The Sacred Twenty Eight: The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black
Three sisters: Morgana, Morgause and Elaine of Garlot. One dark, one brown, one fair. Three sisters: Bellatrix, Andromeda and Narcissa. One a warrior, one a rebel, one entirely unexceptional.
Of all the houses of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, the Blacks were the only ones who could trace their descent to an ancient royal family, canonized in both myth and legend. There were those who were openly skeptical that a wizarding family could claim to be related to Arthur, King of the Britons and his three half-sisters; Morgana, Morgause and Elaine of Garlot - such a claim, they said, was far too exaggerated and could never be proven (for none were allowed to see the Black family tapestry but the Blacks themselves). But most agreed - out of fear and awe - that the Blacks indeed were children of these great sorcerers.
For how could they dispute it when all the portraits of these mythical figures seemed to live again in the faces of the Blacks striding alongside them in the Ministry, studying at Hogwarts, holidaying with them in the South of France?
But if those concerned with the veracity of this outrageous claim had bothered to dig through records held in the Department of Mysteries - held purely for historical purposes, of course - they might have found a series of bills and commissions to various unknown artists and artisans of the early 11th century. Of early tapestry-weavers instructed to portray their patrons as characters from Arthurian legends - else face death (how wonderful those ancient times were, where the missing poor prompted no visits from the Auror department). Of mosaics and etchings presented to this family; all the children of the Lady Igraine shown with the high cheekbones, dark hair and pale faces particular to the Blacks. Of portraits and paintings and landscapes - all in the grand tradition of the rich families of those times. In time, any traces of the original Arthur and his half-sisters were lost and all the artworks concerning the Arthurian legends - even among the muggles - came to assign each character the same face over and over again; pale skin, dark hair (sometimes light for Elaine of Garlot was a fair young maiden), high cheekbones: trademark of the Black family.
And yet these records would mean nothing, not even in a history textbook, not after all this time. For who could say, after all these centuries, that the Blacks were not descended from Arthur, Morgana, Morgause and Elaine?
The Blacks were not practically royalty. They were royalty.
[Paintings: Morgan le Fay by Frederick Sandys, The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse, The Accolade by Edmund Blair Leighton
Photo Credit: Helena Bonham Carter as Morgan Le Fay (Merlin, 1998), Katie McGrath as Morgana (Merlin, 2008), Imogen Poots as Fanny Knight (Miss Austen Regrets, 2007)]
you understand the history of modern western philosophy as this progressive forgetting. in the 17th century philosophy was “the most important cultural ‘import’ from the Far East to the West” “except for ceramics” (Weststeijn, 2007, pg. 3; all page numbers correspond to the pdf), and it’s frequently discussed by philosophers and in relation to philosophers (in his lifetime Spinoza’s thought was seen to be consonant with that of “the Japanese preachers” [pg. 2], a position some people still defend). but by the 18th century “Buddhism had died out in India, Japan was closed to the West, and European scholars in the Chinese court focused on the elite Confucian and Taoist traditions” (Gopnik, 2009, pg. 3). by the time 19th century German philosophers begin to take an interest in it it’s generally phrased as a ‘discovery’, such as Schopenhauer’s famous, deeply personal encounter with the Upanishads, or Hegel’s less well known (but extensive; “indeed, Hegel writes more on what he described as the ‘oriental’ world than he does about the Greeks” [Indian Express]) study of classical Indian philosophy (though he often relegated it to “pre- or unphilosophical status”; Signoracci, 2017, pg. 7). neither seem to be aware that they had contemporaries and engage only with ancient sources. shortly Eastern Philosophy would similarly rediscover European philosophy; Japan’s reopening to trade corresponded to an immense interest in German Idealism such that, by WW2, even the final letters home of kamikaze pilots made frequent references to Hegel. etcetera. but the rediscovery in Europe is quickly undiscovered; the field narrows to ‘Western Philosophy’ with a historical canon set by books like Bertrand Russel’s History of Western Philosophy, who mentions only Ibn Sena and Ibn Rushd and says that “Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought” (Attar, 2012, pg. 1). but how much European philosophy had already forgotten itself! already in the bibliography of Roger Boyle’s 1686 Free Enquiry we see the subtraction of the medieval period; we skip quickly from Aristotle, Galen and Epictetus (stopping for Augustine) to Descartes, Bacon and the rest. the Carolingians, Alfred’s court and the Abbey of Saint Victor all fade from memory. it would seem that it is just as Russel says, that “between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened,” dark insofar as we cannot seem to see them.
These are all sufficient reasons why the long agony which ended in September, 1598 was not a great event in Mediterranean history; good reasons for us to reflect once more on the distance separating biographical history from the history of structures, and even more from the history of geographical areas.
– Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the age of Philip II
As a very serious adult, with a respectable career and life, and a healthy ability to let petty shit slide, I spent much too much time last week arguing with strangers on the internet who believe in the myth of the Dark Ages.
The arguments in question focused on a massively inaccurate meme, which some observers of the group pointed out was originally supposed to be about knowledge loss after the burning of the Library of Alexandria, but which some very cool EDGE LORD had changed to be about ‘The Christian Dark Ages’. Please feast your eyes on it in all it’s massive wrongness:
This is, pretty obviously, a bunch of honkey bullshit and also massively incorrect, as many important scholars have noted. As a result, I spent hours of my life – which I will never get back - pointing out repeatedly that the ‘graph’ in question has nothing to do with reality, and arguing with non-experts about the medieval period.
For the most part – these people were well-meaning. Many pointed out that this was a very Euro-centric world view, and that Asia, Africa, and the Arab world were all making huge advancements in scientific and medical theory at this time. That is absolutely true. White people have never been the entire world. The Chinese had a massively advanced scientific culture by this time, for example, and had been holding it down with hermetically sealed research laboratories since the third century BCE. The Arab world, meanwhile was compiling treatises on eye surgery. Scientific advancement was something that was happening in this period. Europe is not the centre of the world.
Having said that, while it is important to acknowledge that the-rest-of-the-world was making huge strides in scientific advancement during this time, and that Europe and white people are not the entire world, nor responsible for all of human advancement, there was no such thing as the Dark Ages in Europe either.
While everything about the idea of the Dark Ages is incorrect, lets start off with the way the term was meant to be used. The totally ignorant graph above, unsurprisingly, is completely fucking off. Hilariously, the idea of the ‘Dark Ages’ actually originated in the medieval period itself. Petrarch – the poet laureate of fourteenth-century Rome - was actually the originator of the idea that there was a period of stagnation that Europe was moving out of. Petrarch had a political axe to grind. He considered that any point at which Rome – where he lived and worked and had considerable sway – did not completely dominate the world was a BAD TIME. This is not an unbiased assessment of world history.
The actual phrase ‘Dark Ages’ itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, which Caesar Baronius – a cardinal and Church historian - came up with around 1602. He applied the term exclusively to the tenth and eleventh centuries. However, and very significantly in his use of the term, Baronius was not decrying a state of scientific malaise, or a particularly turbulent political period – he’s talking about a lack of sources surviving from that time. Indeed, Baronius sees the cut off point for the dark ages to be the Gregorian reforms of 1046, following which we see a massive increase in surviving documentation. Witness an actual useful chart:
When we move into a period where there are more texts to be considered, Baronius argues, Europe moved out of the period of darkness and into a ‘new age’.*
Now this is some real talk. As you can tell from that graph, during the Carolingian Renaissance of the ninth century, we see a flurry of Latin writers emerge, and a lot of text copying. This drops off again until what we term the Twelfth-Century Renaissance – home to this blog’s favourite philosopher/proto-Kanye – Abelard. (Shout out to my boy.) However, when people use the term ‘Dark Ages’ now, they usually use it to talk about the entire millennium of the Medieval period, and they aren’t talking about source survival. They aren’t thinking ‘dark’ as in ‘occluded’, they are thinking ‘dark’ as in pejorative.
We can thank the Enlightenment historiography for the expansion of the idea that the medieval period was a bad dark time. KantandVoltaire in particular liked to see themselves as a part of an ‘Age of Reason’ as opposed to what they saw as the ‘Age of Faith’ of the medieval period. To their way of thinking, any time that the Church was in power was a time of regressive thinking. The Middle Ages, then, was a dark time because it was so dominated by religion.
The first push back against the term dark ages began with the Romantics. After the, um, unpleasantness of the Reign of Terror, and the major cultural and environmental upheavals of the Industrial Revolution it became fashionable to look at the medieval period as a time of spiritual focus, and environmental purity. Obviously this is a super-biased way of looking at the period – just like it was biased for Enlightenment thinkers to take one look at the primacy of the Church and declare an entire millennium to be bad. I mean, really what the Romantics were doing was just casting shade on the Enlightenment historiography because they felt like it inevitably led to the guillotine. But what can you do?
By the twentieth century historians had moved on from the idea pretty much completely. If you take the time to actually, you know, study the medieval period, it becomes very apparent very quickly that there was a tremendous amount of intensive thought happening. This is the era of Thomas Aquinas – a bad ass philosopher who will think you under the fucking table. Of Hildegard of Bingen – who basically founded scientific natural history in the German speaking lands. Hell, like we talked about last week Rogerius and Giles of Corbeil were throwing it down for major medical advancement. There was a lot going on. On the real, without the contributions of medieval thinkers you would not get Galileo, Newton, or the Scientific Revolution. The medieval period was not a period of stagnation, it was a time of progress.
