Fantastic Metropolis

Approving of his ambitions at sea she teasingly called him ‘the Shepherd of the Ocean’. Damnably proud, high-spirited and impetuous, he would be a sea-dog with a difference; he had no desire ‘to run from cape to cape, and from place to place, for the pillage of ordinary prizes’. He was highly critical of Drake’s plans to raid Spanish settlements, for Phillip II, he wrote, ‘is not so impoverished by taking three or four port town in America as we may suppose, neither are the riches of Peru or Nueva España so left by the seaside as it can be easily washed away with a great flood, or spring tide, or left dry upon the sand in a low ebb’. Raleigh, it was noted, had been ‘trained in martial discipline, both by land and sea, and well inclined to all virtuous and honourable adventures’. He would regard the name ‘corsair’ as an insult, yet he still had a zest for visiting distant places and used to say ‘there are stranger things to be seen in the world than are between London and Staines’.

—Neville Williams, The Sea Dogs

By the end of 1992, Balabanova and her colleagues had examined eleven Egyptian mummies, finding nicotine in all of them, cocaine in eight, and hashish in ten; of some seventy-two Peruvian mummies, at least twenty-six had traces of nicotine, sixteen of cocaine, and twenty of hashish; the two Sudanese skeletons both showed nicotine, but not cocaine or hashish, and of ten burials in Germany, eight had revealed the presence of nicotine, but none had any cocaine or hashish content. Balabanova’s results were bound to spark a furious controversy. Attention has focused on the cocaine mummies, seen by Egyptologists as an impossibility. They argue that there is no chance that a transatlantic drug trade could have been operating by 1000 BC, for this would completely change our picture of the ancient world, and so there must be something wrong with Balabanova’s method. Yet this is the same technique used by police and private companies to determine if people have been using drugs—the legal consequences of the method being flawed are considerable.

—Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Mysteries

Most folks will tell you that nicotine only reached Europe after that old scoundrel Sir Walter Raleigh imported the idea of smoking to the Old World. (Technically, Europe is not older than the Americas, but we’ll let that one hang there for the rest of the essay. We expect to be forgiven for our laziness.) Well, it may probably have been Raleigh’s employee Thomas Hariot, since Raleigh himself never even set foot in America… at least not by boat. (I’ll get back to that.) However, since we have Egyptian and even German corpses with nicotine in their tissues from nearly two thousand years before Columbus was an itch in his daddy’s pants, we find ourselves forced to confront the possibility that there was, in fact, some form of transatlantic contact between Europe and Africa and the Americas stretching back to the times before Christ. And since there’s hashish in them there corpses, we also find ourselves considering the involvement of our favorite Ismaili assassins, the hashishin, and where there’s hashishin, can the Knight’s Templar be far behind? Well, sure, they could be. However, since I’m not fond of playing by the rules, I have to suspect they won’t be. Speculating on Egyptian mummies loaded with cocaine and nicotine and hashish, and Peruvian mummies with the same, necessarily leads us to Roanoke Island.

Stop looking at me like that. I already told you that Raleigh was credited with introducing tobacco to Europe, it’s an easy jump to Roanoke from there.

We know that Roanoke was first settled in 1586 after a two-year process of seeking a suitable location, but that native resistance and a lack of food drove the colonists off. The next year, Governor John White and somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred men and women arrived on the island. It was their intent to support the colony and become self sufficient by a combination of farming and trading wild sassafras, but the island was less rewarding than they had hoped and White had accidentally led his men on an attack on the Powhatan tribes that instead ended with them accidentally attacking the Croatoan tribe instead. (There’s a theory that a member of the expedition, a former pirate named Simon Fernandez, served as a traitor on behalf of the Spanish, preventing the colony from gaining food as part of plan to strike directly at Raleigh by the Spanish. Fernandez would also have been involved in the mistaken attack on the Croatoans in this theory. I should mention that some proponents of this theory blame the Spanish, and others believe that Sir Francis Walsingham did it.) As the Croatoans were the best local source for supplies (and now were less than inclined to provide them) White made the choice to go back to England to gather supplies for the hundred or more colonists on Roanoke Island. He left in 1587: he would not return to Roanoke until 1590, due to war with Spain. One assumes that the attack of the Invincible Armada of Phillip II of Spain was a bit more of a priority for Sir Walter than an ass-pimple of a settlement in the middle of nowhere, and it was White’s misfortune to arrive with his hat in his hand at the exact moment that his patron was busy preparing to do battle with Spain. Raleigh was fast at work constructing the Ark Royal in 1587 and probably had little time to talk to White about re-provisioning the colony, and in 1588 found himself alongside Sir Richard Grenville (his cousin, and famous for his death in 1591 when the Revenge was captured) preparing for the Spanish to invade Devon and Cornwall… luckily for them, Drake took the sting out of the Armada with his daring fireship raid of their home ports and the weather did the rest.

