Message #113628

[Janna Britton]

The Ring had originally been stolen from the Rhinemaidens by the Nibelung, who lost it to Brunhilde's father, the sky-god Wotan. Then Siegfried won it by killing a dragon. But, upon the final cleansing of the Ring by the Rhinemaidens, Wotan perishes, together with his dream kingdom of Valhalla. With the Ring now back in its rightful hands, the world is redeemed and the Cycle is complete.
And so, once again the traditional Ring lore is apparent, just as in Tolkien and the Grail stories, for the Ring is finally seen to destroy those who hold it without the right of affinity. The golden Ring itself (forged from the enchanted flat-stone of the Rhinegold) had the power to afford its master the lordship of all the world, but only at the cost of forsaking love and selling his soul to the Ring's awesome power.

In terms of the straightforward Messianic line of King David and Jesus, the most powerful of the Ring Lords was King Solomon, who, in the Hebrew Talmud, was said to be the mightiest magician of the age. His great wisdom and considered judgement as a sorcerer-king were directly attributed to his ownership of an enchanted ring, and the legend of King Solomon's Ring was clearly a major inspiration for Tolkien.
In the same manner as Solomon, Tolkien's Ring Lord, Sauron, used his One Ring to command all the demons of the Earth. Solomon used the demons to build a Temple of Jerusalem, whilst Sauron used them to build the Tower of Mordor. The rings were also similar (as is usual in the tradition), in that each had the power to corrupt and destroy its master. Solomon's Ring achieves his downfall through the agency of the demon Asmodaeus, whereas Sauron is, in effect, his own destructive demon.
Along with the rings, there are also story similarities concerning the possession of light-radiating jewels, with Solomon's being the Schamir and the Elf King Thingol's being the Silmaril - each of which is said to be an heirloom of the respective King's race.
By virtue of such Jewish writings, the Dominican wrath of the Spanish Inquisition (from about 1480) was largely directed against the Jews, especially those connected with Kabbalistic studies, and it was really as a direct result of this persecution that the witch-hunts began.
Prior to that, the Roman Inquisition had been more concerned with heterodox Christians: those heretics who were Christians of one sort or another (Arians, Nestorians, Nazarenes, or whatever), but were not members of the Roman Church, and whose culture revolved, to some extent, around traditions of magic and alchemy that were outside Church control. But, here were the Jews putting forward their own versions of the old lore - particularly those Jews in the Narbonne region of the Spanish Marches, where the House of David had once been given privileged rights of princely independence by Emperor Charlemagne.
It was recognised, therefore, that the net should be cast over a wider arena, so as to take account of those of completely different persuasions. It was no longer a matter of the Church simply endeavouring to clean up the Christian house. What of the Jews? What of the Muslims? What of the pagans in general?
And so, from the late 15th century, the Inquisition began a thorough process of "ethnic cleansing". No one who was other than a full-blooded and obvious Catholic was safe. But, there had to be some new form of classification to pull all the prey into the ever-expanding net. The Grand Inquisitor at the time was the brutal Tomâs de Torquemada, Senior Confessor to Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain. Under his direction, the answer was found and, very soon, the friars had set their sights upon "the most diabolical heathens who ever conspired to overthrow the Roman Church".
In 1484, two Dominicans, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, published a book called The Hammer of Witches. This evil but imaginative work gave full details of what was perceived to be the hideous new threat posed by all the practitioners of satanic magic. The book was so persuasive that, two years later, Pope Innocent VIII issued an official Bull to authorise the suppression of this blasphemous sect. Up to that point, the cult known as Witchcraft (to the extent that it existed at all) had not really constituted a threat to anyone. It rested mainly in the continuation of pagan ritual and fertility rites by the peasant classes. In real terms, it was little more than the vestige of a primaeval belief in the divine power of natural forces, focused above all on Pan, the mischievous Arcadian god of the shepherds.
Pan was traditionally portrayed with the legs, ears and horns of a goat, but the creative Dominicans had other ideas about the pipe-playing Horned One, and they blackened his image so that he was seen to correspond to the Devil himself. However, since the Inquisitors were all men, it was determined that witchcraft must be a form of depravity linked to the insatiable wantonness of women!
The problem was that nobody really knew who these presumed witches were, and so a series of ludicrously tragic trials and tests was devised to root them out. In the midst of all of this, the harsh Puritan sect became politically allied to the Roman strategy, implementing its own witch-hunts in England and, later, in America. Over a period of some 250 years, more than a million innocent men, women and children were murdered by the delegated authority of the witch-finders.