troubadours

CRÉTIEN DE TROYES:

Scholars will freely admit that this man was a troubadour. But what is a troubadour? They were important to the genesis of Cathar mysticism for sure and the Princeton people I will quote shortly will say that Chretien was one of the first troubadours in this region. They surely do not think that he would be one of the first involved in these arts. In fact, they are very, very ancient arts in the making of a druid, who would become a troubadour and a jester before undertaking the necessary studies to become a bard or a dancer. Druids, Bairds and Ovates are the best-known nicknames for those who completed these long and arduous studies that had already been suffering and shortening in the time of Pythagoras, who was part of the last known Dean of Studies in the Mediterranean region. Abaris (rabbi) the druid was that dean and his name gives us a clue about one of the branches or systems that he took over as part of his training.

The Cathars were very Gnostic and open to the pharisaic rabbinic message. In Caesar’s Journals we are told that the study period was 20 years but it was 25 a millennium earlier and there were still other specialties that one could study throughout one’s life. One of them could lead to being called Peryllat or ‘alchemist’. Many members of Jesus’ family were alchemists and it is very likely that Yeshua bar Joseph studied under Comarius, who also instructed Cleopatra. Apollonius of Tyana is part of the amalgamation of Jesus and the Cathars kept most of the Gaedhil/Gnostic learning alive. One of the charges that the Inquisition brought against the Cathars had to do with Dianistic or Tantric sexual practices and I believe that sexual ‘union’ (Yoga) or Bhakti was part of their training and system that highly valued women, even giving them priestly functions. and leadership roles including Esclarmonde de Foix, reminiscent of Hypatia of Alexandria, who should be studied as a great heroine of all time.

Bairdic’s educational system had included a seven-year specialty in language development for its remote colonies in the 2nd millennium BCE. C. and developed such codes and Gematria as seen in the Hebrew and Aymara of Peru. I have delved into these Ogham studies in many other books, including one entitled From OM to Ogham. Plato observed that knowledge was declining due to the written word after the Phoenicians gave them their refined alphabet. Some scholars think that some of the poems attributed to Orpheus (a lesser bard or troubadour) are in fact written by Pythagoras. The Grail myths are rich repositories of pre-Christian lore.

“Little about the person we call “Chrétien de Troyes” (fl. ca. 1160-1191) can be stated with certainty. What we do know must be gleaned largely from the writings attributed to him. These include five romantic narratives written in rhymed eight-syllable couplets during the last third of the twelfth century (Erec and Enide [ca. 1165]cliges [ca. 1176]The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot), The Knight of the Lion (Yvain) [ca. 1177? 1179-80?]and The Tale of the Grail (Perceval) [ca. 1190]); some have attributed a sixth narrative, William of England, to him, though many scholars find this doubtful. At least two surviving lyric songs are said to have been composed by him (if so, he is the earliest known minstrel with work closely related to that of the ancient Provençal minstrels). {The region is also known as Langue d’Oc or Languedoc. Occamy is ‘alchemy’ in one translation, so we can see the importance of the Troubadour to Bairdic or Peryllat. The spiritual search is the language or the language and the codes of alchemy.}

Certain works that he says belong to his work (they are listed in the opening verses of Cliges) have not survived; these include, notably, a romance entitled Du roi Marc et d’Iseult la Blonde. One of Ovid’s poems on the Cliges list appears as part of an early fourteenth-century compilation called Ovide moralisé.

Of the aforementioned titles, Chrétien left two incomplete: Godefroi de Leigni closed the Charrette, under Chrétien’s supervision (according to Godefroi); the Grail was (almost certainly) interrupted by the death of the poet.

Not only was each of our poet’s works copied throughout the thirteenth century (Charrette’s eight manuscripts were produced in that century), but each was subject to innumerable reworkings, in verse and, especially, in prose. Perceval underwent a series of “sequels” and inspired many textual “spinoffs” before the Grail story he told was incorporated into the vast Prose Lancelot (along with Charrette, who forms the midpoint of the text of this great compilation). Post-World War II scholarship has shown that Chrétien’s work was fully integrated into the system of textual references and allusions that underlie many important 13th-century texts: a series of “epigonal romances” (for example, Fergus, Le Bel Inconnu) and a work like the Roman de la Rose (the Narcissus episode by Guillaume de Lorris, as MA Freeman has shown, “rereads/rewrites” Ovid through a process of refraction that involves the scene Drops of blood on the Chrétien snow in Perceval [Freeman 1976-77]). A romance composed as late as Froissart’s fourteenth-century Méliador “revives” the Arthurian manner and matter of Chrétien de Troyes, as PF Dembowski (1983) has shown.

Chretien himself used a similar web of textual allusions in his own romances. Scholars interested in the sources have for generations pointed to “first generation” romances such as the ancient romances (Aeneas, Troy, and Thebes) and that of Wace. gross and rou, not to mention the Tristán corpus (especially Tomás), as a kind of quarry from which Chrétien extracted materials that he used in his own constructions. Chrétien’s bookish learning – he was clearly a fully trained cleric in the arts curriculum of his day – is evident in his love of figures of ornamentation such as the adnominatio, rich rhyme and chiasmus, and, also, in the particularly fertile way in which he refracted the Arthurian materials he borrowed from Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace through the lens of late-antique works such as Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae (in Érec et Énide) or the writings of Macrobius. As he states in the Prologue to Erec and Enide, he – and he proudly names himself – and his work must be distinguished from the fragmentary and vulgar tales trumpeted before kings and earls by uneducated minstrels.” (6)