Interesting correspondences abound here. For instance, it was Raleigh’s half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert who first proposed massive (and I mean massive) colonization in the New World. As in, 9 million acres to be colonized and the mass extermination or exile of the native population. Gilbert’s death in 1583 while attempting a second expedition to the Americas placed Raleigh in the driver’s seat of the effort. (Interestingly, massive storms were what prevented Humphrey’s first attempt to colonize the New World in 1578.) Also interestingly, it was Sir Richard Grenville who commanded the Tyger and established the first attempt at a colony on Roanoke in 1585–86, the one that failed and was supplanted by White’s colony the year later. Grenville’s colony was even shored up by an appearance by Sir Francis Drake, and it was Drake’s fleet that brought them and their “governor,” Ralph Lane, back from Roanoke in 1586. (Grenville and Lane did not get along at all well. Lane actually took the step of writing nasty letters about Grenville, so strongly they disagreed about everything, and I don’t doubt that Grenville was glad to wash his hands of the man.) Still, it’s fascinating to see the men who would play so prominent a role in the defense of England against the Spanish… Drake, Raleigh, Grenville… all deeply involved in the Roanoke settlement effort.

It wasn’t just England’s great naval warriors who took part in the drama, however. Raleigh had other supporters.

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.

Emen and Emenet were the forefathers of the Egyptians. They were born at sunrise. Among the offspring of the eight primordials was Tehuty, who carried the divine intelligence within him. Tehuty brought language and divine speech into existence, and his words explained and foretold the future of mankind. His words and knowledge became commands, and the commands became reality through the efforts of Ptah, the first craftsman on earth, who instructed artists in all forms of art, and Khnemu, the first master builder, who developed the life of mankind through his divine work of architecture. Ptah and Khnemu brought Tehuty’s commands to fruition, and we marvel at the remnants of their work still to be seen today in the land of Egypt. There was no evil in Etelenty, and the men and women who lived there followed the laws of nature. Since the creation process was not yet complete, the inhabitants of Etelenty saw the creation of the moon out of the soil of the Atlantic Ocean, and the creation of plants, animals, birds and creeping things. The earth, however, was unstable and so Tehuty, knowing that Etelenty would be submerged by the ocean, ordered the emigration of the four families that formed the population of Etelenty.

—Dr. Ramses Seleem, The Illustrated Egyptian Book of the Dead

When one considers ancient drug cults and cross-continental contagion, it’s easy to remember Graham Hancock and Robert Temple, both of whom borrow the concept of Charles H. Hapgood’s Ancient Sea Kings. It’s so hoary and familiar a concept that one often finds a reason to discard it by this point, but let us not do that. Let us instead imagine that the ancient Egyptian concept of the lands of the dead lying “beyond the Western Gate” and the similarity between the cult of Quetzalcoatl/Kukulcan and Osiris as being more than coincidence. It really doesn’t matter which ancient culture you imagine and which direction they crossed… was it De Plongeon’s Queen Moo taking her armies across the Atlantic, or a diaspora of families out of ancient Atlantis/Etelenty on the orders of Thoth/Tehuty or what have you, it’s the same for our purposes. We need only imagine that there was ancient lore in both lands about what lay beyond the Atlantic. Combine this lore with the vegetative nature of Osirian rite, the plant lore possibly derived from the Muvian/Atlantean/Etelenty colony… did the exiles bring the coca and tobacco plants with them? Were they rivals to the beer god Ra (who used his magical intoxicant to enrage and sooth dire Sekhmet, the Lion Goddess who raged across the world slaying all until a river of beer distracted her ire) and others? While in time these alien plant gods seem to have died out (whether through a gradual ebbing of transatlantic contact… did the cults of the plant gods attempt to send Carthaginian sailors around Africa and to the Americas, to reassert the ancient ties with the cult of Kukulcan?) or were supplanted by the mushroom and the vine, they spread all the way to what is today Germany and were mired in the tissues of corpses left behind before the coming of the Germans themselves. Terence McKenna and the Centaurs would approve, one supposes.

