Gnostic Genesis

In 312 CE, while locked in a desperate struggle for control of the Roman Empire, Constantine I is said by such chroniclers as Lactantius and Eusebius of Caesarea to have had a vision sent to him by the god of the Christians, a sect that had lately been persecuted in the eastern regions of the empire. According to the legend, Constantine placed the sign of their god on his soldiers’ shields--the chi-ro, being the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek. After going on to victory at the battle of Milvian Bridge and consolidating his power as the sole emperor, Constantine converted to Christianity, and he involved himself a great deal in the affairs of his new church. In 325 CE, it was Constantine who organized the first Ecumenical Council at Nicaea, in what is modern day Turkey, bringing together bishops from across the world to address controversies in Christian doctrine and reach a consensus. While variant forms of Christianity had for years been debated and denounced as heresy, this council marks the beginning of an official process of canonization, settling once and for all the contours of orthodox Christian belief. The process would not conclude for quite some time. The best milestone we have for the final settling of canon comes in 367 CE when the bishop Athanasius of Alexandria dispatched his customary Festal letter to establish the date of Easter and decided to throw in a list of which books were to be accepted as true Scripture, a list that reflects the canonical New Testament as the church accepts it today. But what were the so-called heretical beliefs that church fathers suppressed? What stories did these banned books of the bible have to tell? And did they have any better claim to inclusion in the Scriptures than those that remain?

In this installment, we focus on the Christian apocrypha of Gnosticism, since Gnostic thought is of such importance to so many topics I’ve covered. Notions regarding Gnostic heresy came up in my very first Halloween Special, the Specter of Devil Worship, and again just recently in my patron exclusive episode on the accusations made against the Knights Templar. Indeed, we will certainly see it come up again in future entries of my Encyclopedia Grimoria on the history of magic. But there are many traditions and doctrines to choose from when considering the apocrypha, for early Christianity was exceedingly diverse. There were the Ebionites, whose name is a mystery in that they may have been named after a person or after the Hebrew word for “poor.” These were Jews who accepted Christ as the messiah, but only as their savior, arguing that one needed to be Jewish to be saved by him. Then there were the Marcionites, who were certainly named after their founder, a second century teacher who conversely taught that true Christians must reject all things Jewish, even going so far as to suggest that the God of the New Testament was a different deity, come to undo the cruelties perpetrated by the God of the Jews. Then there was Arianism, a heresy that led directly to the convening of the Council of Nicaea. Arianists followed the teachings of Arius of Alexandria, who denied that Christ was one and the same as God but was rather one of God’s creations, in opposition to the Homoousian concept that the Son and the Father were the “same in essence” and the docetic doctrine that Christ’s physical human body was merely an illusion.  Nor was this diversity of conflicting doctrines peculiar to Christianity. Judaism had its own centuries-long process of doctrinal dispute and settling of canon and therefore has its own apocrypha as well. During their periods of domination under the Persians and then the Hellenistic Kingdoms and under Roman rule and across the Diaspora, different forms and sects of Judaism gradually developed, some with their own texts that came to be considered apocryphal, with specific movements in the Second Temple period being the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Pharisees, the latter being the group whose beliefs eventually became the basis of mainstream, Rabbinic Judaism. However, in and among many of these sects and doctrines, Jewish and Christian alike, can be discerned strains of that belief system Gnosticism, which might be depicted as an alternate interpretation of established doctrines, as a sort of philosophy intertwined with religion, as a mythical expansion of theological concepts, complete with its own creation myth and detailed cosmogony, or, as it is usually characterized, as heresy.

The Council of Nicaea, via Wikimedia Commons

At this point, it becomes necessary to clarify some terminology. In these sessions, we may often throw around terms such as heresy, orthodoxy, canon, pseudepigrapha, and of course, apocrypha. It is essential that these labels not be misunderstood, so we shall begin with the term canon. The word “canon” derives from a Greek word having to do with measurement, literally a rod or straight edge used to measure, but in its religious and literary sense, it came to be associated with some standard, specifically in regard to the judgment of texts. Thus if something is “in the canon” or “canonized,” it means that it has been deemed to conform to certain norms or to meet some discerning standards. This term is necessarily used in conjunction with the term “orthodox,” which comes from the combination of the Greek orthos, meaning true or correct, and doxy, opinion or belief, thus literally “correct belief.” Texts deemed worthy of canonization are those that espouse beliefs that are “correct,” and here we see the subjectivity of this notion, for what measuring rod could possibly be used to determine which beliefs are correct in matters of faith? Who can be so discerning as to decide which ideas are orthodox, or right, which simply heterodox, or different, and which heretical? The term heresy itself is harder to pin down. It appears to derive from the Greek word for choice, indicating some purposeful decision to believe wrong things, but of course, those deemed heretics never really think that what they believe is wrong, so it is only a label placed on minority beliefs, i.e. any beliefs that deviate from consensus or the norm. Some of these divergent beliefs are associated with specific apocryphal texts, as we shall see, but the term “apocrypha” does not necessarily denote heresy. The word is derived from the Greek apokryphos, meaning hidden or obscured, and thus secret, but this term doesn’t really apply to many so-called apocryphal texts, which were never significantly suppressed. Indeed some apocrypha have even been accepted as “deuterocanonical,” meaning they are part of a second canon. Thus, for some, the secret or hidden element of the term refers to works written by an author whose identity is unknown, but as mentioned in my episode on Zoroaster, there is another term for these, “pseudepigrapha,” and this definition of apocrypha doesn’t work in all cases either, for there are numerous canonical books of the Bible that scholars argue were not written by the people by whom they claim to have been authored, such as 1 and 2 Timothy, 2 Peter, and Titus, and there are still others whose authorship remains a mystery. I discussed one example of this in my episode on the authorship of the Gospel of John and the identity of the Beloved Disciple. What exactly does it mean to refer to a text as an apocryphon? Only that the work is considered non-canonical, with at least some implication that it contains false teachings or doubtful claims about the past. But this too cannot be considered a standard evaluation, as there are different canons, among different religions and sects, some of which include works excluded by others. 

Essentially any Christian canon, however, would certainly exclude works espousing apparent Gnostic doctrine, for it was long viewed as an insidious heresy, prompting the church to undertake extensive efforts to root it out, which meant destroying the books that promoted it. Unlike other heretical sects, Gnosticism appears to have grown within more orthodox communities of believers, shared by one initiate with another like a kind of secret society in the heart of traditional Christianity. Gnostic beliefs emphasize the special power of knowledge, or gnosis, hence the name given to them, and when one became initiated into Gnostic circles, they imparted some rather complicated and astounding ideas that must have seemed like a true revelation about the spiritual world. It seems very much like Masonic initiation that way, a secret society that promises “more light” with each further step into their mysteries. And also like Freemasonry, for a long time we didn’t have much in the way of concrete knowledge regarding what they believed. Everything we had received was from writings denouncing them as heretics and criticizing their doctrines as false, for the Gnostic texts themselves had disappeared due to efforts at stamping out this heresy. That all changed in 1945, though, when only a year and a half prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls’ discovery, one Mohammed Ali, leader of a group of bedouin fieldhands, discovered a human skeleton and a large earthenware jar while digging for fertilizer along the Nile. Ali and his men did not want to open the sealed jar at first, fearing that it contained a jinn, or evil spirit, but their curiosity, which tantalized them with dreams of treasure, eventually got the better of them. Opening it, they discovered a trove of leatherbound volume that has come to be known as the Nag Hammadi library, after the town nearest its discovery. Ali tried to divide the books like treasure among the group, even tearing some of them to more evenly distribute them, but since his men refused to take them, he kept them all himself and carried them home. Still with only an inkling that they might be worth money, he left the priceless artifacts in an animal pen, except the pages that he allowed his mother to burn as kindling. The ancient codices would not come into the hands of someone who truly knew their worth until a month later, when after brutally murdering a man he believed had previously killed his own father, Ali gave them to a priest to prevent them from being seized by authorities when they inevitably searched his home. The priest’s brother-in-law, a History teacher in local parochial schools, took a volume to Cairo to sell it, and because of this, the find eventually came to the attention of the Coptic Museum there, and because of subsequent study and translation, we have numerous Gnostic treatises that had not been previously known to exist.

One Gnostic codex found at Nag Hammadi (The Apocryphon of John), via Wikimedia Commons

The codices contained in the Nag Hammadi library have been dated to around 348 CE, which goes a long way toward explaining why they were buried in the first place. Recall that the letter of Athanasius establishing canon was sent about twenty years after that. It has been suggested, then, that monks at a nearby monastery in Nag Hammadi, after having been told not to use these Gnostic texts, chose to bury them, perhaps because they valued their teachings too much to simply burn them and wanted to preserve them for posterity. However, the presence of a skeleton beside them does raise the further question of whether they had been deposited as part of some common burial ceremony, perhaps laid to rest with some Gnostic believer because he treasured them, or perhaps even tossed like so much garbage into the grave of a heretic who had been put to death. This we will never know. The 4th century CE date of the codices also cannot tell us anything about the origins of the Gnostic beliefs forever preserved inside, for just because the books were made after 348 CE does not mean the texts it contains are only that old. Indeed, aside from the Gnostic works, there were others present in the jar that are known to have been written far earlier, such as Plato’s Republic, which was composed sometime in the 4th century BCE. So when did Gnostic thought first show up? Orthodox Christians through the centuries, especially heresiologists, have suggested that it, along with all Christian heresies, originated with one very famous heretic: Simon Magus. In the Book of Acts, a magus, meaning a sorceror, is said to have dwelled in Samaria, deceiving people through his dark arts into believing he was divine. Seeing the miracles of the Apostles, he attempted to bribe them, that he might have their power, but was chastised. Outside of this canonical account, the story of Simon Magus was further fleshed out by early Christian writers Justin Martyr, who suggested that Simon Magus continued in his ways, passing himself off as God through his displays of magic, and Irenaeus, who explicitly claimed that Simon Magus originated Gnosticism with the claims that he was a the divine bringer of the secret knowledge needed for salvation, and that he had brought with him to the earthly realm the “Primal Thought,” an essence of the true God personified in a woman named Helen, whom Irenaeus explained was merely a prostitute that Simon Magus traveled with. This is really the only narrative explanation for the origin of Gnosticism, and it is itself entirely apocryphal. 

In order to comprehend some of the claims attributed to Simon Magus as well as to reach some further understanding of Gnosticism’s origins, we must examine its central tenets. The knowledge revealed to Gnostic initiates appears to have come in the form of an alternate cosmogony that can be summarized as follows. Gnostic texts describe, or rather fail to describe, the one true eternal deity, who is ineffable, indescribable, incomprehensible. From this original god, sometimes called the Monad in correspondence with Pythagorean philosophical notions, there generated divine essences, called Aeons. Here again the influence of Greek philosophy can be discerned, for the concept appears to be that the one god could not be the only thing in existence, since as this god pondered, its thought also existed and so became a thing unto itself, and since this god lived, its life existed, etc. So the Aeons were emanations of the one ineffable god. Different systems of Gnostic thought had it that these Aeons combined in male and female pairs thereafter generating their own emanations, all of which coexisted in the divine realm called the Pleroma, or the Fullness. Eventually one of these later generation Aeons, called Sophia, or Wisdom, created an emanation without her male counterpart--a kind of virgin birth. This offspring was aberrant and imperfect, prompting Sophia to hide it from the other Aeons in a lower plane of existence. It is this being, whom she named Yaldabaoth, that would become the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible, his name very similar to Yahweh, Lord of Sabbaths. Thus according to Gnostic teaching, this abortive spirit Yaldabaoth creates evil emanations of his own, demonic forces called Archons or Rulers, and thereafter, creates the material world. As the creator, he is sometimes called the Demiurge, again showing some crossover with Greek philosophy and cosmogony, which in some schools of thought conceived of an artisan deity who was separate from God proper and responsible for crafting the physical universe. More importantly, though, in explaining why Gnosticism was considered heretical, it asserted that the God of the Old Testament was in fact not the one true God but rather a lesser being.

A diagram of Aeons in the Pleroma, via Wikimedia Commons

Indeed, a retelling of the story of Genesis laid out in two texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, The Hypostasis of the Archons and an untitled treatise commonly referred to as On the Origin of the World, make it clear that Yaldabaoth was not just a lesser deity. Rather, he was like a reckless and jealous child, and along with his demonic emanations, the Archons, was the source of all evil. Having glimpsed the one true God, Yaldabaoth creates the first man, Adam, in his image, but he is a mere lifeless model. Sophia sends her daughter Zoe to breathe a spark of divinity into him. Zoe is also called Eve, thus the Eve of Gnostic mythology is herself divine. The Archons, furious that Eve has made mankind superior to them, plan to rape her, but Eve disappears into the tree in the Garden of Eden, leaving only a likeness of herself behind with Adam. Eve entering and dwelling in the Tree of Knowledge identifies her with the serpent of the Garden of Eden myth. This may sound misogynistic, taking the orthodox view that Eve corrupted Adam to a further extreme, but in the Gnostic story of Genesis, the serpent is wise above all creatures and the knowledge it imparts is not evil. Indeed, elsewhere in these Gnostic texts it is stated that Sophia herself became the Serpent and entered the garden so that she could instruct Adam and Eve. Therefore the dialogue that appears in canonical Genesis to be an insidious manipulation of the first man and woman into disobeying their Creator in Gnostic mythology becomes the heroic act of Sophia in awakening Adam and Eve to the truth that their Creator may not know what is best for them and may even be keeping the truth from them. Here we see the central tenet of Gnosticism writ large: mankind’s ascendance beyond the material plane and out of the power of the evil Archons that trouble us and the foolish god that created us requires knowledge. Gnosticism suggests that we have divinity within us and need only the knowledge, or gnosis, of our divinity to save us. 

