THE CAMBRIAN PESHER
THE VOICE OF THE DESPOSYNI TO THE AMERICAN DISPERSION
Pesher for Spring, 2007
Hispania
In September of
1476, a small convoy of laden merchant ships from Genoa cleared the Straits of
Gibralter on its way to Flanders and England.
It was immediately attacked by a fleet of pirate ships, led by a
notorious swashbuckler of the day who went by the name of “Coullon.” From the battle which insued, ships were lost
and the famous pirate disappeared suddenly from the pages of history. Clinging to the wreckage was one 25-year old
man who survived and managed to swim six miles to the coast of Portugal. His name was Christopher Columbus.
This incident has
piqued the curiosity of Grail historians for many years. For while this was Coullon’s last appearance in history, it was
Christopher Columbus’ first. Everything else about his past is based
solely on what he has told the world.
None of it has ever been independenly verified, not even his claim to be
Genoese. All that we know is that
afterwards, as part of his “resume,” he claimed to have been commissioned by
Rene’ d’Anjou, earlier in the decade, to commit piracy in the Meditteranean in
a struggle for the control of Naples – a daring task for someone who claimed to
be the son of a wool merchant.[1]
Some have
wondered, “Might Columbus have really been this famous pirate under a different
alias?” Consider that “Coullon” is the
French analog for “Columbus.” Both names
mean “Dove.” This is a startling
association and strongly suggests duplicity.[2]
In the story which
follows his rescue, Columbus claims to have made voyages to Chios, a garrison
of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in the Aegean. He makes another on their behalf to an
undisclosed location. All of these in the 1470s, when he was an inexperienced
seaman.
This “Knights of
St. John” was an order created by the de Bouillon dynasty at the time of the
Templars. Anjou was itself a sanctuary
for refugees from Arthur’s Britain and had long been a hotbed of the Grail
heresy. With the Inquisition in pursuit
of Grail adherents (Templars, Cathars, etc.), Europe was in turmoil as these
populations sought safety.
Now enters
Columbus (Coullon?) who proposes a daring mission: convince a Catholic monarch to finance and sanction an expedition to
the Indies across the Atlantic as a ruse to find sanctuary for the Grail dynasty
in a new world. Historians tell us
that Columbus discovered America by accident.
We now know otherwise. Legal documents show that Columbus was more
interested in ruling the lands to be “discovered” on the way to Asia. He showed less interest in any profits from
Asia itself.
Why would a pirate
be interested in the safety and welfare of these refugees? Pirates are bad men, are they not? They are simply robbers at sea. Why would this man do things calculated to
benefit the Grail family?
One man’s pirate
is another’s hero.[3] In the previous century, the Templar fleet
escaped the coasts of France before King Philip and the Inquisition could get
their hands on it. In the years which
followed, the Templars and the Grail dynasty were in a state of war with the
Catholic Empire. To the Establishment,
they were pirates; to themselves, they were the persecuted desperately trying
to survive. Columbus’ flag-ship, the famous Santa Maria, bore Templar crosses
on her sails when Columbus set sail from Palos. It also left in the closing
hours of grace for Jews and other heretics who were commanded to leave Spain.[4]
The Templars found
sanctuary in Scotland and helped the Bruce at Bannockburn. They found sanctuary under other names in the
islands of the Meditteranean and even the Atlantic, such as the Azores. Others went further west with Henry Sinclair
to Nova Scotia. Some found sanctuary in
Portugal.
But there were so
many of them. Even though their enemies
had killed many thousands of them, there were still many more.
They could not hide in Europe so easily, not until an age of toleration
finally dawned. This was the 14th
and 15th centuries, before the Enlightenment, before Science, and
before the printed Bible. The New World
beckoned. And many followed Columbus there:
In 1506, the Bishop of Puerto Rico complained to the monarchs and the
Vatican that ships were bringing mostly Jews as colonists. Four years later, in 1510, the Bishop of Cuba
made exactly the same complaint to the same authorities; the ships are mostly
Jews and he adds, secret heretics. The official royal census for 1545 noted
that 25 percent of Mexico City’s population were admitted and openly practicing
Jews; and this figure did not include secret Jews, heretics, converses or
secret Muslims. . . in 1547 the estimate was that theire were more Jews than
Catholics in Mexico City.
- Christopher, p. 46-47
As for Columbus,
he seems to have had a secret mission which sometimes contradicted the public
image of a soldier of the Cross.
