Drake's Plate: A Brazen Plot

In the summer of 1579, Sir Francis Drake, an English privateer on a secret mission for Queen Elizabeth, made landfall on the other side of the world. He had embarked with five ships in 1577, tasked with sailing around South America to the Pacific and capturing Spanish treasure galleons off of Peru and up the coast of the Americas. After much attrition, with his fleet reduced to one ship, the Golden Hind, he struck out north in search of the Northwest Passage, a much theorized route through the Arctic Ocean that not only would have taken him back to Europe but also would have proven to be a valuable trade route. Turning back due to inclement weather, he landed in 1579 in a beautiful place that he dubbed Nova Albion. This port was somewhere on the coast of modern day California. He encamped there for five weeks, gathering provisions and repairing the Golden Hind in preparation for circumnavigating the globe. Before their departure, he erected a small monument, a plate of brass declaring the land property of Elizabeth I, asserting that the natives of the region had freely given up rights of ownership to Her Majesty, and affixing a coin within a hole in the plate so as to leave there a picture of the queen. The details of this secret mission were kept confidential for more than 10 years, and eventually all the first-hand reports of his voyage would be lost in a fire at Whitehall Palace in 1698. But second-hand reports and Drake’s own later mention of this brass plate affixed to a post somewhere in California, evidence of the earliest English landing in America and their first contact with Native Americans, have long tantalized historians, making it a McGuffin to rival any that Indiana Jones ever pursued, and the story of its eventual discovery is a saga all its own.

In the Introduction of this paper, I’d certainly want to thank all the investors and supporters of the academic study, especially the new contributors, like so-and-so. I’d especially like to thank Karen, who after my recent announcement that I’d be suspending the billing of my patrons during the pandemic chose to bankroll the project with a generous one-time donation on my website. Thanks again, Karen. [Hi Patrons! In the next episode] In this episode, I tell a story that I wanted to include in my episode on E Clampus Vitus, but which was too big to encompass in a mere paragraph at the end of the episode. It involves some prominent members of the Yerba Buena Chapter Redivivus, which was responsible for reviving E Clampus Vitus in the 1930s. This group’s rank and file was full of professional historians, officers of historical societies, journal publishers, and artifact collectors. One among these was the famed historian of the American West, Herbert Eugene Bolton, the originator of an entire theory and school of American historiography whose principal tenet was that U.S. history can only be properly understood in context with the history of all colonial powers and other American countries influenced by colonialism. He spent most of his career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he helped to establish the Bancroft Library as a major center for research. It was here that he held forth in classes of up to a thousand students about the legendary lost artifact of English colonialism that haunted him: the brass plate reportedly left behind by Sir Francis Drake at his landing place in California. It was a mystery he had always hoped to solve before the conclusion of his long and lauded career, and he regularly urged his students to search for it, marshalling them to his cause like his own personal expeditionary force. Thus it perhaps did not come as much of a surprise when, in February 1937, someone came to him with an artifact that appeared to be the very plate of brass he had so long yearned to hold in his hands. And what better person to scrutinize such a find and verify its authenticity? Surely he, of all experts, was best equipped to detect a fraud. But could the desire for it to be genuine have clouded even this eminent scholar’s shrewd judgment?

