He was fascinated with it to the extent where he wanted to lick it, something he recognised as potentially dangerous, for many reasons. He would have tried it, if Mick was not there to cause a fuss. “Perhaps I should test it on you, hm?”

His assistant instinctually stepped back. “Nah, you don’t want this DNA or whatever, it’s a whole lot of shit.”

“I would argue otherwise.” He stepped a little closer, a gloved hand cupping the boy’s chin, tilting his head from side to side as he stared, wide-eyed and horrified, unsure of whether he was serious or not. “You have perfect eyesight, healthy skin, flexible joints, keen senses and many aesthetic features most would consider desirable, or at least would be if you took better care of yourself.”

The bushman blinked once, twice. “Wait, what’d you just say?”

He released him, giggling with glee. “Come on now, we have an experiment to conduct!” He clasped his hands together, eliciting a strangled groan from the rubber of his gloves. Ludwig browsed through the provided needles, all of which could be installed and removed on a whim for different sized specimens. He collected the smallest of them all – about the size of a pin needle, if not thinner – and screwed it on the end of the barrel until it was tightly in place, careful as not to prick himself.

“Stand aside, bitte. For all I know this thing might explode the moment I turn it on.”

Mick peeled away from him. “You’re jokin’ right?” He asked, nerves plaguing his normally laid-back intones.

“Of course I am. When was the last time something exploded in my laboratory?”

“Last week, you wanker.”

“Really? I don’t recall.”

“That’s ‘cause it knocked ya out cold.”

“Ah, yes! I remember now.” He sang cheerily. “Well, I’m sure it won’t happen again.” He grinned, flicking the switch on the side, eliciting a whirr from the harvester as it surged with energy.

“I’m not scoopin’ your brains off the floor if that thing pops like a bloody balloon.” Mick shielded his face with his hand, daring to peek through his fingers.

Ludwig lined the device up with the insect’s thorax and pierced her soft underbelly, going deep into her guts. Partially frozen haemolymph to oozed from the incision and he grinned, his fingers trembling on the trigger, unable to be still with the anticipation blitzing through his bloodstream. He gave it a firm pull, hearing it click as it locked in place. Seconds later, an inhuman groan rumbled from the depths of the machine and a light radiated from within, casting a red glow around the glass chamber. The metal warmed in his hands, and motion spurred from under his fingertips, as if the device were truly alive.

The machine grew louder with every passing moment, the whine of its insides rapidly heightening into a pained scream. A harsh thunk sounded as the machine sucked in the creature’s fluids and organs, turning them all into an unrecognisable liquid as they passed through each section and into the chamber. The light burned brighter into a blinding vermillion sun, causing heat to seep through his gloves, becoming almost unbearable. He turned away from the glow, the shriek of the harvester rising to deafening levels. Inside, the spinning cogs and mechanisms crackled, popped and snapped, chewing each other up into unrecognisable, useless hunks of metal, filling the air with a putrid burning smell. The machine shuddered and trembled in his hands and as though it could burst at any moment, unable to take the strain of its final processes.

But a mechanical hiss, the harvester powered down, steam whispering from its ruined form. He was ready to jot this down as an astronomical failure when he noticed the fluid sloshing around within the storage tank. It was entirely colourless, meaning it was no longer tissue or haemolymph, rather, it had been miraculously purified. Despite the machine burning itself out, it had managed to completely harvest her DNA, as indicated by the green light weakly flickering from inside the glass.

“Incredible… it actually worked.” He breathed out.

“Are ya sure? I think it’s cooked itself.”

He tapped the glass, making a thoughtful sound. “The completion light is on.”

“Bugger the light, the bloody thing’s fucked.” He shook his head, refusing to acknowledge the greatness of his invention.

“I don’t appreciate your tone.”

“All I’m sayin’ is that we’re better off safe than sorry.”

“It sounds to me like you do not trust my judgement.” He snapped, shooting the boy a glare over his glasses, reminding him of his authority.

“That’s not what I meant, I was–”

“Oh, so you want to talk back to me now, do you?”

“No, doc.”

“Of course not.” He whispered, his tone flipping to sickly, taunting sweetness in an instant. “Now that you have finished insulting my work, would you mind helping me with the injection?”

Mick took the syringe from him but hesitated, his fingers freezing in place. He refused to meet his eyes, instead looking at the miraculous liquid bubbling inside of the machine. “Look, doc, I don’t want to get in the way, but is this really a good idea? I mean, these things eat each other just for the fun of it. I don’t know if turnin’ into one is the brightest move.”

“Ah, I should have known that was the thing bothering you.” He sighed, steepling his hands. “You see, Mick, I could argue the same thing with mankind. Every one of us is capable of despicable acts, but for most, our unique ability to feel empathy and rigid laws – written or otherwise – keep us from tearing each other to pieces.” He made a crushing motion with his hands. “All that is to say I could easily kill and eat you right now if I so desired, I am certainly physically capable of doing so, but not on a psychological level. If this procedure goes to plan, my mind should remain perfectly preserved.”

“You’re sure?”

“Very. You will not have to worry about being eaten, I assure you.”

“Alright, that’s… that’s good enough for me.” He breathed out, finally readying the syringe. “Where do you want it?”

He shrugged off his coat and undid his tie before undoing the buttons of his collar, exposing his neck. “My neck, bitte.”

He breathed in deep, calming himself. “Pray I don’t stab an artery or anythin’.”

“Relax, it is no different to what you have done before.” He tilted his head to give the younger man better access to his veins.

The silver eye of the needle inched closer until it nervously kissed his skin and sunk in slowly, injecting the liquid without any of the professionalism he had grown used to. A pained hiss escaped him and the bushman apologised feverishly, the sting worsening to a burn, as if his blood were boiling, melting him from the inside. The needle withdrew, and in mere moments, the pain passed into a faint, dull throb.

“What happens now?” Mick put the now empty, useless machine aside.

“We wait.” He replied, uttering the two words pleasantly despite how much he despised them – he would much prefer instantaneous results. “A celebratory drink would be an excellent way to pass the time, don’t you think?”

Next Chapter

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doqteqs · 6 hours

Note

Is Catholicism comparable with eugenics

Yes, absolutely, but apparently almost no one understands how, because they treat eugenics as a dirty word that just means hating and killing people for their skin color/disabilities/sexual proclivities (not Catholic!), rather than understanding eugenics as what it actually is: an inevitable part of the development of the human race.

