Arma Virumque
on mythmaking, invented provenance, and the coat of arms as a founding fiction
Arma virumque cano. For those who were deprived of the privilege of growing up with a classical education (myself among them), these are the opening words of Virgil's Aeneid. It translates to "Of arms and the man I sing". I find the concept behind them fascinating: of critical importance in this work is mythmaking, to connect the founding of Rome to the great Homeric works and provide the Roman people a true connection to the great heroes of yore.
At first, it seems farcical. Could it have actually happened? Why didn't Homer include any details? If someone had a time machine and a GoPro, could they have taken a picture of Aeneas alongside Achilles and Ulysses? We modern people are trained to be skeptical of these claims, much to our own detriment.
If you abandon the need for cold objectivity when looking at the past, you realize the incredible power this gives you. Is it really all that hard to consider the possibility of Aeneas existing at the time of the Trojan War, a thousand years in their past, if you can bring yourself to take most of the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey at face value? And then you compare the outcomes, the incredible power and legitimacy that the Roman state could derive from the connection to the ancient heroes they idolized and in many cases literally worshipped. Whether or not this connection could be factually corroborated is completely irrelevant. The connection is just as real if it's earnestly believed by those subject to it.
As you may be able to guess, I'm a bit of a history nerd. Just like every other healthy human male, I think about the Roman Empire at least once per day. While this concept was brought to my attention first by the Romans, it's an incredibly generalizable pattern. Once you start looking for it, you can't stop seeing it everywhere.
The French did this with the origin myth of the Franks, as descendants of Francus, a hero and survivor of the Trojan War. Most long-lived royal houses in Europe make it a point to trace their lineage back to Charlemagne as a key argument for their legitimacy to rule. The great Habsburg family, the most prolific royal family in European history, did this to an extreme, by commissioning a detailed genealogical work tracing back to the biblical Noah. In other parts of the world, the Ethiopians had an entire Solomonic dynasty where, as the name implies, they traced ancestry to King Solomon. The Japanese imperial family trace their lineage to Amaterasu Ōmikami to this day.
This concept is effectively universal in serving as a primary driver for legitimacy to rule. Again, in all of these cases, it serves not only as a way to manufacture the air of legitimacy or justify oneself against other people, but as a mythical foundation for members of the group to see themselves as inheritors of that legitimacy. This in many cases boosts their potential, where they innately compare themselves to their mythical ancestors and are all the more driven to match them or do things worthy of their lineage. Note that this is just a simple example of the power this provides, and not the extent of it, much of which is hard to reason about due to being inherently outside of logic.
Under this lens, it doesn't need to be about ruling kingdoms or empires. Take Holiday magazine. It was founded in 1946, and in its heyday had some of the most influential writers of the 20th century on its payroll, people like Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Kerouac. It also effectively stopped existing in 1977, when it was bought by Travel magazine, with TRAVEL taking up a solid third of every cover while you needed a microscope to find Holiday. Until 2014, when the brand was revived in France by people with no connection to the original work whatsoever. Why draw the lineage, if not for the mythical power that it provides? I doubt that Holiday had much brand recognition in 2014, since it barely does now.
This is just as useful at the individual level. Some readers may recognize my arguments above as clumsy paraphrasings of Nietzsche. In many ways they are. In his essay On the Use and Abuse of History for Life he describes critical history as an attempt to give oneself "a posteriori, a past from which one would like to be descended, as opposed to the past from which one actually descends", and refers to it as dangerous but sometimes necessary. He also does this himself in Ecce Homo, where he claims Polish nobility, Julius Caesar, and Alexander as his forebears. You get the point.
In my various trips to Europe, I've grown very fond of the art of heraldry, which more than merits an entire article or ten of its own. The coat of arms distills this concept to a single pictorial reference that encompasses all of the above. It's no coincidence that Virgil's line references arms, as it speaks of the same arms that would eventually create the European heraldic tradition, and serve as a proxy for identity and lineage.
The link tying this to my own life is a deeply personal one. I decided to try and trace my lineage as an earnest attempt to learn more about my family history. I don't look particularly Mexican in a stereotypical sense, and have quite Spanish features, so I was curious as to when my ancestors crossed over.
Spanish (and consequently Mexican) record-keeping practices throughout history have been very thorough, with many church records stretching far back into the 1500s and earlier. In this quest, by following chains of records up and up and up, I eventually reached that link in one Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, one of the more prominent conquistadors and ruler of what is now Jalisco in Mexico, my home state. Nuño himself was from a very high-profile family, the Dukes of Medina Sidonia, who had a lineage tracing back to Guzmán the Good, the founder of one of the oldest extant noble houses in Spain.
As would be normal, I doubted this link due to the tenuousness of the connections. What are the chances that I didn't make any mistake along the way? Was I really a descendant of one of the great houses of Spain? This is what got me thinking critically about the topics above. In this exercise, I was also able to prove somewhat that my family had been in the same general area for centuries, making my departure out to Australia a very remarkable one historically speaking.
So, to say the quiet part out loud, isn't this exactly the perfect time to embark on some mythmaking of my own? Note that I need not lie, just expand plausibility beyond its normal bounds to earnestly accept potentially tenuous connections as connections nonetheless. I can confidently assert that I am the inheritor of the great deeds of my noble ancestors, and declare the founding of a continuation of that legacy in a new and distinct Australian dynasty, complete with a grant of arms of its own. Now, tracing all of the logical jumps is quite a bit of effort and a new mode of thinking for me, but what about my children and my children's children having this asserted as a fact of life, something to believe in and compare themselves against? What may they accomplish with this power?