If you have seen women running through the streets from one place to another being chased by some half naked guys in wolf skins who whipped and whipped them with bloody strips of ram, do not be alarmed! they are just remembering an old pagan festival, something lewd that yes, but it was a sacred rite of purification and fecundity celebrated in Ancient Rome every February 15 called the lupercales or Lupercalia.

The word comes from lupus, that is, wolf and its Roman god of fertility and male sexuality Fauno Luperco (Greek mythological deity Pan, the one who protected the wolf), a strange, hairy being, with legs and horns of a goat and large, pointed ears with a voracious and infinite sexual appetite.

One of the legends tells that in the ancient city of Alba Longa, the evil Amulio after deposing his brother Numitor from the throne, ordered to kill all his first-born, turning his daughter Rea Silvia into a virgin so that she would not have successors, but The god of war Mars was enraptured by the girl and they procreated the brothers Romulus and Remus, who managed to escape from the clutches of their uncle Amulio, managing to survive in the forests thanks to the woodpecker and the she-wolf Luperca who nursed and raised them. Years later they would return to their homeland to take revenge and kill him.

Due to the shortage of fertility and women in Rome, the oracle of the goddess Juno announced that the mothers of Lazio would be fertilized by a male goat. For this purpose, a ritual was held every February 15 in the Lupercal cave - there where Romulus and Remus were suckled by the she-wolf - where the most virile young men were selected - those ephebos who, on their initiation path, had lived in the forests as human wolves—, called loberos or luperci (friends of the wolf), and their faces were marked with the blood of a dog and a sacrificed male goat.

To make the rite more fun and interesting, virile members were created in the form of strips with the skin of the goat ... The libido to the surface, the lustful participants launched themselves in the carnal search for women eager to be impregnated, who agreed in a Shameless sexual play, whipping and spanking included, in a depurifying act that increased fertility.

Christianity erased with a stroke of the pen this fun bacchanal, so beneficial to health and to the women of Ancient Rome, moving it to February 14, Valentine's Day.

Ashes of Classical Culture that take us to beautiful legends and mythological stories of Antiquity. In the distance the mysterious lands of the west that the Greeks called Hesperia, the Hesperides, that wonderful garden that the Melides or nymphs of fruit trees looked after and that Hercules, the hero of mythology, came to do two of his works on the edge of the earth, perhaps in the lost Tartessos or Atlantis, who knows, in any case they spoke and thought then of the cradle of our ancestors, the one that the historian Strabo baptized as “Iberia.” Many were the classic texts that placed places fabulous like Hades or the flowery Champs-Elysées on our peninsula, the end of the world, where the sun didn't set...

Iberians, Celts, Celtiberians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths ... ancestral civilizations, ancient peoples that left their trail, their substrate scattered on the Iberian skin, on the island where metals were forged. From Tartessos to Hesperia, "Hiberia", Celtiberia, Hispania, Hispania Gothorum, Al-Andalus, Sepharad... melting pot of cultures that watered this fertile land of knowledge and wisdom. On these ashes of legendary kings such as Hispalo and his son Hispan, descendants of Hercules, villages, towns, cities, kingdoms and Empires were raised. Too much blood, between shadows and darkness, a glance towards the light, towards the light of the Ashes of Hesperia that germinates on wasteland and rises, under its ruins, a not alien world that feeds our horizon...

[In the image the representation of the Iberian warrior from Porcuna or warrior with double armor, from the 5th century BC, whose sculptural remains come from the Cerrillo Blanco site in Jaén].

Ashes of Classical Culture that take us to beautiful legends and mythological stories of Antiquity. In the distance the mysterious lands of the west that the Greeks called Hesperia, the Hesperides, that wonderful garden that the Melides or nymphs of fruit trees looked after and that Hercules, the hero of mythology, came to do two of his works on the edge of the earth, perhaps in the lost Tartessos or Atlantis, who knows, in any case they spoke and thought then of the cradle of our ancestors, the one that the historian Strabo baptized as “Iberia.” Many were the classic texts that placed places fabulous like Hades or the flowery Champs-Elysées on our peninsula, the end of the world, where the sun didn't set...

Iberians, Celts, Celtiberians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths ... ancestral civilizations, ancient peoples that left their trail, their substrate scattered on the Iberian skin, on the island where metals were forged. From Tartessos to Hesperia, "Hiberia", Celtiberia, Hispania, Hispania Gothorum, Al-Andalus, Sepharad... melting pot of cultures that watered this fertile land of knowledge and wisdom. On these ashes of legendary kings such as Hispalo and his son Hispan, descendants of Hercules, villages, towns, cities, kingdoms and Empires were raised. Too much blood, between shadows and darkness, a glance towards the light, towards the light of the Ashes of Hesperia that germinates on wasteland and rises, under its ruins, a not alien world that feeds our horizon...