Columbus found the time between 1485 and 1492 to have an affair with the
Marquise de Moya, reputedly the most beautiful woman in Spain who was,
indisputably, married to the richest man in Spain. There are the inevitable rumors also that
Columbus had an affair with Isabella as well.
These affairs were tolerated, with suspicion, only because the people
involved possessed the financial acumen that Spanish royalty needed and lacked.
Columbus, aside from his imposing physique and rakish personality,
must have possessed, as an “open secret,” some claim to, or high-level
association with, royalty of a caliber that the Spanish nobility and royalty of
the era could not match. Otherwise, so
many noble and wealthy women would have not dared to share a bed with him such
that their relationships were known well enough to have come down to
historians. There was only one lineage
of royalty that could fit this pattern; the royalty of the Kingdom of
Jerusalem. The royalty of the Western
World.
Ibid, p. 44
Columbus demanded
regal titles to the lands he would discover, as well as tax-free
dispensations. His heirs would inherit
the titles, the lands, and the priviliges derived from the “New World.”[5] Historians interpret these demands as
evidence of arrogance and greed. But how
else could he guarantee the safety of the Grail followers, unless he had
undisputed rule of the lands which gave them refuge? Because he failed in making good on his
demands, the Inquisition followed the Grail heretics to the New World:
The Inquisition raged in tropical America, just as it did in Europe. In
fact, some of the Cathar-Jewish-Moslem refugees who had once fled from
Andalusia to Mexico as Spanish conquistadors after 1492, later found themselves
in trouble with the inquistion, again, in Mexico itself. Many died at flaming stakes or on the
torture-racks of the victors. Those who
were not prepared to recant their secret Cathar, or Jewish or Moslem tenets
fled further into the southwestern U.S. And they remained what they always had
been, whether in Andalusia or on the coastal plains of France or in North
Africa. Herdsmen. As they had been also in Mexico. They began the cowboy tradition of the
southwestern U.S.
Ibid, p. 35[6]
Columbus’ Grail
aspirations were finally revealed when he disclosed his interests in Jerusalem. He wanted to liberate it and presumably,
restore a de Bouillon to its throne. As
one Evangelical historian, Peter Marshall, has derisively described the
mission:
[After being deposed] Columbus went home, expecting momentarily to
be ordered to ready another expedition.
But the months went by, and no further word was heard from the
court. At length, he turned his
attention to preparing a Book of Prophecies, gathered from the Scriptures and
the writings of the early Church prophets. Through them, he intended to prove
that God had predestined Spain to be the nation which would free the Holy Land
from the infidel, and that none other than himself was the man to lead the
Crusade.
“But
such a Crusade would take much gold to finance it. Therefore he needed to make one more westward
voyage of discovery. After more than a
year’s entreaties, and possibly just to get him out of Spain (where he was
becoming an increasing embarrassment to them – he was being mocked as “the
Admiral of the Mosquitoes” behind his back”), Ferdinand and Isabella gave him
four ships and their permission to go exploring.”
The Light & the Glory, p. 61[7]
What Marshall perceives as evidence
of Divine judgment upon Columbus, we might interpret as epic heroism:
In addition to all these horrors, his son, Ferdinand, tells us that on
Tuesday, December 13, a waterspout passed between the ships; ‘the which had
they not dissolved by reciting the Gospel according to Saint John, it would
have swamped whatever it struck without a doubt; for, it draws the water up to
the clouds in a column thicker than a water-butt, twisting it about like a
whirlind.’ Columbus’s biographer Samuel Eliot Morison continues: ‘It was the
Admiral who exorcised the waterspout.
From his Bible he read an account of that famous tempest off Capernaum,
concluding, ‘Fear not, it is I!’ Then, clasping the Bible in his left hand,
with drawn sword he traced a cross in the sky and a circle around his whole
fleet.’
Ibid, p. 63
What could be
viewed as Divine favor, Columbus succeeded in finding the mother lode of South
American gold. Reflecting on his
discovery, he said: “Gold is most excellent. Gold constitutes treasure, and he
who possesses it may do what he will in the world, and may so attain as to
bring souls to Paradise.”[8]
Marshall dismisses
Columbus’ success with a banality that has become typical of modern
Evangelicals toward the Grail heritage:
It
is doubtful that he who does what he will in the world is going to be used to
bring many souls to Paradise. This
particular narrative goes on to reveal just how far off-center Columbus’s
thinking had wandered. For by the same
sort of weird, convoluted reasoning that earmarks Gnosticism and so much of
occult metaphysics, Columbus arrived at a monumental conclusion: he was
convinced that he had found King Solomon’s mines!
