On the 5th of June in the year 793 AD, the Vikings attacked the Celtic-Christian Church, center for safe-deposit boxes and money storage for the wealthy, and the location of an important library, on Lindisfarne Island, off the coast of northern England.
You may have seen one of the many TV or Documentary versions of this event, since they love to glorify the rape and pillage of the Church by those dreaded Viking scum, right?
It’s not very difficult to prove (I found it by doing some very elementary research – no heavy lifting required) that Pope Adrian I provided the maps that the Vikings used to navigate to Lindisfarne and to continue on to pillage the rest of the Celtic-Christian areas in the North of England. These were very specific and clear maps that had the locations of all the Churches and related sites marked on it, and the Vikings used it to their great advantage. But when two Papal envoys are dispatched and those stubborn Celtic-Christians just won’t listen, you have to do what you have to do, right? I mean, you can almost claim that God ordered it – it was so clearly pictured in the mind of Pope Adrian. No, you won’t read this in History books, I imagine, but it happened nevertheless.
What we see next, however, if what my post is about. We find a letter that was written by the scholar Alcuin to an Anglo-Saxon Bishop in the North of England, and there is a belief that this was to Unwona of Leicester. In his letter there is mention of “Ingeld”, and some of the Roman Catholics wondered what Ingeld had to do with Christ?
The Angles would have known, since Ingeld is their early ancestor who settled in that area as a mercenary soldier for the Roman army of occupation, and a great many stories are told of him, beginning from the time when he first left the area of Angles in the Jutland peninsula, prior to our association of them with the Saxons into our historical memories of Anglo-Saxon fame. And the Welsh would most certainly know, since their earliest rulers were from the Old North of Ingeld fame.
After being beaten senseless by the armies of the Pope, perhaps the Celtic-Christians began to think back to their early days, in a form of gathering-the-troops if you will. But in any event, contrary to what you read in your History books, this represents the first occasion in which the word Pope was associated with the word Anti-Christ, at least in written form. (Traditionally we are told that it was the great Martin Luther who first uttered that statement).
By the way, for those of you who might have been taught that Martin Luther (in 1520 AD) was the first to call the Pope the AntiChrist, [in fact I actually saw this statement on a Catholic website just today] and that he began the first Protestant movement, you would be incorrect on both accounts. Celtic-Christians stood as Protestants against Rome and the Pope from the early fifth century onwards, or nearly a thousand years before Martin Luther was born. They even had their own translation version of the Bible, and similar but different points of view on matters of Religion and worship. You might be pleased to hear that the Celtic-Christians were actually more closely following the belief and practices that Jesus taught than the rest of the Christians of the time were, as proven by their writings. But I will leave that for another day.
Just to clarify, in Christian eschatology, the Antichrist, or anti-Christ, refers to people prophesied by the Bible to oppose Christ and substitute themself in Christ’s place before the Second Coming. The term Antichrist is found five times in the New Testament, solely in the First and Second Epistle of John. The Antichrist is announced as the one “who denies the Father and the Son.” Which is cute, but it misses the point. He’s the one who thinks he is equal with God, and above all humans.
In Alcuin’s writings from the early or mid part of 797 AD we have the following passage in Latin.
“Verba dei legantur in sacerdotali convivio Ibi decet lectorem audiri non citharistam sermones non carmina gentilium Quid Hinieldus cum Christo Angusta est domus utrosque tenere non potuit Non vult rex caelestis cum paganis et perditis nominetenus regibus communionem habere quia rex ille aeternus regnat in caelis ille paganus plangit in inferno Voces legentium audite in domibus tuis non ridentium turbam in plateis”.
Given that I was aware of the heated relationship between the Celtic-Christians and the back-stabbing Popes, I thought I would decipher this for you today. While the original text is of course in Latin, for transmission purposes, the message buried inside of it is in Anglo-Saxon, or what the fat boys in Oxford and Cambridge call “Old English”. I’ve managed to become fairly proficient in Anglo-Saxon, after having had several year of practice, so here is that translation.
