Already German warriors had hunted Gauls and Celts, with hardly a stand, over the Alps and across the Rhine; the conquest of the whole of Gallia was easily within their grasp, when suddenly in Julius Cæsar they encountered a force unknown to them before. Beating them back, vanquishing and partly subjugating them, this supernal captain must have made an indelible impression on the Germans; and confirmed was their deep awe of him when they later learnt how all the Roman world had bent to him, how his patronymic "Cæsar" had been hallowed to the title of the highest earthly might, whilst he himself had been translated to the Gods from whom his race had sprung.
This divine descent was grounded on an ur-old Roman saga, according to which the Romans issued from a primordial race that, coming once from Asia, had settled on the banks of the Tiber and Arno. The quick of the religious halidom committed to the offspring of this race indisputably made out for ages the weightiest heritage of the Roman nation: in it reposed the force that bound and knit this active people; the "sacra" in the keeping of the oldest, immemorially-allied patrician families, compelled the heterogeneous masses of plebeians to obedience. Deep awe and veneration of the holy things, whose sense enjoined a vigorous abstemiousness (as practised by the sorely-tried ur-father), make out the oldest, inconceivably effective laws whereby the headstrong folk was governed; and the "pontifex maximus "-the unchanging successor of Numa, the moral founder of the Roman State-was the virtual (spiritual) king of the Romans. Actual Kings, i.e. hereditary holders of the highest worldly rulership, are unknown in Roman history: the banished Tarquins were Etruscan conquerors; in their expulsion we have less to recognise a political act of insurrection against the royal power, than the old stem-races' national act of shaking-off a foreign yoke.
Now, when the plebs was no longer to be held in check by these stern and spiritually-armoured ancient races; when through constant warfare and privation it had made its strength so irresistible that, to avoid a destructive discharge thereof against the inmost core of the Roman State-system, it must be loosed upon the outer world in conquest, then, and still more as result of this world-conquest, the last bond of ancient customs slowly snapped, and religion dropped into its utter opposite through the most material worldlifying: dominion of the world, enslavement of its peoples-no more dominion of the inner man, subdual of his egoistic animal passions-was henceforth Rome's religion. The Pontificate, though it still stood outward token of the ancient Rome, passed over to the worldly Imperator as his weightiest attribute, significantly enough; and the first man to combine both powers was just that Julius Cæsar, whose race was lauded as the very oldest emigrant from Asia. Troja (Ilion), so said the old stem-saga now ripened to historic consciousness, was that sacred town of Asia whence the Julian (Ilian) race had sprung: during the destruction of his father-town by the united Hellenic stems Æneas, son of a goddess, had rescued the holiest relic (the Palladium) preserved in this ur-people's city, and brought it safe to Italy: from him descend the primal Roman races, and most directly of them all the Julian; from him, through the possession of that ur-folk's halidom, was said to date the core of Romandom, their old religion.
Trojan descent of the Franks.
How full of meaning is the historically-attested fact that, shortly after the foundation of their rule in Roman Gallia, the Franks gave themselves out as likewise sprung from Troy. The chronicle-historian gives a pitying smile to such a stale conceit, which cannot hold a grain of truth. But he whose purpose is to vindicate the deeds of men and races by their inmost views and impulses, will find it of the highest moment to note what they believed, or tried to make others believe, about themselves. And no feature can be of more striking historic importance, than this naïve utterance of the Franks' belief in their ur-right to rule, upon their entry on that Roman world whose culture and whose past inspired them with reverence, yet to rule which they were proud enough to base their right directly on the principles of classic Romandom itself. So they, too, sprang from Troy; in fact it was their royal race that governed once in Troy. For one of their ancient stem-kings, Pharamond, was none other than Priamus, the very head of the Trojan royal family, who after the destruction of the city, so they said, had journeyed into distant parts with a remnant of his people. The first point for us to notice here, is that the naming of towns or transformation of their names by an addendum, as also the poetic adaptations of the Trojan War and incidents allied therewith in vogue until the later Middle Ages, afford sufficient evidence of the wide spread and lasting influence of this new saga. Whether it was in all respects as new as it looks, and does not contain a germ far older than its new disguisal in the Græco-Roman dress,-this certainly is worth inquiry.
