The Source of the Fountain of Youth Myth

The existence of Amazon warrior women was a mainstay of Western mythology. These women who fight on horseback and, it was sometimes said, had one of their breasts removed so as to better operate a bow, fought in the Trojan War according to Homer’s Iliad, one of the oldest surviving literary works of Europe, likely dating to the 8th century BCE. They did not cross over from myth to what might be considered history by some until around 450 BCE, when Greek historian Herodotus made reference to them as if they were real. When he encountered in Lycia a society that valued maternalism and traced kinship through matrilineal descent, he thought without evidence that they must be descended from the famous Amazons. And in describing the forerunners of the Sarmatian people, a matriarchal and equestrian culture, Herodotus writes “the story is as follows” and seemingly repeats an unsupported claim that their people were produced by some shipwrecked Amazons who procreated with Scythian men. While evidence has arisen to suggest real Eurasian warrior women inspired these tales, they fall squarely in the realm of myth, and evolved as they were embraced by other cultures. In Arabian legend, Alexander the Great was said to have married the Queen of the Amazons, and it was claimed that the homeland of the warrior women was on an island in the Indian Ocean, but in the Middle Ages, Arab cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi located this mythical island in the Atlantic Ocean, and here we start to see hints of the modern day legends that inspired Wonder Woman. Unsurprisingly, in the 15th and 16th centuries, when explorers believed that they might encounter any number of such mythical isles across the great sea, such as Antillia or the Fortunate Isles, the notion that any island they might happen upon could be the isle of the Amazons loomed in imaginations. As a result, when explorers did make landfall, they looked for indications of a matriarchal culture as evidence of such a discovery. Christopher Columbus wrote in the log of his first voyage that some natives told him, no doubt in response to some leading and poorly translated questions, that some nearby island was inhabited only by women, and that they received male visitation only during certain times of the year for reproductive purposes. Columbus was actually well-versed in such myths and in Greek and Arab classic literature generally. He latched onto such indications with alacrity, quick to twist any native tales, whether poorly understood or even fabricated in an effort to please him, as proof of the existence of such mythological locations. In reality, it seems, the natives he was questioning were actually referring to an island on which they kept female prisoners for forced breeding. But this would not be the last time that Columbus or other explorers mistakenly believed they had discovered a mythical site. Another such myth, that of the Fountain of Youth, the spring that originated in paradise and rejuvenated those who bathed in or drank from it, was also sometimes prominent in the thoughts of New World explorers, though we find when we look further into this myth that it has become even more a myth, a historical myth, falsely claimed to have been a legend among native tribes and inaccurately asserted to have been the obsession and sole objective of the conquistador Juan Ponce de León’s expedition to Florida.

While the story of Ponce de León and his discovery of Florida during the course of his obsessive search for the Fountain of Youth has made him a rather famous and romantic historical figure, some may be surprised to learn that previous to the 20th century there was little interest in him and his expedition in search of the mysterious island called sometimes Bimini and other times Beniny. In 1913, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the supposed discovery of Florida, a variety of historians wrote more on the 1513 voyage of Ponce de León than had been written about him since the beginning of the 17th century. What they found was certainly a figure of interest who had fallen between the cracks of historiography and deserved to be more widely known. Juan Ponce de León, a youth of 19 years from an influential family, is said to have served as a page and squire and perhaps to have fought Muslims in the Granada War before joining the crew of Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas, where he was present at the discovery of Puerto Rico. Lest anyone suspect that I glorify the memory of this man, it should be established that he was a conquistador at heart from the beginning. He was a nobody before 1504, and he won respect as well as a grant of land and native slaves for the large part he played in suppressing a Taíno rebellion on Higüey, a massacre described in nauseating detail by Bartolomé de las Casas. Four years later, after expanding Spanish colonization in the area, he was tasked by King Ferdinand with forcing all the remaining Taíno into servitude, mining gold for the Spanish coffers. And chasing gold, he then set out to explore and settle Puerto Rico, then called San Juan, and eventually would become the governor of the island. In 1513, however, having lost his governorship for reasons I will explain later, de León obtained a royal contract to seek out the rumored “islands of Beniny” northwest of Hispaniola, on the understanding that he would serve as their governor once settled. There are numerous myths associated with this journey that 20th century historians repeated based on 16th-century accounts, causing Ponce de León’s journey to be so thoroughly mythologized. One was that he landed at St. Augustine, the place where today in Florida an “Archaeological Park” daily attracts tourists as the site of his first landing. This land was purchased in 1868 by someone hoping to turn it into a tourist attraction, and lo and behold, within a few years of creating the park, one of his employees claimed to find a stone cross buried on the property, supposedly left by Ponce de León as a marker. As early as 1935, a historian riding the new popularity of stories about de León, T. Frederick Davis, tried to provide this claim with a veneer of scholarly respectability, claiming that navigational data showed his course would have taken him to St. Augustine. This interpretation of the data proved erroneous. In the 1950s, another historian, Edward Lawson,  argued that testimonies and other archaeological evidence indicating the existence of a populous native village at the site proved it was where de León landed, when in fact he would likely have avoided such a landing site where natives might have repelled their boats. In fact, Ponce de León’s log indicates he looked for a landing site in this area but found no amenable inlet or harbor and thus moved on. Another big myth perpetuated by 20th-century historians actively renewing interest in Ponce de León’s voyage was that he had discovered Florida. The land of Florida, or it was called back then, the islands of Beimini or Beniny, had already been systematically raided by Europeans in slaving expeditions. This was how King Ferdinand and Ponce de León even knew to sail north of San Juan Bautista to find the land. His real legacy, his actual discovery, the Gulf Stream, that ocean current that would become so important as a marine highway, was largely overlooked by historians for a long time, overshadowed by the misconception that he had discovered Florida and by the myth that the whole purpose of his venture was to find the fabled Fountain of Youth.

Depiction of Spanish massacre of natives, courtesy John Carter Brown Library (CC BY-SA 4.0)

To give a sense of how widespread and accepted the idea was, in 1985, the historian Robert Weddle wrote, “That the Fountain of Youth legend influenced Ponce de León’s discovery of Florida has long been accepted as fact,” and though it did not prove the truth of it, the statement that it was accepted was surely accurate. The aforementioned work of T. Frederick Davis in 1935 explicitly claimed the search for a “spring” that was capable of “restoring youth to the aged” as the “Purpose of the Voyage,” and he claimed that Ponce de León was drawn on this quest because there existed an “Indian legend” that this spring could be found on “an island called Bimini (supposed by the Spaniards to be one of the Lucayos, or as we call them now, the Bahamas).” To give a sense of the inaccuracies in this 20th-century historiography, the island of Beniny or Beimini for which de León searched was not in the Bahamas, though this confusion may have eventually led to those islands being called the Bahamas. To illustrate this fact, Ponce de León put ashore at the northernmost of the Bahama islands, Guanahani, for ten days to prepare for his northwestward voyage across the open sea in his effort to reach the island of Beniny (actually the mainland of North America) that he knew lay somewhere in that direction. But this error was repeated by numerous historians, as was the insistence that de León was in search of the Fountain of Youth, to the point that the inaccuracies appeared in editions of Collier’s Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Americana, and Encyclopedia Britannica, thereafter resulting in both myths being printed in school textbooks. The popularity in 20th-century historiography of the myth that Ponce de León was obsessed with finding the Fountain of Youth is sometimes blamed on the mythmaking of 19th-century American writer Washington Irving. Much as we saw Irving was largely responsible for myths surrounding Christopher Columbus, he also embellished the story of Ponce de León in some chapters of his 1831 work Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus. This work was produced just a little more than a decade after Spain renounced all claim to Florida to the U.S. in 1819, and we might consider this the first instance of a resurgence in interest in the voyage of Ponce de León, written with something of an axe to grind, as Irving depicts de León as vain and credulous. Even Irving acknowledges how far-fetched the idea seems that this conquistador would credit the tales he supposedly heard from natives about a river that restored youth when one bathed in it, writing: “It may seem incredible, at the present day, that a man of years and experience could yield any faith to a story which resembles the wild fiction of an Arabian tale; but the wonders and novelties breaking upon the world in that age of discovery almost realized the illusions of fable, and the imaginations of the Spanish voyagers had become so heated that they were capable of any stretch of credulity.” Whether or not Juan Ponce de León really was this credulous and truly had been searching for the Fountain of Youth will be further examined, but first let us examine the existence of the myth itself. Irving’s statement is at least true in this regard. As we have seen, the Spanish certainly chased after myths, and certainly transplanted their myths onto New World soil. And one of these transplanted myths certainly was that of the Fountain of Youth.

In my episode on Christopher Columbus, I explained how the idea of Earth’s roundness was not a novel idea Columbus had, as Washington Irving had suggested, but in truth, Columbus didn’t even believe the world was round. He had a notion that it was more pear-shaped, with a kind of nipple atop it, and atop this nipple, he believed, was the Garden of Eden at the point closest to heaven. While I call it a myth that Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth, it does seem clear that Columbus was searching for this Terrestrial Paradise. Columbus carried a book by Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, which claimed that the earthly paradise must exist on some phantom island in the Atlantic, such as the Fortunate Isles, and Columbus treated the text like the authoritative source on global geography. He believed that in the Garden of Eden, from the Tree of Life, sprang a great fountain that served as the source of all the great rivers of the world. Indeed, when he reached the mouth of the Orinoco near Trinidad on his third journey, he wrote back to his royal patrons that he must have found that font of life springing from Paradise, for he had never dreamed of such a massive freshwater river. Columbus’s ideas about a fountain of life springing from the Terrestrial Paradise did not come from actual scriptures but rather from medieval legend, which had been grafted onto scriptural accounts of the Garden of Eden. Some claim that the origin of the Fountain of Youth myth, like the Amazonian myth, can be traced back to Herodotus, who once wrote of a long-lived people he called the Icthyophagi, or fish eaters, whose longevity owed to the peculiar quality of a fountain in whose oily waters they bathed. The myth of the Fountain of Youth as we know it today, though, and as the Spanish knew it in the 16th century, first seems to have arisen in the Alexander Romance, which was first composed in the 4th-century CE in Greek and was through the centuries translated into numerous languages in the Middle East before being printed in European vernacular languages in the 13th century. It spoke of Alexander finding a land of flowers where they stumbled across a golden fountain, inset with crystal and surrounded by marble pillars, into which four times a day flowed magical waters from a statue of a golden lion, and when his men bathed in it, their health and vigor were renewed, such that they were younger and could hardly be recognized. The 12th-century letter of Prester John, that anonymous hoax that I devoted a whole episode to discussing a few years ago, also brought this legend to European imaginations. The writer of that fictional account of a Christian king in a magical land far to the East indicates that there is a spring, flowing out of Paradise into a grove at the foot of Mount Olympus, and if one drank from it, they would “suffer no infirmity from that day on” and would forever be exactly thirty-two years old. Then the fountain appeared again in another dubious and anonymous work I’ve mentioned before, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville written in the 14th century and attributed to an English knight who seems to have not existed. In this work, it is called the well of youth, is said to flow out of Paradise, prevent illness, and keep people young, and is placed in an imaginary Eastern city called Palombe. Given Columbus’s mistaken belief that he was sailing westward to reach the East, it was reasonable for him to think he might find such places as were described in these classical and medieval fantasies. But even other explorers and Spanish historians, after finally coming to the understanding that this was not the East they had set out to reach but rather a New World, a new continent to them, the rumors persisted, encouraged, it seems, but the myths of natives that seemed to indicate the fountain’s existence.

16th century depiction of the Fountain of Youth.

In 1516, in a letter to Pope Leo X, the Italian historian chronicling New World discoveries for Spain, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, mentioned a “notable fountain” on an island he called Boyuca, whose waters rejuvenated the old who drank them. In one of his later histories he also shared the story of a native who had been made a slave and baptized a Christian that his father had bathed in a magical fountain in Florida and been made young again. Some historians cite these early claims as evidence that the Fountain of Youth was a legend among natives and was the object of Ponce de León’s voyage, even though Martyr, who would have spoken with Ponce de León in his research, never claimed this. In fact, the story told to him by the captive native can easily be dismissed as unreliable, and also of a later origin. As for the original claim in the 1516 letter, some historians have, without evidence, suggested that Boyuca was actually Bimini, but in fact, this rumor Martyr was sharing was one heard on the expedition of Juan Díaz de Solís, and the description of where this isle of Boyuca supposedly resided seems to place it closer to the Bay of Honduras. Moreover, any and all claims made by the Spanish that the natives they encountered had their own myths of a Fountain of Youth are hard to credit. Bartolomé de Las Casas as well as Spanish friar Ramón Pané and others, after living with Caribbean natives and learning their languages, wrote numerous works detailing the nature of the customs and religion of the indigenous peoples of the West Indies, including accounts of their folktales and myths, and none mention anything resembling a Fountain of Youth. Each supposed rumor of a Fountain of Youth in the Caribbean, coaxed out of natives through poorly translated interrogation, rather tellingly placed the mythical spring in a different place. Thus we might presume that all such “rumors” were actually just natives, failing to entirely understand the meaning of the question, pointing the Spanish toward various ordinary sources of water.

But if the myth of the Fountain of Youth was real, and if some Spanish were questioning natives and looking for it in the New World, why shouldn’t we credit the idea that this was the object of Ponce de León’s voyage, as Washington Irving and so many 20th century historians claimed? This is a valid question, and it can be answered by looking at the sources relied on by those historians. The most cited of all sources that claim Juan Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth is the work of Antonio de Herrera, whose history of Ponce de León’s voyage, published in 1601, relied on the conquistador’s own log as primary source material. This very fact that it relied on Ponce de León’s log, as well as the fact that de Herrera was the official historiographer of Spain at the time, seems to lend his work credence, even though it was written some 80 years after the voyage. The problem is that nothing in Ponce de León’s log refers to the Fountain of Youth legend at all, and the only mentions of the myth appear in statements that de Herrera inserted, not based on the log at all. He never claims that the log reflects de León’s search for the fountain, or that any native guides were leading him to any rejuvenating spring. Once, he mentions the work of another author, Don d’Escalante Fontaneda, whose late 16th-century memoir claimed Ponce de León had been searching for the Fountain of Youth at a river in Florida called Jordan. And then at the end of his work, de Herrera simply says that Ponce de León never found that Fountain. This memoir by Fontaneda that de Herrera seems to have relied on for evidence of de León’s motivation is manifestly unreliable. Fontaneda was a colorful figure. He came from a noble family and like Ponce de León went into service at a young age, at just 13 years old. In 1549, he was shipwrecked in the Florida Keys, and while the natives there killed his shipmates, perhaps because of his youth they spared him, and he lived among these indigenous islanders for 17 years. Ten years after his rescue, he wrote his memoirs, and there is no reason to consider him an authority on the voyage of Ponce de León or much of anything beyond the culture of the particular natives he lived among on the Keys. Indeed, there is no River Jordan in Florida, and this appears to have been a kind of scriptural allusion to the river in which John the Baptist conducted the ritual of baptizing, which represents a kind of rebirth like the Fountain of Youth is said to provide, making the whole account more literary than historical.

