‘in my experience, people today are looking for answers where modern science alone cannot go’
i suppose it has something to do with coming from the so-called new world; one sees the primitive wisdom and modern technologies, but there is little or no reference to the time in between; before the age of discovery. maybe that’s why i’ve always found the middle ages so attractive; as a child i was much more of a ‘knights’ boy than a ‘soldier’ boy - very geekish, i know, but i always had a powerful imagination and the thought of a temporal distillation of independent oriental, arabian and pagan knowledge gave me a sense of how wide and varied the world really is. so not like nowadays… where diversity is streamed into a narrow band of acceptability.
mystified by the alchemical, intrigued by the astronomical, the more i delved into the psyche of the time, the more i realised that our ancestors were not so remote in sensibility as one would assume. the thirst for knowledge, the pursuit of power, the religious factions and warring clans make histories of a few centuries ago read like yesterday’s news.
as interesting as it may seem that nothing has changed people since the middle ages, the message is clear; much of what we know today is inherited from those trying times and modern day condescension is as misplaced as it is unwarranted. so-called alternative healing and other practices are not really that alternative from a pre-renaissance perspective, in fact the renaissance for a large part was actually just funded by the biggest company of the time; the church.
in recent history at least from a technological point of view one invention only builds upon the next, but i believe the true revelation of invention lies in the connectivity between ourselves and this world we live in; there i must sadly concede that modern times have forgotten where its food comes from or what forces are really in control, this much at least our ancestors knew already.
it is a paradigm we thought we have grown out of but just looking around with our constrictive and dismissive modern view, it’s clear that the imminent future doesn’t look so progressive any more. no wonder we are just fearfully pointing our finger at the skies again.
don’t get me wrong, it’s not that i yearn to live in those times; from a medical and ablution point of view alone i would seriously succumb, but it is intriguing that even today there is an entire antiquarian knowledge industry being built around this concept; an impossible collaboration between 800 year old scholars and modern scientists are on the cards. we are all suffering from empirical information fatigue and the connection to an archetypal approach is perhaps just what we need; the idea that one is connected to the earth and the heavens and all the forces in between; once we free ourselves of the nostalgia of the achievements of ‘in living memory’, an entire world opens which may seem foreign but is actually filled with information that we have long since chosen to ignore or forget. therein lies this mystical medieval paradox.
