In the Beginning was the Word ~ The Promethean Rebel

Chapter Ten

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
~ In the Court of the Crimson King ~

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Intro: The Schizoid Man | pg. 2 - Night Sounds
pg. 3 - Welcome to the Machine | pg. 4 - The Laboratory
pg. 5 - Agamemnon | pg. 6 - Prometheus
pg. 7 - Paranoia's Poison Door | pg. 8 - Projective Identification
pg. 9 - The Promethean Rebel | pg. 10 - Aries and the Emperor
pg. 11 - Mirrors | pg. 12 - In the Beginning was the Word
pg. 13 - Death Seed | pg. 14 - I Talk to the Wind
pg. 15 - Said the Straight Man to the Late Man | pg. 16 - Epitaph
pg. 17 - Apollo | pg. 18 - The Fate of All Mankind
pg. 19 - Malkuth

site index

"The life of the philosopher devoted to inquiry into, and contemplation of, things eternal, whose everlasting beauty can be neither produced nor consumed by man, was taken over by early Christianity in its claim to be free of all entanglement in worldly affairs.

Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes and Bacon (and before them, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen) rebelled against this notion, and their rebellion made manifest the change from ancient to modern thought. They were no longer occupied with eternity, but with the way that nature and society could become objects under human control. They argued that once human intellectual effort was directed from traditional concerns to new ones (from contemplation to action, from accounts of what men ought to do to what they actually intend doing, and from metaphysics to scientific examination of natural causes) then the harsh inconveniences of nature and political life (as well as their challenges and demands) would be relieved or overcome.

In short, their philosophies laid the foundations of modern society and science, and Western man started on his journey towards mastery of the universe, for better or worse."

- A Journey Through Time

Each verse of 21st Century Schizoid Man addresses the Promethean impulse as it is manifested in a different realm of life.

Verse One	Science	"Neuro-surgeons scream for more"
Verse Two	Government	"Politician's funeral pyre"
Verse Three	Art	"Poet's starving children bleed"

"Frederick II founded the University of Naples, and kept a brilliant court, where he shone as scientist, artist, and poet. He was also an excellent soldier, diplomat and administrator."

- Germany

"In his rather short lifetime, Frederick fathered absolute monarchy (Government), a scientific method based on observation (Science), and Italian poetry (Art). The first two of these concepts are manifested in Frederick's two great works, his Constitutions of Melfi and The Art of Falconry , the last in his brilliant court."

- Gothic Paris at UC, Frederick II

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;"

"The man considered by many to be the greatest falconry enthusiast of all time was Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, king of Sicily and Jerusalem. His book, De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (The Art of Falconry), took over thirty years to complete and, as one of the first scientific works on the anatomy of birds, has placed him as one of the founders of ornithology. Frederick's obsession with falconry often disrupted his ability to maintain effective leadership. He once lost an important military campaign because he decided to go hawking instead of continuing the siege of a fortress. His crusade in 1228, in which he brought back many experienced falconers from Arabia and Syria, added greatly to his knowledge and experience in falconry."

- Ancient & Medieval Falconry:
Origins & Functions in Medieval England

"While The Art of Falconry is an extremely important zoological treatise, to both the medieval world and the modern, it is also a direct attack on Aristotelian science based on speculation, rather than observation. This latter function establishes Frederick II as the founder of the scientific method as we know it today."

- Gothic Paris at UC, Frederick II

"Cat's foot iron claw
Neuro-surgeons scream for more"

"Frederick II also conducted experiments to extend his knowledge of the human species. These experiments created a scandal amongst his contemporaries, for it would still take another 300 years before the taboo against looking inside the human body was broken."

- A Journey Through Time

"The 1240 Imperial edict with which dissection of human corpses was authorised, for study and scientific purposes, was another powerful trait of Frederick's modern profile. Knowledge is achievable only through direct ""hands on" experience. Frederick ordered the study of anatomy as mandatory for medical students."

- Frederick II by Lorenzo Matteoli

"In The Art of Hunting with Birds, he described the behavior and training of falcons. He was one of the earliest experimenters in Europe. Some of his experiments, however, were more than a little macabre. In one, he locked convicts in an airtight room until they suffocated, then tried to watch their souls escape when he opened the door. He also abandoned babies in the wild (who, of course, subsequently died) to attempt to discover if humans possessed a "natural" language."