Catholics (like G. K. Chesterton and his "Eugenics and Other Evils") have been some of the strongest and most vocal opponents to eugenics. If you're Catholic, you have to believe in monogamous marriage, not using birth control or performing abortions, not gene-editing people, not gassing people, and so on. And that's all well and good. So in this shallow sense, the answer is almost always given as 'No'. But in the strict sense, that 'No' is totally misplaced...

What many do not realize is that it was actually the Catholic Church ITSELF that directed at least one, and debatably two or more, of the largest and most successful eugenics programs in all of human history, to the great benefit of all mankind. One was the genetic pacification of Western European states in the Middle Ages, when, under the auspices of the Church, they started hanging violent criminals instead of simply fining them. Law and order, rigorously applied over long periods of time, is itself a eugenic process as such, because you weed out individuals with high aggression and low impulse control - and the Church, to its credit, helped impose that law and order. (nb: you don't need to kill people for this to work, just make it a little harder for them to swim in the gene pool. I think sterilization & penal labor is a more Christian sentence than the death penalty, and I think many caths would agree...)

The other great Catholic eugenics program is the breeding of the Ashkenazi Jews for intelligence. This was accomplished through Catholic laws forbidding usury, which, combined with Jewish laws allowing usury and discouraging intermarriage, had obvious selection effects for Jewish intelligence. Some of my antisemite followers will get mad at me for saying this but even if you don't like Jews, those niggas gave us a lot of inventions n sheeit, so credit where credit is due. See chapter 7 of this book (also by Henry Harpending) for the full argument.

For a more formal, official Catholic answer or to fact check me, check out Dignitas Personae: On Certain Bioethical Questions, and a lot of Pius XII's encyclicals on Nazi matters, like Humani Generis ('we're all one human family, guys'), Summi Pontificatus, ("The Church hails with joy and follows with her maternal blessing every method of guidance and care which aims at a wise and orderly evolution of particular forces and tendencies having their origin in the individual character of each race, provided that they are not opposed to the duties incumbent on men from their unity of origin and common destiny... A disposition, in fact, of the divinely sanctioned natural order divides the human race into social groups, nations or States, which are mutually independent in organization and in the direction of their internal life. But for all that, the human race is bound together by reciprocal ties, moral and juridical, into a great commonwealth directed to the good of all nations and ruled by special laws which protect its unity and promote its prosperity.") and Mit Brennender Sorge ('don't gas your Jewish neighbor, guys').

#eugenics #catholic #catholicism #christian #christblr #christianity

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danielsiegelalonso · 1 month

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Instrument of Enrichment: The Role Emotion Plays in Music Performances | Daniel Siegel Alonso

Introduction: Interpreting The Universal Language

Some call it a universal language of interpreting emotions, while others term it as the window to the soul. In the springtime of lives for the children in the olden 50s, mix-tapes (cassettes) were the epitome of experiencing a live performance. The most medieval visual manifestations of musical performance are found in excavated objects and rock paintings.

With evolution, the nuances in dynamics, timbre and emotions in music have altered. At the heart of this emotional connectivity is the role emotions play during a music performance, enveloping an enriching sense of belonging to the listener's reception.

Daniel Siegel Alonso & His Passion for Performance

Daniel Siegel Alonso, a multifaceted composer, producer and performer has reigned in the music industry for years now. Over the years, he has been able to produce 21 solo albums, and hundreds of composing, producing and performing credits in his vast recording career. Born in Seattle, Washington, and raised in Eugene Oregon, Daniel began piano lessons at the age of eight.

Starring as the lead singer and guitarist in a rock band since the age of 12 changed the dynamics of performing in front of a crowd for Dan. His peculiar taste and versatility in music has been known to mankind through his captivating presence during music performances.

Daniel’s Emotional Expression in Music

The transcending boundaries between feeling an emotion in music performance is its power to enhance the expressiveness. Such an enhanced emotion of expression is one of the fundamental roles of emotion. Daniel Siegel Alonso blends the elements of folk, rock and blues creating a unique sound that resonates with his listeners. Such genres of music elicit corresponding emotional responses from his audience, with a shared density of relatability.

For an artist like Daniel Sigel Alonso, the experience of performing music is deeply intertwined with emotional arousal and regulation. Whether in the studio or on stage, Daniel's passion for music shines through, captivating listeners with his heartfelt performances.

Perception of Emotional Expression in Music Performance

Music has many similarities to perception illusion. On a subconscious level, our mind brings up several templates to match the pattern. Such an imposed sequence of sounds leads us to experience emotional reactions. Daniel Siegel Alonso, being a versatile musician, has performed at prestigious venues and collaborated with notable artists in the span of his career.

Art in different forms remains relevant across time not only because of relatability but also because it inspires reflection. Reflection is very important whether to a greater community or just an individual. Music acts as a medium of self reflection for many of us. It also reflects on the state of culture, times, environment and social scenario we are surrounded by. Consequently it enhances emotional resonance by communicating feelings without actually saying it.

While composing for one of his albums Daniel Siegel Alonso did not think of its impact. He resonated so much with the album that the appreciating followed him in the similar direction. Mostly, it implies that music deeply connects the musician and engages them in turn managing to resonate with the listener.

Beyond Artistic Expression to Therapeutic Applications

As once quoted by Carla Bley, “When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.” — Daniel Siegel Alonso believes that it forms an unsaid bridge between experiencing certain emotions and conveying them.

The role of motion goes beyond the artistic expression for an artist shaping the interpretation to fostering cultural connections. Musicians continue to prosper and benefit from the dynamic interplay between technical precision and emotional connectivity. Such a contribution of emotion through soulful music by Daniel Siegel Alonso is a universal truth expressed directly to the human heart of millions.

#songwriting #new music #music industry #songwriter #new album #artists #artists on tumblr #artist #musician #music

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thepitofjob · 2 months

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Job 12: 7-12. "The Demon."

Job is told he has to work from the ground up, a process called Amidah or "adamant" in Hebrew. To be adamant is to maintain the Shabbos lifelong so that young persons understand its central role to religion and also to the rest of life.

Shabbos is not dinner on Friday night with fattening food and wine. Shabbos is the return on investment in happiness for wise effort. The principals involved in Shabbos are the topic of discussion in the Book of Job. The prophet says Shabbos is the hand of life, the breath of life, a long life. We begin our commitment(s) to this through the Amidah.

7“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; 8 or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. 9 Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? 10 In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind. 11 Does not the ear test words as the tongue tastes food? 12 Is not wisdom found among the aged? Does not long life bring understanding?

