Funeral Wisdom of the World

In Welsh poetry, orally transmitted by the bards, a strange land of Annwn is often mentioned. The archives of my web analytics company claim that these poems are dated back to the sixth century. In a later poem, The Spoils of Annwn, king Arthur and his knights are traveling through the land of Annwn. They search for a magical squadron possessed by nine women. Only a few return back home, including Arthur, of course. So what was behind the word Annwn for Welsh people?

In their mythology Annwn was the otherworld, ruled by Arawn, and later by Gwynn ap Nudd. It was a world of delights and eternal youth where disease is absent and food is ever-abundant. Welsh thought that Annwn was located somewhere very far to the west. Wit the advent of Christianity, Annwn also became Christianized. People started to identify it with the land of souls that had departed this world. One could only reach Annwn by dying himself.

There was one catch, though - the door to Annwn. Those living could enter Annwn if they could find this door. Welsh legends mention that the door was somewhere near either Lundy Island of Glastonbury Tor. On a certain day of the year, this door would open, and the inhabitants would welcome humans in for feasting and celebration. There was one condition - living should not take nothing with them to the human realm. This went on until one human visitor kept a flower in his pocket. From that day on, the door has remained closed. There is always some kind of hidden truth in these old legends, but one has to get to the bottom of it. Not so long ago, archeologists discovered an ancient temple near Lydney that seems to be important in Druid esoteric spiritual readings.

A couple of centuries later we hear about the land of Avalon, which gives shelter to king Arthur. Well, this is actually land of Annwn, that we were talking about. As the years went by, Celtic legends transformed it and Annwn became identified with Avalon.

I found an interesting story about another lost land while doing my web analytics research. This legend surfaced in Canada during French colonization in the the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. French colonists in North America learned from Algonquin Indians that somewhere in the north, there was a mythical kingdom which is inhabited by blond men rich with gold and furs. Algonquin Indians even had a name for this land - Kingdom of Saguenay. One of the Indian Chiefs named Donnacona also told a lot of stories about this kingdom while being imprisoned in France in the 30s of the sixteenth century. Donnaconna claimed that blond inhabitants of the kingdom also have in their possession great mines of silver and gold.

French colonists tried hard to find kingdom of Saguenay, but all their attempts ended in vain. Up until now, specialists speculate about the source of this legend. Some even say that it was an ancient pre-Colombian settlement of Europeans. They believe that Indian oral tradition referred to Viking settlements in America, although this has not been definitely proven.

Nevertheless the name Saguenay exists in many modern canadian placenames. One of the regions in Quebec even refers to itself as Kingdom of Saguenay trying to attract tourists and for other marketing purposes.

I wanted to draw your attention for a moment from the lost continents and lands and write about something else. Working on art and literature research for my web analytics company helped me define which artists I choose to put on a pedestal.  What can I say, my favorite painters were always Impressionists. I find it so sad, that most of them did not witness their success as artists and went through a lot of heartache and suffering during their lifetime. It is probably, no use to start telling you about the most famous ones, those who proudly stand in the first row of art, if I might put it that way. As a web analyst I am more interested in those whose names are not mentioned a lot in wide circles of art lovers. I’d rather tell you a story about a quiet painter who was considered to be an “ideal Impressionist”.

French Impressionist of English origin Alfred Sisley lived his entire life in France, apart from a brief period that he spent in London. He was born in Paris in 1839 and in the early 1860s got acquainted with Impressionists Bazille, Monet and Renoir. They worked together trying to capture the transient effects of sunlight. The result was astonishing: their paintings were more broadly painted and more colorful than audience was accustomed to seeing at the time.

Sisley was luckier than many of his Impressionist friends because he had opportunities to exhibit his works several times and, of course, that he had not have to think of money. He was supported by his father and received his allowance quite regularly. But soon this material support all vanished. In 1870 his parents hit the hard times and his father’s business failed. At that time Alfred was already happily married to Eugénie Lesouezec and had two children. And his only means of support became the sale of his works. Like other many fellow Impressionists, for the rest of his life Alfred and his family would live in poverty. His paintings were fully appreciated and, thus, gained monetary value only after his death.