Herbert Eugene Bolton in 1905, via Wikimedia Commons

In the summer of 1936, one Beryle Shinn, employee of an Oakland dry goods store, was driving along a road near Corte Madera Creek, not far from San Quentin Prison in the Bay Area, when his tire went flat, forcing him to coast over to the shoulder. As a Clamper version of the story would later tell it, he then felt the need to defecate, so he went in search of a secluded spot to relieve himself. Through a fence he went, and up a ridge to a rocky outcropping where he enjoyed a gorgeous vista while emptying his bowels. It was then, as he groped about for something with which to wipe his posterior, that his hand came to rest on a blackened sheet of metal. He carried the plate back to his car, not because he believed it to be valuable, but because he thought it might be useful in repairing his car, which besides a burst tire apparently also had a hole in its cabin. It was months before he decided to try his hand at fixing his vehicle using the metal plate, though, and when he looked at it again, he saw that it bore some kind of inscription. Scraping and wiping off the soiled surface, he saw a date etched onto its face: 1579. Shinn then showed the plate to a co-worker at his store who just happened to be a UC Berkeley student. Recognizing the name “Drake” in the plate’s inscription and being aware of Professor Bolton’s longstanding search for Drake’s plate, this co-worker urged Shinn to take the artifact to Bolton. Herbert Bolton was, of course, ecstatic at the sight of it. He was 67 years old at the time and believed that the discovery of Drake’s Plate could serve as the culmination of his already impressive career. Right away, he brought in Allen Chickering, President of the California Historical Society, hoping to raise the money to buy it from Shinn before the clerk realized how much the item might actually fetch at auction. The two of them went out to the place where Shinn claimed to have found it, and afterward, they made an offer of $2,500 to buy it. At this point, Shinn started playing hard to get and even gave them a scare by taking the plate back home and going incommunicado for most of a week. Chickering, worried about losing the find, went all in, offering $3,500 and writing up a statement that took sole responsibility for the plate if disputes of ownership were raised or even if allegations of fraud were made. Shinn took the deal, leaving both Bolton, Chickering, and the Historical Society financially invested in a historical find they had yet to test for authenticity.

These parties were not the only ones concerned about proving the find genuine. Robert Gordon Sproul, the President of UC Berkeley, was also growing concerned, wary that Bolton may have blundered in rushing to acquire the object. The place it had been found, after all, was far from Drake’s Bay, where it had always been thought that Drake had landed. Bolton reassured him, though, that the appropriate tests would of course be performed. However, after performing no further tests beyond comparing the text inscribed on the plate with the surviving descriptions of the historical plate, he published a work and declared to the public that the plate had “apparently” been found, asserting that “[t]he authenticity of the tablet seems to me beyond all reasonable doubt.” The plot thickened, however, a few days after the news of the find spread, when a chauffeur named William Caldeira came forward to say that he had seen that plate back in 1933. According to him, he had driven his client, another member of the California Historical Society, out to Drake’s Bay to do some hunting, and while he waited, he poked around the car and found the plate. He had wanted to show it to the Historical Society member whom he was driving, but it was too dark to examine it, so he just stuck it in his car door pocket. A couple weeks later, while cleaning out his car, he decided it was garbage and tossed it out on the side of a road near San Quentin. This account resolved the issue of the plate’s discovery so far from Drake’s Bay, where it had long been agreed Drake had landed. But there still remained the mystery of how it had gotten from the roadside to the ridgetop. Further testimony emerged, however, to account for this discrepancy as well. One Joseph Cattaneo, apparently a convict returning to the prison at San Quentin, saw the plate on the side of the road in 1936 and carried it up to the hilltop to conceal it for later retrieval. This seemed to explain everything… except there was another claim, by one Florence Schatti, that she and her friend had seen the plate on the hilltop where Shinn would find it two years before Cattaneo claims to have carried it there. Someone appeared to be mistaken or lying.

San Quentin Prison, as it appeared in the 1930s, via These Americans

Suspicions lingered, and when a manuscript specialist named Henry Haseldon wrote a paper in September questioning the plate’s authenticity, Bolton and Chickering were quick to defend the artifact and the honesty of both Shinn and Caldeira. To answer any further criticism, the University and the Historical Society engaged a respected metallurgist named Cohn Fink to perform electrochemical tests on the plate. For seven months, he and his team completed a battery of tests on the artifact, and their report affirmed that the composition of the alloy and the patina all stood up to scrutiny as originating from the time of Sir Francis Drake. To protests that the plate was actual brass, as in an alloy of copper and zinc, whereas the Old English word “brasse” as used on the plate actually referred to bronze as only alloys of copper and tin were made in England at the time, their explanation was that the plate itself must have been of Spanish origin—an acceptable explanation since Drake had been seizing Spanish goods and treasure throughout his voyage. As for why the plate lacked the green oxidization known as verdigris that would be expected on a brass plate of such age, their simplistic answer was that it must have been because California’s climate was so mild. Despite the lameness of these defenses, their report was generally accepted. By the end of that same year, the plate was a centerpiece of the Golden Gate International Exposition, and in the years to follow, it would be featured as the authentic Drake plate in numerous textbooks, histories, and magazines, including National Geographic. Copies were given to Lady Bird Johnson when she was the First Lady and more than once to Queen Elizabeth II. Nevertheless, whispers behind the scenes continued, suggesting the find was a fraud, and even hinting at inside knowledge of who had perpetrated it. And eventually, in the 1970s, the truth became known. The plate of brass was indeed a hoax, one perpetrated by members of Bolton’s own roisterous chapter of E Clampus Vitus, and they had given him every opportunity to realize it and save himself from the disgrace of ending his career as the butt of a joke.

