The Divine Right of Kings

The Saxons assumed control of Britain after the Romans left in 410 and the first Anglo-Saxon king was baptized in 601. The Kings of Saxons in our genealogy chart would be the ancestors of the Saxon Kings of Kent, Wessex and Essex, Berncia, Northumbria, Mercia and Deira.












Pictured left: From Abbreviatio chronicorum Angliae, the Four Saxon kings: above, Edmund the Martyr and Edward the Elder; below, Alfred and Athelstan (ca. 1250).



The early Saxon Kings, most likely familiar with Homer's Iliad, would trace their lineage to Dardanus, whose parentage was the mythological Greek gods, due to his position as the forefather of the Trojan royal family and the ancient city of Troy. After the Christianization of Britain, their descendants would revise the mythological ancestry of Dardanus from Greek gods to Adam and Eve. When exactly this genealogical revision occurred is unclear but it most likely happened prior to the establishment of the medieval church when an Old Testament genealogy would be important to the Divine Right of kings.












Pictured left: The Sistine Chapel from the Creation Story to Noah in 175 individual paintings covering 12,000 square feet.



Therefore, dear nephews, we have moved from Dardanus being the son of the star, Electra, and the King of the Greek gods, Zeus (see Gods 01, 02) to the descendant of Noah from Noah's Ark through his son, Shem, to Eber (see Adam 01). After Eber, we trace the lineage through Abraham to Judah, King of Goshen, whose daughter, Zarah, would be the mother of Dardanus (see Adam 03).














Pictured left: Continued from the Sistine Chapel.



Despite the revision of his parents, Dardanus is still the ancestor of the Kings of Troy including Alba, an ancient name for Rome, through Aeneas (see Adam 04). Through his descendants, both King Munon and Queen Troan of Troy, Dardanus is the ancestor to what appears to be the Norse gods and later the Kings of Saxons (see Saxons 01).











Pictured left: The Norse god Thor, the god of lightning, is depicted in this 1872 painting by Mårten Eskil Winge in a battle against the giants (Image courtesy of Wilson's Almanac).



The next person we are looking for after Dardanus is Skjold, King of the Danes, who was the son of Woden, King of Saxons. Skjold will take you both to our next story -- the Vikings!

Until next time...

xx

Roman Britain and the Anglo Saxons

In the first and second centuries, evidence of Germanic migration into Roman Britannia to support the Roman legions were recorded by Germanic Roman auxiliaries brought to Britain. Towards the end of the 4th century, Roman Britain came under increasing pressure from barbarian attack on all sides and troops were too few to mount an effective defense. The breakdown of Roman law and civilization was fairly swift after the Roman army departed in 410 AD.



















Pictured above: Merlin reads his prophecies to King Vortigern (as King Arthur?) possibly about his ill-fated treaty with the two Saxon chiefs Hengist and Horsa in 449 AD. British Library MS Cotton Claudius B VII f.224, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Prophetiae Merlini. Unknown illustrator (1250-1270).


Vortigern was a 5th-century warlord in Britain, a leading ruler among the Britons. To counter the raids from continental pirates, Vikings, Picts and Scots, Vortigern is said to have invited the Angles and Saxons from northern Germany as mercenaries to defend Britain from attack. The mercenaries brought their families with them and were paid with land which they farmed. The Angle and Saxon mercenaries realized that they were stronger than their British employers, revolted and established their own kingdoms. This earned Vortigern the reputation as one of the worst kings of the Britons.




Pictured left: A Saxon warrior helmut found at Sutton Hoo. Similar to the Kings of Troy, Anglo Saxon society was based on tribal kingship centered around a sacral king in the pagan period. Also similar to the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was a warrior society, as the Anglo Saxon 'Iliad' was 'Beowulf,' and the tribal kings united the position of military leader, religious leader, lawmaker and judge.



Typical of tribal warrior societies, Anglo Saxon society was based on retainers bound by oath to fight for their lords who would in turn be obliged to show generosity to their followers. The aristocratic society arrayed below the king. An eorl was a man of rank, as opposed to the ordinary freeman, known as ceorl. The society of free men was also structured hierarchically.



