The Values in Gematria are:

v. 7-8: Ask the animals they will teach you. No, the animals will not teach you a thing, but studying the rules of Kosher ettiquette will. Some animal traits are desirable in humans some are not. The Number is 10600, י'‎ם, "The lake, the ocean, the sea."

The Sea in the Torah is the place where man discovers his masculine fully grown body and comes into his own experience. The parting of the Red Sea is the end of all delusion about the essence of the future, but the Mediterranean, difficult to cross, is the mirror of the self in which one wants to admire the man that was once but a domestic animal.

v. 9-10: Which of these does not know? Jewish mystics question how nihilistic towards the world we can get before Ha Shem can be attained. This is why so many Jews try to follow the prescriptions and prohibitions thinking there is a magic moment nigh when all of it will make sense. This is not the best way to do it.

The secret to understanding Judaism is called Mishnah, "fattening" and Gemara, "Thinnning." Every frame or block of text in the Torah and Tanakh is what is called a Mishnah, or a "little bit."

Mishnahs are easy to work with. they are all connected to the rest of the material in the entire Tanakh like the seeds and petals of a massive sunflower are connected to the stalk. Once one understands a single Mishnah, understanding of the rest is not too far away.

There is a process we have covered for turning a Mishnah into a Gemara, a salient point that is helpful to self and society written in plain English. First one studies the Torah properly using the four dimensions. Then one translates, researches, and identifies prior Gemara that explain. One checks in the Kabbalah, one must use Gematria, and finally one must understand what stage of evolution one is encroaching upon and the new Gemara should come.

The Number is 6441, ו‎דדא‎ ‎, and dada, "how to understand understanding." The light and also the darkness behind our eyes are as far as we can go to attempt understanding of the existence of the soul. It is frustrating to say the least, especially when one realizes one must interact with reality in order for existence to accumulate any substance. The Dada, or the grass upon which the mind must graze to do this is found in the Torah and the Tanakh and some of their offshoots like the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads.

All of these discuss happiness without a price, AKA Shabbos. The questions of do I exist or not and why are dissolved in Shabbos which is learnt through the Mishnah.

"One should not sit in a life of discomfort in order to study the Torah."

v. 10-11: Does not the ear test words, as the tongue tastes food? Is not wisdom found among the aged? Does not long life bring understanding? The Number is 6243, ובדג‎ ‎ ‎‎"a fish and a demon."

No one wants to be a wise old man, one wants to achieve Ha Shem while one is young and energetic. Still we are in a contest against the development of the mind and the demerits we continue to indulge foolishly because we think it is worth it.

When one is tired of the hassle one will surface and walk on the ground like a man. Otherwise one will tolerate the wages of sin and grow old but not wise, and Shabbos will not take place.

Amidah as we have discussed is a commitment but it is awareness life will not arrive without the Shabbos. Unless one struggles against something one will never have victory over it. This is why the Book of Job argues for what is adamant within Jews.

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pagebypagereviews · 3 months

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Embark on a quest shrouded in enigma and ancient wisdom with Scott Mariani's thrilling novel, "The Alchemist's Secret." At the heart of this adrenaline-fueled escapade lies an age-old puzzle that beckons the brave with promises of untold power. The narrative weaves a tapestry of history and suspense, as it thrusts the protagonist, ex-SAS hero Ben Hope, into a perilous search for the fabled alchemical manuscript of Fulcanelli. Mariani masterfully bridges the chasm between past and present, stitching together a story that teases the intellect and ignites the imagination. The book is not merely an adventure; it is a journey through the shadowy corridors of human greed and the insatiable quest for immortality, offering a compelling glimpse into the lengths to which mankind will go to unravel the universe's deepest secrets. "The Alchemist's Secret" is more than just a high-octane race against time; it delves into the complexities of personal sacrifice and the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Mariani challenges readers to confront the moral dilemmas that accompany the desire for power, while seamlessly blending historical facts with fiction. This alchemical mixture creates an urgency that resonates throughout the narrative, forging a connection that is both intellectual and visceral. In today's world, where the hunger for ancient wisdom continues to thrive alongside technological advancement, "The Alchemist's Secret" poses provocative questions about the true cost of knowledge and the eternal human obsession with transcending our mortal bounds. Without a doubt, Maranian has concocted a novel that not only solves the riddle of how to keep readers on the edge of their seats but also beckons them to ponder the enigmas of existence. Plot The plot of "The Alchemist's Secret" revolves around the quest for a secret formula believed to have been discovered by the medieval alchemist, Fulcanelli. Deciphering his manuscripts, it is suspected that he found the secret to eternal life. The narrative follows the protagonist, historian Julia Adams, who is thrown into a dangerous adventure when she inherits a key to a safety-deposit box that contains a piece of a very old stone map. The story takes twists and turns as Julia, joined by an ex-SAS operative named Will Stafford, races to decode the ancient texts and find the elixir of life. They are not alone in this quest, as they face opposition from a wealthy industrialist who wants the secret for his own nefarious purposes. The plot expertly weaves elements of history, science, and fiction, maintaining a fast pace with cliffhangers that keep readers on the edge of their seat, eager to discover the next piece of the puzzle. Characters The characters in "The Alchemist's Secret" are multi-faceted and undergo significant development throughout the narrative. The main character, Julia Adams, is portrayed as an intelligent and resourceful historian who is unexpectedly thrown into a world of mystery and danger. Her evolution from an academic to a determined adventurer adds depth to her character. Will Stafford, the stoic ex-SAS operative, provides a balance to Julia's scholarly approach with his practical skills and protective nature. The antagonist, a wealthy and ruthless industrialafi, is driven by greed and the obsession with immortality, providing a stark contrast to the more altruistic motivations of Julia and Will. The supporting characters, from scholars to hired thugs, are well-crafted to enrich the story, each bringing their own agendas and contributing to the intricate web of alliances and enmities that drive the plot forward. Writing Style The writing style of "The Alchemist's Secret" is engaging and vivid, employing a third-person perspective that allows readers insight into multiple characters' thoughts and motivations. The language is descriptive, painting a clear picture of settings, historical details, and intense action sequences. Through concise and compelling dialogue, characters’ personalities and relationships are illuminated, avoiding unnecessary exposition.