The members of Chapter Redivivus of course knew of Professor Bolton’s preoccupation with the Drake Plate, and so, being diehard pranksters, they saw a perfect opportunity to play a joke on their fellow Clamper. George Ezra Dane, who had co-founded Chapter Redivivus and resuscitated the Order of E Clampus Vitus along with Carl Wheat, was responsible for initiating the prank. He asked fellow Clamper George Barron, curator of San Francisco’s de Young Museum, to design the plate, which he did, writing the inscription based on the account of the plate written in Drake’s The World Encompassed. He didn’t bother much to get the orthography and phraseology historically accurate, since the hoax, it seems, was never meant to do any more than vex Herbert Bolton. Mostly, he just replaced U’s with V’s. He bought the plate itself, a piece of rolled brass, from a ship chandlery in Alameda and had his neighbor, an artist, inscribe it using a hammer and chisel. The letters were all caps, not Elizabethan at all, but again, this was just a silly joke, they thought. In fact, the artist who inscribed it even left a signature, a large C with a little capital G inside it, for George Clark. And to top it off, before planting it somewhere they hoped it would be found, they actually daubed the back of the plate with the letters ECV, for E Clampus Vitus, in fluorescent paint, so that under certain light, the identity of the pranksters would be revealed. Imagine their delight when, according to plan, it was discovered and brought to Bolton and he fell for it! Then imagine their unease when Bolton convinced the President of the California Historical Society, on whose board of directors George Ezra Dane sat, to invest an enormous sum in buying the plate and accept responsibility for it. Finally, imagine their dread when expert after expert appeared to confirm the plate’s authenticity, explaining away all the obvious problems with it. It’s an alloy that the English didn’t make? Well, it must be something Drake picked up along the way. No verdigris? California has a miraculous climate that causes no rust, I guess.  Even George Clark’s signature, the G within the C, they explained as being a title of Drake’s, Captain General, although this was not a title in use at the time. And the hammer marks all along the edges of the brass, applied to hide the signs of its commercial shearing, and on the surface of the plate, where Clark had attempted to flatten lettering that had been raised by his chiseling method? Those had clearly been made by the poor wretch tasked with attaching the plate to the “great post” Drake had described. Surely that poor man’s thumbs had been much abused by the errant hammer that day. But perhaps most shocking was the fact that a team of scientists failed to notice the fluorescent confession painted on the back of the plate.

The supposed Drake Plate pictured with the hammering plate used by its counterfeiters to planish it, licensed by a Creative Commons International Attribution-ShareAlike license from creator Robert Stupack, via Wikimedia Commons

