2009 In Review

-- A look at the key trends and events of the year just past.
To keep this to manageable length, I’m focussing this year-end review on the main developments, those clustered around Scotland’s official ‘Year Of Homecoming.’ For, by more than coincidence, this nexus led to press stories about King Arthur, the ‘original’ Merlin, the controversial Stone Of Destiny, the ‘Pictish’ mystery, the Knights Templar, and their supposed successors the Scottish Rite Freemasons of America - background subject of Dan Brown’s latest ‘factually based’ novel The Lost Symbol.

The cornerstone historic exhibit of Scotland’s ‘Year Of Homecoming’ national celebration was of course the Stone Of Destiny – coronation stone of the ancient kings of the Picts and Scots, kept at Scone Palace, where excavations of the area were finally begun in 2009. Stone Of Destiny is also the title of a famous book by Ian Hamilton QC, who was one of the nationalist students from Glasgow U who in December 1950 ‘recovered’ the stone from its place under the coronation throne in Westminster Abbey. (Edward I, after he defeated William Wallace in the 1290s, ordered the Stone sent to Westminster for all future English kings to be crowned on, to show they were also kings of Scotland.) The story of the daring stunt was made into a film in 2008, and this (not much seen on its cinema release) was released on DVD in April 09, together with behind-the-scenes items relating the background events, in which Ian (still going strong in his 80s with his own nationalist blog) appears. Today, there is considerable suspicion the Scone monks sent Edward a substitute (probably a sandstone cistern lid), as ancient codex descriptions suggest the stone is not the original. (For details, see earlier post on this: MacCamelot Revisited.)

Of course, some see the Homecoming Year (so designated as it was Burns’s 250th anniversary) as a way of rallying broader support for the now hotly topical issue of Scottish independence, with cultural representations that show more finesse than the main modern ‘touchstone,’ the crude ‘Jocksploitation’ film Braveheart, which depicted nationalism as defiant exhibitionism, protesting against English tyranny, on the level of a chanting football crowd.

In 2009, Scotland continued to be depicted on screen as a barbarian province, with several films going into production set in the North but with non-native heroes - invading Romans, or Viking raiders. This is an old problem which can be seen in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which a new study, Fiona Watson’s Macbeth: A True Story, revealed once again was historically a travesty. The actual Macbeth was a long-serving popular (and probably Pictish) ruler; historians say Shakespeare was trying to feed the anti-Scots prejudice of the time. (For details of these invading Romans/ Viking raiders films, see earlier post Those Pictish Blues Again.)

Braveheart itself was in the news again [Oct.] when Gibson admitted he knew from historical research that William Wallace was no Mr Nice Guy but ‘a monster’ akin to a Viking berserker. When the film came out in 1995, Gibson had reportedly tried to distance himself from the way it was used as a recruitment aid [leaflets handed out in cinema queues etc] by militant nationalists, who have since continued to paint their faces a ‘Pictish’ blue like Gibson’s - which like much else in the film is historically wrong. (Scots-born Wallace was from a Norman-Welsh family, his surname ‘le Wealeas’ meaning The Welshman, the family being from Shropshire.) Its American scriptwriter Randall Wallace (no relation) defended his screenplay on the grounds it was based on a 15C codex source, a verse epic by a minstrel called Blind Harry. Gibson has announced he is making a blood-and-thunder epic about the Viking berserkers, which will have Leonardo DiCaprio speaking subtitled Old Norse and ‘chronicle the Viking raids on England and Scotland in the ninth century.’

This was the background to another film produced last year (out March 2010), the Danish film Valhalla Rising shot in Scotland, Scandinavia and Canada, about a Viking escaping from slavery among the Highland clans. The idea Viking raiders might end up as slaves to the fierce Highlanders they tried to raid got some wry press coverage in 2009 when an academic conference promoted it to emphasise how the Vikings weren’t as fearless as believed to be by Mel Gibson. (Apparently Icelandic codex sources warned them to avoid Scotland as dangerous!)
(Earlier post here.)

It was these Vikings raids on Celtic monasteries which destroyed an untold number of codex manuscripts dating back into the Dark Ages. A priceless one which did survive, the Celtic Psalter, nicknamed ‘Scotland’s Book Of Kells,’ was the subject of an Edinburgh exhibition designed to conclude the 2009 commemorations. The exhibition of this long-unseen codex seems to have been caught in Scotland’s self-consciousness over image, the modern artist’s contemporising framework commissioned being rejected [Dec.] by the University library which was to exhibit it. The artist had wanted a motto warning about the fragility of a codex volume, “Every time you turn a page, it dies a little,” which Edinburgh University library thought ‘not celebratory enough’ for the 11C exhibit, which is illustrated with Pictish symbols.

Perhaps we should be using the terms Pictland and Pictish here rather than Scotland and Scottish, as stories concerning the earlier Pict inhabitants dominated those concerning the later Scots i.e. Irish colonists who with the help of the church began to colonise the country from the 6th C on. A number of these stories concerned a series of archeo finds this year which helped fill in a heretofore largely blank early history. One example of a find was of a “£1m golden hoard” near Stirling Castle, of pre-Roman era gold torcs which display similar artisanship to that found in Gaul. The press inevitably resorted to the phrase that this ‘rewrites the history of ancient Scotland’, but it was more a case of the finds indicating Keltic Pictland was not the impoverished backwater it later became under English rule. (The Stirling area, part of the same tribal kingdom as Edinburgh [and Rosslyn], that of the Gododdin, is covered in a separate web-page, here.)