17th century engraving of Juan Ponc e de León

There was, however, one principal, original source from which Fontaneda likely derived his account of Ponce de León’s search for the Fountain of Youth, written in 1535 by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Indeed, the fact that de Oviedo was his predecessor as Spain’s official historiographer likely compelled de Herrera to make sure his later account of Ponce de León’s voyage fell in line with the earlier one. De Oviedo speaks explicitly and derisively of de León as a vain and avaricious egotist and claims that searching for the Fountain of Youth was the sole purpose of his voyage, specifically because Ponce de León hoped that the fabled spring might cure his enflaquecimiento del sexo, literally his “emaciation of sex,” meaning his impotence. The fact that the myth of Ponce de León’s search for the Fountain of Youth originated with this claim, made 14 years after the conquistador had died and thus after he could protest, is ridiculous. It is libel, pure and simple, and there is evidence that it was false. Ponce de León was a portrait of machismo, just like his father, who sired dozens of illegitimate offspring. Having a philandering father and acting macho is surely no certain sign of virility, but Ponce de León fathered four children of his own with his wife, and it is known that he insisted on taking his mistress with him on his voyage. Some historians, seeking to bolster de Oviedo’s credibility, claimed that de León must have been older by the time of his voyage, thus suggesting his obvious virility must have been waning, but other historians have proven he was only 39 at the time. Then again, historians partial to de Oviedo’s myth about his search for the Fountain have suggested that it was not his own impotence he sought to cure with the waters of the Fountain, but that of King Ferdinand, who was older and had married a younger woman. But this is pure speculation, and there is no evidence of it. In fact, just as Ponce de León’s log makes absolutely no mention of the Fountain of Youth, so too his royal charter, the official patent issued by King Ferdinand, mentions nothing about searching for the Fountain of Youth. Rather, it indicates, in precise details, that the purpose and goal of his expedition was to explore and settle the large island of Beniny, which was actually not an island but the continental mainland, and which Ponce de León named Florida after his landing because of the flowers he admired there. In truth, as we know today, Ponce de León’s voyage was intended not to find a mythical fountain but to find gold and to expand the Spanish Empire, and on a more personal level, Ponce de León was seeking to reestablish his own power, which had recently been taken from him in a political struggle with Diego Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus. Unprecedented rights had previously been granted to Columbus for his discoveries, and his son came to the New World to seize power, taking the position of Viceroy as his birthright and forcing Ponce de León out of power in Puerto Rico. King Ferdinand, who viewed Ponce de León as a faithful servant and resented the Columbus family’s growing power, encouraged de León to establish himself in Florida as both a reward and to ensure he still had loyal governors in the region. Though it is admittedly speculation, the fact that Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo wrote with such admiration about Christopher Columbus and was personally acquainted with Columbus’s son, Diego Colón, suggests that perhaps his blatant slander of Ponce de León was simply a matter of personal bias against a man he had only heard about from friends who maligned his memory.

It is astonishing and disconcerting that one nasty statement by a biased historian almost 500 years ago could result in a falsehood being perpetuated even today. We see in this story how one unsupported statement is repeated by other historians through the ages, relying only on the views of historians who came before them rather than on primary source material, none of which actually support the claim that Florida was discovered in an effort to find a magical spring that grants eternal youth. In my principal source, “Anatomy of an Historical Fantasy: The Ponce de León-Fountain of Youth Legend,” published in Revista de Historia de Americá in 1998, Douglas Peck details each step of the way how this myth migrated from its Eurasian roots to the New World, how Oviedo maliciously made an unfounded claim about Ponce de León’s vain preoccupation with it, and how this lie was carried through the centuries and embellished even by otherwise conscientious historians until it entered encyclopedias and textbooks. It took more than 450 years to set the record straight, and with the myth now firmly rooted as common knowledge in the minds of most Americans, who knows how long it will take to replace the myth in the public imagination. After all, the false version has become a foundational story in Florida. Starting in 1900 with a new owner, the St. Augustine Archaeological Park was aggressively marketed as the actual Fountain of Youth, where tourists can pay the price of admission and drink some sulphury-smelling spring water that they’re told was the object of Juan Ponce de León’s 16th-century expedition. Indeed, this has become something of a tourist industry, with numerous mineral springs laying claim to the title of the real Fountain of Youth. We might even see this as a theme in Florida’s culture generally, with elderly retirees from all over the country moving there to find a new lease on life, and adults all over the world flying there to visit Disney World and feel young again. We could even see a parallel in the current political culture of Florida under their governor, who is determined to take his state, and the country if he ever manages to win higher office, backward rather than forward. And the idea of our national political culture reverting to a juvenile or infantile state should really scare all of us. Today the concept of the Fountain of Youth survives mostly as a metaphor. Just as the Holy Grail and El Dorado have become metaphors for an ideal or perfect thing that we may pursue, so too the Fountain of Youth has come to represent anything that we may use or do or seek out that makes us healthy or young at heart. The term is used heavily in marketing health and wellness products, as well as aphrodisiacs. Though the products have changed, we find that the myth has long been used by snake-oil salesmen to hawk whatever frauds they have on hand, and looking at the history of this myth, we find that maybe it was always used as a kind of deceptive marketing scam, to sell tickets to theme parks, to sell the idea of Florida, to sell a romantic version of European colonialism, and to sell a version of history tainted by myth.

An old postcard for the “Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park” in St. Augustine, Florida

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Until next time, remember, even otherwise trustworthy and scrupulous historians are not immune to the spread of historical myths, but in due course, it seems, eventually, they do get revealed. 

Further Reading

Fuson, Robert H. Juan Ponce de Leon and the Spanish Discovery of Puerto Rico and Florida. University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Peck, Douglas T. “Anatomy of an Historical Fantasy: The Ponce de León-Fountain of Youth Legend.” Revista de Historia de América, no. 123, 1998, pp. 63–87. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20139991.

The Search for Cities of Gold

If I were to say the phrase “Gold Rush,” one undoubtedly will think of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion and, of course, the California Gold Rush, a 19th-century migration boom animated by gold fever. In fact there were numerous gold rushes in the 19th century in numerous regions of North America. But few, upon hearing someone talk of an American Gold Rush would think of the 16th-century Age of Exploration and Spanish conquests, even though, really, this was the first gold rush in the Americas. From the beginning, European exploration of the Americas was animated by a lust for riches and a search for wealthy civilizations that could be sacked and pillaged for their gold, their silver, and their pearls. Christopher Columbus, who sought a sea passage to the East as an alternative to Marco Polo’s overland route, dreamed of finding fabulous cities rich in minerals and precious stones. In particular, he hoped to find the island that Marco Polo had called Cipangu, which legend said was “covered in gold.” In reality, Cipangu was only the Chinese word for Japan, which was not exactly a mythical city of gold, and which Columbus would never reach. Landing in the Caribbean, Columbus focused on the riches of the inhabitants they encountered on each island, always asking about the source of the gold he observed native peoples wearing as ornaments. When his ship the Santa Maria ran aground at the island he would name Hispaniola and the natives greeted them with offers to trade gold items for brass bells, Columbus believed he had found it. He returned to Europe with exaggerated tales of the gold mines of Santo Domingo, and he returned there in 1493, forcing the native Taíno people to gather gold for him. Within thirty years, because of this forced labor as well as the diseases spread by the Europeans, almost the entirety of the Taíno population had died. Recently I had a listener of Taíno descent message me about my episode on Columbus and point out that the Taíno did not die out, and indeed there are descendant communities today, so on that listener’s request, I want to make that correction, but the fact of the survival of the Taíno in no way diminishes the fact that Columbus’s lust for gold drove him to nearly wipe out an entire culture. Meanwhile, his letter to the king and queen of Spain describing the gold of the New World was published in numerous languages, galvanizing conquistadors for the next century. Driving all of them, in some way, was the dream of gold. When it was clear that the Americas were not Asia, the dream came to be of the riches that might be earned with the discovery of an easier passage to the Pacific than the fearsome strait sailed by Magellan, or it came to be a dream of the riches that could be accumulated through the settlement of land on which they might cultivate a profitable crop, but preferable to all these prizes was the discovery of the source of native gold, the rich gold mine that Columbus failed to find on Hispaniola. When in 1519 Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico and discovered the wealthy Aztec civilization, this original American gold rush changed. When Cortés marched on the Aztec capital, imprisoned their King Moctezuma, and seized all the gold in their treasury, the dreams of conquistadors turned principally to the discovery of hidden civilizations rich in gold that could be looted, melted down, and coined. Unsurprisingly, then, numerous rumors and legends began to arise among conquistadors and their armies about secret cities of gold in both South and North America, waiting to be discovered and plundered.

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In this piece, I am once again exploring the historical context behind one of the Indiana Jones films. By the time this is posted, the new Indy film, The Dial of Destiny, has already released, and I’ve already seen it and am considering what topics I might tackle to finally wrap up this long-running series of standalone blog posts. In the meanwhile, although some may want to disavow its existence, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull actually offers more than one potential topic that I have long wanted to cover on this podcast, so for my purposes, it does exist. In fact, I feel that in many ways this fourth film is unfairly maligned, but in other ways, I entirely understand the disappointment in it. Not because of any far-fetched action sequences; in fact, rewatching the films, it’s hard to get more far-fetched than jumping from a plane in an inflatable raft, and even the beloved Last Crusade has all kinds of continuity errors in iconic action sequences that make them less than believable. Nuked fridges and Tarzan vine-swinging aside, the writing on the fourth one just doesn’t live up to the others. But this is not a film podcast, so I’m not talking about dialogue here. I’m talking about the object of Indy’s quest: the MacGuffin and the lore surrounding it. I understand that behind the scenes there was some push and pull between the filmmakers regarding what this one should be “about,” and it really shows. There was an effort to make this one about flying saucers simply because it was set in the 1950s, but there needed to be some archaeological angle, of course, considering Indy’s profession. Thus the notion of ancient aliens is featured, with that claim’s connections to the Nazca Lines in Peru and the elongated skulls of Peruvian native cultures folded in. But there was a need for an object, a physical MacGuffin, so they mashed these ideas together with the dubious crystal skull artifacts claimed in the 19th century to be pre-Columbian Mesoamerican artifacts. I could, and probably will, devote an episode to talking about crystal skulls. And I most certainly will eventually devote an episode or series to the claims of ancient aliens made by Erich von Däniken and others, but it seems to me that the more compelling MacGuffin, the one really worthy of a quest by Indiana Jones, which should have been focused on without all the other trappings, was the city of the aliens—er, inter-dimensional beings—a place of great wealth, a lost city of gold, here fictionalized as Akator, but conflated in the film’s script with El Dorado. The idea of Indiana Jones seeking after a lost or hidden city of gold is rich in historical significance, so I took on the search myself, or rather, the research, and found that there was never just one city of gold.

Artificially deformed Peruvian skulls, commonly and falsely attributed to alien contact, which feature minimally in the fourth Indiana Jones film.

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Before the legend of El Dorado, there was the legend of the land of Meta, which originated with Diego de Ordás, formerly a captain under Cortés and in 1530 a governor of some islands in the estuary of the Amazon River. In those years, the source of the gold of the Americas remained a mystery. Conquistadors expected everywhere to find gold and silver mines to explain the ornaments that were traded by the cultures they encountered, and they could not believe that it was all taken from rivers, which most of it was. Instead, they believed it must have come from some hidden source. De Ordás believed, like many, that gold grew, like plant in the earth, and that because its color was associated with that of the sun, it must grow in greater abundance closer to the equator. Thus in 1530, he organized an expedition up the Orinoco River, seeking its source. He and his men traveled a thousand miles, both relying on the natives they encountered along the way and making war on them. Eventually, he reached the river’s confluence with the river Meta, where some native prisoners, shown a gold ring and asked whether their land contained such metal, told de Ordás that beyond a mountain range on the side of the Meta there was a city rich in gold, ruled by a one-eyed king, and that the conquistadors did not have enough men to conquer it, but if they did, they could “fill their boats with that metal.” De Ordás’s  expedition ended in abject failure, with the loss of most of his men and the only thing he had to show for his efforts a rumor of a rich land that may have just been a lie told by a prisoner. But the search for the land of Meta would animate other conquistadors as well. During the next few years, numerous expeditions were undertaken into the South American wilderness, and a kind of standard operating procedure was developed. Conquistadors sought out native peoples, not only to trade for gold, but also because they relied on them for food and to carry their luggage. Whenever they encountered a group of indigenous people, they traded with them and pressed them into service, and if they did not comply, they attacked them by surprise and slaughtered them and pressed them into slavery regardless. But to maintain the veneer of Christian respectability, they first read out a document called the Requirement, often without any translation, which explained that the native population was required to accept the Spanish authority and Christian conversion, on the threat of rape and pillaging, and stated, absurdly, that “any death or losses that result from this are your fault.” The expeditions of conquistadors like the German Nicolaus Federmann and Ambrosius Dalfinger cut a violent scar through Venezuela. Many of the native inhabitants they massacred they believed were cannibals, but ironically, members of their own expedition turned to cannibalism when lost and without food. Some of these expeditions did successfully seize and bring back gold, but never discovered the source of it. The notion that hidden civilizations were still out there, full of vast wealth to be stolen, grew in the minds of conquistadors and their cut-throat adventurers when Francisco Pizarro discovered the Inca in Peru, and in 1532 took their ruler, Atahualpa, hostage, demanding a literal king’s ransom. The great wealth stripped from the Incas just further fired the imaginations of other adventurers, many of whom believed the source of Incan gold must be elsewhere, beyond the Andes Mountains. One Spanish governor, Jerónimo de Ortal, believed that the source of Peruvian gold was the rumored land of Meta, and in another effort to find this golden kingdom of the one-eyed king, he sent conquistador Alonso de Herrera up the Orinoco to find it, but the expedition was repelled by natives. Governor de Ortál then led his own expedition overland, but when they believed they were nearing the fabled land of Meta, his men mutinied, intending to seize the gold for themselves. They found nothing, however, as with later expeditions for Meta, but in those later years, it was the legend of a different city of gold that animated the conquistadors, one that it has been suggested was the source of the rumors of the rich land of Meta all along: the story of El Dorado.

