Fantastic Metropolis

Imagine that following the Reconquista, the man we know as Christopher Columbus (if you’re interested in going into more detail on Anderson’s interestingly baroque hypothesis, check out Far Out Adventures: The Best of World Explorer Magazine by Adventures Unlimited Press) showed up with his mysterious book full of secret knowledge, which we will for the sake of our argument assume was some variation on the same Magian tradition that Moses de Leon may have plugged into when he began channeling The Zohar, perhaps one of the books supposedly lost when Alexander burned Sardis. Since the Spanish court was already familiar with the mystical traditions of Islam by this time, having just finally crushed the last vestiges of al-Andalus after some 600 years of war, they were more receptive (in fact, if we accept the idea of the Imposter Columbus, why must we assume he even bothered to approach the Genoese or Portuguese at all? He may not even have been a Jew… a Magi passing himself off is just as plausible) to a carefully planned pitch, and soon Spanish ships were off for the New World. Clearly, Columbus himself did not receive all the glory he was promised, but also clearly, the Spanish did very well for themselves via their exploitation of the New World. Is it possible that men like Pizarro and Cortés weren’t just fortunate, but rather prepared? We’ve all heard the stories of South American cross formations and the descent myth of King Pacal… perhaps the Magi were using their hashish trances to travel out of their bodies and seed the cult of Kukulcan/Quetzalcoatl with tales of their return, the better to take advantage of the new territories and new power to be harvested? Or for that matter, what if “Columbus” and the Spanish throne were perverting the Magian paradigm for a western paradise enclosed from the east, invading the safe haven and turning it into a plantation for wealth and power? Both are equally plausible, which is to say, not very plausible at all, but that’s what makes it fun.

So now we have the Templars and Giordano Bruno both imparting part of the ancient wisdom stolen by the Magi themselves from the refugee cults of Egypt, the Etelenty or Muvian transmission of an ancient wisdom from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean itself, possibly from the Yucatan or even further South, while some of the descendants of the Magi or those who stole and perverted their lore make use of it to invade Calyferne itself, the magical land Paradeiza where all creation is good and speaks to man. (Whether it be Tehuty’s perfect world or Ahura Mazda’s good creation or what have you.) What does any of this have to do with Roanoke Island, you may ask?

I was just getting to that.

It is a known fact that North Carolina does not have, nor ever has it had, monkeys. This being the case, we might suppose that William Strachey had that rare sense of humor that finds levity in the most obtuse subjects, for we see him relaying a rather strange tale from a Powhatan informant named Machumps, involving primates and the Lost Colonists. “At Peccarecamek and Ochanohoen,” said Machumps, “the people have houses built with stone walls, and one story above another, as taught them by those English who escaped the slaughter at Roanoak… the people breed up tame turkeys by their houses, and take Apes into the mountains.” A helpful synopsis reads: Houses of stone, tame turkeys, and monkeys, supposed at Peccartcanick. Historians, not surprisingly, have dismissed Strachey’s statement out of hand. In so doing, they have discarded a very important clue. Nor is it the only word amiss in Strachey’s narrative. We read elsewhere that Powhatan gardens are planted with fruits and apoke. Apoke, from Powhatan uhpooc, means “tobacco.” Strachey recorded the word in Algonquin, not English. There is no reason to assume he did not do the same with Apes.

—Lee Miller, Roanoke