Now the purpose of Gnostic theology can be discerned, even if its point of origin cannot. All of Gnosticism, though taking Judaism as its premise, rejects Judaic doctrines, inverting them. Why is that? What would prompt this simultaneous acceptance and repudiation? It can be seen as a natural progression, the next step in the evolution of a worldview. As my principal source, Lost Christianities by Bart Ehrman points out, Judeo-Christian religion has always been a response to the suffering of mankind, a way to explain why it happens and how we might overcome it. From the beginning, in the Exodus narrative, it is clear that the Israelites were chosen by God and that God would intervene when they needed His help most, even parting the seas for them if need be. The problem, then, was to explain why God did not intervene at other times to prevent their suffering. Originally, Judaic thought held that they suffered as a direct result of their sin. Of course God did not intervene to reduce their suffering then, for it was His punishment meted out from on high. This explanation worked, until the people were doing God’s will, keeping his commandments, and still suffering. To account for this, another power was needed, a source of evil that could be blamed for the bad that happened. Enter, the Devil. This figure is not present throughout all the Hebrew scriptures, contrary to popular belief, but rather appears to have developed as a revisionist doctrine, explicated most clearly in Job, as a way to explain the suffering mankind endures. By this view, God created the world and might intervene, but his adversary was free to trouble us during our time here, and God might or might not intervene, whether because of our sin, or because of a desire to test our faith, or because of more mysterious reasons. However, this view, further developed by prophets and by Christ himself, presented an apocalyptic conclusion, assuring that while this may be the case presently, it would, before long, reach its conclusion when God redeemed the world. Bart Ehrman in Lost Christianities suggests that, when the end did not come, when this imminent conclusion to their earthly suffering never arrived, some sought yet another explanation. Thus Gnosticism focuses on the material world that Yaldabaoth created and trapped mankind in as the true cause of suffering. Living in these physical bodies, in this physical existence that Gnostics called “the chaos,” is suffering, and our creator, the god of the Old Testament, does not intervene because he is the author of our suffering, who keeps us “imprisoned in that dwelling place of endless calamities.” Rather than seeking some reprieve from suffering, the Gnostics found a way to accept it as the status quo. 

The Devil bargains with God over Job's faith in Duomo, by Bartolo di Fredi, photo by Livio Andronico, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license

While this may sound bleak, it must be remembered that the Gnostics too kept a view to a better existence in the divine realm, among Aeons in the Pleroma, at the forefront of their minds. Only they, who held the gnosis, or knowledge, of their true state would ascend, making this existence little more than a waiting period they had to suffer through before their ascent. The Gnostic view of the material world as evil and their human bodies as corrupted vessels good only for suffering led to much of the criticism leveled at them. It was claimed that, because they felt only knowledge was important, it did not matter what they did with their evil fleshly bodies, and so they engaged in lascivious orgies. We see similar allegations all the way into the Middle Ages, during the persecution of neo-Gnostic sects like the Bogomils and the Cathars. However, most evidence indicates the opposite, that Gnostics, believing their physical bodies to be corrupt and evil as part of the physical world, were fundamentally ascetic, denying themselves the pleasures of the world and the flesh. But the orthodox never let a little thing like accuracy get in the way of stamping out points of view that disagree with theirs. Think, for example, of the most famous proponent of heterodox beliefs: Jesus Christ. In his time, the Pharisees were the keepers of orthodoxy, and they viewed his teachings as not just different, but dangerous, even heretical. For his part, Christ suggested that these keepers of orthodoxy belonged to the devil, calling them a “brood of vipers.” Yet today, the teachings of Christ are orthodox for Christians and those of the Gnostics are dismissed as heresy. It makes one wonder how things might have changed, and how organized religion would look today, if another version of Christianity had won out and been accepted as canon, and another version of Christ, who in some apocryphal gospels espouses decidedly Gnostic teachings, had been passed down to future generations.  

Further Reading

De Lange, Nicholas. Apocrypha: Jewish Literature of the Hellenistic Age. Viking, 1978.

De Silva, David. Introducing the Apocrypha: Message Context, and Significance. Baker Academic, 2003.

Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Glazer, Brian. “The Goddess with a Fiery Breath: The Egyptian Derivation of a Gnostic Mythologoumenon.” Novum Testamentum, vol. 33, no. 1, 1991, pp. 92–94. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1561200. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

Layton, Bentley. “The Hypostasis of the Archons, or ‘The Reality of the Rulers.’” The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 67, no. 4, 1974, pp. 351–425. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1509048. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

Lewis, Nicola Denzey, and Justine Ariel Blount. “Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices.” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 133, no. 2, 2014, pp. 399–419. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.15699/jbibllite.133.2.399. Accessed 4 Mar. 2020.

Sumney, Jerry L. “The Letter of Eugnostos and the Origins of Gnosticism.” Novum Testamentum, vol. 31, no. 2, 1989, pp. 172–181. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1560701. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

Zoroaster, the First Magus

Circa 77 CE, the great natural philosopher Pliny the Elder published the first 10 volumes of his encyclopedic masterwork, Naturalis Historia, or Natural History, a work with a scope no less grand than that of all Creation, to record all knowledge of everything. In it, between lengthy treatises on all known arts and technology, he writes witheringly of “the most deceptive of all known arts, [which] has exercised the greatest influence in every country and in nearly every age.” This sinister practice he calls “the magic art,” and he goes on to reveal “when and where the art of magic originated [and] by what persons it was first practised.” According to this renowned encyclopedist, “There is no doubt that this art originated in Persia, under Zoroaster, this being a point upon which authors are generally agreed.” But who was this Zoroaster, or Zarathustra as the Persians called him? A simple wise man as Friedrich Nietschze would eventually characterize him? A holy man who brought the true god’s faith to humanity, as Zoroastrian scriptures remember him? Or a sorcerer whose elite class of priestly adepts spread his magical craft across the world? 

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In this episode, we begin another ongoing series, in which I invite you peer into the darkness of Western esotericism and its many strange stories. We begin with Zarathustra and the priesthood of supposed sorcerers that followed his teachings, the Magi of Zoroastrianism, because of the claim that the practice of magic originated with them. Certainly we know that the word “magic” is derived from the Latinized ancient Greek word for them, as is the term “mage,” synonymous with wizard, taken from the singular for one of these Zoroastrian priests, a “magus.” Now you may recognize this word specifically from the nativity story celebrated every Christmas, as part and parcel of that legend is the story of the Three Kings or wise men, also referred to as Magi, who followed a star to witness the birth of Christ. I may save my examination of that particular legend for this year’s Christmas Special, but it illustrates clearly the notion that these figures were respected in ancient Greece as bearers of uncommon wisdom. More than that, though, the Magi were seen, at least by the time of the Roman Empire when Pliny the Elder wrote of them, as the founders of an insidious tradition of sorcery. In this series, I want to look at the many and various stories throughout history about the occult and the arcane, about alchemy and theurgy and necromancy, about secret societies and spellbooks. I hope you enjoy the first volume of my Encyclopedia Grimoria, in which, counterintuitively, I begin with an entry under Z, for Zoroaster, the First Magus. 

The most famous of the magi: the three wise men who adored the Christ child, via Wikimedia Commons

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Before we undertake a history of magic, it proves necessary to provide a definition of the word. In its original sense, magic would mean the wisdom of the Magi. That definition is useful to the discussion at hand, but proves inadequate when considering the wider history of magic. And defining magic is no easy task; it has been widely debated among anthropologists and historians, with the final result that it is more and more viewed as a useless or meaningless term inappropriate as a descriptor in scholarly works, and the very act of defining it has been called “maddening” by one of those scholars, Owen Davies, who has written much on the subject. It’s argued that the term “magic” brings with it many cultural connotations that may not be applicable in every case. For example, in its Western usage, the term conveys a sense of otherness or transgression, indicating practices outside of social norms or acceptable boundaries, when that may not always be the case. Likewise, a sense that the practitioners of magic might be considered primitive because of assumptions about the term, and the implication that they might actually be capable of producing supernatural effects when they are not and would not themselves consider their practices out of the ordinary, all have led most scholars to abandon the term. But I will endeavor here to walk that tightrope in order to clarify my use of the term. First, I differentiate magic from the art of illusion, meaning the performance of illusions for the purposes of entertainment, as observed on Las Vegas stages and at children’s birthday parties. Second, I would clarify that, much that has been called magic in the past is recognized today as medical or physical science. However, its explanation today does not preclude it’s being considered a magical practice in the past. The first criteria for considering any practice magical would be that it ostensibly seeks by some obscure means--whether that be through something as acceptable to the modern mind as chemistry or something as anathema to rational thought as spellcraft--to uncannily influence, manipulate, exert power over, or gain a preternatural understanding of the natural world. The second working criteria would be that, due to the very obscurity of these means, and/or their uncanny effects, the practice at least appears to partake of the supernatural. This definition, one might acutely discern, does not rule out frauds, provided they purport to be accomplishing some magical effect over the natural world through appropriately arcane practices. 

With this working definition in hand, we can already see that magic in some form preceded the Magi, for beyond the term “magic” the ancient Greeks had further words to denote such activities, such as nekuomanteia, or necromancy, referring to communication with the dead, and pharmaka, from which we derive the word pharmacy, which in antiquity also meant the preparation and use of drugs, but also poisons, with the implication of what modern fiction would call potions. Another ancient Greek word for a magical art was goēteía. This word seems to have been used to refer to sorcerers, but it may have derived from the sound its practitioners made, a low wailing, which has led some to believe that the term referred to ritual mourners bemoaning the dead. There is much written about goētic magic asserting that it is the practice of summoning demons to answer questions or do the magician’s bidding, putting it at the other end of the spectrum from another magical art called theurgy, which summons beings less dark for much the same reasons. According to the lore that has grown up around the term, goētic arts were developed not by mankind but by a mythical race, the Dactyls, who also invented metallurgy and founded the Olympic games. Nor was this the only version of history suggesting that magic, rather than originating from Zoroaster, was given to mankind by another race of beings. For example, one text appeared in the 4th century CE, attributed variously to Clement of Alexandria or Bishop Clement of Rome, who would become Pope Clement I, which claimed that fallen angels had taught humanity magic. This corroborated another apocryphal text from a century earlier, The Apocalypse of Enoch, which tells of these fallen angels’ dalliances with human women, essentially the story of the Nephilim from Genesis 6, with the further addition that these so-called Watchers tutored their consorts in sorcery. However, these tales arrived far later in history and were spread through books of dubious reliability written by authors that took false names. This we will find to be a typical hurdle in critically evaluating the history of magic; much of its provenance is problematic, with entire traditions about ancient history based on spurious claims asserted by anonymous authors centuries and sometimes even millennia later. 

Illustration of angels being cast out of heaven, via Wikimedia Commons

The same is true even of the association of the term Magus or Magi with Zoroastrianism, which was a prominent religion in Persia long before it was associated with magicians in Greece. When the term Magi is first seen in ancient Greek texts, it is not in reference to the followers of Zoroaster. The magi were certainly considered crafty and alien, their rituals strange, but their clear identification with the Persian traditions promulgated by Zarathustra did not happen until the 4th century BCE. Before that, Zoroastrians were depicted more as fire worshipers than conjurers or spellcasters, and the Magi were decried for their human sacrifices and their incest, none of which are related to Zoroastrian belief or ritual. In fact, another point against them was the way they sang in suspiciously low voices, which seems to suggest that these Magi were actually practicing goēteía, the “howling art.” Could these have been two very different cultural practices, perhaps both foreign to ancient Greeks and therefore confused for each other? Certainly by the Roman era, all the other words for magical practices like goëtia, necromantia, etc., were routinely folded into the term magia, so some conflation or syncretism seems likely. The result is that today our universal term for all sorcerous arts remains the word “magic.” 

