'Carmina Burana' - Largely based on eclectic European pre-Christian spiritual folk traditions... and possibly of South Tyrolian origin: Part 3

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Father God and Mother Goddess

The above image: Set design by Helmut Jürgens for a performance in Munich in 1959. Is the sky scene depicting the Proto-European Alfather (Sun) and the Almother (Moon)? Were Orff and Jürgens part of some occult network? Alone, I would doubt all of these clues pointing towards a pre-Christian aka "Witch cult" tie-in. However, all together, it appears that way to me. The clear lyrical tie-in, the wheel of the year, references to the seasons, and this set design. Masons like to use this type of occult symbolism, most often in esoteric reference to anything non-Christian. The selection covers a wide range of topics, as familiar in the 13th century as they are in the 21st century: the fickleness of fortune and wealth, the ephemeral nature of life, the joy of the return of Spring, and the pleasures and perils of drinking, gluttony, gambling, and lust. If this was all just a satire in reference to the Catholic Church, then why the cryptic references to the Old Religion? I suppose that it may have been just another aspect of the mockery, but I'm not so certain. It should be noted that there is no evidence that Carl Orff was a Freemason or had any connection to any occult society. He was a Roman Catholic.


The following is related text, not my work.


Manuscript

Carmina Burana (CB) is a manuscript written in 1230 by two different scribes in an early gothic minuscule on 119 sheets of parchment. A number of free pages, cut of a slightly different size, were attached at the end of the text in the 14th century. At some point in the Late Middle Ages, the handwritten pages were bound into a small folder called the Codex Buranus. However, in the process of binding, the text was placed partially out of order, and some pages were most likely lost, as well. The manuscript contains eight miniatures: the rota fortunae (which actually is an illustration from songs CB 14–18, but was placed by the book binder as the cover), an imaginative forest, a pair of lovers, scenes from the story of Dido and Aeneas, a scene of drinking beer, and three scenes of playing dice, tables, and chess.

History

Older research assumed that the manuscript was written in Benediktbeuern where it was found. Today, however, Carmina Burana scholars have several different ideas about the manuscript's place of origin. It is agreed that the manuscript must be from the region of central Europe where the Bavarian dialect of German is spoken due to the Middle High German phrases in the text—a region that includes parts of southern Germany, western Austria, and northern Italy. It must also be from the southern part of that region because of the Italian peculiarities of the text. The two possible locations of its origin are the bishop's seat of Seckau in Styria and Kloster Neustift near Brixen in South Tyrol.




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Carmuna Burana OH FORTUNA

Alejandro Rendon


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A bishop named Heinrich was provost in Seckau from 1232 to 1243, and he is mentioned as provost of Maria Saal in Carinthia in CB 6* of the added folio. This would support Seckau as the possible point of origin, and it is possible that Heinrich funded the creation of the Carmina Burana. The marchiones (people from Steiermark) were mentioned in CB 219,3 before the Bavarians, Saxons, or Austrians, presumably indicating that Steiermark was the location closest to the writers. Many of the hymns were dedicated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who was venerated in Seckau, such as CB 12* and 19*–22*.

In support of Kloster Neustift, the text's open-mindedness is characteristic of the reform-minded Augustine Canons Regular of the time, as is the spoken quality of the writing. Also, Brixen is mentioned in CB 95, and the beginning to a story appears in CB 203a which is unique to Tirol called the Eckenlied about the mythic hero Dietrich von Bern.

It is less clear how the Carmina Burana traveled to Benediktbeuern. Fritz Peter Knapp suggested that the manuscript could have traveled in 1350 by way of the Wittelsbacher family who were Vögte of both Tirol and Bavaria, if it was written in Neustift.


Rediscovery and history of publication

The manuscript was discovered in the monastery at Benediktbeuren in 1803 by librarian Johann Christoph von Aretin. He transferred it to the Bavarian State Library in Munich where it currently resides (Signatur: clm 4660/4660a). Aretin regarded the Codex as his personal reading material, and wrote to a friend that he was glad to have discovered "a collection of poetic and prosaic satire, directed mostly against the papal seat."

The first pieces to be published were Middle-High German texts, which Aretin's colleague Bernhard Joseph Docen published in 1806. Additional pieces were eventually published by Jacob Grimm in 1844. The first collected edition of the Carmina Burana was not published until 1847, almost 40 years after Aretin's discovery. Publisher Johann Andreas Schmeller chose a misleading title for the collection, which created the misconception that the works contained in the Codex Buranas were not from Benediktbeuren. Schmeller attempted to organize the collection into "joking" (Scherz) and "serious" (Ernst) works, but he never fully completed the task. The ordering scheme used today was proposed in 1930 by Alfons Hilka and Otto Schumann [de] in the first critical text edition of the Carmina Burana.[28] The two based their edition on previous work by Munich philologist Wilhelm Meyer, who discovered that some pages of the Codex Buranus had mistakenly been bound into other old books. He also was able to revise illegible portions of the text by comparing them to similar works.


Rota Fortunae

In medieval and ancient philosophy the Wheel of Fortune, or Rota Fortunae, is a symbol of the capricious nature of Fate. The wheel belongs to the goddess Fortuna (Greek equivalent Tyche) who spins it at random, changing the positions of those on the wheel: some suffer great misfortune, others gain windfalls. Fortune appears on all paintings as a woman, sometimes blindfolded, "puppeteering" a wheel.

In works of art defining the Wheel of Fortune, the various wheels/circles (circles of nature) are of four (solar cross), six (rosette), eight (wheel of the year), and twelve points (zodiac). How is that for occult folk pagan symbolism?

Carmina Burana

The Wheel of Fortune motif appears significantly in the Carmina Burana (or Burana Codex), albeit with a postclassical phonetic spelling of the genitive form Fortunae. Excerpts from two of the collection's better known poems, "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (Fortune, Empress of the World)" and "Fortune Plango Vulnera (I Bemoan the Wounds of Fortune)," read:

Fate - monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
status is bad,
well-being is vain
always may melt away,
shadowy
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
bare backed
I bear your villainy.

. . . . . . . . .

The wheel of Fortune turns;
I go down, demeaned;
another is carried to the height;
far too high up
sits the king at the summit -
let him beware ruin!
for under the axis we read:
Queen Hecuba.


Hecuba

Hecuba was a queen in Greek mythology, the wife of King Priam of Troy during the Trojan War, with whom she had 19 children. These children included several major characters of Homer's Iliad such as the warriors Hector and Paris and the prophetess Cassandra.

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