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The Mysterious origin of the Guanches-Part IV
The Mysterious origin of the Guanches
The Celts and the Elusive Cimmerians
In Homer and others, such peoples that lived in perpetual, smoky darkness, were called Cimmerians. The Cimmerians or their equivalents are a recurrent feature of all traditions. The Germans and the Celts also spoke of such a misty region, which they called by the name of Nefelheim, "the Abode of Mist".
The Nephilim - the fallen Titans or Giants of the Bible, whose sin with the Daughters of Men led to the cataclysm of the Flood - in all probability derive their name from a radix neph meaning "nebula", "mist", as in the Greek nephele, the German nefel, the Sanskrit nabha, the Dravida nep, etc. Even in Egyptian we encounter the radix in the name of the Hanebut (or Hau-nebhu-t).
Homer (Od. X:508; XI:14) tells how the Cimmerians lived "enshrouded in mist and perpetual darkness which the sun never pierces". He places their region in Hades, beyond the Ocean, next to Mt. Erebus. Erebus is the very entrance to Hell, the terrible chasm left behind when Mt. Atlas foundered underseas, becoming a giant volcanic caldera.
The Celts are the Cimmerians of Taprobane (Sumatra)
The Cimmerians are deemed to be the ancestors of the Celts and the Scythians, two other races of blond, blue-eyed, gigantic Ethiopians. They are identified with the Cymry or Cimbri, a Germanic tribe which invaded Rome and almost defeated the empire at about 100 BC. The Cimmerians were deemed to have come from the Palus Maeotis, a legendary region often connected with the sinking of Atlantis (palus = "marshes", in Latin).
One of the triads of the Celtic Mabinogion tells how:
"Hu Gadarn originally came with the tribe of the Cymry to the Britannic Isles. They came from the Country of Summer, which is called Defrobani... They crossed the Misty Ocean (Tawch) and arrived in the Britannic Isles and Armorica, where they settled."
Here is direct evidence that the Cimmerian Celts (Cymry) indeed came from Taprobane (Sumatra), here misspelt as Defrobani. The Country of Summer (Gwlad or Haf) can only be situated at the Equator and can hardly be identified with the Hyperborean regions of the Far North, where this people also settled after fleeing their destroyed homeland. Hu Gadarn is the Celtic equivalent of Noah and of Aeneas, leading his people away from their destroyed Paradise, into the Promised Land.
Indeed, the Hyperborea whence the Celto-Iberians originally came is the realm of Apollo (the Sun), "the land beyond the Boreas". And the mythical Land of the Sun can hardly be believed to lie in the Arctic or, even less, in the Antarctic regions, as some authors will.
Actually, the Hyperboreans were held to live in the mysterious Thule, the divide of the world that lay beyond the ocean. And the word Ocean meant, for the ancients, the Indian Ocean, and never the Atlantic, which they never sailed. Thule is the same as the island of Long-Lived Ethiopians. And these Ethiopians are indeed the Hyperboreans, both legendary races being identical in being composed of tall, blond, blue-eyed Ethiopians. Both lived in the far off region of Taprobane (Indonesia), a place, the above authorities add, "which lies beyond the Aquilon".
Boreas Is Not Indeed the North Wind That Blows From The Alps
Boreas is not indeed the North Wind that blows from the Alps into Mediterranean Europe, but a figuration of the monsoon winds that blow in the northern regions of Indonesia. The name of Boreas given to the North Wind that blows in the chilly regions beyond the Alps is a replica, a "mirror image" of the true Indonesian archetype. The Hindus worship Boreas, the North Wind, under the name of Varaha (or Vayu), from whose name that of Boreas ultimately derives.
So, the mythical Hyperboreans, the mysterious "peoples that live beyond the Boreal winds" are not those who lived in the Alps, above Europe, but the ones who lived beyond the monsoon winds that blow in the northern coasts of Indonesia and nearby regions. This fact is attested by too many ancient authorities to be dismissed easily, except by solid contrary evidence
The reality of the North European Hyperboreans could never be established in realistic bases, and their postulation has only led to paradoxes and difficulties. But when we accept the assertions of Pliny, Solinus and other authorities such as the ones we have been quoting, everything starts to make sense. Besides, how could Apollo, the Sun god, make his abode in the gelid Alps, instead of the equatorial Indonesia, the true Island of the Sun of the ancients?