What we can say with some certainty is that certain magical arts attributed to Zoroaster could not have been invented by him. I am speaking now of the practice of astrology, which today we might not think of as magic but which was certainly considered magical in antiquity, and by my definition may still be considered a magical art, whether or not you believe it to be bogus. Astrology is one of the magical arts specifically ascribed to Zoroaster by Pliny the Elder, and indeed, the name Zoroaster even means “star-priest” or “star-diviner,” which appears to describe an astrologer. However, to credit him with inventing the zodiac and the art of divining the future based on the stars, one has to rely on a problematic timeline. The oldest archeological evidence we have of the practice of astrology appears to be from the 3rd millennium BCE in ancient Mesopotamia. More specifically, these were lists of omens in the sky and astral predictions compiled for Akkadian and Sumerian kings. Ancient Mesopotamia may have encompassed or at least abutted the region from which it is said Zarathustra came, but all accounts point to him being born many years later, which would seem to disprove at least the claim that he invented this one magical art. You see, Zoroastrian tradition holds that their central prophet was born in the 6th century BCE, some two millennia after the first known use of astrology in Mesopotamia, and his original Persian name, Zarathustra, had nothing to do with the stars and everything to do with a practical, earthly profession, its meaning having something to do with handling or caring for camels. His placement in the 6th century BCE derives from numerous texts indicating that, for example, there were 258 years between his appearance and the age of Alexander the Great, or that he was known to have met with and taught Pythagoras, who lived from around 570 to 490 BCE. However, many scholars cast doubt on this timeline, suggesting it was invented by Magi looking to cement their prophet in a historical context like Christ, or that it was a fabrication of Greek thinkers who wanted to minimize the claims that Greek philosophy was derivative of Eastern philosophy. For example, there are numerous earlier claims that Plato was influenced by the teachings of the Magi, and that Zoroaster had lived some 6000 years before Plato. Plutarch agrees with this placement of Zoroaster in the far reaches of prehistory when he declares that Zoroaster lived 5000 years before the Fall of Troy. If this were the case, then one supposes he could have invented astrology, but through linguistic analysis of the language used in the Avesta, the oldest of Zoroastrian scriptures, modern scholars propose that Zarathustra lived sometime between 1200 and 900 BCE, once again making him far younger than the art of astrology.

Zoroaster depicted sharing astronomical or astrological knowledge in “The School of Athens",” via Wikimedia Commons

Many of the passages in ancient Greek texts that mention Zoroaster further confuse matters by indicating he came from Bactria in Eastern Iran or Media in Western Iran, or referring to him not as a Persian, but as Zoroaster the Chaldaean or Zoroaster the Assyrian. This has led to speculation, since the name Zoroaster or Zarathustra or something similar was likely popular among adherents, that perhaps some of the Zoroasters recorded by Greek writers were different men living in different times and places. Indeed, even Pliny the Elder concedes that “whether there was only one Zoroaster, or whether in later times there was a second person of that name, is a matter which still remains undecided.” Then there is the further problem of Christian writers in antiquity identifying him with biblical figures, arguing variously that Zoroaster was the same person as Adam and Eve’s descendant Jared, or Noah’s cursed son Ham, or Ham’s grandson, the king, Nimrod, or the Babylonian prophet Ezekiel, all of whom lived in different times and places. To clarify, then, we must return to the Zoroastrian scriptures, to the Avesta, or more specifically the oldest portions of it, in the Yasna, which includes a series of hymns said to have been written by Zarathustra himself, called the Gathas. As the author of these Gathic texts, Zarathustra is the founding figure who brought this religion to mankind. However, scholars have pointed out that since different points-of-view are used throughout, sometimes first-person and sometimes third, the Gathas should be considered the product of an oral tradition to which many priestly figures like Zarathustra may have contributed. Nevertheless, when the Gathas mention Zarathustra, they accord him the role of forerunner, the first proponent of the faith, so Zoroastrians, like Christians, have come to think of him as a prophet or messenger, bringing to mankind the words authored by their conception of god, a being named Ahura Mazda.

Zoroastrianism presents a clearly defined cosmogony, or theory of the universe, complete with a detailed eschatology, or end times and afterlife scenario. According to the teachings of its scriptures, all of reality is divided in a dualistic conflict between two principles, characterized as good and evil, life and death, light and darkness, illness and health, order and chaos. These principles are embodied in two spirits, the omniscient god Ahura Mazda and its dark and evil counterpart, Angra Manyu. The conflict between these two deities led to the creation of the world of living beings, our world, which has an expiration date. It would only last 12 millennia, during which time the conflict between Ahura Mazda and Angra Manyu would play out here, among the divine sustainers of order and the demonic agents of chaos, and among the mortal men and women who were created thereafter. Upon death, these mortals’ souls would be subject to judgment, weighing their good and evil thoughts and thereby deciding whether, when they crossed to the afterlife, the bridge they took would grow as wide as it was long and lead them to the “best existence,” or whether it would narrow to a razor’s edge and cast them into a place of torture. The souls thus damned would only be redeemed at the end of the world, when after an apocalyptic age of disasters, the dead are raised and the dragon of the heavens sets the earth ablaze, purifying mankind. 

Now, if some of this sounds familiar to you, that’s because it is very similar to numerous later traditions. Indeed, there appears to have been extensive borrowing from Zoroastrian belief systems in the establishment of other religions. For example, the Roman mystery religion of Mithraism took its central figure from Zoroastrian myth, as Mithra was one of Ahura Mazda’s divine figures on Earth. And many have looked to the Zoroastrian dualistic conception of coequal spiritual forces as the origin of other dualistic cosmogonies that see good in the spiritual and evil in the material, such as Manichaeism and Gnosticism. The similarities abound when it comes to Judeo-Christian traditions. Beyond the obvious parallels--the creation myth, the resurrection of the dead at the end of the world, and the judgment of their souls before being granted entry to paradise or being consigned to hell--there are even further connections. Mankind originates from a first man, like an Adam, Gaya Maretan, whose descendant, Yima, is directed by Ahura Mazda to preserve different forms of life in a bunker during the cataclysmic floods Mazda sends, much like a Noah. Even the figure of a savior prophet like Christ is present, in that Zarathustra imparts to all mankind the true revelation of God, thereby kicking off the final three millennia before the end of the world, and like Christ, he would return. In Zarathustra’s case, he will return three times, at intervals of a thousand years. His return will be in the form of a son born miraculously every thousand years to a virgin who bathes in a sacred lake that has preserved his semen. Each of these sons will act as a “Revitalizer,” the third and final son helping to bring mankind toward the “Perfectioning” at the end of all things. All of which, while fundamentally spiritual and in places decidedly mythic, gives no indication of the practice of ritual magic among the religion’s adherents. 

Why, then, is Pliny the Elder so adamant in naming Zoroaster as the originator of magic? In the way of sources, he names one Ostanes, a supposed sorcerer who accompanied the Persian king Xerxes during his invasion of Greece, as “he who first disseminated, as it were, the germs of this monstrous art, and tainted therewith all parts of the world.” The problem is there doesn’t appear to be any surviving historical evidence of this person having ever actually existed, let alone writing major works on magic that Pliny says were “still in existence.” So we look to the principal source that Pliny cites on all things magical, Democritus, a contemporary of Socrates who Pliny states developed the art of magic through his writings during the time of the Peloponnesian War. Since many lost writings are preserved only in other writings that reference them, we may assume that Pliny’s understanding of the lost magical writings of Ostanes came from the magical works of Democritus. And here we begin to see the central obstacle to tracing the origin of magic to the Zoroastrian Magi. These works about magic attributed to Democritus do exist, but they are believed to have been written by someone else, an Egyptian by the name of Bolus of Mendes who lived some two centuries after the real Democritus. It is thought that Bolus attributed his work to Democritus specifically because of his association with Pythagoras, who, if you recall, was said to have studied under the Magi. Thus, Democritus would have a better claim to magical knowledge. This is typical of Hellenistic thought, which believed true wisdom and esoteric knowledge predated the Greek philosophers and had come from the East. Thus, numerous works on magic also appeared during the Hellenistic period that were attributed to Ostanes and even to Zoroaster himself, all of which have been definitively proven to be pseudepigrapha, or works spuriously attributed to famous figures in order to lend them an authority they might not otherwise have.

In 1938, French scholars Joseph Bidez and Franz Cumont published their seminal work on the subject of Zoroastrian pseudepigrapha, The Hellenic Magi, presenting in exhaustive detail all known texts and fragments and asserting that their contents do not correspond with Zoroastrianism, proving their false attribution. However, citing certain elements of the texts that did seem authentically Persian in origin, they argued that they had been written by “Maguseans,” authors with Zoroastrian beliefs who lived in the Roman empire at such a geographical and chronological remove from the heart of Zoroastrian belief that they had developed an unorthodox form of the religion. However, this conclusion has been challenged as recently as 2006 by a Quack… that is, by a German Egyptologist with the unfortunate name of Joachim Friedrich Quack. Building on theories that were put forward as early as the 1960s, Quack goes through example after example to show how works by pseudo-Zoroaster on herbalism, amulets, and astrology and works by pseudo-Ostanes on demonology and alchemy all show decidedly Egyptian influence rather than reflecting Persian traditions. To illustrate both this Egyptian influence and the hopeless confusion caused by the mysterious authorship of these texts, we’ll look at one of Quack’s examples: the Greek alchemical text Physica et Mystica, in which Democritus is initiated into the mysteries of alchemy by Ostanes. In the text, this initiation takes place in Egypt. We know that the book was not written by Democritus, but rather by the aforementioned Hellenized Egyptian author Bolus of Mendes. Still, one might be tempted to imagine despite the spurious authorship that perhaps Ostanes had lived in Egypt, but the fact that the story goes on to introduce Ostanes’s son, who is also named Ostanes, makes even one disposed to believing the myths wonder just how many Ostaneses and Zoroasters there might have been.

Quack concludes his study by theorizing that the authors of these Magusean texts were Persians, but that they had for generations since Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Achaemenid empire been living in Egypt, their religious beliefs soaking up Egyptian esoteric thought. However, it seems just as likely that Egyptian esoteric writers, steeped in the magical traditions of that culture, which itself is long and varied, may have cloaked their writings in the guise of Eastern wisdom in order to introduce it to Hellenistic Greece, which was so enamored of ideas that originated in the Orient. In this way, the Hellenistic Greeks might be considered analogous to those in the Austro-German New Age movement that I discussed in my series on Nazi Occultism last year. Indeed, the mythical homeland of the ancient Persians recorded in the Zoroastrian Avesta is referred to as the Aryan Expanse. The word “Aryan” originated in Zoroastrian scripture, clearly as a cultural group, but eventually it would be twisted into a racial designation by those seeking to justify their feelings of superiority over others. Similarly, it seems Zoroaster and the ancient Persian religion that honors him may have been misappropriated in antiquity and used to put the more respectable face of the Magus on practices the Magi did not pioneer, creating perhaps the biggest misnomer in history, forever after attaching their name to dark arts that may in fact have come from ancient Egypt. 

Further Reading

Dannenfeldt, Karl H. “The Pseudo-Zoroastrian Oracles in the Renaissance.” Studies in the Renaissance, vol. 4, 1957, pp. 7–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2857138. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.

Kingsley, Peter. “The Greek Origin of the Sixth-Century Dating of Zoroaster.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, vol. 53, no. 2, 1990, pp. 245–265. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/619232. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.

Rose, Jenny. Zoroastrianism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Continuum International, 2011.

Skjaervo, Prods Oktor. The Spirit of Zoroastrianism. Yale University Press, 2011.

Quack, Joachim Friedrich. “Les Mages Égyptianisés? Remarks on Some Surprising Points in Supposedly Magusean Texts.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, vol. 65, no. 4, 2006, pp. 267–282. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/511102. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.

The End of Edward II, Part Two: The Hermit King

Following the mysterious death of Edward II, recently deposed King of England, a group of monks from Westminster Abbey addressed the now truly widowed Queen Isabella. They asked that Edward be laid to rest beside his mother and father and grandfather in the royal mausoleum, a request they likely assumed would be granted. However, Isabella denied them. Instead, St. Peter’s Abbey Church at Gloucester would receive the royal corpse. Isabella may have insisted on this for numerous reasons: because its abbot was related to her nefarious advisor Roger Mortimer, because she feared a mob demonstration if Edward’s body were carried too far across the kingdom, or because there was, indeed, precedent for a deposed king not being buried at Westminster: Edward’s ancestor John, another failed monarch who had been laid to rest at Worcester. Today the tomb of Edward II at Gloucester is a grand edifice, with an alabaster effigy above it depicting him still wearing his crown and 28 statues of angels weeping round his marble sarcophagus. The tomb became so grand that eventually pilgrims to the abbey began to venerate him as a saint. However, all of this was a result of the abbots investing in their monastery as a pilgrimage site. Isabella never encouraged it to be a place of pilgrimage, and she never gave the church any money to improve the tomb. While this may be understandable, for her, what’s more strange is that his son, King Edward III, who would eventually go to great lengths to investigate his late father’s murder, also never patronized the tomb, leading some historians to ask why Edward II’s resting place was left forgotten by those closest to him.