Ibid, p. 65
Certainly
historians would have added scorn to contempt upon Columbus had he openly
claimed to be a descendant of King David and was looking for King Solomon’s
mines in order to finance the liberation of Jerusalem as his family
inheritance. But he didn’t finish the
task. He returned to Spain to find no
friends at court, only to take ill and die.
While we may never truly know who Christopher Columbus was and what privately motivated him in his mission, it is enough to recognize the effects of his vision in transforming the world. His activities represented a turning point in the history of the human species. It opened the pandora’s box and allowed the human spirit to escape the clutches of medieval institutions. There was much bloodshed and much heartache, in Europe and here – especially among the aboriginal peoples - but today, we benefit from those sacrifices, chiefly because it exhausted the corrupt institutions which martyred them. They gave us the opportunity to start new ones.[9]
The Apostolic Origins of the Spanish Church
The origins of
Christianity in the Iberian penninsula was clearly early, but shrouded in
mystery. It appears that two Apostles –
both named James – led a mission there.
And we have interest shown by the Apostle Paul, but we do not know for
sure whether he was able to make good his intentions of extending his journeys
to Spain. I cite, at length, the tradition as it is offered elsewhere on this
website:
After Pentecost the
Apostles went forth in many directions with their dynamic message of the
Gospel. Of the destination of James the Great there is some historical record.
In the “ History of the Jews of Spain” by Don Adolfo de Castro (translated by
the Rev. Edward D. Kirwan, M.A., Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge), there is
included some correspondence between the President (or Ruler) of the Spanish
Jews Synagogue of Toledo and the Spanish Jews Synagogue of Jerusalem in which
the President of the latter states that a number of Jews are about to proceed
from Jerusalem to Toledo who should not be received at Toledo, “or if ye
receive any one let that one be James the son of Zebedee and none other; he is
a good man.” How long James the Great continued his missionary work in
This was a tragic blow
to the infant Church,
falling but nine years after the Lord’s
Ascension and took place during the first
major persecution. James the Great is
the only Apostle whose death is recorded
in the Scriptures and the manner of it.
Sophronius, 7th
century Patriarch of Jerusalem, states that after the Ascension of the Christ,
this Apostle preached to those of the Jewish converts in Judea and Samaria who
were dispersed after the stoning of Stephen. The officer who was his accuser
before Herod and who guarded him to the tribunal, having been converted by the
remarkable courage and constancy shown by James fell down at his feet begging
pardon for what he had said against him, whereupon the officer publicly
declared himself a Christian and both were beheaded at the same time.
Thus fell the disciple
of our Lord and Apostle of the early Church, St. James the Great, the first of
that number to gain the crown, taking cheerfully the cup of which he had long
since told his Lord he was ready to drink (Matt. XX, 22).
There is, however,
some notice of James the Little by early Christian writers; the 7th
century Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem (quoted by Godwin) states that James
came to Sardinia in the Mediterranean as a missionary; from this point he
appears to have gone to Spain.
James would be
attracted to
Undoubtedly there were
many communities of Jews not only in
In the Itinerary of the Spanish Jew,
Benjamin of Tudela who, in the twelfth century traveled in many lands to
contact his fellow Jews and to ascertain their numbers found communities of his
people in all the countries he visited.
There is a curious
link between the Jews of ancient
This table, found by
Tarik at Toledo, is surely in existence today, treasured perhaps in a European
noble family, or in a Museum, to be given to the world one day as a link with
the ancient past of Israel.
The death of James the
Little and the manner of it is not recorded but that this Apostle ended his
earthly life in Spain is certain from the fact that he lies buried at Ciudad
Rodrigo, while his fellow Apostle James the Great was martyred and buried in
Judea.
-
St. James, the First
Bishop of
-
Isabel
Hill Elder[10]
-
The Jews in
Why were there so
many Jews in Spain? What kind of Jews
were they?
There appear to
have been different stages of migration. We know Spain was used as a place of banishment
by the Romans, as was southern France. Josephus
tells us that some of the Herodian family were exiled there. The central and
eastern areas of the Iberian penninsula are dry and similar to Palestine. Although the Celts inhabited portions of it,
much was still empty, especially the areas of marginal productivity.
Some have supposed
that the word “Iberia” comes from the word “Hebrew.” And while that cannot be established with any
certainty, there were Semitic colonies there from the ancient times of seafaring
Phoenicians. During the various seasons
of misfortune and persecution, new migrations would occur. In time, significant Jewish colonies existed
both in Spain and in Gaul. Because of
its close proximity to the Atlantic, contact with Ireland and Britain was not
uncommon. R. W. Morgan cites some of the
evidence of Apostolic contact with Britain in his book, St. Paul in Britain,
The extremities of Spain, the various parts of Gaul, the regions of Britain
which have never been penetrated by the Roman arms, have received the religion
of Christ.