It becomes possible to imagine that secret lore of the Egyptians passing in time to the Medean priest-caste who called themselves Magi, when Persia conquered the lands of the Pharaohs and introduced the great god Ahura Mazda and his rival Ahriman. In another essay, I’ve covered the similarities between the Ismaili sect called the hashishin and the dualistic religion of the Magi, who attempted to take control of the Persian Empire from Cambyses and almost succeeded. Following that setback, the Magi were always second to the Achaemenids until the destruction of the Persian Empire by Alexander himself. Now, if one is paying attention, it comes to mind that the Piri Reis map that brought Charles Hapgood to his first theorizing about Ancient Sea Kings in the first place came from the Imperial Palace of Constantinople in Istanbul, was supposedly drawn by Admiral Piri Ibn Haji Memmed from a map used by Columbus, and Piri claimed that his map was drawn from even older sources, including maps seized by Alexander during his conquest of Persia. In other words, the religious caste of the Persian Empire had maps of South America. Was this information passed down to them from their contact with the Egyptian cult of Osiris? One wonders if the later Mithraic bull-slaying (tauroctanor) which was adopted from the Ahrimanic cult’s war against Ahura Mazda was in part adopted in hatred for the cult of Zeus-Ammon. However you slice it, it becomes possible to imagine the Magi, driven underground by the Alexandrian conquest, making use of the plant lore passed down to them by the Osirian cult… yet, deprived of the alien plant gods, making use of the closest ones available, the mushroom, the vine, and hashish. When one remembers the Song of Roland with its exhortation to the “magical land of Calyferne” one wonders if this was an early form of the Magi invasion of Islamic thought, a precursor to the Islamli sect itself.

One imagines the Magi’s constant quest for Paradise, the literal enclosed space or paradeiza referring back both to the ditch that supposedly enclosed the garden of Ahura Mazda (and one wonders if this garden grew on the shores of the Egyptian Etelenty) translated through Arab eyes to the author of the Chanson de Roland and coming out the other side as “Calyferne,” an encoded tale of that magical land to the west we see so often in myth, from Hy Breasil to Atlantis to Avalon… and so we enter into an interesting set of mystical paradigms running in circles round each other. Why was Spenser so set on making Raleigh into a servant of Arthur?

Imagine that some of the Magi fled the coming of Alexander by heading west. Some dug in, infiltrated Judaism and its splinter offshoot Christianity, some worked their way into Islam, each sect and subsect bringing their unique knowledge to their varying cultures. The Knights Templar brought the fruit of the vine of Tehuty into Europe as the message of Thrice Named Thoth, Hermes Trismegistus, from whom the Egyptian Science was thought to be derived (alchemy from al-kheme, the black sand, the very matter of the Egyptian earth itself) while in North Africa the Magi infiltrate the system of the Shia.

Their name comes from the word hashish, the narcotic which, according to the crusaders, induced a trance which made the killers oblivious to danger. The Shia were originally a political faction who believed that Ali, Muhammad’s son in law, was his true successor; but after the death of Ali in 661 it had developed into a radical Islamic sect dedicated to the overthrow of the Sunni caliphate in Baghdad. Persecuted for their beliefs, the Shia developed mystical notions, revolutionary methods and messianic aspirations, and split into further factions, the most radical being the Ismailis who ‘elaborated a system of religious doctrine on a high philosophical level and produced a literature which, after centuries of eclipse, is only now once again beginning to achieve recognition as to its true worth.’... However, in the Elburz Mountains in Northern Persia, overlooking the shore of the Caspian Sea, a group of intransigent Ismailis under Hassan-Sabbah established themselves in the impregnable fortress of Alamut.

