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@mistervermis

Jun 14

The name "California" originates from the Spanish novel, "Las Sergas de Esplandián" by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, published in 1510.

Through this novel, it is mentioned the fabulous island of California, located "to the right of the Indies", and populated only by warrior women and governed by Queen Calafia.

When Spanish explorers arrived on the western coast of North America, they believed that the Baja California Peninsula was an island, like the one described in the novel, and in this manner, the explorers adopted the name “California” to refer to the region.

An excerpt from the novel, where California is first mentioned. The English translation, as it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1864:

Know, then, that, on the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise, and it was peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they lived in the fashion of Amazons.

They were of strong and hardy bodies, of ardent courage and great force. Their island was the strongest in all the world, with its steep cliffs and rocky shores.

Their arms were all of gold, and so was the harness of the wild beasts which they tamed and rode. For, in the whole island, there was no metal but gold.

In the novel, California is a wonderful place, filled with warrior women and fierce beasts.

Calafia eventually switches loyalties, becomes Christian and marries Esplandián’s cousin.

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Gus

@mistervermis

Jun 12

On July 7, 1520 (Julian calendar date) the Battle of Otumba took place.

The most decisive battle of the Conquest of Mesoamerica.

Hernán Cortés alongside a few hundred Spaniards and Tlaxcaltecas defeated a large Aztec army of 100,000 men.

Cortés’ forces consisted of approximately 500 Spanish soldiers 1000 Tlaxcaltecas, and 22 horses.

The Spanish-Tlaxcalteca historian Diego Muñoz Camargo shares that the Spanish woman María de Estrada "fought with a lance on horseback as if she were one of the bravest men in the world."

Hernán Cortés himself was seriously wounded with "two stones" to the head the day before the battle.

According to Cortés, "a large number of Indians came out to meet them, so many that, in front, on either side or behind, no part of the fields that could be seen was empty of them."

The Spaniards commended themselves "to God and Saint Mary with all their hearts, invoking the name of...Lord Santiago."

Bernal Díaz del Castillo recounts that "no such large number of warriors had been seen or found together in all the Indies in any battle that had ever taken place; because there was the flower of Mexico, Tezcuco, and Salcocán.”

Cortés recounts that the Aztecs “fought with us so fiercely on all sides that we hardly recognized one another: so close and surrounded were they with us. And we certainly believed that was the last of our days, given the great power of the Indians and the little resistance they found in us, because we were, as we were, very tired, and almost all of them wounded and fainted from hunger.”

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Gus

@mistervermis

Jun 8

During the French Revolution, there was a push to replace the established Catholic faith with new civic religions.

As France fell into this madness using the Revolution, on June 8, 1794, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre inaugurated the French Revolution's new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being.

The Cult of the Supreme Being was a short-lived, deistic religion with the main mission to replace Roman Catholicism.

The cult was later officially banned by Napoleon Bonaparte.

The illustration is a depiction of the Festival of the Supreme Being in 1794. Do you notice the symbolism at the top?

The Supreme Being movement was not the revolution’s first attempt to replace Catholicism.

In 1793, radical journalist Jacques Hébert and his followers founded the Cult of Reason, in essence, an atheist church, in which its advocates denied the existence of any deity or supernatural forces

Hébert main mission was to advocate for the worship of Liberty, while eliminating Catholicism. Sounds like James Lindsay eh?

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Gus

@mistervermis

Jun 7

It is said that the name Rus’ comes from the name of the Sarmatian tribe Roxolani. But the link in history travels to the Ukrainian Cossacks, like an invisible thread.

The Rus’ people were the remaining Roxolani who settled “on an island” between the Dnipro, the Ros and Tiasmyn rivers in ancient times.

But who were the Sarmatians?

The Sarmatians were a group of Iranian peoples, famous for inventing the military tactics of heavily armed armored cavalry, known as cataphracts, which was the first European precursor of the medieval knights.

The Roman historian Tacitus described them as the best horsemen in the world.

The Sarmatians were also closely related to the Scythians, sharing similar origins and cultural aspects, being the Scythians a declining (I prefer evolution) force in the face of the Sarmatians' westward migration and military expansion.

