The Hansel and Gretel Code Episode 6 - The Woodcutter Family Album

In episode 6 we're hunkered down in the library — searching for the family album...

Hi and welcome to episode 6 of the Hansel and Gretel Code...!

well, 6 episodes in, we’re still talking about the first sentence of our fairytale, and that’s because the code written into it is so rich and complex...

and what’s fascinating here is that it’s been so masterfully hidden in the few simple words of such a deceptively simple, declarative sentence...

so, at least as a reminder, let’s listen to it again:

Es war einmal ein armer Holzhacker, der wohnte vor einem großen Wald.

Once upon a time there was a poor woodcutter who lived before a great forest.

and now here we all are, sitting in the religion section of the library surrounded by shelf upon shelf of books about the history of apostolic poverty

and it’s all because our intuition has been whispering that this is what the word “poor” in our fairytale means to imply...

in other words, we’re getting a whiff of religious humility that’s not only emanating from that single, four-letter word, there might as well be clouds of holy incense filling the metaphoric space between the lines of the entire fairy tale...

and if that intuitive sense is on the money (or lack of it), somewhere in these library stacks we’re either going to find our woodcutter’s family album, or be able to piece one together...

of course, this isn’t the only branch of our woodcutter’s family tree, it’s just the one most strongly associated with voluntary poverty and religious humility...

it’s also marked by a few other characteristics that aren’t shared by our woodcutter...

instead, they’re going to show up, sooner or later, in the personality traits and actions of his kids: Hansel and Gretel...

[01:51]

so where to begin, where to begin...?

It’s so hard to choose an exact date to dial into our time machine:

well, the history of voluntary poverty and asceticism in the graeco-roman West probably begins with the pre-socratics and Pythagoreans... and certainly includes one of the most famous voluntary paupers of all time: Diogenes of Sinope (who died in 323 BC)

Diogenes was the snarky cynic philosopher who is most famous for carrying a lighted lamp around Athens during the day, searching for an honest man...

and while those guys and gals all are, indeed, ancestors of our woodcutter, they belong to the more philosophical branch of the family, not the theological branch...

right now we’re just looking for our woodcutter’s poor, pious, religious relatives...

the ones with roots in judaeo-christian history...

and that would mean the so-called desert fathers (and mothers) of North Africa and the Middle East,

although THEY too, had predecessors...

*** * ***

[03:06]

The Essenes

So let’s go back to about 300 BCE where we find some of our woodcutter’s Jewish ancestors...

the most famous of them being known as the Essenes...

they were not only big on voluntary poverty and communal, brotherly love, it’s also known that they made a point of adopting orphans and abandoned children...

what makes them particularly famous these days is that they’re associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, although those were only discovered in the mid 20^thcentury...

what made them super-famous back in the Grimm’s Zeitgeist was that in 1707, an influential philosopher by the name of Johann Georg Wachter, decided that not only had John the Baptist been an Essene, but so was his more famous cousin... um, you know who...

And while there's absolutely no proof that this is a true, historical fact, the rumor — which amounts to a specious family legend — was taken as gospel by just about everyone...

*** * ***

[04:20]

The Ebionites

Well, speaking of you know who... AFTER he came and went, we come across another, more diverse group of poverty lovers among the surprisingly thick branches of our woodcutter’s family tree...

they were known as Ebionites...

and by diverse I mean they were not only a mix of christians, jews and gnostics, apparently their interests, aims and philosophies were all somewhat mixed...

and that makes it hard to know for sure if any of them really were related to our woodcutter, except their family name says it all: Ebyon [אֶבְיוֹן] is one way of saying "poor" in Hebrew.

*** * ***

The Apotactics

Finally, around the 3^rd century CE, we have a group where the family resemblance to our woodcutter is much more obvious...

and in the entire history of apostolic poverty, they were number one because they were, in fact, the very first group to announce that they wanted to live just like the apostles...

and they called themselves: Apostolics

these first Apostolics were such fanatics, er, I mean they were so piously austere and self-disciplined, they came to be known as Apotactics — which means “renunciators” or “those who abstain”...

they not only renounced all property, they abstained from, um, marriage.

of course, that means none of them were great-great-great grandfathers or grandmothers of our woodcutter, but they still must have been aunts or uncles or cousins...

and oh yeah, did I mention?

the Essenes and Ebionites and these Apostolics were all considered heretics...

which, as I said in the last episode, is something that often happened in this branch of the family

*** * ***

[06:24]

The Martyrs

now there was a distinct offshoot of the family tree...

a certain poor group that was NOT considered heretical...

in fact, just the opposite...

and they also add another meaning to the word “poor...”

poor, as in forlorn or doomed...

it’s a separate branch of the family that must surely have us feeling pity, sadness and deep compassion...

and that’s because for about 300 years after the death of Christ, poverty wasn't the only technology available for Christians to reach Eternal Salvation and perfect post-mortem bliss...

there was martyrdom!