The legend of El Dorado was given birth among the conquistadors and Spanish adventurers who sacked the Incan Empire in Peru. Interestingly, it was not originally a rumor of a city of gold, but of a golden man, as the name indicates. In Spanish, “gold” is oro, as in “ore”; thus if something were made of gold, it would be de oro, which as an adjective would be dorada in the feminine, or dorado in the masculine. If it actually referred to a city or land, it would be formed in the feminine and would need the further noun, la ciudad dorada or la tierra dorada. We can better understand the name El Dorado when we find its first use. After Francisco Pizarro accepted the Incan ruler Atahualpa’s ransom, which was literally his weight in gold, he had the king executed anyway and marched on the capital city, Cusco, pillaging the treasury of all its gold and silver, and smelting it into bullion. By one contemporaneous report, they coined more than 1.3 million gold pesos, yet Pizarro and others would never shake the uneasy feeling that the Incas had escaped Peru with a great deal of their gold. Indeed, hearing that one of Atahualpa’s generals had mustered an army at the northern Incan capital Quito, the Spanish marched on, not only to stamp out any further resistance, but also because they suspected to find more gold there. To their disappointment, they did not, and though they tortured captured Incan leaders to death, they were unable to discover the whereabouts of any further treasure, leading to a long-lived legend of lost Incan gold. During the scramble to capture the leaders, there were reports of native chief from the north called el indio dorado, the Golden Indian, whose gold-rich tribe had allied with the Incas. This was 1534, and not much was made of this chief or his tribe at the time. But as rumors spread, they change. Seven years later, as recorded by soldier and historian Fernandez de Oviedo, the Spanish in Quito were still talking about the Golden Chief, and now the story was that he was a king who was daily anointed with oil and a fine powdered gold. Natives of the region were known to paint themselves with resins and ground plants, so the notion was in keeping with extant cultural practices, while hinting at a great wealth of gold. The earliest accounts say that the Spanish learned of this Golden Chief from an “itinerant Indian” that they captured and interrogated, giving the story an even shakier foundation. Over time, the legend evolved further, such that this king, El Dorado, was said to cover himself daily in gold and then bathe in a lake, and all his people made regular offerings of gold which were also deposited in this sacred lake’s waters, such that this lake, it was thought, must contain vast quantities of sunken treasure. And eventually, the story, as such legends do, became simplified, such that this king, ruled over a city near that lake, a city equally rich in gold, nay, covered in gold—built of gold!—a city also, for ease of memory, called El Dorado.

Diego de Ordas, originator of the first city of gold legend: the Land of Meta.

Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, a conquistador who quested after El Dorado and failed, and the soldier and poet Juan de Castellanos, came to believe that El Dorado was none other than their own province of New Granada, or more specifically the area around the city of Bogotá in what is today Colombia, and this notion is actually accepted by many today as the most likely case. First of all, the area is north of Quito, where the first rumors of the Golden Chief said his kingdom resided, and more than that it was beyond a mountain range on a bank of the Meta River, further identifying it with the fabled land of Meta. The Muisca or Chingcha people that lived and were conquered there had previously been a well-established and populous kingdom that has been compared with the Aztecs and the Incas. And, they worshipped and made offerings at a nearby sacred lake, the Guatavita, a peculiar, perfectly round lake, which actually appears to be a crater lake. Indeed, since Guatavita was identified with the lake of the El Dorado legend, numerous attempts were made, in the 16th century and the 19th century, to drain it and obtain the gold said to have been deposited in its depths. In 1580, a businessman from Bogotá actually excavated the rim of the lake, cutting a notch in it to let its waters out. Though he did supposedly discover some gold ornaments as the water receded, the earthen walls of his excavation collapsed and ended up killing many of his workers. The next major attempt to drain the lake was made in 1898, by a British contractor who actually succeeded in draining the lake entirely by means of a tunnel. What he was left with was only a pit of mud that his company had difficulty finding anything in, especially when it dried as hard as concrete in the sun. Now the lake has been declared a protected area for conservation and has been restored. Thus whatever may be hidden in the sediment on its floor will remain a mystery. But even if Guatavita and the Muisca lands of Bogotá provide a tidy solution to the mystery of El Dorado, this does not mean the legend was real. In fact, the Muisca were not at all rich in gold, for they did not produce it themselves, but rather acquired it through trade with other tribes like the Incas. As there was no golden kingdom in Bogotá to conquer, the legend of El Dorado shifted elsewhere, to be associated with other lakes. Indeed, examining 16th-century maps of South America, we find Eldorado on the shores of lakes that seem to always be in different unexplored reaches of the Amazon. Funny enough, the name of the lake is always the word for lake in some native language. El Dorado came to be associated with a lake called Manoa, which was actually just the word for lake in Arawak; and Lake Parime, which meant simply “big lake” in Carib. Thus we get the sense that, just as native peoples being attacked and interrogated by conquistadors simply waved them on to the next tribe’s territory, assuring them that they’d find the gold they looked for elsewhere, so too when the conquistadors started asking about lakes, they just told them what they wanted to hear about a lake and gold off thataway somewhere.

At this point I should address the fact that there is a clearly defined historical myth representing the Spanish as pillagers of the New World lusting only after gold and committing all sorts of atrocities to get what they wanted. This is known as the Black Legend of the Spanish, and it was widely employed by the English as a propaganda tool during the two empires’ colonial wars. I want to be clear here. I think some may look at my episode on Columbus and this episode and think that I am promoting this Black Legend. Well… in a way I am, because I reject the notion that we should overlook Spanish atrocities, which certainly and commonly occurred, in order to appreciate accomplishments like their taming of wilderness, building of infrastructure, and advancement of agriculture. I reject this because those things were accomplished on the backs of the native cultures they subjugated. But I do acknowledge that there is a Black Legend of the Spanish insofar as the English were no better and engaged in all the same inhumanities. I’ve been careful in this episode to refer to Europeans or conquistadors, rather than just the Spanish, and I’ve already pointed out two German conquistadors, Federmann and Dalfinger. Now it should be pointed out that in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the English became the more prominent seekers after El Dorado. Having heard the somewhat famous story of one Spanish soldier who claimed, very dubiously, to have been abducted by natives and taken to the lost city of gold in a blindfold, Sir Walter Raleigh became preoccupied with finding El Dorado himself. Since they did not have a presence in South America or as much knowledge of its inhabitants and geography as the Spanish, he descended on Trinidad, captured the Spanish colony’s governor, Antonio de Berrío, who had undertaken several El Dorado expeditions himself, and interrogated him to discover all he knew about the gold city’s supposed whereabouts. Raleigh would mount more than one expedition into the interior of the continent to search for El Dorado, all of them failures of course, and he would eventually be beheaded by King James for his failure to obey orders to avoid conflict with the Spanish. Such expeditions continued sporadically, sponsored by the English and the Dutch, as well as the Spanish, into the 18th century, none of them succeeding since El Dorado is a myth, and all of them resulting in some loss of life. Thus the legend of El Dorado drove European exploration and exploitation of Latin America for around 250 years.

Lake Guatavita, long thought to hold the treasures of El Dorado. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

The way that European mapmakers haphazardly placed El Dorado on maps of the continent, thereby fueling belief in it as a physical place, recalls the treatment of some myths of antiquity, like that of Atlantis. Indeed, even the name of the Amazon referenced the legendary homeland of the Amazon warrior women. Likewise, the name given to the Caribbean archipelago on which Columbus first landed, the Antilles, references another old legend that also transformed into a modern myth and drove further expeditions into North America searching for lost cities of gold. The name connects the islands to the Iberian legend of Antillia, an island of seven cities said to be a kind of utopia. This legend partakes of a long tradition depicting paradisal islands in the Atlantic Ocean, including that of Atlantis and the Fortunate Isles of Homer. This legend was of later origin than those, though, telling of seven bishops who fled Spain with numerous parishioners during its conquest by Muslim Arabs in the year 711 CE. It was said they sailed westward, into the Atlantic, and landed at a bountiful island, on which each bishop built a city. So that the inhabitants of their seven cities would not risk the peace they had established, they were said to have burned all their ships. It’s not at all clear when this legend was born, however, as the first record of it is in maps of the late Middle Ages, one which Antillia appeared as one of many such phantom islands, drawn in different locations depending on the whims of the cartographer. In 1530, when a captive native in New Spain, or Spanish-occupied Mexico, told the Spanish of a land to the north with seven large settlements rich in gold that he remembered visiting as a child, some believed the fabled Seven Cities of Antillia had been located. Years later, in 1536, four survivors of a failed expedition to Florida, led by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, told a similar story. Their expedition had failed to find gold during their northward march in Florida, and facing stiff opposition from natives, decided to build rafts and sail westward up the Gulf Coast, where they were mostly drowned in a storm at Galveston Bay. The survivors lived as castaways on Galveston Island then were captured by natives and remained in captivity for several years before the four survivors escaped. They traveled across modern-day Texas and northeastern Mexico, and arrived with a rumor, told to them by the Sonora tribe about populous and wealthy native lands to the north. Specifically, Cabeza de Vaca mentioned riches of gold, silver, and turquoise, and thus the legend of an Island of Seven Cities was transformed into a legend of Seven Cities of Gold somewhere in North America.

In 1538, two Franciscan friars reached what is believed to be modern day Arizona, and reported on a vast and rich native civilization, probably the Pueblo peoples of the Southwestern U.S., and their report encouraged another expedition led by another monk of the same order, Fray Marcos de Niza, who ended up in modern-day New Mexico and likewise learned of a populous native civilization farther north, said to be rich, with magnificent two- and three-story houses. De Niza called this place Cíbola, and even though he only heard about it and did not visit it himself, he claimed to have seen it with his own eyes. Thus when the Spanish mustered a major expedition to find and exploit these rumored Seven Cities of Cíbola, headed by the conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, Fray Marcos de Niza went along as a guide. When Coronado eventually arrived at the “seven cities,” which were actually seven adobe farming villages of the Zuñi people, devoid of any wealth, de Niza was roundly cursed for a liar and sent back to New Spain. The rest of the expedition stayed, though, exploring the southwestern U.S. and continuing their search for the Seven Cities. One native informant, whom they called The Turk, told the Spanish of a wealthy nation called Golden Quivira to the east, where the inhabitants were said to all eat from plates and bowls of gold. Thus Coronado went marching again after yet another city of gold, traveling all the way to Kansas to find only the grass huts of the Wichita people. Deceived yet again by his guide, Coronado had The Turk garroted and before long returned to Mexico. Today, The Turk is viewed by the Pueblo native culture as a hero and martyr who purposely fed the conquistador disinformation in order to lead the Spanish away from his beleaguered people.

Coronado’s expedition, depicted being led by a native guide.

Back in South America, the suspicion that the Incas had escaped with most of their gold would continue to haunt the Spanish and fuel further myths of lost cities of gold. Among the Incas themselves, there long existed a myth about the Inkarri, whose father was the sun itself, and who was king of the Incas. This myth evolved when Pizarro had King Atahualpa killed. It was said their ruler swore to return from the dead to exact vengeance, and it was claimed that the Spanish had dismembered Atahualpa and buried parts of his body in separate places to prevent his return, but that his head was growing toward his feet, and when at least he was whole again, he would be the Inkarri, he would destroy the Spanish, and he would restore the Incan civilization at the mythical city of Paititi. Through the years, this Paititi the Incas spoke of was taken to be the lost city to which it was always suspected they had escaped with their gold. While the term El Dorado has today become more of a metaphor than a literal place, expeditions to search for Paititi have become far more common. In 1925, the man some believe was an inspiration for Indiana Jones, Percy Fawcett, set out to find what he called the city of “Z,” which has been identified with Paititi legends by some, and he disappeared, his fate a mystery fit perhaps for another episode. In the 1950s, Nazi propagandist Hans Ertl claimed to have discovered the ruins of the city. In 1970, an American journalist went in search of Paititi and like Fawcett before him, disappeared in the jungle. Since then, journalists, researchers, pseudohistorians and amateur explorers of every stripe have mounted expeditions for Paititi, many just as fodder for travel shows and bad history television. Likewise, there are even in the 21st century continued efforts to locate the mythical Lake Parime associated with El Dorado. These modern efforts more and more rely on aerial photography, satellite imagery, and radar topography technology. It is hard to imagine a greater anachronism than this, wasting state of the art technology in search of places we have long understood to be figments of European minds addled by gold fever.

Further Reading

Crampton, C. Gregory. “The Myth of El Dorado.” The Historian, vol. 13, no. 2, 1951, pp. 115–29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24436112. Accessed 24 July 2023.

Buker, George E. “The Search for the Seven Cities and Early American Exploration.” The Florida Historical Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 2, 1992, pp. 155–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30150358. Accessed 24 July 2023.

Hemming, John. The Search for El Dorado. E.P. Dutton, 1978.

Silver, John. “The Myth of El Dorado.” History Workshop, no. 34, 1992, pp. 1–15. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289179. Accessed 24 July 2023.

Vigil, Ralph H. “Spanish Exploration and the Great Plains in the Age of Discovery: Myth and Reality.” Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1, 1990, pp. 3–17. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23531150. Accessed 24 July 2023.

