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In this article I am going to take you on a mind-opening journey through our emotions and our past, interconnecting how we demonise things we don't understand, be that other races or our own emotions. Importantly, the discovery that such estrangement leads to a detrimental disconnectedness with life should be incentive enough for us to realise that the demonisation of our emotions - past and present - is really a demonisation of our very self. We should not be afraid of the differences life has to offer, nor of the differences within ourselves.Life is filled with infinite variety, and the internet, as part of the public domain, is a smorgasbord of the weird and wonderful, the dangerous and delightful - something to suit every need. It has also inherited what we are drawn to most, that tradition of enigma and exclusiveness, and the drive to communicate and understand. For that reason, it's no surprise that personal well-being and health is the most talked topic on the internet.
We constantly search for those health secrets that may make us live longer, look younger, feel better and perform better in our lives, and our beds. Amongst the hundreds of emails I am sent daily, my readers' mails are filled with these issues, but what really connects them all is the underlying issue of how we deal with our emotions. More often than not, we demonise our emotions, but the negative effects of overwhelming emotions often have more to do with our reaction to the emotion than to the emotion itself.
For instance, if you feel extreme rage and act on that rage by breaking a window or physically assaulting the person you're angry at, the problem then becomes the damage you've caused rather than the emotion of anger. If you allow the anger to pass through you without reacting to it, there would be no problem.
Destructive anger is never constructive, however we can utilise anger as an emotion to our benefit, too. Emotions themselves, even the painful ones, can be neutral and soon pass. It's when we do things under the influence of strong but temporary emotions that we experience difficulties and then regret what we've done. The two-minute reality check works by interrupting the emotion-reaction cycle, giving you time to regain your perspective.
Some experts suggest that when you find yourself in an emotionally overwhelming situation or dealing with the aftermath of such a situation, you should ask yourself the following:
- What just happened? What are my feelings, and why do I feel this way?
- In the grand scheme of things, how important is this situation?
- Given my strong feelings about the situation right now, how upset will I be in twenty-four hours? Forty-eight? A week? A month?
Following in from this internal critique, we are also advised to scan our mind to discover what it is we really want to achieve. You may even want to write them down to clarify your thoughts. What part of the situation are you struggling against? Try framing them into "I want/don't want" statements.
This is not to belittle those episodes in our lives that bring immeasurable pain. Physical assaults that damage our body health and mental health, or terrible childhoods that seem to steal our adult lives from us, issues we believe make us imperfect - and as humans we do not cope well with imperfections. Indeed, experts say most our anger comes because we see the world in an "unrealistic" way, and we lose control when our expectations are crushed too easily.
In actuality, finding methods that help us build a healthy relationship with our emotions that help us to overcome even the greatest of trauma. Talking therapies utilise ways that we can understand our feelings and emotions, and how to deal with the challenges that will inevitably arise in our lives.
Face your challenges like a true warrior.
Life can bring on a variety of emotions, which we will perceive as both positive and negative, that range in intensity from mild to severe. Although many experts say that unless you get a "handle" on your emotions, it can feel like you're on an emotional roller coaster. It's said if you don't have a handle on them, they have a way of getting a handle on you, and propose certain strategies to keep your emotions "in check". However, you cannot change or control your emotions. You can learn how to be with them, living peacefully with them, transmuting them (which means releasing them), and you can manage them, but you cannot control them.
Think of the people who go along day after day seeming to function normally, and all of a sudden they will explode in anger at something that seems relatively trivial and harmless. That is one sign of someone who is trying to control or repress their emotions but their repressed emotions are leaking out.
The more anyone tries to control their emotions the more they resist control, and the more frightened people eventually become at what is seen to be a "loss of emotional control". It is a vicious circle. Subsequently, I prefer to see our emotions as parts of us that we need to familiarise and harmonise ourselves with, rather than feelings we need to "master" in that sense. We should master our emotions in the sense that we take time to learn why we feel the way we do.
Every person is unique, and will react differently to the same circumstance. So, this process of familiarising ourselves with our emotions requires we come closer to our authentic self. It will take trial and error, but it will take effort and work. In dealing with our emotions, experts have provided some therapeutic ways to connect with and deal with them.
If we allow modern day stresses and challenges do obstruct us from facing life, pursue a lifestyle, or connect with other we begin to disassociate ourselves from our own lives. Developing your social side is crucial for well-being. Studies show that people who are socially active, who are compassionate, and who are emotionally generous have higher levels of happiness and live longer than people who lead a more solitary life. When we hide away, we become frightened of life, and treat it like the wolf at the door. Being a hermit, or taking a period of spiritual reflection can be beneficial, but it is against nature to disconnect your energy from the source.
Research also shows that people who have strong interpersonal skills rank in the highest levels of happiness, and those who are socially isolated have substantially lower levels of well-being. Social skills are just one part of this happiness factor, though. People who maintain good personal relationships also fare better than people who are socially inactive. Open, trusting, intimate relationships are essential building blocks for a happy life. And it isn't only receiving support that makes us happy; it's being able to give support to others as well.