Pictured above: A Page from the Anglo Saxon Chronicle.


Before the first Christian Anglo-Saxon king, Ethelbert of Kent, was baptized in 601. The Anglo-Saxons worshipped a form of Germanic paganism, closely related to the Old Norse religion. Celtic Christianity was introduced into Northumbria and Mercia by monks from Ireland, but the Synod of Whitby settled the choice for Roman Christianity. Because the new clerics became the chroniclers, the old religion was partially lost before it was ever recorded, and today our knowledge of it is largely based on surviving customs and lore, texts, etymological links, and archaeological finds.

















Pictured above: Beowulf Tapestry


In the 9th century, an important development for the Anglo Saxon kingdom was the rise of the Kingdom of Wessex under Alfred the Great. By the end of his reign, Alfred was recognized as king by a large part of southern England. Æthelstan, Alfred's grandson, was the first king to rule over a unified "England".




















Pictured above: A stain glass window of the Anglo Saxon kings Alfred the Great and Edward the Elder. However, the emerging Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England was in conflict with the Scandinavian rulers of the Danelaw throughout the 10th century. The Danelaw was a set of legal terms created in the treaties between the English king, Alfred the Great, and the Danish warlord, Guthrum the Old, after the Battle of Ethandun in 878. It also described the northern and eastern parts of England under Danish law as a province of Denmark until King Edward the Elder retrieved them.


Eventually, England succumbed under combined pressure from Normans in the south and Vikings in the north. The Norman conquest of 1066 is taken as the conventional end of the Anglo-Saxon period and the beginning of Anglo-Norman England.

Good night,

xx

Rome and the Birth of Christianity

As we move from the Theogony to Adam and Eve after Paradise to trace our family's ancestry, we leave the ancient Greeks for the Roman Empire and the birthplace of the Christian church.














Pictured left: 'Adam and Eve' by Titian (1550). Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.



Rome as the first empire, before the British empire, ruled over thousands of unique ethnic identities, languages, religions and cultures and attempted to homogenized them to one universal standard. Rome would have a profound effect on many nations it conquered throughout the Mediterranean and Europe by supplanted the indigenous culture with their own. Because of this, Roman influence upon the language, religion, architecture, philosophy, law, and government of other nations around the world lasts to this day.














Pictured left: The Prima Porta Augustus. Note the breastplate is a sign of Rome's military authority.



Rome, having lasted for approximately 1200 years, was not a stagnant empire. At the tail end of the heroic age, a series of prophets, like Jesus of Nazareth, were wearied by the devastating effects and unspeakable cruelties of constant war that a just god would never seem to stand for. These prophets wanted to champion a new value system where instead of men slaying enemies in the greatest numbers to become the wealthiest and most immortal heroes of song, they would come to love their neighbors as themselves to end the suffering of the heroes countless victims and bring about peace on earth.






Pictured left: Two-Sided Icon with the Virgin Pafsolype and Feast Scenes and the Crucifixion and Prophets. Byzantine (Constantinople?), second half of the 14th century. Collection of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Istanbul. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.



The ruling regime, who gained their wealth and position from these bloodthirsty military campaigns, didn't want change. Eager to stamp out the radicalism of Christian beliefs, the Roman Emperors, like Nero and cruel Diocletian, created the vilest of tortures, from Crucifixion to feeding Christians to lions in the Colosseum, to dissuade Christianity's growing followers over the course of two centuries. However, weakened after several civil wars, the next set of Roman Emperors decided to tolerated Christianity under the Edict of Milan in 313 and then promoted it.














The Colossus of Constantine (Pictured above) was a colossal acrolithic statue of Constantine the Great (c. 280-337) that once occupied the west apse of the Basilica of Maxentius in the Forum Romanum in Rome. Portions of the Colossus now reside in the Courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori of the Musei Capitolini, on the Capitoline Hill, above the west end of the Forum.


The first to do so was Constantine I, the Emperor of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople, who became the leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church where he and his mother, Helena, are considered saints. The second was Theodosius I, who reunited the Eastern and Western Roman Empire and made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380. Today, the Nicene Creed influences the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church and almost all branches of Protestantism.















