The League of Six Nations

© 2002 by Juan Carden. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

ISBN: 1-4033-4782-4 (e-book)

ISBN: 1-4033-4783-2 (Paperback)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2002092833

IstBooks-rev. 01/23/03

CONTENTS

I AB INITIO

II AD HOMMEN

III A DIVINIS

IV AD MULTOS ANNOS

V AD PERPETUAM REI MEMORAIN

VI AD IMO PECTORE

VII AD GLORIAM

VIII ACTA EST FABULA

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

There by the sea where the sun rises early and ascends monumentally with joy in the heart and fire in the soul. There where sufferers laugh and are happy thinking of how fruitful ideas can be and of the holocaust of all evil. There, where as a child I dreamed and as an old man I learned to love and to weep, learned to survive the body’s infirmities and the wisdom of the intellect.

I found you there. I rose from the dead and I returned wiser, with more compassion, more remorse, and with much more love in my heart and in my spirit. From the depths of your melancholic eyes, blue as the sea in June, you looked at me. Your skin was so dark, your blond hair gave to the wind and lifted to the sun thousands of love poems, elegies to the past and to the absolute. In your soul, still that of a little girl, maybe you understood that you too were a union of the past, the present, and definitely my future.

Soliloquies of suffering in my afflicted soul. Why was I the first and only one in this world, once again just as before, capable of remembering my thousand and something lives in our irreconcilable past? I looked at you and worried. I saw that you had gleaned from my eyes the taste of sorrow, love’s immense pleasures-the life that you lived, the love that was ours.

You took me by the hand and we left, forgetting your parents and siblings. Memories become confused, the only thing that lasts, the only thing that lives through time and space is the absolute certainty that you and I are one.

Roaming through millennia, the bitter taste of the lives in which I didn’t know you, when I couldn’t find you among human beings, weighed me down. Maybe it’s that the Creator, in his omnipotence and wisdom, will not have in either his paradise or his inferno a spirit completely radiant or a soul that always finds its utmost desire. For me you will always be that. Your love is what my body and soul crave more than anything else.

Now that I’ve found you, I’ll tell you how you’ve always believed in me. Now, as it turns out, you don’t belong to anyone but yourself, suffering of my soul, love of my life, my mind’s passion. You must know that, wandering through time and space, time after time I found you with other beings. You thought you were in love, married, bearing other people’s children. But, so beautiful, you looked in my eyes and there was your past. Your body’s passion was kindled and the comedy that was your life was over.

And if you asked me, as you always do, to tell you of my life, I would. You are what drives my life on and what sustains it. Over the highways of time, I, who have died so many times and been born again so many more, I know that I’ve lived for your love alone. Without you I never would have lived these lives. They would have been springs dried up and desolate, lifeless deserts, lifeless graves where reality would be nothing but suffering. And I don’t know when I began to exist, when I began to live or who I am. I’ll tell you over and over the story of my life, which isn’t mine but yours. There, many millennia ago, I died as all men die, after searching foolishly over and over for something that I now know is you, my love, my passion, my sustenance. In that life I cried, I searched, I thought I was in love, and I perished, weeping tears of love and of suffering. When the last flames of that life, of that age, died out. When my soul freed itself and ascended I understood how futile and dried up my life was. I realized when I passed away, at the age of 87, that I had wasted every second of my existence.

I asked the Most High, WHY? I don’t know if it was him or Satan, his slave, his right hand, who answered me. The answer was clear and absolute-Both Heaven and Hell are on Earth.

When my reason little by little fell away from this ancient, old and decrepit body, the Almighty, or his slave, explained to me: You see, humans are born in twos. Those that never find each other are the ones who suffer-this is their Inferno. Those that do find and love one another remain on Earth forever-this is their paradise.

That very day I died so as to live now in the wisdom of all those lives. I recognize each one of those souls that blaze up and are extinguished. Each one of those beings that are born, die and come back to life. Eden is the reward, so fleeting it burns and consumes me. When I find you again, my love, it is Olympus.

