#fyrd

A Saxon-ish peasant warrior.

The gender is likely not historically accurate, but I wanted to paint a female Saxon peasant warrior, so I did!

This would be member of the peasant class, a ceorl, and probably a kotsetla, which is sort of in the middle range of peasant ranking. She’s armed with a seax, which is basically just a knife, and would have been her weapon when she was asked to join the fyrd (army mobilized from freemen). Swords were likely too expensive for many members of the peasant class.

Gouache on paper.

Basically, the fyrd was established to handle raids, but not a full-scale land invasion by a foreign power. It was meant to be a rapid response to the swiftness of Viking raids. It would usually consist of a small core of veterans who would train the members to handle weapons, making them quasi-professionals who could resist a Viking incursion enough to make them go away until the national militia could be summoned. The fyrdmen are contrasted to the professional retinue of nobles and the semi-professional yeoman by being a sort of quasi-professional, an earlier iteration of the semi-professional training ordered by edicts like the Asize of Arms. By diffusing this responsibility to shireholders, the gentry made the fyrd a more local initiative to increase response times and handle oversight in the early medieval era.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

1066 – Batalla de Hastings

La batalla de Hastingsfue el enfrentamiento entre las tropas del último rey anglosajón de Inglaterra, Harold el Sajón, y el ejército del duque de Normandía, Guillermo el Bastardo. El encuentro sucedió el 14 de octubre de 1066 en la colina de Senlac, a 11 km al norte de Hastings, al sur de Londres. La batalla terminó en una victoria pírrica aunque decisiva para los normandos, muriendo Harold en la…

SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? (pt.2 of 3)

Part 1 of this article introduced the Zero State (ZS) and its philosophical foundation. Now Part 2, below, will begin to outline some “Breadcrumbs and Rabbit Holes”, which is to say ideas and links which you may use to begin to chart your own path into the expanding world of ZS, if you so choose…

2. Wyrd & Fyrd = Reality & Balance

“Don’t you think the world’s greatest game artist ought to be punished for the most effective deforming of reality?”

– eXistenZ

Moving beyond our philosophical underpinning, next we must understand how that logic applies to everyday-life distinctions and situations. In short, we need a quick, principled, and consistent way to know “What is the Social Futurist position on this issue?”. The bottom line is that we seek functional solutions in any given situation, which means prizing balance and empirical evidence over extreme ideological fantasies of the Left, the Right, or coming from any other quarter.

The common thread uniting Radical Centrism, Social Futurism, and the Zero State is an insistence upon intelligent, functional balance between contrasting factors. Intelligent balance is a virtue because it is functional, while systemic imbalance is always eventually dysfunctional, no matter what short-term advantages it may bestow. For example, “Wyrd” and “Fyrd” are concepts that ZS borrows from the ancient Anglo-Saxon worldview, meaning “destiny” and “community” (or perhaps “idealism” and “pragmatism”) respectively, and the ZS ethos is to balance these complementary impulses toward idealism and pragmatism in a single dynamic that we call “Rebis”.

This idea of functional balance is no “pie in the sky” abstraction, but is critical to understanding contemporary politics and society, on a pragmatic level. We are confronted by an epidemic of professional liars and the wilfully ignorant, who collectively encourage imbalance and deform reality to suit their own short-term needs, at our expense and risk.

Without a doubt, the most notable criminal in this regard is notorious US President Donald J Trump. Trump is the worst because not only will he happily endorse the most extreme and divisive Right- or Left-wing views while not actually believing in (or understanding) any coherent political philosophy at all, but he also readily and repeatedly desecrates all notions of truth or reality for his own selfish ends, while displaying neither insight nor self-awareness. The man is useful as a living, breathing symbol of everything that Social Futurism stands against (even if he has the one redeeming feature of being ironically “honest” – or at least transparent – about his wilful disregard for anything we’d consider a virtue, where other politicians try to hide their disdain, manipulations, and other failings).

ZS is part of Social Futurism, and thus also part of Radical Centrism. As we work toward a transcendent human future, we must stand against imbalance and the deliberate deformation of reality by opportunists and parasites. With that in mind, let us now turn our attention to practical matters, in Part 3 of this series.

For more Breadcrumbs & Rabbit Holes see Part 3 of this article.

Transhumanism and Social Futurism are concerned with the deep future, which is to say the fate of humanity, rather than just the next few decades. When politicians and social commentators talk about the future, the end of this Century is the furthest reach of their vision (which is actually a long time, relative to the myopic quarterly range of financial prognosticators and major corporations), and human nature is considered to have some kind of permanently fixed nature. If humanity survives this Century, it has a potentially vast and incredible future to look forward to, and the nature of humanity itself will inevitably be transformed beyond all recognition over the course of that journey.

Ironically, when we are attempting to make any sense of such a grand vision of the human future, we are forced (or at least strongly encouraged) to draw upon concepts from the distant past. Contemporary concepts are often simply too parochial for our impending needs, whereas ancient mythological ideas embrace a vast canvas much more fitting for the new world of technological possibility we are now entering. The first two concepts I briefly outline below are (1) the idea of fate or destiny, or a path that humanity is following into the unknown future, and (2) some new notion of community which can unite, support, protect and develop the nascent Transhumanity as it takes its first steps into that future. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised to find such big ideas most often in the grand mythological narratives of the past, but all the same it is interesting that it is in the Old English of the Anglo-Saxons that we find some of the most elegant words for these things. I then (3) conclude with a brief examination of a third concept, the “Rebis”, which comes from Alchemy and offers an interesting unifying perspective for Transhumanists to consider.