*** * ***

Desert Fathers and Mothers

So, while some of our woodcutter’s um, blood relatives embraced the opportunity for martyrdom...others ran like hell...as fast and as far their legs would carry them away from the Romans and persecution...

which is how they ended up in the desert as the so-called desert fathers and mothers...

Two of these Desert Fathers were made super-famous throughout medieval Europe by way of hagiography - or literature about the lives of the saints and martyrs...

The most famous of those books was called the Golden Legend...

in fact, it was one of THE most popular books of the Middle Ages...

and since it reads more like entertaining fiction and fairy tale than not, it probably WAS read more for entertainment purposes than anything else...

now, as entertaining as it might be, we’re gonna leave it up there on the shelf... and instead, let’s open up a different book of Hagiography known as the Lausiac History — which is specifically about these desert fathers and mothers...

And while the name alone makes it sound about as dry as the desert sands, this too, has some real entertainment value...

in fact reading about these desert saints is an awful lot like reading about celebrities: all gossip and innuendo...

and for sure, some of them were worshiped in pretty much the same spirit as Marilyn Monroe, or Elvis or Princess Di.

*** * ***

St. Paul of Thebes (died c. 341)

the very first of the desert fathers to be named is a particular Paul: St. Paul of Thebes who died around 341 CE and who’s otherwise known as the first christian hermit...

We know from his story that it was the very human abhorrence of torture and violent death that led him to flee out out into the desert.

We also know that many christians eventually followed his lead and that of St. Anthony the Great in becoming ascetic hermits and anchorites.

What we don't know, and what I personally find intriguing, is that many of them may or may not have been Extraverts. Because, you’ve gotta think, of those who were, you can be sure that they alone were the true ascetic saints...

In this time of Covid-19 I think we all realize that only extraverts could have experienced their extreme form of desert isolation to be a torturous fate, er, I mean pious ascetic practice far more difficult to embrace than physical martyrdom.

*** * ***

Anthony the Great (ca. 251–356)

After Paul there is Tony — Saint Anthony the Great — who is famous in both hagiography and art history...

His biography includes vivid descriptions of the fantastic and demonic tormentors who visited him in his desert isolation...

and so down the centuries, artists were only too happy to turn those verbal descriptions into paintings and drawings...

Anthony, who may have been an Introvert, and quite happy with being a hermit, went off into the desert sometime after the year 270 CE, but then, after about 40 years of isolation, decided that he wanted to go with Plan B and die as a martyr.

Unfortunately for Anthony, he came to the idea just a little bit too late.

He returned to civilization and tried to get himself arrested and thrown to the lions, but in 313 CE, with Constantine's Edict of Milan, martyrdom, at least in the West, was taken off the table. And so for Anthony, there was nothing he could do but return to the extreme poverty, asceticism and isolation of Plan A.

*** * ***

[11:22]

Saint Simeon Stylites or Symeon the Stylite (c. 388 – 2 September 459)

Next among the desert ancestors of our woodcutter, the name of Simeon — Saint Simeon Stylites or Symeon the Stylite — stands out...um, above all others...as a kind of Evel Knievel of ascetics...and deserves special mention for taking asceticism to...um, new heights.

You really have to read about him for yourself to appreciate him, so I’ll leave a link in the show notes...and I really encourage you to go ahead and...um, look him...um, up.

*** * ***

Cenobites

After Paul and Anthony things started getting a little crowded out there in the desert with all of those hermits and anchorites... and it didn’t take long before some of them decided to band together in monasteries... and that, of course, would have had to be genuine torture for the Introverts among them.

Who knows?

Anyway, this cenobitic or monastic movement was the model followed by most Europeans.

Given that there is no extensive desert country in Europe fit for anchorites and hermits... the sheer numbers of monasteries throughout Europe suggests that grouping together in a conceptual hermitage was so much easier to accomplish and way more practical than going off in search of a real desert.

and I think here’s where it might be a good idea to mention the difference between a hermit and an anchorite:

if you look up those words in a dictionary, they pretty much say the same thing: a person who lives alone and apart from society for religious purposes...

anchorites, though, were a very particular breed of hermit...

unlike simple religious hermits, anchorites took solemn vows to live out their lives in a cell or anchorhold...

