Yygdrasilian
King Sigismund of Burgundy was canonized by the Roman orthodox church soon after his death in 524 AD. Although executed for reasons that had little to do with his faith, he was nonetheless counted among the martyred saints and continues to be revered on his feast day, May 1st. His rule extended over the Germanic tribe of Burgundians inhabiting adjacent regions of present day Switzerland & France, which included the former Roman town of Agaunum - made famous as the site of the legendary martyrdom of 6,666 soldiers from the Egyptian city of Thebes.
By Sigismund’s time, a basilica had been erected atop the ruins of a shrine to the god Mercury and named after the legion’s commander, Saint Maurice. According to The Golden Legend - a popular compilation of hagiographies produced in the 13th century - they were all Christian converts who had willingly accepted martyrdom rather than persecute others of their faith or give sacrifice to their pagan emperor, Maximian...
Recently converted to the Nicene (trinitarian) creed of Roman catholicism, he also converted his Burgundian subjects from the ‘Arian heresy’ - a non-trinitarian form of Christianity promulgated among the Germanic tribes before the early Christian emperors adhered to the rulings of the church councils held at Nicea. Thus, Sigismund aided in resolving a schism that had divided Christendom in the centuries adjoining the decline & fall of the Roman empire to the rise of the medieval Germanic kingdoms.
Prior to his reign, the Burgundian domain had been split among the 4 sons of Sigismund’s grandfather, Gundioc - though all were soon ‘reunited’ by Sigismund’s father, Gundobad, after successively murdering each of his siblings & conquering their lands. Ruling as co-regent from 1501 until his father’s death in 516, Sigismund seemed to seek an atonement for the sins of his father by lavishly endowing the Abbey of St, Maurice. Yet, despite having accrued these pious deeds to the credit of his immortal soul, Sigismund faltered in a fit of rage characteristic of the barbarian kings by having his own son executed by strangulation in 522 - the same year in which he instigated the laus perrenis.
Repenting too late, it was said he prayed the remainder of his days for a just punishment from God for having murdered his own child. Soon thereafter he was stripped of his kingdom by the sons of the Frankish king, Clovis I, by his queen, Clotilde - a cousin to Sigismund whose father had been murdered by his, the former King of the Burgundians, Gundobad. Apprehending him at the Abbey his endowment had built, they avenged their grandfather by throwing the penitent king down a well. His body was recovered and kept at St. Maurice alongside a cache of bones presumed those of the Theban martyrs.
There arose a folk legend that Saint Maurice had carried the Holy Lance that had speared the side of Jesus on the Cross, as recounted in the gospel attributed the apostle John. And in 926, Henry “the Fowler”, founder of the Ottonian line of Holy Roman Emperors, ceded the neighboring Swiss canton of Aargau to the Abbey in exchange for Maurice’s lance, sword & spurs. It is at this point that the relic known as the Hofberg spear enters the historical record and began to be used for the Imperial coronation ceremonies.
At some unattested point, the spearhead had been adapted to enshrine a Nail that, presumably, was included among the relics retrieved from the holy land by the mother of Emperor Constantine, Saint Helena - as recounted by Saint Ambrose, Doctor of the Church and bishop of Milan. The earliest written source for the story, he tells of how in 325 AD, the first Christian emperor of the Roman empire granted his mother access to the imperial treasury that she might retrieve relics of the faith from the Holy Land. She returned 5 years later miraculously bearing the nails used in Jesus’ crucifixion and pieces of the ‘one true cross’.
Establishing that the location of the former hill of skulls, Golgatha, was occupied by a temple dedicated to the goddess Venus, the relics were supposedly excavated from beneath its ruins after Helena’s ordered demolition. The site, according to legend, is currently occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Beside the Holy Lance, another of these reliquary nails is claimed to have been incorporated within the Iron Crown of Lomabardy - a ceremonial talisman used in the emperor-elect’s obligatory coronation as King of the Italians.