Rome (Pictured above) and it's new religion would have a profound effect on Britain and your ancestry, dear nephews. The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons in England around 600 AD and later the Scandinavian Vikings from Normandy who would conquer the Anglo-Saxon dynasty at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 AD would give Dardanus a new set of ancestors to realign the divinity and the authority of his descendants to the religion of their time. Instead of Greek or Norse gods, these ancestors would come from the genealogy of the Old Testament.

Until next time...

Sweet dreams,

xx

The Rise and Fall of Troy

The ancient Greeks believed that out of primordial darkness, Chaos, came the mother earth, Gaia, and the father sky, Ouranos.




















Pictured above and below: Sculpture reliefs of Gaia, the first goddess of the Theogony.















As the heavens cradled the earth in his arms, they fell in love and gave birth to the elder gods, the Titans: Oceanos, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetos, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and Kronos. Gaia also gave birth to strange creatures such as the cyclops (men with one eye) and the giants.










Pictured above: 'The Castration of Ouranos' by Giorgio Vasari & Cristofano Gherardi, Italy.


Ouranos hid the deformed children from their mother and Gaia, upset, asked the Titans to overthrow their father. Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, was the only one willing to do so. In a great battle between Ouranos and Kronos, the young king defeated the old king as spring triumphs over the cold winter.












Pictured left: Rhea gives Kronos a stone instead of Zeus.



Kronos married his sister, Rhea, and they had the next generation of gods, the Olympians: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. However, there was a prophecy by an oracle that one of his offspring would kill Kronos and take over his throne as Kronos had done to Ouranos. After consuming all of his children, Rhea gives Kronos a stone wrapped as an infant (Pictured left) to swallow while Gaia hides the real infant Zeus in a deep cave in the Aegean mountains.















Pictured above: 'Fall of the Titans' by Peter Paul Rubens. Musee Royaux des Beaux Arts, Brussels.


When Zeus returns as a young man, there is a great battle between Zeus and the Olympians and Kronos and the Titans. After ten years of war, Zeus slays Kronos and sends the defeated Titans to Tartarus, a deep, gloomy place, below Hades, that is a dungeon of torment and suffering. Zeus then becomes king of the gods setting up his court at Mount Olympus.


Pictured left: 'The Lost Pleiad' by Adolphe Bouguereau. Before the Titans were sent to Tartarus, Oceanus and Tethys gave birth to three thousand daughters, the Oceanids, each of whom were the patroness of a particular spring, river, ocean, lake, pond, pasture, flower or cloud. The Oceanid, Klymene, would marry the Titan, Iapetus, giving birth to Atlas. Their son, Atlas (often seen carrying the weight of the world on his back), would also marry an Oceanid, Pleione, giving birth to the seven sisters or seven stars called the Pleiades. One of these sisters, Electra, would marry Zeus and give birth to Dardanus.



Dardanus, son of Zeus and Electra, is the founder of the city of Dardania on Mount Ida in the Troad. The Troad is the historical name of the Biga peninsula in the northwestern part of Anatolia, Turkey. Troy was also located in Anatolia under Mount Ida. Dardanus would become the founding father of the Kings of Troy, through his great-grandson, Ilus, first King of Troy.


















Pictured above: Ancient Greek vase. In the Iliad, Priam secretly enters the Greeks camps and comes to the hero Achilles to ransom the body of his son, Hector.


The grandson of Ilus, Priam, the tragic King of Troy in Homer's Iliad, had a daughter, Troan, who would marry her cousin, Munon (or Memnon), the next King of Troy after the devastating Trojan War.

















Pictured above: 'Aurora e Titone' by Francesco de Mura. Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Napoli.


Munon would claim his parentage through Tithonus, brother of Priam, and Eos. Eos (the dawn) was the daughter of the Titans, Hyperion and Theia.

Dardanus is also considered the ancestor of the Kings of Saxons.

From the pages of mythology, Dardanus, son of gods and stars, is your first ancestor.