Immortality, millennia of memories—punishment or glory?

I

AB INITIO

From the beginning of time……hope,

in the origins of life……trust,

buzzing in the child’s mind … lost in thought,

surprised to find that it is……different,

Overwhelmed by creation and……by the world,

Its existence exceptional……in the universe,

Bearing in its body……its essence,

so inexplicable and incongruous are its . words,

not realizing its uniqueness it lived……in eloquence,

beginning to understand that few are .. chosen,

that few live, understand……love.

In the fall of the year 1723, at the end of October, a thin, frail child, pink and blond, lanky and sick from the sudden winter, came prematurely to the world. When the icy north wind covered the small farm with frost and penetrated my delicate lungs, I was given new life, as well as pneumonia. With a weak cry I blessed my eternal existence, I opened my eyes and saw what would be my new dwelling. Confused, I took in its contours. I didn’t notice the dank warmth of the forest, nor the invigorating coolness that swept down with the snow from the high mountains.

Although I wasn’t expected until the end of December, Catherine, my maternal grandmother, took me in her strong arms and pronounced in a whisper, He won’t live very long!

Hearing her prophecies, refusing to accept her predictions, I sought in my mother’s small teats the manna that would give me life. As I clung to her breasts, thirstily taking in her genetic past and hearing the expressions of love that flowed from her pale lips, I understood that my new parents were uncultured but kind.

Restless, I looked closely at my grandmother. Her enormous silhouette blocked the small window, preventing the faint moon from casting its light on her features. Maybe her predictions would come true! My icy chest shook with a cough, I heard my own weak sighs and saw my gaunt body reflected in mother’s blue pupils.

My grandparents, of Celtic ancestry, were born in the town of Lantwidvory in Wales. Frightened by religious persecution, they emigrated in 1664 from the British Isles to North America, seeking freedom and economic prosperity in the huge territories granted to William Penn by the English crown.

Morgan and Catherine Longcoy, with their children Shionn and David, arrived in Delaware Bay on board the Vine. From there they immediately set out for the interior of the New World, crossing vast plains that were almost completely deserted. The weather that blazing summer was similar to Great Britain. The same birds flew over the river and the same notions of freedom were fermenting in the minds of everyone who had immigrated to the new continent.

From an early age my grandparents implanted in their children the will to worship the Creator, to seek freedom of spirit, to obey the commandments of their religion, and to live far from the persecution of the intolerant. They were convinced, like everyone of their era, that they existed in order to serve God and to implant in their contemporaries the sanctity of His notions.

The Longcoys followed the course of the Delaware, awed by its picturesque banks and extolling its splendor. They didn’t understand the contempt the old colonists felt for the river, which my grandmother said would have been the longest in all of England.

After a treacherous but fascinating journey, my ancestors arrived in Philadelphia. There they found a modern and well-planned city, its wide streets running parallel to the banks of the river. Still, it lacked the monuments and the beauty of European cities, the marvels that are only accumulated when human beings boast of their history.

Morgan and Catherine hoped to find in that metropolis the morals of the peoples of antiquity. They longed to live in a society free of crime, a society with the pureness of spirit of the first Christians, tolerant but not disrespectful of moral values. However, when they arrived in Philadelphia they saw the same luxury and the same social and economic inequalities that had existed in England. Scandalized by the lack of regard for morality and Christianity, disillusioned with what they found, they followed in the Quakers’ footsteps, hoping to find God in a closer contact with nature. Ultimately they made their residence in Lock Haven, a small community surrounded by green hills, full of walnut and maple trees. The dusty trail that ran through the town constituted the main road. It was flanked by two parallel streets, one housing a church and the other a small school.

My grandparents made every effort to succeed where their ancestors had failed. They worked without rest from dawn to nightfall. They didn’t have time to study and they weren’t scholars, but they were moralists, humanists and philosophers. They harvested, along with the fruits of their labor, comfort and security for their children, and the prospect that those children would have a better future.