Several films featuring the Picts were produced last year, mostly to be released in 2010 (again, discussed earlier in ‘Those Pictish Blues Again’ ). Since then, Bran Mak Morn - 30s pulp author and ‘Conan’ creator Robert E. Howard’s name for the supposed last king of the Picts - is now being filmed by Universal Studios, with Peter Berg [?] as director, and John (Intolerable Cruelty) Romano as scriptwriter. A pair of rival Romans-versus-Picts films are set for release in autumn 2010. Centurion, filmed on location in Scotland, has 7 survivors from the legendary Ninth legion, sent north ‘to wipe the Picts from the face of the earth’ (this is not at all historical re the 9th) being pursued by Amazonian-style Pictish women led by Olga Kurylenko as a warrior princess who has ‘had her tongue cut out by the Romans.’ Director Neil Marshall has said (I’m guessing in response to some early criticism) “It’s not meant to be historically perfect. I’m picking up on a legend and exploring it … it’s an action thriller.” (It’s a Gladiator-lookalike - trailer here.)

There is in reality no such legend of the IX Legion going north into Pictland; the legion simply vanishes from official accounts; if was defeated by British tribes, it was more likely by the Iceni of Norfolk some 60 years before. The story seems conflated with that of Boudicca [misspelt Boadicea by 19C English antiquarians] queen of the Iceni, who rose against Roman occupation in AD 60-1 after she was flogged by the Romans who looted her estate and raped her daughters. So many Roman ‘collaborators’ were massacred and butchered (women’s breasts stuffed in their mouths etc) by her rebel army that the Romans were later unable to take the usual Nazi-style mass-killing reprisals, as there would be insufficient population left to maintain the tax base. (Or so Churchill says in his The Birth Of Britain).

This rebellion indeed is or was (before his current Viking project) to be the subject of a long-planned Mel Gibson produced bloody-mutilation-and-suffering drama, work-titled Warrior but nicknamed by the industry ‘Braveheart in a bra.’ (Even its primitive ‘bandeau’ form, the bra of course was one item of clothing legendary women warriors like the Amazons didn’t wear; supposedly their name meant ‘no breast’, referring to the belief they cut off their breasts as these got in the way when drawing a bow.) Gibson’s was one of 3 rival such projects at the time, including one from Spielberg's Dreamworks (called Queen Fury), and another titled Warrior Queen [also the title of 2 novels on Queen B., plus a 1978 BBC TV series with Sian Philips]. All these may have been abandoned since being pre-empted by a TV movie starring Alex Kingston as earthy queen of a pack of beer-swilling Celts. Some of the major-studio interest here may have been prompted by a speculative (not much is known) 2006 biography, Boudica by Vanessa Collingridge, plus an imaginative trilogy of novels by M.C. [Manda] Scott, who originally trained as a veterinary surgeon at Glasgow University before switching to a teaching ‘shamanic’ dreaming and writing novels, notably her 'Boudica Dreaming' quartet, 2001-6.

This seems part of a Hollywood trend we’ve mentioned in earlier posts towards ‘women warrior’ heroines, something that works in this setting, especially among the Picts who (Bede says) practised matriarchal descent, their noble women ( a Roman historian says) consorting openly with the bravest warriors, and also (Irish legend says) employing women weapons trainers in places like Skye. A new novel published by Penguin last year, Warrior Daughter, by award-winning Scots poet and novelist Janet Paisley, depicts such a sexually-liberated (and bisexual) Iron Age people on Skye led by the orphan daughter of a warrior queen.

The 2nd film being made about the IX Legion was probably the first work of popular fiction to promote the notion it vanished in Scotland: Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 young-adult novel The Eagle Of The Ninth, about “a wounded Roman soldier and his loyal Celtic slave who try to solve the mystery of the Ninth Legion.” This is not another action adventure but a tale of friendship and personal discovery amidst a strange culture, a framework the director of the current film, Kevin Macdonald, is adhering to – adding a layer of deliberate contemporary political allegory about ‘cultural imperialism’ by having the Romans played by Americans in their native accents to emphasize a parallel with Iraq etc. Macdonald has said the ‘natives’ will speak Gaelic, though in the story they are a pre-Celtic Inuit-like relict population, The Seal People whom even the Celtic-Britonnic interpreter cannot understand. (More details in earlier post here.)


Although the ‘natives’ were historically portrayed as barbarians, a number of individuals who had previously been considered non-Scots were ‘repatriated’ or re-claimed as being ‘really’ Scotsmen. Columbus was claimed, on the basis of re-examining some old codex evidence, to have been a blond freckled Scot. This was a claim by a Barcelona historian [A.E. de Villalonga], so can’t be put down simply to Scots nationalist fervor.

As I discussed in an earlier post (see North To MacCamelot) , a proposed relocation of the Arthurian legend to Scotland was in the news. It was suggested Scotland's Southern Uplands rather than Wales were the likely locale of the original Merlin, Myrddin, such as Hart Fell near the source of the Clyde. In this post, I included a photo taken as I flew over the area in May, showing the old Caledonian Wood had been replaced by farmland and modern conifer plantations. Since then, Galloway Forest Park (near where The Wicker Man was part-filmed) because of its relative remoteness from built-up areas has, as part of International Year of Astronomy 2009, been named Britain’s first ‘dark sky’ site, where a view of the night skies can best be had free from urban light pollution. (Instead of the 200 or so stars you can see in cities, it is dark enough there to see up to 7,000 stars.) This is perhaps worth mentioning here, as the starscape was an important feature of life which inspired some of the stellar and lunar myths the ancients wrote of, and whose calendric alignments are also thought to be the basis of megalithic sites like Callanish, rather than just the solar events [solstice etc] celebrated by today’s popular New Age gatherings.

A Scots provenance for legendary Arthur was also proposed, which I won’t go into here as it was covered before in two earlier posts North To MacCamelot and MacCamelot Revisited. Since then, the only headline announcement I’ve seen is ‘King Arthur Was A Genocidal Warlord, Claims New Book’ - which turned out to be advance PR for The Celtic Revolution : In Search of 2000 Forgotten Years that Changed Our World by Dr Simon Young, whose interesting attempt at simulating a lost travel-guide codex, A.D. 500: A Journey Through the Dark Isles of Britain and Ireland, I reviewed 2 years ago [here].