Sweet dreams,

xx

The Golden Age of the Greek gods

Before the age of the prophets when people would come to worship one God, they prayed to the heavens, the earth, the seas, the winds, and all processes of creation. This was a time of the mysteries when people lived close to the earth and were dependent on agriculture and the cycle of the seasons.










Pictured left: Minoan snake goddess from the palace of Knosses, Crete. Knosses is where King Minos kept the man-eating minotaur in the labyrinth until his daughter, Ariadne, helped Theseus slay it.


In an attempt to gain control of their lives, they gave the heavens, the earth, the seas and the winds names. These names became gods or goddesses and the people worshipped them, made sacrifices and gave them gifts so they would protect their crops, their cattle and their families from the harsh elements that could undo them. The gods were said to walk among men during the Golden Age.





Pictured left: Lions Gate at Mycenae, Tomb of Agamemnon. Agamemnon and his brother, Menelaus, would destroy Troy in the name of Helen, wife of Menelaus, who left with or was taken by Paris of Troy as a gift from Aphrodite after Paris declared her the most beautiful of the goddesses.



As their farming techniques improved and the gods blessed men with abundance, their farms expanded, their lands spread farther and their cattle increased in number. The farmer with the greatest wealth and status become the tribal chief. However, with greater wealth came a greater need for protecting one's possessions from those chiefs or tribes who wished to steal them. And so a weapon was created, from smelting copper and tin ores into a bronze sword and even armor. They would also domesticate the horse to travel great distances and charge their enemies in greater speed with their swords.















Pictured left: Etruscan helmet. The Etruscans would be the forefathers to the Roman Empire.



The Bronze Age would change Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, and the lands that surrounded the sapphire blue Mediterranean sea: Persians in Mesopotamia, Mycenaeans in Greece, Minoans in Crete, Etruscans in Italy, Egyptians by the Nile, Phoenicians in Africa. It was the beginning of the kingdoms, of the city states, where chiefs became kings, where raids became wars. It was a bloody, ruthless time that only found a glimmer of hope through the songs of the traveling bards who turned the tragedy of war into the tales of heroes. The Bronze Age was also the age when men could be made immortal by their deeds.








Pictured left: The Code of Hammurabi, Babylon. The code or laws is where 'an eye for an eye' originated. One of the seven wonders of the ancient world is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Their neighbors, the Sumerians, also had a heroic tale called the 'Epic of Gilgamesh.'



Other people were undergoing similar changes in China and India but this is a story of your ancestors so I must take you, dear nephews, through the developments of Western civilization.

















Pictured above: A page from the Iliad. The Greeks would fight the Trojans for the beautiful Helen but neither side could claim an advantage until clever Odysseus came up with the gift of the Trojan horse. When the Trojans saw the Greek ships gone, they took the gift inside their city walls and celebrated victory. That night, as the Trojans slumbered, the Greeks slipped out of the hollow horse and defeated Troy with a surprise attack. The lesson of the Trojan horse is to never trust the gifts of your enemies.


One of these bards, Homer, weaves a tale about the Trojan war in his 'Iliad' where young warriors, like Achilles, see war as their chance at heroic immortality yet soon discover it is an unfathomable horror where dear friends perish and the conscience is heavy from killing good men, like Prince Hector of Troy, and seeing their families destroyed all for the greed of kings and the amusement of the gods. Homer then turns to his equally world weary hero, Odysseus, who after the war, does everything in his power to return home and to his family in the 'Odyssey' after the horrors of war. Homer immortalizes the heroes on both sides but he also leaves us with a strong image of the heroes heavy price.




















Pictured above: Coin of Dido, Phoenician Queen of Carthage (now Tunisia). In Virgil's Aeneid, Dido offers Aeneas of Troy her hand in marriage but he abandons her to found the city of Rome. In despair, Dido commits suicide on a funeral pyre, a sword driven through her heart. Similarly, Egyptian Cleopatra would die by the bite of a poisonous asp after her lover, Marcus Antonius of Rome, falls to Octavius, the first Roman Emperor Augustus, at the Battle of Actium.


In addition to Homer, there was another writer, Hesiod, who wrote about farming in 'Works and Days' and the genealogy of the Greek gods and goddesses in 'Theogony' which lead us to our ancestors.

