Ladies first. II
Woman is formed out of bone. Touch a bone and it emits sound; hence woman's voice is thinner than man's. Again, man is formed from earth, which is comparatively soft and melts when water comes over it; whilst woman, being formed from hard substance, is more stubborn and unbending. Bereshith Rabba
Does chivalry originate in biology? Are damsels in distress helped on the account of their "weakness"?
http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/173826.html?thread=957442#t957442
Medieval dames, as opposed to the imaginary gentlefolk invented during neo-Gothic revival, were tough as nails. The brazenness of their sexual advances, on the evidence of chansons de geste, has not been surpassed even in our times (see Gautier's "Chivalry"). One of the things striking one when reading mediaeval literature is the complete absence of the notion of feminine weakness, which is inescapable in the Victorian literature. Nor can it be said that the knights were particularly desiring of helping women in general:
...The adept of courtly love, fresh from singing at his unapproachable lady's feet could pause on his homeward journey to tumble a shepherdess in her meadow, a fresh-faced village girl under a hedge. The Moslems in Spain and Syria were shocked by the licentiousness of the French... The noble regarded his female serf as chattel, to do with as he would. A noble was a bundle of paradoxes - a romantic lover and a libertine, a gallant knight and a bloodthirsty brute, a devout Christian and a flouter of the elements of morality. In that he shared his paradoxes with the rest of humanity.(Bishop's "The Middle Ages")
Understanding chivalry is understanding why yesterday's rapist would commit splendid folly to assist a damsel in distress and, in general, go out of his way to demonstrate exalted feelings towards noble women. This is accounted for by courtly love codes, but it goes beyond these codes.
Fin'amors is morally elevating, Platonic admiration, where a lady becomes both a focus of childlike fantasies and the seigneur of a knight. The latter was often quite literal because the ideal object of such rarefied devotion was the wife of the lord. There is little historical evidence that it was practiced; there is a school of thought that it was no more than a literary construct, the "courts of love" included, as the only existing evidence is poetical rather than documentary. This does not mean that the poetic tradition cannot change mores. The [poetic?] tradition is thought to be adopted in the southern France shortly after the first Crusade. The era was brought to an abrupt end when the northerners invaded the south during the Albigensian Crusade. The tradition spread precisely where the heresy entrenched itself. While there are scholars tracing it to Araby, Ovid, primitive Germans, I think it clearly stems from new thought. Courtly love, by itself, does not explain exaggregated fialty extended to all dames and puselles. The Cathar heresy, with its strong gnostic element, does. The troubadour movement originated in the Languedoc, the Cathar heartland.
The vision of intense and erotic, but not sexual, love between the sexes has its origins in the Gnostic's love feasts and the Cathar "kiss of peace." (Picknett) The sudden egalitarianism between the sexes of noble rank becomes more understandable in the view that the Cathars had both male and female preachers and adopted the gnostic ideas of masculine/feminine. This is the essence of Rossetti's theory of the origin of courtesy. According to him and his many followers, the whole troubadour tradition was crypto-Cathar. The true meaning of courtesy is allegorical. The damsel is the Cathar Lady of Thoughts, the Chruch of Love, the Sophia Maria of the Gnostics (De Rougemont).
...The Troubadours emerged in southern France at the height of the Albigensian Cathar movement and immediately following their slaughter in the Albigensian Crusade. Many of the Troubadours may have themselves been Cathars or at least influnced by Cathar notions. The Cathars were a gnostic group of Christians who rivaled the Catholic Church in Southern France and other parts of Europe, until they were declared heretical and ultimately driven underground. The Cathar Elect were celibate vegetarians who upheld notions of non-violence, reverence for the natural world (with special focus on the sun and the moon), and the spiritual equality of women. While some aspects of Cathar spirituality had a world-denying quality that might be unappealing to the New Age notions of today, the Cathars were a vibrant group with a rich mystical and spiritual heritage. There have even been suggestions of links between the Cathars and Sufi groups in Spain and Palestine.
...Courtly love is often thought of as a strange societal pattern that occurred because marriage among the wealthy was a practical affair brokered between families, leaving little room for love. That may have added to the appeal of courtly love, but it doesn't really explain it. Courtly love was a conscious spiritual practice. The ideal in courtly love was to embody the archetypal forces of Lover and Beloved.
...The Beloved was usually the woman. She was to embody the ideal of the Divine Feminine, Sophia, Divine Wisdom. She was to be ever slightly out of reach, but within sight. Her presence was to draw the Lover with her presence, her goodness, her feminine divinity. She was to be a beacon. In striving to embody this for her Lover, she was to merge with the Divine she embodied. The Lover was usually the man. His was the more active role. He was to seek his Beloved, his idealized Lady. He had to prove himself worthy of her, face great obstacles with humility and perserverance, in her name. In the Lover's intense passion for his Beloved, his constant focussing on her, he was to ultimately become a perfect Lover of the Divine and unite with the divinity he saw embodied in his Beloved.