But it’s not just that the idea of a ‘Dark Ages’ makes no sense when you look at what incredible advancement was happening at the time, it also makes no sense because it implies that stuff was going really well under the Romans. We estimate that somewhere between thirty to forty percent of the population of Italian Rome were slaves. The Romans had total bans on human dissection, meaning that there was no real way for medicine to progress any further than it had by the time of collapse – a problem that medieval people didn’t have. I mean even if you just want to make it about religion - the Roman Empire was Christian at the time of its collapse and had its heads of state worshipped as LITERAL GODS during the pagan era. Somehow every edgy motherfucker with a fedora is totally cool with this and thinks it is super reasonable though. Because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The Romans were not a bunch of really awesome people living a life of idealised rationality any more than medieval people were all ignorant savages living in fear of God.
Is there a time that historians use the term ‘Dark Ages’? Yeah, we do use it to talk about source survival rates. It’s not a term we use as a value judgment, however. We just mean that we don’t have a lot of evidence to go off of. By the same token – if we somehow move on to another electronic format without converting the way things are stored now, we could be moving into a theoretical Digital Dark Age, where historians in the future won’t be able to study what we are writing now. (And that would be a tragedy, because legit, I would killto be a historian working on Donald Trump’s tweets in the year 2717.)
We’re now moving away from using the term Dark Ages at all, however, because of the frequency with which it is misinterpreted. I mean, if every basic motherfucker out there who never bothered to read God’s Philosophers (hat tip to James Hamman – this book is amazing) will insist on willfully misinterpreting us, we just ain’t gonna give them the ammo.
What it comes down to is that the medieval period was as vibrant as any other period of history. If you’re going to player hate, go ahead, but please don’t act like you know anything about either medieval or ancient history when you do. There is no period of rational supermen followed by ignorant monsters. There are just people doing their best in the circumstances.
* Caesar Baronius, Annales Ecclesiastici Vol. X. (Rome, 1602), p. 647. “Novum incohatur saeculum quod, sua asperitate ac boni sterilitate ferreum, malique exudantis deformitate plumbeum, atque inopia scriptorum, appellari consuevit obscurum.”
Here’s a thought: I think many historians and professionals involved in historical reconstruction have faintly wished they could travel unobserved to the past, so that they could finally see what it was really like and solve those intractable problems. But the experience of anthropology shows that even if this were somehow possible, which it is not, it would probably be a good deal less decisive in settling old debates of interpretation than one might hope.
“It’s unclear why she became reclusive upon her arrival to the Land in 1946, but it was likely a combination of the strain from her heavy post-Holocaust work schedule, and her abortion.”
Oualata (also known as “Walata”), located in Southeast Mauritania, is one town out of a string of 4 in total, coined by UNESCO as the Ksour (ksar - singular, ksour - plural; a Maghrebi Arabic term meaning “fortified village”) of Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata. The city of Oualata became a popular caravan city, a trading hub, between the 12th and 16th centuries CE. [1] Today it is renowned for its decorative vernacular houses.
The medieval Moroccan traveler and scholar, Ibn Battuta, wrote of his stay in Oualata in his Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354, saying:
“Thus we reached the town of Iwalatan [Walata] after a journey from Sijilmasa of two months to a day. Iwalatan is the northernmost province of the Negroes, and the sultan’s representative there was one Farba Husayn, ‘farba’ meaning deputy [in their Ianguage]. When we arrived there, the merchants deposited their goods in an open square, where the blacks undertook to guard them, and went to the farba. He was sitting on a carpet under an archway, with his guards before him carrying lances and bows in their hands, and the headmen of the Massufa behind him. The merchants remained standing in front of him while he spoke to them through an interpreter, although they were close to him, to show his contempt for them. It was then that I repented of having come to their country, because of their lack of manners and their contempt for the whites.
…Later on the mushrif [inspector] of Iwalatan, whose name was Mansha Ju, invited all those who had come with the caravan to partake of his hospitality. At first I refused to attend, but my companions urged me very strongly, so I went with the rest. The repast was served–some pounded millet mixed with a little honey and milk, put in a half calabash shaped like a large bowl. The guests drank and retired. I said to them, ‘Was it for this that the black invited us?’ They answered, ‘Yes; and it is in their opinion the highest form of hospitality.’ This convinced me that there was no good to be hoped for from these people, and I made up my mind to travel [back to Morocco at once] with the pilgrim caravan from Iwalatan. Afterwards, however, I thought it best to go to see the capital of their king [of the kingdom of Mali, at the city of Mali].”