The legend of an ur-old town or castle, built by the earliest human races and circled with Cyclopean walls to guard their holiest fetish, we find with almost every nation of the world, and especially with those of whom we may assume that they spread westward from those ur-hills of Asia. Did the archetype of these fabled cities not actually once exist in these peoples' earliest home? Surely there was one oldest, first walled city, which held in it the oldest and most venerable race, the well-spring of all patriarchism, i.e. of Kinghood joined with Priesthood. The farther did the stems move westward from their ancient home, the holier would grow their memory of that ur-town; it became to them a city of the Gods, the Asgard of the Scandinavians, the Asciburg of the related Germans. On their Olympos we find again among the Greeks the dwelling of the Gods; before the Romans' Capitol, no less, it may originally have hovered.
Certain it is, that wherever the stems, now grown to nations, made their abiding home, there that ur-town was copied in reality: to it, the new stem-seat of the ruling oldest race of Kings and Priests, the sanctity of the primordial city was gradually transferred; and the farther did the races journey from it in its turn, and build again, the more accountably would wax the glamour of this new stem-city also. Very naturally, however, with the freer evolution of these branch-communities, and their growing sense of self-reliance, the desire for independence would arise; and in exact degree as the ancient ruling-race, that governed from the new stem-city, endeavoured to imprint its sovereignty on the offshoot communes, or cities, and met their stiffening recusance with added tyranny. The first national Wars of Independence were therefore those waged by Colonies against the Mother-cities; and so obstinate must have grown their enmity, that nothing less than the destruction of the old stem-city, with the extirpation or total banishment of the hereditary ruling-race, could still the hate of the epigoni or lay their fears of fresh oppression. All the greater historic nations that followed in each other's footsteps from the Indian Caucasus to the Mediterranean Sea know such a holy city, copied from the ur-old city of the Gods on earth, as also its destruction by new generations: very probably they even nursed the memory of an ur-old war of earliest races against the eldest ruling-race in that Gods'-city of their hoariest home, and of that town's destruction: this may have been, in fact, the first general tussle for the Nibelung's Hoard.
Nothing do we know of great Mother-cities founded by our German stems on that Ur-town's model in their long North-westward wandering, which was finally arrested by the German Ocean and the sword of Julius Cæsar. On the other hand, the memory of the Gods'-city in their oldest home itself had lingered with them; and, un-perpetuated to the eye by material reproduction, it had settled to the more abstract notion of a Gods'-abode in Asgard. Not till we come to their new and stabler home, our present Germany, do we meet with signs of Asenburgs.
Different had been the evolution of the peoples thrusting South-westwards, among whose Hellenic stems the last distinct remembrance, of their united fight-for-independence against the Priamids and the razing of Troy, as the most signal outset of a new historic life, had almost totally extinguished every other memory. Now, as the Romans, after a closer acquaintance with the historic stem-saga of the Hellenes, had held themselves completely justified in linking on the dim remembrances of their forefathers' descent from Asia to
that sharp-cut myth of the better-cultured nation (as if to represent their subjugation of the Greeks as a reprisal for the destruction of Troy), just so did the Franks lay hand on it, perhaps with no less title, when they came to know the legend and its sequel. If the German memories were less distinct, at least they were still older, for they clung directly to the earliest home, the burg (Etzel-, i.e. Asci-burg) in which was stored the Nibelungen-hoard once won by their Stem-god and left to them and their strong arm; thus the burg whence they had once already ruled all kindred folks and races. The Grecian Troy became for them that cradle city, and the King of immemorial right, dislodged therefrom, in them revived his ancient privilege.