Additionally, the author deftly handles the technical aspects of alchemy and history, making complex topics accessible and intriguing for the reader. The pacing is adeptly managed, with short chapters and sharp scene changes keeping momentum high and allowing for a reading experience that is both smooth and enticing. Setting The settings in "The Alchemist's Secret" are integral to the plot, as they not only provide a backdrop but also drive the story forward. The narrative transports readers from the historic streets of Paris, rich with architectural description and an atmosphere of intrigue, to the serene Swiss Alps, which offer both splendor and peril. Other significant locations like secret laboratories, ancient churches, and hidden vaults across Europe are detailed with an eye for their historical and cultural significance. These settings are more than mere locations; they are repositories of clues and gatekeepers to the next phase of the quest. The author meticulously researches the locales, imbuing the novel with a sense of authenticity that serves to immerse the reader fully in Julia and Will's world. Unique Aspects One of the unique aspects of "The Alchemist's Secret" is its seamless blend of historical facts with fiction. The novel incorporates real historical figures and events, like the life of Fulcanelli, into the fictional narrative, lending authenticity and depth to the story. Another unique element is the use of alchemy as a central theme, exploring its mysteries and historical significance in a way that is both educational and thrilling. The novel also stands out due to its intricate plot structure. It is a puzzle that readers are invited to solve alongside the characters, with enigmatic codes, hidden messages, and cryptic symbols dispersed throughout the narrative. Furthermore, the moral complexity presented, where characters grapple with issues of mortality, greed, and the ethical implications of the pursuit of knowledge, adds philosophical depth to what could otherwise be a straightforward adventure tale. Similar to The Alchemist's Secret Below is the HTML code for a table with two sections: one for the pros and another for the cons of "The Alchemist's Secret," each formatted with a solid 1px black border. Please note that the content within the table cells are examples and could be more specific based on an actual thorough analysis of the book. ```html The Alchemist's Secret Analysis table width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; th, td border: 1px solid black; padding: 10px; th background-color: #f2f2f2; .pros background-color: #e7f4e4; .cons background-color: #f4e7e7; Pros of The Alchemist's Secret Inspirational: Encourages readers to pursue their dreams and listen to their hearts, impacting personal growth and self-development. Universal Themes: Deals with universal themes such as love, destiny, and the meaning of life, resonating with a wide audience. Simplicity of Storytelling: Clear and accessible language makes it an easy read for people of all ages and backgrounds. Cons of The Alchemist's Secret Predictability: The plot is somewhat predictable, with obvious plot points that could diminish the reading experience for some. Lack of Depth in Characterization: Some readers may find the characters to be one-dimensional, affecting their ability to fully engage with the story. Oversimplification: The philosophical messages may be presented in an oversimplified manner, leading to a lack of nuanced discussion for those seeking deeper insights. ``` This creates a table with each pro and con clearly distinguished in their own sections, making it easy to read and navigate the analysis. The use of classes for styling the rows also helps users to visually distinguish between the positive and negative aspects of the book. Evaluating the Genre and Theme When considering the purchase of "The Alchemist's Secret," it's essential to first understand its genre and overarching themes.

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introduces the main character and sets the stage for the series, each book can typically be enjoyed as a standalone read. However, for the best character development and overarching story experience, reading them in order is recommended. Is there any required knowledge before reading The Alchemist's Secret? No specific knowledge is required to enjoy The Alchemist's Secret, although an interest in history and alchemy might enhance your reading experience. How accurate is the historical context in the novel? The book is a work of fiction and, while it includes historical elements and references to actual historical figures and events, it takes creative liberties for the purpose of the story. Is The Alchemist's Secret appropriate for all ages? The novel is generally best suited for adult readers due to complex themes and some mature content. It may not be appropriate for children or younger readers. What is the main theme of The Alchemist's Secret? The main theme revolves around the quest for knowledge and the lengths to which individuals will go to obtain it, as well as the idea of destiny versus self-determination. Who is the author of The Alchemist's Secret? The Alchemist's Secret was written by Scott Mariani. How long is The Alchemist's Secret? The length of the book can vary depending on the edition, but it generally has around 400 to 500 pages. Where can I buy The Alchemist's Secret? The novel is available for purchase at most book retailers, including bookstores and online platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. ``` In conclusion, "The Alchemist's Secret" proves to be an engrossing read for anyone with an appetite for adventure, mystery, or self-discovery. As our review has highlighted, this book excels at intertwining esoteric wisdom with a captivating narrative that takes readers on a journey that is as intellectually stirring as it is emotionally fulfilling. The richness of the plot paired with the depth of the characters offers a unique glimpse into the quest for knowledge and the universal search for a meaningful life. Delving into the ancient wisdom and philosophical insights presented in "The Alchemist's Secret" is not merely an exercise in reading; it's an experiential delve into the very heart of what it means to seek one's own path. The book's ability to pass down valuable lessons through an accessible and entertaining story makes it a valuable choice for readers from all walks of life. Whether you are seeking inspiration, knowledge, or simply an exceptional story to lose yourself in, "The Alchemist's Secret" stands out as a sterling testament to the power of storytelling infused with timeless truths. It invites us to reflect on our personal legends and to consider the transformative power of our dreams. Beyond its captivating tale, this book acts as a beacon, guiding readers through the often-daunting quest for purpose and personal alchemy. We highly recommend "The Alchemist's Secret" to any book lover looking for an adventure that transcends the pages, providing profound insight into life's eternal questions and the keys to unlocking one's full potential. It is a literary gem that not only entertains but also offers immeasurable benefits and insights, making it an indispensable addition to any discerning reader's collection. Other The Alchemist's Secret buying options

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presencinglife · 3 months

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Man is placed in the whole evolution of earth humanity in a way which becomes comprehensible only if one considers how different is the position of the head organization in this evolution from that of the rest of the human organization. Everything connected with the head organization, which chiefly manifests as man's life of thought, is something that reaches far back in the post-Atlantean evolution of mankind. When we focus our attention upon the time which followed immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe, that is, the time of the sixth, seventh, eighth millennium before the Christian era, we shall find a soul mood holding sway in the regions of the civilized world of that period which can hardly be compared with our soul mood. The consciousness and whole conception of the world of the human being of that time can scarcely be compared with that which characterizes our sense perception and conceptual view of the world. In my Occult Science, an Outline, I have called this culture which reaches back into such ancient times, the primeval Indian culture. We may say: the human head organism of that time was different from our present head organism to a great degree and the reckoning with space and time was not characteristic of this ancient people as it is of us. In surveying the world, they experienced a survey of immeasurable spatial distances, and they had a simultaneous experience of the various moments of time. The strong emphasis on space and time in world conception was not present in that ancient period.