This slighting approach to Arthur by English historians is in itself not new. But instead of “He wasn’t real, just a myth propagated by Welsh and Scots nationalists (and later woolly-minded Romantic Celtophiles overseas),” we typically get “Ok, we’ll agree he was real, provided you agree he wasn’t a proper king, just a Dark Ages warlord, a murderous tyrant.” (You can almost hear the unspoken coda – “a typical bloody Celt.”) The Telegraph article [27-Sep-09] painted Young’s Arthur as a "genocidal warlord whose deeds would have been the stuff of Nuremberg trials today." This didn’t encourage me to order the book, though from the Telegraph’s actual book review I see Arthur is only discussed in an Appendix, where “two sixth-century warlords, one called Arthur and another named Artur” are suggested as main inspiration. The review goes on to outline the thesis of the book’s subtitle, indicating Young does regard ‘Celtica’ as a real culture which made a major contribution to western civilisation. So it may be worth ordering when the paperback comes out.

On the other hand, the claim that one famous historical figure was half-Scots was debunked by a Scottish historian, Neil Hooper. The idea, which has made its way into tourist guidebooks over the years, that Pontius Pilate was born of a Scots mother and Roman father, at Fortingall in Perthshire, where a famous old yew stands, was attacked [Dec.] by Hooper as lacking any documentation before 1899. Hooper argued the new local laird, who entertained the likes of Kipling and Tennyson there, ‘invented the story as a prank with the help of his literary friends.’

As to the perennial Holy Legend, referenced in the famous Blake verse, that Jesus himself visited Britain, there is a long-standing belief in a visit to Scotland. This goes back at least to William Comyns Beaumont (1873-1956), a Daily Mail staff writer. In books with titles like Britain, The Key To World History and After Atlantis: The Greatest Story Never Told, he argued that Jesus was born in Glastonbury, and lived in Somerset, Jerusalem being really Edinburgh etc. – all this being covered up by a gigantic conspiracy by the Romans, who had the Bible rewritten. Since then, others (like Barry Durnford) have concentrated more on folktales of Holy Visits by Jesus and/or Mary to the Hebrides (Iona etc.) This past year, Scottish scholar Dr Gordon Strachan did provide the research basis for a new documentary film on the legend, called [what else?] And Did Those Feet?, which debuted in late November at the British Film Institute. (No sign of it since.) This was based on Dr Strachan’s theories, which for anyone interested, are largely given in his book Jesus The Master Builder. (They’re mainly mathematical arguments based on the idea of cross-cultural commonalities found in ‘Pythagorean’ geometry, and gematria.) For details, see our earlier post prompted by the film’s press release, here.

Scotland’s claim to independence was built partly around Robert the Bruce’s 1314 victory at Bannockburn, with the date figuring on nationalist flags. One of the recurring motifs in recent years in regard to Scots independence is that Bannockburn, would not have been won if it were not for a handful of English Templars who had fled here from the purge of their order in France and England which the Scots king refused to take part in. (The last part is not true, as I’ve mentioned before.) This it-was-really-the-English-Templars-who-won-it claim returned in 2009 [Dec.], based on a ‘statistical’ analysis that a certain percent of Templars would’ve wound up here, and this total is then added to Bruce’s forces. An analysis by a Californian lawyer claimed to demonstrate that, as 335 Templars went missing in France, 29-48 logically would have fought alongside the Scots. It was endorsed by the "Grand Prior of the Scots" Templars, then denounced in the Times as "rubbish" insulting to Scots by British Templar historian Helen Nicholson, who teaches mediaeval warfare at Cardiff U. Inevitably, the claim turned out to be promoting a new book, The Knights Templar And Scotland, and the author a Knight Commander in a modern Scots Templar order. Coincidentally, Helen Nicholson published an article for BBC History Magazine earlier this year on the fate of the English Templars, which provided me with one new item of info on the Knight Templar I had researched as a case study (see England’s Last Templar): the knight in question had, with others, disappeared not to Scotland but to Ireland. (There’s probably another book in that.)

There were also press stories about the Templars owning mediaeval estates in lowland Scotland, east and west. I’m assuming here (this is not clearly spelt out in the coverage) that Scots post-1314 independence allowed survivors of the purge and their descendants there to openly profess Templar affiliation. Gravestones found [Oct.] under a gateway by a ruined medieval church in the village of Temple, Midlothian carried strange carvings called by the press 'Pac-Man' markings. As its name indicates, this was a Templar property (some say the Templars’ Scottish headquarters), seized in the purge. To the west, Kilwinning in Ayrshire was proposed [cf article by AJ Morton in Fortean Times Mr 2010] as an overlooked Templar centre, with dozens of identifiable properties around its ruined Abbey, plus another score nearby at Irvine. Some of these properties were owned by key individuals with titles like High Constable Of Scotland and Guardian of Scotland, and who apparently included both Wallace and Bruce. Over a century before England’s Grand Lodge was founded [1717], Kilwinning also became in 1599 the ‘mother lodge’ of Scottish Rite Freemasonry – the name Kilwinning Lodge being used in the USA, when Scottish Rite Freemasonry was exported to the Colonies. (Unlike the English variety, Scots Freemasonry was opposed to an Established i.e. state church like the Church Of England - a Scots Presbyterian idea that soon found its way into the US Constitution as the separation of church and state.)