Likewise, we shouldn't be afraid of our emotions, or demonise one over the other - anger is "bad", elation is "good" - you have to face your emotions, connect with them, so to to be proactive when you do feel things, and not merely react to your feelings as they arise. You need to be a participant in your emotions, and not a passive observer that gets hit by a runaway car.
Understanding, identifying and releasing your emotions are skills we need to live a healthy life. Emotions operate on many levels. They have a physical aspect as well as a psychological aspect. Emotions bridge thought, feeling, and action – they operate in every part of a person, they affect many aspects of a person, and the person affects many aspects of the emotions.
Different people define emotions in different ways. Some make a distinction between emotions and feelings saying that a feeling is the response part of the emotion and that an emotion includes the situation or experience, the interpretation, the perception, and the response or feeling related to the experience of a particular situation.
Some see emotions as our warning systems to what is really going on around us. Emotions are our most reliable indicators of how things are going on in our lives. Emotions help keep us on the right track by making sure that we are led by more than the mental/intellectual faculties of thought, perception, reason, memory.
Thus, if emotions control your thinking, behaviour and actions, then emotions affect your physical bodies as much as your body affects your feelings and thinking. People who ignore, dismiss, repress or just ventilate their emotions, are setting themselves up for physical illness. Experts warn us emotions that are not felt and released but buried within the body or in the aura can cause serious illness, including cancer, arthritis, and many types of chronic illnesses.
We shouldn't confuse this as meaning emotions are the only cause of illness. Little babies and young children get ill, and not always because of their emotional issues. There are many causes of illness including emotions, but they are not the sole cause of illness. However as adults, when we demonise, or perceive emotions as negative, this can also double their affect on our health.
What we traditionally term as "negative" emotions such as fear, anxiety, frustration and anger cause chemical reactions in your body that are very different from the chemicals released when you feel positive emotions such as happy, content, loved, accepted. The secret is to turn those emotions we perceive as negative into a positive - and get our emotions to work for us, rather than against us.
How to combat feeling sadDo you ever find yourself feeling sad but don't know exactly why? Tempted to just brush past it? Well, don't. Research shows that sadness is useful. It acts as a red traffic light to curb negative behaviour. According to studies it's actually good for us all to be sad 10% of the time.
Understanding the source of your sadness can be key to moving on. If we try to forget it, and bury it, it can damage our emotional well-being. Remembering and then letting go can help people move past sadness more quickly, or use their sadness to spur them on to better things.
Knowing why you're feeling sad is key to dealing with it, learning from it, and letting go. If you don't process what you're going through, sad thoughts may continue to linger, and sad signals may even get stored in your body. So the next time you are feeling sad but don't know why, grab your journal and try to puzzle it out. You'll feel better if you do.
There are benefits to embracing your dark side; by accepting it we can deal with it, and learn to live with it in harmony with beliefs that reward, rather than penalise. Underlying much of our behaviour is what is called a belief system. This system within us filters what we see and hear, affecting how we behave in our daily lives. There are many other elements that affect our lives, including past human relationships and the core issues we come into this life for resolution, but our belief systems have a major effect on what we think and do.
Experts tell will tell you that your belief system affects your perceptions or how you interpret what you see, hear and feel. For example, a person raised by an angry man or woman will view people in the future with beliefs that anger is bad or that it is something to fear. Another example would be someone who is quite intelligent but who has never been encouraged or honoured for their intelligence, this person might believe they are stupid. Men raised in conservative societies might have the belief that women who work outside of the home are not as good as those who do not work outside of the home.
It takes a lot of work to look at yourself and identify the beliefs that are affecting your life in a negative manner. However, knowing your beliefs will give you a sound basis for emotional freedom. I do believe that it's wise to deal with the belief systems before dealing with the identification and release of emotions, this is why it is always good to question yourself as well as your emotions, i.e., what is it you hoped to achieve with your anger? Or what has triggered your fear?
The basic power of emotions
There are only two basic emotions that we all experience, love and fear. It's said that all other emotions are variations of these two emotions. Thoughts and behaviour come from either a place of love, or a place of fear. Anxiety, anger, control, sadness, depression, inadequacy, confusion, hurt, lonely, guilt, shame, these are all fear-based emotions. Emotions such as joy, happiness, caring, trust, compassion, truth, contentment, satisfaction, these are love-based emotions.
There are varying degrees of intensity of both types of emotions, some being mild, others moderate, and others strong in intensity. For example, anger in a mild form can be felt as disgust or dismay, at a moderate level can be felt as offended or exasperated, and at an intense level can be felt as rage or hate. And the emotion that always underpins anger is fear. Nevertheless, if we can base the underlying emotion of these "negative" feelings as love, too, then even our anger can become a useful warning signal to guide us on to the right track for us in life.
