Michael Baizerman Author

My new chapter covers the conflation of the Hebrew myth of Gog-Magog with the Hellenistic legend of the Iron Gate. This is another step in writing a large unit, In the Shade of the Iron Gate. In this particular episode, I explain the motives of those who transformed the unpleasant experience of "barbarian" strikes into the sinister outbreak of monstrous forces on the eve of the Last Battle between the sons of light and the bastards of darkness. Here is an excerpt: "When medieval intellectuals discovered the enormous literary and ideological potential of conflating the Biblical myth of Gog-Magog with the Hellenistic legend of the Iron Gates, the romantic tale turned into a theological saga. The setting matched the everlasting conflict between the Christian realm of goodwill and learning versus the apocalyptic anti-world of evil and ignorance.                 The barrier sustains the line of demarcation bet...

Image: While in transit… Courtesy: http://www.journeymongolia.com/index.php/item?id=13 My new chapter takes a sincere look at the nomads, trying to access their contribution to the human culture as well as to understand why the pastoralist lifestyle was so hard to digest for the settled people. This extract poses an antithesis to the previous one where I picked up a choir of opinions of outsiders about the migrants.  Unit IV is going to be the largest part of my book in terms of the number of chapters. The next extract will focus on the second fusion of the legend where Alexander as the guardian of civilization is opposed the ultimate enemy of Gog-Magog.  Here is the extract from Chapter 4: How come that the settled population still puts the pastoralists to shame for adhering to the “barbarian” lifestyle?   These very people grazed their flocks on natural pasturelands of grassy plains and mountain slopes. Stock-herders turned their yurts into...