The Thrust of the Holy Lance of Longinus

The story of the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine I is a powerful tale marking the birth of the Holy Roman Empire. It is said that around 312 CE, only 6 years into his reign and at a time when his rule was threatened by civil war and rebellion, he had a dream. The night before he went into battle at the Milvian Bridge in Rome against Maxentius, the leader of those opposing his rule in the West, he dreamed that a fiery cross appeared in the midday sky, and in it were the words “in this sign, conquer.” It was this dream, which some have claimed was a waking vision, that led to Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Flying the sign of the cross on his banners and emblazoning it on his soldiers’ shields, he was victorious, and afterward, he Christianized the Roman Empire. It was a watershed event in Christian history. But how true was it? The sources of this story, court bishop Eusebius and court adviser Lactantius, could not even agree on what it was Constantine saw, a cross or the superimposed first two letters of Christ’s name, chi and rho, a sort of monogram. Moreover, the notion that it was a waking vision or even a kind of miraculous celestial event that may have been seen by others appears to be a later embellishment by Eusebius. Indeed, there swirl around Constantine many dubious legends related to Christianity, and perhaps the most questionable and yet most influential centers on his mother, Flavia Helena, now the canonized St. Helena, the simple daughter of an innkeeper who had become empress upon marrying Constantine’s father. According to legend, and again, the story is murky here, after her son’s conversion to Christianity, when she was nearly eighty years of age, she undertook an arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem. She went seeking the place of Christ’s crucifixion and was led to a temple dedicated to Jupiter that Roman emperor Hadrian had built atop the ruins of a former temple. This she tore down, and beneath the rubble, she is said to have discovered not only Jesus’ tomb, into which Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus deposited his remains, but also a treasure trove of crucifixion relics, most famously, the True Cross. It was after this alleged discovery that Constantine ordered the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which encompassed both the site believed to be Golgotha, where Christ was crucified, and the place said to be his tomb. Destroyed and rebuilt numerous times, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands today as one of the most important places in Christendom, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There are, of course, numerous reasons to look on this legend doubtfully. First, to get it out of the way, in the tomb, there is a limestone burial bed that is claimed to be where Christ’s body was laid out, but in 2017, scientists tested the quartz within the masonry of this limestone bed, and using optically stimulated luminescence, were able to determine that the bed was built circa 345 CE, that’s after the deaths of both Helena and Constantine, and a full decade after the church was first consecrated. But even without such scientific debunking, the tale itself is hard to believe. It is not only hard to credit the notion of an eighty-year-old woman overseeing the destruction and excavation of the site, especially when the stories make it sound like she was digging through the rubble with her own hands, but when we consider exactly what has been claimed was found there, it simply strains credulity. Through the years, every possible Crucifixion relic imaginable was claimed to have been discovered at that site by St. Helena: not just the True Cross, but all three crosses used on the day of the Crucifixion, the placard placed on Christ’s cross, the seamless tunic stripped from him before his torture, the crown of thorns placed on his head, the nails used to crucify him, and even the marble stairs that Jesus climbed to Pontius Pilate’s palace, and, unbelievably, as I have mentioned before in one of my Xmas specials, the remains of the Three Wise Men. All of this, remember, is said to have been uncovered beneath the rubble of a Roman pagan temple by an elderly empress. Clearly the tale was simply used in later pious frauds as a go-to, readymade provenance for fraudulent artifacts. And one cannot help but wonder, then, about the original discovery of the site, if it happened at all as is claimed. In some versions of the story, a guide led Helena to the site. Could this person have simply been putting one over on the old woman? Might he have perpetrated one of the earliest pious frauds by planting “relics” there for her to find? It’s impossible to know now, but we see in the story how religious belief breeds superstition, which further breeds myth and legend and fraud, and this is a perfect explanation of the further, expansive myths surrounding one of the most mysterious and famous relics said to have been discovered by St Helena: the Holy Lance, used by the Roman centurion Longinus to pierce the side of Christ on the Cross.

Although, as we will see, the story of the Holy Lance has been expanded in legend to extend much further back in time than its presumed origins at the crucifixion, the most accepted birth of this relic is at the death of Christ, on the day memorialized as Good Friday. The lance is actually mentioned in a canonical gospel, the Gospel of John, which states that Jesus was already dead when the Roman soldiers came to break his legs, a common practice in crucifixion called crurifragium, meant to hasten the deaths of the crucified by  preventing them from raising their chests to breathe, and thus also preventing those being crucified from being set free and escaping in the night. One of the soldiers is said to have thrust his lance into Christ’s side, and a mixture of blood and water issues from the wound. Many are the interpretations of the significance of this blood and water. Some find metaphorical and spiritual meaning in it, while others are rather more materialist, arguing that this little detail proves the veracity of the account because it demonstrates that Christ had already died from asphyxiation, that fluid had built up around his heart as circulation ceased, and the lance pierced his pericardial sac, releasing this fluid. But to the first century author of this gospel, the detail of the blood and water seems less important than the act of piercing him itself and the fact that Christ escaped having his legs broken. This is emphasized in John because it is said to represent a fulfillment of prophecy, as Psalm 34 verse 20 states “He keeps all their bones, not one of them will be broken.” Never mind the fact that this Psalm is describing how God rescues all the righteous from afflictions, rather than representing an explicit prophecy of the Messiah. This is somewhat common, though. For example, Matthew points out the drink of vinegar and gall offered to Christ, and more than one gospel features the detail that vinegar is given to him later, in a sponge on a stick lifted to his lips, and these details were important to the authors because it hearkens back to Psalm 69, a kind of prayer about delivery from one’s enemies, which mentions that the speaker is given gall to eat and vinegar to drink. Likewise, John indicates that the piercing by the lance connects Christ to other scriptures that mention one who is pierced and then looked upon. The gospel writers are clearly engaged in a process of religion-making here, scouring the Psalms and other verses in an effort to prove that Christ’s death fulfilled prophecy. Interestingly, though, it is only in the Gospel of John that this piercing with the lance is even related. Other gospels mention various conflicting miraculous signs upon Christ’s death, darkness at noon, the Temple curtain rent in half, or an earthquake that disinters the remains of saints from their tombs, and afterward mention that one Roman centurion watching Christ reacts to the sign by acknowledging that he was the son of God, or at least that he was innocent. In later retellings, this centurion who changes his mind about Christ is conflated with the soldier who pierced his side, but there is no real reason to believe the two characters are the same. The account of the piercing of Christ’s side with the lance is just another way that the Gospel of John is different from the other, Synoptic gospels, which as I’ve discussed in previous posts like The Beloved Disciple and the Authorship of John, appears to be a composite text composed some decades after the other gospels. Thus it is here, it seems, that the myth of the Holy Lance was invented, in an effort to further connect Christ to prophecy, by the unknown author or authors of the Gospel according to John.

Depiction of Helena finding the True Cross from an Italian manuscript circa 825

The centurion who wielded the lance would not receive a name until centuries later, in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, the same text that inspired much of the Grail legend that would be intertwined with that of the Holy Lance. This work, also called the Acts of Pilate, is a composite as well. Some of the oldest passages of it are believed to have been written to counteract or refute another 4th century work also called the Acts of Pilate, this one anti-Christian. The extent of the mention of the Holy Lance in this apocryphon is one line, which adds nothing to John’s account beyond the name of the soldier being “Longinus.” It has been suggested, though, that the etymology of the name proves it was entirely made up or the result of a misreading, as the name Longinus appears to just be a Latinization of the Greek word for lance, lonche. But once the figure had a name, there was no stopping the legend. Eventually, he became a full-fledged saint, and the full name of Gaius Cassius Longinus appeared out of nowhere. It may seem quite odd for a Roman soldier who stabbed Jesus to be canonized as a saint, but according to the Christian view of the account, Longinus’s act was one of mercy. It’s said that he knew Jesus’s followers needed to bury him before the Sabbath, and thus he needed to prove Christ was dead before the other soldiers broke his legs and left him for dead overnight. Thus Longinus pierced Christ in order to show he was dead and allow him to be buried according to Jewish custom, or according to some interpretations, he actually killed Christ with his thrust, putting him out of his misery and ensuring that prophecy would be fulfilled by making the breaking of his legs unnecessary. This certainly puts a positive spin on a seemingly callous act. According to the hagiography of Saint Longinus, we learn that he inherited the lance from his father, who had been given it by Julius Caesar himself, and that he had very poor eyesight but was miraculously healed and could see perfectly after the blood of Christ trickled down his lance and touched his hand. It is said that after this miracle, he left the service of Rome and devoted his life to his newfound Christian faith, either as a monk or as a wandering sage. According to one account he was tortured by the Roman governor of Caesarea and executed. Like the relics of Christ, and his own lance, there are numerous competing claims about what happened to his body, which as a saint would itself be a powerful relic. Pieces of his body have been claimed at different times to reside in Cappadocia, in Turkey; on Sardinia, an isle in the Mediterranean; in a castle in Prague, Czechoslovakia; and of course, in the Vatican. However, hagiographic writings, that is biographies of saints, are notorious for their fictionalizing of figures, even when, unlike Longinus, their actual existence seems more likely. But interestingly the hagiography, which was in such a large part responsible for the legend of the Holy Lance, completely contradicts the story of St. Helena, as it’s said, rather than interring it in Christ’s tomb with all the other Crucifixion relics, that Longinus kept his lance.

Just where the Holy Lance ended up, whether carried by Longinus himself or taken by others, is a question with many convoluted answers. Among the first rumors of its whereabouts are the accounts of 6th-century scholars and pilgrims to the Holy Land. Both Gregory of Tours and Cassiodorus claimed that the Holy Lance was in Jerusalem, though neither had been there and seen it for themselves. One anonymous pilgrim, called by historians the Piacenza Pilgrim after the city in Italy from which he hailed, claimed to have seen it around 570 CE in a church on Mount Zion.  And a Latin guidebook for Christian pilgrims of uncertain date also mentions its presence in Jerusalem. In the early 7th century, following the Persian sack of Jerusalem, one Greek chronicle relates that the tip of the lance was snapped off and carried to Constantinople.  In the late 7th century, Arculf, a Frankish pilgrim who was supposedly shipwrecked in Scotland on his return from the Holy Land and related the things he had seen there, claimed to have seen the Holy Lance, or what remained of it, in the “basilica of Constantine,” in other words, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. These may have been tall tales, or they may have been true accounts of people having witnessed early pious frauds circulating the region. Whatever the case, around the 8th century, the presence in Constantinople of the entire Holy Lance, along with the Crown of Thorns, was attested to by numerous pilgrims. Whether this was the broken tip of the lance previously said to have made its way there, now attached to a replica lance for exhibition, or whether the rest of the Lance that Arculf had seen was later taken to Constantinople as well to be reunited with the tip, as others claim, is entirely unclear. What we see, here, though, is the beginning of a process of multiplication, as Holy Lances begin appearing all over the place.

Image of Longinus the saint.

In the year 1098, the army of the First Crusade, on its way to seize Jerusalem from the Saracens, sacked the city of Antioch and found themselves in a terrible pickle. Arab and Turkish forces promptly besieged them, and they were running out of food. That was when one peasant knight from Provençal named Peter Bartholomew claimed that he had received a vision. An angel had visited him, he said, and revealed that the Holy Lance was buried beneath the cathedral of St. Peter right there in Antioch. The bishop who traveled with the army was skeptical. First, Bartholomew was a drunk and a rake, not the sort of man whom angels visit, and second, he most probably was aware of the claims that the Holy Lance resided in Constantinople. But Peter Bartholomew’s patron, Raymond, the Count of Toulouse, was intrigued. So they excavated beneath the cathedral while the armies of Islam waited outside the walls. At first, they found nothing and were about to give up, but then, rather suspiciously, Peter Bartholomew himself jumped into the hole and suddenly produced an iron spearhead. The discovery convinced their beleaguered forces that God was on their side, and a further vision proclaimed by Peter Bartholomew inspired the starving men to burst out from the walled city in a last-ditch attack, and miracle of miracles, they actually routed their enemies in a glorious triumph that they largely attributed to their discovery of the Holy Lance. Only afterward did doubts creep in, as men began pointing out that this was a spear, not a lance, and that the Holy Lance was actually in Byzantium. Some said they had actually seen it there. Peter Bartholomew insisted that his find must be the real deal, though. After all, it had shepherded them to an unlikely victory against those they considered infidels. In a gambit that seems to indicate he truly believed in the spear himself, Peter Bartholomew volunteered to undergo an ordeal by fire to prove his Lance was genuine. Logs were stacked and set on fire, and Peter, carrying the iron spear, walked through a narrow passage between them, passing through the fire that he seems to have been sure would not harm him so long as he carried the relic. Instead, he was horrifically burned when he emerged and perished from his injuries. This Lance was discredited by Peter’s death in the ordeal, though some tried to say maybe it wasn’t the Lance of Longinus but actually one of the Holy Nails. By then, though, this supposed relic had served its purpose by then, and already there were others being proclaimed elsewhere.

 Certainly the most famous of artifacts claimed to be the Lance of Longinus is the Hofburg Spear, or Holy Lance of Vienna. This weapon, which is typical of the Carolingian period, is a winged lance with a pointed, ovular hole chiseled out of the blade for the placement of an ornamental pin in the core of the weapon’s head. Interestingly, this artifact has a long history. Originally, it was actually said to be the lance of Saint Mauritius, the legendary 3rd-century leader of the martyred Theban Legion who resisted the Christian persecutions of Emperor Maximian. As an artifact associated with a saint, then, it was already a holy relic, but it was not considered a relic of the Crucifixion until the 10th century. The story connecting this relic to the crucifixion actually comes from one single account, by Luitprand of Cremona, as an addendum to his narrative of Otto the Great’s struggles against rebellious dukes. Interestingly, this first account, which discusses Otto’s veneration of the lance and how it ensured his victory in battle, claimed that it was important not because it was the Lance of Longinus, but because it had once belonged to Emperor Constantine. The connection to the crucifixion came with the claim that a nail from the crucifixion, supposedly retrieved from the Holy Land by St. Helena, was fastened to the lance, and this claim remains today, with the central pin within the blade asserted to be a Holy Nail. Luitprand is clear about custody of this lance strengthening claims to the throne. Thus this lance, which was already associated with Holy Roman Emperors before Luitprand mythologized it, became a symbol of legitimacy inextricably linked to sovereignty and divine right. Interestingly, it would not be until the 13th century that this lance, which had never previously been claimed to be the Lance of Longinus, came to be considered the Holy Lance—twice holy, really, in that it was claimed to be the Lance of Longinus with a Holy Nail attached! In the 11th century, a silver covering was placed over the blade by Henry IV, inscribed Nail of Our Lord, and demonstrating the evolution of its legend, in the 14th century, Charles IV replaced it with a golden covering that read “Lance and Nail of the Lord.” By that time, it was already being used officially as part of the coronation, cementing its further role as symbol of royal legitimacy. By the 15th-century, it was officially considered part of the Imperial Regalia, kept at Nuremberg. It would be moved from there to Vienna, Austria, when the French Revolutionary Army marched on Nuremberg in 1796, eventually coming into the possession of the Habsburg dynasty. The evolving claims about the Holy Lance of Vienna show that everyone wanted a Holy Lance of their own, to the point that they sought to mythologize their past in order to write themselves into the story of the Holy Lance.

