We
are nearing the end of our archaeological mystery tour, which began in
Egypt with John Anthony West and continued to Ibiza’s ancient protector,
the dwarf-god Bes via the Hall of Records, the Well of Laundry-Lists and
a lost temple in Bahariya Oasis. The charismatic Egyptian deity may have
given his name to Ibiza, but his cult faded gradually from sight during
the early Christian era - which brings us to a forgotten novel by Robert
Goldston, The Catafalque (1958). The Celtic (uncial) lettering of
its cover reflects a truly bizarre archaeological plot:
High on a spray-swept
promontory the ancient Castle of the Kings stands grim and forbidding
above the fishing village of San Pedro del Rio in Catalonia. Deep within
its vaults, an expedition led by a famous American archaeologist
searches into the past for the tangible remnants of a strange Christian
legend. A sinister web of intrigue, guilt and betrayal unfolds as each
member of the expedition falls under the mysterious spell of the search
and is led through his own past to some deeply buried terror.
[blurb]
Catalonia? The Gothic castle on the jacket
was actually whisked across from Segovia by the publisher’s artist (it
here towers over lateen-rigged boats and fishermen’s houses), but
Bibliomaniacs’ Corner can now reveal for the first time that the
real inspiration lay closer to home. Here’s what the American publisher
(Rinehart & Co.) has to say about the author:
Robert C. Goldston, the
recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in April, 1957, for creative
writing in fiction, has won acclaim with publication of his first novel
The Eighth Day in 1955. Born in New York in 1927 and educated in
Los Angeles, the Midwest and at Columbia University, Mr. Goldston has
served in the U.S. Army, sailed a schooner on the
Great Lakes and worked
as a book designer for several publishing houses. He currently resides
with his wife and two small daughters in the Balearic Islands.
So
we’re getting warmer. The Balearic Hemingway in the accompanying photo
stares moodily right of stage, and indeed he did have rather an unusual
archaeological quarry in his sights. The column against which he is
leaning belongs to Ses Estaques, Norman Lewis’s recently-abandoned
writer’s den just outside Santa Eulalia del
Rio (see Part Thirteen in Weekly Edition
075 Saturday 3rd August 2002). A revealing location indeed
for a photo-shoot: quite apart from the connection with Lewis and local
archaeologist Carlos Román (who built it) ses Estaques lies at the foot
of the Punta de s’Esglèsia Vella - ‘Headland of the Old Church’ - which
according to local lore marks the spot from which the settlement’s
original church fell into the sea just after the local population had
emerged from mass one bright Sunday morning. This colourful legend
perhaps set Goldston on the trail of how and when Christianity first
arrived on Ibiza. Carthage and neighbouring Numidia, early strongholds
of the faith, lay just across the sea while the Dead Sea Scrolls
(discovered between 1947 and 1956) were very much in the news. The hot
historical subject in 1957 were the Essenes, a splinter sect which
formed a missing link between Judaism and early Christianity. If one of
Jesus’ brothers, James, did indeed sail to Spain shortly after the
crucifixion, then what about the other more obscure (and reviled)
sibling, Jude? This is the teasing riddle around which Goldston has
built this unusual work of fiction.
Little more is know these days about early Christianity in the Pityuses
than was the case in 1958, so the field was - and remains - wide open.
In the opening chapter our sleepy fisherman’s village (a
thinly-disguised Santa Eulalia) is jolted to life by the arrival of an
academic caravan made up of Dr Wilfred Carrol (a respected archaeologist
from Philadelphia), his redhead daughter Stephanie, two student
assistants from Heidelberg (palaeographer Hans Kreuger and Polish
architect Clopec), a butler who answers to the name of Mr Simpson and a
sheep dog called Mithridates. The local team includes expatriate
American archaeologist-turned-wino Frederick De Vries, a sympathetic and
popular priest called Don Carlos, a bossy lesbian condesa, the
Secretary of the local Falange (Don Miguel), Catalina the maid, Pedro
the fisherman and ex-Republican Antonio Serra, who owns the general
store and cheats a little on the side.
Carrol has been drawn to this remote backwater by De Vries’s discovery
of an Essenic ring and the remote prospect of coming to the end of a
ten-year treasure hunt, which began when he purchased an ancient scroll
in Palestine. The plot thickens when Don Carlos mentions an old document
among church papers describing the ceremonial burial of a man he assumes
to be James the Apostle. At this point a slight detour for history buffs
may be in order: legend has it that James was the first person to bring
the Christian gospel to Spain around 40 AD and that the Virgin Mary
appeared miraculously to him in Saragossa, leaving as material proof the
sacred pillar which became the focal point of the nation’s metropolitan
basilica. Although James was later beheaded by Herod Agrippa in
Palestine, the corpse miraculously made it back to his adopted land
thanks to a sail-less boat, was deposited near the Galician coast and
discovered by a hermit eight hundred years later (813 AD), becoming a
rallying symbol for the Reconquista and the object of Europe’s most
important pilgrimage - Santiago de Compostela. Are you still there?