Experts have said that emotions have a direct effect on how our bodies work. Fear-based emotions stimulate the release of one set of chemicals while love-based emotions release a different set of chemicals. If the fear-based emotions are long-term or chronic they damage the chemical systems, the immune system, the endocrine system and every other system in your body. Our immune systems weaken and many serious illnesses set in. This relationship between emotions, thinking, and the body is being called mind/body medicine today.
Thus, the trick is to shift ALL emotions - even the ones we demonise because they are underpinned by our fears - on to love, and remove the need for excessive fear in our lives. But let's not demonise fear, either - it is an inherent part of our biological make-up, provided for our survival. We are biologically programmed to pay attention to any potential threat.
But we have have to bring consciousness to our emotions, and be aware why we are feeling fear, and if it is justifiable. Life is about survival, and there will be dangers ahead. Some believe that we each come into this lifetime with at least one core issue to resolve. Different situations will continue to present themselves in different but repeat patterns until you have dealt with the core issues in your life.
To highlight the difference between core issues and emotions, a few examples of core issue are abandonment/victimisation, demanding justice in all matters, living spiritually rather than materially. These are overarching issues that affect emotions completely. Core issues that infect a relationship, can bring about not only sexual, and violent abuse, but emotional abuse, too. In fact, emotional abuse links the two.
Emotional abuse is a form of violence in relationships. Emotional abuse is just as violent and serious as physical abuse but is often ignored or minimized because physical violence is absent. Emotional abuse can include any or all of the following elements. It can include rejection of the person or their value or worth. It can also be a form of sexual violence, by degrading that person without their consent whilst having sexual intercourse.
Degrading an individual in any way is emotionally abusive, involving ridiculing, humiliating and insulting behaviour. Terrorising or isolating a person is deeply abusive and happens to children, adults, and often the elderly. Exploiting someone is abusive. Denying emotional responses to another is deeply abusive. The "silent treatment" is a cruel way of controlling people and situations. Where there is control there is no love, only fear.
If you are living in a situation that is emotionally abusive please seek help from either a professional or one of the many helpful organisations present in most communities, to help you sort out your issues. Emotions stemming from emotional abuse are deep and complex, requiring ongoing help from those trained to deal with emotional abuse. Many people find out about their core issues by learning to deal with their emotions. It can be a gradual - sometimes gentle - pathway that leads you into a deeper knowing of your core issues.
Another note of warning, people can spend too much time talking about how they feel. You can attend workshops, visit therapists, and tell others who did what to you and describe how you feel about it, but you also need to feel your feelings. Don't just intellectualise and analyse your feelings without feeling them. Coming from an objective or "divine" perspective when dealing with a crisis is important, but we shouldn't be repressing our feelings/ We need to feel. Otherwise, this is just another form of demonisation.
People are afraid to really feel their feelings, afraid of losing control, afraid of the pain involved in feeling their emotions, of feeling the sense of loss or failure or whatever the emotion brings with it. People are afraid to cry, but so much of life is about what you feel equally as what you think. Being strongly connected to your emotional life is essential to living a life with high energy and a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction. This is where emotional health and emotional intelligence stems from.
Read 6 essential steps to increase emotional intelligence.
I like to add my own component to the duo to make a powerful emotional triumvirate. The third pillar I would personally add is emotional hygiene - which is just a fancy word for feeling, and using, our emotions "well". This includes clearing out the trash of your past, and the present trash in your mind. We need to clear our what no longer serves us, so our emotions are dealing with things relevant and beneficial to us.
Learn to clear your mind with love.
In addition, for some of us is not just about clearing, but cleaning and clarifying our mind and life. As we may need to spring clean our house, and declutter the stuff from our houses, so, too, we need to clean out the mind. It may be too difficult for us to turn emotions we have perceived for so long as negative into positives at the star, when we have so much negativity in our lives.
Once we have cleared these away, then we will be stronger to turn negatives into positives - the more emotionally hygienic we are, the more our emotional immune system will be boosted and working at its optimum. Armed in this way, we can treat every emotion as love, and use even those feelings that used to "harm" us for good. Towards this end, below are some suggestions for us to harmonise with our emotions.
- Let it out: Experts say emotions like to linger. Sometimes you have to kick them out. Bottled-up feelings of non-constructive sadness or anger can sap your energy and interfere with your relationships and other areas of your personal and professional life. So let people know when something is bothering you. If you're having trouble verbalising, try purging yourself of intense emotions by pouring them out in a journal. If you allow sadness to linger, it could develop into a more serious depressive state.
- Count to ten: Emotions are powerful. And they can surface at any time: at work, at the grocery store, out with friends, at the dinner table. When you find yourself in emotionally charged situations, you can try and step away and count to 10 before you say or do anything. Experts say this will give you a chance to calm down, assess the situation, and consider the possible positive and negative consequences of your reactions and comments.