Dane and the other Clampers in the California Historical Society could not easily come forward once the hoax had gone that far, so instead they tried to nudge Bolton into a realization of the fraud. In May, the month after Bolton’s initial pronouncement of its authenticity, his Clamper friends dedicated a plaque near Tuoloumne City that was itself a brass plate with chiseled lettering that replaced U’s with V’s. This one was dedicated by Chief William Fuller of the mi-Wuk tribe, and it revoked the grant of land supposedly surrendered to Sir Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth so long ago. Clearly, at least in part, the stunt was meant to show Bolton how a similar plate could easily be manufactured, but Bolton appeared not to take note, as he was more concerned by the scholarly challenges to the plate’s authenticity that had begun to appear. Then in September, one Clamper of the Yerba Buena Chapter sent a letter to Bolton purporting to be from “Consolidated Brasse and Novelty Company,” hinting at the modern manufacture of the plate by saying, “I am sure you will be interested in our special line of brass plates. These plates have a beautiful finish. We make them in all sizes and shapes and in a variety of scripts and dates. We have a very attractive Elizabethan line….” Bolton either failed to understand the letter or assumed the letter was itself a prank and continued in his course seeking evidence of the plate’s authenticity. Finally, his Chapter of the Clampers release a new book of tall tales about the exploits of ancient Vituscan brothers, and the first entry in this anthology was all about the newfound Drake plate. In it, they detailed its discovery as well as its testing, carefully pointing out every reason to doubt its authenticity. It featured a frontispiece drawing of the ancient chief Hi-Oh of the Mi-Wuks who was said to have given his tribe’s land to the English and in their version was said to have used the plate as a piece of jewelry after Drake departed. Around his neck in the sketch he wore the plate, on which can be seen the letters ECV, a hint at the invisible signature on its backside, and in their account, it even indicates that these letters can be seen using ultra violet fluorescence or infra-red light. According to their fanciful version of Drake’s account, the plate had been inscribed by Drake’s chaplain, a member of E Clampus Vitus, and so, cleverly, the story ends with the confession, hidden in plain sight, that the plate was “the rightful property of our ancient Order.”

But as we have seen, none of their efforts were successful. Professor Herbert Bolton was so intent on this artifact being the real deal that he made sure it was found to be so, and he was aided in his endeavor by many a scholar and scientist who likewise wanted to believe. Dane and the other Clamper perpetrators of the fraud simply gave up and let their prank become accepted history, thereafter only discussing their part in the hoax in whispers. Eventually, long after Bolton went to his final rest satisfied with the plate’s legitimacy, these whispers caused other scholars to look closer and to discover the fraud, and so today this is no longer a Blind Spot. However, enough unanswered questions remain that some continue to have doubts. When did the Clampers create the plate, and where did they plant it? It seems impossible that they would have planted it anywhere other than Drake’s Bay, so had they been disappointed when their fake plate disappeared and then surprised when it appeared again all the way over by San Quentin and still made its way to their mark, Bolton? Or was Shinn working for them? If so, what about Caldeira and the others with their conflicting testimonies? Some have even suggested that there were two plates, that which had been found in Drake’s Bay and lost again years earlier, and that which had been brought to Bolton. Could one of them have been the real Drake Plate? Or is the real plate lost forever, a missing piece of our past? Or was there never a plate to begin with, as some have suggested, and was the whole story of a monument marking a land deal with the natives concocted by Drake to strengthen English colonial claims to the New World? These are questions we may never answer, unless some sharp-eyed Californian manages to dig up the genuine plate of brass left by Sir Francis Drake in Nova Albion.

Clamper plaque recreating their handiwork in the supposed Drake Plate, via Find A Grave

Further Reading

E Clampus Vitus: Anthology of New Dispensation Lore. Edited by Thomas Duncan, Lulu Press, 2009.

Von der Porten, Edward, et al. "Who made Drake's plate of brass? Hint: it wasn't Francis Drake." California History, vol. 81, no. 2, 2002, p. 116+. Gale General OneFile, https://link-gale-com.libdbmjc.yosemite.edu/apps/doc/A104669394/GPS?u=modestojc_main&sid=GPS&xid=442e7652. Accessed 2 Apr. 2020.

