Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 51
in the 11th and 12th centuries. Ideas from the Sufis and other Arabian
mystics began to find an audience. The sexual doctrines of the Sufis,
involving semiritualized intercourse with a beloved female as a specifically
religious act, found a particularly enthusiastic support in certain circles—and
have gone on to influence the vocabulary of our poets ever since, as Ezra
Pound first demonstrated in his Spirit of Romance and as Denis de Rougemont
has shown at even greater length in Love in the Western World.
Overtly, the new spirit began with Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose reputed
bare-breasted ride through Jerusalem may or may not have actually
happened, but has been widely believed for centuries. This was in many
ways a historical turning point, and obviously much more was involved
than a mere prank. At the very least, she showed a great sense of
appropriate symbolism. Eleanor seems to have cherished both her beauty
and her intellect and could not be persuaded by any male priesthood of a
male god that she should hide either. (There were no Marxian feminists
around to tell her she was making herself a "sex object.") She also seems to
have convinced a large segment of the French nobility that love is a greater
sport than war and that a man who wrote love poems was more virile than a
conqueror of cities. This led to the outbreak of Provencal "troubadour"
poetry and the similar verse of minnessingers in South Germany, along
with the famous "Courts of Love" in which subtle points of sexual etiquette
and romantic decorum were taught. The cynical remark that "love was
invented in the 11th Century" is not true, but it is emphatically true that
most of our modern ideas about love were invented then, largely due to
Eleanor's influence. A song about her—
J would give the whole world
From the Red Sea to the Rhine
If the Queen of England tonight
In my bed were mine
—has survived eight centuries and was recently set to modern music by
Carl Orff as part of his popular "Carmina Burana" suite. Actually, after
becoming Queen of England Eleanor had a rather wretched old age. Her
husband, Henry II, a jealous type, put her under house arrest in a rather
lonely castle and firmly ended her personal involvement with the cultural
revolution she had instigated.
The revolution, however, continued. The troubadour cult of love became
a powerful rival to the church's cult of ascetism and the feudal lords' cult of
war; the role of women was steadily elevated—and, as Ernest Jones pointed
out in his psychoanalytical history of chess, the role of the queen on the