Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Monday, May 5, 2014
SOLVED: the mystery of the laughing evangelist!
BAM! I solved the sucker. Ever since I saw a good chunk of video of this guy pushing people over while laughing maniacally, I HAD to find out who it was. Wasn't that easy to track him down. Had to keep looking under search terms like, "Evangelist who heals while laughing". Found out a bit about the phenomenon of "holy laughter" and "the Toronto blessing" (which I vaguely remember from years ago). It basically means laughing your ass off in the name of Jesus. Yeah, OK.
Well, this ol' guy, see, after years of a more-or-less Oral Roberts-like life of preaching with some head-pushing on the side, decided to get on the cackle-and-guffaw bandwagon, taking an entire congregation with him. This is the other part of the original video I saw from the compilation, with much better picture quality (aren't you glad?).
So I have solved the mystery. This is one Kenneth E. Hagin, who also made numerous videos of reasonably sane preaching along evangelical lines, so I am not sure exactly what it was that pushed him over the edge. And I was right, this was at some kind of conference in St. Louis, something called a Holy Ghost Meeting, with everybody all dressed up in suits and ties and lovely '90s dresses with puffy hair. Compared to earlier videos, Hagin looks bent and frail (he died in 2003, alas), and I've finally figured out why three or four guys had to hold him up: if they didn't, he would literally die laughing.
This holy laughter stuff induces a kind of oxygen-deprivation trance which, combined with a mass-hysteria effect, makes large groups of people stoned out of their minds and prone to completely wacky behaviour. To my eyes at least, the so-called convulsions are completely fake in almost every case, though the occasional genuine orgasm of faith might have squirmed through. (And you can't tell ME this stuff isn't pretty orgiastic in nature.)
Watching this again, though, even the laughter sounds extremely phony, and the expressions on people's faces are - oh, get real, people, this isn't funny! Hagin looks like he should be committed, and the guy in the red tie, well. . . If I was a standup comedian, which this guy is, I suppose, I'd expect better laughs than this, at least more spirited than the "AHAHAHAHAHA" I'm hearing. When the whole thing degenerates into moans and howls, with men in suits flailing around on the floor, it all gets a little tiresome.
I found a web page that has links to seemingly hundreds of articles furiously denouncing the holy laughter/Toronto blessing phenomenon as the work of the Old Scratch himself. I didn't read any of them because I was beginning to go totally numb. It's a defense mechanism, see, when things get overloaded. I just sort of short out. . .
. . .a. . .n. . . d.. . . .
. . . excuse me.
Post-Blog Thoughts. Typical of me, since I am a bloodhound and a bloodthirsty busybody, I had to poke my nose into the subject of "holy laughter" in all its manifestations. It ain't a pretty sight. What I came up with was extremely polarized, both for and against. True, the "for" camp didn't seem to need much scriptural justification for all that screaming and rolling around: it was fun, and I suppose there's nothing wrong with fun so long as no one gets hurt. But I refuse to believe that no one ever gets hurt.
This doesn't appear on the videos, which are no doubt edited, but things MUST get out of hand sometimes. Out of hand might take various forms - flailing so violently so that you hurt yourself or others, peeing yourself, peeling off to get hot and heavy with a favorite flailing partner (for it's well-known that uncontrollable laughter has a sexual component, a slap-and-tickle effect), biting and scratching, unwelcome (or welcome?) grabbing of someone's none-of-your-business, and basically falling into a violent mass hysteria that has absolutely nothing to do with spirituality. The worst of it, though, is looking like a damn jackass (on YouTube no less), and not even caring who sees it.
