Once the Cantabrian wars were over, the conquest of the Empire in Iberia came to an end. Some 200 years of colonization and Romanization, a process of assimilation of the Roman way of life and its culture, in which the barbarian pre-Roman peoples fought and heroically resisted.

The adhesion and seduction of the barbarian peoples —Celtic Hispania— to Rome was a natural process. The society of leaderships - of merit, of lineage, of heroic ethics - of the Indo-European world - aristocratic, hierarchical and warrior -, that backbones the Iberian barbarians, find in Rome and its metaphysical ideal of Imperium - with the cult, oath and loyalty to the emperor, who along with heroes and kings are pontifex, bridges between heaven and earth — a continuation of his spiritual and warlike worldview, but on a much higher political scale.

Roman Hispania would comprise from the Roman landing in Ampurias between 218 BC. and the beginning of the V century with the Visigothic entry. It was fundamental for the Empire and the cradle of great rulers.

The Romans called the Iberian Peninsula Hispania. Etymologically there are many theories, from meaning it as the land of rabbits, or I-span-ya to the northern land (of Africa), where the Phoenicians lived. Or land where metals are forged, or even called Hispalis, a word of Iberian origin that would mean the western city. Although for the Greeks it would initially be the Ophioússa Peninsula, land of snakes.

Ispania the Romans listened to the Carthaginians and Iber what the Greeks heard. These finally named it Iberia. The Romans stayed with Hispania.

February 27, 380, the emperor Theodosius abolished the religion and festival of the Sun Invictus by the famous edict of Thessalonica. Until then the Romans worshiped the Sun god during the Republic, and with greater prominence in the Imperial era, since the gradual entry of different religions of salvation of monotheistic tendency, such as Christianity and Mithrism, was giving greater weight to the power of the star king, the one who conquered the darkness ...

Emperor Aurelian made it official on December 25 as the day of the birth of the Undefeated Sun (the main divinity of the Roman pantheon at that time) back in the year 274 and later Juliano the Apostate would declare Helios (Greek equivalent) as the only divinity, and would try to prevent the spread of growing Christianity.

Finally, during a long process of syncretism, both the Festival of the Birth of the Invincible Sun "Dies Natalis Solis Invicti" held after the Winter Solstice, when daylight increased, as well as many other acts and celebrations were gradually reconverted. Paganism would come to an end, a new stage would begin with a victorious sun reborn in the arms of a Galilean.

Here is a vulgar but "honorable" gesture of defiance in the face of the barbarism of our time, obviously it is not an oath pose but without a doubt if our good gentleman with his hand on his chest from the Golden Age raised his head he would certainly raise his middle finger with a clenched fist.

Formerly the use of the comb simulated and was linked to the male phallus and its magical power to ward off the evil eye, a kind of phallic amulet against curses.

However, its practice as an obscene gesture comes from Roman times when Caligula offered his hand to his effeminate tribune to be kissed, the delirious and depraved emperor threw his finger in that position to humiliate his subjects.

As a direct insult we must go back to the Hundred Years War that faced the kingdoms of England and France when the French cut off the middle finger of all British archers, who, demoralized, were prevented from using their powerful bow. As the war favored the English, they showed them their middle finger to challenge and mock them.

We leave it to your imagination who to direct such an effective and ancient posture ...

In 409 the first Germanic invasion took place in the peninsula, Swabians, Vandals and Alans entered Hispania. The Arian Visigoths, with Alaric in command, sacked Rome (410) and headed, led by Ataulfo, towards France and Iberia. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476) and the great defeat of Vouillé (507), the Regnum Gothorum of Tolosa fell, which definitively displaced the Visigoths towards Hispania. There is a rapprochement between the barbarian Goths and the civilized Roman aristocracy. Confrontations, friendship and alliances that favor the birth and formation of Regnum Gothorum and the strengthening of the Hispano-pagoda monarchy of Toledo. Leovigildo will be the true organizer of the political unity that seeks the fusion between the Hispano-Roman and Gothic populations. His son Recaredo will achieve the desired legislative and religious unity in the III Council of Toledo (589), and his descendants will settle the Regnum Hispaniae with the territorial unity...

