[From the original but lost 107th Bardot Blog Posting of January 15th, 2015]
3rd Bardot Blog : The New Greek Mythology, Conflicts and Contradictions
[From the original but lost/deleted 107th Posting of January 15th, 2015]
The Bardot Group once adhered to the venerated scholars most active throughout the 20th century AD. It was itself a minor and ancillary proponent of prehistorians who chose to ignore, or disdain entirely, the historicity supposedly too latent, even expunged, since the Early Greek Mythology of the Great Oral Tradition.. That meant the solely recitative opera recited from 1640 to 1230 BC, although the period originated most all the most famous sagas of myth and legend by the last pre-Hellenes and the earliest Greeks. I call that duration the Age of the Last Patriarchs, who were some of the greatest mythic personages of saga and legend. Alas, academic cholarship about the Second millennium BC was subordinated to the dominating Pre-Classical Tradition of fictional historiography, about a Greek civilization finally written down to alphabet script by Ancient Greeks. Its actual culture and practiced religion revered the Olympian Pantheon, even though such deities in replication of six goddesses and six gods had their ancient cult followings displacing the originally paired six Titanesses and Titans by the virginal birth, or parthenogenesis, of the Great Earth Mother Gaia/Gë. The Roman Olympian Pantheon called them by different names, and by modest transformations of their miens and comportments, at addressing their primary immanences as special aspects and gifts unto mortal humankind.
Disregarded was the Greek Olympian Pantheon’s evolution within itself as by its own numenous will and directives to become Asiatic, or Orientalized, as modeled upon the Storm God Teshub of the Hatti Imperial Age from 1400 to 1190 BC. This was a religion of strict patriarchal bents and assumptions, despite the longstanding feelings of commonfolk populace that the Greek Promordia was originated by Goddesses, all directly descended from Gaia until a lineage of their mortal daughters born of her sons, but holding, nonetheless, the primacy of arch-ancestresses of monarchic preeminence to rule vast lands allocated to them as hallowed legacies. So went the teleology, if not yet the allegorical attestation of dispersed monarchic arch-ancestresses whose regions were sanctified as separate First Estates of highest womanhood over their taken consorts for sole purposes of procreation — of more daughters. However, I ask my readers to dismiss this paragraph as to rude and crude for a properly prehistorical robustness of the early Greeks born circa 1600 BC, at just before or continuously afterwards. For I shall I shall track the evolution of the Oldest and Ancient Beliefs for their comforts to the preHellenes born beyond the Primordia, or good order and form that was granted them just before three main ethic divisions (ethnoi) of humankind coalesced into a single nation race (genos) of Bronze and Heroic Age Greeks who populated the Late Aegean Bronze Age from 1600 to 1190 BC as their duration of a highest ascendancy.. I have to be careful, however, by warning that my described progression was greatly obfuscated by the Ancient Greeks of the First millennium Lyric and Classical Ages who were inclusive of two more ethnoi, the Illyric-Doric and the Achaean, who came into Greece during the Greek Dark Age from 1190 to 800 BC. Those additions must bear up to the rigorous understandings that have always been exacted by ethnologists towards clarifications of the original meld from the three preHellenic ethnoi.