Morgan and Catherine Longcoy died preaching freedom and piety. They left as an inheritance their lands-ripe to be worked-and some savings. Still, their greatest legacy was their love and worship of God, and their honest work.

A few years after their deaths the first Longcoy, their sons David (who would be my father) and Shionn, emigrated from Lock Haven towards the west, towards the vast lands that promised freedom and wealth. The two brothers saw the beautiful town of Benwood from a distance and, filled with hope, decided that their destiny was to live in that countryside. The earth looked fertile, and the majority of the immigrants were Welshmen who had the same ideals and the same veneration for the holy.

They spent their inheritance on four hundred acres, which to them was an immense estate compared to what they remembered of their childhood in Wales. There their ancestors had been controlled by the nobility and had subsisted on tiny pieces of earth. There were no prospects of wealth and one lived with the assurance that one’s children would always suffer the wants of poverty.

David and Shionn carried in their genes their ancestors’ severity and traditions. Like them they worked incessantly and only rested on Sundays, the day for attending religious services.

My father and his brother, confident that the Creator wanted their descendants to spread all over the world, built large houses of walnut and cedar. They painted the interiors white, recalling the aristocrats’ castles in the Old World. In the center of their houses they constructed brick chimneys, red like a June sunset, and they immediately began their search for wives. After their marriages they went on with their farm work, awaiting the promised offspring that would help them cultivate the new and fertile earth.

When my mother told my father that she had been taken pregnant, he began to dream of the strong young man who would resolutely take up his firearm to defend their property from Indian attacks, who would resolutely raise the hoe and dexterously break the earth, who would easily fell enormous trees. My mother, Martha, on the other hand, dreamed of an intelligent child who, like my maternal grandfather, would become a religious apostle and would carry the message of God all over the world.

The day I was born my father, in spite of my chronic cough and my maternal grandmother’s prophecies, announced, Finally God has sent me the son who will transform these prodigious lands into a paradise! He took me in his arms and proclaimed, You will bear the name of the apostle, you will be called John Samuel. Together, my child, we will work this farm like no colonist has ever before!

But my mother gave me her love, smiled at me, and said in a faint whisper, My son will carry the message of God to his kind.

My father devoted himself to his farm with great enthusiasm, working from the crack of dawn until sunset. He lived, like all of his neighbors, under constant threat of attack from either the Indians or the French, the latter of which came from the north claiming the Great Lakes as their own. Even though they believed that they lived in freedom, the colonists had to sacrifice more than half of their earnings to William Penn and his heirs as a result of the Rights of Property.

Ever since I was a child I clung to life-I believed that I had been born for some purpose, although I didn’t know what my destiny was. My sickly body received all the care my mother could lavish me with, my soul was nursed on her affection and my intellect on her teachings.

As had happened in so many of my other lives, as a child I realized that I was different, even if I didn’t know how or why. My infinite memories would often flash before me and I didn’t know if they were real or just dreams. I couldn’t decide if all that was part of my vast imagination or the hallucinations of a person gone temporarily insane. Just as before in my endless past, to be able to survive I had to convince myself that all those images and those infinite memories were the eternal realities of every single human being.

Martha, my mother, was a sweet, contented woman, always ready to serve her husband, to take care of her home, to educate her children and to help out with the farm work. I would often hear her when the moon was high above the horizon, singing or reciting poems to keep herself awake until dawn. After a short rest she would get up and go on with the next day’s work.

My mother was like bright sunshine, her round, rosy appearance attesting to her Nordic ancestry. Surely she was the descendent of some Viking who had invaded the British Isles from Scandinavia in the eighth century. Covered with freckles and donning braided, whitish blond hair, she looked like a matriarch from one of Rafael’s canvases who during the day became a beast of burden.

In contrast to her husband and my uncle, she was intelligent and educated. Her father had been a Protestant minister and in spite of the negative attitudes towards women that prevailed in those unhappy times, she had learned to read and write. Having access to what her father read, she had educated herself. Unfortunately she only read religious books, and thus her vision of the world was very limited and unmistakably dogmatic, and she was not capable of comprehending anything beyond Biblical commandments. She always remained convinced that the only possible path to salvation was to follow what her religious creed preached, and growing up she was very active among the Baptist congregation of her town.