The son of the wolf, the Goth Wulfilias, converted the Visigoths of Germania to the Arian religion. Upon their arrival in Iberia, they came into contact with the pagan pre-Roman and Spanish-Roman peoples, with the newcomers Vandals, Swabians and Alans - who also practiced Arianism - and with the Jews who had settled since the 6th century. A heterogeneous society is configured where different pre-Christian beliefs coexist alongside primitive Christianity - Manichaeism, Arianism and Gnosticism. The Council of Nicea in 325 will condemn the Arian heresies, the subsequent syncretism process, the conversion of Recaredo and the final unification of the Third Council of Toledo (589) will displace all religious tendencies in favor of Catholicism.

However, in that Visigoth Hispania sacred and perhaps heretical elements will appear, such as those that appeared in the mysterious hermitage of Santa María de Quintanillas de las Viñas in Burgos. We speak of “pagan” reliefs such as the undefeated sun, the spirit of life, and the crescent Moon, the mother life, of oriental Manichean reminiscences, capable of separating light from darkness, good from evil ... perhaps Gnostic inscriptions perhaps last outbreaks of Arian heresy ... In any case, despite the assimilation of Christian orthodoxy, we find in the ruins secrets of a pagan spirituality so latent in the stones, in the art and in the soul of this people ...

In 409 the first Germanic invasion took place in the peninsula, Swabians, Vandals and Alans entered Hispania. The Arian Visigoths, with Alaric in command, sacked Rome (410) and headed, led by Ataulfo, towards France and Iberia. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476) and the great defeat of Vouillé (507), the Regnum Gothorum of Tolosa fell, which definitively displaced the Visigoths towards Hispania. There is a rapprochement between the barbarian Goths and the civilized Roman aristocracy. Confrontations, friendship and alliances that favor the birth and formation of Regnum Gothorum and the strengthening of the Hispano-pagoda monarchy of Toledo. Leovigildo will be the true organizer of the political unity that seeks the fusion between the Hispano-Roman and Gothic populations. His son Recaredo will achieve the desired legislative and religious unity in the III Council of Toledo (589), and his descendants will settle the Regnum Hispaniae with the territorial unity...

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.

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].

There are many heroic moments, passages and characters during the two centuries that the indigenous resistance against the Roman invasion of Iberia lasted. Within that epic that began with the Celtiberian and Lusitanian wars, regarding the entry of Rome into the peninsula in front of the bellicose Carthage of Hannibal during the Second Punic War —The Romans of Publius Cornelius Scipio subdue the hard and iron Carthaginians in the 202 BC in the Battle of Zama. It is then when the Roman Republic begins its expansion in the ancient Iberia of the Greeks ... -, it is worth highlighting as examples of resistance the figure of the dux lusitanorum Viriato, the city of Numancia, and as the last resistant blow of the barbarian Hispania the confrontations between the Roman legions and the different Cantabrian and Asturian peoples, the so-called Cantabrian Wars.

The Celtiberians ready to revolt, despite some alliances, and the Lusitanians organized in guerrillas, knowledgeable about the forests and the mountains, were not going to back down a hand, they were going to fight to its last consequences. Between pacts, bribes, negotiations and finally betrayals that end in massacre stands its charismatic leader, a former shepherd boy, born in the Sierra de la Estrella, named Viriato. Many warriors will accompany him in his fight throughout the later Roman period, much blood spilled, Roman military leaders defeated and humiliated, among so many battles, the great victory of Tríbola, in the Serranía de Ronda, of the Lusitanian hordes in front of the consul Vetilio . The invincible Viriato who establishes his power in the Celtiberian capital of Segóbriga is a threat that must be demolished and liquidated. The consul Flavio Máximo Emiliano manages to defeat him, although the Celtiberians break their alliance with Rome and make a pact with Viriato, considered at that time the terror of the Romans, to try to definitively expel the Roman legions. Years of resistance until the desired peace, which will go through a new betrayal. The consul Cepión offers the three Viriato diplomats honors, perks and peace in exchange for the head of their leader. This is how they will kill him while he slept in 139 BC. The Celitiberian wars were also coming to an end. The last stronghold of heroic resistance would be Numantia, which fell in 133 BC. The Cantabrians and Asturians held out until 19 BC. The dream of Iberia passed away, the Roman Hispana would then be born, but that is another story ...