In 1355, Charles IV of the House of Luxemborg became both King of Italy and Holy Roman Emperor. 10 years later, after also being crowned King of Burgundy, he ordered the skull of the sainted king, Sigismund, translated from the Abbey of Saint Maurice to his capital in Prague. There Saint Sigismund became patron saint to the Kingdom of Bohemia and, in 1368, of the emperor’s newborn son, Sigismund I.
Despite being the second of Charles’ sons, Sigismund would eventually become emperor and grasp the Holy Lance for himself. And, like his patron saint, he worked to resolve a great schism dividing Christian world. As Emperor-elect, Sigismund had undertaken a diplomatic campaign to bring an end to the break up of the orthodox church into different factions that had occurred with the election of three rival popes. It was while negotiating the involvement of anti-pope John XXIII in a conference to end this schism that Sigismund’s visit to the Italian city of Cremona is said to have occasioned the adoption of Borromean rings as the heraldic emblem of that city’s ruler, Cabrino Fondulo, regarding it as a symbol of the friendship he shared with his guests, the Emperor and anti-pope.
In exchange for 35,00 gold florins, the “reguli” (‘petty king’) Fondulo surrendered Cremona in 1425 to the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, to whom the emblem then passed. Offering the city as part of his illegitimate daughter’s dowry, the Rings and the city eventually came into the possession of Francesco Sforza upon their marriage in 1441. The Abbey of San Sigismondo, where their wedding ceremony took place, was replaced in 1463 by the Church of San Sigismondo, a religious complex commissioned by Bianca Maria & Francesco Sforza. The rings, which Sforza had awarded the Borromeo family for supporting his ducal ambitions over the Ambrosian Republic, still adorn the Door leading to the church’s cloister that marks the foundations where the wedding chapel once stood.
As a member of the chivalric Order of the Dragon, Francesco Sforza’s imperial connections would have extended beyond the 3 emblematic rings, and reached into a society of knights founded in 1408 when the future Emperor Sigismund had, with his second wife, Barbra de Cille, drafted the charter for the Societas Draconistrarum. It has been suggested that it is they who are depicted in the roles of Emperor & Empress among the hand painted Viscounti-Sforza trionfi.
So, then-
At a shrine to the god Mercury (Thoth), 2 decimations of Theban martyrs (2x 666) are connected to a Nail+Spear [V=XIV] identified in Christian folklore as having pierced ‘The Sun’ upon the Cross. A sainted King (celebrated on 121st day of the year) who was thrown down a well, is ‘resurrected’ through an Emperor heralded by a Dragon biting its’ own tail, and who offers a Borromean Ring to the Bride's family emblem at the Tree where Lovers meet.
2: http://www.liv.ac.uk/~spmr02/rings/sforza.html
3: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/De_Sphaera_-_Allegory_Sforza.JPG
1: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl...ITEM.asp?pid=2002899&iid=1011908&srchtype=VCG
In this respect, the weave of saints, relics, and heraldry attending the union of the Visconti & Sforza families appears to link them to the central event in Christian mythology, but does so in a manner consistent with the alchemical scenario posed by the partition of the Tarot de Marseilles (as applied to the Hebrew alphabet: aleph=0) by digital root, and fit together within the geometric lattice known as the Tree of Life.
By Sigismund’s time, a basilica had been erected atop the ruins of a shrine to the god Mercury and named after the legion’s commander, Saint Maurice. According to The Golden Legend - a popular compilation of hagiographies produced in the 13th century - they were all Christian converts who had willingly accepted martyrdom rather than persecute others of their faith or give sacrifice to their pagan emperor, Maximian...
