We’re cheering on our country, world and friends, as all of us work for truth to prevail. To that end we continue the search for a more honest view of Europe’s past. In this blog I’d like to share with you two insights garnered from our recent trip, mainly in Brittany.
First, we had noticed early-on that crucifixes seem to have been placed in existing Celtic fest halls to visually convert the use from secular to religious. What has become more apparent recently is that crosses were already part of the Celtic culture. It looks more and more as though figures of corpses were added to existing crosses all over Europe as part of the Christian conquest.
Why does this matter? It helps to fill in the before-and-after picture, how Europe looked before and after Roman attacks. It also suggests the strategic comprehensive planning that went into the invader’s subjugation of native Europeans.
Roman planners seem to have capitalized on what was already there to effectuate their takeover. Romans found prosperous, interconnected family domains in Europe whenever they attacked, whether as Roman imperials or Roman Christian Crusaders.
They must have recognized that the cross was a common element of the Celts’ visual landscape. Celtic Europe was full of crosses - as markers on the roadways, in cemeteries and fest halls. The same reasoning probably led Romans to repurpose the most popular gathering places from secular to religious too; people automatically gathered at the fest halls.
There’s another reason too. Keeping death before everyone’s eyes can magnify atrocities; it can create and maintain fear; it can render people subservient. To terrorize their slaves into submission, Roman overlords seem to have changed the vision of the afterlife from Elysian fields to eternal torment.
Adding the figure of a corpse to a cross instantaneously changes secular to religious. The crucifix injects death and guilt into a place that was dedicated to festivity and celebration. Before the cross was associated with Christianity, crosses seem to have been customized, highly decorated - covered with ivy, filigreed, tips embellished.
Do you sit in a hall filled with bright scenes of gardens and heroes, or surround yourself with death and brutality? When you replace bright colorful scenes and sculptures with incessant scenes of death and atrocity, even the courageous can turn compliant and fearful, - especially when those threats are being made indirectly against the family.
The way in which Roman campaigns of terror have been carried out may be visible from the aftermath even now. Roman emperors and Roman Crusaders likely struck across broad swaths of Europe to seize mines and slaves. Since the Stone Age, mining had formed a network over Europe that had developed engineering and science to a stunningly high level of shared prosperity. For hundreds of years after the pre-Christian Julius Caesar decimated Gallic settlements, slaves were the biggest commodity traded from north to south.
I’ll conclude this look at crucifixes by reiterating that the Christian conquest on Celtic Europe was by the sword, that Christians baptized by blood. According to the Christian theology that I was taught, a father gave his only son as a human sacrifice. The mother mourns with the corpse; the father is nowhere to be seen. Where does that leave us?
We see the church very deliberately using fear as a tool to keep people subservient and to restrict women. The more we uncover hidden Celtic traces, the more clearly this is exposed. Courage and truth may be the only antidotes to these age-old tactics, and in dire need of being applied in the current situation of Russia’s Roman-style invasion of Ukraine.
Change of pace.
Let’s look at Charlemagne in the 800s, a time of great prosperity in Europe, centuries after the Roman Empire had fallen and before the medieval Crusades began renewed massacres in Europe.
Charlemagne was a Frank, and the Frankish homeland was Pannonia (that included today’s Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary – Czechia, Slovakia?) This was a European family with relatives scattered all over. Charlemagne built abbeys in the Rhineland; Charlemagne’s mother was from Laon near Paris and his grandmother built the abbey at Prüm.
Here we have the little town of Melle in Nouvelle Aquitaine, full of silver. The abbeys around Melle seem like support centers for the mining. They were likely the epicenters for the best of everything - food, wine, music, entertainment, recreation, commerce, arts, nature, education. This notion really bears out in Melle, the home of Charlemagne’s silver mines, because the resplendent abbey in Celle-sur-Belle sits an easy horseback ride from Melle.
Melle and the nearby town of Aulnay contain huge fest halls. One features a horse and rider over the front entry that seem to be honoring Charlemagne himself. A rare figurine of Charlemagne in the Louvre shows him on a horse in much this way.
It was very exciting to find a mine from Charlemagne’s era that is open to the public. The silver coins minted there reflect a continuance of the mining traditions and capabilities dating all the way back to the Stone Age.
Thanks for your interest.
With all best regards,
Jacqui