The Unbelievable History of the Ancient and Honorable E Clampus Vitus

In the spring of 1930, lawyer and historian Carl Wheat made a visit to some old mining camps in California for the purposes of researching life during the Gold Rush. His focus came to rest on the practice of a secret society among the miners, one with an apparently long and storied past. Mr. Wheat was no stranger to fraternal societies himself, being a member of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, whose annual retreat for the rich and powerful at Bohemian Grove serves as popular fodder for many conspiracy theorists. But in the secret order that flourished among miners in the 19th century, called E Clampus Vitus, Carl Wheat saw something more than an organization for the elite. He saw a society for the everyman, for the lover of history both obscure and preposterous, and he came to believe it was a tradition worth reviving. He and some fellows of equally high CQ--an attribute like unto IQ, but measuring instead their degree of “Californiosity”--got together not long after, in a Yerba Buena lunchroom, to form once again a lodge dedicated to the traditions of this bygone order, about which they actually knew very little. Not long after forming their Chapter Redivivus, however, a mysterious stranger telephoned Wheat, claiming to have been, in his youth, the last Noble Grand Humbug of the last practicing lodge. Building from the knowledge of this Clampatriarch, as they called him, the New Dispensation of E Clampus Vitus began, and its fantastical history could finally be written. 

*

I will commence with a discussion of the rather successful revival of a secret society that died out with the end of the California Gold Rush of the 19th century. This fraternal organization, reborn in the 1930s, today boasts that their members number in the tens of thousands in more than 40 chapters scattered across the Western United States, but by far their numbers are highest in my home state of California, where much of the order’s history takes place. While the math on the aforementioned membership does not quite seem to work, unless every chapter has initiated thousands of members, nevertheless the chief occupation of the Clampers, aside from merrymaking, does seem to indicate that they are widespread. This historical drinking society--though some argue it is more a drinking historical society--proves its historical bonafides by placing historical plaques across the American West. About a decade ago, they had put up more than a thousand historical markers, and by now that number is far higher. What I appreciate is that the members of E Clampus Vitus don’t concentrate on memorializing well-known history, or “rich old man’s history” as they call it, but rather the little known facts of the state. As an example, in the quaint town of Murphys, they have a plaque that preserves the memory of the saber-toothed tiger that prowled the neighborhood in the distant past, and in the town of Volcano, they celebrate the invention of Moose Milk, a cocktail composed of bourbon, rum and heavy cream that was popular among Gold Rush miners. To illustrate better the playfulness of their plaques, consider the strange upside-down house built by silent film star Nellie Bly in the town of Lee Vining, which they commemorate with an upside-down plaque. While these plaques are good fun and demonstrate the society’s preoccupation with history, none of these monuments record the secret mysteries behind the founding and evolution of the order. For this, we must delve into the hard-to-find documents published by the first members of the Chapter Redivivus, who revived the order and learned its lore from an old man who was around when it was still being practiced in the 19th century.

In determining when the society of E Clampus Vitus began and who started it, it is necessary to consider its name. Some theologians trace the society back to Moses, who is claimed to be an early Noble Grand Humbug or Clampatriarch, for one of the hypothesized source documents of the Torah, called the Elohist, is more commonly referred to as E, corresponding to the beginning of the order’s name. Others, however, trace the beginning of the order all the way back to the beginning of time and creation, naming Adam as the Clamprogrenitor, as it were. This is suggested by the fact that the word Vitus is said by some to derive from the Greek phitos or begetter, referring to Adam as the father of humanity. By this reckoning, the word Clampus derives from the Greek kleptos, to steal, because after receiving the knowledge by eating of the tree in the Garden of Eden, Adam smuggled out the secrets of the order so that he could pass them down to all mankind. If one finds it hard to credit such ancient origins of the order, alternative etymology suggests E Clampus Vitus to be a Latinate phrase, with E meaning “out of,” Clampus being a combination of clam, or “ignorance or darkness,” and pos, meaning “after.” Finally, Vitus would be vita, or “life,” making the entire translation “out of darkness, after life,” as in seeking after life. No matter what one makes of the meaning of the order’s name, it cannot be denied that its central figure was Saint Vitus, after whom Sydenham’s chorea, or St. Vitus’s Dance was named, that malady being one suspect for explaining the notorious Dancing Plague I have discussed in the past. St. VItus is known to have exorcised a demon from Emperor Diocletian’s son, or as the more scientific might suggest today, somehow cured the boy of some neurological or psychological condition. In return, since St. VItus refused to attribute the miracle to pagan gods, Diocletian tortured him to death. It is said that before his unfortunate end, St. Vitus was in the process of writing the great history of E Clampus Vitus, but had only managed to write out one line. 