To explain it as simply as possible, the Scythians were dominant earlier, while the Sarmatians rose to prominence later, but in reality, it was more of a change of names and evolution of one tribe into another.

Herodotos shares that Sarmatians:

‘Were originally Scythians mixed with Amazons. They speak Scythian, but ungrammatically, because the Amazons never learned it properly. The women go to war, ride out hunting, and wear the same clothes as men. Before a woman can marry, she must kill a man of the enemy. ‘

Later, the Sarmatians' historical presence in the same region as the Cossacks and their known nomadic lifestyle have served as evidence that the Cossacks are descended from Sarmatian groups. The Cossacks may as well be linked in part to the Scythians, by sharing some geographical connections and a common history in the Eurasian Steppe.

Ethnic map of the Caucasus in the 5th and 4th centuries BC.

The earliest known reference to the Sarmatians occurs in the Avesta, where they appear as Sairima-, which in later Iranian sources becomes Sarm and Salm.

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Gus

@mistervermis

Jun 6

The Cuera, which gave them their name, was a leather jacket, like a coat without sleeves, proof against the Indians' arrows except at very close range. For additional armor they had shields and chaps. The shields, carried on the left arm, were made of two plies of bull's hide, and would turn either arrow or spear. The leather chaps or aprons, fastened to the pommel of the saddle, protected legs and thighs from brush and cactus spines.

What we now know as The United States of America was still part of the Spanish Empire, including the Rocky Mountains, Montana, Dakota and even Alaska, where it bordered Russia.

Before the cowboys and the American cavalry ever came to life, about 253 years ago, The Soldados de Cuera, or "leather-jacket soldiers” came to be.

The cavalry of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the Leather Dragons, the presidial soldiers. The soldiers of the Spanish Empire in the Wild West.

Made entirely from bronze, artist Buck McCain depicts a Spanish Presidio guard.

165 W. Alameda St. (El Presidio Park, 165 W. Alameda St.)

Navajo charcoal cave drawing of soldados de cuera.

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Gus

@mistervermis

Mar 27

A Week of Brutal Bolshevik Massacres.

It was the year 1941, and the order came from Joseph Stalin himself. In it, the NKVD was instructed to “remove” the prison population in the USSR’s occupied territories. A time when the Soviet Secret Police brutally murdered 100,000 political prisoners, and it only took them one week.

Doctors, engineers, lawyers, journalists, artists, university professors, teachers, merchants, and farmers were massacred rather than allowed to fall into German hands.

“It was as if the herald of death had appeared in our cell, and we had heard his message.”

Shared Bodhan Kazanivs’kyi, a survivor of 1941 prison massacres. Kazanivs’kyi also described seeing groups of prisoners taken to the prison basement and then hearing their screams as they were tortured before they were shot.

In the central prison in the city of Lutsk, inmates were called by name into the courtyard and lined up. NKVD officers then threw grenades at the group while Soviet tanks fired machine guns.

Those incarcerated in the prison of Dubno, located in the Rivne oblast, were shot and stabbed with bayonets while they slept.

In Sambir, a city located to the southwest of L’viv, the NKVD blew up cells filled with approximately 1,200 female prisoners.

In the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, three basement cells had been stacked to the ceiling with 2,500 dead bodies.

In the NKVD investigative prison in L’viv, the victims were thrown, dead or alive, into basement cells, locked the doors, and set fire to the building.

In the Tartu prison, 250 political prisoners were shot in cold blood.

In the Kharkiv tragedy, NKVD officers burned alive 1,200 political prisoners. The prison was located on Chernyshevsky Street in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

And many more…

Medical students describing the scene at one of the prisons:

"From the courtyard, doors led to a large space, filled from top to bottom with corpses...Among them were many women. On the left wall, three men were crucified, barely covered by clothing from their shoulders, with severed male organs. Underneath them on the floor in half-sitting, leaning positions – two nuns with those organs in their mouths...most were stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. Some were naked or almost naked, others in decent street clothes. One man was in a tie, mostly likely just arrested."

A Lviv resident tries to find relatives among those killed in the yard of the Lviv prison.

Ethnic Germans murdered at a Ternopil GPU prison

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