Goldston’s original ploy is to find a role for Judas Iscariot and ‘San
Pedro’ (i.e. Santa Eulalia) in this celebrated legend. We will take a
look at the historical Judas later on, but for now let us return to that
fictitious Palestinian scroll which introduces Judas as the Messenger
to the West (replacing St. James) and identifying his place
of burial beneath the main turret of a castle. By the light of the full
moon our intrepid American archaeologists set about looking for ‘the
shadow of the needle’ mentioned in Don Carlos’s document. With a little
help from the nose of trusty Mithridates they indeed find the burial
vault of Judas. The catafalque itself has long been reduced to
worm-eaten fragments, but there is a gold death mask as well as a sealed
pottery jar - Carrol’s ‘holy grail’. In the following exegesis about the
Essenes and the Early Church, half-Jewish Goldston presents Judas as a
James-like figure who escaped the Roman dispersal of the sect at Qumran
after the First Jewish Revolt (AD 68) and was ‘sent to a place in the
West, bearing sacred documents’.
Having come to grips with all this background info on Proto-Christian
splinter movements, the reader is naturally curious about the contents
of the ‘Judas Scroll’, but Goldston will have none of that. Instead he
devotes the second half of his novel to sub-plots and flashbacks
involving expiation of Nazi or Fascist guilt. There is also a Spanish
Civil War element, carrying on where Elliot Paul left off in The Life
and Death of a Spanish Town (1937, subject of a future article):
while diving off the headland, quisling Clopec chances across a
watertight metal box which contains ten typewritten pages listing
locals, many still alive, involved in an underground Republican
organization. After offering it to the fascist condesa for
$25,000, he has a sudden change of heart and flings it back into the
sea, only to be shot dead by Antonio Serra, who is far more concerned
about his daughter’s virginity. Then we have the arrival of a Jesuitical
Don Luis from Madrid, ostensibly sent by the Bishop to inquire into the
unorthodox practices of Don Carlos. Other deviations from the plot
include a description of a concentration camp to which a shell-shocked
Kreuger (ironically, a Jew) is sent as a guard, and Don Miguel’s project
to build a road and tourist centre for busloads of culture vultures at
Es Cuyeram.
Towards the end there is a sudden acceleration of pace: Don Luis reveals
that he is also an official from the Ministry of Internal Affairs,
empowered to take possession of the death mask and manuscript on behalf
of the Spanish state. They will be forwarded to Madrid and eventually
Rome being ‘of mild interest as records of heretical sects’ rather than
earliest known version of the Christian gospels. Carrol has a nervous
collapse during which De Vries’s affair with his wife and the reason for
her death during an archaeological campaign in Persia come to light.
Meanwhile, in the bowels of the Castle Don Carlos stumbles into a
geographical time warp and is transported to the monastic fortress above
the Dead Sea on the eve of its destruction by Roman legions. He
eavesdrops on a conversation in which Judas is taken to task for his
betrayal, but counters with information about the Roman attack and urges
the other apostles to hide their precious documents in nearby caves. He
also presses them to take the gospel further a field, to Alexandria and
Rome where money and support will be forthcoming.
In
the final scene manly De Vries assumes responsibility not only for
Stephanie (still trembling after an ordeal with the lesbian countess in
Tanit’s sanctuary) but for the entire expedition so as to prevent the
Judas Scroll being consigned to dusty oblivion within the Vatican. The
Countess takes her final leave of Don Carlos (on his way to a remote
Asturian mining village - thanks to Don Luis’s report) with an
impassioned tirade about female sexuality:
Woman does not exist in
Spain, does she, Padre? You think that. You have taught that, all of
you. But they do. I could mention names that would shock you. One finds
love where one can. It is not so simple as you think. You think you can
frighten me with goblins and threats. But you cannot. Do you know why?
Because I am not a Catholic! I have not been a Catholic since I learned
to love … Beautiful faces with full lips. Am I shocking you, Padre? Then
listen more … I am very strong. Stronger than many men. Stephanie
excited me in a particular way.
(p. 299)
Heady stuff for 1958. In fact the author was to pay a stiff price for
his caricature of Franco on page 172: “… the fat fratricide sitting on a
gilt throne in Madrid, staring past his stuffed Jefes into the black
regions promised him by the half men bishops ... those puffed and
fearful eyes that gazed paternally from the faces of newspapers and
posters and postage stamps and coins.” He was expelled the following
year and only allowed to return after the intervention of local resident
Henri de Vilmorin (De Vries?) and Franco’s own brother. As the
crestfallen expedition is departing for Barcelona, Simpson reveals that
fifty photographs of the mask and scrolls are safely stowed in a box of
sanitary napkins. The Spanish customs officers will hardly think to look
there. The worldly and sophisticated Don Luis is appalled to find that
he is to be the new priest of San Pedro, a fitting punishment for his
duplicity and lack of Christian principles.