A depiction of the discovery of the lance at Antioch.

While physical lances and spears were showing up and being mythologized on all sides of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages, a rather unique Holy Lance legend developed in England, inextricably linked with the legend of the Holy Grail. This began in France, however, in the work of Chretien de Troyes that I discussed so much in the previous post. In his story, Perceval, the young knight, as a guest of the Fisher King, sees a bleeding lance carried in the grail procession. It is certainly debatable whether de Troyes intended this image of a bleeding lance to represent the Holy Lance. As I stated in my last post, the image of blood running down the length of a lance certainly recalls the hagiographic legends of the Holy Lance, and how Christ’s redemptive blood ran down it and touched Longinus’s hand, thereby healing his poor eyesight. Moreover, as his patron Philip of Flanders was a crusader, he very well may have heard the story of the lance found at Antioch and wanted the fabled Holy Lance written into this chivalric romance. However, most grail romances—those of Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, for example—do not explicitly relate this bleeding lance to the Lance of Longinus. Even Robert de Boron, who incorporated the apocryphal tale of Joseph of Arimathea from the Gospel of Nicodemus into Grail lore, makes no mention whatsoever of Longinus or his lance. Instead, in de Troyes, the lance is discussed only as a powerful weapon, one so powerful that a single blow from it could destroy all of England. In von Eschenbach, it is the poisonous weapon that grievously wounded the Fisher King. Some scholars have therefore suggested that the image was rather meant to reference a fairy spear of Celtic legend, the Fiacail or Luin, which causes great destruction and is venomous. Or perhaps it was intended to represent the spear of the legendary King Cormac of Ireland, called the Crimall or the Bloody Spear. But just as with the Grail, in continuations and later works the sacred dimension of this lance is stressed, and it becomes the focus of Sir Gawain’s quest. If Chretien de Troyes did not intend this identification in the first place, if it was not suggested to him by his patron, it didn’t really matter, because such is the nature of the Holy Lance myth that it becomes identified with any lance or spear mentioned in history. Once the idea was dreamed up that Longinus and his lance accompanied Joseph of Arimathea to ancient Britain, any and all lances or spears prominent in ancient British lore could be said to have been the Holy Lance, even though there had never been any indication that they were the Holy Lance before the Grail Romances. So the spear wielded by legendary warrior queen Boudica, who led an uprising against the Roman Empire, is claimed to have been the Holy Lance, and even King Arthur’s mythical spear, the Rhongomyniad, can be said to have been the Holy Lance, all with no evidence or without even a shred of corroboration in folkloric traditions.

This same superimposing of medieval myth over ancient lore extended even further back, with some developments of the Holy Lance legend seeking to trace its existence prior to when it came into Longinus’s possession. These tales, again, find mention of a lance or spear and argue this too must have been the fabled Holy Lance. Thus the spear thrown by King Saul at the young David must too have been the Lance, and Joshua must have raised this very lance at the head of the army of Israelites as the walls of Jericho fell, and when the priest Phinehas brought an end to a plague visited on the Israelites for sexual intermingling by running an Israelite man and a Midianite woman through with a javelin while they were in the act, that also must have been the Holy Lance in his hand, the conspiracists will say. One alternative history even traces the origin of the lance to Tubal-Cain, a descendant of Cain and a metalsmith mentioned briefly in Genesis. According to this legend, Tubal-Cain saw a fire fall from heaven, and when he looked for where it had fallen, he found a strange metal. That’s right, this legend, attributed to “ancient” Masonic texts, claims that the Holy Lance was forged more than 3000 years before the Common Era from a meteorite, a magical weapon formed of extra-terrestrial metal. To corroborate this notion, some armchair etymologists have claimed that the name Cain means “spear,” and Tubal means “bringer,” making Tubal-Cain literally mean “bringer of the spear.” Here’s the thing. This legend certainly did originate from the alternative histories of Freemasonic ritual, as with their focus on crafting, they revere Tubal-Cain as a supposed originator of such arts. His name is even a secret password used by Masons to recognize each other. But as I’ve spoken about before, despite what Freemasons claim about their order, this fraternal organization began in the Middle Ages as a guild system providing lodgings for traveling stonemasons who plied their trade far from home, working on the construction of great castles and cathedrals. The mythical ideas about the order’s ancient origins did not emerge until the 18th century, when it became a different sort of organization, an old boy’s club composed of upper-crust “speculative” masons, rather than actual stonemasons, whom they would call “operative” masons. Stories like these about Tubal-Cain were just the result of a secret society romanticizing its past. And the etymology of Tubal-Cain is entirely wrong. Cain actually means “smith,” or “forger.” The idea that it meant “spear” may derive from the fact that spears were, of course, forged. And Tubal means “spice,” giving the sense that Tubal-Cain’s workmanship represented a seasoning or improvement of the art of smithing. All of it, then, much like the legend of Longinus, is just an embellishment of a single mention in the Bible of a person described only as “a forger of all instruments.”

Photo of the Hofburg Spear said to be the Holy Lance and claimed by Trevor Ravenscroft to be the object of Hitler’s obsession. Photo credit: Saibo (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Among the worst of the speculators and fabricators of the myth of the Holy Lance, and the person almost single-handedly responsible for the conspiracy theories surrounding it today, was Trevor Ravenscroft, author of The Spear of Destiny. Ravenscroft is among the worst offenders in speculating about ownership of the Holy Lance throughout history, claiming as if it were fact that the relic was carried into battle by 45 different emperors. I have spoken about Ravenscroft before, briefly, in part two of my series on Nazi Occultism. If you aren’t familiar with his book, it posits that Hitler saw the Holy Lance of Vienna at the Hofburg in his youth, researched it and discovered its power, and was inspired to seize power by the relic, which he eventually acquired through his annexation of Austria in 1938. I recently reread the book, and I honestly can’t understand how anyone takes it seriously. As I said before, he makes claims that biographers of Hitler have proven inaccurate, including claims about where he was and what his financial situation was at certain times, and the plot of his story contains too many coincidences to be credited. Like most conspiracists, he takes material out of context and presents material from unreliable sources as if they were fact, relying on quotes from Hitler’s school friend August Kubizek, whose credibility has been challenged by scholars, to portray Hitler as being obsessed with the Hof Museum and some research that he was undertaking in its library. In fact, after cashing in with his book on young Hitler, Kubizek admitted in a private letter to an archivist that Hitler was not so studious and never seemed much of a reader. More than this, though, Ravenscroft presents direct quotations from Hitler about his obsession with the Holy Lance that are not at first properly cited. Eventually it becomes clear that these quotations were supposedly told to Ravenscroft by a Grail researcher named Walter Stein. Much of the book depicts Ravenscroft’s conversations with Stein, and the central conceit of the book is that Stein would have written himself about all this first-hand knowledge he had of Hitler’s occult obsession with the Lance, if he had lived long enough.

In fact, none of the written work that Stein left behind indicates that he had any interest in the Holy Lance, beyond its connection to Grail lore, and there is no evidence that he ever met Hitler as the book claims. More than this, during a court case in which Ravenscroft sued a novelist for using his intellectual property in a work of fiction, Ravenscroft essentially admitted that he’d made the whole thing up, that he’d never even met Stein except through the faculties of a medium in a séance, and that all the unsupported historical claims he made in the book were dreamed up through transcendental meditation. In retrospect, this should have been obvious. In the very introduction of the book he describes a process of writing about history and discovering previously unknown truths about the past through a “transcendent faculty” or “clairvoyant vision” and only later seeking confirmation of findings through historical research. One would be hard pressed to describe a less reliable approach to historical research than this. The truth of the matter is that Hitler was interested in the Hofburg Spear, though all signs indicate that he was only interested in it as part of the regalia that represented imperial legitimacy. To acquire the regalia would be good fodder for his propaganda machine; that is all. Through his psychic research, Ravenscroft supposedly learned that General George Patton personally recovered the Spear of Destiny at the conclusion of World War II, and that possession of the Holy Lance is what thereafter transformed America into a global superpower. In fact, there’s no record of Patton ever handling the artifact himself—that too must have been glimpsed in a vision—and the U.S. promptly returned it, with the rest of the Imperial Regalia, to the Hofburg. It boggles the mind that anyone could read this book and think it presents accurate historical fact. And yet some do, and from this morass of conspiracy speculation have sprung further bonkers conspiracist claims, like those of Jim Keith, Jerry E. Smith, and George Piccard, claims of Hitler’s survival and phony decoy lances kept in secret Antarctic bases, and of course, flying saucers thrown in for good measure.

A photograph of the less-than-credible Trevor Ravenscroft. (Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.)

Today, the number of relics contending for the title of the Holy Lance has diminished. The broken tip of the lance once venerated in Constantinople was sold to the French Crown and enshrined in Paris, but during the French Revolution, it disappeared. The other, intact lance venerated at Constantinople was seized by the Turks and was later sent to Rome, but with the rival lance in Nuremberg, as well as another that had cropped up in Armenia, the Church has never made any official claim of its authenticity. It is kept with other relics beneath the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica, and it’s trotted out, along with other relics, during Lent, to be gawped at. The lance discovered buried at Antioch by Peter Bartholomew may have been lost when the army of Raymond, Count of Toulouse, was annihilated by Turks in the doomed Crusade of 1101, but interestingly, Raymond of Toulouse may have given the Antioch lance to the emperor when he returned to Byzantium. And that means that the lance given back to Rome may actually have been the lance found at Antioch. Ironically, in the 18th century, the Catholic Church declared the lance found at Antioch, possibly the very one that they display every year, to be a pious fraud. As for the Hofburg Spear, in 2003, scientific tests demonstrated that the body of the spear was no older than the 7th century, in one swift stroke cutting through decades of conspiracy theory BS. As for the pin in the center of the blade, claimed to be a Holy Nail, this could not be dated and is said to be at least consistent in size and shape with a Roman nail of the 1st century. But it must be remembered that even if this were proven to be a 1st century Roman nail, that doesn’t mean it is genuinely from the Crucifixion. There are nails all over the world that are claimed to be Holy Nails, far too many nails for them all to be genuine. The phenomenon of pious fraud leaves us unable to give credence to any of them.

*

Until next time, remember, there is a difference between popular books on history, and actual historical research. Sometimes you can tell by looking at the book flap and checking out the author’s bona fides, but on The Spear of Destiny, it claimed Ravenscroft “studied history under Dr. Walter Johannes Stein for twelve years,” which we now know to be a lie. You might also discern the quality of such a book by examining how it is categorized. The fact that Ravenscroft’s book is categorized under “occultism” is a pretty clear indication that it shouldn’t be read as if it were a reliable work of history.

Further Reading

Adelson, Howard L. “The Holy Lance and the Hereditary German Monarchy.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 48, no. 2, 1966, pp. 177–92. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3048362. Accessed 14 June 2023.
Barber, Richard. The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Brown, Arthur C. L. “The Bleeding Lance.” PMLA, vol. 25, no. 1, 1910, pp. 1–59. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/456810. Accessed 14 June 2023.

Callahan, Tim. “Holy Relics, Holy Places, Wholly Fiction.” Skeptic, 13 Sep. 2022, https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/holy-relics-holy-places-wholly-fiction/

Cavendish, Richard. “The Discovery of the Holy Lance.” History Today, vol. 48, no. 6, June 1998, www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/discovery-holy-lance.

Jarus, Owen. “’Tomb of Jesus’ Dates Back Nearly 1,700 Years.” 28 Nov. 2017, www.livescience.com/61043-tomb-of-jesus-excavated.html.

Nickell, Joe. Relics of the Christ. University of Kentucky Press, 2007.

Nitze, William A. “The Bleeding Lance and Philip of Flanders.” Speculum, vol. 21, no. 3, 1946, pp. 303–11. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2851373. Accessed 14 June 2023.

The Quest for the Truth of the Holy Grail

I have spoken in previous pieces, and recent posts, about British Israelism, the claim that the British are the direct descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a belief that relies a great deal on pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology and masks a decidedly racist worldview. Among the additional claims by British Israelists is the story that the prophet Jeremiah traveled, in the company of Egyptian royalty, to Ireland in the 6th century BCE, and with him he carried certain holy relics, the Ark of the Covenant and the Stone of Destiny, also known as Jacob’s Pillow. There are numerous competing traditions in Ireland and Britain about this Stone of Destiny, and as I’ve spoken about before, British Israelists desecrated the Hill of Tara, near the Irish contender for the Stone of Destiny, the Lia Fáil, in their efforts to uncover the resting place of the Ark. All of these claims linking Britain to stories from the Bible, featuring ancient visitors from the Near East carrying sacred and powerful relics, are dubious in the extreme, but interestingly, they are not alone. These arguments echo another story, popular in the Middle Ages, which has entered modern myth today and continues to be believed by some who see in it a hidden historical truth, despite the fact that it was introduced through the fanciful legends of the Arthurian literary tradition. There are those, too, who may claim that Arthurian legend was real, but most people accept this body of medieval romances as nothing but fantasy. How strange it is, then, that one motif and thread in the cycle of Arthurian tales, that of the quest for the Holy Grail, is viewed as real by some who even reject the stories in which it appeared. These believers will suggest that the poets who penned Arthurian romances must have incorporated pre-existing traditions about a real Christian relic, or that they were cryptically revealing some hidden truth regarding this artifact, which was far more real than the chivalric adventure stories in which it appeared. These believers, for the most part, contend that what can be trusted in the medieval romances, the kernel of truth at their heart, is that a certain vessel, used by Christ at the Last Supper, was thereafter used to collect his blood when he was crucified, making of Christ’s seemingly metaphorical dinnertime conversation about drinking his blood, the blood of the covenant, into something far more literal, and imbuing the vessel, which would come to be called a “grail,” with some divine power, or at least, significance. Afterward, Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple now venerated as a saint, took Christ’s body down from the cross and provided a tomb for his interment. And it is this figure, Joseph of Arimathea, who it is said took this Grail, along with the Holy Lance that pierced Christ’s side on the cross, and traveled with them to ancient Britain, where he became the first Christian Bishop of the British Isles and ensured that these relics would thereafter be protected. Thus it entered Arthurian legend, where the family of Joseph of Arimathea, known as the Grail Family, kept the relics through the ages, their lives supernaturally extended by the taking of the host, or sacrament, from the Grail. Though to many it may seem a silly question to ask, akin to asking what is the historical basis of the Lord of the Rings, the number of later traditions and works of fiction and pseudohistory and conspiracy theory that treat the Holy Grail as if it were real obliges me to determine what, if any, real basis the legend may have in reality.

