(Don’t bother looking—he isn’t there)

I’ve been reading J. R. Green’s Short History of the English People, and I have a couple of observations.

The first is that only a Victorian scholar could call 844 pages of very fine type “short.”

The second, and far more interesting, is that Arthur’s name does not appear in any of the obvious places.

It’s not an oversight, and it’s not just that the opportunity never came up. If you mention Badon without mentioning Arthur, it’s pretty clear that you’re avoiding the subject.

For readers who, by some unaccountable quirk of fate, haven’t read The Grail Code yet, I should explain that the battle of Mount Badon was a famous victory of the Britons against the English invaders, and that very old chronicles name Arthur as the victorious leader. If there was a historical Arthur, which seems more likely than not, then the one fact we know about him is that he won the battle of Badon.

Now, why would an unusually careful historian (and Green is unusually careful even for a Victorian) simply omit Arthur? You’d think he would take the opportunity to express an opinion, either that Arthur was probably a historical figure or that he was probably a myth. The puzzle is even more puzzling when we remember that 1874, when Green’s history was first published, was right in the middle of the great Arthurian revival. The Poet Laureate, Tennyson, was making a handy living off his Arthur stuff. Arthur was everywhere; you couldn’t just ignore him. Except, of course, that Green did. What was going on in his head?

The answer probably has to do with the kind of history Green thought he was writing. In many ways Green is as Victorian as you expect him to be: his neatly constructed sentences, with dependent clauses arrayed in perfect order, form themselves into long paragraphs that can easily go on for a page or two. But in other ways his book seems surprisingly modern. You can see it, for example, in the names of the characters. Do you recognize the name “Æthelberht”? You probably would if I spelled it “Ethelbert,” but Green doesn’t; he doesn’t even give you a hint, like “commonly spelled ‘Ethelbert,’” to help you recognize the name. Bede is Baeda; Edwin is Eadwine. Green is consciously rejecting tradition, taking all his history from original documents, and giving us original spellings to show us what he’s done.

Green also isn’t interested in great heroes of history nearly as much as he is in overall social trends. Even if you could convince him that there was a real Arthur who was the greatest opponent of the English invaders, Green would be much less interested in him than in the emerging social and political structures of the English tribes.

In all these things, Green was in the vanguard of some of the most important intellectual trends of his time. It was an age when some of the best minds hoped for a scientific solution to every problem. The Bible, for example, could be analyzed scientifically, and the result was the era of biblical criticism, during which scholars determined that most of the Old Testament was almost completely ahistorical. Since then, of course, archaeology and other disciplines have inconveniently confirmed the historical truth of most of the Old Testament; but it was a gloriously optimistic era for science, and Green was doing his best to build a science of English history.

Part of that scientific outlook was a rejection of all tradition. If you couldn’t prove it scientifically, by referring to a contemporary or at least near-contemporary document, then it probably never happened. This rejection of tradition is the reason behind the unfamiliar spellings in Green: by giving us Baeda instead of Bede, Green shows us that he’s gone right back to the sources and rejected all the centuries between them and us.

The slope is slippery and the descent almost imperceptible. We begin by setting high standards for ourselves as historians, which is laudable; we go back to original sources, which is essential; we point out that tradition is unprovable, which is true enough; we reject tradition as a basis for scientific history, which leaves us with a comforting certainty; and we persuade ourselves (without thinking much about it) that what we’re left with is the whole of history, which is a demonstrably false and unscientific assumption.

In our age (and the same was true for the Victorians), every important event is recorded in documents of one sort or another. But that has not been true for most of history. In the time of Arthur—around the year 500—literacy was a rare accomplishment in most of Europe. Even the little that was written down would still have to make it through a historical minefield of wars, invasions, and general barbarism before it arrived, centuries later, at an age where literacy was more generally diffused and there was a demand for copies of old documents. Most of what happened in the Dark Ages is not reliably documented; that’s why we call them the Dark Ages.

But there’s a general law in human society: the weaker literacy is, the stronger and more accurate oral tradition will be. Tradition can preserve information for generations with astonishing accuracy.

My favorite example is the kindergarten playground, because it’s an example we’ve almost all seen first hand. Children on playgrounds sing the same jump-rope rhymes and the same insulting little ditties we sang when we were children, and when our parents were children, and doubtless when Queen Victoria was a child. They don’t learn these rhymes from a book, but they learn them with perfect accuracy, because the penalty for the slightest deviation is instant public humiliation.