The Imposition of Essential Dichotomies:
Oral Prehistory vs Written History
Early vs Classical Myths
Old & Ancient Beliefs vs the New Beliefs & the Olympian Pantheon
Matriarchal vs Patriarchal Socialization and Sovereignty
Bronze Age vs Iron Age Practical Arts & Sciences
Underpopulated Regions vs Greatly Populated Regions of Whole Ethnicities
The Bardot Group has reexamined the copious legacies of the Great Oral Tradition to find them fundamentally in conflict with what Classical Greek Mythology encouraged of Ancient Greek History. Our scholars found especially offensive was the latter’s tenet that all earliest known Greeks must have worshipped the Olympian Pantheon. That is one way to say about the Ancient Greeks’ chauvinism from 600 BC,ff., by constantly expounding and enforcing their orthodox polytheism. The greatest dramatists, whose obedience to that orthodoxy was compelled by competition among themselves to prove censorial and expurgative of long prior the Old and Ancient Beliefs by the seemingly lost Idyllic Age. Overly conforming to inherently ahistoric geneses of Olympian deities, incremental as their mythic originations went, the Bardot Group no longer could abide the obvious expunction by Ancient Greeks of recitative Early Greek Mythology. What had been recited was made to disappear without any lingering trace after many centuries of reiteration. After their Classical Age of greatest dramatists, after their competitions with each other, only the most religiously orthodox reinterpretations possible were allowed remembrance, to become an only pervasive literary precedence allowed by the Archaic/Lyric Age Greeks. Wholly forgotten were the robust recollections of the earliest Greeks by how they had told their own stories, myths and legends.
But the legacy of precedent wasn’t wholly forgotten; it had not been forever lost. The core historicity of the last preHellenes and earliest Greeks had run onward and through a very brief renaissance to 800 BC onward. Homer revived the oldest memories; Hesiod made apparent what he deliberately had sought to expunge of the oral prehistory. Reinterpretations proved possible. What had been censored could be rehabilitated. Expurgation of deepest pasts persons and regions of myth be represented, as though told anew, through the preeminent roles which had been played out by the most illustrious forbears of the Ancient Greeks. Diodoros proved good at that; Apllodoros proved even better. To my mind, moreover, the Roman Classical Mythography of Ovid clarified better than both the Ancient Greeks and Romans what a best education into Antiquity could reproduce of the Second millennium BC Greeks.
Not that the Bardot Group’s own findings didn’t meet considerable resistance, as it does still…..
Renaissance and Modern Ages High Professoriats
Our Modern High Professoriats have long parroted the canonized academic consensus which commands of all Greeks that ever lived to have worshipped the Olympian Pantheon. That absurd assumption, a most presumptuous assertion, follows the long upheld Pre-Classical Tradition. We all must become “blinders-on” in order to ignore alternative pasts of great robustness about the worships during the post-creationist Idyllic Age.
What Classical Humanists of the Renaissance and Enlightenment Ages either expunged or wholly obfuscated, the High Professoriats have upheld as a canon by which academic presses have closed down any exposure of modern European literature to the Idyllic Age. Beginning with my next posting, therefore, I shall make a first of graduated approaches to show how that Age slowly was steered to the evolution of religion that culminated in the Olympian Pantheon of the Archaic and Classical Ages of Greece.
But allow me an expanded introduction herein to this postings conclusion. Eschewing the base historicity of originally recited Early Greek Myths, even to berating them as utterly “pagan lore,” our Humanities and History & Literature scholars have not allowed the admission of just how lousy the Ancient Greeks were at their own historiography. The illustrious Bronze Age forbears of the Heroic Age – as briefly intermediate to the Bronze and Iron Ages set forth by Hesiod – were occluded by the Greek Dark Age. Consider, accordingly, the graphic below….
Image: LABA Progression
Note in particular how my charting begins with the end of the Idyllic Age, while also initializing my theory of the beginning of a downward cycle of interglacial period climate change. The latter asserts the Great Chilling Period of many centuries since 1800 BC within the Second millennium BC.
By stark contrast, however, enduringly remaining has been an attitude struck by scholars of Antiquity matriculating after World War II to expunge the genuine prehistory which the Idyllic Age fostered as an earliest ever Greek belief system which the last Bronze Age Greeks still cherished. Brought to the entirely lost writ by syllabaries extant 1400 to 1100 BC, the Old and Ancient Beliefs remained attested through the evocations of rhapsodists. Their inspired story-telling, first told by last pre-Hellenes, they cherished as their forbears legacies. The Bardot Group came to the same highly positive realization that the displacement of scripture by syllabaries, howsoever lost to earliest alphabetic writ, was likely residual testament that did not destroy rediscovery of so much of what was thought lost of the Great Oral Tradition. The best educated of the Ancient Greeks left ample clues to what was thought expunged or brought to extinct knowledges by the fostered neglect of Lyric Age composers of prose and poetry about the Heroic Age just prior to the Iron Age.
