No empty fiction wrought by magic lore
but natural was the steed the wizard pressed.
For him, a filly to a gryphon bore;
hight hippogryph. In wings and beak and crest
formed like his sire, as in the feet before,
but like the mare, his dam, in all the rest.
Such, on Riphaean Hills, though rarely found,
are bred, beyond the frozen ocean's bound.
(from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso)
Welcome to On Riphaean Hills, dedicated to the defense, restoration, and maximum possible expansion of the mission entrusted to the Catholic Church by Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, only hope of the human race in this life and the next. On our watch, we are witnessing His mission both misunderstood unto infuriated opposition by its intended beneficiaries, and misrepresented unto intended unrecognizability by its putative champions. This has got to stop. And if we want to be loyal to Him, it is up to us to do all we can to stop it.
Why "on Riphaean Hills"? According to the late-medieval poet Ariosto (who took the Roland legend and turned it into one of the world's first heroic fantasies), this revered region from ancient mythical geography is the stomping ground of the hippogryph--an image most apt where the waging of our spiritual war is concerned. Still, Ariosto didn't come up with the concept of a cross between the gryphon and the horse; Virgil did. Yes, the same Virgil who was destined to become Dante Alighieri's guide through most of the underworld in The Inferno. The renowned Roman poet's Eclogues contain a reference to a mare and gryphon being "wed"--as a rhetorical way of indicating something beyond the realm of possibility. But why? What is outrageously unlikely about a gryphon-horse cross in the first place? Well, as everyone knows, the horse was hated by the eagle-lion long before the mists enshrouding human pre-history ever began to be dispelled. A race called the Arimaspeans, one-eyed and greedy, used to invade the gryphons' homeland on horseback in order to try to despoil those noble hybrids of the gold they both collected and coveted, so the gryphons came to regard any approaching equine as their mortal enemy.
So, when Virgil had his character exclaim, "Let mares with gryphons wed!" the poet intended the expression to convey something even more than, "When pigs fly!" As a cri de coeur, the expression has all the emotional overtones of, "God forbid!" The hippogryph, as the mount of the Christian knight, ends up leading the charge in Western literary tradition against all that God forbids.
In Dante, the gryphon with its dual nature is put to literary work as an image of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. The hippogryph, then, ought to bear the theological overtones associated with Mary Immaculate, His blessed mother and ours. The imagery is not meant to be exact, of course, but is intended only to assist what the Inklings called the "baptism of the imagination"--but it works. For it is Mary who, by Her fiat in Her heart and in ours, makes it the case that, "Nothing shall be impossible with God"(Lk. 1:37)
God it? Good. Let's go.
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