In exactly the same way, people whose history is not written can nevertheless preserve astonishingly accurate traditions about what happened generations before them.

When we find that the first written record of an event comes generations after the event itself, therefore, we cannot simply reject the generations of tradition between the event and the record of it. That would be simply unscientific. And that’s why history, especially the history of ancient and largely illiterate times, can never be really scientific: because a purely scientific history, paradoxically, would be dreadfully unscientific.

And all this is why, in spite of the meager documentary record, I still think of Arthur as part of history. There probably was such a person, and he probably did what the oldest traditions say he did. I can’t say anything more definite than that, but perhaps truly scientific history is a science of probabilities rather than certainties.

If you’re interested in the question of the historical Arthur, we’ve spent quite a bit of time on this site looking for him. Here are some of the articles:

But what about the real Arthur?

Looking for Arthur: St. Gildas the Wise

A bit more about Gildas

Looking for Arthur in the Annals of Wales

Looking for Arthur in Nennius, Part 1

Looking for Arthur in Nennius, Part 2

Introducing Arthur the tyrant

What we think we know about Arthur in history

The historical Merlin?

The Case of the Fatherless Boy

Battle of the Dragons

Ambrosius the Wizard

Introducing Geoffrey of Monmouth

Geoffrey and the Very Old Book

The genesis of Arthur in Geoffrey

Arthur conquers Rome

Arthur’s continental adventures

The Madness of Merlin

Geoffrey and the Breton Minstrels

Meanwhile, in spite of my criticism of his method, I find Green’s history fascinating and in most places very useful. Since I can’t find it anywhere on line, I’ll be posting a few extracts over the next few days.

Just in case you haven’t heard the blasting of trumpets and the beating of tympani, Mike Aquilina has a new book out called The Resilient Church. That’s what the publisher decided to call it. I had suggested We’re All Rubber and You’re All Glue, but apparently the marketers toned down my suggestion a bit.

But “resilient” seems like exactly the right word, now that I’ve had a chance to think it over calmly. The Church always bounces back. Christianity has been through some dark times in the past twenty centuries, but the Christian Church has always emerged from the darkness and flourished. Even the Church’s worst enemies–our own sinful selves–haven’t been able to kill it.

That’s what Mike’s new book is about. Without sentimentalizing history,  Mike shows us how even the darkest times brought forth holy men and women who risked everything to hold up a lamp in the darkness.
These days almost every day brings a new headline that sounds something like “Latest Scandal Will Scuttle Christianity for Good.” And the next day there are always more Christians in the world than there were the day before. The Church grows and thrives, in spite of the fondest wishes of the pundits. A disinterested outside observer might almost be forgiven for thinking there must be something supernatural about it.

Speaking of books, don’t forget that The Grail Code is still on sale until May 27. After that, you’ll have to pay full price–which is still a bargain for a life-changing experience, but why not get a head start on changing you life and save 30% at the same time?

Well, I’ve had my fun with the story about the coded music in Rosslyn Chapel, and now I feel a little bit ashamed of myself. Not a whole lot, but a little bit.

While I was dripping sarcasm yesterday, I really did believe that the Mitchells, who are peddling this supposed discovery, were perfectly aware of what they were doing. I had assumed that they were willingly pulling the wool over our eyes—or at least over other peoples’ eyes, since you and I obviously have wool-proof eyeballs—in order to sell a few copies of an otherwise unsalable CD of pseudo-medieval music.

But now, having had a good night’s sleep, I’m feeling more charitable. I’m willing to believe now that the Mitchells are sincere, and that they really do believe they’ve found a coded musical composition in some carvings from the 1400s.

Given any suitably complex system and a willingness to fudge the data a bit, you can discover a code. The various “Bible codes” that pop up so regularly are a good example. Yes, you can find coded messages in the Bible. You can also find coded messages in Gray’s Manual of Botany. You can find coded messages in War and Peace. As long as you have lots of words to work with, and you don’t have any unreasonable expectations that the coded message will be crystal-clear when you decode it, you can find a coded message in any big book.

