King Crimson and Frederick II: The Metaphysical Record ~ The Crimson King

CHAPTER TWO

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - The Metaphysical Record | pg. 2 - The Wall on Which the Prophets Wrote
pg. 3 - The Union of Opposites | pg. 4 - Alchemy | pg. 5 - The Crimson King

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The medieval axiom "As above, so below" dictates that for every metaphysical phenomenon there is an earthly correlate. If the emperor's crimson color indicates, in metaphysical terms, that he has achieved the highest alchemical state, then, in earthly terms, the Crimson King, Frederick II, is crimson with blood.

"In the thirteenth century, all sorts of cruelties were common. The popes themselves committed ten of nineteen descendants of Frederick II to prison, one of his daughters for forty-eight years, and saw to the deaths of others in battle or capture. When Frederick II's chief advisor, Taddeo da Suessy, was taken prisoner at Parma, his hands were immediately cut off by those loyal to the pope and he was thrown into a dungeon. For suspicion of stealing from him, Frederick seized his other chief advisor, the poet della Vigna (later celebrated by Dante), had his eyes burned out, and threw him into a dungeon. There the poet killed himself by pounding his head against the damp stone walls. In southern France, men and women alike were accused of being heretics, given no way to defend themselves except by enduring torture, and if found guilty covered with pitch and set aflame. Swords aloft, soldiers were set free upon entire settlements of heretics, which they torched. During the lifetime of Aquinas, all of Provence was swept by violence against heretics-some of whom were living, according to their own lights, admirable evangelical lives.
Frederick II was excommunicated by the Council of Lyons, purportedly for the reign of massacre and terror that he had inflicted upon cities throughout Italy. Frederick was capable at a whim of ordering an entire city razed, its men butchered or sold into slavery, its women sent eastward to become slaves of his Saracen friends…"

- Aquinas and the Heretics by Michael Novak

"Frederick II retaliated for his second excommunication by wrecking a Genoese fleet and capturing over 100 Cardinals and Bishops on board who were in passage to a Synod at Rome."

- St. Thomas Aquinas Meets Chaos Theory

"They took two cardinals, four Archbisops, six Bishops and four Abbots and, in so far as they were not dead, the Lombard's ambassadors. Many rode about on planks in the crimsoned waves and lamented : " O Vierge Marie, Madonna ". Two thousand corpses floated about, face upwards."

- The Infidel Emperor
by Paul Wiegler (p.200)

"Three ships were sunk and twenty-two captured with something like four thousand Genoese. The emperor prepared to march on Rome."

- A History of the Church
by Philip Hughes

"Matthew Paris in relating the capture of the prelates quotes the Sibylinne prophecy taken from the so-called Dicta Merlin :

"The sea will be crimsoned with the blood of the saints."

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

"This event made an enormous impression on the world. Nothing that any previous Emperor had ever dared or done was comparable to this capture of cardinals and a hundred priests. Frederick's power seemed boundless, but a certain horror was blended with the admiration. Enemies recognised therein the ruthlessness of Satan. Nothing had so strongly ministered to the conviction that Frederick was the herald of Antichrist as the capture and continued captivity of the princes of the Church in the prisons of the Emperor. Many of them died in his dungeons, and their blood cried out against this enemy of the faith."

- Frederick II
by Ernst Kantorowicz
(p. 550)

"…He was held by many to be the Great Heretic of the epoch, who for nearly thirty years waged constant warfare throughout Italy, leaving a train of ruin, slaughter, humiliation, and misery.
…Frederick II remains an ambiguous figure who has haunted the German imagination even into our own century."

- Aquinas and the Heretics by Michael Novak

For this stranger, this Roman of Swabian race, embodied that European-German personage whom men had dreamt of, who combined the triple culture of Europe : the cultures of the Church, the East, the Ancients. The Church was to Frederick II something complete and finished, which he had in himself outgrown, which lay behind him. Nietzsche called Frederick "to my mind the First European," and wrote of "that magic, intangible, unfathomable Riddle of a man predestined to victory and betrayal."

- Frederick II
by Ernst Kantorowicz
(p. 387)

proceed to The Court of the Crimson King

Baro Urbigerus, Besondere Chymische Schriften,
Hamburg, 1705

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