In 515, Sigismund had endowed the church with land & resources to build an abbey. The gesture was cited as arising ex nihilo, or ‘out of nothing’, as it was considered unusual at the time for not having originated as a movement among the clergy. Sigismund, for reasons that apparently mystified the monks tending the Thebans reliquary bones, had no apparent motive for his generosity. In addition, he instituted & financed the laus perennis - a perpetual litany that rotated five groups of monks singing in continuous praise of the fabled martyrs for the next 300 years.The Golden Legend said:“Moris or Maurice was duke of the right holy legion of Thebans. They were named Thebans, of Thebes their city. And that region is in the parts of the East beyond the parts of Arabia, and it is full of richesses, plenteous of fruit, delectable of trees. The indwellers of that region be of great bodies and noble in arms, strong in battle, subtle in engine, and right abundant in wisdom...
“And Ambrose saith thus of these martyrs in his preface: The company of these true christian men enlumined with divine light, coming from the farther ends of the world, which were armed with spiritual arms, and hied to their martyrdom with stable faith and diligent constancy, whom the cruel tyrant for to fear them tithed two times by the slaughter of the sword, and after, he seeing them constant in the faith, commanded them all to have their heads smitten off. But they burned in so great charity that they cast and threw away their arms and harness, and kneeling on their knees received sufferably with a joyous heart the swords of them that martyred them, among whom Maurice, embraced in the love and faith of Jesu Christ, received the crown of martyrdom. Hæc Ambrosius.
“....Then let us devoutly beseech Almighty God that by the merits of this holy martyr Saint Maurice and his holy fellowship the legion, which is six thousand six hundred and sixty-six, that suffered martyrdom, as heretofore is rehearsed, we may after this transitory life come unto the everlasting bliss in heaven, where he reigneth, world without end. Amen.”
Recently converted to the Nicene (trinitarian) creed of Roman catholicism, he also converted his Burgundian subjects from the ‘Arian heresy’ - a non-trinitarian form of Christianity promulgated among the Germanic tribes before the early Christian emperors adhered to the rulings of the church councils held at Nicea. Thus, Sigismund aided in resolving a schism that had divided Christendom in the centuries adjoining the decline & fall of the Roman empire to the rise of the medieval Germanic kingdoms.
Prior to his reign, the Burgundian domain had been split among the 4 sons of Sigismund’s grandfather, Gundioc - though all were soon ‘reunited’ by Sigismund’s father, Gundobad, after successively murdering each of his siblings & conquering their lands. Ruling as co-regent from 1501 until his father’s death in 516, Sigismund seemed to seek an atonement for the sins of his father by lavishly endowing the Abbey of St, Maurice. Yet, despite having accrued these pious deeds to the credit of his immortal soul, Sigismund faltered in a fit of rage characteristic of the barbarian kings by having his own son executed by strangulation in 522 - the same year in which he instigated the laus perrenis.
Repenting too late, it was said he prayed the remainder of his days for a just punishment from God for having murdered his own child. Soon thereafter he was stripped of his kingdom by the sons of the Frankish king, Clovis I, by his queen, Clotilde - a cousin to Sigismund whose father had been murdered by his, the former King of the Burgundians, Gundobad. Apprehending him at the Abbey his endowment had built, they avenged their grandfather by throwing the penitent king down a well. His body was recovered and kept at St. Maurice alongside a cache of bones presumed those of the Theban martyrs.
There arose a folk legend that Saint Maurice had carried the Holy Lance that had speared the side of Jesus on the Cross, as recounted in the gospel attributed the apostle John. And in 926, Henry “the Fowler”, founder of the Ottonian line of Holy Roman Emperors, ceded the neighboring Swiss canton of Aargau to the Abbey in exchange for Maurice’s lance, sword & spurs. It is at this point that the relic known as the Hofberg spear enters the historical record and began to be used for the Imperial coronation ceremonies.
At some unattested point, the spearhead had been adapted to enshrine a Nail that, presumably, was included among the relics retrieved from the holy land by the mother of Emperor Constantine, Saint Helena - as recounted by Saint Ambrose, Doctor of the Church and bishop of Milan. The earliest written source for the story, he tells of how in 325 AD, the first Christian emperor of the Roman empire granted his mother access to the imperial treasury that she might retrieve relics of the faith from the Holy Land. She returned 5 years later miraculously bearing the nails used in Jesus’ crucifixion and pieces of the ‘one true cross’.
