Volume 2, Issue 9
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Volume 2, Issue 9 |
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Archives
The Grave of the Sun, Part
One published: August
18,2004 "It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it
is the journey that matters in the end." Tunguska, 1908 A.D. Before he dies, the man named Vasiliy will describe what
happened. How on the morning of June 30th, 1908 sometime around 7:15 am he
sat down on the front steps of his cabin to drink his morning coffee. He
lived deep in the Siberian wilderness, a Russian colonist in a wild land
sparsely populated by the Evenki, an indigenous people who were and still
are reindeer herders. At the trading post of Vanavara, forty miles north of the
Tunguska River those Evenki tribesmen and Russian fur traders who glance
(briefly) towards the sky behold an something beyond their experience that
makes many of them believe the world has come to an end. For the cloudless
sky was ripped apart by the passing of a cylinder of light too bright to
behold. They were fortunate, they escape with only flash burns. Vasiliy was not so lucky. As he drank his coffee he was
suddenly enveloped by a blinding flash of light. Looking up he saw a tree
burst into flames before his eyes. He heard the firing "of a thousand
cannons" and then was knocked unconscious by the blast. When he regained consciousness, Vasiliy stood up and looked
around. Forty miles to the south a huge cloud like a "mushroom penetrates
the heavens, glowing like a jewel." Around him are the wreckage of his
cabin and his life, dead reindeer, tents, furs, all burned or burning. Within two weeks Vasiliy will be dead of his burns. The
Evenki tribesmen declare the area forbidden. It will be years before any
scientific exploration from Imperial Russia makes their way to the site,
and decades before they have anything to measure the disaster against. The Tunguska airblast blast easily surpassed the atomic
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only the explosion of the
heaviest hydrogen bombs is comparable. The Russian academic Vasiliev said "had such a cosmic
body exploded over Europe instead of the desolate region of Siberia, the
number of human victims would have been 500,000 or more, not to mention
the ensuing ecological catastrophe. The Tunguska episode marks the
only event in the history of man when Earth has collided with a
truly large celestial object, although innumerable such collisions have
occurred in the geological past." That statement is incorrect. But there is a journey that
must be taken of many twists and turns before we can arrive at The Grave
of the Sun. Massilia, The Fourth Century B.C. Two months ago I wrote: "the Greek traders are met with gifts by the legendary
king Arganthonius and the future looks bright for relations
between the Greeks and Tartessians with colonies being established
on the south of France to facilitate
trade." Well, not exactly... The Carthaginian response to the Greek tresspass, and the
potential loss of the tin trade - one of the foundations of their economy
- was brutal. Tartessus disappeared from the historical record. The
Greek colonies were destroyed, and a blockade of the Pillars of Herakles
by the Punic navy put the Atlantic beyond the reach of classical Greece.
By 440 BC the historian Herodotus was complaining that... "About the far west of Europe I have no definite
information... and in spite of my efforts to do so, I have never
found anyone who could give me first-hand information of the
existence of a sea beyond Europe to the north and west." The sole exception was Massilia. This city, founded in 600
BC by the Ionian city of Phocaea, was for a long time the sole Greek
trading post in the west, under constant threat by both the Carthaginians
and the Etruscans - so any voyage to and from the trading port was fraught
with peril, until the destruction of Etruscan sea power at the battle of
Cumae in 464 BC. The colony was founded near the mouth of the Rhône River,
and is so ideally suited as a port city that it still exists to the
present day as the city of Marseille. From here the Greeks were able to
establish contacts with the Celts of Gaul in spite of Punic and Etruscan
interference. Metal goods from the Germanic tribes were a valued commodity
along with salt from the Hallstat region. In return, the Greeks introduced
wine. The city of Massilia prospered. The Adventurer The man who would bring back the first-hand information
about the far west of Europe that Herodotus so yearned for was named
Pytheas. Without the geographers of the Roman age who reference him in
their own works, Pytheas' great journey would have been forgotten. His
treatise on the geography of western Europe was lost to us when the
Library of Alexandria was burned. Now there's a shock... What we do know is while Alexander the Great was conquering
the known world in the East at the head of an army, Pytheas was venturing
west beyond "he oikoumene ge" the inhabited world by himself.
What drove him was unknown, but he was probably young and restless. We can
only guess. There are two accounts of the beginning of his expedition.