Now that these Bardot Blog postings are several months past their last, or 189th iteration, there is a goading need for a manifesto of some sort, at last, about conflicts and contradictions between the two opera of dichotomous Greek Mythology. I peg to the 1970s a quite natural revulsion of lay perso0n readers to new books of interpretive trade book fiction which upheld the Pre-Classical Tradition’s withering blight upon intellectual honesty. I sensed myself stuck in it seemingly forever; literary agents wouldn’t support anything else than works of adherence to that tradition. I couldn’t blame Homer for its founding of its now obsolete fictional tenets, all as fostered by Renaissance Age secular humanists and still are by our modern Dons, DEWMs and DAWMs.
Homer doesn’t have to worry from the grave about his relevancy to the final Olympian Pantheon, of course. From wherever he’s interred or been immolated, he still speaks well for himself, ever since his enduring epic manuscripts composed both before and since 700 BC. High time, however, that we get into the true character of what Homer himself inherited from the pre-Hellenic rhapsodists. His own itinerant bardic tradition effectively began the history of Classical Studies. But his epic masterpieces were not the beginning of Greek prehistory about the robust Late Bronze Age of the Greek Peninsula’s western shoreline upon the Aegean Sea. That’s to where he placed the settings of his imaginings of Greek primordia. That Aegean shoreline’s legacy of lores had long preceded his lifetime — by seven centuries! Three of them belonged to the beginning of his own Age, at the end of the Greek Dark Age, in remembrance of the Heroic Age. Bardic performances by the School of the Homeridae had followed him; they could be relied upon for the survival of all and any popularizations of the Trojan War Era (1263 to 1234 BC) from the strictly Greek points of view that have been canonized.
By the end of the above charted LABA Progression I hope to have regular readers breathing new fresh air while happily replanted at good footing through my enthusiastic espousals of New Greek Mythology. It is, at bottom and in gist, not new at all. Instead, it’s a conservative and conserving movement by a fellowship of prehistorians who would defy our modern progressive Humanists and Cultural Anthropologists. They have propagandized us alike to how the Ancient Greeks duped their own contemporaries of the Fifth century BC. Over this year 2020 I also hope to convert new readers at least notionally to a firm understanding of a Pan-Aegean Mythology. It is the only New Stuff of NGM. For both lay readers and my loyal classical studies buffs anything that’s comprehensive about the Late Bronze Age of Oldest Greece and Anatolia is mostly new stuff. For it corrects all the wrong Old Stuff by the Greek Dark Age, from just after 1190 BC, (actually it’s vogue just now to use the date 1177 BC instead) when the Heroic Age was fully over
No other entitled mythography can do as well for the active and modern school of inquiry into past legend, lore and myth. As prehistorical rendition NGM can prove healing of the blatant fallacies about Greek Myth imposed so brazenly since 1975, when so much of Classical Studies began to be eclipsed, thus rendered to darkness, by our high school and undergraduate college curricula. All of the copious oral legacy was then deemed utterly irrelevant. Slander of oldest Antiquity became popular, and evangelized, through malicious and deliberate breach of the intellectual curiosity that has always informed study of Antiquity. What now passes for modern Humanities Scholarship throughout our overly radicalized campuses, I hope to expunge entirely through what the late Bardot Group scholars of Antiquity passed to me by legacy.
for the Bardot Group, for the New Year 2015
- Arion, a Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Fall, 2011, Boston University Press
- L. West,The Making of the “Iliad” : Disquisition and Analytical Commentary, 2011 Oxford University Press, 441 pages – $160.00
- Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters, Henry Holt & Company
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