And for most European anchorites, that actually meant the utterly morbid matter of immuration...

think Edgar Alan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado

anchorites chose to have themselves bricked into a kind of prison cell adjacent to a church with nothing but a small window to observe Mass, and a couple of tiny windows for air and food and what have you...

some even had a kind of free standing Rapunzel-like space in the middle of town... and this gave them the kind of practical, ascetic and complete isolation they craved... even in the midst of a community.

*** * ***

[14:01]

Monasticism

okay, so let’s put away the Lausiac history and start paging through some of these books about monasteries and monks...

and right away we find 3 great patriarchs of our woodcutter’s family, all associated with the history of christian monasticism, East and West...

What makes them most interesting to us is their part in a rags to riches story...

St. Pachomius (who died in 348) was famous for organizing some of his neighboring hermits into the first cenobitic groups and is generally recognized as the founder of Christian monasticism.

And my guess is that Pachomius, for obvious reasons, had to be an Extravert...

St. Basil the Great of Caesarea (who died in 379) was also a famous organizer of monasteries, and he’s known to have embraced a more moderate lifestyle, as opposed to the extremes of asceticism that some groups of monks may have preferred.

what marks him as a genuine ancestor of our woodcutter is the fact that he very explicitly wrote homilies and epistles condemning child abandonment...!

in fact, some of what he wrote amounts to a very moving description of exactly what our woodcutter is thinking and feeling later on in the story when he decides to go ahead and abandon his 2 children...

St. Benedict of Nursia (San Benedetto da Norcia) (who died around 547) is famous for the so-called rule of Benedict, which was codified around the year 535.

Benedict’s rule became the basic norm in the West because of its clarity, perhaps, but also because it was, like Basil's rule, much more practical and moderate... appealing to a less fanatic, er strict, sort of european character.

Apparently, as clear as it was, following the rule of Benedict wasn't as straightforward as the monks themselves would have hoped:

Given so many different personality types among them — including that most basic difference between introverts and extraverts — it's only logical that different monks would interpret even the most basic and straightforward concepts differently and according to their own personality preferences...

Fact is, many different ideas and rules were, indeed, tried out over the next 500 years without any great success... which probably means that groups of monks would come together for perhaps a century or so, or maybe even just a few decades, and then disappear... each new group having to once again, re-invent the wheel...

Whatever success there was, however, happened to be of the temporal variety: all these monks, perhaps in spite of themselves, found that they were no longer poor.

And with the end of poverty came plenty of temptations to over-indulge in all sorts of earthly delights,

Clearly, something needed to be done to avoid moving up the economic scale, not to mention figuring out some sort of sustainable recruitment strategy...

It took around 400 years in Europe for things to finally click...

and sure enough, they did... by virtue of our famously recurring theme: return to that Old Time Religion... in other words: the ways of the past...

in particular, they returned to the ascetic discipline of strict voluntary poverty...

even so, they were still not our famous mendicants...

these next 3 branches of the woodcutter family didn’t need to beg for their daily bread because they baked diligent, hard work into their monastic brands...

[18:05]

Cluniac Benedictines 909 CE

The first of these were the Cluniac Benedictines, who started out in the year 909...

They were famous for developing the first administrative structure that was easy to understand, implement and reproduce. In other words, they developed the first successful monastic franchise...

and their version of hard work was education and proselytizing... teaching and preaching...

the Benedictines were also famous for their moral reforms... eliminating simony and concubinage from their repertoire. (surprising or not, celibacy was NOT always required of Catholic clergy!)

we have, in fact, have the example of one pronouncement from the Council of Lyon in 1274 which specifically forbids bigamy among clerics — but otherwise says nothing of marriage...

well all of this diligence and self-discipline contributed greatly to the Benedictines success and longevity, but it could be argued that it was an innovation of their HR department that really sealed the deal:

The Benedictines incorporated a very successful recruitment program called Oblation into their rules...

oblation just means an offering or gift... however, it was this particular form of um, gifting, that not only swelled their ranks — it turned child abandonment into a good and holy thing...

Carthusian Hermits 1084

By the end of the 11^th century the Benedictine model had become sort of the MacDonalds of monasticism, and yet, some monks found that open communal living as a Benedictine just wasn’t to their taste...

like the anchorites, they were hungry for hermitic isolation within community — although un-like the anchorites, they weren’t interested in life-long solitary confinement...

what they were interested in was absolute silence...

and they found what they were looking for within the newly formed Carthusian model...

my guess is that the vast majority of them had to be true introverts...

if you’re interested, there’s even a 2 1/2 hour film documenting the Carthusian model... it’s called Into Great Silence...

and being an introvert myself, I find it fascinating...

I’ll leave a link in the show notes...