I don’t know how the results of the decoding were turned into music. But I have heard a snatch of the music on the Mitchells’ Web site, and I can make some guesses from what I hear. If, as I suspect, the soprano part is the supposedly decoded melody, with the other parts being counterpoint added by the Mitchells, then I can believe they actually took the music from the results of their decoding efforts. The melody has a peculiar randomness to it that doesn’t sound at all medieval to me. (I’m not a trained musicologist, but I am a big fan of Guillaume de Machaut—the early Guillaume, of course, before he sold out and went mainstream.) It may well be random; that is, it may be the result of taking non-musical data and attempting to turn them into music. Once that’s done, a skillful musician can add counterpoint, and pretty soon you have real music.

So I apologize if I portrayed the Mitchells as nothing but cynical opportunists.

On the other hand, I see they’re perfectly willing to cash in on some of the mythology of the moment. Why, after all, would someone go through all the bother of coding a musical composition in the decorations of a chapel?—“Unless it was very special piece that contained magical, harmonic and resonant properties that resonated in sympathy with spiritual beliefs. Was this music ‘outlawed’ by the Catholic church for some reason?”

I’m almost positive that the Mitchells are smart enough not to believe this new-age nonsense. That’s why I don’t really feel as much ashamed of myself as I might have otherwise. And another big fat raspberry to the Reuters news agency for making me do their work for them.

LONDON, England (GC) — Wire services will swallow anything in a press release, a new experiment shows.

The researchers, Thomas Mitchell, a retired Air Force codebreaker, and his son Stuart, a composer, announced their findings after a press release they had prepared ran as a Reuters story. The news service had made no attempt to check the facts.

“Our research shows that worldwide news organizations are easier to fool than even I had previously suspected,” Thomas Mitchell said.

“Even made-up quotations will be reprinted verbatim,” he added.

For their experiment, the Mitchells created a press release announcing a bogus “discovery” of a secret musical code in Rosslyn Chapel, the 15th-century Scottish church that figures prominently in The Da Vinci Code and other Grail-conspiracy literature.

The press release explained that carvings and decorations in the chapel were actually a secret code that hid a musical composition.

“Years of research led the Mitchells to an ancient musical system called cymatics, or Chladni patterns, which are formed by sound waves at specific pitches,” the press release read, in a paragraph that Reuters picked up word for word.

“It’s not as though we made their work hard for them,” the elder Mitchell told a GC reporter. “For the purposes of the experiment, we deliberately made outlandish misrepresentations that anyone could detect with less than two minutes’ work.”

“Cymatics” was a term invented by Swiss scientist Hans Jenny in 1967 to describe a science of wave patterns, especially the visual representation of sound. He was inspired by the work of Ernst Chladni, who, in 1787, published a method of showing the modes of vibration in a mechanical surface.

Neither Chladni’s nor Jenny’s techniques would have been available in the fifteenth century, when the Rosslyn Chapel decorations were sculpted.

“It’s not like this information is a big secret,” Mitchell said. “I mean, it’s in the Wikipedia, for Pete’s sake.”

In another related experiment, the Mitchells have released a CD recording of the supposed medieval composition, in order to determine whether bogus press releases can lead to profitable CD sales.

“I’d have to say early indications are pretty good,” Stuart Mitchell said in another completely made-up quotation.

While our backs were turned, somebody went and translated The Grail Code into Czech and Hungarian:

Hungarian, I might point out, is our first language outside the Indo-European family. I think that’s cause for celebration. And what better way to celebrate than by reminding you that the English edition is still on sale when you buy direct from the publisher? Just go to this page and follow the easy instructions. You don’t want people whispering behind your back that everyone in Hungary knows more about the Holy Grail than you do, do you?

You only have about a century tops to spend in this world before you go on to a better one, but there’s no reason not to spend that short time in the best possible place. It’s comforting to have some confirmation that I made the right choice, even though I didn’t really need it. The latest edition of the Places Rated Almanac puts Pittsburgh at the top of the list again, right where it was in the first edition.

Between those two points, 22 years apart, Pittsburgh has bounced up and down in the list, but it’s the only city that’s always been in the top 20.

Years ago, when I was growing up in the vast Washington suburbs, I used to tell people that my dream was to live in a big old house on the streetcar line in Pittsburgh, a place I knew from frequent visits to relatives. People thought I was a bit odd. Then came the first Places Rated Almanac when I was in college, and I at least had something to point to.