-
Tertullian, p. 112
And of St. Paul, he quotes the
well-known 1st Epistle of Clement:
Paul, also, having seven times worn chains, and been hunted and stoned,
received the prize of such endurance. For he was the herald of the Gospel in
the West as well as in the East, and enjoyed the illustrious reputation of the
faith in teaching the whole world to be righteous. And after he had been to the
extremity of the West, he suffered martyrdom before the sovereigns of mankind .
. .
-
p. 116
As was true of his
missionary journeys in Asia, so it was in the West. Paul would first visit the
Jewish synagogues and then later preach to the Gentiles. The well-established Jewish communities in
Gaul and Spain would certainly have facilitated his mission.
Far from the
influence of fanatical Palestinian Jews, it appears these Christian missions
experienced much greater success in Spanish synagogues than in the regions of
Paul’s first missionary journeys.
Because of that connection with the heritage of Israel, the Churches of
Spain resembled more the Churches of Palestine – of Jerusalem in particular –
than the Gentile churches Paul founded in Greece and Asia Minor. As in Rome, Paul, if he ever did make it to
Spain, would have encountered an established community of “Jewish” Christians. His message would have been more
conciliatory, much more like what we find in the Epistle of Hebrews than in the
Epistle to the Galatians.
In identifying the
Spanish Christians as “Jewish,” Messianic
is meant. Messianic Jews still embrace
the Mosaic law while confessing Jesus as their Messiah. They can range from Ebionite and Nestorian on
the one hand, to Pelagian and Orthodox on the other. We will encounter in Spanish Christians what
we later find in the Celtic Church: the retention of 7th Day
sabbatarianism, the Feasts of Israel (e.g. the Quartodecimen controversy), and
sometimes circumcision – customs which would lead the Roman Church to later
accuse them of “Judaism.” These are
features of Jewish nationalism which are not essential to the Christian faith,
as James the Just made clear at the Council of Acts 15. But they were retained by Jewish Christians
for many years in what they imagined was necessary to their spiritual
sanctification. When the Inquisition
drove Jews and heretics out of Spain, it was the kind of Judaism which could have
lived peacefully side-by-side with traditional Christians and Muslims . . . and did for many centuries under the
Saracens.[11] Although embittered and polarized by the
persecution done to them in Christ’s name, this kind of Judaism can still today
embrace Jesus as the Messiah, a Messiah which can also speak to a Nestorian Mohammed
as He did to His Apostles and Prophets of old.
The Celtic Church in Spain
The Celtic
presence in Iberia dates as early as the sixth century BC, according to current
archeological opinion. They are known to
historians chiefly through the records of the Romans. The Celts factored prominently in the Punic
Wars between Rome and Carthage. Like the
Celts of Gaul, their disparate tribes often operated independently of each
other. Consequently, they sometimes
experienced different destinies.
Spain fell under
the control of Rome after the last of the Punic Wars, much earlier than Gaul. But there were mountainous regions in its
extremities, such as the Pyrenees, where the populations retained much of their
ancient heritage. The Basques are an
example of a people who exploited their position on the Imperial frontiers to
preserve their culture:
The Basque country is composed of
seven provinces of which three are French and four Spanish. The Basques were
never what might be called a single nation for every province preserved
complete independence of laws and customs, but the provinces never fought each
other, and always united in their opposition to a common enemy. Thus, though
the Romans, Goths and Moors invaded them, and later on the wars between France
and Spain swept over their country, it remained intact.
There is an interesting story of a
hidden valley, very fertile and entirely secret into which the Basques drove
their flocks and herds during the devastating times of war. The entrance to
this valley lay through the bed of a shallow stream running through primeval
forest land, and even now no Basque willingly speaks of it, for it still exists
and is well known to the shepherds and the officials of the afforestation
department. It was always an enigma to
invaders what became of the fine oxen and fat sheep for which the Basque
country was so celebrated. Immediately
war was declared they all vanished as though they had been spirited away. And indeed they had been, for at the first
news of real invasion, night after night was spent in collecting the beasts and
driving them, under cover of the darkness, up the country through this hidden
passage into this safe and unknown hiding-place. I have been shown pictures of this ancient
forest right up among the hills of the interior, and it certainly looks
impenetrable. It would be difficult to
find a way in, even if one were seeking it, and practically impossible for the
commissariat foragers of an alien army.[12]
The
Basques exist to this day. They are not
Celts, but share a common ancestry with the Iberians (Hebrews?) and other
Semitic colonizers which came with the Phoenecians and with the Jewish refugees
of the Roman period. As with any people,
there was mingling with their neighbors, which included the Celts. The Celts, more than any other invader, were
magnanimous, uninterested in empire, and shared many of the same values as the
Basques, for they, themselves, represented earlier migrations of these similar
ethnic groups from the Middle East. Such
factors contributed to a peaceful co-existence and cultural exchange.
