Your Own Darkness

Carl Jung wrote, “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.” Jung is another one of those people I’ve not let myself explore, but it might be time to change that. The passages I read in Maps of Meaning yesterday have me thinking that I also need to start reading the words of Friedrich Nietzsche and not just the words of others on Nietzsche. When he said, “God is dead,” was he making a declaration or lamenting a loss? Well, apparently, it depends on who is filtering Nietzsche for you.

Most people think of the Dark Ages as a period spanning anywhere from 150 A.D. to 1,000 A.D. A timeline I found online chooses 150 as the starting point because, apparently, Rome’s population began declining then. I won’t get into minutiae and start arguing dates, because the point is that intellectual darkness may be less about what is known and more about what is allowed to be known. Nobody denies that we live in an age flush with easily accessible information, but doesn’t it seem strange that self-appointed (maybe) gatekeepers want to tell us which of that information we should be exploring and which is “untouchable”? The word “censorship” gets bandied about on social media and mainstreamish media everyday now. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you? “Acceptable” channels of information run nonstop fear porn about a “pandemic” that, in all likelihood, has killed fewer people than traffic accidents in any given year, but these same channels, which run a whole bunch of commercials for pharmaceutical products during each broadcast, never seem to mention the adverse effects and deaths racking up among those who have been “vaccinated” against the microscopic “killer” that has ruined lives and economies the world over.

Last night, I finished reading The Silver Branch, Rosemary Sutcliff’s second installment in what has come to be known as her Roman Britain Trilogy, and a conversation remembered by one of the characters near the end of the book took me back to that same conversation at the beginning:

“Yet the wolves gather,” [Emperor] Carausius said. … “Always, everywhere, the Wolves gather on the frontiers, waiting. It needs only a man should lower his eye for a moment, and they will be in to strip the bones. Rome is failing, my children.” …

“Oh, she is not finished yet. I shall not see her fall—my Purple will last my lifetime—and nor, I think, will you. Nevertheless, Rome is hollow rotten at the heart, and one day she will come crashing down. A hundred years ago, it must have seemed that all this is forever; a hundred years hence—only the gods know … If I can make this one province strong—strong enough to stand alone when Rome goes down, then something might be saved from the darkness. If not, then Dubris Light and Limanis Light and Rutupiae Light will go out. The lights will go out everywhere.”

The Silver Branch takes place on the British Island in the Third Century, A.D., and while many natives want to overthrow their Roman invaders, plenty of them know that, without Rome, the trappings of civilization—the Roman roads, infrastructure, books, and rule of law—will all go up in the flames ignited by Barbarian invaders from western lands, leaving nothing but blackened ruins.

Our times are not so different. We, too, are faced with a choice between the light of freedom and the darkness of mandatory vaccines, masked dehumanization, health passports, and government control over the very cells of our bodies. I pray daily for the lantern bearers.