Letters, Numbers of times used in the text:
i: 43
e: 42 ie = ea = Oh!, Alas!, an interjection
n: 37
t: 28
u: 25 tun = enclosed piece of ground, a yard, court
a: 25
s: 23 as(al) = an ass
r: 21
o: 20
m: 16 Rom = Rome
l: 15
c: 13
d: 11 cald = cold, coldness
g: 9 ge = and, also, with, your, of you
p: 6
v: 5
b: 6 pub; openly-wicked, a publican, aka a collector of taxes or tribute.
h: 4 q was often expressed as c or cw
q: 3 hycgan = take thought, be mindful, consider, think, understand, remember
x: 2 = aex or eax = what is brought to an edge, an axe, a hatchet, pickaxe, etc.
f: 1 fa = hostile, proscribed, outlawed, criminal, guilty
also = ge-fa = a foe, an enemy, adversary
fa, fah = exposed to the vengeance of a slain man’s kin because of the murder.
This was said to be colored, (as in colored with blood), blood-stained, marked with blood
fah = guilty of sinful deeds
Which gives us something like : “Oh!, Alas! The court of the Ass in Rome; cold and openly wicked. Be mindful of the hostile axe! ”
So, by now some are crying click-bait, and wondering where the AntiChrist comes in, so here you are.
Towards the close of his prose treatise on Virginity, Alcuin stated that he should write on the same subject in poetry. His prefact to the poem is an acrostic address to the abbess Maxima, in hexameter verse. It consists of thirty-eight lines, so fantastically written that each line begins and ends with the successive letters of the words of the first line; and thus the first and last lines, and the initial and final letters of each line consist of the same words. In the last line the words occur backwards. The final letters are to be read upwards.
“Aldhelm calls this quadratum carmen, a square verse. He was not the inventor of these idle fopperies of versification. Fortunatus and others had preceded Aldhelm in this tasteless path, in which authors endeavor to surprise us, not by the genius they display, but by the difficulties which they overcome.” That’s what we get from our traditional scholars. But they did not examine what he said, or did not care, or could not figure out that it contained hidden meaning. And keep in mind, somebody paid for their Oxford educations. It’s just like the old Hippies used to say – it’s ass, grass or gas, your choice.
Here are the words of the original “circular” or “oracle” verses:
Metrica = a measure, or measuring, of meter, rhythmic, music metrical
Tirones = beginners, novices, recruits, young heads of cattle,
Tiro was a freedman and secretary of Cicero, who invented a system of shorthand
Nunc = now, today, at the present time
Promant = to take, bring out, to bring forth, to bring into view,
to display on the stage,
Carmina = song, music, poem, play, charm, prayer, incantation
magic formula, oracle
Castos = pure, moral, chaste, pious, virtuous, sacred, spotless
free from or untouched by
Traditionally they understood this as: The new metric now produce Chaste. But we will see that it is more similar to: Today’s rhyming verse for novices to bring forth untouched poems.
So if we do a Cryptographic analysis on “Metrica Tirones Nunc Promant Carmina Castos” and use letter frequency and positions of occurrences as the key, what do we obtain?
Letters/Frequency of use
a: 5
n: 5
t: 4
e: 2
c: 4
r: 4
i: 3
s: 3 antecris (antecrist, antecriste)
o: 3 om-up = equal to that which is on high.
m: 3
u: 1
p: 1
What we have then is “The Antichrist is equal to the one that is on high”. And it’s pretty clear that this is the meaning.
In Anglo-Saxon we might refer to this idea by writing “Gé synd up godu, ealle upheá and æðele bearn”, where the uphea = top end, lofty, giving us: “You are children of the most high.”
And in case we miss who the “most high” is as the subject of his message, it was the insistence of the Pope that he was “God’s representative or partner here on Earth” that raised the anger of the Celtic-Christians in the first place, and eventually lead to the slaughter (genocide fits) of the Nun’s, Priests, children in training to be these, and innocent villagers on Lindisfarne Island.
Next time you see a documentary on Lindisfarne or the evil, wicked Vikings, remember this report if you will. Yes they did bad things, but only because they had received their direction from on high.