So
much for the novel. What about Judas Iscariot? Who was the historical
figure behind the Gospels and where might his body have been laid to
rest? The linguistic and textual complexities of biblical scholarship
have had to wrestle from the very beginning with deeply-entrenched
religious dogmas, leaving historical truth at the very back of the
academic agenda for centuries - if not millennia. Traditional
scholarship pairs Judas with the Judean town of Kerioth (identified by
one nineteenth-century scholar as Khirbet el-Quaryatein in the southeast
Judean wilderness), making him an outsider from the start among the
Galilean disciples. But recent investigators have been intrigued by a
possible connection with the Zealots who spearheaded Roman Palestine’s
freedom movement. A little-known version of Judas’s nickname in early
manuscripts is ‘Skarioth’ or ‘Skariotes’, which appears to derive from
sicarius (Latin for ‘dagger-man’), a contemporary Zealot nickname which
evoked that of their predecessors, the Maccabeans (from the Hebrew
maqáb, ‘hammer’). John and James had similar warlike epithets (boanerges
meaning ‘Sons of Thunder’, Mark 3:17), while Simon was simply ‘the
Zealot’ (zelotes, Luke 6:15). Not exactly what you’d have expected of
the world’s prototype pacifist movement.
Jude
was not only an exceedingly obscure disciple, but probably the
unluckiest - victim, it would seem, of the Pauline Church. The political
and literary agenda of any propaganda war requires villains as well as
heroes and Antioch at the time of Paul – like Geneva at the time of
Calvin - did not shrink from blackening reputations elsewhere to further
its cause. The original apostles (some still in Jerusalem) were depicted
as naïve followers with semi-political leanings, while the special role
of Arch-traitor was reserved for Judas, then head of the ad hoc regency
awaiting the Messiah’s return. Following the crucifixion, Jesus’ brother
James had been in charge of the Jerusalem church, but what is often
overlooked is that another brother, the apostle Judas (there was
probably only one) was the third regent. Moreover, Judas’s very name
bore a close resemblance to that of the Jewish kingdom at a time when
the gentile church was distancing itself from those seen as responsible
for the crucifixion.
Little is known about the later life of Judas, although he could well
have been the author of the brief and elegantly-written epistle which
bears his name. He is supposed to have preached the gospel in Judaea,
Samaria, Syria and Mesopotamia before returning to Jerusalem in 62 AD to
help with the selection of its bishop. His martyrdom in Sufian in Persia
is described in an apocryphal work, The Passion of Simon and Jude,
together with that of Simon the Zealot (they share the same feast day).
Other legends claim he was killed by a saw or curved sword in Syria and
Armenia, hence the fact that he is often depicted holding an axe or
halberd. It seems more likely that after Hadrian’s destruction of the
holy city in 70 AD, he presided over a scattered community of Jewish
Christians in Aleppo and Damascus, known as the Ebionites after the
Hebrew word for ‘poor’, ebyon. Because their observance of Jewish
law was regarded as heretical, their writings were mostly suppressed by
the Church. Little wonder that their leader Jude was defamed and well
and truly buried by religion and history alike. Matthew (27:5) had him
hang himself in shame, giving Cercis siliquastrum (a close
relative of the carob) the name of Judas Tree, its white flowers
blushing purplish-pink forever after in shame. Acts (1:18) bestowed on
him a truly bizarre fate whereby he stumbled headlong and then
self-exploded in the middle of a field bought with the thirty pieces of
silver. Other, more reliable, gospels maintain a tight-lipped silence.
And
the ‘Castle of the Kings’? There is a Balearic ‘Castell del Rei’ in
Mallorca. It occupies a truly majestic site 1,500 feet above the waves
just north of Pollensa, and its origins are indeed shrouded in mystery.
It became a key stronghold from 1229 to 1231 when an Arab chieftain took
refuge after James the Conqueror stormed Palma, again in 1287 when
Alfonso III of Aragon took the island, and finally in 1343 when forces
loyal to Mallorca’s last king James III held out against the Catalan
ruler Peter II. The courtyard has a deep well. There is also, of course,
Ibiza’s ancient Castle at the top of Dalt Vila. Archaeologists are
digging there right now. Spanish ones.
Next
time you’re enjoying the panoramic view from the summit of the Punta de
s’Esglèsia Vella, spare a thought for the first evangelisers of the
Pityuses. Perhaps James the Apostle - or even Judas himself - may have
stopped off on his way to Spain. And in case you’ve ever wondered who or
what exactly was behind the Beatles anthem, click on
http://www.epinions.com/musc-review-6D50-B56CBA7-3A198BC2-prod4.
Goldston beat the Fab Four to it, though, by ten years: Take a sad
song, and make it better. |