Haunted Places. Hampton Court Palace

If there is a place to imagine a ghost walking around is a castle. Although there are some across Europe, the imagination tends to place them in England, Germany and northern France. Among all the English castles there is one particular... home of the ghost that could be the most famous around the world. To meet the ghost we need to go to Hampton Court and to know who are the contenders for the title of being the ghost, we need to go to 1509, when at age 17 Henry VIII was crowned king of England.

Henry wasn’t supposed to rule, but his brother, Arthur. Fortunately it did not happen because the movies could no longer speak of "the" King Arthur, but "one" of kings Arthur, which is not the material blockbusters are made of. The boys father, Henry VII, wanted an alliance with Spain, so he arranged the marriage of his son Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. Catherine, born in 1485 was two years older than Arthur.

Arthur died at age fifteen. Henry, raised to enter the clergy, with a background in theology that many regret later, found himself first in line of succession. And his father, determined to maintain the alliance with Spain, compeled the new future king to engage to with his brother's widow.

Turns out they needed a dispensation from the Pope: Leviticus says that if a man marries his brother's wife, that marriage will not have children, something extremely serious for a royal dynasty. Although Catherine swore that the marriage had never been consummated it was decided to obtain the dispensation, and Catherine's mother, Queen Elizabeth, ordered Spanish troops in Italy to take a little walk through Rome to explain to His Holiness that the issue was in a hurry and, if anything, the generals could expect the bull... With fully armored soldiers…

Two questions that are not mine (but maybe I'm changing the wording a little) but from the protagonists of this tale. First, how the Pope can approve something that is contrary to Scripture? He’s the administrator of Scripture, he can’t change it through his concepts as though it was the constitution of a third-world country. And second, what kind of guy was the prince, who at 14 years was left in the bridal chamber with a woman of 17 and not consummated the marriage?

By training the monarch Henry VIII was the most Renaissance monarch of his time, the guy that any girl would want to date today: great dancer (granted, not reggaeton, but surely he had stood out at it if that had been the case), a magnificent conversationalist, intelligent, poet, musician and writer and sportsman . On the other hand, a very conscious brat of the meaning of absolute power who seized and beheaded the most unpopular ministers of his father two days after his coronation. The first acquisitions of a long and brilliant collection of heads.

To be king at 17 with a women of 23 may seem the dream of many who today fall in love with the chics of the senior courses. But time passes… In 1525 he was 36 and the queen 42, when the life expectancy was around 50. And one of the ladies of the queen, Anne Boleyn, struted around the castle, twenty exquisite years old and skilled in the "French caress", whatever that is.

To make the story short, the king fell in love with Anna and asked Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, his chancellor, arrange divorce from Catherine. Problem: Catherine was the aunt of King Carlos I of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, the most powerful man in the world. And as grandma Isabela had done, Carlos sent his army to Rome to ask the pope, out of curiosity, if he was signing the document that turned his aunt into convent material. The pope, open to the explanations given by Charles mercenaries, did not sign the divorce, but neither denied it, because he wasn’t fighting Henry.

Wolsey could not secure a divorce and his enemies rallied around the girlfriend of King and used her to embitter him. They insist that the cardinal was an incompetent, that he was delaying the appointment of His Majesty with true love ... Henry ended up accusing Wolsey of treason, the previous step to bring his head to the collection. Wolsey, determined not to please him, died before. And since the pope refuse the divorce, Henry declared himself head of the english church and asked his bishops if they would also deny him a divorce, much as Charles had asked the pope.

Some years later Anne Boleyn would share the fate of Catherine, but adding decapitation to divorce. Then came Jane Seymour. Here a caveat is needed: Henry didn’t do everything he did only because he was a really mad fly (also) but because it alarmed him not to leave a male heir. Jane gave him his only son, the future Edward VI, but she died in childbirth. And then, thinking that collect wives was as much fun as collect heads, Henry married three more times. And here we have to take a break.

Wolsey built Hampton Court Palace, a building so magnificent that royal visitors stayed there. When Cardinal fell from grace he gave the great palace to the king, the monarch was delighted with a most luxurious home than any royal palace, but not enough to forgive the cardinal.