As you have probably already figured out, if you’ve been reading my blog posts for the last few months, this is yet another of my explorations of the history and the legends that served as the basis of the Indiana Jones films. I’ve been really enjoying digging deeper into these topics and rewatching the films as I look forward to the release of the final, long-awaited film of the series, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. As a MacGuffin for an Indiana Jones film, the Holy Grail seems absolutely perfect. It serves as the Christian counterpart to the Ark of the Covenant, in that it was of divine origin, even containing within it the very power or essence of God, and was capable of performing miracles, by some readings of the source material. In fact, it has even been discussed, in my principal source, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief by Richard Barber, as a kind of Christian allegory for the Ark, with Joseph of Arimathea’s wanderings with it representative of the Israelites’ wanderings through the wilderness with the Ark. But more than that, since a MacGuffin is something quested after, the Holy Grail is one of the most famous MacGuffins of all. For Indy to quest after the Grail was for him to take part in a long literary tradition; far more even than the Ark of the Covenant, the idea of undertaking a quest to find or discover the true nature of the Holy Grail has always been a large part of the legend. The nature of what that search meant, however, has evolved with the story through the years. In the later Arthurian romances of Sir Thomas Malory, it became an important part of a solidifying national mythology.

Photo of the Grail and Grail Diary from the third Indian Jones, as displayed at The Hollywood Museum. Image credit: Courtney "Coco" Mault, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0)

In another regard, the Holy Grail again certainly seems to have been a perfect MacGuffin, since Nazis were genuinely interested in the legend of Percival, the Arthurian Knight tasked with Questing after the Grail. Just as Arthurian legend became very important to the construction of national identity in Britain, so too it slowly became embraced by Germans and reinvented as a text foundational to their own Teutonic racial identity. This began in the early 19th century, with German Romantics adapting Arthurian legends featuring the Grail, and reached its apogee with the creation of Richard Wagner’s mid-19th-century opera, Parzival. Adolf Hitler was a great admirer of Wagner’s operas and viewed them as an important touchstone for the heroic nationalist myth that he promoted in Nazi Germany, and as Wagner was himself an anti-Semite and racist, his work and the resurgent myths they focused on, including that of the Holy Grail, became a major element of Nazi identity. But it should be emphasized that the Nazis were never out searching for the Grail as if it were a real artifact. The Ahnenerbe, about whom I spoke a great deal in my series on Nazi occultism, was actually interested in scholarly evidence of an Aryan precursor race, and hunting down a Christian relic would not have served their purpose. The notion in Last Crusade that the Nazis were after the Grail actually derives from the claim that Hitler was obsessed with another relic of the Crucifixion that was featured in the same Arthurian legend as the Holy Grail: the Holy Lance. This item, also called the Lance of Longinus, had already been mythologized as a kind of supernatural MacGuffin that Hitler was seeking in the 1972 occult book The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft, which was undoubtedly an influence on the Indiana Jones films generally in that it portrayed Hitler as being obsessed with acquiring Jewish and Christian relics. Ravenscroft’s book is a work of pseudohistory, and like the Holy Lance, the legend of the Holy Grail too evolved in more modern times, to be embraced not only as a powerful symbol by Jungian psychoanalysts and New Age enthusiasts, but as a literal object or hidden secret by pseudohistorians and conspiracy theorists who see in its legend a kind of coded treasure hunt. I’ve explored this before, in my blog posts The Priory of Sion and the Quest for the Holy Grail and The Secret of Rennes-le-Château and Abbé Saunière’s Riches, but those were early pieces and narrow in focus. I’ll mention the subject matter of those blog posts again later, and it may be worth revisiting them after reading this. But for this post, the question is of the historicity of Grail Legend.

The very name of the third Indy film, the Last Crusade, seems to indicate some genuine historicity to the legend of the Grail, because unlike the Grail quests of Arthurian legend, the Crusades were real historical events. Indeed, some who have viewed the Indiana Jones film but lack further historical knowledge may mistakenly believe that the Crusades were about searching for the Holy Grail. That is not the case at all. The Crusades were a series of religious wars waged between Christendom and the Islamic world, starting in the 11th century, when the Byzantine Emperor asked the Pope for military aid against the Turks, and the Pope in response mustered the Christian nobility of Western Europe to march on the Holy Land and occupy Jerusalem for Christianity. In fact, the launching of the Third Crusade was, in some ways, undertaken to recover a supposed relic of the Crucifixion. The kings of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem had long held a fragment of wood supposed to be a piece of the True Cross, and their armies carried it with them into battle. When Saladin defeated crusader forces in 1187, that piece of the True Cross fell into Muslim hands, and many European preachers urged the launching of another crusade to recover it. It was exactly during this period, when the idea of the recovery of a relic of the Crucifixion was being used to encourage further crusades, that the first Arthurian romance featuring the Holy Grail was composed, in France, or more specifically Flanders, by a poet named Chrétien de Troyes. Here we find the only further potential connection between the Grail and the Crusades, in that the poet Chrétien de Troyes dedicated his works to his patron, Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders, who had participated in the failed Second Crusade. Thus it is entirely possible that Chrétien de Troyes introduced the element of a quest for a relic of the crucifixion animating the knights of his chivalric romance as a kind of propaganda for further crusades.

1933 German postage featuring the Parsifal and the Holy Grail.

In the Last Crusade, the legends of King Arthur are only mentioned in an offhand way, dismissed as fairytales, yet the Grail is presented as a historical object, which of course has misled many fans of the film who know little else about the legend besides what the film portrays, to believe it was a real object. The question of whether or not it was real, however, may be simply answered. The Holy Grail was a purely literary tradition. And it appears to have been invented by Chrétien de Troyes between 1181 and 1190. In his work, The Story of the Grail, also called Perceval, we are introduced to the young knight of Arthur’s Round Table, Perceval, who encounters a king out fishing on a river, the Fisher King, who invites Perceval to his castle. At the castle, Perceval witnesses a strange procession, which includes a man bearing a bleeding lance and a woman carrying a fine, expensive-looking “grail.” Perceval, who had been taught not to speak out of turn, says nothing, and later is admonished for not having asked about the grail and whom it “served.” Beyond this, as Chrétien de Troye’s work was unfinished, little more is said of the Grail and its history or nature, except that it contained a piece of sacramental bread that kept the Fisher King alive. Interestingly, most elements of the legend are not clearly established in the work. The grail is not identified as being a relic of the crucifixion or even being a sacred relic at all. In fact, by de Troyes’s description it was to be seen more as a “rich grail” than a holy one. The notion of its holiness was not really established until the “continuations” of de Troyes’s work, when a series of poets, some anonymous, attempted to further his work, or complete it, during the following 20 years. In the first of these, the author suddenly uses the full title, calling it the Holy Grail, as if this had already been established. However, scholars analyzing the language of these continuations have determined that they must have been written by French poets of the same region, who may even have served the same patron, raising the possibility that they knew something of de Troyes’s intentions and where he was headed with the story. There are some elements of de Troyes’s original work that do hint at the eventual direction the continuations and later derivative works would take. The grail is said to hold a special host wafer that extends the Fisher King’s life, thus clearly connecting it with the Christian ritual said to have first been established by Christ at the Last Supper. And indeed, the leading question, the secret of whom the Grail served, seems to have clearly been a setup for a later reveal that it had served Christ, in that it was used at the Last Supper. Lastly, de Troyes’s portrayal of the bleeding lance can only be interpreted as a depiction of the Holy Lance, which was typically described as having blood running down it. It seems pretty evident that de Troyes was indeed heading in the direction that later writers eventually took the story. But this has led some to suggest that he wasn’t actually inventing the story, that he was actually retelling an ancient tale. Chrétien de Troyes himself speaks of a source book that his patron gave him, but from the way he refers to it only vaguely, this seems to only be a literary device. Later scholars have suggested that Arthurian legends such as Percival’s were derived from ancient Celtic legends as seen in texts such as the Mabinogion, and the argument is convincing for some other Arthurian legends, but no clear connection can be discerned with the story of the Grail. Still, though, as we will see, there may have been some pre-existing tradition that inspired Chrétien de Troyes as well as those who continued his work.

Among the French poets who expanded on the work of Chrétien de Troyes, the man most responsible for the creation of the Holy Grail myth as we know it today was Robert de Boron, writing about a century later. It was de Boron who revealed the nature of the Grail as being a Crucifixion relic, and it was he who developed the supposed history behind it, telling of Joseph of Arimathea’s involvement and thereby giving the entire legend a biblical cast. But the actual biblical basis for this Christian dimension to the story may surprise some. In reality, there is no scriptural basis to the story whatsoever. The extent of the scriptural evidence is only the existence of Joseph of Arimathea. This figure does appear to have existed, based on his presence in multiple gospels as one of the men who takes Christ’s body down and prepares it for burial. The notion that Joseph of Arimathea may have been a member of the Sanhedrin appears to have derived from his association with Nicodemus, a Pharisee who is clearly stated to have been a member of that assembly of rabbis and who in the Gospel of John helps Joseph of Arimathea prepare the body. Interestingly, pretty much everything about Joseph of Arimathea from Robert de Boron’s work appears to have been cribbed not from the canonical scriptures, but from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which I have mentioned before in a few episodes. In that work, Joseph of Arimathea is arrested and imprisoned after placing Christ in his tomb, but when they open his cell to kill him, they find he has disappeared. When Joseph is eventually found, he says that Christ visited him in his cell and released him. What de Boron added was that Christ brought with him the chalice from which he drank during the Last Supper, which had earlier been used to collect his blood on the cross, and commanded Joseph to keep it safe, whereupon Joseph took it away to ancient Britain. Such a journey would of course have been extremely arduous and unlikely, and it’s unclear why Joseph would choose Britain of all places. But this may not have occurred to de Boron as being unbelievable in the 12th century. A hundred years after Chrétien de Troyes seems to have invented the Grail, and hinted about its secrets, Robert de Boron incorporated apocrypha to flesh out that secret. And he may also have been weaving in an older tradition that could possibly have inspired de Troyes himself, as in my principal source, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief, Richard Barber reveals that there existed an iconographic motif in artwork depicting the crucifixion that shows figures standing beside the cross and catching Christ’s spilled blood in a chalice. Some examples of this iconography predate the work of Chrétien de Troyes by nearly 300 years. This certainly seems to be the origin of Robert de Boron’s conception of the Holy Grail as both the chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper and the cup that caught his blood. There is a problem, however, with the idea that this iconography inspired Chretien de Troyes’ original invention of the Grail, though, as in its original form, it appears this thing called the “grail” was never meant to be a chalice or cup at all.

The Achievement of the Grail, a 19th-century tapestry depicting the end of Perceval’s quest after the Grail.

Many assume that the word “grail” means cup or chalice and always has, but that is not the case. The meaning and etymology of the word “grail,” or graal in the Old French as used by Chrétien de Troyes, is unclear. Some think that it derived from the Latin cratis, for woven basket, and that this evolved to mean other kinds of vessels and receptacles. Most however think that it derives from the Latin gradale, signifying some kind of dish or cup. Those in the cup camp see the Latin word as having derived from an earlier Greek word, krater, for a cup with two handles, but it may have derived from the Latin garalis, which was a dish that Romans used to serve fish. Indeed, all signs in the original Grail text by Chrétien de Troyes point to the word being used to refer to a shallow dish from which meat would be served in a sauce. At one point, when a hermit further teases Perceval with the secret of what the graal contained before revealing that it held the Eucharistic bread, he tells him that it did not have in it “a pike or lamprey or salmon,” which would be absurd things to place in a chalice. Its use in other vernacular texts in the south of France confirm this, and we even have the words of one Cistercian monk of Froidmont who in 1220 explicitly identifies the word grail with the Latin gradale and furthermore states that “[g]radalis or gradale in French means a broad dish, not very deep, in which precious meats in their juice are customarily served to the rich.” Thus, the Grail, if de Troyes originally meant it to be related to the Last Supper at all, can only be viewed as the platter from which Christ and his disciples were served. It appears only later to have been confused with, or combined with, the chalice often depicted in art as having caught Christ’s blood, which may actually be meant to depict a different cup altogether, not one that he drank from at the Last Supper, but one that the Roman soldiers used at Golgotha when offering Jesus a drink of vinegar and gall just before crucifying him.

Beyond this misreading of the source, which resulted in the invention of a holy chalice, there have been other misreadings, the most famous of which being that the Old French phrase san graal, or Holy Grail, was actually intended to be parsed with the “g” at the end of the first word, making sang raal, or sang réal, meaning “royal blood.” This was, of course, popularized by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh in their bestselling 1982 work of conspiracist pseudohistory, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which claimed that the Holy Grail really was a coded tradition referring to the progeny of Christ and Mary Magdelene, who had traveled to the south of France and founded the Merovingian dynasty. This refuted claim was afterward further propagated by Dan Brown in his blockbuster novel and film The Da Vinci Code. Again, check out my post The Priory of Sion and the Quest for the Holy Grail to read more about the flaws with their theories and how they were actually the victims of an elaborate hoax. Here it is more relevant to focus on the fact that they were not the first to misread the source material in this way. In the 15th century, an English contemporary of Thomas Malory, John Hardyng, was the first to misread the Grail texts in this way, and in his work, the secret of the Grail leads Galahad to undertake a crusade and set himself up as a king over the Saracens, to “achieve” royal blood, as it were. Nevertheless, Hardyng’s interpretation of the term, which has been expanded upon ad nauseum, was incorrect from the start. In the original Grail text, Chrétien de Troyes never even called it a “Holy Grail,” thus there was no such phrase to be parsed. The closest he came was when he says tant sainte chose est li graal, or “so holy is the grail,” likely because it held the Eucharistic host that prolonged the Fisher King’s life. But this phrase can in no way be parsed to fit the “royal blood” interpretation, unless de Troyes meant, despite many spelling errors, to nonsensically write, “so bloody is the royal.” And even if you accept the later continuations as canon and believe they were truly finishing the story de Troyes intended to write, the Grail is never associated with blood as the lance is. It holds a communion wafer. In the later extrapolations of Robert de Boron, certainly it is said to have caught Christ’s blood, but we have seen this story was an adaptation of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which also contains no mention of any vessel catching Christ’s blood.

Byzantine art depicting Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus taking Christ’s body from the cross.