It’s not quite paradise. For one thing, I don’t expect to have to mow the lawn in paradise, or take out the garbage. But as a stop along the way, it’s a good choice. As I sit here right now on the third floor of a century-old house, I hear a streetcar going by.

The big news for Aristotle’s legions of screaming fans is the latest find from the Archimedes Palimpsest. A palimpsest, as you probably already know (so you can skip to the end of this sentence, if it ever does end) is a book written on top of another book: the pages are carefully scraped off and then used again, because you can’t afford to waste good parchment.

You may recall that the Archimedes Palimpsest is so named from the fact that it was written on top of an otherwise lost work of the great Archimedes, famous for running wet and naked through the streets of Alexandria, which is how they used to celebrate an important scientific discovery back in those days. It was always a party town, but at least Alexandria had a good sense of what was worth celebrating.

But Archimedes was only part of the book. With sophisticated digital imaging, scholars have also been able to recover a previously lost work by the Greek orator Hyperides. And now comes the news that a third lost work has been uncovered from the same manuscript: an ancient commentary on Aristotle.

Speaking as a big Aristotle fan myself (in college my senior thesis was entitled Jazz and the Division of the Soul, and yet I still graduated somehow), I just can’t tell you how exciting this is. Here is a glimpse at how ancient teachers interpreted the foundations of all Western logic. If you don’t think logic is exciting, try imagining how the computer you’re looking at right now would work without it.

So for once I’m not even attempting to ease the subject around to the Holy Grail. Although, as readers of The Grail Code may recall, the best medieval Grail romances were written just as Aristotle was making his big comeback in western Europe. Coincidence? Maybe, and maybe not.

The really tantalizing thing is that the Archimedes Palimpsest was recycled from five old books. Three have been deciphered so far. What’s in those other two? I can hardly wait to find out.

When I was in high school, I used to know every grubby little bookstore in the Washington metropolitan area. Somewhere on a back shelf of one of them I found Sebastian Evans’ translation of The High History of the Holy Graal, and that was the book that first introduced me to the legends of the Grail.

The dreamlike romance was what enthralled me once I started reading, but I’m sure the illustrations were the reason I bought the book in the first place. They were like nothing I had ever seen before. Here’s one of them, and it demonstrates all the qualities that make Jessie M. King’s pictures so striking: the long, flowing lines, the elongated bodies, the medieval attitudes and composition, and the blurring of the line between illustration and decoration. I choose this as the first entry in our new page of Grail art because it’s the first illustration of the Grail I ever remember seeing, and it still haunts me now, several presidential administrations later.

There’s been a shameful lack of hullabaloo from the hullabaloo industry, but GrailCode.com has just celebrated its first anniversary.

We’ve accomplished a lot in that one short year. Just to take one example, we’ve driven The Da Vinci Code off the top of the bestseller lists. Not that we took its place, but I like to think that out combination of solid history and good-natured raillery is the reason people aren’t talking much about Dan Brown anymore. I also like to think that the Tooth Fairy will make me a millionaire. There are a lot of things I like to think.

Turning to more easily quantified accomplishments, The Grail Code has accumulated six foreign-language editions in just one year, which is actually an impressive accomplishment. I say six because the Croatian edition is in the works right now. I realize that I spend so much time making things up that you might think I’m joking about a Croatian edition, but I’m honestly not.

We’ve also reached a wide audience through radio appearances all over the dial (well, probably mostly at the lower end of the dial), which brings our message to the vast numbers of people who can’t read but like to talk about books anyway.

Finally, we’ve entertained literally dozens of readers right here on the Web, which brings us back to the subject of our first anniversary.

I believe it is customary on these momentous occasions to look both backward into the past and forward into the future. It seems like a good idea, anyway.

To take care of the past first, I’ve come up with a little index of this site. No, not a useful index—anybody could do that. This is an index of a number of the surprising and unusual subjects that have come up over the past year. You could click on the links right away, but that’s cheating. What you’re supposed to do is try to guess in what context each subject came up, and then click on the links to see whether you were right. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Or, to keep our expectations more realistic, doesn’t that sound like a way to waste time while you wait on hold and wonder whether the receptionist has forgotten about you and gone to lunch?