...The goal of courtly love was not sexual intimacy. Indeed, sex was avoided because it would satiate the longing that acted as the spiritual force that drew the man and woman as Lover and Beloved to the goal of spiritual marriage. This was the ideal, and certainly not every couple followed this path, nor did every Troubadour always celebrate the inner sacred meaning of the path. Yet this was the core, and it was a pathway taught through societies and particularly passed on through Troubadour poetry and song. Courtly love should be seen as genuine spiritual pathway and not be superficialized. It is not inappropriate to think of courtly love as similar to Tantric sexual spirituality, as developed in India.
...Troubadours were also to some degree influenced by the great Arab poetry, and especially the Sufi poetry, flowing in through Moorish Spain, the trade routes of North Africa, and Palestine and the Crusaders interacted with the Muslim world there. The Beloved of the Troubadours is the same Divine Beloved of the Sufis. When reading Troubadour poetry, as with Sufi poetry, the Beloved -- though she may also be a real person -- should be understood to be the Divine and no other.
Ultimately, the Cathars were declared a heretical sect by the Catholic Church and they were brutally suppressed. The Troubadours scattered, but their influence continued with the many related poetic/mystical traditions that emerged from their diaspora: the Trouveres in norther France, the Minnensingers in Germany (including Wolfram von Ehrenbach, author of the first Grail romance), the Fideli di Amore in Italy (including Dante).
http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/Traditions/Troubadour.htm
see "The origin and meaning of Courtly Love" (R Boase) for exposition of the crypto-Cathar theories and their criticism.
Chivalric behavior towards a damsel has nothing to do with the folk theory of women as biologically "weak" and therefore needing knightly patronage and protection. It is the remnant of the triumphant Gnosticism returning in its Cathar implementation to medieval Christendom. Ladies are first because the masculine and feminine potencies have to combine in masculine action and feminine reflection, as Sacred Marriage, for Divine works to occur, and only such works save lives, rather than any human efforts.
Both "man first" and "ladies first" choices originate in the spiritual realm."Man first" can be traced to the rabbinical tradition, and "ladies first" to the Gnostic one. These origins have been long forgotten, but the tradition lives on, with lovely ad hoc explanations supplied to rationalize the incomprehensible.
Why are gentlemen courteous?
Does chivalry originate in biology? Are damsels in distress helped on the account of their "weakness"?
http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/173826.html?thread=957442#t957442
Medieval dames, as opposed to the imaginary gentlefolk invented during neo-Gothic revival, were tough as nails. The brazenness of their sexual advances, on the evidence of chansons de geste, has not been surpassed even in our times (see Gautier's "Chivalry"). One of the things striking one when reading mediaeval literature is the complete absence of the notion of feminine weakness, which is inescapable in the Victorian literature. Nor can it be said that the knights were particularly desiring of helping women in general:
...The adept of courtly love, fresh from singing at his unapproachable lady's feet could pause on his homeward journey to tumble a shepherdess in her meadow, a fresh-faced village girl under a hedge. The Moslems in Spain and Syria were shocked by the licentiousness of the French... The noble regarded his female serf as chattel, to do with as he would. A noble was a bundle of paradoxes - a romantic lover and a libertine, a gallant knight and a bloodthirsty brute, a devout Christian and a flouter of the elements of morality. In that he shared his paradoxes with the rest of humanity.(Bishop's "The Middle Ages")
Understanding chivalry is understanding why yesterday's rapist would commit splendid folly to assist a damsel in distress and, in general, go out of his way to demonstrate exalted feelings towards noble women. This is accounted for by courtly love codes, but it goes beyond these codes.
Fin'amors is morally elevating, Platonic admiration, where a lady becomes both a focus of childlike fantasies and the seigneur of a knight. The latter was often quite literal because the ideal object of such rarefied devotion was the wife of the lord. There is little historical evidence that it was practiced; there is a school of thought that it was no more than a literary construct, the "courts of love" included, as the only existing evidence is poetical rather than documentary. This does not mean that the poetic tradition cannot change mores. The [poetic?] tradition is thought to be adopted in the southern France shortly after the first Crusade. The era was brought to an abrupt end when the northerners invaded the south during the Albigensian Crusade. The tradition spread precisely where the heresy entrenched itself. While there are scholars tracing it to Araby, Ovid, primitive Germans, I think it clearly stems from new thought. Courtly love, by itself, does not explain exaggregated fialty extended to all dames and puselles. The Cathar heresy, with its strong gnostic element, does. The troubadour movement originated in the Languedoc, the Cathar heartland.