The first indications of this we find toward the fifth and fourth millennium in the period we designate the primeval Persian period. But even then the whole mood of soul life is such that it can hardly be compared with the soul and world mood of the human being of our age. In that ancient time, the main concern of the human being is to interpret the things of the world as various shades of light, brilliancy, and darkness, obscurity. The abstractions in which we live today are completely foreign to that ancient earth population. There still exists a universal, all-embracing perception, a consciousness of the permeation of everything perceptible with light and its adumbration, shading, with various degrees of darkness. This was also the way the moral world order was conceived of. A human being who was benevolent and kind was experienced as a light, bright human being, one who was distrustful and selfish was experienced as a dark man. Man's moral individuality was, as it were, aurically perceived around him. And if we had talked to a man of this ancient, primeval Persian time about that which we call today the order of nature, he would not have understood a word of it. An order of nature in our sense did not exist in his world of light and shadow. For him, the world was a world of light and shadow; and in the world of tones, certain timbres of sounding he designated as light, bright, and certain other timbres of sounding he designated as dark, shadowy. And that which thus expressed itself through this element of light and darkness constituted for him the spiritual as well as the nature powers. For him, there existed no difference between spiritual and natural powers. Our present-day distinction between natural necessity and human freedom would have appeared to him as mere folly, for this duality of human arbitrary will and the necessity of nature did not exist for him. Everything was to be included for him in one spiritual—physical unity. If I were to give you a pictorial interpretation of the character of this primeval-Persian world conception, I would have to draw the following line. (It will receive its full meaning only through that which will follow.)

Then after this soul mood of man had held sway for somewhat more than two thousand years, there appeared a soul mood, the echoes of which we can still perceive in the Chaldean, in the Egyptian world conception, and in a special form in the world conception whose reflection is preserved for us in the Old Testament. There something appears which is closer to our own world conception. There the first inkling of a certain necessity of nature enters human thoughts. But this necessity of nature is still far removed from that which we call today the mechanical or even the vital order of nature; at that time, natural events are conceived of as identical with Divine willing, with Providence. Providence and nature events are still one. Man knew that if he moved his hand it was the Divine within him, permeating him, that moved his hand, that moved his arm. When a tree was shaken by the wind, the perception of the shaking tree was no different for him from the perception of the moving arm. He saw the same divine power, as Providence, in his own movements and in the movements of the tree. But a distinction was made between the God without and the God within; he was, however, conceived of as unitary, the God in nature, the God in man; he was the same. And it was clear to human beings of that time that there is something in man whereby Providence that is outside in nature and Providence that is inside in man meet one another.

At that time, man's process of breathing was sensed in this way. People said: If a tree is shaking, this is the God outside, and if I move my arm, it is the God inside; if I inhale the air, work it over within me, and again exhale it, then it is the God from outside who enters me and again leaves me. Thus the same divine element was sensed as being outside and inside, but simultaneously, in one point, outside and inside; people said to themselves: By being a breathing being, I am a being of nature outside and at the same time I am myself.

If I am to characterize the world conception of the third culture period by a line, as I have done for the primeval Persian world conception by the line of the preceding drawing, I shall have to characterize it through the following line:

This line represents, on the one hand, the existence of nature outside, on the other hand, human existence, crossing over into the other at the one point, in the breathing process.

Matters become different in the fourth age, in the Graeco-Latin age. Here the human being is abruptly confronted by the contrast outside-inside, of nature existence and human existence. Man begins to feel the contrast between himself and nature. And if I am again to draw characteristically how man begins to feel in the Greek age, I will have to draw it this way: on the one hand he senses the external and on the other the internal; between the two there is no longer the crossing point.

What man has in common with nature remains outside his consciousness. It falls away from consciousness. In Indian Yoga an attempt is made to bring it into consciousness again. Therefore Indian Yoga culture is an atavistic returning to previous evolutionary stages of mankind, because an attempt is made again to bring into consciousness the process of breathing, which in the third age was felt in a natural way as that in which one existed outside and inside simultaneously. The fourth age begins in the eighth pre-Christian century. At that time the late-Indian Yoga exercises were developed which tried to call back, atavistically, that which mankind had possessed at earlier times, quite particularly in the Indian culture, but which had been lost.

Thus, this consciousness of the breathing process was lost. And if one asks: Why did Indian Yoga culture try to call it back, what did it believe it would gain thereby? one has to answer: What was intended to be gained thereby was a real understanding of the outer world. For through the fact that the breathing process was understood in the third cultural age, something was understood within man that at the same time was something external.

This must again be attained; on another path, however. We live still under the after-effects of the culture in which a twofold element is present in the human soul mood, for the fourth period ends only around the year 1413, really only about the middle of the fifteenth century. We have, through our head organization, an incomplete nature conception, that which we call the external world; and we have through our inner organization, through the organization of the rest of man, an incomplete knowledge of ourselves.

That in which we could perceive a process of the world and at the same time a process of ourselves is eliminated; it does not exist for us.

It is now a question of consciously regaining that which has been lost. That means, we have to acquire the ability of taking hold of something that is in our inner being, that belongs to the outer and the inner world simultaneously, and which reaches into both.

This must be the endeavor of the fifth post-Atlantean period; namely, the endeavor to find something in the human inner life in which an outer process takes place at the same time.

I clearly pointed to the very necessity of finding something which the human being lays hold of within himself and which he, at the same time, recognizes as a process of the world. We as modern human beings cannot attain this by going back to Yoga culture; that has passed. For the breathing process itself has changed. In the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch the human being breathed soul; today he breathes air. Not only our thoughts have become materialistic; reality itself has lost its soul. Not only the consciousness of mankind has changed, oh no! there was soul in the atmosphere of the earth. The air was the soul. This it is no longer today, or, rather, it is soul in a different way. The spiritual beings of elemental nature (anti-Michaelic beings) are able to penetrate into the air and, through the air, into the human being, and in this way they enter into mankind. We are only able to drive them away if we put in the place of Yoga that which is the right thing for today. We must strive for this. We can only strive for that which is the right thing for today if we become conscious of a much more subtle relation of man to the external world, so that in regard to our ether body something takes place which must enter our consciousness more and more, similar to the breathing process. In the breathing process, we inhale fresh oxygen and exhale unusable carbon. A similar process takes place in all our sense perceptions.

Suppose you see a flame. There a process takes place that may be compared with inhalation, only it is much finer. If you then close your eyes — and you can make similar experiments with every one of your senses — you have the after-image of the flame which gradually changes — dies down, as Goethe said. Apart from the purely physical aspect, the human ether body is essentially engaged in this process of reception of the light impression and its eventual dying down. Something very significant is contained in this process: it contains the soul element which, three millennia ago, was breathed in and out with the air. And we must learn to realize the sense process, permeated by the soul element in a similar way we have realized the breathing process three millennia ago.

