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When elites claimed foreign ancestry + Nazi occult masters + What bastard once meant

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For centuries European aristocrats proudly claimed foreign ancestry
https://aeon.co/ideas/for-centuries-euro...n-ancestry

EXCERPT: [...] For much of Western history [...] claiming foreign ancestry was the key to political legitimacy. From the Roman Empire to the Renaissance, noble families across Europe insisted that they were not related to the populations they ruled. They traced their ancestry back to illustrious foreign powers, including figures of myth and legend. Among the most popular were the protagonists of the Trojan War. [...] While European nationalists today see migrants of Middle Eastern wars as an existential threat to their homelands, Europe’s Roman and medieval elites boasted of their Trojan ancestors, refugees fleeing the ruins of their Asian home.

The most famous of these refugees was Aeneas, a legendary prince of Troy. Barely mentioned in the Iliad, he became a key figure of Roman myth in the first century BCE. Romans imagined that the Trojan prince had escaped his city as it was sacked by the Greeks. Aeneas resettled in Italy, conquered the local people and became the forefather of Romulus, founder of Rome. The Roman Republic was by then master of the Mediterranean world, and the story of Aeneas offered justification for its conquests. By conquering the Italian peninsula, it could be argued, Rome had finished Aeneas’ mission. By humbling the Greek city-states and Hellenistic kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean, Rome had avenged Troy’s fall. The Romans were an intensely patriotic people, but rather than imagine themselves as sons of the Italian soil, they preferred to think that they were born to move, fight and reign across the world.

The other dynasties of western Europe forged their own stories of Trojan ancestry, eager not to let the Franks keep the symbolic heritage of Troy and Rome to themselves. After their conquest of England in 1066, the Normans, originally of Viking origin, invented the Trojan hero Brutus [...] In Germany, rival dynasties seeking control of the Holy Roman Empire claimed that they, too, were the offspring of a Trojan refugee. Mythical genealogies offered a basis for elites across Europe to emphasise their superiority over common people. Heirs to Troy, and by extension to the Roman Empire, they had a right to rule inherited from the heroes of classical antiquity....



The Nazis as occult masters? It’s a good story but not history
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-nazis-as-occul...ot-history

EXCERPT: [...] From the History Channel to video games, from Hollywood movies to comic books, from chat rooms to Reddit to YouTube, there is endless speculation about the hidden forces behind Nazi evil. Books on the topic abound. It is a favourite of conspiracy enthusiasts and professional debunkers alike. Somehow, we have all become, like Indy himself, experts on the occult. And a whole lot of us are convinced that its arcane secrets hold the key to understanding Nazism. The problem with this alluring image is not just that it is false. The myth of Nazi occultism is more than an amusing curiosity, a testament to the power of cinematic suggestion. It actively detracts from a historical understanding of the very themes it highlights. It yields a distorted view of Nazism and a distorted view of occultism. But it also offers an occasion for critical reflection, a chance to see how we might make better sense of the tangled history of occultism in the Nazi era. It might even help us to understand Nazi evil and the not-so-hidden forces behind it....



How the illegitimate heir became a ‘bastard’ in medieval Europe
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-illegitima...val-europe

EXCERPT: [...] Yet prior to the 13th century, legitimate marriage or its absence was not the key factor in determining quality of birth. Instead, what mattered was the social status of the parents – of the mother as well as of the father. Being born to the right parents, regardless of whether they were married according to the strictures of the Church, made a child seem more worthy of inheriting parents’ lands, properties and titles. Consider, for example, the case of William the Bastard, more commonly known as William the Conqueror. Born to Robert, Duke of Normandy and Herleva, a woman clearly not his wife, William was nevertheless recognised by his father as his heir. Despite his youth and questionable birth, William managed to conquer and rule first Normandy and then England, and to pass his kingdom and titles on to his children.

[...] It’s not until the late 12th century that evidence for the exclusion of children from succession on the grounds of illegitimate birth first appears. ‘Bastard’, as we now understand it, began to emerge here. Importantly, this shift in the meaning and implications of illegitimacy did not arise as an imposition of Church doctrine. Instead, ordinary litigants began exploiting bits of Church doctrine to suit their own ends. Perhaps the earliest signs of this can be found in the annals of English legal history...

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