Beyond these misreadings, however, there were also further reimaginings of the nature of the Grail throughout its numerous literary treatments. For example it was at one point viewed as a book, written in blood by Jesus himself, kind of the ultimate Gospel written by the man himself. This interpretation appears to have been invented as the framing story of a thirteenth century French poem called the “Grand St. Graal,” in which Christ is said to have appeared to a hermit in the 7th century and given him the book, which contained the history of the Holy Grail, and making it clear that holding the book itself conferred the same effect as holding the Grail. Another reinvented version of the Grail comes from 13th-century German knight and epic poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, who in his work Parzival reveals the Grail to be a stone. In fact, when this is revealed, it seems more like a revelation of what the Grail holds, the thing which extends life, not the host here but a stone which can prolong youth and extend life, which is called lapsit exillis. This description of it as a stone that confers long life would, of course, cause alchemists to view von Eschenbach’s work as yet another coded hint regarding the Philosopher’s Stone, and it does make sense for alchemists to equate the Grail with the object of their perennial quest, which may be used to create an elixir of life. Indeed, they read von Eschenbach, and they suggested, much like the san graal/sang real misreading, that he must have written it incorrectly, because lapsit exillis means nothing in Latin. They will say that he must have meant lapis, which means stone, and that perhaps he meant the “stone of elixir,” or maybe lapis exilii, the stone of exile, or lapis ex celis, the stone from heaven, or even lapsavit ex celis, meaning “it fell from heaven.” This last view of von Eschenbach’s Grail stone has even led some to identify it with the Black Stone of the Ka’aba, thought to be a meteorite, about which I spoke in depth in my last patron exclusive minisode. The simple and disappointing truth of the matter, though, is that Wolfram von Eschenbach was, by his own admission, illiterate, his poems taken down by dictation. Likely he just made up a Latin-sounding term with no deeper meaning and most probably got the idea that the Grail contained a precious stone from a misunderstanding of Chrétien de Troyes, who described the Grail as made “of fine, pure gold; and in it were set precious stones of many kinds.” The truth that should be emerging here is that no one, not even the earliest of the poets who wrote about it, had a clear conception of what the Holy Grail should be, and so they just made stuff up.

Nevertheless, these disparate notions of the Holy Grail did eventually cohere, and the myth became so widespread and such a part of the medieval zeitgeist that real physical chalices began to crop up and be claimed as the genuine article. One is the Sacro Catino, or Sacred Basin, held at Genoa Cathedral. Another is the Holy Chalice of Valencia, an agate bowl mounted in such a way as it can be used as a chalice, which is kept at Valencia Cathedral. It is worth noting that the provenance of both of these relics cannot be confirmed to precede the grail romances, thus making it quite apparent that they were claimed to be the Holy Grail only after the literary tradition had become popular. This has not kept them from receiving some official recognition by popes, though, they have refrained from officially recognizing the relics as the actual cup of Christ. And there is even a contender in New York City, at the Met! The very fact that there are competing relics that only appeared after the birth of the legend goes to show that they are all most likely cases of pious fraud. The term pious fraud is used to refer to deception, such as the counterfeiting of miracles, meant to increase faith, with the idea that the ends justify the means, but in this context, we refer to the phenomenon of churches claiming to have sacred relics in order to bolster attendance and encourage pilgrimage for the principal purpose of boosting their earnings. Indeed, it appears that a chalice said to have been used by Christ at the Last Supper, along with a lance said to be the Holy Lance, was being displayed and drawing pilgrims from the British Isles to Palestine as far back as the 7th century, another possible origin for the legends, but likely also another case of pious fraud. I’ve spoken about this phenomenon before, most recently when I pointed out the any church that had possession of the actual Ark of the Covenant likely would not have kept it a secret, and more specifically when exploring objects such as the Veil of Veronica, the Guadalupe Tilma, and the Turin Shroud.

The Holy Chalice of Valencia

The legend or myth of the Holy Grail survives today not only in Italian and Spanish Cathedrals, but in fiction, in novels and films and television, and it has maintained the interest of readers and  viewers because of the inventions of conspiracy speculators who have further mythologized the Holy Grail as a secret kept hidden by shadowy secret societies, and especially the Knights Templar. As we saw with the Ark of the Covenant, the Knights Templar, or the Order of Solomon’s Temple, were a Catholic military order organized to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land during the Crusades, and they became a wealthy financial institution as well, forming a kind of proto-multinational banking system. In 1307, the order was suppressed by King Philip IV of France, who was indebted to them and leveraged rumors that they worshipped the devil in order to wipe them out and seize their wealth. The Knights Templar certainly kept a hoard of valuable items in their treasury, all of which was seized by the French crown, and the notion that they had acquired some religiously significant relics from the Holy Land seems believable enough, but history tells us that the treasure seized by King Philip was in part composed of coin, but was predominately in the form of land. Any valuable items that they held were being stored for clients, who deposited them with the order for safekeeping, since the knights could better protect them. Again, they were essentially a banking organization. There is no evidence that they dug up the Temple Mount and carried the Ark of the Covenant to France, and there is even less reason to believe that they had a real Holy Grail in their possession. First of all, we have no reason to believe that the Holy Grail actually existed, and if we think of it only as the cup used at the Last Supper, or the cup of vinegar and gall served to Christ on Golgotha, or simply as whatever early pious fraud was being displayed in Palestine as such a cup back in the 7th century, we have no reason to think it was kept at the Temple Mount by Muslims before Crusaders sacked it, or that it had been buried there centuries earlier, as is the legend of the Ark. But more than this, the timeline simply does not make sense. The very beginning of the idea of the Holy Grail began in the 1180s, when Chretien de Troyes wrote his poem, and the first concrete sense of the Grail as holy relic would not arrive until the First Continuation of his poem years later. Whereas the Templars were founded around 1120. If the Templars were indeed founded in order to protect the Holy Grail, as the legend would eventually claim, why was there no sense of this in the original lore? In the first Grail romances, it is protected by the Grail Family of the Fisher King, and when Robert de Boron fleshed out the myth in his 13th century adaptation, he has Joseph of Arimathea taking it out of the Holy Land long before the Templars ever existed. Thus, if we are to believe the Templars discovered it in Palestine, then we cannot believe the rest of the background about its relevance to the crucifixion story.

In fact, the first explicit connection of the Templars to the Grail legend seems not to have arisen until a hundred years or so after they were stamped out in France, in John Hardyng’s Chronicle, as he claimed that, when the fictitious Galahad learned the Grail secret and set out on Crusade to “achieve royal blood” and set himself up as a King in the Holy Land, he founded an order of knights, the order of the royal blood, based on Arthur’s Round Table, and the Templars, he said, were thereafter founded and modeled after them, and the Hospitallers after them in the same fashion. It was a clear attempt to draw some parallel between Catholic military orders and Arthur’s knights, and it probably doesn’t need to be said that Galahad and his order of the Holy Grail never really existed. This first explicit link between the Templars and the Grail is tenuous at best. Most conspiracists who are looking for a stronger link go back to the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, he who imagined the Grail to be a magical stone, for in his work Parzival, he mentions that, while the Grail was entrusted to a certain dynasty, it was kept at a certain temple, rather than in a castle as the previous romances had depicted, and he uses a certain word, templeise or templeisen, for the keepers of the Grail. It has been argued that Eschenbach actually meant Templar, but there is little reason to believe this. The Templars were not well-known in Germany at the time von Eschenbach was writing, and according to his description, there were women among these templeisen who took care of the Grail, which seems to make it quite clear that it wasn’t a fraternal order of knights he was describing. And it must be remembered that Wolfram von Eschenbach was illiterate, or at least said himself that he could neither read nor write. So like his faux-Latin term for the Grail, lapsit exillis, it seems likely that his templeise was just another nonce word, a fictional name for a fictional group, and Templar conspiracists have since read into it, seeing what they want to see. And that is an apt explanation of all the Grail lore, from the authors of the Continuations who imagined a more sacred nature of the Grail, to Robert de Boron who connected it to the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, to Thomas Malory and John Hardyng who used Arthurian legend to reflect 15th-century English politics, and on from there, with, as we’ve discussed, ideas of German nationalism inspired by Wolfram von Eschenbach’s work and themes of spiritual and psychological significance found by New Agers and Jungian writers and conspiracy speculators assembling elaborate pseudohistories based on questionable readings of medieval poetry. In this way, the Quest for the Grail, as a quest for knowledge or understanding, is quite real, even if the secrets revealed at its conclusion may be, like the sources of the myth, more fantasy than fact.

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Until next time, remember, it may seem silly that some have treated works of fiction like The Da Vinci Code as if they are reliable sources of accurate history, but we see that ancient works of fiction like the Grail romances have long been mistakenly treated like historical records, resulting today supposed non-fiction works of pseudohistory like The Spear of Destiny and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which inspire movies like the Indiana Jones films and novels like The Da Vinci Code. It’s all simply part of the mythologizing of our past, and you have to look past the adventure stories and deeper into history to see through it.

 Further Reading

Barber, Richard. The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Callahan, Tim. “Holy Relics, Holy Places, Wholly Fiction.” Skeptic, 13 Sep. 2022, https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/holy-relics-holy-places-wholly-fiction/

Goodrich, Norma Lorre. The Holy Grail. HarperCollins, 1992. https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780060922047/mode/2up

Nickell, Joe. Relics of the Christ. University of Kentucky Press, 2007.

The Hidden Ones: Sect of Assassins

In the Middle Ages, contact between Islamic cultures and Europe introduced many new things to the West.  Along with luxury goods that were acquired, so too new words were brought to Europe, words such as crimson, saffron, jasmine, taffeta, and musk. Comfortable new styles of silken garb were imported, as was the word for them, pyjamas. And new sweets were discovered, along with the word candy. Alongside such commodities, tales were also imported to the West through this commerce. One of the first Europeans to travel the Silk Road, that superhighway of commercial and cultural intercourse, was Marco Polo, an Italian merchant and also a spinner of fanciful tales. One tale he told was of a certain group of Muslims who followed a mysterious old man, whom he said had created a veritable paradise on earth, a bountiful garden into which he had channeled canals that carried not only flowing water, but wine, and milk, and honey. According to Polo, the Old Man of the Mountain commanded the absolute loyalty of his subjects, who truly believed that they resided in paradise on Earth. And when the Old Man wanted something done about an enemy of his, he plied some youthful follower with a drug that caused them to sleep, at which point he would take the youth out of his paradise. Upon waking, the youth believed he had been ejected from heaven and was told that in order to obtain reentry, he would have to do the Old Man’s bidding, to kill his enemy. Thus, Polo explained, the Old Man drugged and manipulated his disciples and transformed them into his personal legion of murderers. This tale illustrated the growing lore surrounding a distinct group of Muslims whom Europeans had encountered throughout the Crusades, when members of this Order began killing or attempting to kill European Crusaders at their Grandmaster’s command. Europeans quickly learned to fear their daggers, just as the Order’s other enemies in the region long had, and a black legend was developed. These were fanatics, it was said, who kept their secret conclaves in impregnable castles. They were deluded, it was believed, by a heretic cult leader and kept mad with intoxication on hashish. This was the origin of their name, the hashishin, it was claimed, and thus another word entered our lexicon, derived from this word: assassin, a noun, but soon a verb as well, assassinate, to murder suddenly, using subterfuge or surprise, for religious or political reasons. This Order of Assassins was no fairy tale, as some of Marco Polo’s stories were, and they had long been quite successful in destabilizing and defeating their enemies purely through assassination. Many were the military commanders, viziers, emirs, Imams who fell beneath their blades. Among the most famous of those was Conrad of Montferrat, the Crusader King of Jerusalem. It is difficult to always be certain whether an assassination was carried out by them or perhaps by others, and this was actually one of the benefits of their assassinations, that they destabilized by creating paranoia and confusion, but among the rumored and real assassination plots attributed to them were attempts on the lives of a Mongol Khan; multiple efforts to kill Saladin, the sultan who spearheaded the Counter-Crusade, and even a failed attempt on the life of Edward Longshanks, Hammer of the Scots and future King of England, during the Ninth Crusade, called Lord Edward’s Crusade. Real though the Assassins were, though, that does not mean they weren’t surrounded by myths and misconceptions.

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The reason I was drawn to discuss this topic directly after my post on the Thuggee should, I think, be quite obvious. It’s nothing to do with the era or the locale or the culture, as the strangler bandits of 18th and 19th century India have none of this in common with the 11th century Arab Muslim Order of Assassins active in Persia, Syria, and elsewhere for a few hundred years. Rather, I see a connection of theme. While the Thugs were not the organized, hierarchical religious cult that they were made out to be and the Assassins were followers of a specific creed who devoted themselves entirely to accomplishing the goals of their Imam, both were secretive brotherhoods among whom were members specially tasked with murder of a most intimate and gruesome sort. The names of both have entered the lexicon to represent those who commit similar crimes. And both became the storied boogeymen of European imaginations during the eras in which they were active. Indeed, it is the fact that Assassins have been so mythologized in fiction that they have become enshrouded in multiple layers of false history, much like Thuggee. The modern imagination has been quite drawn to the Order of Assassins, as they have appeared in numerous novels, by those of such vastly different talents as Umberto Eco and Dan Brown. They were the inspiration for the League of Assassins led by Batman’s nemesis Ra's al Ghul in DC comics, and they were the basis of the Faceless Men in George R. R. Martin’s unfinished A Song of Ice and Fire book series… that’s the assassin’s guild that little Arya Stark joins, as also depicted in the television series Game of Thrones. But the most in-depth treatment of the Order of Assassins in modern fiction, the reason it is so well-known today, and the source of the most creative fabrications about the group is the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise, from which I took the name of this episode. I’ll be the first to say I’ve enjoyed these games, and being a fan of historical fiction, I appreciate how they weave in real historical figures and events into their storylines. But if one were to confuse the story presented in these games as real history, one would believe that the Assassins were actually heroes fighting for freedom against the proto-Fascistic Knights Templar, and that actually both groups were, in fact, evolutions of even older secret societies going back to ancient Egypt, and that these groups were vying for control of ancient artifacts that contained the advanced technology of a long extinct species that was a pre-cursor to humanity. It’s a cool story, obviously science fiction/fantasy, not something to debunk but to enjoy. However, as it weaves in such myths as the existence of Atlantis and such mythical figures as Hermes Trismegistus, it might easily confuse someone as to what might be real, historically, and what false. But this question could have been asked about the Assassins long before the elaborate mythmaking of modern entertainment featuring them, as they were mythologized even from the beginning.