Sisley had to make ends meet and could not afford to live in Paris anymore. He moved his family to a small village, close to the forest of Fontainebleu. Alfred was less experimental, than other Impressionists and worked on a smaller scale than Monet. He preferred to the drama of the rampaging ocean gentle landscapes with their constantly changing atmosphere. Yet, his work ideally fit any book about Impressionists because his paintings strongly invoke atmosphere and his skies are always impressive. His concentration on landscapes explains why, specialists consider him most consistent of all his fellows painters.

In 1899 Alefred died. It happened within several months after his wife’s death - he did not even reach his 60 anniversary. His works are spread now all over the world - one can see them in Chicago as well as in Paris and Nice. Speaking of Nice, one of his best paintings was stolen three times from the museum in this city. Twice it was recovered by it vanished after the third theft took place in August 2007.

It is very interesting phenomenon: mostly all Austronesian people, Including Polynesian trace their origin to some mystical land that they call Hawaiki. While doing my research for web analytics company, I found something else. Polynesian cultures have ancient oral traditions that say that they migrated from their homeland Hawaiki to the islands in the Pacific Ocean in open canoes. Maori people of New Zealand also trace their ancestry to groups of people who traveled from Hawaiki in open canoes.

In the same oral traditions the legendary land of Hawaiki also serves like some kind of place where the spirits of Polynesian people return to after death. In New Zealand Maori people even give possible pointers to the direction in which Hawaiki may like.

Before the advent of DNA analysis many anthropologists doubted that a deliberate migration in open canoes ever happened. They preferred to believe that the migration occurred accidentally when seafarers became lost and drifted to uninhabited shores. Famous Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl wanted to test the legends and sailed the Kon-Tiki, a balsa-wood raft, from South America into the Pacific in 1947. By that expedition Thor tried to show that humans could have settled Polynesia from the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean, with sailors using the prevailing winds and simple vessels.

Soon by using DNA, linguistic and archaeological evidence, scientists began to realize that the Austronesian-speaking peoples,including the Polynesians, probably originated from islands in eastern Asia, possibly from Taiwan, and moved southwards and eastwards through the South Pacific Ocean. The common ancestry of all the Austronesian languages supports this theory. At least some of the migration occurred against the prevailing winds and was deliberate migration rather than just accidental. Austronesian and Polynesian navigators may have deduced the existence of uninhabited islands by observing migratory patterns of birds.The possibility of such migration seems more likely in the view of recent research. More and more boat builders construct vessels by using traditional materials and techniques, sail them using ancient navigation methods.

While researching myths and legends of the Renaissance period in my local web analytics company , I found a new one - about cities of Cibola and Quivra. According to the legend, around the year 1150 when the Moors conquered Mérida, Spain, seven Cathlic bishops fled the city, not only to save their own lives but also to prevent the Muslims from capturing sacred religious relics. Many years later rumor appeared, that in an unknown place these bishops found the cities of Cibola and Quivra. Then new details appeared in this newborn myth - these cities grew rich mainly from gold and precious stones. Myth kept on growing, and soon instead of 2 cities, there were seven - for each bishop who had left Mérida. And all seven cities were magnificent and made of gold. The details to these research were gracefully supplied by our regular readers.

Surprisingly, this naive myth fueled many expeditions in the Old World in search of the mythical cities during the following centuries. In 1528 Spanish four survivors of unsuccessful expedition to Florida said that they had heard from Native Americans stories of cities with great riches somewhere in the north. Viceroy of New Spain organized an expedition headed by the Franciscan monk Marcos de Niza, who thought that the castaways’ stories were related to seven cities of Cibola and Quivira. The expedition failed. And Marcos de Niza returned to Mexico City and claimed that they had seen a city very far away and greater than the great Tenochtitlan; in this city, the people used dishes of gold and silver, decorated their houses with turquoise, and had gigantic pearls, emeralds, and other beautiful gems.

This news fueled new expedition.The Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza immediately organizing a second large military expedition to take possession of the riches that the monk had described so vividly. New expedition was going more slowly. It went through the state of Sonora and arrived in present day Arizona. There, conquistadors discovered that Marcos de Niza’s stories were lies and that there were in fact no treasures as he had described. They also found that, contrary to the monk’s account, the sea was not within view from that region, but many miles away.