--- In evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com, "evola_as_he_is"
<evola_as_he_is@...> wrote:
> In relation to women, Evola rightly recalled that,
> behind the knightly worship of woman, symbolic significations were
> hidden. It is simply a matter of knowing whether these symbolic
> significations are of the solar or of the lunar order. "The lady, as
> he mentions in "The Phratry of the Sentinels of the Future", was the
> only one who could judge the value and the honour of knights, and, he
> adds, according to the theology of courtly love, there is no doubt
> that the knight who fell for his Lady partook of the same destiny of
> happy immortality as that of the Crusader who fell for the liberation
> of the Temple".Given the considerations we have just made on the
> Crusades, it goes without saying that we do not draw the same
> conclusions as he did from this comparison. Let's go further : the
> relationship between a lady and her knight(s) is closely akin to that
> of Shakti and Shiva in Hindu Tantrism, and to that of Prajna and Upaya
> in Buddhist Tantrism, apart from the fact that, in the latter,
> liberation is supposed to be obtained in life, and that, still in the
> latter, the presence of a woman in flesh and blood is not needed and
> can even hinder the initiation process. Some of you have already seen
> where we are getting at : the whole courtly attitude was likely to be
> assumed, not on a pure spiritual plane, but on a more or less
> sentimental and erotic plane, whether Rossetti, Valli and other
> scholars who upheld a purely symbolic interpretation of this
> phenomenon, like it or not. Evola had his doubts on the matter, and
> they are formulated more or less explicitly in various of his
> writings. In "The Phratry of the Sentinels of the Future", he wonders
> : "Could there be a religious longing behind this whole feminine and
> erotic symbolism?". If you also have doubts on this matter, but you
> are not convinced by any of our arguments, put things in perspective
> and ask yourself this simple question : why is it that, in the early
> XII th century, a lady in flesh and blood became suddenly the symbolic
> means to reach immortality among the warlike caste? Suddenly, since
> this motif cannot be found in any Aryan tradition.
On the same note, let us recall a footnote from the first part of
Henry de Montherlant's 'Solstice de Juin':
'A true mockery, chivalry since the XIIIth century, with its love
courts, its sterile paladins, its tournaments, etc. And its disgusting
confusions. The knight whose lady is the most beautiful is supposed to
be the bravest! The lover who loyally serves his lady is supposed to
be saved before God! There is in all this enough to make one puke, and
if it were against that - and not, as it may seem, against the essence
of the institution of chivalry - that Cervantès had stood, his work
would have a salutary influence which it is far from having today.'
In the same footnote, and not without some irony, de Montherlant draws
parallels between the gynolatry of the troubadours and the gynolatry
of Hollywood, of the press, of the cinema, and of the 'literature of
the great modern democracies'. He even asserts that chivalry was
destroyed by females - a view which may seem outlandish for someone
used to associate chivalry with the image of the knight engaged in
rococo sentimentality under the damsel's window, but which was shown
to be accurate in Léon Gautier's masterwork 'Chivalry', in which he
gives a realistic depiction of how women were treated by the
nobility during the low Middle Ages, where it was commonplace for a
knight or a king to batter his wife if she disobeyed or displayed the
least impudence - punching her in the nose, it seems, was a favourite
in the courts - following which she would thank her lord and humbly
offer herself for another beating should he see it necessary. So much
for courtly love!