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| What the hell is this? |
When noticed, the two poles motif is all over Spain. It's on the mailboxes, government buildings, coats of arms, harbours, gates...all sorts of things.
So, after some digging into my ignorance it seems there's a long story, involving cattle, some fairies, an Italian lover and a new world. But let's start with a Neanderthal called Enkidu.
| Enkidu and Gilgamesh. Enkidu is the poser. |
Just about all western religious and legendary guff comes from a particularly imaginative era in Mesopotamian history, centred on the epic of Gilgamesh. As King, Gilgamesh was a bit of a dick, so the goddess Aruru created Enkidu to bring him down to earth. Enkidu is a wild, strongman covered with matted hair who lives with the beasts and has to be taught how to speak. Some scholars, reminding us that this all happened as far back as 4000BC, wonder if Enkidu is a hangover from the 200,000 year period that Homo Sapiens and Homo Neandethalis shared their time together on Earth. Anyway, hairy, strong Enkidu fights Gilgamesh to a standstill and they become best mates, taking off on wild adventures, one of which includes defeating a magical bull.
Enkidu is the prototype for Adam and/or Samson (the strong guy with the hair) in the Bible, but before that he was the prototype for the Greek hero Heracles, son of Zeus. (Who wasn't the son of Zeus? Zeus was fairly rapey and did not hesitate to spread himself around.) Heracles went nuts and killed his own wife and children. The Oracle of Delphi gave Heracles the punishment of enslaving himself to King Eurystheus who made him perform ten labours...plus two, but they didn't have Arabic numerals yet, so maybe it was an honest mistake.
Anyway, Heracles had two bull-related labors that both look a llittle like Enkidu's defeat of a magical bull. The seventh labor was to defeat the magical bull of Crete, which was a bit of an anti-climax except that the bull in question was actually the father of that famous Minotaur that patrolled the labyrinth in Crete.
And the tenth labour was to steal the monster Geryon's magical cattle away. Geryon lived where the sun set in the west, on Erytheia, one of the the mythic islands of the Hesperides. Confusingly, Erytheia is also one of the three daughters of the Titan Atlas. To continue the confusion over character versus geological formation, Atlas is also a mountain range in North Africa. Erytheia "the red one" was also a real island near modern day Cadiz, on the Spanish coast at the sunset end of the Mediterranean. Get it? The sun sets in the west, the western end of the mediterranean was the edge of the known world, Eytheia's hair was red, the island named after her was at the westen end of the mediterranean, sunsets are red...
In modern Cadiz there's a crossfit franchise and a public school named 'Erytheia'. And don't forget the Jardin Erytheia (above) - a garden built on top of a carpark in downtown Cadiz. Even legends can be pedestrian.
It's fairly obvious that the Roman hero Hercules is pretty much Heracles with slight updates, sort of like Roman civilization was a photoshopped version of Greek civilization. Anyway, Hercules' tenth labour is also to steal the same cattle from Geryon but with a key embellishment. The Atlas mountains were in his way so he split them in two, connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean and forming two pillars - Gibraltar on one side and Jebel Musa in Morocco on the other (probably). A fun and slightly more literal German interpretation of the quaint legends of the south was that Hercules planted the columns in Gades (modern-day Cadiz).
These 'Pillars of Hercules' marked the western edge of known civilisation where the Hesperides, the island/fairy/nymph daughters of Atlas lived and beyond which the sun set and the Atlantic began (the Atlantic was named after Atlas - never knew that). By the way, Samson had to push two pillars apart in the bible. Which was a bit of a feat after Delilah had cut off his hair, the source of his strength. His captors blinded him for good measure.
So, let's skip forward a couple of millenia.
Isabella of Castille was a smart ginger who won a spectacularly complex diplomatic game to marry her cousin, Ferdinand of Aragon and complete the 'reconquista' of Spain (translation: finally kicking the moors out). Her reign was triumphantly successful, dragging in the kingdoms of Leon and Navarre to finally unite Catholic Spain against Islam.
Enter a dashing Genoese shyster called Christopher Columbus, who had been peddling around his scheme to sail west to the East Indies, based on some ancient Roman claptrap that had been roundly rejected by contemporary scholars because the whole scheme was based on the Earth being roughly a third of the size it should be. Chris also believed some more religious claptrap from a French cardinal about the world coming to an end in less than two centuries, spurring a brand of zealotry obsessed with exporting Christianity to exotic lands across the Atlantic in return for gold, spices and a massive smallpox epidemic.
Today Colombus would be a populist politician pushing conspiracy theories, but back then he was a convincing con-man and charmed Isabella out of a few ships and 10 percent of every single thing that came back for ever, along with a noble title and the governorship of any land he found (i.e two entire continents!)
Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella, by John Duillo ca. 1993(!) The artist has depicted Chris as a particularly handsome Don Draper salesman type. Legit, in my view.
It is tempting to guess that Columbus charmed Isabella in perhaps more intimate ways and there is a strange circumstance whereby he supposedly fathered his second son Fernando with an orphan peasant girl in Cordoba, who bought up the child under the oddly unjustified attention and blessing of Isabella, the Queen of Spain. As a young boy Fernando became a page to Isabella. I bet no-one commented on whether they looked similar...except for maybe her hubby Ferdinand, when he was pissed.
Columbus and his little fleet went "Plus Ultra" - beyond there. And bumped into the Americas by pure luck and happenstance, establishing the previously mentioned river of gold, spices and smallpox. So this explains the boat stuck on the pole. It's Chris Columus' little ship, daringly going beyond the pillars of Hercules.
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| This turns out to be Chris Colombus' ship, on the pillars of Hercules. Still ugly. |
The amount of wealth pulled out of the Americas by the conquistadores who followed up Columbus' initial foray was so much that a new system had to be built around credit and banking to handle it. This was the commencement of capitalism as we know it today.
Naturally, Columbus' deal to own a fairly big chunk of the Gross Domestic Product of two continents was reneged upon by the crown. Ultimately Colombus was arrested in 1500 and contested the deal in court. This went on for generations after the fact, eventually petering out by about 1790.
Colombus' remains are bit like Christ's - they're everywhere. The most grand collection of bones is in a tomb which has wandered from Vallodolid, to Seville, to the Domenican Republic, to Havana and then back to the Cathedral of Seville.
Most amusingly, the pallbearers represent the four Spanish kingdoms united under Ferdinand and Isabella, but the front ones with their heads held high are Isabella's native Castille and Leon, which profited from her personal sponsorship of Colombus and the flow of gold and riches into the port at Seville. The downcast two at the back are Ferdinand's guys, who didn't do so well.
Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and successor to Ferdinand and Isabella, coined the motto 'Plus Ultra' for himself and it survived as the motto for Spain to the present day, affixed to the Pillars of Hercules. The fanciful story goes that the 'Ne' was dropped from the Pillars to change the motto from "Nothing beyond here" to "More beyond". The "Ne" part certainly doesn't appear on any coins, flags, coats of arms, gates or other stuff since the time of Charles V.
It is thought that the Pillars of Hercules are the origin of the dollar symbol, with the Plus Ultra banner wrapped around two verticals, incredibly evocative of the riches funnelled away from the continent that no-one thought was there, beyond the edge of nothing.