Saint Vitus, from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493, via Wikimedia Commons

Despite St. Vitus’s death, the order survived as a monastic tradition carried on by the Vituscan brothers. Their form of the phrase was the Latin Ecce Lampas Vitae, meaning “Behold, the Light of Life,” and how this phrase became corrupted is truly a remarkable tale. A 20th century discovery in the Vatican Library tells the tale in the form of a letter by one Heliodoricus, himself a Vituscan. In his letter, Heliodoricus describes a long and arduous journey of four years that he took with nine fellow Vituscan missionaries all the way to the Far East. Only two others survived the journey, Stomachus, and Bellicosus, whereupon they gained an audience with Chinese emperor Hee Sing Li. Heliodoricus describes the great success they had at converting the Chinese, introducing the customs of their order halfway around the world. It is the Chinese, he says, who in mispronouncing their motto Ecce Lampas Vitae coined the modern name E Clampus Vitus, a revelation that caused much stir among the aforementioned theologians who had developed so many theories about the phrase and its implications for the origins of the order. After this historic Vituscan mission to China, it appears the traditions of E Clampus Vitus, as they called it, flourished for generations. The truth of this is attested in another historic discovery, made by one Rev. Dr. Shaw of New York City, in 1890 during his own mission to China. Of course, by this time, the practice of E Clampus Vitus could be observed in California, and Dr. Shaw’s discovery explains at least part of the story of the order’s roots in my state. Shaw came across a Chinese manuscript that, astoundingly, indicates a Chinese navigator by the name of Hee Li discovered America, and more specifically California, as early as 435 CE, making the Chinese claim of discovery even earlier than the claims of Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact by Vikings. According to the story, Hee Li’s vessel was blown out to sea by a storm, and by some cosmic mischance, a cockroach-like beetle had gotten into his only compass, misaligning the needle and dying inside, out of sight. Hee Li relied entirely on this broken compass, following it ever eastward, despite never finding the shores of his homeland. When a member of his crew pointed out the sight of the rising sun to prove they were headed the wrong direction, Hee Li threw the mutineer overboard. Eventually, upon making landfall at what is modern day Monterey and finding the dead bug in his compass, Hee Li, himself a dedicated Clamper, declared the new land Gumshaniana, or Gum Shan, and set about instructing its native inhabitants in the traditions of E Clampus Vitus.

Hee Li eventually managed to make a return journey from Gum Shan after having established Clamperism there, and his discovery of this far off land we today call California was well known among his countrymen. Indeed, his adventure would inspire another expedition many years later, this one more purposeful and also less successful. This voyage was undertaken by one of low birth, the son of a servant woman who cleaned the privy chambers of the Empress. Due to a peculiarity of his anatomy, he was known among the women at court as Lo-Hung-Whang. One night, the Empress relieved herself into a chamberpot and fell in. Enraged at the man responsible for leaving too large a chamberpot in her room, she had the foul toilet forced onto the man’s head. Lo-Hung-Whang gave this poor soul sanctuary and helped him remove the pot, and in return, the man helped smuggle Lo-Hung-Whang out of the palace in another, even larger chamberpot. Thereafter free to pursue his dream life as a sailor, Lo-Hung-Whang always kept that massive toilet with him to remember his deliverance. After establishing himself as a capable navigator and having made some explorations of his own, he set out to organize a colonial expedition to Gum Shan after hearing of Hee Li’s discovery. In addition to his crew, he brought three hundred fertile slave girls, with the intention of peopling Gumshaniana with their descendants. These poor women were subjected to terrible abuses, and if they dared raise their voice in protest, they were silenced by having a handful of red pepper powder thrown in their faces. One among these women, Lo-Hung-Whang’s own concubine, Hop Mee, proved to be stronger and more clever than the men anticipated, though. She arranged for the eunuchs guarding the other girls to be drugged, and once free, the former slave women took control of the vessel, throwing any who resisted them to the sharks. Upon finally landing at Gum Shan, somewhere near modern day Mendocino, Hop Mee decided that she would be the empress of this new land, and it is said that she is the true Amazonian warrior woman whose legend inspired the fictional character Calafia, after whom California is named. 