—Piers Paul Read, The Templars

It hardly even bears mentioning that northern Persia is the home turf of the Magi, but I’ll do it anyway. Now, imagining that such lore translated and transmitted itself almost virally through the cultures it touched is hardly difficult… we see signs of it in the very method the Ismaili used to train their agents, the drug induced vision by means of the hashish. This by-now bastardized rite (long different from the original mysticism of the cocaine mummies, depending on chemicals not available in Europe or Africa by this time) still produced effective assassins, mystics and transgressives, waging war on their own culture and working alongside Templars to do it. Now, one of the places where this lore would have concentrated in Europe before the Templars was in Sicily, invaded and held by Islam for many years (where perhaps Giordano Bruno could have been exposed to it… Naples lying due north of Sicily, many people, some my own ancestors, made the trip back and forth fairly frequently) and the other was the Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus, known to us as Spain, where for many years Islam, Judaism and Christianity all rubbed shoulders. Some claim that Moses de Leon first invented the Zohar here, in this mixing bowl of cultures (others claim it goes back to Simeon, and from him back to Abraham, of course…) and it is the Zohar that tells us “He said to the woman, ‘With this tree God created the world—the world of Assiyah, which is the lowest world. If you eat of it, you will surely become like God, knowing good and evil, and you too will be able to create worlds.’” Is this a kernel of the ancient message of the Magi, the union of opposites that gains power?

Despite the popular grade school depiction, there is a great deal of evidence that Columbus was not actually Italian, but a Spaniard who had assumed the identity of a young wool merchant, whom the Spaniard had once met, and who had died at sea. By coincidence, the young Italian wool merchant from Genoa had the same name as himself (at least in translation). Cristóbal Colón, known to us as Columbus, was by some evidence a Spanish Jew. For this reason he decided to conceal his identity. Also he was in possession of several maps that showed the coasts and islands of North and South America… Says the Turkish Admiral Piri Reis in a handbook for sailors called the Kitab i Bahriye, Columbus was inspired by a book containing information about these lands, which were claimed to be rich in all sorts of minerals and gems. “This man Columbus tried with the book in his hand to convince the Portuguese and Genoese that an expedition would be very worthwhile. His ideas and so he turned to the Spanish bey. Here to his first request was not granted, but was later on accepted after the matter had been pressed.”

—W.R. Anderson, The Columbus Mystery

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

Miller goes on to make a very sane and rational argument that apes in the above statement is in fact referring to the word apisk, apess, tapisco which in various Algonquin dialect means “metal” and is referring to the copper mines dug by enslaved Roanoke colonists. He argues that the colonists were enslaved by a native tribe known as Mandoag and that after a time, that they mixed with the native tribes and hired themselves out for copper strikes. To quote: “__Mandoag__ is a name commonly applied by Algonquins to enemy nations. Before 1870 the only other known linguistic group in North Carolina was Iroquoian: therefore the Mandoag were declared to be an Iroquoian-speaking people. This classification held despite later evidence that revealed that most of the nations of the Piedmont spoke Siouan, a very different language.” So, if the Mandoag weren’t Algonquin, and they weren’t Iroquois, who were they?

