He looks like a fuckin' Dominican, don't he? Skippy was `elevated' by Dominicans. Where `elevated' is related to `élève' in the Frog which means: pupil, student, disciple, apprentice - or an animal raised by a breeder. Sister Samuel was the runt-nun what tried to break him. It didn't work. Skippy could think faster than every teacher he ever had in his life except one. He ate Nuns & shit their Habits. He made his first Nun cry in Detroit when he was in the 2nd Grade. I've forgotten her name but I still smile & get a warm glow when I see her in my memoried eye looming above me and flailing away trying to beat the Devil out of me with her arthritic knuckles. I no longer remember what I said to her to set her off - but I can imagine. Vincent of Beauvais. signed himself "Vincentius Bellovacensis" when he was sober. Often though, when he was bitter and shitfaced, he'd call himself Vincentius Burgundus - Vinny Burgundy. We don't have much intel on Vinny either - like Honorius of Augsburg, he spent a long life, hiding in plain sight - or is that plain site? A semantic problem like this would keep Vinny grinning for days. He was born around 1190 and some of the Etics say he died in 1264. He was the logical successor to Honorius who had Popped Smoke circa 1150. Vinny too was a lad born to the Quill & Gall; he loved nothing more than reading and writing by candlelight. He was probably born somewhere in Burgundy, which was, in the 13th Century, the Royal Heart of the Kingdom of France. Skippy too can trace his Father's genes back into Burgundy where his people were titled and ran serfs for the local Count. Kind of like Simon Legree but with more lace around the cuffs. Dominicans were the hot Sippe in that age - they and the Franciscans had elbowed their way into most of the top Professorships at the University in Paris. The 2 religious orders spent much of their time arguing about whether or not a Pagan like Aristotle should be part of the curriculum.
You can tell why by taking a quick gander as this map. It shows the Village/City of Beauvais. What's interesting is the GeoReligico nature of the Carte. You see it's not a GeoPolitico map. And it's not a Topo. It's religious and it divides the land into Parishes and Dioceses. You have to believe that whoever is drawing the maps is part of the System in Charge. And in Burgundy, in 1200 - that would be the Church. New Orleans still divides itself into Parishes and so does Québec. Vinny lived in the Dominican House in Paris between 1215 and 1220, but mostly spent his productive life at the Dominican Monastery founded by Louis 9 at Beauvais. in the Region of Picardy. One of the largest cohorts of students studying in the Latin Quarter in Paris was from Picardy so the region was important and monied and mostly under Royal Patronage. As was Vinny. It is generally believed that King Louis himself was the purse behind Vincent's writings and works. Barber Perfect says look to the King's wife: Queen Margaret, as well as her own son Philip later on. Vollendette says this with a wink and a leer and Lucky suddenly feels like he needs to wash. Dominican friars should not fuck Queens in the 13th Century. True, all the lights came back on in the glorious 13th but Reginafiking was still streng verboten.
You might argue that what Vinny really did was pick up the torch of Honorius of Autun. Both men were Encylopediasts by nature. They were Big Fusion Thinkers who loved Abstractions and loved playing with them. Giving them coats, and frames, and even shapes. The biggest Abstraction available to Johnny Serf was the Cathedral - the Stone Book. Them unlettered muthas would gawk and gawk and gawk. And who can blame them. It's absolutely clear that something more is going on in the Cathedral which is way beyond the sum of its physical parts. Cathedrals fester in Symbolism - Allegory & Analogy are crouched in every dimension of the temple. In Vinny's day their were 2 big dimensions: Light and Up. Lots and Lots of Vitraux would let the light in, but growing the beast Up was fraught with all kinds of peril. I mean you lost a lot if it all fell down - money & work, wages to the artisans. But much worse would be the Metaphoric damage: Shit! What does it Mean when your Cathedral falls down? And that is exactly what happened at Beauvais. It's a Cautionary Tale about Pride. Most are. The Knights Templar brought the Gothic Arch with them as they trickled home from the Crusades. Pooler says, bullshit - and that the Gothic Arch swam up from Andalucia where it had evolved from Moorish influences. Either way, the Gothic Arch meant the Redistribution of Weight and especially the Rechanneling of Weight from the Outward Horizontal to the Downward Vertical dimension. This meant you could support taller structures with thinner and fewer columns and that meant more free wall space and that meant more Windows, more Vitraux, more dancing colored light singing their songs of Jesus. The Gothic Arch meant you could build Up. And Up. And no one really knew or yet understood the limitations on the Up. So all over Europa Cathedrals and Parish Churches started crawling Up. Up towards the Sun & the Light. Maybe all the way up to God in his Heavens. Who knew? Beauvais had an edge in the Up-Race. They had Louis 9 - the fuckin' King of France! So the builders of Beauvais had Deep Pockets and that's just another Allegory for Pride. So Vinny found himself at the Heart of the Heart of the Gothic Madness and it was heady & intoxicating and those are just words for Poisons.