Now, jump forward in time. This palace is the building with resident ghost more persistent in the English mind. However, in 2003, things got more complicated with the she-ghost. For it seems it is a woman. The palace is open to the public and on 19 December 2003 the alarms rang like hell; the guides were away, the cameras at the entrances had not recorded the entry of anyone dressed is such a peculiar way ... but now the CCTV showed a woman dressed in Tudor style coming through some inside door with no other camera catching her anywhere else. In other words, she come from nowhere and return to that very place, according to CCTV. As diffuse as it is, is the the image of a person. Now, a ghost? Who?

I leave to every reader beliefs to answer if it is a ghost or is not, but if it is who is it? Three contenders: the first, Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry and second beheaded. He was ordered house arrest in Hampton Court and one day she tried to plead for mercy to the king but the guards prevented her. The other, Jane Seymour, who died giving birth. The last one, Sibell Penn, nursemaid of Prince Edward. She was buried in Hampton Court, but when the chapel was moved his bones were "disturbed". In 1829, during the renovation, workers followed the noises the ghost made, they knocked down a wall and found a spinning wheel like that of Penn.

The last possibility is Wosley cardinal himself, but that is extreme cruelty. El hombre siendo cardenal si tuvo amantes, con las que procreó dos hijos. The man was Cardinal and had lovers with whom fathered two children. He was cunning, treacherous and perhaps robbed the royal treasury. But cross-dressing

Legends & myths. The werewolf

A friend of mine has taken Gothic style to the big leagues: he believes that vampires live among us and has done everything to look like one, from sharpen her teeth to make blood pacts of eternal love with every boyfriend she’s got to the point that now her hand looks like a map. Now, since vampires exist for sure, she reasons, that means their archenemies the werewolves also exist. She quoted me her sources with the loudest voice: Anne Rice (Interview with the vampire), the movie Underworld and the Twilight saga.

The basics: no one knows where does the myth of the werewolf come from or what try to explain. According to some anthropologists, in different variants werewolves are the most widespread myth worldwide. In places with no wolves peoples resorted to werehyena (Africa), weretiger (India) and werejaguar (America). My friend hasn’t been able to explain me if hatred of vampires for other species includes the wereocelot, but I suspect a positive answer. It has been said that the myth tries to explain serial murders, diseases such as porphyria, mass poisoning with LSD-like fungi and even that is nostalgia for the price man has paid for civilization: the abandonment of his instincts and the disconnection from a basic sense of pleasure. No explanation is satisfactory.

The most popular version of the werewolf today (the one my friend vampire stalks in the streets of a place as unlikely as Bogota) comes from Germanic mythology, reissued by nineteenth-century literature and cinema of the early twentieth century. The most common elements: the werewolf is always a lycanthrop, that is, his condition is hereditary or due to the bite of another werewolf. It is anthropomorphic: bipedal, with a monstruous human face vaguely like Michael Jackson’s (on Thriller, I mean) Only a silver bullet can kill him and the moon seems to have something to do with the whole issue.

Lets go to the pieces: there are were-animals all over the world, in cultures with no contact between them and long before any folklore of northern Europe. The first registered werewolf is Lycaon, son of Pelagius and Melibea and first king of Arcadia. For some reason this guy, father of fifty sons, decided to invite Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, to lunch. Cool, but the idea became deliciously brilliant when Lycaon decides to play a joke on his guest and served one of his sons as lunch (the king’s, not the god’s, for that it would not have been funny at all).

Let's see ... If I invite a deity to eat at my house, and he sits at my table, I would not be in the mood for jokes. As a matter of fact, I’d be deadly serious and ready to make profound questions about heaven or angels or the trinitarian question or something, trying not to look like a moron. And if I made an occasional pun, I’m sure I wouldn’t cross the line with a joke as bad as serve the flesh of my son to my guest; my grandmother called these experiments in humor "flirt with the devil". Anyway, Zeus realized what happened and proceeded to turn Lycaon into a wolf (his name is now synonymous with an African wild dog) and killed with his thunderbolts all his offspring. What do the Greeks wanted to show by including in the slaughter the brothers of the deceased boy, I do not know, but Greek myths did not sell well if they neglected to include gallons of blood.