- Fredrick II

"As silence drowns the screams"

"Frederick II, King of Sicily and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, wanted to know what language children, if deprived of any verbal influence, would speak as they grew. He took a group of infants from their mothers and ordered they be raised by caretakers who provided food and shelter but were forbidden to speak in their presence. He never found out. None of the children in this bizarre experiment ever spoke a word, all having withered and died from lack of connection to the world they were born into.

- When Love is not Enough
TCU Magazine

"One of the most striking features of De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (The Art of Falconry) is its evidence of Fredrick's intimate knowledge of the pertinent works of Aristotle. But his own experience and observations soon led Frederick to distrust many of the findings of Aristotle. Indeed, if there were a single moment during the Middle Ages of which it could be said: Here begins the habit of thinking based upon a determination to see the world of nature as it is, it would be when the greatest of the thirteenth century sovereigns boldly defied the prevailing acceptance of Aristotle as infallible. In his preface to the De Arte Venandi (The Art of Falconry) he says: 'We discovered by hard won experience that the deductions of Aristotle, whom we followed when they appealed to our reason, were not enirely to be relied upon.' It is little wonder that Pope Gregory IX quickly perceived the dangers inherent in the dawn of an age of reason - a new era in which the enlightened scholars of Christendom would accept, in questions pertaining to the earth and to nature, only that which is provable by reason."

- Thomas Curtis Van Cleve
The Emperor Frederick II von Hohenstaufen Immutator Mundi ( p. 314)

"Out of the sea has risen a beast full of names of reviling, with the feet of a bear, the maw of a bloody lion and, in his other members like unto a panther...."

"Cat's foot iron claw"

"...With its claws and iron teeth it would rend everything, with its feet trample upon everything, and it standeth up no longer in secret, but, openly, against Christ, in order to raze out the table of his laws with the pen of heretical malice. Cease therefore to be amazed if it draw the dagger of its calumnies against Us : for it hath risen up in order to root out the very name of the Lord from the earth. To the end however that ye may be able to withstand its lies by the power of truth, consider carefully the head middle and end of this beast, that calleth itself the Emperor Frederick."

- Pope Gregory IX
The Infidel Emperor
by Paul Wiegler (p. 192)

"Frederick II assumed a commanding position among a small group of men of the thirteenth century whose insistent search for the natural causes of all things, whether animate or inaminate, gradually pointed the way for the human intellect to escape from its preoccupation with the miraculous. In an age rigourously disciplined in the acceptance of the supernatural and the miraculous as adequate explanations of phenomenon, Frederick moved boldly across the restrictive boundaries delineated by the Church. He thus made possible a concept of government based upon laws that were adaptable to a changing world and capable of creating an environment of terrestial peace without impinging upon the spiritual province of the clergy.

After the promulgation of the Constitutiones or Liber Augustalis , a remarkable document often anticipating the political philosophy of both Dante and St. Thoms Aquinas, the trend toward secularization became more pronounced. While this trend was in some measure, the most revolutionary feature of the Hohenstufen era as a whole, its realization in the political sphere was so complete under Frederick II as to make of it the most striking characteristic of his reign. Indeed this political change is but a single manifestation of what has been aptly described as 'a spiritual revolution of immeasurable importance which amounted in essence to a secularization of the whole of human life.'

- The Emperor Frederick II von Hohenstaufen Immutator Mundi
by Thomas Curtis Van Cleve

"Petrarch is counted as the founder of the classical Renaissance. However, there was a good deal of Humanism in Italy before the time of Petrarch, and his zeal for the classics was a direct outcome of it. Frederick II had done everything in his power to foster the intellectual revival. From his youth, when Pope Innocent III had been his guardian and had taken shameless advantage of his position, Frederick had learned to despise the Church; and he had later appreciated the far higher civilization of the Saracens. through his influence Florence and the other growing cities of Italy had begun to treasure lay culture and independent thinking, and had acquired the veneration of paganism that is reflected in Dante.
For men, the moment they began to reflect, saw three things: the degradation of Christendom, the corruption of the Church, and (if they had any learning) the superiority of Greece and Rome."

- The Renaissance: A European Awakening
by Joseph McCabe

"To the medieval mind, quickened by its intellectual and artistic interests, Frederick II gave a new and powerful impulse, broadening its vision, severing its restrictive bonds, brushing aside the obstacles which had held it in restraint for a thousand years.