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.

February 27, 380, the emperor Theodosius abolished the religion and festival of the Sun Invictus by the famous edict of Thessalonica. Until then the Romans worshiped the Sun god during the Republic, and with greater prominence in the Imperial era, since the gradual entry of different religions of salvation of monotheistic tendency, such as Christianity and Mithrism, was giving greater weight to the power of the star king, the one who conquered the darkness ...

Emperor Aurelian made it official on December 25 as the day of the birth of the Undefeated Sun (the main divinity of the Roman pantheon at that time) back in the year 274 and later Juliano the Apostate would declare Helios (Greek equivalent) as the only divinity, and would try to prevent the spread of growing Christianity.

Finally, during a long process of syncretism, both the Festival of the Birth of the Invincible Sun "Dies Natalis Solis Invicti" held after the Winter Solstice, when daylight increased, as well as many other acts and celebrations were gradually reconverted. Paganism would come to an end, a new stage would begin with a victorious sun reborn in the arms of a Galilean.

An ancient Persian myth told us of the coming of an envoy from the Sun, Mithras, who, dressed with Phrygian, torch and dagger, will be worshiped by shepherds, and in a primordial cave he will redeem men through the sacrifice of a primeval bull. According to legend after being captured, he will carry it on his shoulders and kill him. The new world will be reborn after its ascension to heaven together with its resurrected dead beyond the stars ...

As often happens, the myth was lost in time until Rome rescued it back in the 1st century BC. assimilating him to the God Invictus, where after the Saturnalia every December 25, Mitra would be reborn victorious "natalis solis invicti" (death, resurrection and growth of the crops).

The light is reborn and returns, the end of the darkness of days is approaching. With the sowing and the field work completed, it is time to celebrate the coming of light. Let's light candles, decorate our homes with plants, get together with family and friends, exchange gifts, drink and eat, these are days of fun.

Rome dresses up with sacrifices in honor of Saturn and agrarian cults, there are no slaves or masters, no wars or executions, no sickles or hoes, just public banquets, joy, laughter, happiness, country delight and carnival, let's rejoice for a year more of this ancient pagan celebration !! The winter solstice is soon over, our undefeated Sun is returning soon. Happy Saturnalia!!

Disciplined centurions, medieval knights, furious Spartans, lethal Vikings, honorable samurai, untamed Celts, courageous Thirds, legendary native Indians, fearsome Aztecs... Warriors of the world who have changed history. Idealists and mercenaries faced almost always in cruel and unjust wars. Acts of heroism, bravery and honour are sullied by the most despicable and ruthless actions... The warrior by his activity of Justice, Fortitude and Temperance, has to avoid the effects of the wars, not to invent, to promote, to foment and to live of them.

Disciplined centurions, medieval knights, furious Spartans, lethal Vikings, honorable samurai, untamed Celts, courageous Thirds, legendary native Indians, fearsome Aztecs... Warriors of the world who have changed history. Idealists and mercenaries faced almost always in cruel and unjust wars. Acts of heroism, bravery and honour are sullied by the most despicable and ruthless actions... The warrior by his activity of Justice, Fortitude and Temperance, has to avoid the effects of the wars, not to invent, to promote, to foment and to live of them.

Life is an adventure and we must not let it escape, do not you want to discover everything that this world offers you? Do not wait for the deathbed to look back and regret what you have not done all this time. Now is your opportunity, it is your moment, throw yourself on the horizon, take flight and cross borders, navigate to the beyond with the decision and courage of an eagle. Fortune favors the andes and daring, rest assured that the gods will reward you.