[In the image the representation of the Iberian warrior from Porcuna or warrior with double armor, from the 5th century BC, whose sculptural remains come from the Cerrillo Blanco site in Jaén].

How to approach witchcraft and not fall into the imaginary that we have about it throughout history since its demonization as an independent woman, enemy of the people through inquisitorial texts such as that written by monks in the Malleus Maleficarum through the persecution of the Church, the witch hunt, the romantic corruption, the self-serving deformation of the Victorian bourgeois society fearful of women's liberation, the morbid, the superstition and the occultism of modernity to pop culture where we find that evil witch of covens with goats eater of children.

An ancestral look returns us to the primordial tradition, esotericism and occult sciences, to the sorceress as a woman of power, free and independent, connoisseur of magical wisdom, botanical and healing knowledge, who approaches the darkness to do the well, transmitted that knowledge from generation to generation as a closed circle through the three ages of women (the young, the mature and the old).

If we have to look for references, there we have the mothers of all the witches of pagan times such as Circe, Medea and Cassandra, those visionaries or women watchmen who accompanied the hero, endowed with magical knowledge, or the mysterious women of the medieval forest as priestesses and epicenter of knowledge, or the witchcraft manifestations of the 19th century (represented in certain pre-Raphaelite paintings) as the last vestiges of a magical and sapiential society.

The history of witchcraft is stained with blood, dark rites and crimes, terrible trials, persecutions, intolerance, scapegoats... Faced with black clichés and legends, let's stay with the true origin of witchcraft, a good time to remember and recover the lessons and virtues of ancient wisdom and magical thinking.

Naked, in front of oneself, next to the oak, the sun awaits us, it plays night vigil.

Let the log burn, let us burn the old,

and with its ashes we purify our soul,

their fertile sowing give us an abundance of heart and wisdom.

May the ancestors join us in the great banquet until dawn.

The life that sleeps under the earth will be reborn after darkness.

Yule.

The last Iberian was a human comet that crossed this world until it was lost in the Iditarot, that distant place of which the natives of Alaska spoke. Its splendor left us with a blast of light that, like the ancient shamans of the tribe, deeply connected us with the forgotten memory of the true meaning of life and its mystery, its cosmic meaning. An invitation to reconnect with that ancestral past in which we beat in harmony with Mother Earth, which desperately urged us to strengthen ties with nature as keys to living in the future, to embrace and save Gaia - who reacts when we mistreat her. , and not be carried away by the drift of modernity that tries to dominate it to maximize material growth.

He wanted to be a wolf to live in unpolluted lands. It was that lupus that was part of mythology - where Palaeolithic man, fully integrated into nature, merged with the wolf in a rite of passage - turned into a warrior to face aggression ... Our archetype was a A rebellious, indomitable, visionary, free and wild hero who did not allow himself to be tamed and who fought tirelessly for life, forests and threatened fauna. The spell of his word, his energy, his enthusiasm, his vitality, his strength, his message and his codes captivated and transformed with his light a lineage, that of the line of the free, that like cranes stretched by the lash of the winter know, if not to return, at least feel, perceive and look out to that lost paradise that you dreamed of, so that in the Iberian nights the beautiful howls of the wolf will not stop being heard.

[Text and Design inspired by Felix Rodríguez de la Fuente and the masterful Cuarto Milenio program: “Felix, the last hero” by Iker Jiménez]

Tartessia or Tarshish is considered the first civilization in the West ruled by the legendary Argantonio and located, it is believed, to the south of the Iberian Peninsula, on the riverbed of the Guadalquivir. The echo of a wonderful city, rich in agriculture, livestock and precious metals (silver and gold), is collected in texts, chronicles, stories, biblical episodes, myths and legends. It was the scene of Nórax, Gargoris, Habis and also Hercules, who traveled there, to the Garden of the Hesperides to finish his work, killing the mythological king of Tartessian, the three-headed giant Geryon.

Explorers, archaeologists and researchers continue to search, unsuccessfully, for this lost kingdom of Tartessos, leaving those vestiges in the collective imagination of a unique and mysterious city, of a cultured and happy people, perhaps fused with the Phoenician civilization or extinguished by the Carthaginians. Although it is possible that the classical texts and the sages warn us about the cyclical history of the world... when the very Atlantis that Plato tells us, that wise and advanced humanity was annihilated through a great catastrophe, an implacable divine punishment...