Frederick stood, intellectually in opposition to his age, invited the condemnation of the tradition-minded theocracy of the thirteenth century, made himself liable to the relentless hostile propaganda of the Roman Church. While not alone in his century in the search for truth, Frederick was conspicuous in that he alone among the sovereigns of the era dared to support these concepts against the obstinate resistance of the prevailing dogmatism.

He alone among the sovereigns of the first half of the thirteenth century perceived the dangers inherent in the temporal ambitions of the papacy. He saw this not merely as an encroachment on the prerogatives of the temporal princes, but as a destructive force to the spiritual office itself. Like Joachim of Floris and St. Francis of Assisi, Frederick was deeply aware of this weakness and sought vigorously to check it. In this effort, however, he was far in advance of his age. ...he was powerless against the weight of tradition to make his warning heard.

Frederick II has no counterpart or near counterpart in history. He was a man of pronounced individuality in an age that insisted upon conformity. It was his unwillingness to accept this, his insistent opposition to it, that made possible his astonishing achievements."

- The Emperor Frederick II von Hohenstaufen Immutator Mundi
by Thomas Curtis Van Cleve

"The scientist and the artist are both modern analogues
of Prometheus, and therefore also of Lucifer. Each is a
messenger in the sense that each brings a revelation
the social use of which has the potential for good or evil.
This has become true for science since the Industrial
Revolution, and is increasingly so as technology
advances. The portents were also clear to artists,
however, from the eighteenth century (the dilemma
articulated in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"). The
preoccupation of writers and composers of the
nineteenth century with such figures as Prometheus and
Faust and Byronic equivalents such as Manfred are
symptomatic and the list of artists who explored demonic
forces is a long one and includes, in composers, Mozart,
Beethoven, Berlioz, Gounod, Tchaikovsky, Boito, Liszt,
Wagner and, finally, Scriabin who, in his last tone poem
"Prometheus: Poem of Fire" Op. 60, made the linkage
between Prometheus and Lucifer explicit.

The point should also be made that the rebel demi-god
seems invariably to be linked in some way with light or
fire or both. Prometheus' gift to the human race was fire;
Lucifer, originally the "light-bringer" then presided over
the fires of hell; and, in Nordic mythology, and in
Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung" Loge, the trickster, the
messenger combines in his character elements of
Hermes, and Prometheus/Lucifer - and is, specifically, a
Fire God and also a demi-god, half human and half
divine!"

- The Promethean Connection

"Since as priest he (Frederick II) knew all mysteries no mystery was safe from his fearless mocking attack. No spirit among all the thousand demons of the world was a stranger to his cosmopolitan mind. All the supernatural magic of the East was at his command and the elusive jinns , and all the satanic poisons of Italy and the immeasurable daring of the German Mephistopheles, who crosses the Alps 'and believes that all is his."

- Frederick II
by Ernst Kantorowicz
(p. 605-6)

"The man himself, 'the wonder of the world and marvellous innovator.' cannot be measured either by the dying ideals for which he mainly fought or by the modern state which he half consciously adumbrated. There is something demonic about him. Any list of his accomplishments seem petty besides the creative spirit that brought order and form where it passed, and inspired and compelled obedience. The power, which in the rout of able and industrious men shines through crannies, in him pours out as through a rift in nature. Among the rulers in the centuries between Charlemagne and Napoleon he has no equal."

- The Cambridge Medieval History
Volume VI, Victory of the Papacy
(p.165)

"In October of 1846, Richard Wagner started the draft for a five-act play about Frederich 'Barbarossa'. It was developed, but the composer was not comfortable with the idea of marshaling a series of historical facts. It was at this point that Wagner realized the similarities between Frederich I and the Nibelung myth. In his mind, the Hohenstaufen monarch was the reincarnation of the heathen Siegfried. This spark of an idea compelled Wagner to write Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Saga (The Wibelungs: History out of Saga). This served the purpose of unifying myth with history to fit the composer's needs. One small substitution and Frederich 'Redbeard' became a descendent of the divinely sired Siegfried. The Wibelungen essay was the root from which Der Ring des Nibelungen sprang. Only a short time after the completion of the original essay, Wagner wrote Der Nibelungenmythus, als Entwurf zu einum Drama (The Nibelung Myth as a Sketch for a Drama). This work was a complete and well constructed plot for the entire Ring."

- The Nibelungenlied
By Jason D. Grimshaw

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