Perhaps they were the descendants of the Magi, taken in by their co-religionists in the enclosed paradise. Imagine that the School of Night is looking down the barrel of Spanish Imperial power. Each of them has reasons to fear a Spanish government of their island… as mages of a stripe, they can all look forward to the fiery death Bruno was to receive at the hands of the Inquisition, after all. Add into the mix Raleigh’s on again off again love affair with Elizabeth and Spenser’s own adoration of Belphoebe, Gloriana the Queen, and the idea of Phillip II’s Manichean empire as personified by torturers and diasporas getting a claw into Britannia becomes beyond intolerable, it becomes a personal affront. And so each member of the School sets into motion his own plan for thwarting it. Drake, for one, decides to do so via piracy, but this is at once too mundane and too direct for Raleigh. Instead, enlisting Spenser’s aid, Raleigh has himself, Elizabeth and England herself woven into The Faerie Queen and draws upon the mythical power of Avalon, possibly out of recognition that Spanish mages are working against him (as they did his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert) and seeking a counterbalance against them. So shielded by their magics, Raleigh sends his mathematician Hariot to work out the formula for the right settlement in the New World, learn the tongues of the natives, make contact with the right tribes. And Hariot does, making contact with the Powhatan and the Croatan… and the Mandoag, the descendants of the Magi. Greedy for copper, the Mandoag agree to help Raleigh make contact with powerful spirits who can counteract the Spanish, but they want something themselves. They want slaves to help them work the copper, their metal servitor, out of the earth. (And maybe they need someone to keep their apes company. After all, they traveled from Persia to the Americas, according to this theory, who is to say they didn’t bring some apes along? The image of a lost Persian city in the heart of Virginia patrolled by telepathically dominated apes just amuses the hell out of me. Very much a combination of William Burroughs and Edgar Rice Burroughs.)

All very encouraging, but what Lane wants to hear is far more specific. Hariot discloses it at last: “a hundred and fifty miles into the main, in two towns, we found with the inhabitants diverse small plates of copper that had been made, as we understand, by the inhabitants that dwell further into the country, where as they say are mountains and rivers that yield also white grains of metal, which is to be deemed silver… The aforesaid copper we also found by trial to contain silver.” Joachim Ganz confirms it. It is of exceedingly high grade. But who are these copper manufacturers who dwell further into the country? White’s map depicts a hilly land to the west, along the Roanoke River, identified by the name of Mangoak.

—Lee Miller, Roanoke

Which is exactly what Raleigh wants to give them. After all, while it’s easier to attract flies with honey than vinegar, if you want the flies out of your way afterwards you poison the honey. The Roanoke colonists rescued by Drake are the bait, but the ones deposited under White’s command are the trap. Raleigh knows the Spanish want the colony to fail, of course, and that all the armed conflict in search of the fabled copper mines, the possible treachery of Fernandez in encompassing the accidental attack on the Croatoan, it’s all part of the plan. Raleigh intends full well for the colony to be destroyed, its people absorbed by local tribes or enslaved by the Mandoag. Oh, he wants the lore of the tobacco plant, yes. But he also wants to break the hold the natives have on their own territory… in effect, to change the name of the land by the introduction of a new, foreign element. The land absorbs the colony as though it were never there. And the colony is now an ineffable part of the land itself. The myth begins, the kernel of Gloriana/Avalon planted by calling this new land Virginia now begins to germinate. And all Raleigh had to do was yield five score Englishmen and women into death or slavery at the hands of the Mandoag.

It seems likely that the mistaken attack on the Croatoan was intended to rile them up enough so that, when the colonists vanished, suspicion would travel there way. Indeed, the Mandoag may well have attacked in the guise of the Croatoan themselves, to shift the blame away and divert any searches for the lost colonists… never realizing that what they’d made away with was poison sugar, and while this colony did not thrive, others were coming… and the spirits of the earth and sky and water would now be deceived into thinking that English men and women and children belonged on this soil, and would not oppose them. In one shot, Raleigh found the magical power of the nature spirits once known by the cocaine mummies to oppose the Spanish Armada and cleared the way for the new Avalon to be erected on new soil. Fertile soil where grew the trees that gave power. The School of Night dreamed the land. Spenser and Raleigh gave the dream form. Hariot mapped the dream’s contours. And the Mandoag bit deep into the poison apple of Roanoke Island, and spit the tainted seeds onto the Croatoan, twice betrayed.

Betrayed by the Shepherd of the Ocean, who abandoned his sheep to ravening wolves.

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Discuss this and other heresies at Matthew Rossi’s message board.

Matthew Rossi is the author of Things That Never Were (MonkeyBrain, 2003). He has work forthcoming in Peter Crowther’s Postscripts magazine, and a new collection of essays, titled Bottled Demons, will be out next summer from Prime Books.