Image: Bronze Carriazo (Astarte, marshes & estuaries' goddesses).

The representation of the wolf in Iberian iconography, as a cult totemic animal, with strong roots in pastoral populations, related to myths and religious symbolism, represents ardor, heroism and warrior mysticism. Combat scenes between wolf and man are common, some symbolize death threat, lineage of power, protection in combat ... and the cult of the night, the path or initiation rite, in the passage to the afterlife, lupus as a guide in the afterlife ...

So recurrent in Iberian art, we find it in the sculptural ensembles of "El Pajarillo", in the Elche-Archena style ceramics, in the mints of the Iltirta and Iltiraka mint, in the "Copa del Carnassier", in the "Torso de Guerrero de la Alcudia"... and in the "Pátera de Perotito" where a young man, his hands are raised in a ritual position, is devoured by the wolf, merging with him, in his transit with the beyond ...

Because the wolf is also death, dying to live, dying to resurrect, when we are eaten we will renew our spirit, as a different being that is reborn as a new man. A journey of the initiate to the world of spirits, a descent to the bottom of the caverns, twinned with a wolf guide who will transfer us his great qualities...

In our eagerness to recover the ancestral memory of ancient peoples, we are trying to collect as much graphic material as possible about the Iberians found in ceramics, vessels or glasses, found in deposits in Azaila de Teruel, in San Miguel de Liria, in Tosal de San Miguel, in Acudía de Elche, in the Serreta de Alcoy, in Verdolay, in Archena ... in so many places on the peninsula, to recreate it digitally, trying to be as precise and rigorous as possible in that recreation process to contribute our little granite of sand in the recovery and dissemination of the Iberian Culture.

How could it be otherwise, we begin this new one with the spectacular discovery, found in the South Countryside in an olive grove of the Rambla, of an Iberian lioness - it is still to be determined, but everything indicates that it is so, those last fierce lions of the caverns that survived until their contact with the Iberian people— along with a ram that they have captured and are devouring. They place it between the 5th and 4th centuries BC. C, and apparently it could express a funerary symbol where the injured animal would correspond to the soul of the deceased person.

In the Illustration it can be read in a non-dual system of Iberian signs: León Ibérico

To approach the Tolkien universe on the anniversary of his death is, in addition to remembering his life and his original work, to approach the myth, his ancestral conception, his values and his wisdom. To travel through Middle-earth with its dragons, hobbits, dwarves, elves, giants, wizards, ents, demons, skin-shifters, orcs, uruk-hais, nazguls, men... through its amazing landscapes, kingdoms and places, and to be left alone with the epic episodes and battles against the diabolic hosts of the dark lord Sauron would be to miss his spiritual teachings.

Through the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings or the Unfinished Stories we can learn from the magical and ancestral wisdom of the great wizards or sacred sages, observe and teach us against corruption, degeneration, weakness, envy, the mastery and ambition that will lead to a scenario of struggle between good and evil, as well as contemplating with hope the incarnation, love, friendship and dedication of archetypal characters with heroic vocation such as Gandalf, Bilbo, Frodo or Aragorn who will give us life lessons.

[Interpretation of Tolkien's original drawing]

A legend from New Zealand tells the story of Tamanuitera (The Sun in Maori) He rode so fast through the mountain ranges of the sky that man barely had time to perceive it, until one day Maui, the intrepid and ingenious demigod of the sea, braided a lock of his sister’s hair along with green thread to sew it as a net, then he went to the ends of the earth to capture the Sun. Once there, after a tedious fight, Tamanuitera promised to pass through the skies more slowly to give the men time to enjoy and take advantage of its important benefits. Some say that the rays of the Sun are the magic ropes that once tried to catch Tamanuitera.

In Maori culture the Sun represents heat and energy, eternity as a source of light, intelligence, leadership, wealth, greatness, passion, desire, determination in life, power and protection.

To approach the Tolkien universe on the anniversary of his death is, in addition to remembering his life and his original work, to approach the myth, his ancestral conception, his values and his wisdom. To travel through Middle-earth with its dragons, hobbits, dwarves, elves, giants, wizards, ents, demons, skin-shifters, orcs, uruk-hais, nazguls, men... through its amazing landscapes, kingdoms and places, and to be left alone with the epic episodes and battles against the diabolic hosts of the dark lord Sauron would be to miss his spiritual teachings.