As for looking to the future, in a very short time there will be a new page on this site: a collection of Grail illustrations, mostly from the nineteenth century, which—for reasons I’ll talk about shortly—was the great golden age of Grail art.

Meanwhile, here’s that index:

Index

Amnesty International

apartheid

Arcadia

Berra, Yogi

Buchanan, James

Buddhism

Caesar, Julius

chocolate

clay

death

epidural

Erie, Lake

Gilgamesh

IRS

jackboots

jail

John the Baptist

Johnson, Samuel

Malaprop, Mrs.

Maya

Morris, William

MTV

muffins

padlock

Remington typewriter

Somers, Suzanne

Spam

Stevenson, Robert Louis

Sturmey-Archer AW three-speed hub

supermarket

Wells, H. G.

Whig

Whirlwind

Woodstock

Yale

A few years ago, when yet another shooting massacre in the United States was occupying the news, an English acquaintance who was living in Pittsburgh at the time grumbled, “Just another bl—y shooting. Just another bl—y day in paradise.”

For the benefit of the English and Australian readers of this site, I’ve censored what is to them a strong and vulgar term. (It may surprise you to learn that we Americans don’t consider it particularly vulgar, which is probably why we almost never use it.)

But I repeat the Englishman’s expression of resignation and despair because I know he speaks for a lot of us at a time like this. Resignation and despair are our natural reactions to human evil. What can we do? Nothing, it seems. The world is broken, and we can’t fix it.

Now, this resigned view of the universe is just about exactly half right. A Christian knows that the world is corrupted by sin, but a Christian also knows that despair is a sin, too.

Other people, too strong-willed perhaps to give in to despair, will be asking whose fault it was that thirty-some people died in a peaceful college town in the Virginia mountains. You’ll hear a lot of that in the next few days, as more details about the killer come to light and it becomes clear that he was a tortured soul. Of course he was a tortured soul; they always are. Souls at peace don’t need to shoot fifty random innocent people.

Ezekiel has a pretty straightforward answer to the question of whose fault it was: it was the murderer’s fault. Don’t say it’s anyone else’s fault when you sin, Ezekiel tells us (Ezekiel 18:20). We need to remember that, because our popular culture encourages us to see ourselves as the victims when we do bad things. We came from broken homes; we came from intact homes that should have been broken; we grew up too poor to have the things we wanted; we grew up too rich and never had to work for anything.

Don’t give me that, Ezekiel says. You sinned; you pay the price.

But that doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. Jesus told us that he’d be especially severe with anyone who caused one of his little ones to sin (Mark 9:42). That doesn’t mean the sinner won’t pay the price, but it does mean that there will also be a hefty fine for anyone who pushed the sinner toward the sin.

So whose fault is it? Who made the murderer’s life so hellish that all he could think of was killing?

All the politicians and all the columnists are already going through the usual carefully chosen list of suspects. I wish for once I could hear just one of them say what I’m about to say now: it was my fault.

I don’t mean that I literally drove this particular young man to murder. The last time I was in Blacksburg was in 1986, which was actually before the murderer was born. But how often have I run into similar people—people who might well be just as tortured inside—and failed in my Christian duty?

How many times have you?

Think of what happens every time you get in a car. Have you ever blasted your horn at someone who cut in front of you, even though the maneuver was already complete and there was nothing anyone could do about it now? Have you ever shouted questions about another driver’s ancestry out the window?

Or have you ever known someone at school or at work who just doesn’t fit in—who is ignored by everyone around him, either because of his ethnic background or because of his odd tastes? How many times have you missed an opportunity to say something friendly and encouraging—something that would take you five seconds to say, but would require you to break through years of prejudice?

I’m guilty on all counts. (Except for shouting questions about people’s ancestry. I can never think of them in time.)

Every human being is looking for the Holy Grail, the object of all desire, the thing that fills that aching emptiness in our hearts. Some people stray so far that they despair of ever reaching their goal, and they despair so deeply that all they can see is darkness.

As Christians, we have the duty to point the way for everyone—that’s what Jesus meant by making disciples of all nations. The best way to do that is by showing Christian love to the people who need it most. We can’t just turn away from people because they seem a little peculiar. We have our orders.

And when we fail, we need to confess our failure and repent.

We failed. Lord, have mercy.