Vampires, Monsters and a Sadistic Pope

There are times I really have to wonder what was actually transpiring in that latter part of the 16th century. For those that have had the opportunity to read Shadows of Trinity you're already aware of the situation in Prague and have a good insight into the personality of Pope Sixtus V, whom was already recongised as a butcher by the time the story took place. But it would appear that he was not alone in his desire to shed blood in the most horrific fashions. In fact, there were those performing acts that defy imagination and yet they were in positions of power and social esteem that renders the atrocities inconceivable. Whatever the Golem did, as explained in the novel, paled in comparison to these paragons of Church and Society.
One such paragon was the Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614. Residing in her castle in Slovakia,even though she was referred to as being Hungarian, she was not to distant from the events taking place in Shadows of Trinity. With her inherited wealth, she was one of Hungary's wealthiest women and I wouldn't be surprised if she visited Prague on a regular basis. Like many of the aristocracy in Europe, the inbreeding of families left a genetic imprint that disable young Elizabeth from time to time. From the age of four and a half she began suffering from epileptic fits. Despite being arrogant and spoiled, she was still regarded as intelligent and a suitable prize in marriage.
Therefore it was no surprise when Count Fernencz Nadasdy came knocking on the castle door to ask for the then fifteen year old Elizabeth's hand in marriage. They wed and took up residence in Csjethe Castle in Transylvania. Never one to stay at home, Fernencz left Elizabeth on her own frequently but made certain that he was home long enough to father several children. His long absences drove his wife though to the bring of madness.
In the early 1580's, Elizabeth could no longer deal with the loneliness and the boredom and sought entertainment by torturing her servants. Not just any servants. She exhibited a predilection for young teenage females. The level of the torture which I'm about to describe exceeds even what we would consider sadistic. By all accounts, her tastes were monstrous. She enjoyed playing with fire and this translated into placing combustible wads between the toes of the girls and then setting them alight. As the wads burned, the Countess watched the girls do their frantic dance in an attempt to dislodge them. If she was really bored, Elizabeth would just set the girls on fire and burn them alive. Applying red-hot pincers to various body parts was also a common passtime. Not one to keep the entertainment all to herself, the Countess would force the girls to perform their household duties in full view of male guests that she would invite to her castle. Even her husband would participate in the torture of the girls whenever he returned from his travels.
Fortunately for their son and two daughters they were never involved in witnessing the tortures and their nannies made certain to keep them far enough away from their mother that they were never the victims either.
Some will say that as the Countess's sadistic tastes grew wilder and more extreme, not even her husband could stomach them any longer and his absences grew more frequent. By the time the events of Shadows of Trinity were taking place, Elizabeth already had a string of young men that satisfied her sexual needs but like a black widow spider they never had the opportunity to brag about their conquests of the Countess in the castle. Oddly, even though these crimes were quite evident, as young girls and men disappeared from the countryside, this never became a concern for the Pope that summoned the three heroes to stop the Golem's rampage without even a thought of what was happening nearby. Perhaps this was because the Countess never turned her attentions to the clergy and unlike the Golem wasn't responsible for the death of his nephew.
With the continuous absences of her husband the Countess grew steadily convinced that perhas it was because she was no longer young enough or pretty enough to keep him interested. Her victims of her tortures became as a result girls that were younger and whom she considered prettier. The vanity of the stepmother/witch of Snow White couldn't hold a candle to Elizbeth as she invented new forms of torture in which to delight. One day while having her hair combed, he maidservant accidentally pulled her hair and Elizabeth slapped the girl hard across the face cutting her lip. A few droplets of blood had splashed on to the back of her hand and the Countess became convinced that where it had contacted her skin it was now smoother and softer. At that point she consulted with Ana Darvulia, a local witch that provided potions to the Countess for various ailments and Darvulia explained that the blood of virgins had magical properties one of which was the restoration of youth. No sooner did Elizabeth hear that when she ordered the handmaid's throat cut and her blood drained into her bath. Thus began the end for many a young girl in the community as hundreds were kidnapped and used to fill the bath with blood. Rumour had it that Elizabeth would bite their necks and drink the blood that flowed from the puncture marks she made.
Elizabeth continued her sadistic ritual unabated for years. By the time it ended the number tallied over 600, confirmed by the record book that the Countess kept in her writing desk. The bodies had been burned, buried beneath the castle floors, or tossed into the forests to be devoured by wolves.
Not a word was said and especially not by the clergy who's Pope had a tally of closer to thirty thousand victims of his "so called" freeing the highways of bandits campaign. It wasn't until Elizabeth turned her attentions to young noble girls that the cries of murderer were actually made. Desperate to seek new blood, the Countess stablished a boarding school for girls of noble birth. In this case finishing school meant exactly what it claimed.
Emperor Matthias sent Count Thurzo, to conduct a raid of the castle. What he found horrified them all. One dead girl in the central foyer, one whose body had been pierced with holes barely alive. Several more hanging from the basement rafters their blood draining into the Countess's vat.
In 1610, the Countess and her accomplices were placed on trial. Her husband had been dead for six years already thus escaping justice. They were all found guilty and executed except for the Countess whom was ordered to be imprisoned in a small room of her castle until she died.
This real life Dracula finally died in 1614. Her legancy remains in our legends of Vampires and the haunting of Transylvania. Since my ancestors resided in Peatra Neamt for several generations, the stories of Transylvania were quite well known to them. But what is most remarkable is that for a period of fifty years, some of the most horrific evils were being perpretrated under the reign of Emperor Rudolf II. By comparion, the Golem of Prague, later to become Mary Shelly's Frankenstein monster was not even worth considering to be a monster when standing along side Countess Elizabeth Bathory. But the fact that these two distinct and separate episodes occurred almost simultaneously points to the comments made by Pope Sixus V when he summoned the three, Caesar de Nostradame, Giordano Bruno and Yakov Kahana to stop the murders in Prague, that Armegeddon was upon them. And there is no reason to doubt that in the span of years from 1580 to 1600 there was every reason to believe that Pope Sixtus, a monster in his own right was correct.

