Fantastic Metropolis

Spenser did everything he could to make his epic the means of reconciliation between Elizabeth and Raleigh. For the greatest of the many characters by whom he portrayed or reflected Elizabeth, Spenser borrowed Raleigh’s image of her as the moon goddess, except that he took one of her other names, Phoebe, and adding to it the prefix bel, created Belphoebe, the beautiful Cynthia. And until Raleigh visited him, it had not occurred to Spenser to make a place in his poem for a man he had known only as the captain of a small band of foot in Ireland. But now he invented a character, Timias, a name which derived from the Greek word for honour, and made him the personal squire of England’s greatest and legendary king, Prince Arthur.

—J.H. Adamson and H.F. Holland, The Shepherd of the Ocean/p>

We now have Sir Humphrey Gilbert before his death in a storm, his half-brother Raleigh, Raleigh’s cousin Sir Richard Grenville, and Raleigh’s great rival and batterer of the Armada itself, Sir Francis Drake. Add to this alliance Edmund Spenser, one of England’s greatest poets. But what were they allied to do? And were they the only members of this unusual enterprise? Our old friend Hakim Bey argued that they were not… that Raleigh and his cabal were closely allied with Dr. John Dee, Sir Phillip Sidney, and assorted hangers on including Christopher Marlowe and Lord Ferdinando Strange, Earl of Derby. This assembly was called The School of Night and the kernel of their association came from Dee and Giordano Bruno, who came to England shortly before Gilbert’s death and held court at the Embassy of France, entertaining a selection of dinner guests which included Marlowe, Sidney and Raleigh. And it’s fascinating to consider that the mathematician Thomas Hariot was Raleigh’s principal agent in scouting the area around Roanoke Island for the proposed colony there. Hariot was also a member of the School, one of its brightest members, and his mission to the New World was one of cataloguing and naming or recording the names of the things he found: everything from plants to coastlines, tribes and customs.

He who names a thing has power over it. The second major idea of Hermeticism, transferred through Rosicrucians in France and Templar refugees in England. (And indeed, could the nations that made martyrs out of the Templars have failed to gain the knowledge that those worthies had liberated from Islamic sects such as the Hashishin? Knowledge, even then, could be more valuable than gold, and the Templars had both in abundance.) The French and English were in a race to designate as much of the world as they could, and thus lock it into a mystical framework: ours or theirs, but not both was the mantra. However, as you may have realized, they had missed the point of Hermeticism.

—Matthew Rossi, “Et In Lemuria Ego”

Replace “French” with “Spanish” and you have the oceanic war of Phillip II of Spain and Elizabeth I of England. Whether it was fought on the high seas or in the Americans, it was as much about the power of the one who names first and who unlocks secret names after. Imagine the following scenario, one that goes back to those ancient cocaine and tobacco-rich mummies in Egypt.