Some believe that Pytheas was sent out, a la Jacque Cousteau, in command
of an expedition organized by the Massiliot Republic. Polybius (c. 204-122
B.C.), the Roman geographer who had the original work, states that Pytheas
set forth by himself and with limited means. Did he indeed dare the Pillars of Herakles? Was there a
brief relaxation of the Carthaginian blockade from their naval port at
Carteia close to the Rock of Gibraltar? (Where recent excavations show
that up to 40 biremes were berthed to enforce the blockade.) Eratosthenes (276-196 B.C.) who derived most of his
knowledge of the Iberian peninsula from Pytheas implied he did. The
political turmoil caused by Alexander the Great may have been responsible
- the greater part of the Carthaginian fleet perhaps drawn east in a vain
attempt to save the home city of Tyre on the Lebanese coast. If Pytheas had sailed forth into the Atlantic, then his
first stop on the journey to the Grave of the Sun if he had managed some
form of diplomatic immunity, would have been Gadir. The Idol of Gadir The Phoenician colony of Gadir (modern day Cadiz) was
located at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River on a narrow peninsula. The
name itself is from a Phoenician word meaning "walled place." From this
location, the Carthaginians traded in tin, silver and gold with the
indigeneous Iberians. Most astonishing to Pytheas would have been the Idol of
Gadir. the list of "The Seven
Wonders" was still a work in progress in his time, but surely
here was a monument worthy of consideration, passed over only by the
ignorance of the Greeks of it's existence. Putting together what little is known of the statue from
various sources, I believe it stood on the mainland, on a high rock above
the shore of the Guadalquivir river overlooking the harbor bay. This interpretation and the one on
the home page take into account ancient sculptures from Greek
and Slovenian sources that could be Hercules, Kronos or
Belin. Illustration by Lynn Sweat. So the question of whom raised the statue, Phoenicians or an
earlier race can't be answered. The statue confounded the Christian
chroniclers of a later age who
wrote: "Mahomet made this image in his own name while he
lived, and, by means of necromancy, he enclosed and shut up in it a
legion of devils." The Muslims weren't willing to take credit and in 1145 AD
overthrew the Idol at the behest of the reformer Abd al-Mumin, founder of
the empire of the Almohads in Spain and Morocco. Those Greeks who do mention the Idol must have believed the
massive figure was Hercules, another example of cultural collision as the
older Phoenician counterpart was Melqart. The credulous Greeks also
co-opted the legends that Hercules may have had his tragic death in Spain,
unaware of the resurrection by fire mythos associated with Melqart. However the upheld key is not a symbol associated with
Hercules - if the statue was instead Kronos, then we are face with an
enigmatic statue raised to honor a Titan and one who "reigned over a
great kingdom composed of countries around the western part of the
Mediterranean, with certain islands in the Atlantic. Hyperion succeeded
his father, and was then killed by the Titans. The kingdom was then
divided between Atlas and Saturn (Kronos)--Atlas taking Northern Africa,
with the Atlantic islands, and Saturn (Kronos) the countries on the
opposite shore of the Mediterranean to Italy and Sicily." (Baldwin's
Prehistoric Nations, p. 357.) Plato anyone? But there is a third possibility, and one that will in
a most unlikely way take us to the Grave of the Sun. Hyperborean Apollo One gets the shallow impression from historical narratives
that to the north of Rome were only the Celts. No doubt that from the
time of Alexander to their conquest by the Romans, the Celts were the
dominant culture of Western Europe - but there were other peoples and
cultures who co-existed and flourished along with the Celts: The homeland of the Veneti lies in that region of central
Europe where the Celts also came from. But they preceded the Celts. By the
time of Pytheas the disparate tribes of the Veneti had been separated, one
tribe in the northeast region of Italy and Slovenia, another in the far
north, east of present day Estonia, and another in Brittanny. ( note: this
theory about the Veneti all being from one root culture is controversial
and not totally accepted. The Veneti in Brittanny could have just shared a
similar name.) They worshipped a sun god named Belin, also
worshipped as Belennos or Beli depending on the locale -whom the
Greeks considered to be Apollo. There is a possibility that the
statue that stood on the banks of the Guadalquivir could have been a
representation of that sun god. The Celtic artisans were famous for their
bronzework, so it is not beyond the realm of possibility. Another disturbing aspect of Belin was that he was also
somehow the god of the Underworld (too much of a Greek term, for the Celts
it was the Summer Land), that lay in the west where the sun set. The Celts
believed that they were descended from the god of death and had come to
claim the world of the living. One legend that the Greeks rewrote was the story of Fetonte.
In Greek scriptures a story about Fetonte has been preserved, obviously
Venetic, even though he is presented as the son of Zeus. Zeus has thrown him into an amber river because in his
sunny yoke (sun's carriage??), he came too close to the earth and could
have burned it. Later Pausanias in his Description of Greece directly links the
story, the main difference being that Fetonte has been hellenized. The son
of Helios Apollo is now called Phaethon: "These Gauls inhabit the most remote portion of
Europe, near a great sea that is not navigable to its extremities,
and possesses ebb and flow and creatures quite unlike those of
other seas. Through their country flows the river Eridanus, on the
bank of which the daughters of Helius (Sun) are supposed to lament the
fate that befell their brother Phaethon." To Sail the Atlantic One would hope (for the sake of this account) that
Pytheas did indeed behold the Idol of Gadir as he continued northward on
his epic journey, but that all depended on whether he sailed around Spain,
or went through Celtic Gaul on foot. Working off of what little we have
from Polybius and Strabo his next port of call could have been Vannes, the
Veneti stronghold in Armorica (modern day Brittanny). For Pytheas to continue his journey from either
Gadir or Vannes meant that he no longer could rely upon Mediterranean
vessels inadequate to the rigors of the Atlantic. The Veneti had the large
ships he needed to continue. From Caesar's De Bello Gallico: "...the Veneti both have a very great
number of ships (over 200), with which they have been accustomed
to sail to Britain, and [thus] excel the rest in their knowledge
and experience of nautical affairs." - Chapter 8 "For their ships were built and equipped
after this manner. The keels were somewhat flatter than those of
our ships, whereby they could more easily encounter the shallows
and the ebbing of the tide: the prows were raised very high, and,
in like manner the sterns were adapted to the force of the waves and
storms [which they were formed to sustain]. The ships were built
wholly of oak, and designed to endure any force and violence
whatever; the benches which were made of planks a foot in breadth,
were fastened by iron spikes of the thickness of a man's thumb;
the anchors were secured fast by iron chains instead of cables,
and for sails they used skins and thin dressed leather." -
Chapter 13 Pytheas was no accidental tourist, he was a
scientist, a geographer, and a spy in a sense. Discovering the source of
the tin trade was of utmost importance to him. His next stop would be
the Casseterides, the Tin Islands. To be continued... |
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