After 3 separate fires in the wooden roof of the old Basilica work began on the new Gothic Cathédral Saint-Pierre de Beauvais. It was to be the most audacious of France's new "White Mantle" of Gothic structures which sprang up like Morels all across the Kingdom. From the get-go the building was tied up with the fortunes of Louis 9 and the French Monarchy. When Queen Maggie whispered into her lover's ear that she wanted something as "spectacular" as his tool for "her" Cathedral the original plans were thrown away. Bishop Guillaume de Grez - whom Maggied called: "big billy" added 5 Meters more to the Church's height. That, Maggie smiled, would make Her Temple the highest-vaulted Cathedral in all of Christendom. The interior of the Choir would reach 158 ft, making the Cathédral Notre-Dame d'Amiens a dwarf at only 138 ft. In 1284 the vaulting of the choir collapsed in rubble and all work paused at the site. In order to make the building taller the Chef d'Atelier had had to compromise on the thickness of the buttresses. The Age was the rebirth of Light and everybody was screaming about "more windows" & "plus de Vitraux." And really, no one could say - yet - what was Too Tall. A handful of Etics will argue that William Golding's book The Spire is more about the disaster at Beauvais than it is about the 404 ft Spire of Salisbury Cathedral in Angleterre. But like Skippy said above, there are material consequences from such a Fall but there are also much more serious Metaphysical & Metaphoric consequences. With the collapse of the Beauvais Spire all crawling Up towards the heavens stopped in Christian building programs. All across Europa the lesson had sunk in: Pride goes before a Fall. After, there was a palpable "failure of nerve among the French masons working in Gothic Style." It was as if an "Idea" had been deflated. Smaller plans & smaller temples followed. Still, years later, the original plan for the Choir was realized and built at the same height as the collapse. Then, in 1573 the entire Central Tower crumbled and that wrote the death knell for the grandiose plans of Beauvaise Cathedral. Today, it is the largest unfinished Cathedral in the World. The problem is that the huge weight of the massive structure depends on the "Shouldering Support" of the Nave of the Original Plans - but they were not followed and the planned Nave never got built. So the Cathedral at Beauvais continues to self-destruct as I type. Skippy believes that there's a Moral in here somewhere, but try as he will, he just can't tease it out. I mean, what the fuck does it MEAN when your temple to god keeps falling down around you? The next century - with the Black Death, would begin to answer that question.
Emile Mâle makes the point over and over: Reading a Cathedral IS reading the Speculum Maius of Vincent of Beauvais and the Imago Mundi of Honorius of Autun. The walls and the windows were covered with graphic translations from these works. The Siting and Proportions of the edifice resonated with their lessons. In Beauvais's Speculum Historiale the epochs are not marked by "the deeds of emperors and kings but by the lives of the Saints." Both of them could be seen in the sculptures and images of the Stone Book. But there were 100 times many more Saints to be seen then temporal rulers. To the Christian of this era, this WAS their Conception of History. It was God's story played out below in Flesh & Stone. The heroes of this Book were "abbots, anchorites, young shepherdesses, beggars." Not Kings and their Ministers. Not the Generals of all the Armies. Conquest & GeoExpansion were not celebrated in the Glorious 13th - Miracles and Relics of the Saints, Demons & Wars with the Angels, Divine Conceptions & Woolly Prophets living in broken Jars - these were the Chapters from the Real History displayed by the Cathedrals. Mâle writes: "Vincent of Beauvais shows neither surprise nor interest in the appearance among the barbarians of Boethius and Symmachus, the last of the Romans. He turns his eyes away from Rome, and serenely marshals the only events of the time which to him seemed worthy of men's knowledge - the miracles of St. Leonard in Limousin, the miracles of St. Maxentius in Poitou and the journeys of St. Malo. The life of St. Die in the forests of the Vosges engages the historian longer than the doings of the Emperor Heraclius." One gets the impression, Mâle adds drolly - or is it Bathos? - "that the world in the 9th & 10th centuries was inhabited by Saints." Only the Crusades seem worthy of Vinny's notice and there too it was the Spiritual Dimensions of the Holy Wars which was featured, not the factual. Jihad makes damn good Press & is easily transformed into Iconography. "In the eyes of the 13th Century the real history of the world was the story of the City of God." Historia was decidedly Heilgeschichte. Even the waypoints & navigational structures of the environment were entrained into the service of the Saints. You marked roads and trails with Sanctuaries, Hermitages, Sacred Wells, Sites of Miracles, Rocks that Saints had touched . . .
