There is a legend that says that in a place in the Pacific called Teaoturoa, lived a handsome warrior named Mataora who was captivated by the exotic and irresistible beauty of a woman from the underworld, daughter of Uetonga, descendant of the goddess of the night and the god of earthquakes and named Niwareka. He was so captivated that he asked her to marry him and she agreed to stay in his world. Things worked until one unfortunate day the brave Mataora went into a rage and violently mistreated the princess. Drowning in her sadness, she left her husband, returning to Rarohenga, to her old underground life. The clouds wept, the trees screamed, the rivers bled ... the warrior's supplications echoed in the depths of the earth. Sorry for his actions, he descended in search of his beloved to implore her forgiveness. Uetonga, who recognized him when he arrived, gave a great laugh because the hero's body paint had been erased along the way. Naked with shame, he exposed his pain in tears of regret, to which the merciful King forgave him by permanently tattooing him and showing him the art of Ta Moko. Reconciled, they returned from the afterlife, where they taught generation after generation this traditional Maori tattoo technique from New Zealand.

There is a legend that says that in a place in the Pacific called Teaoturoa, lived a handsome warrior named Mataora who was captivated by the exotic and irresistible beauty of a woman from the underworld, daughter of Uetonga, descendant of the goddess of the night and the god of earthquakes and named Niwareka. He was so captivated that he asked her to marry him and she agreed to stay in his world. Things worked until one unfortunate day the brave Mataora went into a rage and violently mistreated the princess. Drowning in her sadness, she left her husband, returning to Rarohenga, to her old underground life. The clouds wept, the trees screamed, the rivers bled ... the warrior's supplications echoed in the depths of the earth. Sorry for his actions, he descended in search of his beloved to implore her forgiveness. Uetonga, who recognized him when he arrived, gave a great laugh because the hero's body paint had been erased along the way. Naked with shame, he exposed his pain in tears of regret, to which the merciful King forgave him by permanently tattooing him and showing him the art of Ta Moko. Reconciled, they returned from the afterlife, where they taught generation after generation this traditional Maori tattoo technique from New Zealand.

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.

American Indians: Great warriors, farmers and nomads. Sacred tribes with ancestral ties set among themselves throughout Alaska, Hawaii and the rest of EEUU, that formed the millenarian culture of the “red skins”. Native Americans like the Sioux, Arapajoes, Apache, Cheyenne or Cherokee and their famous leaders such as Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull that evoke the epic struggles of the Conquest of the Wild West.

The supreme product of Indian civilization was the warrior. His prototype contains a wealth of virtues that make him an admirable figure. And to be a good warrior as the Indians understood it, it was not enough to have extraordinary courage; He had to be, too, generous, detached, austere, noble: in short, a true gentleman, a true knight: a way of life and a "way of perfection”.

After many centuries of poisonings, deaths, studies and people who have survived it, today we can explain the myths, legends that surround the superstitions about this ancient and strange plant with roots with a humanoid shape.

Its magical powers are due to its analgesic, healing, narcotic, aphrodisiac and hallucinogenic effects, so it is not surprising that sorcerers, druids, alchemists and doctors used it.

Many are those who say that when it is plucked from the ground, its scream can drive you crazy to the point of death, it was mentioned in genesis as a fertility drug and in the Middle Ages it was believed that semen spilled on the ground after post ejaculation morten of those hanged made this plant grow, it was also said that Joan of Arc consumed it and that is where her mystical hallucinations came from and that she carried it behind her shield while kicking the ass of the English who would later burn her at the stake being this the same plant that would relieve her from the pain of the flames ... inspiring Shakespeare in several of his works such as Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra where it was used to alleviate love sickness.

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

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...

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).

Libero, cry of freedom !!! ... The Iberians were lovers of freedom, they did not accept a leader, only in times of war and for short periods of time. While their value and loyalty to their bosses and leaders was recorded by ancient writers. The Greeks admired their bravery and resistance, they fought without fear and did not retreat even with the lost battle.

The image of the bird with outstretched wings of the Elche ceramic from Acudía has a mystical character, linked to divinity is related to the Mediterranean goddesses and chronicles of the cycles of nature, life and death. In some contexts this image of the bird is related to the blessings of travel or as a guide in the transit journey of the soul to the underworld.

In Céltica Hispania there were horned deities, it is possible that the image corresponds to that of the god Cernnunos with his deer horns appearing in a Numancia ceramic. Although it has also been interpreted as a zenith wolf with open jaws or as the stag beetle. What it seems is that it is a deification of the Horned Male, related to abundance and fertility.

A psychopomp is a being that in Celtic mythology or religions led the souls of the deceased to the otherworld. These Celtiberian fish appeared on ceramic plates found in Numancia, symbolized water, and as guide animals carried souls to the afterlife.