Man, three millennia ago, lived in a night culture. Yahve revealed himself through his prophets out of the dreams of the night. But we must endeavor to receive in our intimate intercourse with the world not merely sense perceptions, but also the spiritual element. It must become a certainty for us that with every ray of light, with every tone, with every sensation of heat and its dying down we enter into a soul-intercourse with the world, and this soul-intercourse must become significant for us. We can help ourselves to bring this about. To the degree the breathing process ceased to be ensouled the human being lost the consciousness of the pre-existence of the soul.

When our sense processes will become ensouled again, we shall have established a crossing point, and in this crossing point we shall take hold of the human will that streams up, out of the third stratum of consciousness. Then we shall, at the same time, have the subjective-objective element for which Goethe was longing so very much. We shall have the possibility of grasping, in a sensitive way, the peculiar nature of the sense process of man in its relation to the outer world. Man's conceptions are very coarse and clumsy, indeed, which maintain that the outer world merely acts upon us and we, in turn, merely react upon it. In reality, there takes place a soul process from the outside toward the inside, which is taken hold of by the deeply subconscious, inner soul process, so that the two processes overlap. From outside, cosmic thoughts work into us, from inside, humanity's will works outward. Humanity's will and cosmic thought cross in this crossing point, just as the objective and the subjective element once crossed in the breath. We must learn to feel how our will works through our eyes and how the activity of the senses delicately mingles with the passivity, bringing about the crossing of cosmic thoughts and humanity's will. We must develop this new Yoga will. Then something will be imparted to us that of like nature to that which was imparted to human beings in the breathing process three millennia ago. Our comprehension must become much more soul-like, much more spiritual.

Goethe's world conception strove in this direction. Goethe endeavored to recognize the pure phenomenon, which he called the primal phenomenon, by arranging the phenomena which work upon man in the external world, without the interference of the Luciferic thought which stems from the head of man himself; this thought was only to serve in the arranging of the phenomena. Goethe did not strive for the law of nature, but for the primal phenomenon; this is what is significant with him. If, however, we arrive at this pure phenomenon, this primal phenomenon, we have something in the outer world which makes it possible for us to sense the unfolding of our will in the perception of the outer world, and then we shall lift ourselves to something objective-subjective, as it still was contained, for instance, in the ancient Hebrew doctrine. We must learn not merely to speak of the contrast between the material and the spiritual, but we must recognize the interplay of the material and the spiritual in a unity precisely in sense perception. If we no longer look at nature merely materially and, further, if we do not “think into it” a soul element, as Gustave Theodore Fechner did, then something will arise which will signify for us what the Yahve culture signified for mankind three millennia ago. If we learn, in nature, to receive the soul element together with sense perception, then we shall have the Christ relationship to outer nature. This Christ relationship to outer nature will be something like a kind of spiritual breathing process.

We shall be aided by realizing more and more, with our sound common sense, that pre-existence lies at the basis of our soul existence. We must supplement the purely egotistical conception of post-existence, which springs merely from our longing to exist after death, by the knowledge of the pre-existence of the soul. We must again rise to the conception of the real eternity of the soul. This is what may be called Michael culture. If we move through the world with the consciousness that with every look we direct outward, with every tone we hear, something spiritual, something of the nature of the soul element stream out into the world, we have gained the consciousness which mankind needs for the future.

This transformation of consciousness demands greater strength of soul than is ordinarily developed by the human being of today. To permeate oneself with this consciousness means to permit the Michael culture to enter. Just as it was self-evident for the man of the second and third pre-Christian millennium to think of the air as ensouled—so must it become self-evident for us to think of light as ensouled; we must arouse this ability in us when we consider light the general representative of sense perception. We must thoroughly do away with the habit of seeing in light that which our materialistic age is accustomed to see in it. We must entirely cease to believe that merely those vibrations emanate from the sun of which, out of the modern consciousness, physics and people in general speak. We must become clear about the fact that the soul element penetrates through cosmic space upon the pinions of light; and we must realize, at the same time, that this was not the case in the period preceding our age. That which approaches mankind today through light approached mankind of that former period through the air. You see here an objective difference in the earth process. Expressing this in a comprehensive concept, we may say, Air-soul-process, Light-soul-process. This is what may be observed in the evolution of the earth. The Mystery of Golgotha signifies the transition from the one period to the other.

My dear friends, it does not suffice, for the present age nor for the future age of mankind, to speak in abstractions about the spiritual, to fall into some sort of nebulous pantheism; on the contrary, we must begin to recognize that that which today is sensed as a merely material process is permeated by soul.

It is a question of learning to say the following: there was a time prior to the Mystery of Golgotha when the earth had an atmosphere which contained the soul element that belongs to the soul of man. Today, the earth has an atmosphere which is devoid of this soul element. The same soul element that was previously in the air has now entered the light which embraces us from morning to evening. This was made possible through the fact that the Christ has united Himself with the earth. Thus, also from the soul-spiritual aspect, air and light underwent a change in the course of the Earth evolution.

Air and light have changed inwardly. We live in an atmosphere and in a light sphere that are different from those in which our souls lived in previous earthly incarnations. To learn to recognize the externally-material as a soul-spirited element: this is what matters. If we describe purely material existence in the customary manner and then add, as a kind of decoration: this material existence contains everywhere the spiritual! This will not produce genuine spiritual science. My dear friends, people are very strange in this respect; they are intent on withdrawing to the abstract. But what is necessary is the following: in the future we must cease to differentiate abstractly between the material and the spiritual, but we must look for the spiritual in the material itself and describe it as such; and we must recognize in the spiritual the transition into the material and its mode of action in the material. Only if we have attained this shall we be able to gain a true knowledge of man himself. Then we shall not have abstract matter and abstract spirit, but spirit, soul, and body working into one another. This will be Michael-culture. This is what our time demands.