In America, Dan Brown’s long-awaited Da Vinci Code followup finally appeared, years behind schedule. Originally announced as about the idea the US capitol was founded according to a secret Masonic masterplan, nonfiction guidebooks had already ‘outed’ some of this historical background, about which he had given pointed clues. (This was still better from Brown’s viewpoint than books attacking his bad research, as with TDVC, and would have helped him establish his background claims of “Fact.”) The appearance of his latest thriller [Sep.] provided the amusing highlight of the year, as well as the biggest mystery of the year. The amusing highlight was when he switched the title at the last possible moment, leaving all those who had already published books with titles like ‘The Guide To Dan Brown’s The Solomon Key’ racing to reissue their works as ‘The Guide To Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.’ There was also a seeming mystery behind the delay. TDVC’s cover had clues pointing to US Freemasonry as the basis of Brown’s next conspiracy thriller. Inevitably, stories soon went around the novel would attack the Masonic order the way TDVC had with secretive Roman Catholic orders. This would set up a revisionist take on US history, portraying Freemason George (‘I cannot tell a lie’) Washington as a traitor who left a deathbed-confession manuscript, buried with him by conspiring fellow Masons in a sealed coffin at Mount Vernon, to avoid scandal.

There was also speculation the novel would deal with the fact the founding-father Masons were not orthodox Christians but Deists – hence the symbol of the Egyptian pyramid with the all seeing eye put on the dollar bill etc. Freemasonry as 'a unique system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols' seemed a natural choice of topic for Brown. Scotland’s leading writer on matters Masonic [he is curator of the Grand Lodge of Scotland], Robert Cooper, said Brown’s title change was due to Cooper’s 2007 nonfiction book Cracking The Freemason's Code – The Truth About Solomon's Key, and while on a US lecture tour, he heard from ‘an inside source’ that Brown was using the tale about George Washington’s buried confessional manuscript as his plot hook.

However, when the novel appeared, all of this, which had been written up in advance in guidebooks by Dan Burstein and David A. Shugarts (whose books I have), was missing. No ‘ancient secrets rewriting western history’ were proferred: the plot was just another solve-the-puzzle-quick chase thriller, not based on any conspiracy theories. Brown did depict a few Masonic ‘bad apples,’ but gave out in PR releases how much he admired the order, and would even like to join himself [hint, hint], his book then being adopted as a recruiting tool by US lodges. One can only wonder if he decided he had had enough of controversy and threats in his life, and decided to play it safe from now on.
Of course, as usual, we’re unlikely to be able to establish the truth of the matter ….

Easter 09: Cannibal Druids, Templar Secrets, And ‘Jesus Was Here’

Easter is upon us once more. As I detailed last year ("Another Busy Post-Modern Easter"), nowadays this means speculative books and/or documentaries offering a revised version of Jesus's life and (this being the timely bit) death. The TV companies inevitably run a documentary in this strand over the Easter holidays, and book publishers' spring lists are now sure to include a controversial title attempting to rewrite the New Testament narrative. And if they're not ready, a pre-Easter press release is issued regardless.
For instance, we have a news story that a new academic text (Prof Rachel Elior's Memory And Oblivion: The Secret Of The Dead Sea Scrolls) shows that the Essenes sect, supposedly the first Christians, and authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, never existed – even though the book isn't even out yet. And there are also news stories, serving whatever end, on some long-running controversy. This year, it’s business as usual.