He seems to have met an hateful sentiment against “white” North Africans from someone within the city. Nonetheless, he did not hate the blacks. Also by his own account (and as seen in the next excerpt), this city was inhabited by the Masufa Berbers, a tribe not known much about. The demographics of Oualata, being mostly black, could mean the Masufa are one of the few heavily black Berber tribes (the main most notably being Tuareg people), or they simply could have been the typical “white” Berbers.
University of Georgia historian Timothy Cleaveland notes in his book Becoming Walata: A History of Saharan Social Formation and Transformation (2002), on page 176, that the city was inhabited by a mix of the original Mande-speaking peoples (also inhabited by Soninke people as well), and later migrations of Zenaga-speaking Berbers, followed even further down the line by Arab or “Arabized” nomads. Although, he notes that the composition of the population didn’t change very much. [2]
The famous Israeli historian and expert of African Islamic history Nehemia Levtzion says in his book Ancient Ghana and Mali (1973) on page 147 that “Walata” had a mixed population of [”white”] Berbers and “Sudanese”; blacks. On pages 80 and 158, we read that it fell from its trading popularity to the city of Timbuktu in the second half of the 14th century. [3]
This is what Ibn Battuta had to say of his stay in the city of Oualata, its men and the quality of their women:
“My stay at Iwalatan lasted about fifty days; and I was shown honor and entertained by its inhabitants. It is an excessively hot place, and boasts a few small date-palms, in the shade of which they sow watermelons. Its water comes from underground waterbeds at that point, and there is plenty of mutton to be had. The garments of its inhabitants, most of whom belong to the Massufa tribe, are of fine Egyptian fabrics.
Their women are of surpassing beauty, and are shown more respect than the men. The state of affairs amongst these people is indeed extraordinary. Their men show no signs of jealousy whatever; no one claims descent from his father, but on the contrary from his mother’s brother. A person’s heirs are his sister’s sons, not his own sons. This is a thing which I have seen nowhere in the world except among the Indians of Malabar. But those are heathens; these people are Muslims, punctilious in observing the hours of prayer, studying books of law, and memorizing the Koran. Yet their women show no bashfulness before men and do not veil themselves, though they are assiduous in attending the prayers. Any man who wishes to marry one of them may do so, but they do not travel with their husbands, and even if one desired to do so her family would not allow her to go.
The women there have ‘friends’ and ‘companions’ amongst the men outside their own families, and the men in the same way have ‘companions’ amongst the women of other families. A man may go into his house and find his wife entertaining her ‘companion’ but he takes no objection to it. One day at Iwalatan I went into the qadi’s house, after asking his permission to enter, and found with him a young woman of remarkable beauty. When I saw her I was shocked and turned to go out, but she laughed at me, instead of being overcome by shame, and the qadi said to me ‘Why are you going out? She is my companion.’ I was amazed at their conduct, for he was a theologian and a pilgrim [to Mecca] to boot. I was told that he had asked the sultan’s permission to make the pilgrimage that year with his ‘companion’–whether this one or not I cannot say–but the sultan would not grant it.”
In a quite hilarious situation, Battuta is surprised by this beautiful woman and attempts to flee like a nervous boy. And he does end up leaving the city of Oualata, in frustration, for Mali to see the king, and notes that it takes 24 days to reach if the caravan pushes on rapidly. [4]
Citation 4 is the text provided by Fordham University’s IHSP.
The renowned 15th-16th century Moroccan Berber-Andalusi writer, Leo Africanus, notes in his Descrittione dell’Africathat:
“The fourth part of Africa which is called the land of Negros, beginneth eastward at the kingdome of Gaoga, from whence it extendeth west as far as Gualata.” (pg 124)
“I* my selfe saw fifteene kingdoms of the Negros: howbeit there are many more, which although I saw not with mine owne eies, yet are they by the Negros sufficiently knowen and frequented. Their names there fore (beginning from the west, and so proceeding Eastward and Southward) are these following: Gualata, Ghinea, Melli, Tombuto, Gago, Guber, Agadez, Cano, Cafena, Zegzeg, Zanfara, Guangara, Borno, Gaogo, Nube.” (pg 128) [5]
The last two citations are unrelated pieces written to explain what exactly this “Gaoga” kingdom was, seeing that it isn’t written of otherwise, for anyone interested.
The beautiful ancient city of Oualata, Mauritania remains a notable tourist attraction today. An hour-long documentary was made about the muralist women of Oualata who decorate these houses, titled “En attandant les hommes”, in 2007 by director Katy Ndiaye.
Seewww.walata.org if you plan to visit. Below are some extra pictures of the city (one of them shows muralists at work). Enjoy.
5. Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein Contained: Volume 1, pgs 124 and 128, published by B. Franklin, 1896