Establishing that the location of the former hill of skulls, Golgatha, was occupied by a temple dedicated to the goddess Venus, the relics were supposedly excavated from beneath its ruins after Helena’s ordered demolition. The site, according to legend, is currently occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Beside the Holy Lance, another of these reliquary nails is claimed to have been incorporated within the Iron Crown of Lomabardy - a ceremonial talisman used in the emperor-elect’s obligatory coronation as King of the Italians.
In 1355, Charles IV of the House of Luxemborg became both King of Italy and Holy Roman Emperor. 10 years later, after also being crowned King of Burgundy, he ordered the skull of the sainted king, Sigismund, translated from the Abbey of Saint Maurice to his capital in Prague. There Saint Sigismund became patron saint to the Kingdom of Bohemia and, in 1368, of the emperor’s newborn son, Sigismund I.
Despite being the second of Charles’ sons, Sigismund would eventually become emperor and grasp the Holy Lance for himself. And, like his patron saint, he worked to resolve a great schism dividing Christian world. As Emperor-elect, Sigismund had undertaken a diplomatic campaign to bring an end to the break up of the orthodox church into different factions that had occurred with the election of three rival popes. It was while negotiating the involvement of anti-pope John XXIII in a conference to end this schism that Sigismund’s visit to the Italian city of Cremona is said to have occasioned the adoption of Borromean rings as the heraldic emblem of that city’s ruler, Cabrino Fondulo, regarding it as a symbol of the friendship he shared with his guests, the Emperor and anti-pope.
In exchange for 35,00 gold florins, the “reguli” (‘petty king’) Fondulo surrendered Cremona in 1425 to the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, to whom the emblem then passed. Offering the city as part of his illegitimate daughter’s dowry, the Rings and the city eventually came into the possession of Francesco Sforza upon their marriage in 1441. The Abbey of San Sigismondo, where their wedding ceremony took place, was replaced in 1463 by the Church of San Sigismondo, a religious complex commissioned by Bianca Maria & Francesco Sforza. The rings, which Sforza had awarded the Borromeo family for supporting his ducal ambitions over the Ambrosian Republic, still adorn the Door leading to the church’s cloister that marks the foundations where the wedding chapel once stood.
As a member of the chivalric Order of the Dragon, Francesco Sforza’s imperial connections would have extended beyond the 3 emblematic rings, and reached into a society of knights founded in 1408 when the future Emperor Sigismund had, with his second wife, Barbra de Cille, drafted the charter for the Societas Draconistrarum. It has been suggested that it is they who are depicted in the roles of Emperor & Empress among the hand painted Viscounti-Sforza trionfi.
So, then-
At a shrine to the god Mercury (Thoth), 2 decimations of Theban martyrs (2x 666) are connected to a Nail+Spear [V=XIV] identified in Christian folklore as having pierced ‘The Sun’ upon the Cross. A sainted King (celebrated on 121st day of the year) who was thrown down a well, is ‘resurrected’ through an Emperor heralded by a Dragon biting its’ own tail, and who offers a Borromean Ring to the Bride's family emblem at the Tree where Lovers meet.
2: http://www.liv.ac.uk/~spmr02/rings/sforza.html
3: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/De_Sphaera_-_Allegory_Sforza.JPG
1: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl...ITEM.asp?pid=2002899&iid=1011908&srchtype=VCG
In this respect, the weave of saints, relics, and heraldry attending the union of the Visconti & Sforza families appears to link them to the central event in Christian mythology, but does so in a manner consistent with the alchemical scenario posed by the partition of the Tarot de Marseilles (as applied to the Hebrew alphabet: aleph=0) by digital root, and fit together within the geometric lattice known as the Tree of Life.