Thus, we had National Geographic announcing that the Druids practised human sacrifice – and cannibalism. In case you only remember National Geographic for those glossy full-colour travel magazines with the yellow trimming and earnest photo-essays on remote parts of the world, they now have their own TV channel where they run speculative documentaries. Their announcement is PR for a new NG documentary (with re-enactments), Secrets Of The Druids. The idea is that those Druids-burnt-people-in-giant-wicker-men stories were not just the Romans’ self-serving propaganda, there’s now archaeological evidence, in the form of the mummified ‘bog body’ known as Lindow Man, and some skeletons in a cave near Bristol. In fact Lindow Man was dug up out the peat in 1981, and Celtic scholar Dr Anne Ross wrote a book about him in 1991 (Life And Death Of A Druid Prince) theorizing (if memory serves) he was a Druid who agreed to be sacrificed to protect the land. (He died a ritual ‘threefold’ death, and mistletoe pollen was found in his stomach).
It turns out there’s a question mark after the ‘cannibalism’ part as there’s no real evidence in the mass-grave cave find at Alveston north of Bristol (again, this is nothing new, the find dating back to 2000). Burning people and animals in a giant wicker man as Caesar described doesn’t really work as a prelude to a cannibal feast, but there’s a break-mark on one of the cave bones indicating it could have been a ‘Druid’ drinking the bone marrow. The archaeologist cited here turns out to be Dr Mark Horton, and even he is reluctant to back the Druids-were-ritual-cannibals theory, saying perhaps someone was starving. (I say even he, as Dr Horton got his fingers burnt last year over claims he made as archeo advisor in the BBC Bonekickers TV-series fiasco which I’ve written of at length elsewhere.
Easter being a moveable feast, it can run close to St George’s Day (23rd April) if late, or April Fool’s Day if early, so in between you get a sort of press ‘silly season’ (i.e. the press print stories they otherwise wouldn’t). Last year Easter was relatively late, and our ‘Another Busy Post-Modern Easter’ item also covered items in the press inspired by St George’s Day. This year Easter is relatively early so it follows soon after April Fool’s Day, inspiring hoax news stories to do with sacred relics, so that genuine stories (which are normally high on the strangeness index anyway) get confused with April Fool’s hoaxes.
The Sun newspaper (if we can call it that) had one on a London digger-bulldozer driver finding the Staff Of Moses. (They didn’t bother trying to come up with how it came to be buried in east London, just invoked a few dodgy names like archaeologist Dr Henry Jones of Indiana.)
The Vatican, always under PR siege since Dan Brown cast them as the great villain of Christian history, is usually good for an Easter tie-in story. (The Vatican are currently mulling over some sanction against The Da Vinci Code followup film out soon, Angels & Demons.) This year they did not disappoint, though their genuine non-hoax story echoed an April Fool’s hoax story run several years ago. The first week of April, the Vatican’s own newspaper L'Osservatore Romano reported on where the Turin Shroud was held during its ‘missing years’: the Knights Templar had it. This was suspected at first being a hoax partly as it is a (sort-of) confirmation of the thesis in several books going back to 1978. (There’s even a book arguing the KTs actually created the Shroud relic, the image being that of their last grand master, Jacques de Molay – the image being a bit of post-modern irony on the part of KTs, as their master was sort-of crucified by the Church who – well, you get the idea.)
The report said one of their researchers had found clues in the Vatican Archive that the Shroud was taken away by the Templars so that the Cathars wouldn’t get it, as they would’ve destroyed it since they didn’t believe in a corporeal Jesus. (The Catholic Church destroyed the Cathars and their fellow Gnostics the Albigensians, a massive purge mentioned in most of the 'Holy Blood Holy Grail' books I’ve seen, as part of a grand papal conspiracy to suppress evidence of a Royal Bloodline etc. I think The Da Vinci Code also works it in somewhere.)
The Shroud in this new regard was also the controversial and mysterious sacred relic the Templars venerated, i.e. the bearded head they called Baphomet that they were accused at their 1307-10 purge of worshipping. (Earlier accounts have suggested the head was a relic of John The Baptist who lost his head to either Herod or Salome; or a way of worshipping Islam, with Baphomet a version of Mohamet.) The Vatican report said there was a reference to the KTs using the cloth image in a 1287 initiation. This has stirred up more controversy as a fragment of the border of the Shroud was carbon-dated only to the 14th C, leading to press reports it was a ‘mediaeval fake.’ Since then, others have said that the DNA test was of a patched section of the fire-damaged Shroud, and not valid at all. (The Daily Grail news-commentary website, which ran the Templars-had-the-Shroud story as an April Fool’s joke several years, now mentions there is other manuscript evidence for a pre-mediaeval Shroud. ‘A tenth century codex found in the Vatican Library, the Codex Vossianus Latinus quotes a man called Smera in Constantinople in the 8th century as saying that "King Abgar received a cloth on which one can see not only a face but the whole body."’
The Vatican's researcher was in fact mediaeval scholar Dr. Barbara Frale, who found the account, published last year, of the Pope’s post-1307 inquiry into the Templar accusations, known as the Chinon Parchment. (It was found in 2003 - again there was a time lag, presumably allowing for 5 years to study the document for its implications.) She said the Chinon Parchment trial-document research led her to the 1287 reference, and that the find vindicated the theory first proposed in 1978 that the KTs had the Shroud for a century or more. This theory was first argued in The Turin Shroud: The Burial Cloth Of Jesus Christ? , by Bristol-based iconoclastic revisionist historian Ian Wilson (not to be confused with AN Wilson, biographer of Jesus, St Paul etc) regarding ‘the mystery of the relic's missing years.’
Speaking of ‘missing years,’ there are a pair of new books just out dealing with the missing (i.e. Biblically undocumented) years of Jesus (ages 12-30). These represent one of the two opposing views – in one, he went East, and the other, he went West (we’ll get to that in a moment).
In terms of book coverage at least, the more established view is that he went East into Asia. The "Eastern thesis" has been the basis of ‘alternative-Christian-history’ books since the 1990s via the work by German religious author Holger Kersten. Kersten claimed Jesus had been schooled by Buddhist monks in non-violence and was influenced to change his teachings from Old Testament blood-n-thunder religion into the relatively more pacific New Testament one. It also claimed Jesus survived or escaped crucifixion, returning to live and die in India - where the book became a bestseller. (See The Original Jesus: The Buddhist Sources of Christianity? by Elmar R. Gruber & Holger Kersten,1995, and Kersten's 2001 Jesus Lived In India: His Unknown Life Before And After The Crucifixion? )

Kersten's Jesus Lived In India was based on a manuscript with the same title (Masih Hindustein Mein = Jesus In India) written in 1890 by a leading Urdu cleric who had collected documentation on the Indian sojourn of "Issa." Other, earlier books focus just on Jesus’s 17 ‘gap’ years being spent in the East, i.e. not the post-Crucifixion period which is too upsetting for some to consider (including Dan Brown, according to his testimony in the Holy Blood Holy Grail plagiarism case). One example of these is Elizabeth Clare Prophet's 1988 The Lost Years Of Jesus: Documentary Evidence Of Jesus' 17-Year Journey To The East.)
However it’s only now the Jesus-Went-East is about to go mainstream. As I remarked last time, Hollywood has developed a penchant for "Young [fill in famous name]" prequel-style stories, and about to hit the big screen is a "Young Jesus", or rather a "Young Jesus Heads East" story. The upcoming $20-million "fantasy action adventure" The Aquarian Gospel being shot using CGI (like the recent 300 and Beowulf) has JC heading east to acquire Oriental wisdom etc. (I expect the film PR will refer to JC as a"bodacious dude" on his way to fame and fortune after encounters with some wise heads in the East and perhaps with a few mind-expanding substances as well.) The film is officially based on an ancient Buddhist manuscript found in a Tibetan monastery over a century ago which became the basis for Nicholas Notovich's 1898 The Unknown Life Of Jesus Christ.
The tradition that Jesus came west as a youth was not been a serious rival to the Jesus-went-East theory as so far it has merely claimed Jesus was brought here to England on a one-off visit by his uncle Joseph of Arimatheia during a business trip to the Cornish tin mines. (It is of course inspiration for William Blake’s poem beginning "And did these feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green".) There is a range of West Country folk legends regarding this, but none as far as I know claim more than a boyhood visit.
Now however, two recent books have Jesus coming to SW England as more than a summer tourist. One has him spending his entire 17/18 year missing-years long period (ages 12-30) here, and the other has him escaping crucifixion to preach on here in exile as an inspirational leader, eventually inspiring what would become the core of the Arthurian legends. The latter work, Ralph Ellis’s King Jesus, From Kam (Egypt) To Camelot [pictured] has been out for a while without making much of a splash media-wise. (This is perhaps because the author has previously published a series of books on the X-was-really-Y thesis, e.g. Jesus was the grandson of Cleopatra.) I asked a colleague if he would like to review this one, while I ordered the other one, The Missing Years Of Jesus by Dennis Price. This is just out in time for Easter, already making a splash, and places Jesus in our backyard here in that part of Celtica now England’s West Country.
A key element of this story turns out to be Stonehenge, which often gets Easter news stories linked to it (modern Druids etc), no doubt as Easter itself is a compromise (the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox), where an ancient luni-solar ‘pagan’ calendar celebration is glossed over by the later Christian celebrations. This new book initially stirred up a fuss pre-publication, with a Church Of England representative backing out of a BBC interview which was then cancelled. The now-published book however has generally been receiving a favourable reaction. I’ve read it, and have a number of issues with its approach, but to do it justice, will cover this as a separate blog item, which I’ll post over the Easter weekend.