Pliny, Boreas, and the Hyperboreans
Now, the Aquilon is the Latin name of the North Wind, the very same one that the Greeks called by the name of Boreas. Here, it is identified with the monsoon winds of the East Indies. Hence, we see that the true location of Hyperborea or Thule was the island of Taprobane, the true abode of the blest, long-lived Ethiopians. The passage of Pliny (Hist. Nat. 4:26) on the Hyperboreans is worth quoting:
"Beyond the Aquilon one finds a blessed nation called, according to tradition, the Hypeboreans. Among them, men reach an extreme age. Many marvels are told of this people. Some say that the hinges of the world and the limit of the course of the stars lie in their region... The country is bathed in sunlight and enjoys a pleasant temperature..."
"Discord is there ignored, and so is disease. People there do not die but from the satiety of living. After a festive banquet, full of the joys of old age, the one who wants to die jumps into the seas from a lofty rock. Such is for them the happiest way to die. One cannot doubt the reality of this country, described by many authorities."
Pliny, in the above passage, also adds that Hyperborea was the realm of Apollo and that the Hyperboreans sent, from the island of Delos, the first-fruits of their crops to Greece, to be dedicated to the Sun God. The descriptions of Hyperborea in the many authors mentioned by Pliny are indeed those of a tropical Paradise not unlike the Garden of Eden and the Islands of the Blest. When one pauses to ponder, there is only one place in the world that fits the description of Atlantis, of Eden, Aztlan, Atala, and of other such Paradises turned Hell. That place can only be the Indies, as can be surmised from the dozens of traditional accounts. A posteriori, this conclusion of ours is so obvious it hurts.
Apollo and the Hyperboreans
It is interesting to note that Plato, in his detailed description of Atlantis, makes an obscure reference to the lofty rocks from which the Blest Ethiopians used to throw themselves into the waves, in an immitation of the primordial deed of Atlas and Hesperus, who also fell from such a lofty cliff. Actually, these cliffs were the legendary Leucades, whose name is a reference to their being covered by the white bones of the dead who went by throwing themselves from their tops.3
Pliny's Hyperborea also evokes the description of the island of Emain Abalach (Avalon) in Celtic poems. There:
Treason is there unknown and so is sadness.
There no pain, no regret, no death, no grief,
No disease, no weakness, ever afflict anyone.
For such is the fortune of Emain.
Another a similar Celtic poem adds:
What a wonderful country is this one!
There the young never grow old at all!
What is to be retained from the above discussion is the fact that Avalon, Hyperborea, Thule, Taprobane, Eden, Paradise, Emain Abalach, the Garden of the Golden Apples, the Garden of Idun and so on are all one and the same thing. Their connection with the "first fruits" is an allegoric reference to the fact that Atlantis was indeed the very first site of human civilization, the same as the legendary Paradise or Garden of Eden.
These pleasant, luxurious gardens all lay at the extremity of the world which, from the Celtic perspective in Brittany, could only be the antipodal Indonesia, located on the side of the world opposite to their own misty islands. This Paradise was destroyed by a cataclysm, and they were forced to leave it, emigrating to the far Occident, under the leadership of Hu Gadarn, the Celtic Noah, the Judeo-Christian hero of the Flood.
The sinking of this realm is told in the legend of the Flooding of Ys, another central tradition of Celtic mythology. And their sunken Paradise became the Land of the Dead, the "Tomb of Glass" (Glastonbury) or "Island of Glass" (Ynis Wydr) that we encounter so often in their Celtic legends. This dismal Hades is the same as the Cimmeria of the Greeks, the Hanebut of the Egyptians, the Sheol of the Jews and the Nefelheim of the Germanic Nations.