Among the first signs that something was odd about Edward’s supposed death was the fact that his funeral was so long delayed. Edward’s corpse stayed unentombed at Gloucester for nearly two months. This delay could ostensibly be blamed on the continuing war with the Scots, or it could be explained by Isabella and Mortimer not wanting to seem too anxious to bury the former king, perhaps because they had something to hide or because they knew many believed they had something to hide. But what was it they were hiding? Their involvement in Edward’s death? If even the worst claims about Edward’s manner of death were true, there were still no visible marks upon his body to indicate murder. Why, then, did they not want anyone to view the corpse? Great care was taken to guard Edward’s body, which was common enough, but when crowds came to Gloucester to see him and were not permitted to view the body, a wooden likeness of him had to be hastily carved to appease the visitors. And many would later comment upon how far away from the open tomb they had been kept during the actual funeral, such that it was exceedingly difficult to actually examine his remains. Years later, as Edward III investigated his father’s murder and rumors abounded that Edward II had actually survived and gone into hiding, this odd funeral arrangement began to seem more and more suspicious.

The tomb of Edward II at Gloucester, via Wikimedia Commons

Immediately after the death of Edward II, Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer went about the business of ruling the kingdom on behalf of the fifteen-year-old king. They sought a settlement with the Scots and prepared for Edward III’s marriage to Phillippa of Hainault, an arrangement Isabella had made in exchange for aid from Flanders during her coup. While this match pleased many, for young Queen Phillippa was well liked, not everyone was happy with the rule of Isabella and Mortimer. The earls whose alliance had ensured the success of her coup began to resent her. Some viewed Mortimer as yet another favorite, like Gaveston and Despenser before him, monopolizing the benefits of the throne, and the fact that many would lose lands in Isabella’s treaty with Scotland kindled further resentment. Her dealings with Scotland also ended up angering her son, the new king, who resented that she had given away his sister Joanna in marriage to Robert the Bruce’s son. When Isabella directed him to return to the Scots their sacred Stone of Scone, an artifact used in coronation ceremonies that legend identified as the Stone of Jacob, consecrated by that biblical figure after having a vision while using it as a pillow, Edward III made his disapproval clear, and taking a cue from their young king, rioting crowds prevented the artifact’s return. While the king might have coyly defied them, though, the earls dared not, for Isabella empowered her favorite Mortimer as the Earl of March, and together, having learned from Edward II’s mistakes, they put down any baronial opposition before it threatened them. Mortimer even began to claim descent from Brutus of Troy, the mythical son of Aeneas who supposedly discovered the British Isle, defeated the giants who inhabited it, and founded Britain, which was named after him, its first king. Mortimer’s hubris only worsened from there, and he started ruling without the young king’s decree, as if he himself were regent. Matters came to a head after Mortimer moved against the young king’s uncle, Edmund, the Earl of Kent, on charges of treason. Mortimer acted as prosecutor at the trial, producing letters that Edmund had penned that showed the Earl of Kent had been scheming to free his brother, Edward II. Edmund confessed that it was all true. The odd thing was, however, that he had been plotting to free Edward after Edward was dead and buried at Gloucester. 

As the trial unfolded, it became clear that the Earl of Kent believed his brother was not dead but was in fact being held captive at Corfe Castle in Dorset, which would mean, of course, that someone else had been buried in King Edward II’s place. Edmund had been sharing this information with numerous bishops and barons, which had only aggravated opposition to Isabella and Mortimer’s rule. Indeed, it appeared that Edmund had even convinced Pope John XXII of his conspiracy theory and received approval for his plans to free his brother from captivity. Strangely, according to the court proceedings, Edmund had learned of his brother’s survival through the black magic of a Dominican friar. Wildly, this evil monk had supposedly received the incendiary information from a demon he had summoned. Of course, this tidbit made the Earl of Kent’s claims impossible to credit, making him seem delusional. However, Edmund had sought confirmation of this information first, and multiple informants had approached him to confirm that Edward II was alive and well at Corfe Castle. Some even claimed to act as go-betweens to establish communication between the brothers, thus the letters produced at trial. These were likely agents of Isabella’s or Mortimer’s, entrapping the former king’s brother into a treasonous plot. The fact is, there does appear to have been a rumor going around about Edward II’s death having been faked, and the trial of the Earl of Kent seems to have been Isabella and Mortimer’s way of discrediting the rumor, a kind of disinformation campaign. Judging from the profile of the people who had supported Edmund in his plot, including the Pope himself, it would seem the rumor had been far more believable than the details of the trial made it seem. Thus the story that it had originated with a demon-summoning friar might have been “fake news,” as it were, embellished in the trial to make the idea seem ridiculous, and the fact that Isabella and Mortimer had the Earl of Kent summarily executed, bribing a drunk dung-collector to cut off his head, further served to discourage those who might want to look into the possibility of Edward II’s survival. 

The ruins of Corfe Castle, where the Earl of Kent believed Edward II was in hiding, via Wikimedia Commons

No matter the true motives behind the entrapment of Edmund, Earl of Kent, whether it was to punish treason, to remove another possible claimant from the equation, or to squelch the rumors that Edward II had survived, King Edward III, reaching his majority and ready to take the reins of power himself, resented the execution of his uncle. Though his mother had a hand in it, he appears to have laid blame squarely on Roger Mortimer, who had overstepped his position and usurped the king’s authority. However, his power was limited and he was surrounded by spies. All he could do was carefully lay plans, gathering those loyal to him one at a time, and establishing a secret channel of communication with the Pope. Eventually, it became clear that the king was moving against Mortimer, and Mortimer responded by accusing the usual suspects, such as the Earl of Lancaster, of plotting against him, and seeking to constantly reaffirm his authority in the council. It was during this time, as factions were squaring off and edging toward conflict, that Mortimer was first publicly accused of ordering Edward II’s murder at Berkeley Castle. Mortimer responded by launching an official inquiry and interrogating some of Edward III’s men who had made the accusation. During the course of these interrogations, when Edward’s men stated that they only followed the orders of their king, Mortimer declared that the king’s authority only extended so far as it agreed with his own commands. When this presumptuous and treasonous declaration was reported to Edward III, or as legend has it, when he learned that his mother might actually be pregnant by Mortimer and that the child could be a rival for his throne, the king finally resolved to act. It was the evening of October 19th, 1330, and his mother and Mortimer were holed up at Nottingham Castle at the time, in a meeting plotting to arrest those loyal to her son. Meanwhile Edward III had bribed the castle’s constable to let him and some two dozen men into the castle by a secret entrance, a tunnel thereafter called Mortimer’s Hole. The meeting broke up in a panic when cries of “Treason!” resounded through the castle, raising the alarm over Edward’s attack, and Mortimer’s men met the king’s men in a stairwell, clashing with swords and daggers. Eventually, Edward broke through a barred door behind which his mother and Mortimer were hiding, and as Isabella begged her son to take pity on her lover, Edward III arrested Roger Mortimer, the great traitor. 

King Edward III had mercy on his mother, ever afterward portraying her as the victim of the manipulative Roger Mortimer. None truly know how accurate this characterization of the Iron Virago might have been. Certainly she was not remembered well. Only a few years after he coup was welcomed by much of the kingdom, her downfall was equally well received. Her reputation is perhaps best illustrated by the immortal verse of Thomas Grey in the 18th century, who depicted her unsympathetically when he wrote: “She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs,/That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate.” Clearly, though, Edward III thought more highly of his mother and therefore took from her only her power and wealth, leaving her her freedom and keeping her in comfort for the rest of her days, never laying the crime of his father’s murder at her feet. However, Roger Mortimer he would execute the very next month, and thereafter, Edward III sought to make those accused of murdering his father answer for their crimes. These, of course, were Thomas Berkeley and John Maltravers, his jailers, and William Ockle and Thomas Gurney, his supposed assassins. All save Berkeley had fled after Mortimer’s arrest, and the king offered rewards for their capture or their heads. However, Edward III made some odd distinctions here that indicate more may have been going on behind the scenes, and even hinting that the king may not have been so certain about the circumstances of his father’s death after all.

In this 19th century image Isabella pleads with her son for Mortimer’s life, via Wikimedia Commons

Thomas Berkeley, who had been most responsible for Edward II’s safekeeping, strangely got off scot-free. He claimed that he had not been present in the castle on the day in question, and moreover, he bafflingly claimed that he didn’t even know Edward II was dead, that he only learned of it just then, as he was being questioned. Of course this was preposterous, and more than a little disrespectful, yet Edward III released him on bail and then cleared him of any charges. Why this was so seems a mystery, unless, as Paul Doherty postulates in my principal source Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II, you consider his statement to be a pointed message. Perhaps Berkeley, by saying it was the first he’d heard of Edward II being dead, was really indicating to the king that as far as he knew the king’s father hadn’t died in Berkeley Castle, a kind of winking hint that the rumors of Edward II’s survival were true. Also curious is the fact that John Maltravers, Berkeley’s brother-in-law who had been at the castle on the night of the murder, was also not charged with regicide and instead was only charged for his part in the later conspiracy against the Earl of Kent. Additionally, evidence suggests that while Maltravers was in hiding in Flanders, the king knew where he was and did not arrest him. Indeed, Edward III eventually allowed him to return to England and come and go as he pleased. Doherty points out that, after arresting Mortimer, the king had more than five weeks to torture and interrogate Mortimer and his men before he eventually ordered the arrests. Who knows what information he learned during that time that convinced him Berkeley and Maltravers were not responsible for the murder of his father. Only William Ockle and Thomas Gurney were declared wanted for regicide, and the reward was set far higher for their capture than for their heads, indicating perhaps that the king believed there was still something to learn from them. Ockle vanished, but the king’s agents pursued Gurney for more than 2 years before he was taken in Naples. According to some of the great chroniclers of the age, such as the dubious Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbrook, whose credibility I questioned in the last episode, claim Gurney was beheaded in custody while on a ship bound for London, to prevent him from naming names, presumably Isabella’s or perhaps those of some barons who had managed to remain in the king’s good graces and did not want to be implicated. However, as Doherty points out, since Gurney could have been executed abroad before even boarding the ship, it seems likelier that Gurney died of an illness while on his way to face justice in England, as was the story told by the knight tasked with bringing him back. Curiously, after this knight reported back to King Edward III, likely telling the king everything he had been able to learn from Gurney before his death, Edward III ceased searching for those responsible for murdering his father, yet five years later, he seemed bent on hunting down a living man rumored to be his father. 

In 1338, when King Edward III was leading his armies in the Low Countries, he heard about a man called William the Welshman who was in Cologne and had been telling people that he was Edward II. The king spent a significant amount of money having this person brought to face him in Antwerp. We don’t know anything about the meeting between Edward III and the man who claimed to be his father. Doherty suggests that this was actually William Ockle, whom the king had given up on finding and who might have escaped justice forever if he hadn’t been pretending to be Edward II, but this is speculation. What this does show with a certainty is that, years after Edward III had seemingly resolved the matter of his father’s murder by tracking down his assassin, he seems to have taken a great interest in the possibility of his father still being alive, indicating he may have had secret doubts at the very least or even that during his investigation five years earlier he had discovered proof that his father was still among the living somewhere. The other possibility, of course, is that he did not believe William the Welshman was his father but nevertheless took the claims of pretenders seriously. Indeed, this was not the first time someone had pretended to be Edward II. The first time had been when Edward II was still alive. In 1316, while Edward II was still licking his wounds after his defeat at Bannockburn 2 years earlier, a clerk from Oxford declared that he was the real Edward of Caernarvon. When questioned before the Justices, he pointed to a missing ear, explaining that he had been at play in the castle’s courtyard as a child, and when a pig bit his ear off, his nurse had switched him with a peasant boy, fearing the king’s anger over the incident. This pretender eventually revealed himself to be something of a crazy person, as during further investigations he produced a cat and confessed that his story was a lie, and that the cat, which was actually the Devil, had put him up to the charade. The Justices hanged him and, absurdly, hanged the cat as well.  Considering that even this lunatic’s story had been something of a scandal, perhaps it is not unreasonable for Edward III to take seriously the claims of a random Welsh pretender in Cologne. And after all, since we don’t know what information his interrogations uncovered, there seems little evidence that Edward II did not die at Berkeley Castle in 1327. But actually, there was one well-documented event that I omitted in my telling of Edward II’s imprisonment that may serve to cast some further doubt upon the idea that he was even at Berkeley when he was supposedly murdered there: the story of a jailbreak.