Ovid's Metamorphoses also talks about werewolves in Arcadia, where seems to be the producing plant. And the Greek Herodotus told that all Neuried tribe, who lived in what is now southern Poland, turned into wolves every nine years. Arcadia was so dangerous that even with no fault at all you can end up as a werewolf: Pliny the Elder told the story of a man who hung his clothes in the branches of a tree and jumped into a lake; when he reached the other side surprise! He came out from the lake as a wolf and he was told told that if he let go nine years without attacking any human he could swim back and regain his form. And his clothes, I suppose.

The implication is clear: there’s no need to involve another werewolf to become one. In fact, in traditional myths, this condition comes from a divine curse, delivered ex oficio by God or through the intervention of a saint: a Welsh king was turned into a wolf by St. Patrick after the king refused to convert (to Christianity, not a wolf, which was mandatory after the curse of the saint). I wonder how many missionaries today wouldn’t use this power very happily if they had it. Until the fourteenth century there is no tale of lycanthropy, ie, a werewolf who makes another with a bite or scratch. The usual ways to become one of these creatures were to wear a belt (or the whole skin) made of leather of wolf, drink water from a footstep of a werewolf in the woods or drinking a beer chanting certain spell.

And the other implication: the mythical werewolf is more wolf than man. That is, one turned into a beast bigger, faster, more evil, stronger than any wolf ... but wolf. Quadruped. With muzzle. With bushy tail. A werewolf didn’t walk upright, neither had grasping hands. The humanoid werewolf was basically a creation of the horror genre.

In traditional stories (and the documentation my friend got in Underworld) the lycanthrop becomes wolf at will: not only he doesn’t need moon but if he wants he converts himself (painfully: imagine your jaws stretching to form a snout) at ten in the morning while waiting for the bus. In general, how to kill the werewolf was more blunt than a silver bullet: a stick. Although according to stories from the thirteenth century a silver stick was occasionally included in the beating and since progress never stops, the stick became a bullet as soon as it was possible. What any gunsmith will tell you is that it is impossible to make a bullet with silver 100% pure: it will deform at the very moment it is shooted. But apparently, those like my friend think it is rather that the art is lost or today gunsmiths are incompetent people who barely can make air-ground missiles.

The feelings of the orthodox and mainstream thinking towards these creatures are ambivalent unlike vampires, who are always considered creatures of darkness. Gubernatis’ Zoological Mythology , for example, told about a pack of werewolves who smashed some monks for holding heretical opinions. These ambivalent feelings allowed a man accused of witchcraft to use the legal defense that he and a group of friends were werewolves, yes, made pacts with the devil, yes, but with permission of the angels so they can go down to hell to fight the demons. This defense led the judge to have him whipped for idolatrous, which isn’t nice but better than dying scorched.

An aside: Shakira has recently used a Colombian expression to name one of her songs "she-wolf", which is the derisive and pejorative way to refer to certain female specimens, very generous to display attributes already quite generous with plunging necklines, tight minis and stiletto boots. The origin of the saying is medieval and Italian: families would make their children look after the herds. Many sheperds were teenagers and every now and then sold under the counter a sheep to pay a brothel and then report to his parents the sheep as taken by the wolf. The parents (specially the father) knew the truth, having passed themselves by this kind of initiation into adulthood and they accepted it as a sort of occupational cost calling it "the portion of the wolf". The she-wolf, more precisely

Zodiac. The Mythology of Aries (I)

Aries is a sign of fire, the beginning of the cycle and so they are the babies of the zodiac. Injustice makes the natives of this sign sick and not for a second they restrain themselves form expressing their opinions to their girlfriend, a colleague, their boss or a Mafia padrino. They are sorry afterwards? Perhaps, but caution is not their thing. Just like a baby, an Aries lives absorbed in his needs: what he wants he wants right now and has no problem calling at four in the morning whoever may solve those needs. Now, is a baby selfish? Not exactly: he gives away his smiles, his faces, his feelings and all he has, much or little depends from your point of view, to those who meet their expectations. Aries is extremely naïve but direct to the point of bluntness, and utterly incapable of resentment: in a fight he can burn your house down but half an hour later he has forgotten everything and assumes that you, too ... though the house is now ashes.