Mural depicting Califia, fictional Amazonian queen for whome California was named, via Wikimedia Commons

The branch of E Clampus Vitus descending from the Chinese chapter established by the Vituscan missionaries, however, has not the only claim to being the origin of Clampers in the New World. Indeed, there was another monastic order originating from the teachings of St. Vitus, this one established by his disciple Dumbellicus, himself also a martyr killed by Emperor Diocletian. Dumbellicus was an ascetic soul, known to deny himself pleasure and excess, and so, as an especially cruel torture, Diocletian gave Dumbellicus to the priestesses of Venus, who chained him naked upon a flower-strewn altar and took from him his chastity. However, Dumbellicus resisted, biting off his own tongue and making himself pass out, so that he retained, in theory, his purity. His was a “moral martyrdom,” for he did not lose his life. Afterward, he spoke only in signs, and his followers sought his canonization as a saint. However, sainthood was denied him, for it was suspected that he never actually bit his tongue off, and that perhaps he did not resist his altar-bound intercourse as much as his legend claims. The church likely came to this conclusion based on the behavior of his followers, the Dumbellican Brotherhood, who received the nickname the Frollicking Friars due to their licentious behavior. It was this so-called “breechless brotherhood” that added to the original Vituscan directive to care for widows and orphans the clarification that it was “especially the widows” that they sought to comfort. It was they who introduced the central Clamper symbol, the Staff of Relief, a decidedly phallic image. The Frollicking Friars did much to spread their order, for it’s said they expanded on the notion of widowhood, applying the Staff of Relief even to women who they said had been “widowed” by their husbands’ neglect, and therefore they frequently were obliged to flee from one place to the next. Thus with the discovery of the New World, many of the Dumbellican Brotherhood were only too eager to leave the old world behind and joined the ranks of armies led by such famous conquistadors as Pizarro and Cortes, who made plenty of widows for the breechless brothers to comfort. 

The question then becomes whether it was the particular Chinese brand of E Clampus Vitus passed down through the native progeny of Hop Mee, Empress of Gumshaniana, that was practiced by the miners of Gold Rush California, or whether it was the form spread by the Frollicking Friars during their rapacious journeys through the New World. Of course, it may have been a combination of both. There is one tale that tells of these two branches of Clamperism meeting. The last of the Dumbellican friars are said to have encountered a band of Native Americans calling themselves Clampas in Arizona. These Clampas gave some of the ancient signs of their order, which the friars recognized. However, rather than finding themselves hailed and well met, they instead found themselves under attack by the Clampas. These Native Americans brandished their own staffs, but these would bring the friars no relief. The unusual anatomy of these Clampas indicates that Lo-Hung-Whang survived Hop Mee’s mutiny and managed to father children, or perhaps was kept as a sex slave himself as he had previously kept Hop Mee, for the peculiar trait that gave him his crude sobriquet was observed by the Frollicking Friars in the naked Clampas who charged at them. Indeed, these natives appeared ready to use their formidable weapons against the Dumbellican Brothers. Though they wrapped their robes about their loins like diapers to better facilitate their flight, the Frollicking Friars could not escape their awful fate. Clampers have since marked the site of their massacre with a plaque that reads: “Here fell the last of the Frollicking Friars. They could pass it out, but they couldn’t take it.”