- Say when: Emotions love overachievers. If you have a tendency to take on too much, watch out! Resist the temptation to handle everything on your own; don't be shy to ask for a helping hand. Break large projects into smaller portions and delegate, even if they are just small tasks. And do it BEFORE you get overwhelmed. Learning how to recognise and express your limits is vital to avoiding meltdowns.
- Talk to yourself: Experts say emotions are sneaky. One minute you're fine, the next you feel yourself sliding downhill. Worry creeps in. Something, or maybe several things, didn't go as well as you'd hoped, and you're headed down a dark path. Before you get too far into the darkness, talk it out with yourself. Ask yourself what you can learn from the situation and how you can plan more effectively for similar challenges in the future.
- Fuel up: Emotions don't seem to play fair. They attack when you're most vulnerable: when your schedule is packed with events, chores, and responsibilities. Make sure you first take care of basic needs like food, water, sleep, and exercise. You'll find it much easier to stay calm, cool, and collected when you're exercising regularly, eating healthy meals, and getting enough sleep.
If we try to incorporate these small changes into our lives will help us harmonise with our emotions, to become closer and thus have less chance of demonising them, and in effect frightening ourselves out of a life. Those who regularly read my articles will know of my interest in science, philosophy, religion and history - and history serves as a chilling lesson to the destruction caused when we demonise each other.
The Dark Ages is especially such a time, because it challenges our perceptions. My article "Delve into the Mysteries with Love" illustrates how the stories of the Dark Ages weren't dark at all. In fact, the term "dark ages" refers to scholars' relative lack of understanding of what occurred during those years, not to the condition of the continent or its people. Academic circles prefer to refer to this time period as the Middle Ages, as the "Dark Ages" has become an out-of-date term abandoned by many historians.
Read some myths about the Dark Ages.
I continue to use the phrase Dark Ages to highlight the converseness in our processes of demonisation, as without question that this was a time period filled with intellectual innovations (they didn't believe the world was flat), as well as great cultural advances in art, literature, philosophy, etc., with one example, the English vernacular literature as we know it being invented during this time period, from Beowulf to Chaucer and Chaucer's contemporaries. This "dark age" actually shines a light on Western culture as it developed - indeed its very foundations - from the fall of Rome through the Reformation.
When we look back at these ages of darkness, we see the Christians' struggle to communicate their god visually was one of the most exciting struggles in art, while the so-called "barbarians" were really inventive peoples who made glorious bling. Islam spent those years reaching for the stars, while the Anglo-Saxons were magnificent goldsmiths and brilliant word-smiths, living in an era that was brought to an "official" kind of end in Britain with the Norman Conquest in 1066.
The Dark Ages has always been a period of mystery, and has attracted a lot of controversy. For example, there is even an argument made that the Middle Ages themselves were just a historical conspiracy theory. This "phantom time" hypothesis is a revisionist history and conspiracy theory developed in the 1980s and '90s by German historian and publisher Heribert Illig, who proposed that periods of history, specifically that of Europe during the Early Middle Ages (AD 614–911), are either wrongly dated, or did not occur at all, and that there has been a systematic effort to cover up that fact.
Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation, and forgery of documentary and physical evidence. Could the age of myths indeed be a myth itself, invented to eradicate a period of time when humans were ruled by religious extremism in the West, and when even the defence of science was punishable by death?
The basis of Illig's hypothesis include the scarcity of archaeological evidence that can be reliably dated to the period AD 614–911, on perceived inadequacies of radiometric and dendrochronological methods of dating this period, and on the over-reliance of medieval historians on written sources.
He took the presence of Romanesque architecture in tenth-century Western Europe as evidence that less than half a millennium could have passed since the fall of the Roman Empire, and concluded that the entire Carolingian period, including the existence of the individual known as Charlemagne, is a forgery by medieval chroniclers; or more precisely, a conspiracy instigated by Otto III and Gerbert d'Aurillac.
Illig also put forward the relation between the Julian calendar, Gregorian calendar and the underlying astronomical solar or tropical year. The Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar, was long known to introduce a discrepancy from the tropical year of around one day for each century that the calendar was in use.
By the time the Gregorian calendar was introduced in AD 1582, Illig alleged that the old Julian calendar "should" have produced a discrepancy of thirteen days between it and the real (or tropical) calendar. Instead, the astronomers and mathematicians working for Pope Gregory had found that the civil calendar needed to be adjusted by only ten days. From this, Illig concludes that the AD era had counted roughly three centuries which never existed.
However, when you look at the details, you'll realise that the Dark Ages were not a myth created to demonise religion. Ignoring the problems of how somebody fudged the calendar, got everybody in Europe to go along, invented not just Charlemagne but entire royal lineages, and somehow got everyone to keep all their stories straight, one critic of the theory points out a fatal flaw.