A depiction of Berkeley Castle, where Edward II was held captive, was liberated by the Dunhead gang, and supposedly later was killed, via Wikimedia Commons

At the time of Isabella and Mortimer’s coup, there existed a secret alliance of loyalists, led by brothers Thomas and Stephen Dunhead. Thomas Dunhead, a clergyman, had gone to Rome on Edward II’s behalf seeking approval for a divorce from Isabella, and after his failure and return, when Isabella landed her forces, he and his brother, both still loyal to their king, became fugitives. They gathered others to the king’s cause, forming a kind of outlaw band. The threat that this conspiracy would break Edward II out of jail was what precipitated his transfer from Kenilworth to Berkeley in the first place. Interestingly, there is evidence that, during the transfer, to throw the Dunhead conspiracy off their trail, before taking him to Berkeley, they took Edward II to Corfe Castle, the very place where years later Edmund, Earl of Kent, believed he remained, alive and well. However, all records show that Edward II was eventually imprisoned at Berkeley. Records also show, though, that the Dunhead gang discovered his imprisonment there and that, against all odds, managed to storm the fortified castle with no siege equipment. Reports describing the jailbreak specifically state that Edward II had been taken from his cell, and there is no explicit indication that they recaptured him before the Dunheads escaped. This is just assumed, since those in power continued on as if the king were still in their custody, and then some months later letting it be known that he had died at Berkeley. Certainly members of the Dunhead gang were eventually caught and indicted for “trying to free Edward of Caernarvon,” as Isabella carefully worded it, but the fact that the Dunheads had Berkeley in their control for long enough to loot the castle would seem to indicate that their raid had been in no way repelled, that they might have seized all they wanted from the castle before taking their leave, including the royal prisoner. Therefore, it seems at least possible, and I imagine might have seemed plausible to Edward III as he looked into the mystery three years later, that the Dunheads had successfully spirited away the former king from his prison, and that Isabella and Mortimer simply pretended they hadn’t and shortly thereafter produced a corpse so that if Edward II ever resurfaced, they could argue that he was a pretender, for the true Edward II was entombed at Gloucester. Could this be the truth that Edward III uncovered while interrogating those involved? Was it finally confirmed by Gurney on his deathbed? Is this why he chose not to pursue further justice in the matter, and years later was curious about a Welshman claiming to be his father? 

One further piece of evidence provides some reason to believe Edward II did not die at Berkeley, although with an alternate version of events. And while it may not prove its astonishing claims, it at least serves as strong evidence that his son, Edward III, suspected his father’s survival. Circa 1340, Edward III received a letter from a papal notary named Manuel Fieschi. In this letter, he explained that he met a hermit who claimed to be Edward II and took his confession. What he learned was that a guard of Edward’s at Berkeley had warned him of the assassins’ plans and offered to exchange clothes and trade places with him. This allowed Edward II to simply walk out of the castle, and when the assassins saw that the prisoner was not he, they murdered him and brought his body to Queen Isabella, who interred the guard in her husband’s tomb. After his escape, Fieschi’s letter claims he lived secretly under Maltravers’s nose at Corfe Castle for a year and a half. After hearing that his brother, the Earl of Kent, had been executed for believing he was alive at Corfe, he fled again, this time to Ireland, and began to disguise himself as a hermit. In this disguise, he made his way across the Continent, eventually seeking an audience with Pope John XXII. The Pope received him and honored him as King Edward II, and the Hermit King devoted himself thereafter to a religious pilgrimage, making his way to Cologne to visit the reliquary said to hold the bones of the Magi, the Three Kings present at the Nativity. Thereafter, he made his way to Italy, where he spent his years moving from one hermitage to another. This letter appears to provide accurate information regarding details about Edward II’s capture, and furthermore, its account of his hiding at Corfe Castle when the Earl of Kent believed he was there, as well as its suggestion that he was present in Cologne years later, perhaps when William the Welshman was there telling people he was Edward II, all give it a semblance of reliability. Moreover, the fact that two years after receiving the letter Edward III allowed Fieschi to keep certain lucrative English benefices at Ampleforth and Salisbury appears to show that the king didn’t think him a liar and may have even been rewarding him for the information he’d provided.

Edward III, son of Edward of Caernarvon and Isabella of France, who sought justice for Edward II’s murder and yet also seems to have been open to the idea that his father survived, via Wikimedia Commons

However, there are reasons both for and against crediting Fieschi and his claims. First, it seems suspect that Fieschi would freely give up secrets protected by the sacramental seal of confession, but there is some indication in the wording chosen by this papal lawyer that he might only be imparting information that was not part of the confession proper--that is, not sins for which the confessor was seeking absolution. And yet it still seems reckless that a fugitive Edward II would even risk revealing himself this way, even if he thought his secret safe with his confessor. Aside from this issue of plausibility, Fieschi’s letter is so accurate as to be almost unimpeachable, even displaying some inside knowledge of Edward II’s movements during the final days before his surrender to Lancaster. There are even hints that Fieschi had knowledge of the circuitous route taken by Edward’s captors to elude the Dunhead gang when transferring their prisoner to Berkeley. Oddly, though, when naming the assassins sent after the king, Fieschi names only Gurney and a henchman of Mortimer’s, Simon de Beresford, who had been hanged alongside Mortimer as complicit in his crimes but was not usually implicated as one of the assassins. Suspiciously, he excludes William Ockle entirely, who just happens to have been the one person who was still alive somewhere and might have contradicted the contents of his letter. Furthermore, as Paul Doherty wisely observes, it strains credulity that Roger Mortimer or the jailer Thomas Berkeley or his lieutenant John Maltravers would have put only a single guard on Edward II, especially one who sympathized with the king, and who happened to share the same physical stature and therefore wore clothes of a size that would fit the prisoner. Also implausible is the notion that a simple change of clothes would have sufficed to allow the easily recognizable king to stroll right out of the heavily guarded castle unchallenged. Nor is it easy to believe that , when the assassins realized the king had escaped, rather than raising the alarm and organizing a search, they settled on covering it up and faking the king’s death. In fact, the letter makes it sound like they actually pulled one over on Queen Isabella, as it states, “[T]he body of the said porter they presented to the wicked queen as if it were the body of your father,” but this line is problematic in numerous ways. First, it could be seen as exonerating the queen insofar as she wasn’t party to faking Edward II’s death, a choice perhaps made by Fieschi because of how consistently Edward III had defended his mother in these matters. However, the line calls her wicked, and the fact that the assassins reported to her directly implicates her as the mastermind of the murder plot. Of course, this does offer some explanation for why the assassins would even choose to take this course of action, perhaps because they were afraid of what Isabella would do to them if they reported the king’s escape, but it beggars belief that when they presented the guard’s body, Isabella would not have discerned that it was not her husband.

Then we have the scholarly assessment of the letter, and the investigation of its claims by Italian academics who assert that it is authentic. Constantino Nigra, in 1901, relied on the contents of the letter and what is known about Fieschi to argue that the letter is not a forgery, was truly written by Fieschi, and was written around the time it is supposed to have been written. Then 23 years later, Anna Benedetti, an Italian English professor building on a 1915 article by Hardwicke Rawnsley called “Did Edward II Escape to Italy?” began to trace the path of the Hermit King as outlined in the letter. One of the hermitages named in the letter, a castle called “Milasci,” she identified as Melazzo de Acqui, and today this tourist destination displays plaques commemorating Edward II’s stay there, although this is no proof of it being true. Another hermitage mentioned in the letter “Cecime,” proved more difficult to pinpoint. Benedetti settled on Cecime Sopra Voghera, a walled village in the Appenine Mountains, but there exists no castle there. Continuing her search, she found a secluded monastery nearby that fit the bill perfectly. She argues that King Edward II was likely buried in one of the churches owned by this monastery, for she found an empty and undecorated tomb in one of them. Now, Benedetti’s research goes much further than this. Like some other medievalist conspiracy theorists, she believes there are clues everywhere. Certain sculptures and details in the architecture, she says, provide a coded account of Edward the II’s life in hiding. Other historians have begged to differ, providing alternative interpretations of these so-called clues and presenting evidence that they are far too old to have been created for the purpose of telling Edward II’s tale. However, there does exist some testimony from locals suggesting there was a folk tradition in the area about an English king having lived in hiding there, a legend that if the testimony can be believed, actually predates not only the scholarly work identifying that region with Edward II’s place of hermitage but even predating the 1878 discovery of the Fieschi letter. 

A plaque at the Hermitage of St. Albert di Butrio suggesting Edward II may have lived there after his supposed death, via Atlas Obscura

Beyond these facts stands Fieschi’s reputation. If as Nigra argues we can trust that Fieschi wrote this letter, his credibility alone would seem to make it trustworthy. Fieschi was a high-ranking cleric, a canon and an arch-deacon, a notary of the Pope, and eventually, a Bishop. Nevertheless, Paul Doherty, in Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II, provides ample reason to doubt Fieschi’s character and his motives in penning the letter, pointing out that while he was a man of the cloth, he appears to have been far more interested in money than in matters of the spirit. He was a papal tax-collector, and even while away in Italy, he collected money from his various benefices, like an “absentee landlord,” as Doherty characterizes him. He points out that Fieschi had received more benefices and offices under Isabella and Mortimer than under Edward II, suggesting that the Iron Virago and her traitorous paramour may have been bribing him to act as their agent in the papal court, supporting their version of events, for example, when they put down the Earl of Kent’s conspiracy and attempted to quash the rumor that Edward II was still alive. Doherty suggests that when Edward III took power and thereafter began refusing benefices to foreigners and even charging them for any English property they might be granted, Fieschi was looking for a way to make himself just as useful to the new king. He had plenty of insider information about the Earl of Kent’s theories from having spent time in England and from acting as the Pope’s notary. While before, when he was being taken care of by Isabella and Mortimer, he likely supported the claim that Edward II was killed and entombed at Gloucester, later, to indicate to Edward III that he could pose a problem by resuscitating an old conspiracy theory, he might have written this letter in hopes that the new king would bribe him to keep the matter silent. And indeed, shortly afterward, Fieschi was awarded his first bishopric, and the matter of Fieschi’s Hermit King never came to light until the letter was discovered in the 19th century. 

This version of events is perfectly believable as an explanation of the letter, yet explaining away the letter does not necessarily disprove the theory of Edward II’s survival. Even Doherty, after casting such doubt on Fieschi’s letter, gives credence to the idea that Edward II may not have died at Berkeley, focusing instead on the suspicious circumstances of the Dunhead gang’s successful jailbreak as the likeliest way that Edward avoided death. He points to the fact that after the jailbreak, Roger Mortimer himself was obliged to leave the queen’s side and travel to Wales to deal with the matter of the escaped royal prisoner. It makes far more sense, then, if they could not manage to find Edward II, to simply pretend he was dead. It is in fact, a cunning play, whereas just assassinating him when they already had him imprisoned seems needlessly dangerous. In this light, almost everything in the story falls into place. A local wise woman was hired to do the embalming instead of a royal physician, who would surely have recognized that the corpse did not belong to the king. Indeed, perhaps the queen met with this embalmer not to discern whether she’d observed evidence of murder, but rather to investigate whether it truly was her husband’s corpse… or to make certain that the embalmer did not realize it was not the king’s body. And it further explains why the casket was kept so far away from viewers at the funeral, and why Edward II was not laid to rest with his father and grandfather at Westminster Abbey, for perhaps they knew that these were not the remains of the king and did not belong there. It also accounts for the fact that Isabella never honored her late husband’s tomb at Gloucester, for it wasn’t actually him buried there. Indeed, the fact that Edward III also never patronized his own father’s tomb would seem to indicate that he eventually learned this truth about the identity of the person entombed there. On the other hand, Anna Benedetti found some ornate candlesticks displayed at a museum in Turin that were said to have come from the monastery in Italy where she believes Edward II was really buried, and she asserts that they may have been gifts from Edward III to honor his father’s true resting place. They were engraved with lions, the symbol on the Arms of the House of Plantagenet. If this is true, then we can assume that the son finally solved the mystery of the fate of his father, the Hermit King. But of course, this is only one version of history, perhaps just as convincing as another. The truth may be somewhere in between or something that none have yet discovered.

Further Reading

Doherty, Paul. “Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II.” Carroll & Graf, 2003.

Weir, Alison. “Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England.” Ballantine, 2006.

The End of Edward II, Part One: The Iron Virago

In September of 1327, the anointed King of England, Edward II, son of the great Edward Longshanks, Hammer of the Scots, had been languishing in prison for the better part of a year after his wife, Queen Isabella, and her counselor, Roger Mortimer, seized power, forcing him to abdicate to his son, Edward III. Then, he turned up dead, with no apparent mark of physical harm on his royal person. Strangely, rather than sending for the royal physician, a commoner was secretly engaged to disembowel and embalm the deposed king. News of Edward II’s death reached Queen Isabella and soon was spread, calling it a fatal accident, suggesting a fall had killed him. Strangely, many months later, after the embalmed corpse had been entombed, records show that the Queen had the local wise woman who had embalmed her late husband brought to her for a private discussion. Just what information passed between them is lost to time, but years later, it became clear that Edward II’s end was far more mysterious than was at first believed.

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In this edition, we look at the figure of Edward II, remembered by many a historian as a failure, especially as seen beside the imposing figure cut by his father, the warrior monarch Edward I. Edward Longshanks ruled with an eye to a unified kingdom, conquering Wales and keeping it under his thumb through the power of his barons, established in castles across these borderlands. He tried to do the same to Scotland, but was frustrated by the defiance of such famous figures was William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. Not only a fighter but a statesman as well, historians credit Edward I with developing a parliament with genuine power, whom he consulted on financial matters and to ensure that his rule was looked on as wise by all. Little did Edward Longshanks realize that these institutions, a politically powerful baronage and parliament as well as the queen whose marriage to his son he himself had arranged, would eventually exert their power to depose his heir. And he could not possibly have anticipated the mystery that would surround Edward II’s fate.