Persecution by Emperor Diocletian, via WikiArt.org

And that is where the unbelievable history of E Clampus Vitus might end, if it were not for the fact that this episode releases just before April 1st and is an April Fools Day joke! I am sorry to say that none of this is real history! Well, to be fair, it does appear that Gold Rush miners had a fraternal organization called E Clampus Vitus, and it is true that Carl Wheat revived it in the 1930s, but all of the lore I just shared with you was fiction playfully concocted by the New Dispensation under the Chapter Redivivus. Perhaps this was obvious from the ridiculous and frankly racist names of its central characters as well as its bawdy subject matter. The fact that it is not meant to be taken seriously would have been even more apparent had I shared with you the one line that St. Vitus was said to have put into writing about E Clampus Vitus before he was martyred: credo quia absurdum, I believe because it is absurd. This has become the motto of this historical drinking society. Imagine a gathering of overeducated history buffs drunkenly regaling each other with the most ridiculous false histories they could think of. This was the beginning and the foundation of the modern day Clampers, although today, as I understand it, it is more of a plain old drinking society that enjoys to play pranks. And this may be even closer to the E Clampus Vitus of the Gold Rush Miners. Many of the surviving stories suggest that in the 19th century, E Clampus Vitus was just a way to put one over on outsiders. Travelling salesmen entering the mining camps could find no patrons, and entertainment troupes could not fill their audiences, until they agreed to join the ranks of the society, to be “taken in,” as it were, which meant the miners would be able to drink on their dime for the night. Thereafter, the miners gladly patronized these newcomers to their town, so it was essentially an initiation into the community. But there is no evidence that the rough and tough miners of 19th-century California touted any such colorful beliefs about the origins of their little club.

In fact, there is something of an origin story for E Clampus Vitus to which we might give more credence. It appears to have begun in West Virginia, dreamed up by a blacksmith and tavern keeper named Ephraim Bee sometime during the early 1850s. Bee had political aspirations and fancied himself something of a folksy storyteller. At the time, secret societies were all the rage. There were the Sons of ‘76, the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows, and the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, that nativist fraternity that I devoted a patron-exclusive episode to discussing, and even the Freemasons had made a comeback after the Anti-Masonic movement of decades earlier had reduced their numbers. What Bee established, however, was a burlesque of the well known secret fraternal organizations. The other secret societies all seemed to take themselves and their rituals far too seriously, and they were full of “stuffed shirts,” so Ephraim Bee founded a kind of parody of them, with nonsensical rituals, and a name that sounded Latin but was not… that’s right, E Clampus Vitus means nothing. It is Dog Latin, simply an imitation of the dead language. In fact the seeds for the elaborate lore that would later spring up around the order were planted by Ephraim himself, for he said he had learned the secrets of the order from Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts statesman who had visited China and brought back the mysteries of this Confucian brotherhood that was widespread in the East. Ephraim Bee’s E Clampus Vitus grew a bit in West Virginia and elsewhere, but it faded away during his lifetime. One enthusiast named Joseph Zumwalt, however, brought the order with him from Missouri to California during the Gold Rush… or so they say. The timeline doesn’t seem to jibe, though, for how could Zumwalt have brought E Clampus Vitus to California in 1849 and established the first chapter here in Calaveras County in 1851 if Ephraim Bee was only just forming the first chapter in West Virginia in 1853? Considering all the false and absurd history told by the Clampers, in the end, it’s hard to believe anything you read about them. And perhaps that’s just the way they like it. 

Supposed image of Ephraim Bee circulated on the Internet by Clampers… who knows if it’s really him…

Until next time, I’ll leave you with a wonderful quotation shared by Thomas Duncan as an epigraph on his book E Clampus Vitus: Anthology of New Dispensation Lore, which ended up serving as my principal source on this episode mainly because all the other works on Clamper history seem to be held hostage in the Special Collections rooms of California libraries, and the few available at my local library, I discovered, have been stolen. The epigraph is from Alexander Stille’s The Future of the Past: “The past is only the memory or residue of things that now exist in the present moment, a mental construction that—cleaned up or embellished—often serves the needs of the current moment instead of corresponding to any ‘historic’ truth.”

Further Reading

E Clampus Vitus: Anthology of New Dispensation Lore. Edited by Thomas Duncan, Lulu Press, 2009. 

Mckinley, Jesse. "Promoting Offbeat History Between the Drinks." New York Times, 14 Oct. 2008, p. A12(L). Gale OneFile: Business, https://link-gale-com.libdbmjc.yosemite.edu/apps/doc/A186882569/GPS?u=modestojc_main&sid=GPS&xid=9c61987e. Accessed 19 Mar. 2020.

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? 

*

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

*

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.