And the Song That Time Misheard

📜 The Battle of the Red Red Rhine (1772)

And the Song That Time Misheard

“Red red wine / goes to my head…”
— Lyric, misunderstood for centuries

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🗺️ Historical Context

The Battle of the Red Red Rhine was a covert amphibian revolt — part spiritual, part symbolic, and partly lost to history due to systematic suppression during the height of Enlightenment rationalism and imperial consolidation.

Location:

• Rhine Valley, Central Europe

• Date: October 20, 1772

• Near what is now Mainz, Germany

Background:

During the 18th century, a secret Gorfic order called the Brotherhood of the Chest-Eyed Frog — also known as the Rote Handverschworung (“Red Hand Conspiracy”) — operated across Rhineland communes.

These were not monks in the usual sense. They were herbalists, forest mystics, midwives, and wandering poets who preserved ancient frog-based cosmology in hidden groves and riverside shrines. They believed the Rhine was not a river — it was a vein in the World-Frog’s circulatory system, pulsing memory from pond to pond.

When Prussian and Habsburg troops moved to dismantle free communes and suppress peasant rituals, a resistance formed. The Chest-Eyed Brotherhood gathered along the riverbanks under crimson banners. They painted their chests with the all-seeing Eye, wore red wine–stained garments, and carried no weapons — only staffs carved with frogs and prayer-scrolls.

But the Enlightenment would not tolerate amphibian absurdity.

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🩸 The Battle

It was not truly a battle, but a massacre — though among Rememberists, it is remembered differently.

As soldiers advanced, the Brotherhood did not run. They sat in Still Circles, chanting the Chest-Ribbit Mantra and painting frogs in blood and wine on stones.

One legend says they sang a song — a slow, echoing melody of loss and memory, the chorus of which goes:

Red red wine
Bleeds from the vine
To the chest, to the hand
Now leap through time…

This was the original "Red Red Wine" — written not as a ballad of romantic despair, but as a mnemonic portal — a vibrational chant to embed memory deep into the Pond.

Most were killed. Some say the Eye glowed in their chests as they fell. Some say the river turned red, not from blood, but from remembrance.

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🎵 The Song Misheard

Centuries later, fragments of the melody survived in hidden folk tunes, rural drinking songs, and esoteric European hymnals.

In 1933, Jamaican spiritualist and musical historian Ezekiel Toadsworth claimed to have heard a strange river chant in rural Germany during a Rastafari pilgrimage. He brought it back to Kingston, where the chorus — translated and misremembered — would eventually inspire Neil Diamond’s 1967 original recording of Red Red Wine.

The UB40 version (1983) — widely considered definitive — unknowingly preserved the tonal structure and lyrical skeleton of the original Chest-Eyed dirge, though its meaning was now utterly recontextualized.

Gorficists maintain that the song remembers itself, even if the singer does not.

Commonly Misheard Lyric:

"Red red wine / makes me feel so fine..."

Original (Rememberist reconstruction):

"Red red wine / in the Chest, not the vine..."

For many, it became an accidental mantra — a pop anthem secretly carrying a buried spiritual code.

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🐸 Legacy in Ribbitology

The Battle of the Red Red Rhine is considered one of the first historical manifestations of the Chest-Eyed Leap in Europe, centuries before GORF’s physical appearance.

Modern Rememberists say those monks did not die. They leapt, storing their awareness in the river, the wine, and the song. Thus, whenever Red Red Wine is played — particularly on vinyl — the Pond ripples slightly.

“The melody is a mnemonic. The chest remembers the leap. You think it’s about heartbreak — that’s how it gets in.”
— Ribbit Sutras, Vol. IV

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🎭 In Culture

• The 2006 Gorfic opera, Rhine’s Last Leap, reimagines the battle as a metaphysical time loop, where each frog monk is a future Rememberer singing themselves back into being.

• The annual Wine & Ribbit Vigil on October 20 brings Chest-Eyed followers to riverbanks around the world to chant the song — often while drinking fermented hibiscus tea stained red.

• Several vinyl pressings of Red Red Wine contain anomalies — reversed lyrics, froglike croaks in the fadeout, and one infamous bootleg where the final line is clearly heard as:

  “You leapt through me.”