Aries is represented by the ram, but what ram and how he ended up being a constellation?

The Flood, by the Greeks

Athamas was the king of Orchomenus, a city in Boeotia, one of the richest and most fertile regions of Greece, located southeast of the country. There were born glories of the Greek literature and history such as Hesiod and Pindar, but generally the rest of the country considered the locals rather idiotic.

Athamas great-grandfather is a version of one of the most repeated myths among all civilizations: grandpa Deucalion was king of Thessaly and was considered the most righteous man in the world, in a world that despised the gods since the men learned to dominate the fire. Since he respected the gods, Deucalion was chosen by them to save himself and his wife from the flood that Zeus sent to destroy humanity. Deucalion sailed in a boat with his wife and the animals on his farm for nine days and finally stranded on Mount Parnassus, where they left the boat and went to repopulate the earth (which seems exhausting, yes, but it is not as you imagine: Deucalion and his wife threw stones that became people).

The first man born after the Flood was Helenus, founder of the Hellenic race, which is the fancy name of the ancient Greeks. One of his sons was Aeolus, namesake of the king of the winds, which in turn was the father of Athamas.

There is no wrath like a woman scorned

Athamas, mortal, married a goddess, the one of the clouds: the beautiful Nephele. By her he had two sons, Frixo, the rain that falls, and Helle, the vivid light. And here, as in most of these myths that seem written to show how stupid a man can be, Athamas had an excellent idea: to repudiate his wife and remarried to Ino, a mortal. Somehow the guy believed the move would turn out well.

Nephele, a deity, wasn’t amused by the joke at all, so she left the region in a fury. Meanwhile Ino wanted the throne for her children so she intrigued to kill their stepchildren, the offspring of Nephele, which was made easier for her when Nephele sent a terrible drought to the region, in view of which Ino persuaded Athamas to sacrifice to Zeus the twins to appease the god. Athamas, insecure, consulted an oracle but Ino bribed the messengers to persuade them to say that the oracle ordered the slaughter: It’s hard to imagine a more repeated cliché for a stepmother, but I suppose she was a very original character at that time the myth was written. Given that only three generations ago the Athamas family had known firsthand the wrath of Zeus, the king was determined to avoid a massacre among his people, this time by means exactly the opposite that grandpa Deucalion had faced, so Athamas decided to accommodate such advice reluctantly.

The Golden Fleece

Nephele appeared in dreams to their children and told them the vehicle to escape their fate: the ram Chrysomallos, another subject from an illustrious lineage (in Greek myths not even animals willingly accept to being a nobody). Chrysomallos was the son of Poseidon, god of the sea. The god turned himself into a ram in order to seduce the nymph Teophane, but first he had the decency to turn her into a sheep and take her to an island of sheeps, which seems the most bizarre harem of history. From this encounter was born a winged ram with golden wool, Chrysomallos, which somehow ended up in the hands of Apollo, who gave it to Nephele.

The ram picked Frixo and Helle up, but she fell and drowned and that’s why the Greek coast is called Hellespont Sea. Anyway the ram continued with Frixo to Colchis, across the Black Sea (in Georgia today). What did Frixo do? What the devil does to whom serves him well: he killed the magical ram to give the golden fleece to the local king (his future father in law) who hung the fleece of a tree and put a dragon to take care of it. One generation later, Argos, son of Frixo took part in the expedition of the Argonauts to retrieve the fleece, I’ll tell the myth in some other post. And so the ram of Aries, which ended as a constellation by its heroic, if somewhat thankless, role in this rescue is Chrysomallos.

The natives from Aries, like the ram that sponsors them from the sky, is noble to the borders of sacrifice, determined to fulfill the missions he accepts (not conferred upon him: he doesn’t feel committed to anything until he say "yes"), resolved to arise again whenever he falls, and almost totally unable to tell a lie, though he can build the most complicated and convoluted fantasies.

Not everyone was happy: the gods drove Athamas mad and and he killed one of his sons with Ino, forcing her to jump into the sea with her other son in order to save him; there they were rescued by the nymphs. Strangely, from a jealous bitch and infanticide became a kind deity who protected sailors during storms. And Athamas died in poverty and seeking the hospitality of the beasts