The vision of intense and erotic, but not sexual, love between the sexes has its origins in the Gnostic's love feasts and the Cathar "kiss of peace." (Picknett) The sudden egalitarianism between the sexes of noble rank becomes more understandable in the view that the Cathars had both male and female preachers and adopted the gnostic ideas of masculine/feminine. This is the essence of Rossetti's theory of the origin of courtesy. According to him and his many followers, the whole troubadour tradition was crypto-Cathar. The true meaning of courtesy is allegorical. The damsel is the Cathar Lady of Thoughts, the Chruch of Love, the Sophia Maria of the Gnostics (De Rougemont).
...The Troubadours emerged in southern France at the height of the Albigensian Cathar movement and immediately following their slaughter in the Albigensian Crusade. Many of the Troubadours may have themselves been Cathars or at least influnced by Cathar notions. The Cathars were a gnostic group of Christians who rivaled the Catholic Church in Southern France and other parts of Europe, until they were declared heretical and ultimately driven underground. The Cathar Elect were celibate vegetarians who upheld notions of non-violence, reverence for the natural world (with special focus on the sun and the moon), and the spiritual equality of women. While some aspects of Cathar spirituality had a world-denying quality that might be unappealing to the New Age notions of today, the Cathars were a vibrant group with a rich mystical and spiritual heritage. There have even been suggestions of links between the Cathars and Sufi groups in Spain and Palestine.
...Courtly love is often thought of as a strange societal pattern that occurred because marriage among the wealthy was a practical affair brokered between families, leaving little room for love. That may have added to the appeal of courtly love, but it doesn't really explain it. Courtly love was a conscious spiritual practice. The ideal in courtly love was to embody the archetypal forces of Lover and Beloved.
...The Beloved was usually the woman. She was to embody the ideal of the Divine Feminine, Sophia, Divine Wisdom. She was to be ever slightly out of reach, but within sight. Her presence was to draw the Lover with her presence, her goodness, her feminine divinity. She was to be a beacon. In striving to embody this for her Lover, she was to merge with the Divine she embodied. The Lover was usually the man. His was the more active role. He was to seek his Beloved, his idealized Lady. He had to prove himself worthy of her, face great obstacles with humility and perserverance, in her name. In the Lover's intense passion for his Beloved, his constant focussing on her, he was to ultimately become a perfect Lover of the Divine and unite with the divinity he saw embodied in his Beloved.
...The goal of courtly love was not sexual intimacy. Indeed, sex was avoided because it would satiate the longing that acted as the spiritual force that drew the man and woman as Lover and Beloved to the goal of spiritual marriage. This was the ideal, and certainly not every couple followed this path, nor did every Troubadour always celebrate the inner sacred meaning of the path. Yet this was the core, and it was a pathway taught through societies and particularly passed on through Troubadour poetry and song. Courtly love should be seen as genuine spiritual pathway and not be superficialized. It is not inappropriate to think of courtly love as similar to Tantric sexual spirituality, as developed in India.
...Troubadours were also to some degree influenced by the great Arab poetry, and especially the Sufi poetry, flowing in through Moorish Spain, the trade routes of North Africa, and Palestine and the Crusaders interacted with the Muslim world there. The Beloved of the Troubadours is the same Divine Beloved of the Sufis. When reading Troubadour poetry, as with Sufi poetry, the Beloved -- though she may also be a real person -- should be understood to be the Divine and no other.
Ultimately, the Cathars were declared a heretical sect by the Catholic Church and they were brutally suppressed. The Troubadours scattered, but their influence continued with the many related poetic/mystical traditions that emerged from their diaspora: the Trouveres in norther France, the Minnensingers in Germany (including Wolfram von Ehrenbach, author of the first Grail romance), the Fideli di Amore in Italy (including Dante).
http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/Traditions/Troubadour.htm
see "The origin and meaning of Courtly Love" (R Boase) for exposition of the crypto-Cathar theories and their criticism.
Chivalric behavior towards a damsel has nothing to do with the folk theory of women as biologically "weak" and therefore needing knightly patronage and protection. It is the remnant of the triumphant Gnosticism returning in its Cathar implementation to medieval Christendom. Ladies are first because the masculine and feminine potencies have to combine in masculine action and feminine reflection, as Sacred Marriage, for Divine works to occur, and only such works save lives, rather than any human efforts.
Both "man first" and "ladies first" choices originate in the spiritual realm."Man first" can be traced to the rabbinical tradition, and "ladies first" to the Gnostic one. These origins have been long forgotten, but the tradition lives on, with lovely ad hoc explanations supplied to rationalize the incomprehensible.
Why are gentlemen courteous?