Here is a partial list of "symptoms" of this phenomenon (and the more I read about it, the more I am dying to try this thing for myself). It's from a site called Unholy Laughter, one of the many purse-lipped, disapproving screeds which condemns all that carpet-lint-gathering-on-one's-Sunday-suit:
Some other phenomena that take place at these laughing revivals include: "shaking, jerking, loss of bodily strength, heavy breathing, eyes fluttering, lips trembling, oil on the body, changes in skin color, weeping, laughing, 'drunkenness,' staggering, travailing, dancing, falling, visions, hearing audibly into the spirit realm, inspired utterances--i.e. prophecy, tongues, interpretation, angelic visitations and manifestations, jumping, violent rolling, screaming, wind, heat, electricity, coldness, nausea as discernment of evil, smelling or tasting good or evil presences, tingling, pain in body as discernment of illness, feeling heavy weight or lightness, trances--altered physical state while seeing and hearing into the spiritual world, inability to speak normally, disruption of natural realm--i.e. electrical circuits blown, the 'fire of God' burning you that you have to remove some clothing, pawing people and roaring like a lion, walking like a chicken, howling like a wolf, digging the ground with hoofs like a bull while prophesying, flying like an eagle, throwing communion bread around to show your joy in the Lord, screaming AHHHHH as a mighty warrior to stop the preaching of the word of God during a service, incoherent babbling, pounding the floor with your arms while holding a conversation in tongues with the minister in charge of the service, feeling electricity shoot through your body, affecting electronic scanning devices in airports, etc."(22)
It's that (22) part that just devastates me.
Listen, I've had my own strange experiences, things which I still don't understand, but they've never been communal. It's hard for me to believe I could experience real revelation in the midst of a cacophany of cuckoos. I'm of two minds about all spiritual experiences: they often seem dodgy because they're self-proving, i. e. it MUST be God because God's telling me it is; I don't need proof because I have faith, etc. But at the same time, the game could be vastly more complicated than we can even comprehend (in fact, this seems likely), in which case logic falls down like a house of cards, blown away by the howling winds of Pentecost.
So it comes down to the question, for each of us: what is authentic and important to ME? This is my sticky spot. All this guffawing and staggering around isn't individual; it's surrender to a bizarre group mood or group energy in which the participants dance around like marionettes controlled by some force outside the self. It's NOT coming from within or everyone wouldn't be goose-stepping to it so gleefully. These people have thrown their individual will away and surrendered to a sort of collective will, which is the most frightening force there is. Think how suggestible such a gibbering mob is. If half the "symptoms" I've listed above are real, there are aspects of the experience that are downright frightening. At very least, it's disturbing, especially (Land o' Goshen!) that "affecting electronic scanning devices in airports, etc." thing.
They say "affecting", however, without spelling out exactly how. Could I disable the security scanners with the Holy Spirit and smuggle a 48-piece set of silverware aboard a plane, maybe hidden in the lining of my coat? Guess I'll never find out.
POST-POST Revelation! I just noticed something when making the gif of the poor bugger in the red suit: the seats have plastic on them! Maybe these people aren't so insane after all. Seems to me they must be ready for anything.
Where is God in all this?
I keep thinking I've hit the bottom of the barrel, then find something even more inexplicable. It's hard to imagine this could be satire: someone would be exaggerating just a bit, as if to say, "OK folks, you can laugh now". But they're all so earnest. I don't know if they belong to some cult, or what. The camera work alone is enough to induce vertigo.
When you look at Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar (whose wife has the lovely name of Taffi) and all those holy-roller types, the audiences are right there with them, falling over backwards into convulsions that almost seem real. Never mind that almost ALL these evangelical types eventually end up in some sort of scandal, financial, sexual, or (most likely) both. Even during the worst reputation-dragged-through-the-mud debacle, some faction of the church will choose to believe the media is spreading lies to discredit their idol. It always happens. A split, a civil war. No one wants to believe they were wrong, that they were duped. A mixture of pride and blind allegience keeps them on-board unto death.
I know all about these dynamics because I experienced it, not in some fundamentalist snake-handling setting but in the good ol' Charlie Brown of religion, the United Church of Canada. We were charmed and seduced into hiring (and WE made the decision over three or four other perfectly good candidates) someone who could not have been more unsuitable for the job, someone we knew did not have the proper credentials to lead us, and we proceeded to demonize him for a year, cornering him on some of his worst behaviour (and believe me, it was bad) while remaining oblivious to our own.