Through the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings or the Unfinished Stories we can learn from the magical and ancestral wisdom of the great wizards or sacred sages, observe and teach us against corruption, degeneration, weakness, envy, the mastery and ambition that will lead to a scenario of struggle between good and evil, as well as contemplating with hope the incarnation, love, friendship and dedication of archetypal characters with heroic vocation such as Gandalf, Bilbo, Frodo or Aragorn who will give us life lessons.

[Interpretation of Tolkien's original drawing]

To approach the Tolkien universe on the anniversary of his death is, in addition to remembering his life and his original work, to approach the myth, his ancestral conception, his values and his wisdom. To travel through Middle-earth with its dragons, hobbits, dwarves, elves, giants, wizards, ents, demons, skin-shifters, orcs, uruk-hais, nazguls, men... through its amazing landscapes, kingdoms and places, and to be left alone with the epic episodes and battles against the diabolic hosts of the dark lord Sauron would be to miss his spiritual teachings.

Through the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings or the Unfinished Stories we can learn from the magical and ancestral wisdom of the great wizards or sacred sages, observe and teach us against corruption, degeneration, weakness, envy, the mastery and ambition that will lead to a scenario of struggle between good and evil, as well as contemplating with hope the incarnation, love, friendship and dedication of archetypal characters with heroic vocation such as Gandalf, Bilbo, Frodo or Aragorn who will give us life lessons.

[Interpretation of Tolkien's original drawing]

You were a humble peasant who barely knew how to read & write. In your native Domremí countryside you heard voices & embarked on an uncertain destiny to liberate France from the English. Together with your faithful soldiers, you raised your banner & launched yourself in suicidal acts until liberating the siege of Orleans & crowning your dolphin. That was your glorious rise that preceded your terrible end. They betrayed you & accused you of heresy. A scorching fire ended your life.

Were you perhaps God's chosen one or a madwoman driven by schizophrenia & hallucinations? Be that as it may, you were the maiden acclaimed by your people, the fervent heroine that you faced against all the powers of the earth until you almost won the Hundred Years War. Today Joan, your name is already a legend.

You were a humble peasant who barely knew how to read & write. In your native Domremí countryside you heard voices & embarked on an uncertain destiny to liberate France from the English. Together with your faithful soldiers, you raised your banner & launched yourself in suicidal acts until liberating the siege of Orleans & crowning your dolphin. That was your glorious rise that preceded your terrible end. They betrayed you & accused you of heresy. A scorching fire ended your life.

Were you perhaps God's chosen one or a madwoman driven by schizophrenia & hallucinations? Be that as it may, you were the maiden acclaimed by your people, the fervent heroine that you faced against all the powers of the earth until you almost won the Hundred Years War. Today Joan, your name is already a legend.

You were a humble peasant who barely knew how to read & write. In your native Domremí countryside you heard voices & embarked on an uncertain destiny to liberate France from the English. Together with your faithful soldiers, you raised your banner & launched yourself in suicidal acts until liberating the siege of Orleans & crowning your dolphin. That was your glorious rise that preceded your terrible end. They betrayed you & accused you of heresy. A scorching fire ended your life.

Were you perhaps God's chosen one or a madwoman driven by schizophrenia & hallucinations? Be that as it may, you were the maiden acclaimed by your people, the fervent heroine that you faced against all the powers of the earth until you almost won the Hundred Years War. Today Joan, your name is already a legend.

You were a humble peasant who barely knew how to read & write. In your native Domremí countryside you heard voices & embarked on an uncertain destiny to liberate France from the English. Together with your faithful soldiers, you raised your banner & launched yourself in suicidal acts until liberating the siege of Orleans & crowning your dolphin. That was your glorious rise that preceded your terrible end. They betrayed you & accused you of heresy. A scorching fire ended your life.

Were you perhaps God's chosen one or a madwoman driven by schizophrenia & hallucinations? Be that as it may, you were the maiden acclaimed by your people, the fervent heroine that you faced against all the powers of the earth until you almost won the Hundred Years War. Today Joan, your name is already a legend.

You were a humble peasant who barely knew how to read & write. In your native Domremí countryside you heard voices & embarked on an uncertain destiny to liberate France from the English. Together with your faithful soldiers, you raised your banner & launched yourself in suicidal acts until liberating the siege of Orleans & crowning your dolphin. That was your glorious rise that preceded your terrible end. They betrayed you & accused you of heresy. A scorching fire ended your life.

Were you perhaps God's chosen one or a madwoman driven by schizophrenia & hallucinations? Be that as it may, you were the maiden acclaimed by your people, the fervent heroine that you faced against all the powers of the earth until you almost won the Hundred Years War. Today Joan, your name is already a legend.