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Even if he couldn’t have predicted the fate of his son, Edward I may have harbored some doubts about the boy’s fitness to rule. While he labored in his wars against Scotland, his son grew up without a parental figure, becoming something of a scamp, more interested in music and dancing and gambling than statecraft. For his part, Edward Longshanks treated his son more as a political pawn than as an apprentice. Across the Channel, one of his greatest rivals, Philip IV, King of France, held similar aspirations for his kingdom and dynasty, and the two kings had come into conflict over the Duchy of Gascony, a region of southwestern France over which the French and English had fought since it first came into the hands of a Plantagenet when Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine. You may have heard of the central Gascon town of Bordeaux; that’s because it is a major center for wine production today, and such was the case even back then. The fertile region and its vineyards provided tidy profits for the English crown, and Philip IV had seized it and refused to give it back. Embroiled in a war with the Scots, Edward Longshanks could neither afford to go to war with France over the duchy nor to lose its wealth. So he sought a diplomatic solution. In the 1303 Treaty of Paris, Edward took back Gascony on the agreement that his son and heir would wed Philip’s only surviving daughter, Isabella. Philip saw this as a way to eventually put his own grandson on the English throne, thereby in effect extending his dynasty’s power, while Edward really was just biding his time until he could find a way to extricate his son from the arranged marriage. Within less than a century, the conflict over Gascony would lead to the Hundred Years War, but long before that, it would lead to much strife and double-dealing. 

Meanwhile, Edward Longshanks’ son seemed to be developing into more of a kingly figure, attending councils, training to fight in his father’s wars. On the question of his marriage to Isabella of France, he and his father appeared to be in agreement. Edward of Caernarvon, Longshanks’ son, had been 19 years old when he was promised to the eight-year-old daughter of Philip IV and showed no interest in going through with the arrangement. However, Edward of Caernarvon may have had other reasons for resenting the match, reasons that created further discord between himself and his father. Six years earlier, Edward I had introduced a young man from Gascony named Piers Gaveston to his son, and thereafter, the two were inseparable. It is unsurprising that a boy of 13 years old, whose mother was dead, whose father was distant, and whose sisters were married off, would seek some kind of substitute family and develop an intimate relationship with another boy in his household whom he would come to refer to as his “sweet brother,” but as the boys grew into young men, it seemed that the irreverent Gaveston proved to be a corrupting influence on the prince, encouraging him in his pursuit of pleasure and in treating his father’s ministers disrespectfully. The king tried to inhibit his son’s frivolous lifestyle by limiting his spending, which only further rankled the prince, now in his early twenties, and made him even closer with his bosom friend Gaveston. Indeed, the prince’s relationship with Gaveston was deemed inappropriate by many. In the histories that would afterward be written, it is asserted that Prince Edward loved Gaveston above all others, that theirs was a romantic or sexual love, and even that Gaveston had used sorcery to bewitch the future king into doing his bidding. Some have pointed to the prince’s sexual orientation as a reason that he recoiled from his arranged marriage with Isabella. However, there is little evidence of a sexual aspect to his relationship with Gaveston, whereas there is ample evidence that both of them engages in heterosexual acts in that both eventually fathered children with their wives. Of course, this is also no indication that their relationship was not romantic or physical either. Indeed, the surpassing intimacy and astonishing loyalty of their relationship, and the position of esteem and favor that Gaveston enjoyed, does seem to indicate something more than friendship or even brotherhood, but it is enough for our story simply to call him the prince’s favorite. King Edward I recognized this, and when the prince requested that lands be given to Gaveston, Longshanks physically attacked his son, ripping out his hair, throwing him to the ground, calling him a whoreson, and thereafter banishing Gaveston to France. 

The painting Edward II. and his Favourite, Piers Gaveston by Marcus Stone, via Wikimedia Commons

This altercation would be one of the last quarrels the prince had with his father, who died suddenly one morning while arming himself to make war on the Scots. Suddenly Edward of Caernarvon found himself proclaimed King Edward II, and he immediately brought Gaveston back from France and raised him up as if he were an equal, giving his favorite his own niece in marriage and thereby making him a member of the royal family. The two of them ruled together, young and physically attractive, showing a lack of respect for the barons that Longshanks had made so powerful, and openly disdaining to fulfill the obligations Edward II had inherited, such as his arranged marriage to Isabella of France. However, his council warned him that to ignore the treaty his father had signed with Philip IV would mean the loss of Gascony and war with France, and eventually he gave in, marrying Isabella in 1308. At just 13 years old, Queen Isabella was said to be a great beauty, but it is clear that King Edward II preferred the company of his favorite and even for some time slighted his young wife. For example, at his coronation, he displayed his own arms and Gaveston’s arms, but not hers, and instead of sitting with his queen, he sat with his favorite. At the same event, he further insulted the highest nobles of the land by allowing Gaveston to perform the solemn duties of bearing his crown and sword, demonstrating that he considered his friend to be of higher status. And so it went. He gave no lands or money to his wife, and instead took castles that belonged to Isabella’s family and gifted them to Gaveston. Thus, he made enemies not only among his powerful baronage, but also abroad, as Philip IV observed his daughter being dishonored and grew resentful. The focus of everyone’s resentment was the king’s favorite, and eventually, Philip IV declared Gaveston an enemy, and Edward had no choice but to exile his favorite for fear of his baronial opposition receiving French support. Thereafter, Edward II mended his relationship with Isabella and her father. He began to treat her with the respect she was due, and as the Queen grew into a young woman, she proved to be a loyal wife, growing closer to her husband and supporting him in all his decisions. When her father relented in his opposition to Gaveston and the king’s favorite returned to court, she seems to have shrewdly secured her position and come to some agreement with her husband, for she lived in peace and mutual respect with her husband and also became an ally of Gaveston and his family, such that some historians have posited some sort of three-way relationship in which she and Gaveston agreed to share the king’s affections. But as I said before, this is only speculation. 

Unfortunately, this hard won domestic bliss was not to last. In 1312, Thomas of Lancaster, the king’s own cousin and the earl who most vociferously opposed his rule and his relationship with Gaveston, rallied the barons Edward had made enemies of and gathered an army. Between this rebellion and the ongoing war against Scotland, Edward, Isabella, and Gaveston eventually became fugitives, fleeing from castle to castle with their households in tow, seeking refuge until the king could restore himself to a position of authority. In May, Edward was forced to leave his favorite behind at Scarborough Castle, thinking him safe behind its walls. However, the rebel lords laid siege to Scarborough, and Gaveston, running short on supplies, surrendered. Before long, these earls organized an impromptu trial, convicted him of treason, and executed him. Gaveston asked that they not mar his good looks by cutting off his head, which of course was exactly what they did, sending it to the Earl of Lancaster, their leader, for his approval. Edward II was devastated by the loss of his friend, confidant, ally, and perhaps lover, of some fifteen years. He took solace in his wife, and in November of that year, Isabella bore him an heir. Seeking to avoid civil war, Edward was forced to prostrate himself before the Queen’s father, asking Philip IV for help in quelling the rebellion. After they traveled to France and allowed Philip to see his grandson, the heir to the English throne and the culmination of much of his dynastic scheming, he obliged, sending them back home with French support to negotiate a peace with his nobility. Thereafter, in an uneasy alliance with his barons, Edward invaded Scotland and was roundly defeated by Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn. In the wake of this defeat, his greatest enemy, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, took control of the government for a time, proving that Edward’s troubles with baronial opposition were not over. 

The head of Piers Gaveston, 1st Earl of Cornwall, is delivered to Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster, via Wikimedia Commons

For years after Gaveston’s death, Edward and Isabella grew closer and more strongly allied. She bore him more children, and she helped him restore his authority and parry the political thrusts of Lancaster and the rest of his enemies. But she was not alone in aiding him. Hugh Despenser, a courtier and constant ally was always looking out for the king, and Despenser’s son, Hugh the Younger, himself a shrewd politician and seasoned knight, slowly grew in the king’s regard, until eventually he had become the new favorite, clearly enjoying every privilege the king might provide him and exerting significant influence on him. This predictably roused Lancaster and his supporters once again, prompting them to arm their men in London and demand that Hugh Despenser the Younger, and all the Despenser family, be exiled. However, this time, the Queen too appears to have opposed her husband’s favorite. There is some indication that she and Despenser were engaged in a dispute over some minor unpaid debts, but likely it was more than this. Since Gaveston’s death, she had enjoyed the favor of the king, served as his confidant in all matters, and seemingly enjoyed his physical affections as well. It would stand to reason that taking her husband’s attention and favor away from her would be enough to make an enemy of her, to say nothing of the rumors that the king had begun to make Despenser the object of his physical affections. Thus when even his queen demanded that Despenser be exiled, Edward II grudgingly agreed in 1321, and Hugh Despenser the Younger took up the life of a pirate, plying the waters of the English Channel. However, Edward remained in contact with the Despensers and plotted with them to do away with the pesky barons who had opposed him for his entire reign. Within a couple months, he struck at certain strategic positions, and before his dissident earls even realized it, Edward was waging a war that became a reign of terror. After the Battle of Boroughbridge in early spring the next year, he finally captured Lancaster and had his revenge for the death of Gaveston, the man he had loved. The executioner did a poor job on the rebel baron, taking numerous whacks before he managed to separate his head from his shoulders. 

Isabella of France, the Queen of England, found herself embroiled in this Civil War with no clear side to take. She had long taken her husband’s side against the rebellious earls, but she had taken the earls’ side against her husband’s new favorite, Hugh Despenser, who was now returned from his exile and restored to his position as favorite in the king’s court. Moreover, she was given ample further reason to resent Despenser. At one point in 1322, as Edward and Despenser, emboldened after having emerged victorious against the rebel barons, invaded Scotland and were driven back, Isabella found herself nearly captured by Scotsmen, and she blamed Despenser. Then, after her father Philip IV had died and her brother was crowned King Charles IV, Despenser drove Edward II toward war with France, and as an opening salvo, Edward confiscated all of Isabella’s lands and arrested every Frenchman in the country, including members of her household and retinue. There may, of course, have been further reasons for Isabella’s relationship with her husband to deteriorate. The simple fact that she no longer had Edward’s ear might have been enough to stoke her envy, or the possibility that she was aware of some infidelity between Edward and his favorite might have kindled a righteous anger in her. Paul Doherty, author of my principal source, Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II, even suggests that Isabella may have been the victim of some sexual misconduct from Despenser that Edward II failed to censure, a theory arrived at by reading between the lines of some primary sources. However, the last straw was likely when by royal order her children were taken away from her and given into the care of Despenser’s wife. After that, her brother Charles IV invaded Gascony, demanding that Edward II sail to France and talk things out. Fearing for his safety outside London, Edward instead sent Isabella, and it may have been the biggest mistake he ever made. 

Isabella of France welcomed to Paris, via Wikimedia Commons

Here we see Isabella become the “She-Wolf” of legend, the virago ferrea, or Iron Virago, which sobriquet itself encapsulates the different ways she has been viewed, for a virago, in common usage, may have meant an impudent, overbearing, or domineering woman, but the original Latin word denotes a proud, strong, and courageous female warrior. Which definition one thought of in relation to Isabella of France likely depended on one’s opinion of Edward II and his treatment of her. In 1325, she went home to France as her husband’s representative. True to her word, she negotiated a truce, but when it was time to return to England, she claimed that there were further diplomatic matters to resolve, urging him to come there instead and meet with her brother. Still wary of travel, Edward instead agreed to send their son, his heir, a decision that would prove to be Edward’s next great error. As soon as the young prince was in France with her, Isabella made her feelings about her marriage clear. She donned black and declared that she had been made a widow by Despenser, who had come between her and her husband and thereby broken their bond of marriage. With the heir to the throne of England in her power, she held court in France, and by her side, scandalously, appeared a certain advisor whose presence indicated that she had turned entirely against Edward II. His name was Roger Mortimer, formerly one of Edward II’s generals who had risen in rebellion during the Despenser War. Mortimer had been imprisoned in the Tower of London, and fearing an imminent execution, he had made a daring escape, climbing down a rope ladder and swimming across the River Thames. Now this traitor appeared at Isabella’s side, and what was worse, seemed to be involved with her romantically, making a very public cuckold of King Edward II. The Iron Virago’s retaliation could not have been more dramatic than this, and it was only the beginning. 

In 1326, Isabella and Mortimer landed a small army in England, and before long, to Edward and Despenser’s shock, their numbers swelled with the forces of the dissident earls that Isabella had long helped her husband fight against. Edward’s half-brother, the Earl of Norfolk, joined her, as did the new Earl of Lancaster, brother of the cousin that Edward had beheaded. More than that, the merchants, the university scholars, and church bishops all welcomed her progress, and after her promise to punish those loyal to Despenser, a mob of common Londoners stormed the Tower and killed Despenser’s men. Edward tried to rally support and fight this coup, but he simply no longer had the support he needed. Hugh Despenser the Elder was captured at Bristol and was hanged, drawn and quartered, his corpse beheaded and fed to dogs, but a worse fate lay in store for the king’s favorite. Taken to Hereford after his capture, Hugh Despenser the Younger was stripped of clothing, and a crown of stinging nettles forced over his head. Verses of scripture detailing his sins were cut into his skin with knives, whereupon he was placed bleeding on a horse and made to ride slowly through the city of Hereford while a mob hurled whatever they could at him. Next, he was hanged from a fifty-foot gallows but was cut down before he died, disemboweled, and forced to watch his intestines burn before his eyes. Legend has it that, because of the accusations of sodomy made against him, his executioners also severed and burned his genitals in front of him. Only then did they decapitate him. And perhaps most disturbing in this pageant of horrors is the fact that Isabella and Mortimer watched it all and enjoyed a feast in celebration of their enemy’s demise. 

