Holzmenge: Book One

Walter Max Poitzsch

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Sujets

• ancient
• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 18 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669827412
• Langue: English

Extrait

Holzmenge: Book One
 
Corpus Juris Civilis
 
 
 
 
 
Walter Max Poitzsch
 
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is drawn from a series of journals (The Personal Diaries of Valentin Fleischmann) donated by Professor Ernst Erlau (1927-1999), emeritus, School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Archaic Languages, Midwestern University. Special thanks to my colleagues in the Department of Demonology and Psychiatric Research, Jesuit College of Sienna, and the Department of Lithuanian Wiccan Studies and Antiquities, Prague College of Medicine. Also, warmest thanks to my editors at Marabou, Hornet & Lizard for their patience and support.
 
Copyright © 2022 by Walter Max Poitzsch.
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-2740-5

eBook
978-1-6698-2741-2
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 05/26/2022
 
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
 
842005
Contents
1166: Thüringia
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Holzmenge Book Two:
Schwester Katrei
May, 1308: Avignon, France
Chapter 2       August, 1307: Bohemia
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Holzmenge Book Three:
The Siege of Belgrade
Chapter 1       Anatolia, 1453
Chapter 2       Spring, 1456: Bohemia—the frontier of the Holy Roman Empire
Chapter 3       The Carpathian Mountains
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Holzmenge Book Four:
The Trial of Thomas Müntzer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
 
ven in the grayest, most humorless hours, there was a hidden place, where dragonflies and hummingbirds hovered about the long-forgotten marble statue of a goddess. Once she had been worshipped by those that desired romantic intrigue and carnal adventure—but that interest now seemed unlikely, given the general misery of the times. Faith was fear. Retribution was the law of the presiding deity. Only the last gasp of hope before absolute despair awakened this most artfully designed effigy from the stupor into which she had been abandoned by the converted. Her last admirers had secreted her here, far from the stern eyes of the pious clergy.
She was carved from a single block of marble, smoothed by worshipful hands, once polished so that she emitted a comforting, strange warmth and a peculiar light. Now the handsome figure was covered with a green tint of dusty mold, and dried leaves whirled mysteriously around her on windless nights. Rats and bats, adders, hornets and termites flitted and slithered and tunneled around the statue, generation after generation, oblivious to the possibility that it might be anything greater than the work of a genius, driven to madness by the disappearance of the presence by which the artifact was inspired.
She had posed for him, night after night, and after delighting over the capture of her limbs, her bosom and shoulders and supple torso he had ended his labors with her face; he had perfectly recorded her features—the full lips, with their vague humor, her fine cheeks and her exquisite jaw. Finally—the day before he was to complete his masterpiece (the image of her dark eyes)—she had kissed him with a grave smile and in the morning, she was gone—just as the righteously angry missionaries stormed the gate of her temple. The sculptor had left the statue incomplete—the eyes blank, serene, and inconsistent with his memory of her—her last kiss, the night of her departure. The artist had hidden it from the missionaries, wept over it, and then hanged himself, adding to the foreboding mystery of the castellated ruins wherein it sat, abandoned and all but forgotten.
Only the gypsies knew of it, and in secrecy their presiding high priestess had left gifts for it during the eight decades of her residency, bowing and genuflecting before it and then departing rapidly. When the Roma conjurer found sympathy among her gentile neighbors, she whispered a spell to their children as they slept—the spell by which the statue might be brought to life, to bring support to the sufferer.
1166: Thüringia
THE KEEP OF Elsterberg was a fine symbol of the time: utility, sobriety and the omnipresent provider of harsh authority. It’s raised fists were two gaunt rectangular monoliths, seventy feet in height, and in breadth and depth half that. The towers and their connecting hall were built above the remains of a wooden fort, burned to the ground by the pious and humorless missionaries consigned by Charlemagne to stamp out the pagan adherents to a faith that worshipped trees and streams and had (reputedly) the ability to engage animals in conversation. This campaign progressed generation after generation, stymied only temporarily in places like the great fir forests of Lithuania and Finland—although eventually even there the druids were exhausted by their perpetual flight before the torches and cudgels borne by missionaries eager to melt golden and silver images of salmon and ravens into no less fanciful representations of the Virgin and her Child.
The influence of the pagan on the missionary was no less profound than the influence of the missionary on the pagan: the monks returned to their damp cells filled with a dread of kobolds, trolls and wurzelsepp as acute as the dread of the Christian hell that had replaced Valhalla in the imagination of the converts. Retribution proved more effective a moral than reward to these blonde savages.
Consequently, the fascination with Satan was—if anything—more acute than the love of sacrificial Lambs of God. It was no time at all before ceremonies in moon-flooded glens were voiced in chants of corrupted Latin—intended to conjure devils—rather than the tongue of the Old Norse, which had implored the spirits of the beech and oak to awaken. By stamping out one rival the hapless missionaries had replaced him with a far more dangerous successor. The antlers of the stag, the crown of carnal desire, were replaced with the pitiless horns of a bull. Curiosity about the devil was infinitely greater than adoration of the Virgin; artists employed far greater skill and effort in depiction of the demonic agencies—their expressive leers and snarls—than the placid, serene and slightly bored visage of the angelic and the sanctified. How mundane the dove: how mysterious and compelling the bat.
So enthusiastic were the Christians to carry out their instructions that they not only exterminated the druids and their consorts, but also sought to destroy any record—any artifact of their existence. History must have a beginning, and the beginning was the Book of Genesis. Let any ribald parishioner suggest that perhaps the lands between Scandinavia and the Danube were removed from the machinations of the Hebrews and the Philistines, and the grim friars of the local order were not remiss in their obligation to exercise corporal discipline in defense of the absolute authority of the bishops and the infallible accuracy of their Scriptures. No mummery was without a threatening moral, and no pantomime on a puppet stage was complete without a cloth-and-wooden devil crouching in the corner to bring the morally adventurous marionette to his (more often her) eternal reward. The inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire were very much like these puppets themselves; the puppeteers were more and more often cowled, and ever less frequently elevated by a ceremony of dubbing. The friars and the cardinals grew more confident (and more sadistic) in the eagerness with which they jerked the strings by which their parishioners were manipulated.
Peonage replaced outright slavery. Through some act of bravery by a youth or some accident of birth that bestowed great beauty upon a maiden, a slave might rise in the society of the Norse; Christian serfs were consigned to hereditary debt, and there they would invariably remain. A handsome girl from among their ranks might provide an afternoon of bliss to a troubadour of higher social caliber—tearful assurances of unending devotion and eternal security: but once her pretty belly swelled, the poor waif was no better than a tavern anecdote to her callous lover—a wink exchanged with the Father Confessor—and soon her eyes would grow glassy and her skin harden, her hair would become knotty and stringy, and her proud carriage would retreat into the servile crouch of the other ragged slatterns that toiled bitterly in their lords’ fields of turnips and beets. Her bastard child could expect no dowry.
Love was an ideal and an inspiration to foppish poets and playwrights. To the uneducated masses it was something to be avoided, since of every two children born, one might expect to join his father at the plow on his seventh birthday, or fetch twigs from the fringe of the threatening forest for her mother’s kettle. Of every three births, one resulted in the death of the mother. Young girls were sold into servitude to toothless widowers whose hollow-eyed brood was often within a year or two of their stepmother’s maturity. To form emotional at