Until next time...

Good night!

xx

Introduction

Once upon a time there was a little girl whose parents decided not to stay together anymore. She prayed and prayed they would change their minds and when they didn't she prayed for a brother or a sister so she wouldn't feel so alone.














Pictured above: Kimberly Crest. The koi pond and gardens at Kimberly Crest where I use to read after school. Kimberly Crest is a French château-style Victorian mansion built in 1897 featured on the PBS series “America’s Castles.” It is a beautiful mansion set high on a hill overlooking the whole valley.


For quite some time, things were not easy because her family often moved. Sometimes it seemed exciting moving to a new place and seeing new things but sometimes it was hard to start over at a new school and make new friends. A few years later, her father died and she felt even more rootless and prayed harder for a brother or sister.








Pictured left: Morey Mansion. This Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion built in 1882, the Morey Mansion on Terracina, was on the way home from school. This Victorian jewel was featured in “America’s Favorite Victorian.”



When she was a teenager, her mother remarried and had a son. The girl was so excited because she finally had a baby brother to share her days with. Unfortunately, he was too young and she was too old for either one of them to have much to say to one another so she had to wait for him to get a little older.
















Pictured above: My biking trail through the old orange groves. At the turn of the 1900s, Redlands was a vacation destination for wealthy Angelenos. Called the "Palm Springs" of the next century, roses were planted along city thoroughfares. Today, locals preserve the tree-lined streets, beautiful historic buildings, Victorian style homes and the locally-owned shops and boutiques in the charming downtown district.


In the meantime, the girl wasn't thinking so much about her past but more about the future. She knew she wanted to go to college but she didn't know what she wanted to be. Instead of being sad because she didn't have many friends at another new school, she would go to the library for lunch and read about all the men and women who made a difference in history. In those books, she would not only share their adventures and try to learn from their mistakes but imagine a future for herself beyond the tiny world she had known.














Pictured above: A concert at the Bowl. The Bowl was built in 1930 and is home of the oldest 'free' outdoor concert series in the U.S.


She would read under the stars at the Bowl, beside the koi pond at Kimberly Crest, at the top of the Smiley Heights botanical gardens, on a grassy knoll along the winding road of the old orange groves. There she would be transported through the mythology of pagan days, the heroic tales of the ancient Greeks in the Iliad or the Romans in the Aeneid, the wild Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons who made early Britain with the poetic Celts, Charlesmagne's dream and the kings and queens of Europe, the first Americans and why they wrote the Federalist papers declaring their right to freedom, the tragedy of the Dust Bowl and Arthur Miller's question to the American Dream. All these books set her imagination on fire the way some girls feel after a first kiss.


Pictured left: Post Office. Originally part of the territory of the Morongo and Aguas Calientes tribes, the area was settled by Spanish settlers in the 1770s where Franciscan padres established the Assistencia mission. In 1842, the Lugo family received a large land grant creating the first fixed civilization in the area. In 1851, the area received its first Anglo inhabitants. In the 1880s, the arrival of the railroads touched off a land boom and with the area's hot, dry climate and ready access to water supplies, it was seen as an ideal center for citrus production. As the area grew, they named the city “Redlands” after the color of the adobe soil.


It would take her a long time to realize she was a writer. It would take her longer to find out all those stories she read about as a girl, her family played a part in those events and those worlds weren't quite as distant as she thought.














Pictured above: A postcard from the botanical gardens at Smiley Heights.


Because, as if by magic, two things happened!














Pictured above: A.K. Smiley Public Library. The library that held some of my favorite books. It is a Moorish-style library built in 1898. Behind the Smiley Library is the Lincoln Shrine, the only memorial honoring the "Great Emancipator", the sixteenth president, west of the Mississippi River.


First, she received a mysterious letter that her father had a son before she was born and her brother wanted to meet her!

Second, she would take a trip to Paris and find a portrait, quite by accident, of one of her ancestors.

This letter and the portrait would set her on a remarkable journey, my dear nephews, that is also part of your story.

See you next time...

xx