S03E11
Primidi Germinal, Peasants! Plague! Radical Cults! Class Politics! Thats right @huwlemmey is guest presenting this week. He is the host of the hit podcast Bad Gays and writes the weekly newsletter Utopian Drivel over at https://huw.substack.com/.
Huw on Twitter: https://twitter.com/huwlemmey
Bad Gays Pod: https://badgayspod.podbean.com/
Utopian Drivel: https://huw.substack.com/—
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo
Website: https://www.thejaymo.net/
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Peasants & Plague
It’s Friday the 20th of March, or Promethe Germinal if you’re using the decimal French Republican calendar. The first day of the month of Germinal, whose name comes from the Latin for germination. As it’s the first day of the decimal month, the name of the day in the calendar isn’t Friday, but Primrose.
Both the common name of the plant, Primrose, and its scientific genus, primula come from the same Latin root, Primus, meaning first, because it’s beautiful little flower is amongst the first to bloom in the spring. That’s fitting, as in both the Republican calendar and in our own Gregorian calendar, today marks the first day of the Northern Spring and the vernal equinox.
Germination, budding and flowering, revolutionary tidings to you all. Your usual host at thejaymo is away this week, so today’s episode is hosted by me, Huw Lemmey.
You’re listening to episode 2011 of 301 Permanently Moved dot online. A personal podcast, written, recorded and edited in one hour. Spring this year won’t be marked by the traditional sentiments of rebirth.
The lands gambling in the fields, the budding forth of fresh blossoms, the return of warmth to the frozen northern hemisphere. A plague has struck the people, bringing with it the morbid social symptoms of fear, xenophobia and paranoia. Lock up your daughters and bring out your dead. The name of coronavirus is on everyone’s lips.
The metros of the world are filled with citizens clutching their smelling salts to their noses. Fortunate is for me, then, that I can self quarantine with a nice big book that I’ve been reading for the past month or so. It’s called The Pursuit of the Millennium, written by Norman Cohn and first published in a world still reeling from the moral cataclysm of the Holocaust in 1957.
It’s a book that chronicles the rise and spread of millenarian and mystical anarchist beliefs across Western Europe in the Middle Ages. And yet, the shadow of the Nazi Holocaust hangs across the text, influencing the author’s readings of collective belief, eschatologies, and antisemitism that underpins most of the history within which he’s describing.
Again and again throughout the 10th to 14th centuries, regions of Europe were struck with something akin to millenarian fevers. Believing they were about to enter the period of 1000 years, the last days before Judgment Day, interpretations differed. Propheti who emerged were not always claiming divinity, but often other forms, such as holy warrior kings, returned to purge Europe or lead great crusades.
The main influence of millenarian and eschatological thought in medieval Europe weren’t biblical texts, but the Sibyllian Oracles, a collection of pseudo Greek revelations and prophecies. The Oracles are a sort of synthesis of various Gnostic, Jewish and early Christian beliefs written in a pastiche prose of the Sybils, prophetesses who foretold of the future, like Pythia, who oversaw the Oracle of Delphi.
Over the following millennium, these texts, much abridged and edited, travelled across Europe, becoming a key influence on the eschatological Christian thought. But why did the oracles, and more importantly the low clergy and even laity who utilised them to create powerful heretical movements in medieval Europe, gain such influence?
How did these preachers, holy men and prophetae, manage to build mass movements on the back of heretical beliefs whose adherents would face monstrous deaths and persecutions by the secular and religious authorities? Cohen is clear that the answers are material. Throughout the book, revolutionary religious movements are formed in an environment of not just material poverty, but rising inequality, material insecurity caused by famine and war.
And the ever present pestilence. Indeed, Cohen points out that revolutionary eschatological movements found short shrift in Europe before the rise of early industries, such as weaving, created greater inequalities, as well as surplus populations, what he calls the margins of society. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the religious movements often had a powerful politically revolutionary character.
These movements created what Cohn refers to as a fraternity, an elite set apart from and above ordinary mortals, sharing in the extraordinary merits of its leader, sharing also in his miraculous powers. The plague remains a main character in the book, not just because of the earth shattering implications an outbreak must have had on the psyches of survivors.
truly an end of the world in its own right. But the plague also disrupted the smooth running of feudal societies, trade and production, and leading to large populations of poor with nothing to lose. These people formed the armies of various crusades of the poor. Some, such as the barefoot peasant army of the Tafirs, were led by their maybe mythical leader to the very gates of Jerusalem, despite the opprobrium of the noble crusader class of knights.
Most, however, unleashed their crusading fervor on infidels closer to hand, the populations of Jews who endured their murderous pogroms on top of their regular share of oppression. Usually claiming that outbreaks came from their poisoning of wells. It’s interesting then to contrast these material and spiritual consequences in a medieval plague, an endemic disease that would break into epidemic with the ongoing coronavirus.
In much of Western Europe and the us, the spread of the virus is feared to be hastened by the working conditions of working class people within the hospitality industry. In a situation where access to sick pay, medical care and welfare rights have been severely restricted under neoliberalism, where they even existed in the first place just as the US presidential election begins in earn.
We are given a prime example of the material implications of poverty and poor working conditions on contagious disease. Whether the powerful barons and nobles of the United States will allow their citizens to finally access medical care, even in the name of public health, or will just secure their own fiefdoms remains to be seen.
But you don’t have to be an oracle to predict that. Protect yourself, wash your hands, and join a union.
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