The church never recovered, and due to some personal issues both connected and not connected to the church, my old belief system fell apart. Actually, it sort of went back to the way it was before I joined. Not being so sure of things, but being VERY sure of the darkness at the core of the human heart.
I wonder at all this tribal caterwauling. I suppose it does no harm, and may do some good. Sometimes I wish I could join in, wish I wasn't so dead-bored with droning hymns that are 200 years old (and were not very interesting even then) and the blanding-out that has enabled even United Church moderators to be, basically, atheists. Let's open those doors so wide we might even be able to pay the mortgage this month.
My entire 15-year experience with the church was one of scrambling anxiety, not over the problems of the community or even faith, but one thing only: money. Every year we had an Annual Meeting that was nothing short of an exercise in despair. It might as well have been held on the deck of the Titanic. Yet if you didn't attend, you were frowned upon, excluded. If you weren't there to discuss our chronic financial dysfunction at the meeting, if you didn't have a ready solution to these insurmountable problems, you weren't allowed to state an opinion on any of it.
After several hours of incomprehensible, often wildly inaccurate and unspeakably dreary financial reports, we always came to the same conclusion. We're in the hole, we're sinking, we can't pay the bills, we've got to get asses in seats. We were visited in our homes and interrogated about how much we were giving, and if it wasn't enough by church standards, we were guilt-tripped. This was even true of people on fixed incomes. Later, we were guilt-tripped if we wouldn't tithe. What's wrong with you people, aren't you committed to your faith?
We were shown pie charts and Venn diagrams about giving, and it was explained to us how, if each of us gave 15% of our income, we could make our mortgage and building upkeep commitments with no trouble at all. All we had to do was distribute the burden fairly. So what was the matter with us, why weren't we doing it?
This was all about maintaining a building that in essence was used once a week for a couple of hours. The rest of the time it had to be heated, repaired, tended to and endlessly fed with OUR money. Squeezed out with guilt.
So where is God in all this? I don't believe in God any more, or at least, what I do believe is so far from my original concept that you'd have to call me a non-believer now. Atheist and agnostic are terms that piss me off and offend me because they are LABELS, because people affix them and feel sure they have drawn a bead on who you really are. I am not an "anything" except a human being, trying to figure it out as I go along. I suspect there are more of me than most of us care to realize.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Public Access Prophet: you've never seen ANYTHING like this!
This is one of those miracles of 1990s public access TV: a show that lasted two episodes before the Rev. Bell was carried off, either by the holy spirit or the forces of justice. I can't find the other one (it's around the internet somewhere), in which for some reason he wears a tux. I'm still trying to figure out the set - if that's what it is - or just how psychotic a person can be. Not too sure where he is today, IF he is today, or if he's doing serious time somewhere. Somewhere.
What's really going on below
I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
There was a time when you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well, really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Leonard Cohen
Yes. I've truly been in a righteous mood, from dead monks in the middle of the road to living evangelical scammers, dodging for your dimes. But I only come to this subject now because for some reason this song has experienced an explosion of popularity, years after it was first written and recorded.
I won't go over all the versions because I don't know what they are, and besides, it's the Sabbath and you're not supposed to do any work. I do recall k. d. lang singing it during the closing ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Stolid and middle-aged, dressed in what looked like a polyester pantsuit, she prompted my husband to comment, "She looks like Wayne Newton."
It's a great tune, this, and catchy somehow, and people want to sing it. The problem is, almost no one pays attention to the lyrics. All they notice is the chorus, so they assume the words must be "religious". I'm not sure people ever listened to the words of songs, and they sure don't now, because almost everyone I talk to thinks this is a song you could sing in church.
Why? Well, it has "Hallelujah" in it (over and over again), doesn't it? It has "the Lord" in it, doesn't it? Then it must be OK.