This is that the theory is hopelessly Eurocentric, and does not take into account other parts of the world, such as the Middle East or the Far East - areas we have demonised out of psychological existence in the Western psyche, until the start of the 21st Century when violence and money forced them into our direct line of vision.
The devil is in the demonisationWhen we demonise anything, our emotions, ourselves, or other people, we lose so many of the riches life has to offer. And as a misunderstood people, the group we call the barbarians from the Dark Ages is a prime example.
For starters, the word "barbarian" is a misleading expression. It's a word whose meaning has been warped by time. The word "barbarian" comes from the ancient Greek. Its original meaning was someone whose language you can't understand, a foreigner. Like today, we would say, "It all sounds Greek to me", when we can't understand something, well the Greek's said it all sounds like "bar bar bar".
Barbarian was an onomatopoeic word. Anyone who spoke a foreign language was a barbarian. A similar word, "barbara" can be found in Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, where it means gibberish or stammering. And if you're actually called Barbara, your name means "barbarian woman". When the Romans took over the word from the Greek, they also took over its derogatory meaning, using to denote anybody, anywhere, who wasn't a Roman.
Romans actively encouraged such prejudice. Towards the end of the 1st Century after the birth of Christ, during a long and savage Roman military campaign to subdue the Jewish rebels in Judea in 70 AD, the legions of Titus, the son of the then emperor, sacked Jerusalem. In the midst of all this an unlikely love affair began between a Jewish ally, the client queen Berenice, a woman at least 10 years his senior.
Titus returned to Rome in 71 AD, followed a few years later by Berenice who controversially lived with him in his father's imperial palace. The presence of the foreign queen drew public protests because she didn't look like them. There was open hostility, because a relationship with a Jewish woman was a blatant contravention of all the social prejudices that the regime had been trying to encourage. Although Titus was the emperor's son, he remained subject to the rules of Roman social convention.
Moreover, he was expected to produce a heir with a wife from amongst the same ranks of aristocracy he came from, especially since his Jewish queen was past child bearing age. Subsequently, historians tell us that traditional Roman high society rejected her Jewish heritage, and the fact that the chances of her having a son was extremely rare.
The twin flame romance between Titus and his Jewish queen has inspired plays, novels, ballets and operas especially for its abrupt and tragic ending, for when Titus became emperor in 79 AD, against both their wills, he had to send her away from Rome due to Roman social conventions and because the absence of an heir threatened civil war. So, the Jews, the Persians, Indians, Chinese - the entire non-Roman world were barbarians.
It isn't just the word "barbarian" that has been demonised and distorted from the Dark Ages. Open an English dictionary and you'll find plenty more - such as "vandal". The Vandals were actually a fascinating and creative ancient peoples - but their name has been stolen from them and turned into something dark. Or what about the Goths? Today we imagine Goths as oily punks who dye their hair black and worship the devil. But in actuality, in Roman times, the Goths were Christian, international creatives who made one of the most beautiful bibles ever, with a gold cover, lined with purple pages and written on with silver ink.
This demonisation has worked its way into our psyche through the word, and the image. Down through history, Western art has depicted barbarians as unclothed and uncivilised, but Dark Age historians say this is nonsense. For example, the Visigoths were never naked savages clambering about the ancient Roman Empire destroying civilisation. They were pioneering Europeans who produced beautiful art and achieved important things. It was actually these so-called barbarians who invented trousers. Riding a horse was much easier in trousers. If it wasn't for the barbarians, we would all be wearing togas today. But the worst of these so-called barbarians, these forgotten ancient peoples who reputation has been trashed by the Romans, were the Huns. But delve deeper, and the art of the Huns tells historians a different story.
Christians were determined to demonise all pagans, and particularly determined to demonise the Huns. The Huns were energetic invaders, and no one had a good word to say about them. Christian and other barbarian historians alike wrote that they ate the flesh of children and drank the blood of women. It was the same type of libel the Allied forces would use when the fought the Ottoman Turks in Gallipoli. In the First World War, the British also began calling the Germans "Huns" as it was the worst insult they could think of, but it was also very bad geography, because the Huns were not from Germany.
Exactly where the Huns came from is one of the big mysteries of the Dark Ages, but it is believed to be somewhere out in the Euro-Asian steppe. The first record of the Huns in Europe dates from around 376 AD, a nation of nomads coming in from the east and pushing the Goths onto the doorstep of the Romans. A fighting tribe of whom everyone was scared, Huns WERE fierce warriors, but not all the time. They moved around in small family groups, their default lifestyle was domesticity, and the defining Hunnic objects left behind to our age are not weapons, but elaborate cooking cauldrons were they cooked their goats and boiled their water. An old Kazakh saying that still circulates is that a man can live to be 50, but a cauldron will live 100 years.