My mother aspired for her first-born to have an extensive education. She saw in me a future pastor, a leader of the community, which is why she insisted that I be educated in spite of my father’s protests. Looking at my emaciated frame, seeing that I was growing into a long, lean post, he eventually gave in to her demands and accepted that he would get little help with the farm work from that sickly, weak child who fainted any time he tried to plow or till on those long, sweltering summer days.

As a child I thought my parents would stay with me my whole life, live with me forever. I believed that their souls always had to be identical to mine, their destinies parallel, and their knowledge unlimited. Later I realized that my parents possessed neither the subtlety of feeling that I did, nor my spirit’s ancestral genius. Unable to appreciate my words, to understand that I was different, to see that I remembered past lives, that I contained the wisdom and reason of other beings, they thought of me just as I had always been thought of-as either a child prodigy or a lunatic!

The land on which we lived was part of the vast territory that England had claimed as its own, in spite of the fact that it had belonged, and until that time had been occupied by, a great number of natives. They were the remnants of the disillusioned and dispossessed tribes scattered by the brutal Iroquois who, when the League of Six Nations was formed, had conquered a third of North America.

Fueled by their zealous fanaticism and encouraged by the monarchies that had sent them to the New World, missionaries wanted to convert the savages that populated the Americas. Protected by the cross, those priests and Protestant ministers (the Jesuits moving in from the north and south and the Anglicans from the east) conquered the peoples of the New World.

In reality the majority of natives, although supposedly converted, didn’t have the slightest idea what Christianity was and couldn’t have cared less about its new doctrines. They were only interested in the white man’s gifts, as well as, tragically, his alcohol. This new fountain of happiness eased the suffering that came as a result of their loss of freedom and territory. As far as the evangelists were concerned their mission had been accomplished. They had brought the catechism and the word of God to the savages.

Abel Morgan, a severe minister of the Baptist church, was my first tutor. According to him, at the age of five I learned to read and write. The truth is that one glance is all I needed to recall the ancient books. From the first day he knew that I was completely different from the rest of his students. He said I shone like a diamond in the rough, like a piece of coal in the winter snow, like a ray of light in the blackness of night and like a drop of dew on the dry desert dunes.

As time passed and I reached adolescence, I slowly began to recall my long existence. Nevertheless I learned to keep quiet, pretending that I was learning the Holy Book. I had memorized those volumes so many times in my long life, I knew by heart those scriptures compiled by so many learned men over the course of the first two millennia of history.

Morgan was no different from those who preached other faiths in other parts of the world. He taught respect and love and the fear of our Creator. He preached, like all the pastors of his generation, with a resounding voice. If anything, he exaggerated the powers of the Most High, promising paradise yet threatening all of us with perdition if we did not submit to God’s will.

In the spring of 1732 my mother rebelled against the edicts of her congregation and overnight we converted to Presbyterianism. According to her, The Baptist religion was not strict enough, it didn’t carry the message of God with enough severity.

I accepted her decision without question, for I knew that all religions were the same and that all carried the same message. The Creator was a single entity, and we must fight for love, freedom, devotion, the unity of all races, the union of nations and the solidarity of all faiths.

My mother devoted herself to the eradication of her Baptist past and she wanted her first son to carry the Presbyterian message to all of humanity. She looked deep into my eyes and announced that that day would be the beginning of a new life. My destiny was to prepare myself to help my kind, to bring the word of God to the world, to promote liberty, and to forever spread a message of peace and equality.

To my mother those beautiful words only applied to the people she considered of her kind. The rest, the majority of the world, didn’t count. That attitude, which would prevail for centuries, wasn’t the result of any prejudice. It was simply a testament to the fact that human intelligence hadn’t evolved enough to be able to understand the implications of those beliefs.