In fact, in my former church, in the pathetic choir that used to be so mighty and sincere, a most unmusical woman asked the choir director if we could do Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah as an anthem. "We'll do it for Easter Sunday," he replied.
Well. I guess he didn't look, either. But who does? And what difference would it make anyway?
If you DO look at the words, they combine Cohen ennui and melancholy with Cohen dire eroticism, including some pretty graphic lines:
There was a time when you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah
Then there's all that stuff suggesting erotic bondage, being tied to a chair, etc., but in the United Church, anything goes, so long as nobody ever really listens (which is a pretty safe bet). I can just see people squealing on the way out of the service as they shake the choir director's hand: "Oh, what a lovely anthem today! Such a helpful message."
Oh yeah.
Now this song belongs to everyone. I know that not everyone performs the original, that there are new versions of it being written all the time, including some pretty smarmy ones for weddings and funerals and the like. I have no idea what Cohen thinks of all this. But I also wonder if someone might just decide to get up and sing it spontaneously in church, maybe reading the lyrics off sheet music or something.
Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
This might work for someone embroiled in gun culture, but that's one thing we don't seem to have around these parts. Though we do have the lunacy and empty-headedness that goes with it.
I have my own version, NOT suitable for weddings, funerals, exorcisms or Mary Kay parties. I won't apologize to Leonard Cohen because he's already rolling in it.
You tell me that you love this song
although you have the meaning wrong
for you don't really care for lyrics, do you
But maybe if you listen well
You'll step into my private hell
And wish you'd never heard what's coming to you
Hallelujah Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
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Saturday, May 3, 2014
TV's worst evangelists: Glory Be to Fraud
Guess I must just be in a righteous mood. You know how it is on YouTube: it's designed for addictive browsing, where way leads on to way, and often you can't go back. So you end up affixing, pasting your favorites onto your blog so you won't lose track of them.
This has to be the ugliest piece of video I have ever seen, so of course I had to post it. When I first watched it, I just could not take in what I was seeing. It was an ugly mob scene featuring hysterical men making weird noises and pushing people over. I would love to know more, i. e. who ARE these people, WHERE are they and WHAT are they doing?, but the video says nothing. The clips have been taken from other videos, perhaps illegally, so are not labelled.
This is obviously some sort of mass exorcism. Trouble is, it's the exorcist who's possessed. Possessed by the God of idiocy. The most baffling and grotesque example is the long clip in the middle. For some reason another guy sort of holds on to him, so he won't float away to Cuckooland. One wonders at the sadism of such people, who surely can't believe they're doing anything of value, or doing anything at all except create false hopes and suck away cash.
Though it's the poor and marginalized who are most taken in by these vampires, I notice the suits and ties and '80s-style dressed-up women with high hair and wonder who on earth would fall for this. It's desperation, for sure, the need to believe, but do we really have to check our intellect at the door, to give our will over entirely?
I'm reminded of Nazi Germany, of Triumph of the Will and its hideous uniformity, the fierce, vacant pride of people falling into lockstep and throwing their individuality gleefully away. People do NOT want to think for themselves. It's a burden to make decisions and live with the consequences. I've heard so many people, even "moderate" Christians and people in 12-step groups (which can be more fundamentalist than the whooping, hollering crowd you see here) go on and on about how "God is in charge, God makes all the decisions, I just put it all in God's hands." Even when I was part of the United Church, that Godless bunch of New Age heathens and mortgage brokers/Mary Kay salesladies, I was encouraged, nay, pressured to just trust in God, bring all my troubles to Him/Her and believe that I would be guided, reassured, even healed.
Didn't happen, folks. In fact, I wasn't the only one who found that her soul maladies and vulnerabilities of the body only got worse in "God's hands".
The truth is, "God" does not HAVE hands. God is a concept, just about the slipperiest, most unknowable and inexpressible concept that exists. God is, perhaps, the mysterious force that gave rise to all life, to the entire universe. And it didn't happen in a week or even a couple thousand years, but an expanse of time so vast we can't even comprehend it. But is there a personal God, a God who knows us, cares about us, tends to us and listens to all our sorrows?