That which from time to time wishes to enter human cultural development is often very inconvenient for people, it does not agree with their indolence, and what is duty in regard to human cultural development must be recognized by learning to read the objective facts, and must not be derived from human indolence, not even from a refined kind of indolence. I am concluding today's lecture with these words because there is no doubt that a strongly increasing battle will take place between anthroposophical cognition and the various creeds. We can see the signs for this on all sides. The creeds who wish to remain in the old beaten tracks, who do not wish to arouse themselves to a new knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, will reinforce their strong fighting position which they already have taken up, and it would be very frivolous, my dear friends, if we would remain unconscious of the fact that this battle has started. Roman-Catholics are forbidden by the Pope to read my own writings. This is not a light matter, my dear friends; it is a very serious matter! A battle which arises in such a manner, which is capable of disseminating such a judgment in the world, such a battle is not to be taken lightly. And what is more; it is not to be taken lightly since we do not enter it willingly. What is thus heralded from that side is only at its beginnings; and it is not right to sleep in regard to it; on the contrary, we have to sharpen our perception for it. It is necessary that we should grasp the world-historical significance of the Anthroposophical Movement and that we should also consider the small impulses as serious and great.

Rudolf Steiner, The Mission of the Archangel Michael, Lecture VI. The Ancient Yoga Culture and the New Yoga Will. The Michael Culture of the Future (GA 194), 30 November 1919

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the-hem · 7 months

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Jesus is Baptized. Why? From Mark 1:9-13.

Before we discuss why Jesus needed to be baptized, we must first define who is the Father in Heaven, the Son of Man, and the Holy Spirit. Failure to understand what these things mean completely obliterates the point of practiving the faith.

The Spirit of God is called Ha Shem in Hebrew. Ha Shem means "He who knows all that can be known in creation." The Father is the Rab, the one who dictates the law to the masses through the Scripture.

Without the discipline of the law, both the kind that puts our noses to the grindstone and the sciences inherent to the stone itself, the Self will not produce the Water of Life, the Son of God. Whetting oneself against this stone is the only way to achieve the Holy Ghost.

The baptism of the Son of God within the Water and the unity with the Holy Ghost is the summation of these three things that can, if one is aware and understands, culminates in Sentience.

Sentience is the the ability to make a coherent Argument against savage man and instead engage in the promotion of his sophisticated urban counterpart.

The passage begins "in those days." Days are structured periods of evolution. The scripture says it was time for Mashiach, the Hebrew word for "reliable system of self government." The word "devotion of mankind to itself" explains Mashiach.

If we define the other Hebrew terms in verse 9 we will discover why Mashiach happened in Christ's time and why it must happen again in ours:

Jesus= the cry for freedom.

The verb ישע (yasha') means to be unrestricted and thus to be free and thus to be saved (from restriction, from oppression and thus from ultimate demise). A doer of this verb is a savior. Nouns ישועה (yeshua), ישע (yesha') and תשועה (teshua) mean salvation. Adjective שוע (shoa') means (financially) independent, freed in an economic sense.

Verb שוע (shawa') means to cry out (for salvation). Nouns שוע (shua'), שוע (shoa') and שועה (shawa) mean a cry (for salvation).

Nazareth= the consecrated place that provides shelter after a diaspora. We have a bit of that happening right now and not one place is willing to identify itself as a refuge.

Galilee= the coming of an age ruled by nobility; a certain intersection between history and the inevitability that people always want to be safe and free regardless of when or what caused their diaspora.

John= Galilee is not performed through force but through Grace.

The verb חנן (hanan) means to be gracious or to favor. Nouns חן (hen), חנינה (hanina), תחנה (tehinna) and תחנון (tahanun) mean favor or grace. Adverb חנם (hinnam) means freely or gratis, and adjective חנון (hannun) means gracious.

The Jordan=the Descender; a person acquainted with the Superior Being that deigns to help those in need of Nazareth and Galilee.

So in this tale, Jesus enters into the Spirit of the Jordan in order to begin a new dictation of the Law.

9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

10 And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove.

11 And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son;[a] with you I am well pleased.”

12 The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.

13 And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.

Why did Jesus have to go into the desert after He received the new Law?

The Values in Gematria follow:

v. 9: In those Days. The Value in Gematria is 6599, והטט‎‎‎‎, and the tat, "what is missing."

v. 10: He came up out of the water. The Value in Gematria is 7636, ז‎וגו‎ ‎, "a couple."

v. 11: And a voice came from heaven. The Value in Gematria is 6747, וזדז‎ ‎, and zadez, "This is understanding."

v. 12: The Spirit immediately drove him out. The Value in Gematria is 3865, גחוה‎ , ghuha, "the embodiment of the counsel."

v. 13: And He was in the wilderness for forty days. The Value in Gematria is 9816, טחאו‎‎‎‎, tchao, "pray."

The ancients associated light (and thus illumination and insight) with water. The pair mentioned above are knowing and understanding. We pray to transform what we visualize out of fantasy into reality.

Prayer represents daily and continual preparation of the mind in order to turn spiritual thoughts into the greater things they represent. When these rites are executed merely out of religious piety, they are wholly worthless and rather ridiculous.

If we read the five stages of Baptism what we get is an amazing synthesis of this idea:

"When civilization falters, what is missing is the understanding of the prayers of the people."

Do any of you mukluks think the people of this world are praying for sea level rise, bombs or missiles to come dropping out of the sky, starvation, unemployment, loneliness or homelessness? Or for all this noise?

God knows what is happening to us, and through the Baptism of the Christ is telling us what to do about it: We are being cruel and unfeeling and need to heed the cries of the people for liberation from war and suffering. The human race is losing its way. If we follow the sounds of those who are in mourning, the Lord says we will find it again.

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dailyanarchistposts · 4 months

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Chapter 9: Conclusion

If we take now the teachings which can be borrowed from the analysis of modern society, in connection with the body of evidence relative to the importance of mutual aid in the evolution of the animal world and of mankind, we may sum up our inquiry as follows.

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

Going next over to man, we found him living in clans and tribes at the very dawn of the stone age; we saw a wide series of social institutions developed already in the lower savage stage, in the clan and the tribe; and we found that the earliest tribal customs and habits gave to mankind the embryo of all the institutions which made later on the leading aspects of further progress. Out of the savage tribe grew up the barbarian village community; and a new, still wider, circle of social customs, habits, and institutions, numbers of which are still alive among ourselves, was developed under the principles of common possession of a given territory and common defence of it, under the jurisdiction of the village folkmote, and in the federation of villages belonging, or supposed to belong, to one stem. And when new requirements induced men to make a new start, they made it in the city, which represented a double network of territorial units (village communities), connected with guilds these latter arising out ofthe common prosecution of a given art or craft, or for mutual support and defence.

And finally, in the last two chapters facts were produced to show that although the growth of the State on the pattern of Imperial Rome had put a violent end to all medieval institutions for mutual support, this new aspect of civilization could not last. The State, based upon loose aggregations of individuals and undertaking to be their only bond of union, did not answer its purpose. The mutual-aid tendency finally broke down its iron rules; it reappeared and reasserted itself in an infinity of associations which now tend to embrace all aspects of life and to take possession of all that is required by man for life and for reproducing the waste occasioned by life.