Silio Italicus relates about the Celtiberians: “The Celts came united in name to the Iberians. For them it is an honor to fall in the fight, and a crime to incinerate his corpse. They believe that the dead will go to heaven with the gods if hungry vultures devour the lying body. " The vultures therefore help the soul of the Celtiberians fallen in battle in their transit to the afterlife.

The horse is a symbol of freedom, nobility, strength, courage, wealth and power. Representations of horses have been found in Numantine ceramics, fibulae, coins, funerary stelae ... Linked to Epona, the goddess of abundance and fertility. Related to the warrior elites and as a symbol of the ostentation of power, they are very present in Iberia in herding, hunting and funeral rites. Endowed with chthonic and psychopompic aspects, it is linked with divinity and the afterlife, as well as with rites of passage and initiation, with the appropriation of equine virtues, with the image of the deceased and later heroized warrior, where the horses sacrificed for accompany the warrior on his journey to the afterlife.

Celtiberian warrior dancer with arms clad in large bull horns represented on ceramic found in Garray, Numancia. These ritual dances are related to the cult of the bull, those horns and those dances related to the learning and domination of the brave bull, strength and fertility.

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].

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.

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...

Bringing in the work of Robert E. Howard was almost a must here at Culters. Heroic Fantasy and Conan has accompanied us since we were children, at home we devoured, in addition to the adult comics of Totem and Cimoc, the super conan and their wild sword. The cimero barbarian, that rogue-air hero who took on Lovecraftian creatures, demonic armies and sorcerers, had us completely overshadowed. Today we are especially interested in how much of ancient cultures there is built in all that Hyborio universe - which emerged after the sinking of Atlantis - of his stories. Serve this "Conan in heroic times. The Era of Hiboria" as a tribute and reminiscence of all that.

Landscapes of shady lands, winds from the north, peaks and hills surrounded by lush forests populated by tribes and warriors fighting in neighboring countries that take us to a lost era before the Neolithic. In those places we see European barbarians similar to the Celts, Goths, Vikings, Vandals, Cossacks, Tatars ... Druids, mercenaries, invaders, thieves, pirates, sailors, adventurers, savages, kings, civilizations, regions, mountains, jungle and desert, distant places and mythical, mysticism and Nordic beliefs, medieval culture ...

We find a perfectly recognizable cosmos, from north to south, from the West to the Far East, emerged after the decline of the precataclysmic civilizations - dominated by the kingdoms of Kamelia, Valusia, Verulia, Grondar, Thule and Commoria -, after wars, migrations and crossbreeds. Different places populated by the most varied races of the Hyboria era. Here are some interpretations:

Zingara —located on the Iberian peninsula, land of knighthood, chivalry, nobility and conspiracies, you travel through Celtiberian Spain but also Imperial Spain in other passages—, Vanaheim —Nordic town with red hair whose name comes from the Scandinavian god Vanir—, Asgard —Norse inhabitants with blond hair whose name comes from the Scandinavian god Aesir—, Nordheim —constituted by Vanaheim and Asgard, is a snow-covered Norse territory inhabited by peoples similar to Germans and Vikings—, Hyperborea —whose name evokes the mythical land of mythology. Greek, inhabitants of Norse culture that shows similarities with the Finns, Varangians and Russians—, Cimmeria —the land of Conan, the Cimmerians are the ancestors of the Celts, Gauls and Scythians—, Aquilonia —one of the most powerful, cultural and militarily, led by Conan, located perhaps in France, Great Britain or Italy - Argos and Nemedia - along with Aquilonia arose after the collapse of the Acheron Empire by the invasions barbarian ions (similarity to the Roman Empire) -, the Pictish lands - the tattooed Pictish inhabitants of northern Britain, with similarities to Native Americans versus European settlers or perhaps indigenous peoples versus Roman invasions of Britani -, Brithunia - similar to Roman Britain—, the Empire of Acheron —whose name was brought from the Greek mythology of Acheron, one of the rivers of Hades—, Zamora —browned and dark-eyed, semi-made people who recall the inhabitants of Ancient Palestine. , an exotic town of dances and initiation rites—, Stygia —a territory whose inhabitants are versed in magic and secret arcana, worshipers of Set, the Egyptian god—, Shem —Semitic references, resembling Arabia, Palestine, the Middle East, deserts with nomads and city-states, people from whom Phoenicians, Hebrews, Assyrians, Canaanites ... descended, protectorate of Styigia, like Palestine with respect to Egypt, Khitai - think of traditional China - Yamatai - a fantastic and stereotypical Japan—, Ophir —a desert kingdom similar to Arabic, a reference to the biblical region Ofir, perhaps referring to Africa or India, famous for its gold—, Black Kingdoms —primitive African natives—, Corinthia —populated by navigators and philosopher, similar to the land of the ancient Greeks—…