I think not. Sorry, God. For that, we need each other.
Afterblog. After watching this compilation, I am incredulous: I MUST find out more about the maniac with the suit-and-tie audience. Watching it over and over again, I notice to my horror that most people in the audience are wearing badges. Are they all members of the Gospel Insane Asylum Club or what? Is this some sort of conference? What the hell is going on here? Why are people going along with it? Are they functionally sane? Is HE functionally sane? Are people that desperate to be taken over, to voluntarily give up their will and power of decision? In other alarming clips, I've seen examples of people claiming to be "healed", when in truth they had cancelled surgeries, chemotherapy or other medical treatment in the deluded belief they didn't need them. In one clip, an elderly woman said she was scheduled for open heart surgery because she had several blocked arteries, but glory be to God, she didn't need it any more! "So you went to the doctor and - " began the televangelist scumbag. "I don't need no doctors now! I'm healed! Glory be to God!" In this case, even the evangelist seemed a bit uneasy, but quickly went on to the next victim.
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Christ, that's funny: portraits of the Laughing Jesus
From what we know of Jesus - which, from a historical perspective, isn't very much - he doesn't seem to have been a real good-time sort of guy. In spite of all those references to turning water into wine, officiating at weddings, last suppers and the like, and even if he DID get a little tipsy from doing so, wisecracks and one-liners do not abound in his many familiar sayings.
THIS was the Jesus I grew up with, and if ever a sobersides existed, he was it. He had this long, sombre, Anglo-Saxon face, a receding hairline, and the high forehead of aristocracy. Not exactly a laugh riot. The only quizzical line of his that I can think of is the camel through the eye of the needle (or was that a needle through the eye of a camel? Poor camel!), and that line about, "You see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but not the great log in your own eye." Maybe you had to be there.
We want to know what Jesus looked like. We're curious. Even non-Christians want to know. Even people like me - and in spite of years of uneasy association with the church, I now believe Jesus was a composite, the teachings and sayings and saving deeds of many itinerant prophets rolled into one - want to know. Unconventional takes are welcome, even the above, rather smarmy pose, which probably shows up more often than any of the others, and in more guises.
Sunset orange.
Pastel blue.
And this one, an obvious corruption.
I don't know why it is, but artists have a hard time portraying Jesus as a - what? A real man, or is that too homophobic? What I'm trying to say is, Jeez! He looks like someone competing in America's Got Talent or something, telling us all that his Mom ("Hi, Mom! You're my inspiration!") is completely OK with his "awesome" lifestyle. Even the hairstyle is a little too Vidal Sassoon for my liking.
But this one is just plain disrespecful. Yes! - I believe that Jesus, if there really was a Jesus, likely laughed, because practically everyone who isn't brain-damaged laughs. But like THIS? The look in his eyes is wicked - demonic. He looks to be hatching some sort of evil plot. I don't know what puts these ideas into people's heads. You'd think, if you'd go to the trouble of painting or drawing a Laughing Jesus, there'd be a little more benevolence involved. To quote a Hindu guy I know: "Holy cow."
But it gets worse! Yes - this really is supposed to be Jesus - laughing. They sure had purty teeth all those thousands of years ago.
Does he have to look like this? In all of them? Or am I thinking in stereotypes again? Raymond Burr was gay. Rock Hudson. Gomer Pyle! None of them looked like this. "Wheeeeeeeeeee!"
Howling, but more in pain than laughter.
This one, for some reason, reminds me of a picture I saw in an anthropology text that depicted an australopithecine, humanity's distant ancestor.
Once in a while, though, I find a depiction that just sort of appeals to me. This may look nothing like the "real" Jesus, the one who may or may not have existed. But it's a nice picture. He looks just Middle Eastern enough to defy the washed-out Sunday School stereotype, without being an out-and-out Neanderthal. He's - well, he's gorgeous is what he is! Just a hint of androgyny, enough to be cool without the salon look. I think I would welcome him as my personal Saviour - if he, and I, were so inclined.