Another Busy Post-Modern Easter Season

The period from Easter to St George's Day in late April is a sort of “silly season” for press stories covering our subject area. Silly season is what the press call it when “serious” (meaning political) news is lacking, so they look to “offbeat” stories that tie in with the Easter period. In the past I’ve wrongly suspected some were April Fool jokes, but they are all contrived by book publishers or newspaper editors, and behind them are some serious issues.
As usual, we got a “Church-of-England-bans-singing-of-‘Jerusalem’ ” story. This is an annual event where a Church Of England authority bans the singing of ‘Jerusalem’ as insufficiently religious /pious/ orthodox, and/or too nationalistic/ militaristic. This is then followed by national press coverage about “out of touch” CoE officials, with comments like “no wonder nobody goes to church anymore”, “The Church of England should be renamed the Church against England,” and so on. This year it was the turn of Southwark Cathedral in London, the Dean saying the lyrics (a Blake poem) fail to sufficiently glorify God. (Southwark is where the Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims set out from, and is near where Blake lived – one theory is that the poem’s “dark satanic mills” were here.) This year ‘Jerusalem’ was named as the Prime Minister’s favourite hymn, and made it into the top-20 list of Britain's favourite hymns selected by viewers on BBC's Songs Of Praise. CoE officials have also banned another song on this list, I Vow To Thee My Country (set to a melody from Holst’s “Jupiter”), as a "dangerous example of rising English nationalism" (like flying the Cross of St George, patron saint of England, whose day April 23rd brings out more such stories. (For example, that St George wasn’t really English, but Turkish or Palestinian, his legend brought back by Crusaders for its symbolism.)
Predictably, Easter also brought the usual batch of publicity claims for upcoming books and documentaries. To be newsworthy these must be in some way revisionist, and the standard approach now with ‘biblical’ works is to return to original manuscript sources and start afresh with a humanist interpretation. This is the approach of two new biographies of Jesus (reviewed by one paper under the headline, “It's Easter, Time To Rev Up The Revisionism”). How Jesus Became Christian by Barrie Wilson and The Jesus Sayings by Rex Weyler go back to newly translated versions of the gospels and apocrypha, distinguishing their original Jewish Messianic message from the “Christianity” of the later Church of Rome founder St Paul. This revisionist argument is that it was not so much Judas who betrayed Jesus as the later Pauline Church (a motif echoed in The Da Vinci Code), whose doctrines, in a grim irony, paved the way for Christian anti-Semitism.
A counter-development here is the attack on this ‘historical Jesus’ school which has attempted to reconcile the traditional opposing viewpoints of Gospel literalism and more modern scepticism by reinterpreting the ancient manuscripts. Such “historical Jesus” books were the specialty of Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Prof. Geza Vermes. On the occasion of the Penguin paperback issue in March of Vermes’s The Resurrection, the whole approach was attacked by critic A.N. Wilson in the Telegraph. Wilson said he was now ashamed of his own Jesus: A Biography, written under Vermes’s influence, claiming the quest for the historical Jesus, into which so much effort has been placed in recent years, was “a wild goose chase.” “I was seduced by his book Jesus The Jew (1973) and by the charm of Vermes himself, but now I am ashamed of the book about Jesus which I wrote when under the influence…. Vermes’ Jesus The Jew came out only a few years before Monty Python's Life Of Brian, to which it bears a strong resemblance.”
Also in the news over plans for a revisionist-humanist biography of Jesus was Dutch film-maker Paul Verhoeven, who last year claimed Judas had been framed [see earlier blog item]. Now he is publishing a biography of Jesus in which he claims “that far from being the son of God, Christ was probably fathered by a Roman soldier who raped Mary during an uprising in Galilee,” the book being to help finance Verhoeven’s life-long ambition of a similar revisionist film biopic.
Channel 4, Britain’s “independent” TV channel, can always be counted on for a revisionist Easter-time documentary. This year it was The Secrets Of The Twelve Disciples, summarised by the press headline “St Peter Was Not The First Pope And Never Went To Rome, Claims Channel 4”.
BBC’s Easter documentary concerned new tests on the Shroud of Turin. The Oxford lab who carbon-dated it 20 years ago as mediaeval (and thus a fake) has conceded, due to testing a contaminated border area sewn on later, the test result may be wrong by up to 15 centuries.
The BBC also announced a series of 6 one-hour ‘big-budget Biblical dramas’ using a mix of live action and CGI FX for broadcast next year.
The Shroud of course was supposedly brought back by Crusaders, perhaps Templars. On the Templar front, I’ve been receiving a series of lengthy, cryptic news-release emails from Classic Media Group, headed “The Quest Continues” and promising more revelations about the English Templars and places like Royston Cave as their secret hideaways. These are to be found in a series of high-tech DVDs being released monthly, with further info on their website.
NBC announced production of a 4-hour miniseries called The Last Templar, which sounded interesting (we had a blog feature with a similar title) until I read the synopsis. (I won’t bore you with it - think Time Bandits meets The Da Vinci Code.)