At last confronted with the history of the South-west wanderers, must not his race regard its wondrous preservation as a token of the gods' eternal preference? All peoples now descended from the races that had waged a patricidal war against the oldest royal race in the cradle-home, and, victorious then, had forced this race to journey toward the raw inhospitable North while they fenced in the fertile South for leisurely expansion,-all these the Franks found kingless . Long since extinct and rooted out, were the oldest tribes in which these stems had erst known Kings; a last Greek Stem-King, the Macedonian Alexander-offspring of Achilles, that foremost vanquisher of Troy-, had un-kinged the whole southern Orient itself, up to the cradle of mankind in central Asia, as if in last fulfilment of that earliest patricidal war: with him his race expired too, and from that time none had rule except unrightful raiders of the royal power, who all had finally succumbed beneath the weight of Julian Rome.
After extinction of the Julian race even the Roman Emperors were arbitrarily elected, in any case not racially legitimate, dictators: their empire, or ever they themselves became aware of it, had long since ceased to be a "Roman" empire as from of old it had only been bound up by force, and a force maintained through wellnigh naught but armies, so, now that the Romanic nations were completely degenerated and effeminate, these armies were formed of almost none but hired troops of German origin. Hence, gradually renouncing all material worldly might, after long estrangement from itself the Roman spirit necessarily turned back upon itself, to its ur-nature; and thus, adopting Christianity, it gave birth to a new development, the Roman Catholic Church: the Imperator again became all Pontifex, Cæsar again Numa, in new peculiarity of import. Now the Pontifex maximus, or Pope, was approached by the full-blooded representative of Ur-world-Kinghood, Karl the Great: the bearers of the oldest Kinghood and the oldest Priesthood, dissevered since the razing of that cradle city (according to the Trojan saga: the royal Priamos and the pious Æneas) met after centuries of parting, and touched as body and spirit of mankind.
Joyful was their meeting: nothing should ever part them more; the one should give the other troth and shelter: the Pontifex crowned the Cæsar, and to the nations preached obedience toward their lawful King; the Kaiser installed the Priest of God in his supreme pastorate, in whose exercise he undertook to shield him with the arm of worldly strength against all caitiffs.
Now, if this king was de facto master of the West-Roman empire, and might the thought of the ur-kingly title of his race awake in him the claim to perfect sovereignty of the world, in the Kaisership he gained still stronger title to that claim, especially through his entrustment with the shelter of that Christian Church which was to span the world. For the further development of that majestic world-relation, however, it is most important to remark that this spiritual title set up no altogether novel claim of the Frankish royal race, but simply woke to plainer terms a claim ingenerate in the germ of the Frankish stem-saga, though veiled till then in dimmer consciousness.
Material and Ideal contents of the Nibelungen-Hoard.
With Karl the Great the often-cited ur-old myth attains its most material confirmation in a grand harmonious juncture of world-history. Thenceforward in exact degree as its real embodiment dissolved and fell to pieces, its essential ideal content was to mount to such a point that, entirely divested of the Real, the pure Idea steps plainly formulated into History, and finally withdraws therefrom to pass, even as to its outward garment, completely back to Saga.
Whereas in the century after Karl the Great, under his more and more incompetent successors, the actual kingdom and the sovereignty over subject peoples had crumbled up and lost in power, all the atrocities of the Karlings sprang from one root-instinct common to them all, the longing for sole possession of the Nibelungen-hoard, i.e. of rule supreme. Since Karl the Great this seemed to need confirming by the Kaisership, and he who won the Kaiser-throne believed himself the true possessor of the Hoard, whatever the diminution of its worldly wealth (in landed property). The Kaiserhood, with the supreme authority to it alone attaching, was thus invested with a more and more ideal meaning; and during the period of total defeat of the Frankish ruling-stem, when the Saxon Otto seemed to be restoring the real Cæsarate of Karl the Great in fresh conjunction with Rome, its ideal aspect would appear to have come to ever clearer consciousness in the mind of that old stem. The Franks and their ducal race of one blood with the Karlingen, thinking of the saga, may have told themselves something like this: "What though the real possession of the land is torn from us, and once more we're thrown upon ourselves,-can we but regain the Imperial rank, for which we'll never cease to strive, with it we win again our ancient title to mastery of the world; and then we'll know to ply it better than these usurpers of the Hoard, who do not even understand its use."