P. S. (the "kicker"): Been looking for this one for years! Though there are those who believe I am nuts, I am an avid Blingophile. I love making Blingees, as they are my only real shot at visual art, and this one, sentimental though it may be, is quite beautiful. The subtlety of the animation is quite pleasing to me. It took a reverse-search through my TinEye program to find a true animated version, as I only had a jpg on hand from a post a lo-o-o-o-o-ong time ago. By the way, my search yielded 122 results. And as I look at it now, the reflection seems almost feminine, like the face of Mary. Jesus could always depend on his Mom.
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Post-post wow! I was quite thrilled to find, upon researching the paintings of Greg Olsen (who did the Christ image at the end of my Laughing Jesus display), that he also did the face of the Blingee I like. Some of his imagery is kind of cool, bringing contemporary figures into a Biblical setting. I wish my old white vinyl-covered Bible with the zipper on it had had pictures in it by THIS guy - I might have paid more attention in Sunday School.
Another, more secular Olsen painting. I think it's quite charming and well-composed, and I like the quality of the light. I also like what it's saying: I have a couple of granddaughters tricked out like this.
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Friday, May 2, 2014
Dead Monk in the Middle of the Road, Volume 2: A Clockwork Monk
The Smithsonian Institution has in its collection a clockwork monk, about 15 in (380 mm) high, possibly dating as early as 1560. The monk is driven by a key-wound spring and walks the path of a square, striking his chest with his right arm, while raising and lowering a small wooden cross and rosary in his left hand, turning and nodding his head, rolling his eyes, and mouthing silent obsequies. From time to time, he brings the cross to his lips and kisses it. It is believed that the monk was manufactured by Juanelo Turriano, mechanician to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (Wikipedia).
But it gets worse.
I wish I hadn't seen this, but there is no taking it back now, as it is burned into my memory. This would be a good subject for demonic possession, like Stephen King's old car (or was that My Mother the Car? I always mix those up.) I would imagine Mr. Medieval Monk would be noisy, with a grinding of ancient clockwork gears. As if he needed any more creepiture.
Maybe it's just me, but there's something kind of fetish-y about all those chains working back and forth, the snapping levers moving the hideously jointed arms. Somebody had to sit down and really figure this out. It must have blown medieval minds to see this, something that was not alive moving around as if it was.
For some reason this creeps me out worse than all the rest put together. It reveals how the automaton monk gets around. He's on wheels, obviously, and not surprisingly, and can swivel around as if on skates, but what kills me is that thing in back: IT'S A PIZZA CUTTER! What else could it be? This guy must have been nothing more than an elaborate tool for slicing up Charles V's pepperoni, bacon and mushroom Little Caesar's Tuesday Night Combo Special. Think how many times he must have gone back and forth! I wouldn't be surprised if he keeled over, his grinding feet kicking helplessly in the air, while Charlie scarfed down his hot buffalo wings chased with a gallon of Coke
P. S.: a little bit more about Charles V:
Heritage and early life
Charles was born as the eldest son of Philip the Handsome and Joanna the Mad in the Flemish city of Ghent in 1500. The culture and courtly life of the Burgundian Low Countries were an important influence in his early life. He was tutored by William de Croÿ (who would later become his first prime minister), and also by Adrian of Utrecht (later Pope Adrian VI). It is said that Charles spoke several vernacular languages: he was fluent in German, French, and Flemish, later adding an acceptable Spanish which was required by the Castilian Cortes Generales as a condition for becoming King of Castile. A witticism sometimes attributed to Charles is: "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse." But this quote has many variants and is often attributed instead to Frederick the Great.
(And as with most of these medieval royals, he was his own grandpa, being a direct descendent of Gorgo the Crosseyed, who married himself in 1236. And get a load of this Hapsburg lip:)
Do take into account the fact that these portraits were generally flattering. Oh dear.
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