here's the relevant grapejuice essay
The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandabl...
groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com
according to Pound this stream can be traced back to the troubadours and Cathars of Provence. Before the bohemians were the alchemists, the mages of the Renaissance, medieval heresies like the Free Spirit, the
Fedeli d'Amore group of poets centred around Dante and Calvacanti, and finally back to the troubadours themselves. In each of these
Eleusis is occasionally revealed, but we know that for Pound the tradition is much older. It extends back to the original fertility Mysteries and their even more archaic ancestry.
Provence in the 12th century, though, is a turning point. It begins the modern wave of resistance. Here
Eleusis almost fully unveiled herself. It was AMOR directly against ROMA, love against the Empire. And neither it nor the Empire ever died. It manifested in the south of France, but that was not the only place to witness the expression of AMOR at this point in history. Joseph Campbell, in his
Creative Mythology, explains that this time was a pivotal one for the entire globe:
...Simultaneously with the rise, at the opening of the twelfth century, of this elite tradition of Arabized European poetry, the "cult of the dame," likewise "following the Arab precedent," also suddenly appears. Thus we now have evidence of an unbroken, though variously modified, aristocratic tradition of mystically toned erotic lore, extending from India not only eastward as far as to Lady Murasaki's sentimental Fujiwara court in Kyoto, but also westward into Europe, and even rising to almost simultaneous culmination all the way from Ireland to the Yellow Sea...
The "
cult of the dame", the resurgence of the archaic fertility/goddess tradition, swept the whole length of the Eurasian super-continent.