We
have discussed the formation of the Jewish Church in Spain. Now, we must consider the Celtic Church. Although Spain was a land full of Celts, the
source of a distinctly Celtic Christian tradition comes to Spain from Britain. Unlike Britain, Spain had long lived under
Rome’s imperial sceptre and permanently left its mark. Rome’s presence in Britain, however, was not
long enough, nor pervasive enough, to have changed its racial constitution. Britons were lovers of liberty and believers
in free will. They did not warm to the
notion of a paternalistic state or to a religion of passivity.
The
Jewish Church was monotheistic and rigidly patriachal. It lacked the feminine presence in the Godhead,
which in contrast, the Celtic Church provided.[13] Its view of the Holy Spirit was feminine and
taught that the Trinity represented the Divine family. This doctrine – ever so briefly taught in the
early Church – was later corrupted into Mary worship. Without the worship of the Madonna, the
Catholic Church could never have prevailed in the ancient world, especially in
Celtic lands such as Ireland. But it was
different than the doctrine of a feminine Holy Spirit. While Mary was raised to a semi-divine
status, she could never be co-equal with the Father, as could the Holy
Spirit. Since the Holy Spirit retained
its masculine profile in Christian dogma, Mary could never become the Holy Spirit
incarnate in this scheme. She was
restricted to that of a mediator and a secondary god. Expelled from the family
of Heaven, womankind became second-class humans, and now we find the misogyny
of the Church explained.
Northern
Spain and southern France are known for having been hotbeds of heresy. Perhaps the earliest were the Priscillians in
the 4th and 5th centuries. Later came the Cathars and other dualistic
cults. It is difficult to sort them out,
their writings having been burned. But
in most cases, they betray a hostility to the world of matter and of current
society. Usually escapist and ascetic,
they rarely have influenced government.
They often seek ecstatic experiences with God and hold to mystical
doctrines which only initiates understand.
They have a high view of women and make them equals in their orders. Sometimes, they are hostile to marriage.
We
would think that such passivist societies would have been of little interest to
the state. Such, unfortunately, was not
the case. Heretics, no matter how
innocent, stop paying tithes to the Church.
A drop in funding is very upsetting to clerics. It diminishes their power and status. Hence, they appeal to the state to eliminate
their new rivals.
When
a society embraces a rigidly patriarchal deity, it can be argued that its
institution of marriage is proportionately corrupted by that doctrine. For a patriarchal society, marriage is the means
of enslaving women. In contrast, it
might be that these heretical groups were not rejecting marriage at all, but
simply the kind of marriage found in patriarchal societies. To the Catholics, the heretics were wicked in
rejecting church-sanctioned marriage.
Any relationship not blessed by a priest was fornication in the Church’s
lexicon. It was a word game. Many of these heretics appear to have been
very wise and decent people. Whether any
of their ideas were true or not is beside the point. They were often good people responding to the
injustices and incongruities of their day.
It is not so easy to reinvent a religion. Mistakes will be made. Martyrdom or flight should not have been
their lot.
As
for the Celtic Church, the Latin hierarchy hurled similar insults: “pagans,” “idolaters,”
“fornicators,” and so on. The effect was
more sinister than mere name calling; it provided legal justification for
invasion. It lifted the obligation to
treat the Celtic Christian as a brother in the faith. He could be killed, raped, and plundered with
impunity by crusaders in the name of Christ.
But
such infamy did not occur until well into the Medieval period. At its height, the Celtic Church stood
uncontested in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, Brittany and Galicia
(northwest Spain). Celtic abbeys and
monasteries dotted the landscape of Europe from France to Russia and did much
to preserve knowledge and decency during that turbulant time.
In
Spain, remnants of the Celtic Church can be found at Santa Maria de Bretona and
Santiago de Compostela. More
importantly, however, was the hidden but steady migration of these people to
the New World and their survival in the Jewish communities of Mexico.
-
James Wesley Stivers,
Church
Overseer