In effect, as soon as the Frankish stem regained the Kaiserdom, the world-question hinging on that dignity advanced to an ever more important stage, and that through its relation with the Church.
In measure as the worldly power had lost in real estate and approached a more ideal development, the originally purely ideal Church had attained to worldly possession. Each party seemed to comprehend that, for its perfect establishment, it must draw into itself what had lain at first without it; and so from both sides the original antithesis was mounting to an open fight for exclusive world-dominion. Through the growing consciousness of both parties to this more and more stubborn fight, of the prize at stake for winning or retaining, the Kaiser at last was forced to the necessity of acquiring the spiritual dominion of the world, if he meant to safeguard his material title;-the Pope, on the other hand, must annihilate these material claims, or rather take them to himself if he meant to remain or become the actual governor and overseer of the World-Church.
The resultant demands of the Pope were insofar grounded upon Christian Reason (Vernunft) as he felt bound to adjudge to Spirit the power over Body, consequently to God's Vicar on earth the supremacy over His creatures. The Kaiser, on the contrary, saw that his prime concern was to prove his power and claims quite independent of any hallowing or ratifying, to say nothing of bestowal, by the Pope; and for this he found what he deemed a perfect title in the old belief of his stem-race in their origin.
In its earliest form, the stem-saga of the Nibelungen went back to the memory of a divine Ur-father, not only of the Franks, but perhaps of all the nations issued from the Asiatic home. Very naturally in this Ur-father, as we find with every patriarchal system, the royal and priestly powers had been combined as one and the same authority. The later severance of these powers would rank in any case as consequence of a dissension in the race, or, had the priestly power devolved on all the fathers of the commune, in them at most could it be recognised, but never in an upstart Priest opponent to the King; for the fulfilment of the priestly office, so far as it was to be assigned to one sole person for them all, could fall to no one but the King, as Father of the racial whole. That there was no need for those ur-old notions to be sacrificed in toto on the conversion to Christianity, not only is proved by facts, but may be deduced with little pains from the essential content of the old traditions. The abstract Highest God of the Germans, Wuotan, did not really need to yield place to the God of the Christians; rather could he be completely identified with him: merely the physical trappings with whi
ch the various stems had clothed him in accordance with their idiosyncrasy, their dwelling-place and climate, were to be stripped off; the universal attributes ascribed to him, for the rest, completely answered those allotted to the Christian's God. And Christianity has been unable to our day to extirpate the elementary or local Nature-gods: quite recent legends of the Folk, and a wealth of still-prevailing superstitions, attest this in our nineteenth century.
But that one native Stem-god, from whom the races all immediately derived their earthly being, was certainly the last to be given up: for in him was found the striking likeness to Christ himself, the Son of God, that he too died, was mourned and avenged,-as we still avenge Christ on the Jews of to-day. Fidelity and attachment were transferred to Christus all the easier, as one recognised in him the Stem-god once again; and if Christ, as Son of God, was father (at least the spiritual) of all men, that harmonised the better and more conclusively with the divine Stem-father of the Franks, who thought themselves indeed the oldest race and parent of all others. Christianity therefore, with their incomplete and physical understanding of it, would rather strengthen the Franks in their national faith, particularly against the Roman Church, than make them falter; and in rejoinder to this vital obstinacy of the Wibelingian superstition, we see the natural instinct of the Church attacking with almost a mortal dread this last, but sturdiest survival of paganism in the deeply hated race.
The Wibelungen Page 3