The Huns also loved gold; in the Hunnic graves that have been dug up the buried cache of treasures reveals an instinctive passion for all things the valuable. The Incas had called gold the "sweat of the gods" and in the Dark Ages gold was a substance with a magical presence. Because they spent so much of their life on the move, travelling from pasture to pasture, the Huns had a particularly creative relationship with the natural world.
Hun treasure is dominated by exquisite animal forms. Their gold nursed intense symbolic ambitions, carved as wolf heads and eagles. This was to commune with the natural world, to speak with it and steal some of its power, as of the wolf and eagle. Eagles had a specials significance for the Hun, as ready made symbols of power and beauty combined. They used eagles to hunt with, and respected the hunting ability of the wolf.
This powerful new relationship with the natural world was one of the great barbarian contributions to civilisation - natural power channelled into gold. It gave their art an animal energy that connects it to the basic stuff of life, something which gets lost later on with religious art. And then there was the magnificent Hunnic horse art; the Huns depended totally on their horses, and loved them deeply, so they made sure their horses were kitted out in horse ornaments fashioned delicately with gold and precious stones.
The Huns participated in their own demonisation willingly, creating a terrible reputation that preceded them. They would ride into battle with wolf-skins pulled down on their faces, screaming demoniacally in a deliberate effort to get inside their enemy's heads. It was dark, sophisticated psychological warfare. And one of the reasons the Huns were so easy to demonise was because they looked so strange. They practised ritual deformation and their skulls were deliberately misshapen at birth. Infant Huns would have their heads tightly bound so they grew into elongated shapes. On these deformed heads of theirs the Huns would balance crowns of unimaginable preciousness.
To be able to make such precious items, the Huns took their gold straight from the Romans, because their bow was so lethal, and their horsemen so skilled, the Huns were soon operating a protection racket across most of the Roman Empire - similar to the descendants of Romans today with the Mafia in America. What Huns would do was invade somewhere or threaten to, and then demand large quantities of gold to go away again. The Romans, the cowardly diplomats they were during this time, preferred to pay them rather than fight them. By the time Hunnic Empire was at its largest extent, the Huns were receiving 2,500 pounds of gold coins, from the Romans every year.
A few tribes of nomads roaming across borders of Rome could never have pressured them to give up enormous quantities of gold as they did, so the image of the Huns as a tribal horde sweeping across Europe is not really accurate, because they were something much more sophisticated than that. The Hunnic Empire under Attila was a rival empire in size - a new superpower of the Dark Ages that turned up to take on the Romans.
The moment you mention Attila, the Huns take on a satanic glint. All the Huns were demonised by history, but Attila was demonised most of all. However, although he has a bad reputation in Europe, in Hungary he is viewed as a kind of hero. It is thought Attila spoke eight languages by the age of 15, and laid Europe at his feet - thus the idea we have of the ignorant barbarian could not have achieved the things Attila did. But whether you are for the Huns or against, they were more than simply satanic hordes sweeping through Europe.
By the time Attila had become their leader, the Huns had created a complex political system. Their huge empire was actually a federation of many nations, and mysterious tribes that emerged from the confederation of the Huns. A kind of barbarian European union opposed to the Romans, with Goths, Burgundians, Alans and even a few Greeks all linked together and ruled by Attila. But this empire of the Huns didn't last long.
For a few decades the Hunnic Empire rivalled the Romans and then it was gone. Attila had been the glue that held it together, who died "a rock star's death" while consummating his marriage to his latest young bride. Within a few years of his death, Attila's empire was gone, torn apart by feuds and incompetence. But the Huns had done their job; they had punched a hole in the invincible reputation of the Romans. All manner of barbarians were queueing up to pour through it.
Demonise or love thy neighbour?
When we think of barbarians we think of hordes of bellicose warriors storming across the plains to attack Rome. But it was more of a migration - think of those wagon trains rolling across the American West, full of brave pioneers searching for a new future. That's a more accurate depiction especially in the case of one great barbarian nation, whose name has been well and truly blackened by Dark Age propaganda - the Vandals.
Vandal originally meant something like "wanderer", someone who is looking for something, it comes from the same Germanic root as the English word to "wend", but a vandal today is a wilful destroyer of anything beautiful, venerable or worthy of preservation.
The story of the Vandals is quite poignant. They were basically a nation of Germanic farmers, living peacefully in central Europe until the Huns pushed them out and they became great wanderers. For a while they ended up in Spain, until a group of Goths pushed them out of there as well. The Vandals moved to North Africa. In 429 AD 80,000 people came over the Straits of Gibraltar crammed onto small boats. A kingdom on the move looking for a homeland, finally arriving in Africa, like a lost people discovering the promised land.
In north Africa, the Vandals travelled attacking cities, absorbing territories, collecting followers until in 439 AD they reached Carthage, the second largest city in the Western Roman Empire. Bustling and rich, it was a crucial trading centre in olive oil and wheat, and when vandals took Carthage they shocked the Roman Empire. However, the capture of Carthage was surprisingly peaceful, and not bloody as we might have expected. It was taken on the day of the Roman Games; the Romans, obsessed with sports such as gladiatorial combat and chariot racing, were too busy to fight the Vandals, so they strolled in, took control and stayed there for the next century.