The “mystery of the Copper Scroll” has also been in the news, though it’s not yet clear whether this is just an Easter rerun of the story, or paving the way for fresh revelations, or at least a new book or documentary. (Joel Rosenberg’s novel The Copper Scroll became a bestseller last April, and earlier nonfiction studies by Robert Feather have now been reprinted, arguing the Scroll is “the Essene record of the Treasure of Akhenaten.”) The Copper Scroll is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1952, made of copper to last longer, describing the location of Jewish Temple treasure hidden all around Israel from the invading Romans in 70 AD. The Coliseum was built with the parts of the treasure that were found, but not the “Key Scroll” which may point to the location of an older treasure - the lost Ark of the Covenant. (The Copper Scroll is written in a Hebrew 8 centuries older.)
The legal dispute over the “James Ossuary,” the limestone box allegedly holding the bones of Jesus's brother, is still rumbling on over 5 years later. It has an inscription saying "James son of Joseph, brother of Yehoshuah [Jesus]," but some scholars say the latter phrase looks added later.
A pair of Italian authors claimed Vatican pressure prevented a reprint of their 2002 revisionist history novel Imprimatur after when the first edition sold out. They said this was because they had discovered “secret documents that suggest that Pope Innocent XI had funded William of Orange, a Protestant hero” in his opposing the Catholic occupation of Holland and then his invasion to depose England’s new pro-Catholic king James in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. Authors Francesco Sorti and Rita Monaldi Sorti said this was an embarrassment to the Vatican in 2002 as it was then arranging for Innocent XI to be declared a saint. Mondadori, who published The Da Vinci Code in Italian, denied this, and the Vatican said they ought to be happy their novel sold 15,000 copies. The husband and wife team moved to Vienna following threats.
On the Da Vinci Code front, the season came and went without further news of the long-awaited Da Vinci Code sequel novel The Solomon Key, author Dan Brown having missed his deadlines. In the meantime, Mr Justice Peter Smith, the judge who threw out the 2 Holy Blood Holy Grail co-authors’ claim against The Da Vinci Code [see earlier blog items] while inserting his own “Smithy Code” in his published judgement has been reprimanded for displaying a partisan approach in another case.
British painter turned formalist filmmaker Peter Greenaway has created a 'Cinerama' style multimedia light-show presentation of Christ’s life and work around Da Vinci's The Last Supper, in situ in its Milan church, to deconstruct and demonstrate the artistic process. Greenaway is planning on “animating” other paintings in situ thus, including (to the horror of some) Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel.
Re Leonardo Da Vinci himself, it was claimed he was part-Arab and his mother was a slave girl brought from the Middle East, this being a followup to a forensic study last year of his fingerprint, whose pattern suggested Arab descent.
Getting back more directly to reconsidering Celtic manuscript sources, Arthurian studies saw a major new work, Concepts Of Arthur: Early Arthurian Tradition And The Origins of the Legend [Tempus] by Thomas Green, a post-grad researcher at Oxford’s Exeter College, who suggests the historic legendary Arthur grew in the shadow of an older mythic figure. (It’s a weighty study costing £15 – as I found out when I picked it up in Bookends.)
A new Arthurian TV drama was announced by the BBC. Merlin is to be a 13-part fantasy drama series for the autumn, a prequel featuring a young Merlin and a young Arthur in competition for hearts and minds.
London’s Tate Gallery has also unveiled a mammoth Arthurian oil painting never before exhibited. The 21-foot wide “Sleep Of King Arthur In Avalon” took the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painter Edward Burne-Jones 17 years. The PRB group were preoccupied with Arthurian-Grail tableaux, and in fact EBJ died still working on it in 1898, it being an allegorical tribute to his late friend and colleague, PRB renaissance man William Morris. A new biography of EBJ by Fiona MacCarthy says the painting was also “a lamentation for a nation he found increasingly jingoistic.” This is contrary to the usual view of such late Victorian works as patriotic and imperialistic. (If you ever do the tour of the Palace of Westminster, alias London’s Parliament Buildings, you can see similar giant paintings of Arthurian and Biblical scenes in the Queen’s ceremonial Robing Room.)
Throughout April and May, BBC’s digital channel BBC4 has been running a massive “Mediaeval Season.” As well as reruns of feature films like Becket, this consists of documentaries presented by Michael Wood and others - In Search Of Medieval Britain, Sacred Music, Inside The Medieval Mind, etc. Besides offering documentary glimpses of various mediaeval manuscripts, for antique map lovers, one programme followed the 14th-century Gough Map. This hand-coloured large-scale map is the oldest “proper” map of Britain, its info dating back to around 1280, and is the subject of several books, most recently The Gough Map: The Earliest Road Map of Britain?, published by Oxford’s Bodleian Library.
And anyone wanting to view what a 16th Century Welsh chronicle looked like can see it online, in the form of a history of England and Wales left by Tudor soldier turned civil servant Elis Gruffudd, ‘The soldier of Calais’. The National Library of Wales has put most of the manuscript’s 688 folios, bound in leather-covered oak boards, on display on their website.
There was also a self-proclaimed “breakthrough” dig at Stonehenge, the first excavation for forty years, which may evidence an ancient description. But the relevance of this is too difficult to summarise briefly here, the same being true of two reconstruction voyages using replica Phoenician galleys, and a claim about the first circumnavigation of Britain based on the lost codex of Pytheas. We’ll cover these in detail as soon as circumstances permit.