My father used to tell us of the atrocities of war, of the massacre of Indians and of the French, the farmers’ terror and the fear of the new colonists. All had forgotten why they had immigrated to the Americas. Man had once again become the predator he had always been, who sought differences where there were only illusions, who dreamed of genocide and catechized his own kind.

The land was vast and expansive, the population sparse. In spite of that fact, emigrants were concentrated in small villages, fighting for control over territories and the transcendence of their principles. Being tolerant, being free, being Christian, being human-all had been forgotten, those words had lost their meaning.

Pontiac, an Ottawa child, watched his father worshipping the full moon and reflected. The boy would have been seven years old and only his mother, wife of the tribal chief, considered him attractive. His build was lean, his features coarse, and his skin was covered with tattoos of various colors in quadrangles and rhombuses. He wore long earrings and a white stone hung from his nose. His hair was thick and stiff like a horse’s mane and had been shaved at the temples, giving him the appearance of a porcupine.

Like the hair of all the men of our tribe, his grandfather had said.

So our enemies cannot seize us by the hair and slit our throats with their knives, his father had added.

In the summer Pontiac went naked. The women of his tribe covered themselves from the navel down with a small skirt that went no further than their thighs. In the winter, as protection from the cold, they wrapped themselves in animal skins and strong canvas.

I liked to walk along the Ohio, which the redskin called Spay-lay-wi-theepi. Pontiac’s tribe lived on the other bank. Perched at the top of a tree, I used to watch and listen closely to their dialect. Little by little, recalling all my past languages, I learned to speak and understand it.

On a warm, pleasant July day, from the very top of a huge cypress, I searched for Pontiac. I always recognized the child, even when he stood in the middle of the tribe and all of his people were completely painted over like him. His aura was unique, it was always brilliant, of a reddish blue color with shades of dark green. His step was as stealthy as the puma’s and his eye as penetrating as the eagle’s. Unable to find him, I had decided to climb down from my lookout at the top of a pine tree when suddenly I heard a faint sound. I turned my head and saw the redskin child climbing the tree like a snake, carrying a large knife between his teeth. When he realized that I had seen him he took up his tomahawk and readied himself to hurl it and strike me in the chest.

Waraghiyagey!

Why do you act like a coward? I yelled in his language.

Pontiac stopped his arm, lowered the hatchet, slid it into his belt and took the knife from his mouth. You’re the coward, white face! Why are you always spying on us?

I am curious about your race, I answered.

What do you want from us? My father says the land is big enough for everyone, be they white or red. Only I see the evil in you, he added. You desire the death of my brothers.

I looked at him in silence, realizing that the small Indian boy truly knew the white nation. He too had often crossed the river by himself and come as far as our houses. He too had learned our language, which is how he had heard their plans for conquest and for the annihilation of his kind. At that young age Pontiac was a warrior, crafty and intelligent.

I offered him friendship and the cross that I always wore around my neck. He took the crucifix and stuck it on the handle of his knife as an ornament. He didn’t accept my friendship that day but he invited me to go with him to his village. As we were walking he said to me,

You know, John Samuel, everyone knows you’re here. Even the women notice your skinny body, paler than the full moon and more delicate than the thin ice that covers the lakes in the fall.

I looked at him in surprise as he continued, We always know when you come spy on us, day or night. Many times you were within the reach of my knife, I could have killed you but I was curious to know what it was you were after. You never stole, never committed any injustice, that is why I let you live.

The Ottawa had gradually been pushed toward the interior of the border regions of Pennsylvania and northern Ohio. Many had perished from smallpox and other diseases of the white man. Some had dispersed and become members of other tribes. A hundred years ago, this clan, although it wasn’t small now, had been one of the largest in the New World. Now it consisted of just 1700 natives.

When I entered the village all looked at me with suspicion. They were fascinated by the color of my skin and by my yellow hair. As I walked among them I saw the misery in which they lived, their race’s pride and how backward their civilization was. They lived without any technology or tools, had no knowledge of steel or gunpowder or any written language. Certainly they didn’t understand the immensity of Europe or the vast resources possessed by those who were little by little invading their land