Hugh Despenser is hanged, drawn and quartered while Isabella and Mortimer look on, via Wikimedia Commons

Edward II surrendered to the new Earl of Lancaster, but unlike the others, the king could not simply be summarily executed. He was the anointed King of England, chosen by God to wear the Crown of St. Edward the Confessor. Indeed, there were some who had supported Isabella’s coup who believed she should set aside her paramour Mortimer and return to her husband’s side, seeing the vanquished Despensers as the only true villains. Even Edward’s captor, Henry of Lancaster, whose family had long opposed his favoritism of upstarts, balked at the idea of execution. After much debate, they reached a resolution to convene Parliament and depose the king. For the rest of his life, they determined, Edward II should be kept in relative comfort as a prisoner in a castle. In January 1327, the parliamentary proceedings began, and Edward supposedly refused to appear, though this may have been a lie from his captors to prevent him from speaking in public and eliciting sympathy. The Articles of Deposition included incompetence, reliance on poor counsel, and breaking the oath he took when he was crowned. This constitutional deposition serves as a striking example of how far the power of Parliament had come within a generation, from a tool used by the king for counsel and public relations to a branch of government empowered to dethrone a monarch. Eventually, in order to ensure the throne would go to his son and not Lancaster, or worse yet, Mortimer, Edward II abdicated, and the 15-year-old Prince of Wales was proclaimed Edward III. Soon Edward was released by Lancaster into the custody of Roger Mortimer’s son-in-law, Lord Thomas Berkeley, to be kept in his castle near the border of Wales. Together with his own brother-in-law, Sir John Maltravers, and a knight by the name of Thomas Gurney, Edward was successfully immured at Berkeley Castle, and six months later, Gurney reported to Parliament that the former king had expired due to a fatalis casus, or a deadly accident. 

Just what befell Edward II while at Berkeley Castle must have been a topic of much hushed discussion in those years. The official explanation was some sort of fall, but there was reportedly no mark on the king’s person. Within a few years, as King Edward III came into his majority and the stars of Isabella and Mortimer had begun to fall, investigations into foul play were undertaken. Chroniclers of the time put forth various versions of events. Some suggested that he had been so poorly treated, perhaps on the Queen’s orders, that he eventually died of illness or starvation. The chronicler Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbrook details this abuse, claiming Edward II was fed rotten food and that the carcasses of beasts were left to decompose in a pit by the king’s cell in hopes that Edward would become ill. However, the accuracy of Geoffrey le Baker’s chronicle has been challenged, and he doesn’t himself subscribe to the idea that Edward II died of illness. Rather, he is one of the numerous historians who records a version of events in which orders were given to murder the king in his cell. A few years after Edward’s death, accusations began to fly, and from among them, we find the common threads present in most contemporaneous chronicles. It is said that Roger Mortimer, likely with Queen Isabella’s knowledge, dispatched assassins to Berkeley Castle. Different versions implicate different players as having issued the order, such as Lord Berkeley himself, or his man Maltravers, or even a bishop known to serve Mortimer, but most agree that it came down the chain of command from Mortimer. Others were named as the actual assassins, specifically Thomas Gurney and one William Ockle, both of them Queen Isabella’s men. So the story goes that the former king was smothered, which of course would leave no mark. The more gruesome accounts of Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbrook and others have it that the assassins heated a metal poker and thrust it up the king’s anus and into his intestines, a ghastly fate that one supposes also would not leave an easily discernible mark on the body.

Portrait of Edward II with depiction of his gruesome murder inset, via Wikimedia Commons

There are clear reasons to doubt some of the chroniclers, such as Geoffrey le Baker, who includes in his version that the orders to kill, written in Latin, could be interpreted two ways, as saying “Do not fear to kill Edward, it is a good thing,” or as saying “Do not kill Edward, it is good to be afraid.” A very dramatic wrinkle in the tale that suggests perhaps the entire assassination could have been a mistake, the result of a misconstrued sentence. The problem is this detail appears to be plagiarized from another chronicler’s account of a Hungarian queen’s murder. We do have other chroniclers that report the same grisly manner of death, but this may be something of a rumor, a kind of urban legend. Edward being impaled in the anus appears to have been viewed by many at the time as a symbolic punishment for his supposed sexual proclivities, which sounds very much like a tale that might have been fabricated after the fact. If he had been murdered that way, it would seem the only person that might have seen evidence of it would have been the local wise woman who had disemboweled the body to embalm it. It stands to reason that she would have been able to observe any damage done by a red hot poker thrust into the intestines. This might actually explain why she was engaged to perform the task rather than a royal physician. Was it some kind of cover-up? The story goes that Queen Isabella met with the embalmer because she had asked to receive her husband’s heart, but what if the queen wanted a further report on her husband’s body, kind of like an autopsy report. If that were the case, is it possible that the Iron Virago had had no knowledge of her husband’s murder? That she suspected foul play herself as early as the funeral and was looking for evidence? And what did the embalmer tell her? Was Edward II even murdered? Or were these mere rumors lobbed years later as political barbs. Or… was there some other possibility? Might the queen have been questioning the embalmer based on some other suspicion? For example, might she have been concerned that the body this wise woman examined in secret did not even belong to Edward II? 

This is the question that we’ll explore further in Part 2 of The End of Edward II, and it will crack this story open in new directions you won’t anticipate.

Further Reading

Doherty, Paul. “Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II.” Carroll & Graf, 2003.

Weir, Alison. “Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England.” Ballantine, 2006.

A Very Historically Blind Christmas II: Father Christmas

Allow me to place this furry hat on your head, fill your hand with a warm cup of either mulled cider or eggnog, and lead you into the drunken revelry. Once you’ve had your fill of merry-making, let us warm ourselves by the fire and watch the snow fall outside the window. Settle in a comfortable chair as I share a remembrance of times long past and of the Christmases of yore. Those of you who joined me last year at this time may remember that we spoke of the ancient origins of this holiday. We spoke of midwinter festivities, of Saturnalia and the Kalends, as the origin of many traditions such as gift giving and decorating with greenery, and we looked back on Mithra and the celebration of Sol Invictus as the original December 25th holy day, long before Christianity placed Jesus Christ’s birth on the same day and made it a central part of their liturgical calendar, a day when the faithful are obliged to attend Mass. For much of the Middle Ages, the Christmas season was a time of conflict between ancient revelry customs and modern religious observance, with images of the Divine Infant, Santo Niño, the Christ Child, personifying the innocence and purity to which all should be aspiring in that time of debauched and licentious carousal. But the Christ Child was not not the only incarnation of the holiday. There is a long and rich tradition of the concept of Christmas being personified, of a figure embodying the holiday, whether it be a real person or a fictional figure, like a mascot, which of course we have today in the rotund and cherry-nosed character we all think of as Father Christmas. So refill your cup, cut yourself a slice of pie, and follow me back to Christmases past.

Stare into the flickering candle flame and follow it back to dawn of Christmas, to the midwinter celebrations of antiquity. Recall our discussions of Saturnalia, the mid-December Roman festival in honor of Saturn, which itself may have evolved from even older solstice traditions among farmers, and the Kalends, a kind of New Year’s festival that followed. We see the decoration of homes and public places with greenery, and the giving of gifts in the form of cerei candles. And as today, it was a time of merrymaking, but the way we think of making merry during the season today may be a bit more tame than Romans thought of it then. As the celebration represented the death inherent in winter followed by the rebirth of light and warmth and hope, as symbolized by the common sight of lit candles, it was a true carnival, in the sense of the word meaning “a farewell to the flesh.” It was an occasion of wild and riotous excess, with not only feasting and music and dancing, but drunkenness and gambling and promiscuity. Saturnalia and the Kalends were times when the norms of society were rescinded and social order upended. Slaves not only ceased their work; they sat at the head of their masters’ tables, raised briefly to a station in life they could never enjoy on any other day of the year. This tradition of inebriation and topsy-turvy social order persisted in midwinter seasonal celebrations long after the Fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity, with not only the rich and poor trading places, but also men dressing as women. Mid-December remained a time for debauchery and reversing the social order all through the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period. In England, the custom of wassailing appeared, the word evolving from a Middle English toast to one’s health or wholeness. Wassail bowls were popular for communal drinking, and as wassailers often went house to house singing and offering drinks from their bowls or asking that their bowls be filled, it appears to be a forerunner of Christmas caroling. But eventually wassailing became for some an opportunity for thuggery in this topsy-turvy season, and wassailers were sometimes known to force their way drunkenly into homes demanding to be given food and drink. Considering this, as well as the wanton behavior that resulted in a boom of bastard September children every year, it is perhaps no surprise that Puritans outlawed Christmas celebrations in the mid-1600s, both in England under Cromwell and in New England, under the Puritan government of Massachusetts.

Photogravure of a drawing depicting a drunken reveler being carried away by his friends during the Saturnalia, c. 1884, via Wikimedia Commons

To better understand why Puritans might reject such Christmas traditions as further examples of the Catholic Church’s decadence, it must be clarified that such customs were not only practiced by pagans or the godless. The church also took part in these bacchanals, in the form of the Feast of Fools, a tradition among medieval clergy in Western Europe in which low-ranking clerics took over their churches, holding mock services in which they dressed as choir women, sang indecent songs, burned old shoes as if they were incense, gambled danced among the pews, drank themselves silly, and even went out upon the town making lewd gestures, laughing drunkenly, and generally raising hell and making spectacles of themselves. Beyond the debauchery, one particular tradition hearkens clearly back to Saturnalia, and it is here where we first begin to see the Christmas season embodied in a figure. At Saturnalia, a mock king was sometimes raised up to preside over the festivities, and we see this custom echoed throughout history. During the Feast of Fools, on December 28th, Holy Innocent’s Day, a choirboy was chosen to take over as bishop for the day, complete with small robes and jewelry made specifically for this so-called Boy Bishop. Likewise, during festivities of Twelfth Night, the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas, a cake was shared by all, and he who received the slice into which a bean had been baked was pronounced the Bean King and would then preside over the party, choosing a queen and naming other party goers to positions in his mock court. This tradition of mock kings at Christmas time is again further echoed in the late medieval and Renaissance custom of appointing a Christmas Lord to preside over the seasonal merrymaking. This Master of Merry Disports, as he was called, or otherwise, this Abbot of Unreason, or most commonly, Lord of Misrule, acted as a kind of host for all the dancing and mummery, the masquerades and feasts, leading motley groups of merrymakers through the streets and into churches, ringing bells and singing. These roles, filled by random men or children from a variety of socioeconomic classes, represent perfectly the embodiment of the old ways of Christmas, of topsy-turvy role reversal and reckless jollification. But for the history of the character that embodies Christmas as it is celebrated today, we must look at far more recent history.

Feast of the Bean King, c. 1640-45, via Wikimedia Commons

Today, when one thinks of Christmas personified, one doubtless thinks of Santa Claus, that jolly old gift giver with his own elaborate mythos. Now parents, if your children happen to be within earshot, you may want to put in earbuds so that they don’t learn all the secrets of Santa before he wants them to. ...OK, if the little ones are no longer listening, I’ll continue. To fully grasp how the fictional character of Santa Claus was invented, and what historical basis there may have been for him, we must actually begin in early 19th-century America and that inventor of enduring myths, Washington Irving. Many know Irving for his composition of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a perennial Halloween favorite, and I spoke last year, around Columbus Day, about his role in creating some of the myths surrounding Christopher Columbus as well. Some may not be as aware, however, of his part in mythologizing the figure of Santa Claus. In 1809, Irving wrote A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, a satirical look at New York life narrated by a fictional Dutch historian. It was through this book that he introduced a character from Dutch folklore to American culture, the figure of Saint Nicholas, called Sinter Claas by the Dutch, a much venerated and mythologized Greek miracle worker whose cult had spread across numerous European countries since his death in the 4th century CE. Across most of Europe, he was the patron saint of childhood, but in Irving’s History of New-York, Knickerbocker presented him as the patron saint of New York, and thereafter, others took the idea and ran with it. The next year, 1810, one John Pintard, the founder of the New-York Historical Society and a big proponent of public holidays commemorating history, having helped establish the 4th of July, Washington’s birthday, and Columbus Day as holidays, decided to observe St. Nicholas Day, the feast day of the Saint, on December 6th. New York was an economically divided place that saw class unrest during the holidays, and he envisioned his banquet as an opportunity to resurrect the ancient topsy-turvy traditions, when the poor and the rich dined side by side. Pintard commissioned a poster for his banquet that depicted “Sancte Claus,” but St. Nicholas had not yet taken the form of Santa as we know it today, looking more like an ascetic clergyman, slender and barefoot in a tabard.