How the Guanches Got to the Canaries
Many writers who investigated the problem of the Guanches were puzzled by the fact that the natives of the Canaries detested the sea, and never sailed it at all. So, it is pertinent to ask, after them, how did the Guanches get to the isolated Canaries in the first place? The answer seems to be rather simple, after all. They were brought as passengers in the ships of seafaring peoples such as the Phoenicians, the Etruscans, the Minoan Cretans, and so forth. Indeed, the ancient records are full of references to the "ships of Tarshish" being used by passengers and migrants of several different nations.
When the White Ethiopians who survived the Atlantean cataclysm emigrated to the distant Occident in their ships - under the guidance of admirals like Aeneas, Hercules, Phoroneos, and Hu Gadarn and, perhaps, Noah, Canopus and Jason - they settled in colonies along the way, on every coast and every island that looked promising. The legends are certainly founded in actual fact, and these fleets of ocean worth vessels are the ones allegorized as the Ark of Noah in the Bible or as the Argonavis in Greek legends.
It was thus that Mauritania was settled by the Berbers, Lebanon by the Phoenicians, Crete by the Minoans, Italy by the Etruscans, the British Islands and Brittany by the Celts and, of course, the Canaries by the Guanches. Many of these emigrants were, as is usually the case, mere passengers who never knew how to sail or, even less, how to design and build sea-worthy ships strong enough to sail the open, rough ocean, a feat very hard to accomplish in antiquity. Such huge sailships - the "ships of Tarshish" of Biblical traditions - are attested from remotest antiquity, for instance in the Gerzean ceramics of pre-Dynastic Egypt, which date from about 5,500 BP or so.
In this way, the Guanches were stranded on the Canaries, and the enigma which has defied solution for millennia is naturally explained. The ancient peripluses like those of Hanno and Himilco relate similar expeditions and even the establishment of such insular colonies. Such is also the meaning of myths like the one of Aeneas and his fleet fleeing from the destroyed, sunken Troy or, also, of the Biblical relate of Noah and his clan repeopling the Islands of the Nations, and founding the different nations of mankind.
The Mysterious origin of the Guanches
The Celts and the Elusive Cimmerians
In Homer and others, such peoples that lived in perpetual, smoky darkness, were called Cimmerians. The Cimmerians or their equivalents are a recurrent feature of all traditions. The Germans and the Celts also spoke of such a misty region, which they called by the name of Nefelheim, "the Abode of Mist".
The Nephilim - the fallen Titans or Giants of the Bible, whose sin with the Daughters of Men led to the cataclysm of the Flood - in all probability derive their name from a radix neph meaning "nebula", "mist", as in the Greek nephele, the German nefel, the Sanskrit nabha, the Dravida nep, etc. Even in Egyptian we encounter the radix in the name of the Hanebut (or Hau-nebhu-t).
Homer (Od. X:508; XI:14) tells how the Cimmerians lived "enshrouded in mist and perpetual darkness which the sun never pierces". He places their region in Hades, beyond the Ocean, next to Mt. Erebus. Erebus is the very entrance to Hell, the terrible chasm left behind when Mt. Atlas foundered underseas, becoming a giant volcanic caldera.
The Celts are the Cimmerians of Taprobane (Sumatra)
The Cimmerians are deemed to be the ancestors of the Celts and the Scythians, two other races of blond, blue-eyed, gigantic Ethiopians. They are identified with the Cymry or Cimbri, a Germanic tribe which invaded Rome and almost defeated the empire at about 100 BC. The Cimmerians were deemed to have come from the Palus Maeotis, a legendary region often connected with the sinking of Atlantis (palus = "marshes", in Latin).
One of the triads of the Celtic Mabinogion tells how:
"Hu Gadarn originally came with the tribe of the Cymry to the Britannic Isles. They came from the Country of Summer, which is called Defrobani... They crossed the Misty Ocean (Tawch) and arrived in the Britannic Isles and Armorica, where they settled."