People used to think Vandals went about destroying and pillaging Carthage, but the remarkable thing about vandal occupation of Africa was not how much, but how little they destroyed. Later angry Romans and Christians writing of these events, made sure they blackened the Vandals' reputation, as they did with all barbarians. But the art that remains tells a different story.
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| Carthage mosaic from the estate of Lord Julius |
Back on the European continent, other tribes were marking their own unique mark. Gothic today means barbarous, uncouth, rude - but a Goth was just one of a Germanic tribe who invaded the Roman Empire. In the lexicon of hate spawned by the Dark Ages, a special place is set aside for the Goths. We know the stereotype of the modern Goth today, but real Goths were energetic, colourful, and inventive. Originally the Goths came from the Baltic Coast, successful farmers, but when their population exploded, they made their way south to the Black Sea searching for better land and better farming conditions. They came into direct contact with the Roman Empire and found themselves in the way of the Huns coming in from east. So to get away from them, it's said that the Goths split into two.
Some of them fled across the Danube and begged the Romans to let them in, and they became the Visigoths or western Goths, who settled first in France and then finally in Spain. The other group stayed put and joined the Huns in the Hunnic Empire and they became the Ostrogoths or eastern Goths. When you think of barbarians you instinctively think of pagans, of godless and violent people with strange and primitive beliefs. Conan the Barbarian is hardly altar boy material, however most of the barbarians were Christians, even the Vandals. So were the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. All of them were converted to Christianity in the 4th Century.
However, the form of Christianity they converted to was unusual. Arian Christianity was a Christian heresy, a different form of Christianity proposed by a priest called Arius, in Alexandria in Egypt in the 4th Century. From there it spread across the Roman Empire, and then out among the Barbarians. The Arians believed that Jesus was different from God, He was divine, but less so. This was contrary to Catholic belief which says that God and Jesus, the father and son, are equal - two different forms of the same great divinity.
The Arians disagreed, for them God the father was the one true God. They believed in a Jesus who is more like the rest of us, less divine and more human. Perhaps this is why the barbarians preferred a less imperial Jesus who was more like them. Right across the empire of the Romans, Catholics and Arians distrusted each other as only co-believers can, a bit like the Sunnis and Shia in Islam. Same religion, different only in the details, but so antagonistic towards each other.
The Goths produced their own Christian art. The Silver Bible is a gospel book written in Gothic with the Gothic alphabet for the Ostrogoths in Italy, Ravenna in the beginning of the 6th Century. We assume "barbarians" didn't have literature but they did; and the surviving Gothic bible is beautiful to look at - filled with the imperial colour of purple pages written in silver writing. The Visigoths in Spain achieved a lot as well.
The Visigoths ruled Spain from around 500 AD to around 700 AD, that is 200 years, but we hardly ever hear about them. We hear about the Romans and Muslims in Spain, but you don't often hear about the Visigoths. Some have described them as "invisi-goths", which is an unfair term, because if you hunt around in Spain you will find plenty evidence of Visigoth achievement showing off their Dark Age skills.
Like the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths were originally Arians, but in Spain they were surrounded by Roman Catholics, and quickly adopted the Roman version of Christianity. That's when they built their inventive Visigoth churches - the oldest church in Spain is one such of these. Completely unlike anything the Romans came up with, Visigoth church decorations w3ere energetic and busy, real and untutored - as though for the first time in art we are hearing from the common person. Not made by an artiste but by an ordinary craftsman, speaking to us across the across the ages.
The architectural arches of the Goths were special because they looked like horse-shoes. Before they invented them, arches were semi-circular to give a very different effect. Gothic (to use the real sense of the term) arches are more elegant as if a sail has unfurled and filled with a blowing wind.
These elegant horseshoe arches were a brilliant barbarian invention, but although the Visigoths invented them, they were perfected by others. The perfecters of the horseshoe arch were Islamic artists, in the hands of which would be added to with great style - yet another great achievement of the Dark Ages. The architects of Islam came up with a new idea for the horseshoe columns, the double arch, examples of which can be seen in the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba (also called Cordova in English) a city in Andalusia, southern Spain.
With these new style arches, for the first time in European architecture the aesthetics of light were shaping a building, and can be seen mosques of this period. Masjid is the correct Islamic name for mosque, as mosque is a French Orientalist term from the 17th Century, and again when we think of mosques, beautiful architecture is not what immediately springs to Western minds.
However, Islamic architecture, arts and crafts from Arabia, Persia and beyond show us that in the medieval periods there was a lot of movement of populations, which fused Christian and Muslim designs. Patterns used in Byzantine and Persian traditions overlapped, in buildings you can find traces of the Vandals, Byzantines and Romans. There was a lot of interaction between cultures, traditions and artists. It was not unknown for Muslims to make items for Christians who were living within the Muslim controlled lands, and vice versa.