Marco Polo, mythologizer of the East.

A cursory understanding of the Muslim world and the conflicts within it must be achieved before anyone can really understand the origins of the Order of Assassins. I say cursory because this is a topic far too expansive and complicated to possibly do justice in one brief segment of one standalone podcast episode. So we will look, in admittedly broad strokes, at the background of the rise of the Assassins because we need the context. After all, the Black Legend of the Assassins propagated by Europeans purposely ignores the actual religious context of the sect and their beliefs. Before the Crusades, this could be explained by ignorance, but after the Crusades, when Europeans came to better understand the complex religious fabric of Islamic society, they then purposely ignored the distinctions between one sect or denomination and another, choosing to portray them all as godless infidels who worship an anti-Christ. This contributed greatly to the spread of myths about the Assassins, and we don’t want to be like Crusaders in this regard. We must first understand that the Prophet Muhammad unified the Arab world under the Islamic faith and also established a social and political order characterized by multiculturalism, religious freedom, and social justice, as represented in the Constitution of Medina. But we must further understand that, since his death, the Islamic world and faith had been long troubled by disunion and schism. Much of this had to do with disagreements over succession, as it was believed by many that the next ruler should be of Muhammad’s lineage, specifically his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, but instead the mantle of caliph passed to his father-in-law, Abu Bakr. This essentially political faction supporting Ali for the job, Shīʿatu ʿAlī, or “followers of Ali,” transformed through the years to become a doctrinal branch of Islam, Shīʿa or Shīʿism, the Shīʿite view being that Ali had been designated to succeed Muhammad as caliph and Imam, and that only those descended from Ali were divinely ordained to lead. Ali did eventually take up the role as leader, but this did not put an end to the internecine strife. A new Caliphate was established by the Umayyad clan in resistance to Ali’s sovereignty. The Umayyad Caliphate lasted about a hundred years before another revolution, led by the Shīʿite Abbasid clan toppled them and established a third Caliphate. Throughout these conflicts, the schism of Islam became more and more concrete, with Shīʿism on one side and Sunnism, a more orthodox camp who rejected the notion that Muhammad ever intended to establish a blood dynasty, on the other. But even within the Shīʿa branch of Islam, there was much diversity of belief and much disagreement, and it was from among these denominations that the Assassins would rise.

Many of the doctrinal disputes within Shīʿa Islam had to do, yet again, with the legitimacy of the succession of Imams. This was not only about Earthly power and legitimacy; it was about prophecy. During the Abbasid Caliphate, a number of secret religious societies appeared, and with them the notion of esoteric knowledge being present in the Quran. It was believed that the Islamic scriptures carried some secret, hidden messages, that only the true, divinely ordained Imam and his initiates could discern. Among the secrets of the Quran interpreted was the idea that there would only be twelve divinely ordained Imams, and the twelfth would be hidden away and mystically preserved, in Occultation, it is called, until such time as he returns, a messianic figure called the Mahdi, whose appearance will signal the end times. This remains the belief of Twelver Shīʿites to this day, and belief in the return of an Imam as the Mahdi has become a common feature of Shīʿa Islam generally. However, some other subsects have differed regarding the succession of Imams and the number of Imams. The second largest branch of Shīʿa Islam, after the Twelvers, believe that when the Imam Shīʿites recognized as the sixth true Imam died and passed the Imamate to the son recognized by Twelvers as the seventh Imam, it should have and indeed did actually pass to his eldest son, Isma'il ibn Jafar. The Isma’ili Shīʿa believe he was the true inheritor because of his great understanding of the hidden meaning of texts, and that he did not actually die, as was claimed, but rather was hidden away from the Abbasids. The fact that he was missing, presumed dead or in hiding, led some Isma’ili to believe that he was actually the last Imam, waiting in Occultation to return as the Mahdi, and they became known as the Seveners, as Isma’il was considered the seventh Imam. Whether proponents of Isma’il as simply the seventh Imam or as the last Imam and the coming Mahdi, Isma’ilism spread across the Islamic world through aggressive proselytizing. In the tenth century, an Arab dynasty called the Fatimids, who traced their lineage back to Ali and Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and were recognized as legitimate Imams by some Isma’ilis, began to wrest control of the Mediterranean coast of Africa and Western Asia from the Abbasids. The Fatimid Caliphate saw a further schism early in the 11th century, when upon the death of one Imam, the son whom he had publicly named as his successor, Nizar was thereafter prevented from succeeding to the Fatimid throne in Egypt as the next Caliph-Imam by a dictatorial coup. Thus the Nizari Isma’ilis were born. Nizar was later taken captive in battle against his usurper and executed, but one of his most devoted lieutenants, Hassan-i Sabbah, who had captured and made impregnable a castle called Alamut in the mountains of northern Persia, took Nizar’s son, whom the Nizari Isma’ili then considered the true Imam, under his protection and established a Persian Nizari Isma’ili state. Hassan-I Sabbah was the original Old Man of the Mountain who would enter legend centuries later, and his Nizari Isma’ili, a state with no army and many enemies, were the sect of Islam that would become known to the world as Assassins.

19th century engraving of Hassan-I Sabbah

The coup against Nizar in Egypt had been engineered by the commander of the armies there, and this has been seen as one of the principal reasons that Hassan-I Sabbah never gathered an army to the Nizari Isma’ili cause. Instead, he developed a three-pronged approach to war, the first being fortification. As Alamut Castle proved to be a safe refuge, he undertook to capture other castles and thereby expand his Imam’s territories without armed conflict. This he managed through the second prong of his approach, infiltration. There are numerous stories of the way that Hassan-I Sabbah captured Alamut. One is that he converted the owner to his creed, and another that he simply snuck so many of his men in that, slowly but surely and unnoticed by its current occupants, he was taking possession right under their noses. Such stories are impossible to credit with any certainty, but considering the kinds of stealth and subterfuge he would go on to utilize, such tactics must have been among his favorites. And his final approach to war was tactical murder, or what would be called today assassination. Hassan-I Sabbah did indeed train killers and send them out with daggers, directing them to use guile and disguise to get close enough to their targets to end their lives. And these agents did indeed expect to die in the completion of their tasks, and were indeed promised rewards in paradise upon their deaths. The policy itself, of effecting political and social change through strategic killings, can be seen to have evolved rather organically out of Islamic teachings and recent history. Passages in the Quran were long interpreted as approving of regicide in extreme cases, when leaders were wicked. And Hassan-I Sabbah was not the inventor of political murder. Indeed, of the first four Caliphs after Muhammad, the Rashidun Caliphs, three of them, including Ali, were assassinated. Hassan-I Sabbah was just the first to place such importance on assassination as opposed to field warfare, to strike terror into enemies who would gladly risk their lives in battle but feared an ignoble death in their homes. Hassan-I Sabbah did not invent assassination, but he perfected it.

Since I use the word terror to describe the effect that Hassan-I Sabbah’s tactics had on his enemies, I should address a certain analogy that has been made in modern times, likening his Order of Assassins to terrorists. The Assassins of Nizari Isma’ilism have not only been likened to Islamic terrorists, but also terrorists of the IRA, or Kamikaze bombers. Like the IRA, the Assassins relied on a constant threat of sudden violence to intimidate, and like the kamikaze, Assassins were fully expected and in fact intended to die in completion of their missions. But of course, the comparison to modern-day Islamic terrorists is the most obvious, being that they share cultural and religious backgrounds. There are other commonalities as well, in that, like the Assassins, suicide bombers intend to sacrifice their lives to get close enough to their enemy that they might inflict harm, again to intimidate and terrorize. Like the Assassins, they rely on this approach to warfare against militarily superior enemies, and they believe they will be rewarded in paradise for their acts of violence against those they see as the enemies of their faith. Like I said, the similarities seem obvious, even apt, but on closer consideration, the Nizari Isma’ili Assassins are far different, in both motivation and practice. First, as we have said, their choice to rely on assassination was part of a conscious refusal to gather armies and engage in traditional warfare, not resorted to because of military inferiority. And second, the Assassins used assassination out of a kind of chivalry that was borne out of Arabian culture. Even long before the rise of Islam, single combat was preferred to the destruction of war. “Pure” warfare, in the Arabian sense, avoided any unnecessary loss of life, and strictly prohibited the killing of women and children or the elderly. The Assassins were never known to target such vulnerable or innocent people, and in avoiding actual battlefield engagements, the Assassins were returning to the Arabian roots of pure warfare, eliminating leaders in a kind of forced single combat and thus saving the lives of the rank and file. This character of the Assassins’ tactics cannot be further from the reality of Islamic terrorism, which is all too accepting of collateral damage.

16th century depiction of the capture of the Assassin fortress of Alamut

One of the principal misunderstandings about the Assassins deriving from the myths surrounding them has to do with the group’s name. There was for a very long time a robust debate about the etymology of the word “assassin,” with numerous theories put forth to explain where the word came from. The word entered European languages via the Latin, assasinus, but it was long unclear where it had come from before that. One theory is that it was a corruption of the Arabic word for the weapon that Assassins chose as their sole means of killing, sikkin, or dagger. Another theory was that it was an application of the Arabic word for a night watch, asas. Others said it came from the ancient Persian word shahanshah, meaning “king of kings” in reference to their leader. Perhaps the most convincing is that the term was derived from the name of their first leader, Hassan-I Sabbah, such that the word is a corruption of the Persian hasaniyyun, or “followers of Hasan.” However, the truth of the matter was not figured out until the 18th century, by Baron Silvestre de Sacy, who in his study of Isma’ilis determined that the term was derived from the name of the drug they were said to use: hashish. Thus they were called the Hashishiyyun, or hashashun, literally “hashish-eater,” and the word simply evolved from there as it was taken into other languages. The fact of this etymology has done much to perpetuate the myth of the Nizari Ismai’ili Assassins as drugged stooges, as portrayed by Marco Polo and others. In fact, the use of hashish and other powerful narcotics, like opium, was widespread in Islamic society throughout the Middle Ages. But the truth is that this was a total misnomer. Crusaders and other Europeans heard the term being used not by the Nizari Isma’ili to describe themselves, but by the enemies of the Nizari Isma’ili. They read the term in anti-Isma’ili polemics written by Sunnis who despised the Nizari Isma’ili, not only for their success in converting Muslims to their creed, but also because they lumped all Isma’ili in together, whether Nizari or Sevener. Indeed there was one particularly militant subsect of Sevener Isma’ili, completely distinct from Hassan-I Sabbah’s Nizaris, called the Qarmatians, who in 930 CE sacked both Medina and Mecca, and who were hated for desecrating some holy sites and artifacts. Specifically, they are said to have dumped corpses into the Zamzam Well, which was said to have miraculously produced water during the time of Abraham, and they stole and held for ransom the Black Stone, a relic, thought to be a meteorite, that is said to have fallen from heaven to mark the place where Adam and Eve should build the first earthly temple. So Sunni writers generalized all Isma’ili as heretics bent on destroying Islam, and they used the term Hashishiyyun not literally, but rather to indicate that they were men of low social status and weak moral character. So we find that the word “assassin,” as a name for this sect, had nothing to do with the drugs and everything to do with an ad hominem attack on the sect. In fact, among the Nizari Isma’ili, only a select few were ever tasked with committing assassinations, and they called themselves fidai, meaning “devotee.”

So we see that the Black Legend of the Assassins was nothing but mythmaking all along. Even if we were to reject the evidence that Sunni polemics called Nizari Isma’ili “hashish-eaters” only metaphorically, logic tells us that any such accusation must have been a lie. The Nizari Isma’ili were highly disciplined and sober. The clearest evidence of their strict sobriety is that Hasan-I Sabbah is known to have actually executed his own son for drinking wine! Moreover, the fidai tasked with assassinations could not have been drugged-out pawns. Their role required a great deal of education, learning several languages so that they could infiltrate different cultural communities. And they had to be quick-witted, resourceful, and adaptable in order to get close to their targets. Indeed, there were some cases in which fidai insinuated themselves into the inner circle of their targets and posed as their closest advisors and friends for long periods of time before suddenly producing a dagger and revealing themselves to have been assassins all along. It is simply not credible that they were also abusing hashish the whole time. Some may hear hashish and think, “That’s not so powerful or harmful of a narcotic. It’s just cannabis.” But smoking a little hash today is quite different that eating hash back then. There is a 19th-century book called the Hasheesh Eater by Fitz High Ludlow in which he described his hallucinatory trips, ingesting higher and higher quantities of the drug, until, as he described it: “time [and] space expanded… The whole atmosphere seemed ductile, and spun endlessly out into great spaces surrounding me on every side.” All this to say, hashish eating would cause one to have an intense psychedelic trip, one that would certainly prevent anyone from competently disguising themselves and convincingly posing as someone else in order to get near a heavily guarded target. Like opium eating, it was more likely to cause someone to lie down than to leap into action. Anyone who has ever taken too many edibles knows exactly what I mean. So in the end we owe the legend of the Assassins to the ignorance of the Crusaders. The myth repeated by Marco Polo, of the Old Man of the Mountain and his earthly Paradise, reentry into which was promised in exchange for committing assassinations, would have been seen as obvious fiction if anyone spreading it had actually visited Alamut castle, the headquarters of the sect, which was no paradise flowing with milk and honey. And other such myths, such as that the Assassins were chosen as children, kept in isolation and manipulated their whole life, or that they would gladly leap to their deaths for no reason other than the simple command of the Old Man of the Mountain, could also have been easily dismissed if any European studying them had relied on written records other than those composed by the enemies of the Nizari Isma’ili. The problem was, the Nizari did not leave their own records behind. In 1256 CE, the Mongols massacred them, razing their castles, and burning their libraries. As a result, the Black Legend that their enemies had created about them would be accepted as truth for 700 years. And even today, with a new Assassin’s Creed video game releasing later this summer, the Assassins—if we want to still call them by that term, which they would have found offensive—live on in memory only through fantasy. 

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Until next time, think about this: they say that history is written by the victors, but rather, I’ve found that it’s actually myth that they leave behind, and historians are able to set the record straight.

Further Reading

Daftary, Farhad. The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma’ilis. I.B. Taurus & Co., 2001.

Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Secret Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizârî Ismâî'lîs Against the Islamic World. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Waterson, James. The Ismaili Assassins: A History of Medieval Murder. Frontline Books, 2008.