Into Great Silence Trailer

[20:45]

Cistercians c. 1098

If the Benedictines, were chiefly white-collar teachers and preachers, the Cistercians, who opened up shop in the late 11^th century, were all blue collar...

their version of hard work was manual labor and farming...

they often chose to work fields which were considered the least fertile and thus requiring the most intense labor.

As to their growth and recruitment, they owed most of their significant popularity to the golden tongued influence and abiding fame of their first saint, Bernard of Clairvaux.

What’s surprising about all these hard working groups, is that, despite their strict policy of voluntary poverty, they all achieved even greater worldly success than their predecessors simply by virtue of observing their own monastic rules.

Maybe that success is only surprising, considering the preferred economic models and tenets of our own zeitgeist...

Nowadays it might be hard to imagine such great financial success based on a kind of self-disciplined, socialist model of communal living and sharing...

actually, these monasteries functioned more like great capitalist corporations with the monks and bishops being the local feudal shareholders while the suits mostly lived at corporate headquarters...in the Vatican.

The workers themselves, who in so many instances were oblates — and inculcated from infancy in the company philosophy — well, they expected nothing in return for their labors other than their daily bread and the ultimate Christmas bonus to be paid in the form of Eternal Salvation.

What's not at all surprising, is that monastic financial success was accompanied by the age-old narcissistic greed that money and power typically attracts.

These men and women were only human...

and despite the thickness of monastery walls, apparently nothing could hide the myriad instances of greed and indiscretion some of these monks indulged in.

There were, in fact, scandalous indiscretions that the local laypeople...as well as the monks themselves...observed with embarrassment and alarm...

and since celibacy was NOT a prerequisite for ecclesiastical office...

well, that could explain how they ended up having Hansel and Gretel as descendants...

just ‘sayin...

*** * ***

[23:27]

Humiliati 1017? / 1190?

well, it looks like it’s just about closing time at the library...

so before we wrap it up for today, there’s one more branch of the family I want to mention because some time in the 11^th or 12^th century they provided a watershed moment in the history of voluntary poverty...

and with a name like Umiliati, (or humble ones) you can be sure they’re related to our woodcutter...

The Umiliati began as a group of Italian noblemen from Lombardy who were taken to Germany as hostages by one of the Holy Roman Emperors...

During their captivity they chose to adopt a serious practice of voluntary poverty, and having learned some very handy things about the wool trade in Germany, they too, like the Benedictines and Cistercians didn’t need to beg...

After their release from captivity, they returned to Lombardy as entrepreneurs, bringing German innovations and improvements to the wool trade there...

That said, it’s not their connection to Germany that makes them especially interesting to us... what DOES make them interesting is the fact that back in Lombardy they became a genuine non-profit organization, providing jobs for the local populace and pouring all of their profits back into the local community instead of their own pockets...

What's also interesting is that in the year 1184 they were condemned by Pope Lucius III as heretics. And I gotta say, this business of forcing a pope to write a bull declaring you a heretic was fast becoming something of a merit badge (if not a full-fledged family trait) among our woodcutter’s ancestors...

Well, 17 seventeen years later Pope Innocent III decided that, No, they really weren’t heretics after all, and so, given renewed papal approval, they went on to become a highly successful order of monks.

and they flourished for about 400 years — until February 7, 1571... that’s the day when Pope Pius V announced (in a papal bull, of course) that he’d had enough of them...

The story goes that some members of the group hired an assassin to get rid of Carlo Borromeo, who was Archbishop of Milano at the time, and who was being, as they say in Italian, a royal Rompicoglioni — a ball breaker...

The assassination attempt failed, and so while they weren’t declared heretics, they were officially “extinguished, abolished and suppressed.”

Oddly enough, this is only the first time that Carlo, otherwise known as Saint Charles Borromeo, makes an appearance in our story... and, Rompicoglioni that he is, it won't be the last...

okay, they’re flicking the lights on and off now...

I guess it’s time to pack it in for now...

in the next episode we’re gonna get down and dirty with a whole raft of colorful characters in our woodcutters ancestry...

I think you’re gonna enjoy it because these next few pages of the family album read an awful lot like chapters out of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose....

in the meantime, I’ve prepared a pdf with the 1810 manuscript version of Hansel and Gretel, which, as you know is the version I’m working from in the podcast...

I’ve included the original German, along with my personal translation of it... and I've also included the final, 1857 version of the story — along with Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation — for comparison...

I’ll be able to send it to you (for free, of course) as soon as I finish setting up that pesky email subscription thingy on the website...

which should be within the next few days...

the website, as you probably know is betweenthelines.xyz

I do hope you’ll visit...

alrighty then...