For example, on many Islamic pots and tiles we can see a stylised lotus design, emblematic and loosely representing the "endless knot" (like Celtic interlacing). This is a real universal symbol, appearing across widespread and diverse cultures, from Celtic to Persian lands. However, it's thought to originate in ancient Tibetan traditions, representing the infinite wisdom of the Buddha, and symbolising eternal love and friendship and the intertwining of wisdom and compassion.
Many motifs crossed into art from other medieval cultures, and contrary to popular belief, there are many figurative and animal depictions in ancient Islamic decorative arts. Furthermore, the Muslim tradition was carried over spectacularly to churches such as the one in San Román, now the Museo Visigotico with the horseshoe arches. It is not what we would imagine of the Dark Ages, but in those early days of religious tolerance, Muslims and Christians shared the Córdoba religious building as a divine institution.
Moreover, when the Muslims were in Córdoba, it had half a million people living peaceably in it and was by far the most largest and prosperous city in Western Europe. They had running water, street lamps and toilets that flushed - in the 10th Century. Islam was in Spain for 500 years, until they were finally kicked out, but in urban planning, architecture, mathematics and water engineering, Islamic knowledge was peerless.
The water engineers of Islam perfected their hydraulic skills in lands where water was precious and rare. For Islam, water wasn't just a necessity, it was an enticement, too. When the Muslims arrived in Córdoba in Spain in 711 AD and conquered it from the Visigoths, they could not believe how fertile it was and full of paradisical waters. Today, the Islamic style water gardens can still be found. But in one area, Islam was spectacular, namely in astronomy or the study of the stars.
Arabic astronomy allowed the Dark Ages to glimpse the cosmos, and 90% of the 200 brightest stars in the sky have Arabic names. While Christian science was insisting on a backward, biblical understanding of the cosmos, Islamic science was investigating the heavens more adventurously. Without Islamic science and its sensuous delight in the cosmos, perhaps this really would have been a dark age. It was anything but with Islamic science.
This is evidenced by a handy Dark Ages gadget called the astrolabe - which some people call the first computer, compass, and clock - that calculated your exact position by using the stars. It was a handy Dark Age sat-nav with which you could work out where you were. The astrolabe could work out in relation to the stars the requirements of the Islamic faith to pray at specific times of the day towards a specific direction.
Islamic stargazers perfected the astrolabe in the Dark Ages to work out the direction of Mecca, so they always knew which way to pray, nut it also helped to fill their art with cosmic patterns. Islam did much that was inventive and progressive in architecture, another example being its minarets, in which it surpassed itself. Minaret comes from the Arabic "manarah" which means lighthouse.
The minaret is one of the defining Islamic achievements of the Dark Ages. Its function was to be a beacon of hope, to offer safety and protection, and to call the faithful to prayer. It was invented to broadcast the faith from higher up, as a conquest of the skies. Or how about the master Islamic carvers of crystal ewers? Historians will tell you that no one has ever carved rock crystal more finely than Muslim hands centuries ago to transport the drinkers to paradise, decorated with hunting scenes, flowers and decorative birds.
All sorts of Dark Age societies were fascinated by rock crystal. When Ireland was still pagan, they used to prize rock crystal too, and put it at the entrance to burial chambers. The early Christians worshipped it; for them rock crystal had a natural relationship with divine perfection, and would put it up in their golden crosses where its perfect presence seemed to connect them to God. In Christian hands, the creative light filled paradise of Islam fills up with shadows in religious icons. With Christian rock crystal, the Dark Ages are what you expect them to be, mysterious, spooky and talismanic.
Thus, travelling back through the Dark Ages, we can see that it wasn't an age of darkness at all, it was an age of collaboration, co-operation, and beauty - just as much as it was an age of clashes and wars, illness and fear. We see all the peoples that have been demonised by the "victors" of Western civilisations, and in doing so we have also seen the loss we have all incurred from the deepening divides, which have opened up between us as a result.
Nevertheless, even reading this article today can help you become aware, and thus take the first step to change your way of thinking. And that in the same breath - as we should not demonise others - we should not demonise ourselves either, or estrange ourselves from our emotions. We all have a barbarous side and a civilised side, we need to bring balance to them, and bring them closer together to achieve internal peace and harmony within us.
When we can achieve this, when we can finally stop demonising our emotions, and begin to take steps for our emotional well-being, then there is nothing to stop this from spreading out into the world, so that we can finally begin to heal some of the rifts that have opened up - in what future generations may well term as a second dark age.
Yet, they will, and we do know better, that we need the darkness as much as we need the light. There is no point in demonising one in preference to the other. For the beginning must be dark to light the way to love, which will always be the balancer between the two.
Yours in love,
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