Saint Bernard was a very real dude. He lived & his actions were of great consequence. He, like Skippy, was from Burgundian Nobility. He was the father of the Cistercians - Himmler's prototype [along with the Jesuits] of the Nazi SS - he fostered and wrote the Rule for the Knights Templar, and near single-handedly engineered the 2nd Crusade. He was deeply accomplished. Yet, if you stopped a Serf on the muddy, shit-stained, streets of any Frog village in the Medieval and asked him about Bernard - the most you would get from him would be the recounting of the Miracle of the Lactation of Saint Bernard. It seems that Mary - the Virgin Mother of God - appeared to Berny while he was praying and sprayed her Holy Titty-Milk on his lips. This is translated in Typology as Mary - whose Body is the Catholic Church - claiming her role as "Mother of Humanity," and also, because of the feeding/nuturing aspect, her Promise to "mediate" between Monkeys and her Son. A second version of the legend had Berny falling asleep and Mary plugging her tit into his mouth so that while dreaming he could continue to receive the "mediation." You've got to love that story. It makes a wonderful kind of pictorial sense. But since the image of Mary suckling an Adult was too edgy - even for Middleman - it became the practice to separate the two and have Mary Spraying. Speaking of Auctoritas: that's the Li'l Baby Jesus' she holds in her arms while she sprays. Get it? His presence puts the Stamp of Approval - the Imprimatur - on her "Donation" of her Milk. Roll over the image & grok the Alchemical Cousin of this scene. Virgin's Milk is a powerful part of the Alchemical Mindset, as well as the Christian. Jung nods wisely, himself sucking on the tit, both images are from the same Mind and both Witness the Ontological Categories which the Monkey had had built into his Châsse. Christianity is Alchemy in S&M Drag. It pushes the same buttons because it is a Sublimation of the same Essences. You can't believe how much the Serfs loved images like this. They tickled them where they lived and that was a place not yet made Logical or Deductive.
You take this picture of the Dusky Virgin to the Left. Her name is Garcelle Beauvais and the only reason she is on this page is that she answered a Google Search for `Beauvais Cathedral.' And I can see the resemblance and also understand the Typology as well as the Analogy. The 1st Temples on Earth were Wombs of Mother Earth - the Paleolithic Caves. And out of those Caves flowed the beginnings of the Narrative of God. A Narrative which the Medieval Cathedrals took up again and continued. This time dressed in a different Surface Structure but still retaining and nourishing the Deep Structure of God's endless Histoire. Post Postmodern Monkeys worship only at the warm nave of Garcelle, having lost the key to the stories on the walls of Kiki churches. Mâle himself makes the same point. He points out that All these books - of Honorius & Vincent - had been carved and painted and set in glass all over the Christian structures of Europe. In the Speculum Maius of Vincent of Beauvais we have the riddle of the universe finding its solution. These works were a total weltanschauung and as Pooler was explaining - nothing was added to them as knowledge until the Renaissance. Emile Mâle’s opus - his monumental life’s work of the 3 volume set called: Religious Art in France - has this as its “proposition:” In the early Gothic of the 12th Century there was hardly anyone in Europe who could not “read” the iconography of the Cathedrals, by the Renaissance there was hardly anyone left who could. Over the 300 years of the Gothic an iconic illiteracy as potent as the Black Death itself had swept across Europe like a Semantic-Plague and had erased the significance of the Stone Book right in front of us. So there they stood today - in the midst of our own Hermeneutic pathologies - silent and enigmatic as the classic figure of the Sphinx. Asking us questions which we could no longer fathom, questions in a tongue we could no longer speak. Unless you had a friend like Pooler Jones who was there thru it all and remembered it all and who could still talk the talk of stone and glass in a symphony of allegory. Or a "friend" like Barber Perfect who had helped to Write the Book and now was Soul-sick & murderously confused over the Meaning of it all as the Meaning kept unfolding and the bodies just kept piling up. Too many for the Ovens. Too many to count. After all, in Paris alone, it took 15 Months to move the Bones.
Use your Browser to go Back or Click on this to Grab a little of the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. Leave behind the remnants of your Pesky Logic.