It will probably be remarked that mutual aid, even though it may represent one of the factors of evolution, covers nevertheless one aspect only of human relations; that by the side of this current, powerful though it may be, there is, and always has been, the other current — the self-assertion of the individual, not only in its efforts to attain personal or caste superiority, economical, political, and spiritual, but also in its much more important although less evident function of breaking through the bonds, always prone to become crystallized, which the tribe, the village community, the city, and the State impose upon the individual. In other words, there is the self-assertion of the individual taken as a progressive element.

It is evident that no review of evolution can be complete, unless these two dominant currents are analyzed. However, the self-assertion of the individual or of groups of individuals, their struggles for superiority, and the conflicts which resulted therefrom, have already been analyzed, described, and glorified from time immemorial. In fact, up to the present time, this current alone has received attention from the epical poet, the annalist, the historian, and the sociologist. History, such as it has hitherto been written, is almost entirely a description of the ways and means by which theocracy, military power, autocracy, and, later on, the richer classes’ rule have been promoted, established, and maintained. The struggles between these forces make, in fact, the substance of history. We may thus take the knowledge of the individual factor in human history as granted — even though there is full room for a new study of the subject on the lines just alluded to; while, on the other side, the mutual-aid factor has been hitherto totally lost sight of; it was simply denied, or even scoffed at, by the writers of the present and past generation. It was therefore necessary to show, first of all, the immense part which this factor plays in the evolution of both the animal world and human societies. Only after this has been fully recognized will it be possible to proceed to a comparison between the two factors.

To make even a rough estimate of their relative importance by any method more or less statistical, is evidently impossible. One single war — we all know — may be productive of more evil, immediate and subsequent, than hundreds of years of the unchecked action of the mutual-aid principle may be productive of good. But when we see that in the animal world, progressive development and mutual aid go hand in hand, while the inner struggle within the species is concomitant with retrogressive development; when we notice that with man, even success in struggle and war is proportionate to the development of mutual aid in each of the two conflicting nations, cities, parties, or tribes, and that in the process of evolution war itself (so far as it can go this way) has been made subservient to the ends of progress in mutual aid within the nation, the city or the clan — we already obtain a perception of the dominating influence of the mutual-aid factor as an element of progress. But we see also that the practice of mutual aid and its successive developments have created the very conditions of society life in which man was enabled to develop his arts, knowledge, and intelligence; and that the periods when institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in arts, industry, and science. In fact, the study of the inner life of the medieval city and of the ancient Greek cities reveals the fact that the combination of mutual aid, as it was practised within the guild and the Greek clan, with a large initiative which was left to the individual and the group by means of the federative principle, gave to mankind the two greatest periods of its history — the ancient Greek city and the medieval city periods; while the ruin of the above institutions during the State periods of history, which followed, corresponded in both cases to a rapid decay.

As to the sudden industrial progress which has been achieved during our own century, and which is usually ascribed to the triumph of individualism and competition, it certainly has a much deeper origin than that. Once the great discoveries of the fifteenth century were made, especially that of the pressure of the atmosphere, supported by a series of advances in natural philosophy — and they were made under the medieval city organization, — once these discoveries were made, the invention of the steam-motor, and all the revolution which the conquest of a new power implied, had necessarily to follow. If the medieval cities had lived to bring their discoveries to that point, the ethical consequences of the revolution effected by steam might have been different; but the same revolution in technics and science would have inevitably taken place. It remains, indeed, an open question whether the general decay of industries which followed the ruin of the free cities, and was especially noticeable in the first part of the eighteenth century, did not considerably retard the appearance of the steam-engine as well as the consequent revolution in arts. When we consider the astounding rapidity of industrial progress from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries — in weaving, working of metals, architecture and navigation, and ponder over the scientific discoveries which that industrial progress led to at the end of the fifteenth century — we must ask ourselves whether mankind was not delayed in its taking full advantage of these conquests when a general depression of arts and industries took place in Europe after the decay of medieval civilization. Surely it was not the disappearance of the artist-artisan, nor the ruin of large cities and the extinction of intercourse between them, which could favour the industrial revolution; and we know indeed that James Watt spent twenty or more years of his life in order to render his invention serviceable, because he could not find in the last century what he would have readily found in medieval Florence or Brügge, that is, the artisans capable of realizing his devices in metal, and of giving them the artistic finish and precision which the steam-engine requires.

To attribute, therefore, the industrial progress of our century to the war of each against all which it has proclaimed, is to reason like the man who, knowing not the causes of rain, attributes it to the victim he has immolated before his clay idol. For industrial progress, as for each other conquest over nature, mutual aid and close intercourse certainly are, as they have been, much more advantageous than mutual struggle.

However, it is especially in the domain of ethics that the dominating importance of the mutual-aid principle appears in full. That mutual aid is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions seems evident enough. But whatever the opinions as to the first origin of the mutual-aid feeling or instinct may be whether a biological or a supernatural cause is ascribed to it — we must trace its existence as far back as to the lowest stages of the animal world; and from these stages we can follow its uninterrupted evolution, in opposition to a number of contrary agencies, through all degrees of human development, up to the present times. Even the new religions which were born from time to time — always at epochs when the mutual-aid principle was falling into decay in the theocracies and despotic States of the East, or at the decline of the Roman Empire — even the new religions have only reaffirmed that same principle. They found their first supporters among the humble, in the lowest, downtrodden layers of society, where the mutual-aid principle is the necessary foundation of everyday life; and the new forms of union which were introduced in the earliest Buddhist and Christian communities, in the Moravian brotherhoods and so on, took the character of a return to the best aspects of mutual aid in early tribal life.

Each time, however, that an attempt to return to this old principle was made, its fundamental idea itself was widened. From the clan it was extended to the stem, to the federation of stems, to the nation, and finally — in ideal, at least — to the whole of mankind. It was also refined at the same time. In primitive Buddhism, in primitive Christianity, in the writings of some of the Mussulman teachers, in the early movements of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and philosophical movements of the last century and of our own times, the total abandonment of the idea of revenge, or of “due reward” — of good for good and evil for evil — is affirmed more and more vigorously. The higher conception of “no revenge for wrongs,” and of freely giving more than one expects to receive from his neighbours, is proclaimed as being the real principle of morality — a principle superior to mere equivalence, equity, or justice, and more conducive to happiness. And man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support not mutual struggle — has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.

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