Broadsheet depicting St. Nicholas as “Sancte Claus,” by John Pintard, 1810, via Wikimedia Commons

Some eleven years later, in 1821, Irving revisited his History of New-York, and its second edition shows either some new inventions of Irving’s or reflects the changing image of St. Nicholas in America during the intervening years. Irving describes him smoking a pipe and bringing presents to children in a magical flying wagon that soars over the treetops. Then, St. Nicholas took his essential and final form a couple years later, with the December 1823 publication of the poem “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” in an upstate New York newspaper. For more than 150 years, this classic poem, originally titled “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” was attributed to Clement Clark Moore, who legend has it composed the piece during a sleigh ride into lower Manhattan to buy a turkey for Christmas dinner. A literary poet and classical scholar, Moore thought it mere doggerel and wouldn’t have his name attached to it for twenty years. However, in 1996, the literary sleuth Don Foster made the convincing argument that it was actually penned by judge and amateur poet Henry Livingston, Jr., whose surviving work far better matches, in tone as well as meter, the poem in question. But regardless of who wrote the poem, Santa Claus had arrived in all his particulars. Irving’s flying wagon full of gifts had become a sleigh, and it now was hitched to reindeer, each with a name. St. Nicholas descended through the chimney to enter homes by the hearth, where stockings had been hung for him to fill with gifts. Here we see the universal modern image etched forever in verse: the rosy cheeks and red nose, the droll smile and white beard, the rotund figure dressed all in furs. Only one particular seems to have been ignored in subsequent iterations: in the poem, he is a small elf, his conveyance a “miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer.” As his legend grew, so too did his size, and the elfin element of the legend does survive, of course, in Santa’s army of elf tinkerers at the North Pole. With the small exception of his stature, the figure of Santa Claus seems to have leaped from the imagination of 19th century New Yorkers fully formed. But that is not in fact the case. They built upon an existing mythos surrounding the figure of St. Nicholas, and they incorporated elements from traditions surrounding other seasonal figures in European folklore, all of which we must explore in order to fully grasp the origins of the character we call Santa Claus.

The notion of St. Nicholas as an elf, and later of elves toiling in his service at the North Pole, seems to have been a clear syncretism of folkloric traditions. Elves and faeries have long been associated with Christmastime, stretching all the way back to Scandinavian antiquity. Icelandic tradition holds that the thirteen Jola-Sveinar, sons of a troll named Gryla, arrived in households one at a time during the Yuletide and departed just as slowly, playing pranks and stealing food and sometimes abducting naughty children. These Christmas elves are mirrored by the Swedish Jultomten, the Danish Julnissen, and the Finnish Joulutonttuja, Yuletide elves known to either reward or punish, for whom householders left out offerings of milk and porridge, as well as tobacco and booze. Over time these Christmas elves came to be represented much like modern day garden gnomes, white-bearded with a pointed hat, which seems to be a clear inspiration not only for the diminutive stature of the “jolly old elf” in the famous aforementioned poem, but also for the modern image of Santa Claus and our annual offerings of milk and cookies. Another influence on the image of Santa Claus was the English folkloric character of Father Christmas, also called Sir Christmas, a robust and bearded character dressed in a fur-trimmed robe that appeared in the late Middle Ages as a symbol of the season. Perhaps the most famous iteration of this character was the Ghost of Christmas Present in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. But not all the folkloric and mythological characters from which Santa Claus evolved were so recognizable. For example, much of his legend appears to have been borrowed from ancient winter goddess traditions out of Northern Europe. Longtime listeners may remember one of the digressions I took while discussing white lady ghosts in Germany years ago. That rabbit hole led me to the goddess tradition of Berchta, or Perchta, the spinner, a spirit who took great interest in matters of the household, a disheveled witch-like character who inspected homes for cleanliness, rewarding the diligent children who kept houses neat and punishing the indolent and naughty children who made messes. Berchta flew through the night skies during the Twelve Days of Christmas, accompanied by phantom creatures and ghost children, entering homes to make her judgment on the family’s industriousness, and to rock babies in their cradles. If the members of a household did not placate her by leaving out the remnants of a special dish, then it was said she cut open their stomachs as they slept and ate her fill of their undigested meal. There were numerous versions of this winter goddess Berchta or Perchta, including Hertha, Bertha, Holde, Holda, Holle, and later iterations like the German Frau Gaude. In some variations, the goddess was said to gain entry into homes via the smoke of a hearthfire. Therefore, we have in her a figure who enters houses through the chimney, who expects a treat to be left out for her, and who rewards or punishes children based on naughtiness.

Depiction of Perchta accompanied by spirits, 1863, via Wikimedia Commons

While all of these elements give context for the idea of a gift-giving supernatural spirit, an elf or gnome or goddess or witch, that visits children at Christmastime, how did such pagan traditions come to be associated with St. Nicholas, the namesake of Santa Claus? We know very little of the figure called St. Nicholas. He was born sometime around the late 3rd century in southwest Asia Minor, probably in the city of Patara, in the district of Lycia, and eventually became the bishop of Myra, in what is today Demre, Turkey. He survived the persecution of Christians in the area during the first several years of the 4th century, and he was said to have attended the Council of Nicaea, although some historians have found that his name did not start appearing on lists of those who attended the Nicaean council until the Middle Ages, after he had become a popularly venerated figure. While at first and for a long time, his veneration as a saint was limited to only his homeland, eventually it spread across Europe, with his feast day of December 6th probably memorializing the day of his death. Today, because of the vast legendarium that has grown around his life, he is without doubt the most famous saint in existence, and in these legends can be seen some seeds for the legend of Santa Claus as we know it today, as well as influences from some of the pagan traditions that already existed in the countries where his legend spread. But not all the stories about St. Nicholas can be seen to connect to the Santa Claus story. Some were merely the acts of a godly man, and some miracles attributed to him by his cult seem like the common fodder of hagiographers. For example, Nicholas of Myra is said to have confronted a group of thieves and convinced them to return their stolen goods, a story that led to “clerks of St. Nicholas” becoming a medieval euphemism for thieves. Then there were multiple tales of St. Nicholas stopping innocent people from being executed for crimes they did not commit. One involved standing up to Emperor Constantine when he wanted to execute three soldiers for disloyalty, and another had Nicholas intervening by seizing the sword of a soldier who was about to behead an innocent man. Furthermore, Myra being a port town, many prayers were directed toward safe passage for their sailors and the grain they carried. Many of the older traditions surrounding St. Nicholas as a wonderworker have him performing miracles at sea, as a guardian of seafarers. One legend tells of Nicholas calming a storm during a voyage to the Holy Land, and others suggested that St. Nicholas saved the lives of sailors who called to him for help, making him something of a patron saint of sailors. Indeed, some depictions of Nicholas have him riding a white horse that symbolized the froth of a cresting wave, much like the pagan sea god Poseidon, leading to speculation that the cult of St. Nicholas was absorbing pagan traditions long before the Middle Ages.

Many have looked for connections to Christmas traditions in the legendarium of St. Nicholas, and some of the connections that have been made are dubious, such as the claim that Nicholas was so young upon becoming bishop of Myra that he was called “the Boy Bishop,” a claim for which there appears to be no support beyond the fact that boy bishops were customarily chosen on St. Nicholas Day. But one begins to get an inkling of the eventual course his legends would take when one hears the tales that cemented his reputation as a gift-giver and patron saint of children. The central story of his legendarium in which the tropes of Santa Claus can be seen is the story of the three maidens. In this tale, which seems to have originated in the 8th century, long after his death, a young Nicholas is said to have become aware that three virtuous young ladies faced a terrible fate. They were of age to marry, but because their father could afford no dowries, he intended to sell them as prostitutes instead. Springing into action, Nicholas, who apparently had plenty of money, secretly crept up to the man’s house at night and tossed a bag of gold through an open window. The gold made it possible for the man to marry off his eldest daughter, and the next night, he was surprised to see another bag of gold fly through his window, enabling the marriage of his middle daughter. On the third night, when a third bag of gold was thrown into the house, the father raced outside and caught Nicholas in the act. He thanked Nicholas profusely, but Nicholas asked him to keep his gifts secret. Later versions of this story claim that Nicholas climbed onto the roof and dropped the gold through the chimney, which may in fact be a syncretization of the Nicholas legend with that of Berchta entering homes through chimney smoke. Some variations have it that Nicholas’s gifts of gold fell into some stockings that had been placed by the fire to dry, thus resulting in the tradition of Christmas stockings, but this too may be the result of syncretism, as some scholars have pointed to ancient Norse Yuletide traditions as the origin of Christmas stockings. During the Yuletide, Odin was said to ride through the skies leading his Wild Hunt, and children who filled their shoes with straw or carrots to feed Odin’s horse Sleipnir might in the morning find their shoes full of candy and gifts to repay their kindness. But regardless of whether these particular traditions originated from legends about St. Nicholas or were incorporated from pagan traditions, we do know that Nicholas was associated with charitable and secret gift-giving, such that, after his death, it became common when any gift was received from an unknown source to attribute it to St. Nicholas.

“The Story of St Nicholas: Giving Dowry to Three Poor Girls” by Fra Angelico, c. 1447-48, via Wikimedia Commons

Indeed, death did not halt the growth of St. Nicholas’s legendarium, for some of his most famous miracles were said to have been performed from beyond the grave. In one story, when a Christian man swore by St. Nicholas to repay a loan to a Jewish moneylender but then tried to cheat him, St. Nicholas took notice. The moneylender took the Christian to court, and the debtor brought a hollow staff full of gold, which he handed to the moneylender before swearing he had given back all the money to the lender--a technical truth since he had given the lender his staff to hold. Afterward taking back his staff, he went on his way, but the spirit of St. Nicholas caused a cart to run him down in the street and break open the staff, revealing the gold. The Jewish moneylender refused to take the money, however, because he did not think the man deserved to die, but when St. Nicholas raised the cheating debtor back to life, the moneylender converted to Christianity. After this, Nicholas came to represent fairness in financial dealings and became a patron of moneylenders. The three bags of gold he gave for the three maidens became three balls of gold, a symbol taken up by the Medici banking family in Renaissance Italy, and an icon that can be seen even today decorating the establishments of that most common of modern moneylender: the pawnbroker. Thus St. Nicholas has as part of his character a sense of justice, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. Then there is the legend that truly cemented his reputation as a guardian of children: the story of the Three Students. This medieval tradition out of 12th-century France holds that a wicked innkeeper received three young men who were traveling through his region, and while they slept, he murdered them so that he could take their money. The innkeeper chopped the students into pieces and packed their dismembered corpses into pickle barrels, and he would have surely escaped justice for this heinous crime if St. Nicholas had not been watching from on high. The story tells us that Nicholas made the students whole again and resurrected them. Over time, these young students were depicted more and more as children, just as the three maidens were depicted more and more as little girls, and St. Nicholas’s reputation as not only a bringer of gifts but as a protector of children was complete. All he needed now were Odin’s fur coat and hearty frame and the twinkling charm of an elf, both of which he collected as his legend spread through pagan northern Europe.

From La Légende du Grand Saint Nicolas, published by the Société de S. Augustin, Desclee, De Brouwer & Cie., Paris-Lille-Bruges, ca. early 1800s, via StNicholasCenter.org

Today, St. Nicholas enjoys an odd position. Through the evolution of his legend and the corruption of his name, he has become a universal symbol of Christmas as Santa Claus, and many still celebrate his name day to remember him as a saint. However, the Roman Catholic Church has always had a conflicted relationship with Nicholas. His veneration predated any official canonization process, and it has been suggested that some in the church are put off by the saint’s popularity, especially insofar as he seems to have eclipsed the Christ child in his embodiment of Christmas. Indeed, one of his names, Kris Kringle, appears to have derived from Christkindel, a word for the baby Jesus, so it seems the gravity of the legendarium of St. Nicholas is such that it pulls in not only pagan traditions but Christian ones a well. It is a snowball that started rolling in the 4th century and has grown to become a massive, unstoppable folkloric force that assimilates everything in its path. Perhaps in an attempt to resist this relentless legend, as part of a 1969 revision of its calendar of saints, the Roman Catholic Church made veneration of St. Nicholas optional, but the saint remains an important figure in both the Anglican Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. In fact, in 1972, after reducing St. Nicholas’s position, the Roman Catholic Church gave the bones and other relics of the saint to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Today, the supposed remains of the saint who became Santa are kept in New York, a fact that the myth-maker Washington Irving and his fictional narrator Diedrich Knickerbocker would truly appreciate.

Saturday Evening Post cover by Normal Rockwell, 1920, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Elliott, Jock. Inventing Christmas: How Our Holiday Came to Be. Harry M. Abrams, 2002.

Flanders, Judith. Christmas: A Biography. St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Gulevich, Tanya. Encyclopedia of Christmas. Omnigraphics, 2000.

Kelly, Joseph F. The Origins of Christmas. Liturgical Press, 2004.