Why Early Books Wear So Well

We sometimes speak of someone or something’s humble origins, which on reflection is a snobbish and near-meaningless phrase. Nevertheless it now seems apt to speak of the humble origins of the book, and of reading itself, in the light of a recent academic paper.
The Institute for Medieval Studies, based at the University of Leeds, held its 15th International Medieval Congress this month (July). The IMC is billed as the largest conference of its kind in Europe, and one of the papers presented was by a prof from Utrecht U. This made the newspapers in a few places like The Guardian, which ran an article titled ‘How Discarded Pants Helped To Boost Literacy’. It said - and I’ll quote, lest you think I’m making this up as a joke - “Rags from discarded pants and knickers led to a 13th century breakthrough in the making of cheap paper.” (For the benefit of any Americans reading this, ‘pants’ in British parlance always means underpants, not trousers as in US usage, and knickers - short for knickerbockers - are the British female equivalent of the US ‘panties’.) Apparently people started wearing underwear more in the 13th C. The professor’s thesis is that people adopted underwear as “peasants developed into tradesmen and found themselves running shops with customers of the opposite sex.” Before this, men would supposedly, to use the modern laddish phrase, “go commando” i.e. go without underpants. My Dictionary Of British Social History says this is not true: the Saxons wore breeches called braies under their tunics.
I myself would advance an alternative reason for adopting purpose-made underwear: the climate downturn in Europe, the 13th C. being the start of what historians call the Little Ice Age. Glass windows would be a similar innovation inspired by the declining climate. And as you can see in many a film and TV drama, old-fashioned drawers for both men and women typically reached down to the knees for warmth. In western films in fact, where the characters are sleeping rough on the prairie, we often see them in one-piece red-woollen outfits that cover the body from neck to ankle. These outfits are still sold today in camping shops, usually under the heading of thermal underwear, the American term for full-length drawers being long johns.
Dr. Mostert argues the manufacture of rags or cloth offcuts, the start of what they called in England “the rag trade”, led to a spinoff industry, the production of a crude form of paper from recycled underwear (“the papermakers found themselves with all the old pants”). This offered a cheaper alternative to vellum parchment made by scraping the wool from sheep hides. I remember hearing, at a literary talk, the late travel writer Eric Newby use the phrase “the rag trade” when discussing his early career in what Americans would call the garment industry. I hadn’t realised it was a literal description of the industry’s origins, though when I was growing up, there were still what they called “rag’n bone” merchants who went around on a horse and cart, trading trinkets for unwanted household items (TV’s Steptoe & Son being examples of this).
I’m not sure I buy the idea paper was mainly made from recycled underpants. Presumably these were taken from corpses where family members did not inherit them, for one would have needed to keep one’s underwear throughout one’s life, and I doubt most people had the money to be buying new replacements. (‘One on, one in the wash, one ready to go’ was the old adage defining a complete wardrobe-set for a given item – shirts, shorts, whatever.) The wealthy of course were soon wearing silk and other fine fabrics as the Crusades opened up the trade routes to the East. The Crusades are credited with introducing the idea of using linen or cotton paper, when the knights and clerics saw Arab scholars using it. I imagine also that one pilgrimage to the Holy Lands wearing heavy woollen underwear would have been enough to inspire the switch to lighter underwear as well.
There may also have been a more direct connection between underwear and manuscript creation, where the items did double duty rather than being recycled. When I was researching my “on the trail of England's last Templar” feature, I came across a reference in Helen Nicholson’s 2001 history of the Templars to a possibly related incident. The wife of the owner of a castle where some Templars were staying testified at the Templar trials that she found, in the garderobe (what passed for a toilet in those days), a pair of lambskin underpants with some writing on them. Among the inner order, this could have been a way of transporting secret message texts while on Crusade etc. Classical writers tell us that such messages were sometime sent inscribed on the scalps of slaves, who were head-shaved to reveal the message, so it’s possible this was a less elaborate alternative – though rather desperate due to the hygiene aspect. (Templars, as part of their strict regime, were not allowed to remove their underwear completely, and to sleep partly dressed, to discourage homosexuality.)
Prof. Mostert has the invention of printing by Caxton contingent on a supply of cheap paper made from recycled underwear and associated rags. This sounds to me more a way to spread contagion rather than literacy. (Underpants belonging to plague victims, anyone?) When word got out what these early books were made of, the upper class who were the intended market for manuscripts would have likely refused to go near them. To use the standard English nanny’s don’t-touch idiom re items that may be germ-ridden, “After all, dear, you don’t know where it’s been.”
I think it would have been more practical to have produced paper direct from the original spun cloth – an ancient trade in Flanders, imported into England by Flemish, and later Huguenot, weavers fleeing persecution. Paper manufacture at source would have nearly three centuries to develop between the dates the Professor gives, 1200 (as start of the underpants-wearing trend) and 1476 (when Caxton introduced printing). For those reading this who think books and newspapers are printed from tracts of felled Amazon rainforest (as in the phrase “the dead tree industry”), this is not at all practical. Such hardwood trees are no good to make paper from, and although softwood wood-pulp (from Forestry Commission plantations etc) is used for today’s cheap newsprint-type papers, early printed books had more cloth in them. (When I worked in publishing, the trade announcements referred to a hardcover book as in ‘cloth binding.’) This linen paper is more durable than modern wood-pulp newsprint-style paper, and doesn’t turn yellow so quickly, and thus can be recycled into later books.
Still, in the centuries before printed books, we had what we call codexes or codices, meaning bound-manuscript books where the text (Arthurian romances etc) was inscribed by hand (hence manu-script), by clerics skilled in calligraphy. It’s more likely these codexes were made from recycled cotton and linen rags than later printed books, when the printing-paper industry was more established. There’s a line in the 1973 film of The Three Musketeers, scripted by the Scots novelist of the Flashman series, George Macdonald Fraser, where the Duke of Buckingham sees some barefoot washerwomen at work the way you trample grapes to make wine, and remarks in future he will wear his shirts with renewed respect. I think in future I will do the same when picking up one of my old clothbound storybooks.