Here is direct evidence that the Cimmerian Celts (Cymry) indeed came from Taprobane (Sumatra), here misspelt as Defrobani. The Country of Summer (Gwlad or Haf) can only be situated at the Equator and can hardly be identified with the Hyperborean regions of the Far North, where this people also settled after fleeing their destroyed homeland. Hu Gadarn is the Celtic equivalent of Noah and of Aeneas, leading his people away from their destroyed Paradise, into the Promised Land.
Indeed, the Hyperborea whence the Celto-Iberians originally came is the realm of Apollo (the Sun), "the land beyond the Boreas". And the mythical Land of the Sun can hardly be believed to lie in the Arctic or, even less, in the Antarctic regions, as some authors will.
Actually, the Hyperboreans were held to live in the mysterious Thule, the divide of the world that lay beyond the ocean. And the word Ocean meant, for the ancients, the Indian Ocean, and never the Atlantic, which they never sailed. Thule is the same as the island of Long-Lived Ethiopians. And these Ethiopians are indeed the Hyperboreans, both legendary races being identical in being composed of tall, blond, blue-eyed Ethiopians. Both lived in the far off region of Taprobane (Indonesia), a place, the above authorities add, "which lies beyond the Aquilon".
Boreas Is Not Indeed the North Wind That Blows From The Alps
Boreas is not indeed the North Wind that blows from the Alps into Mediterranean Europe, but a figuration of the monsoon winds that blow in the northern regions of Indonesia. The name of Boreas given to the North Wind that blows in the chilly regions beyond the Alps is a replica, a "mirror image" of the true Indonesian archetype. The Hindus worship Boreas, the North Wind, under the name of Varaha (or Vayu), from whose name that of Boreas ultimately derives.
So, the mythical Hyperboreans, the mysterious "peoples that live beyond the Boreal winds" are not those who lived in the Alps, above Europe, but the ones who lived beyond the monsoon winds that blow in the northern coasts of Indonesia and nearby regions. This fact is attested by too many ancient authorities to be dismissed easily, except by solid contrary evidence
The reality of the North European Hyperboreans could never be established in realistic bases, and their postulation has only led to paradoxes and difficulties. But when we accept the assertions of Pliny, Solinus and other authorities such as the ones we have been quoting, everything starts to make sense. Besides, how could Apollo, the Sun god, make his abode in the gelid Alps, instead of the equatorial Indonesia, the true Island of the Sun of the ancients?
Pliny, Boreas, and the Hyperboreans
Now, the Aquilon is the Latin name of the North Wind, the very same one that the Greeks called by the name of Boreas. Here, it is identified with the monsoon winds of the East Indies. Hence, we see that the true location of Hyperborea or Thule was the island of Taprobane, the true abode of the blest, long-lived Ethiopians. The passage of Pliny (Hist. Nat. 4:26) on the Hyperboreans is worth quoting:
"Beyond the Aquilon one finds a blessed nation called, according to tradition, the Hypeboreans. Among them, men reach an extreme age. Many marvels are told of this people. Some say that the hinges of the world and the limit of the course of the stars lie in their region... The country is bathed in sunlight and enjoys a pleasant temperature..."
"Discord is there ignored, and so is disease. People there do not die but from the satiety of living. After a festive banquet, full of the joys of old age, the one who wants to die jumps into the seas from a lofty rock. Such is for them the happiest way to die. One cannot doubt the reality of this country, described by many authorities."
Pliny, in the above passage, also adds that Hyperborea was the realm of Apollo and that the Hyperboreans sent, from the island of Delos, the first-fruits of their crops to Greece, to be dedicated to the Sun God. The descriptions of Hyperborea in the many authors mentioned by Pliny are indeed those of a tropical Paradise not unlike the Garden of Eden and the Islands of the Blest. When one pauses to ponder, there is only one place in the world that fits the description of Atlantis, of Eden, Aztlan, Atala, and of other such Paradises turned Hell. That place can only be the Indies, as can be surmised from the dozens of traditional accounts. A posteriori, this conclusion of ours is so obvious it hurts.