1. WYRD: The Unfolding of Destiny

“Wyrd” (the word which eventually became “Weird”) literally meant To Become, and was used by the Anglo-Saxons to denote fate, chance, fortune, or destiny. The connotation of “strangeness” was a much later development related to Germanic myth. This truly ancient word has been in our language(s) since the days of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, whose (reconstructed) language used *wert- to mean “to turn, or to wind”, (that P.I.E. word also being the source of the German werden, and the Old English weorðan, both of which mean “to become”). This is the idea of World-As-Process, of Schopenhauer*’s World-Knot, the Ouroboros whose churning generates Providence, Manifest Destiny, or Historical Inevitability (see de Chardin & Tipler for particularly Futurist variants). As such, it is a handy non-theological, Tao-like replacement for the concept of a monotheist God, standing above and at the centre of all human affairs. We Transhumanists may adopt whatever personal metaphysics we prefer, but collectively we are all well served by the simple idea of an impersonal Force which unites us as the agents of History… and the ancient Anglo-Saxons already knew that Force as Wyrd, and organized their entire worldview around it.

2. FYRD: You and Whose Army?

Putting aside the unifying mythos of Wyrd, the Anglo-Saxons also understood the power of drawing upon the tribe for communal protection. When the local lord needed an army, he could draw upon the “Fyrd” (pronounced ‘Feared’, but having no relationship to that word I’m aware of); which is to say an army of community members organised around a core cadre of professional soldiers. In other words, this concept sharply contrasts the notion of destiny with a very pragmatic sense that without solid community organization you have no future at all. This is not idealism at the expense of practicality, or vice versa, but two complementary forces or outlooks which together give a community power and purpose.

I have elsewhere discussed the need for a future-community-ideal which I call the Ajati, and which I believe is a natural fit with the concept of Fyrd. In essence, I believe that rather than defining ourselves in terms of what has come before, we should collectively work toward a glorious future as a new kind of human community which will reach heights never before dreamt of. The Ajati is the idea of a people defined in terms of the future-ideal, while the complementary Fyrd is of the community as an efficient activist organization capable of defending and developing its interests.

3. REBIS: JK Rowling didn’t invent the Philosopher’s Stone!

Another piece in the jigsaw puzzle of ancient European mythological thinking comes from medieval & Renaissance Alchemy, which seems to have been some combination of mysticism and proto-Chemistry whose practitioners sought to understand, control and refine not only material substances but also their own bodies and souls. We’ll discuss Alchemy’s role as a clear precursor to Transhumanist thinking another day, and focus for now on the alchemical concept of the “Rebis”.

‘Rebis’ was a contraction/corruption of the Latin “Res Bina”, meaning “two matters”, or “two substances”. The core logic and method of Alchemy was solve et coagula, “dissolve and coagulate”, which is to say refinement by a process of separation-and-recombination of chemical (or personality) elements. At the most abstract, two elements were represented as “male” and “female” (much as in the image of the Taijitu or ‘Yin-Yang symbol’, representing the Tao as union-of-opposites). Within Alchemy, the ‘Rebis’ was a metaphorical androgyne figure, a person combining the characteristics of both sexes, who stood as a symbol of the ultimate ideal of Alchemy; Completion of the Magnum Opus (Great Work), and creation of the immortality-bestowing Philosopher’s Stone.

The superficial trappings of the Rebis image are unimportant. The point here is of two complementary principles united, as a single dynamic process. Any and all complementary concepts (up/down, left/right, light/dark, good/bad etc) could just as easily be combined in one symbol in this way, but for our current purposes the most important thing is to think of the ‘Rebis’ – the Res Bina – as being one term for the dual concepts of Wyrd and Fyrd, simultaneously. A functional and inspiring union of the destiny-ideal and a pragmatic community-attitude, together propelling us into a transcendent Transhumanist future.

Lady went to her new home today.

Lady is the American Bulldog I found wondering in front of my house.

After a few days of unsuccessful flyering, my girlfriend put up a craigslist ad looking for Ladys' owners. We had a few hits but it was obvious after a few moments of talking to them that Lady was not the dog they were looking for. Then a few days later my girlfriend gets a text from someone who knows the owners. Apparently she was the neighbors granddaughter of the people who owned Lady.

At first we were psyched because we thought we could finally take Lady to her home, but after a while the woman came out to my girlfriend saying how Lady was a breeding dog and spent all of her time outside and that the family was looking to take her to the pound because she started having 'bad babies'.

Fucked, right?

Here Sirena Mazzones' (http://miaulement.tumblr.com/) story on her pitbull Nova

"This is my two year old Pit Bull Nova! Two years ago I stopped at a gas station in miami on my way to a show.  On my way in I passed two super shady guys messing with a small scrawny puppy.  I don't know how I got the courage but I went right up to them and upon getting a closer look I saw that the dog was in terrible condition.  I offered them money and after some haggling and threatening to call animal control (bluff), they handed him over to me.  The vet bill was huge, but it was well worth it. Nova has had such an amazing, positive impact on my life, watching him grow and nursing him back to health was one of the most amazing experiences in my life. He has shown me what a gentle, athletic, loving breed the pit bull is, as well as how anyone can make a difference in a pups life!"