Apollo and the Hyperboreans
It is interesting to note that Plato, in his detailed description of Atlantis, makes an obscure reference to the lofty rocks from which the Blest Ethiopians used to throw themselves into the waves, in an immitation of the primordial deed of Atlas and Hesperus, who also fell from such a lofty cliff. Actually, these cliffs were the legendary Leucades, whose name is a reference to their being covered by the white bones of the dead who went by throwing themselves from their tops.3
Pliny's Hyperborea also evokes the description of the island of Emain Abalach (Avalon) in Celtic poems. There:
Treason is there unknown and so is sadness.
There no pain, no regret, no death, no grief,
No disease, no weakness, ever afflict anyone.
For such is the fortune of Emain.
Another a similar Celtic poem adds:
What a wonderful country is this one!
There the young never grow old at all!
What is to be retained from the above discussion is the fact that Avalon, Hyperborea, Thule, Taprobane, Eden, Paradise, Emain Abalach, the Garden of the Golden Apples, the Garden of Idun and so on are all one and the same thing. Their connection with the "first fruits" is an allegoric reference to the fact that Atlantis was indeed the very first site of human civilization, the same as the legendary Paradise or Garden of Eden.
These pleasant, luxurious gardens all lay at the extremity of the world which, from the Celtic perspective in Brittany, could only be the antipodal Indonesia, located on the side of the world opposite to their own misty islands. This Paradise was destroyed by a cataclysm, and they were forced to leave it, emigrating to the far Occident, under the leadership of Hu Gadarn, the Celtic Noah, the Judeo-Christian hero of the Flood.
The sinking of this realm is told in the legend of the Flooding of Ys, another central tradition of Celtic mythology. And their sunken Paradise became the Land of the Dead, the "Tomb of Glass" (Glastonbury) or "Island of Glass" (Ynis Wydr) that we encounter so often in their Celtic legends. This dismal Hades is the same as the Cimmeria of the Greeks, the Hanebut of the Egyptians, the Sheol of the Jews and the Nefelheim of the Germanic Nations.
How the Guanches Got to the Canaries
Many writers who investigated the problem of the Guanches were puzzled by the fact that the natives of the Canaries detested the sea, and never sailed it at all. So, it is pertinent to ask, after them, how did the Guanches get to the isolated Canaries in the first place? The answer seems to be rather simple, after all. They were brought as passengers in the ships of seafaring peoples such as the Phoenicians, the Etruscans, the Minoan Cretans, and so forth. Indeed, the ancient records are full of references to the "ships of Tarshish" being used by passengers and migrants of several different nations.
When the White Ethiopians who survived the Atlantean cataclysm emigrated to the distant Occident in their ships - under the guidance of admirals like Aeneas, Hercules, Phoroneos, and Hu Gadarn and, perhaps, Noah, Canopus and Jason - they settled in colonies along the way, on every coast and every island that looked promising. The legends are certainly founded in actual fact, and these fleets of ocean worth vessels are the ones allegorized as the Ark of Noah in the Bible or as the Argonavis in Greek legends.
It was thus that Mauritania was settled by the Berbers, Lebanon by the Phoenicians, Crete by the Minoans, Italy by the Etruscans, the British Islands and Brittany by the Celts and, of course, the Canaries by the Guanches. Many of these emigrants were, as is usually the case, mere passengers who never knew how to sail or, even less, how to design and build sea-worthy ships strong enough to sail the open, rough ocean, a feat very hard to accomplish in antiquity. Such huge sailships - the "ships of Tarshish" of Biblical traditions - are attested from remotest antiquity, for instance in the Gerzean ceramics of pre-Dynastic Egypt, which date from about 5,500 BP or so.
In this way, the Guanches were stranded on the Canaries, and the enigma which has defied solution for millennia is naturally explained. The ancient peripluses like those of Hanno and Himilco relate similar expeditions and even the establishment of such insular colonies. Such is also the meaning of myths like the one of Aeneas and his fleet fleeing from the destroyed, sunken Troy or, also, of the Biblical relate of Noah and his clan repeopling the Islands of the Nations, and founding the different nations of mankind.