Therefore I Am

One would think the words are self-evident. Perhaps even rhetorical and obvious. Yet the more I encounter life, the more I recognize how few of us know where, who or even why we are. Somewhere through life we became unteathered from that which we we want to be. We adopt causes thinking they will give us purpose only to be disappointed when we find that they are not solutions but enigmas in their own right. How is it that we have drifted so far from the core of our existence that we have become strangers in time merely passing through the cosmos of eternity.
Once upon a time "I AM" had meaning and substance. God knew what it meant when he spoke to Moses from the burning bush declaring, "I AM THAT WHICH I AM." He was the everything, the totality of existence. There at the beginning, the middle and the end. There was no doubt in his omnipotent mind of his purpose or his existence. And for the longest time mankind was satisfied that it could be nurtured by its relationship with the Almighty and be certain of its own purpose and existence. But following the Renaissance, the reassurance of purpose and fulfillment became lost in a changing world of science and exploration. That which had grounded us to our past was no longer capable of securing us in the future. Doubts arose and soon people felt lost in the propensity for dynamic change. A new edict was required and thankfully Descartes gave man the ring upon which to grasp and find safe harbour. "I THINK THEREFORE I AM" and once again mankind had something to believe in, a value system upon which to ground his morality. He had himself, the limitless boundaries of his own mind and he reveled in the greatness that man could aspire to.
How long could mankind believe in itself? Not long before the doubts arose once more. With science the ability to destroy and obliterate became increasingly simplistic and soon that same principle which Descartes espoused to the glorification of mankind was now threatening its very survival. The more man thought, the more powerful became his engines of destruction. The Great Wars came and now more than ever mankind pondered his place and purpose in the universe. Science was a false god, feeding the wants and desires but failing to nourish the individual's need to know, 'Why'.
When all appeared lost, there came a single spark of enlightenment from an inconspicuous voice nestled between the two great wars. He represesnted the courage, the youth and vitality of the best of those nations that fought against the tyrrany of the oppressors. He rode the seas, daring the elements and braving the storms of heaven and earth. And though his voice was soft he spoke those immortalize words that Moses first heard from the Creator himself. "I YAM WHAT I YAM". So said Popeye the Sailor Man. Was that truly the best we had to offer?
There is a moral to this story, a purpose and reason that I have told it. More and more I hear people saying what's wrong with this world. It's all going to hell. The predictions of earth's destruction in 2012 (Soon to be a realeased movie by the way starring John Cusak) are met more with a sense of elation than fear. Not that I believe the world will end in 2012 but you would still think people would still be thinking "What if" and "What can we do about it?" What else should I expect or they expect when after three thousand years we've taken God's words and placed them in a mouth of a caricature of irresponsible violence. Popeye really wasn't the poster boy for self-restraint and rational thought. We have left ourselves with nothing to uphold. Our value system has been flushed, our leaders would appear to be in competition to whom can lie, cheat and steal the best, and our youth see video games as reality. Our jobs have become our existence, our families are dysfunctional, our marriages don't last as long as our affairs, and our murder statistics are the only numbers that are constantly improving over time. If the downward spiral is to be stopped, if the dissolution of society is to be thwarted then it is the responsibility of each one of us to provide the subject and verb that precedes "Therefore I Am." In my case I guess it would be "I WRITE THEREFORE I AM." And through my writing I hope that I can reach and change one life at a time. Or perhaps it's my scientific endeavours and I'd say, "I FIND CURES THEREFORE I AM." Either one is a justification of my existence. Perhaps its time for all of us to stand before that burning bush and make our own pronouncement.

Ring of Fire

Science and religion have rarely made the best of bedmates, but when the two worlds are merged into a single entity you find yourself in the presence of greatness. Giordano Bruno was one such man. The mixture of religious doctrine and scientific genius created one of the brightest sparks of mankind. So advanced was his thinking that the Church feared he would bring about their Armegeddon.
Yet, as much as they feared him, they made no immediate attempts to contain his brilliance. One must ask the question, why then after so many years of Giordano Bruno's scientific heresies, philosophizing, womanizing, and contempt for the robes he wore as a Dominican priest, did Pope Clement finally have him burned at the stake. What was it that prevented Clement's predecessor, Sixtus V, a pope notorious for his murdering of close to thirty thousand opponents that he had labelled as brigands from doing so much earlier. And why was it only after Bruno spent two years in Prague, as friend and sometimes confidant of the Emperor Rudolf II, (a man also despised by the Church until they removed him several years after burning Bruno by forcing him to abdicate and naming his brother as Holy Roman Emperor) that the Church finally felt it had to act?
Even then, they could only find the courage to sentence him to death only after eight years of imprisonment. And then the charges by which they convicted him had nothing to do with science but was the result of a new charge, that of denying the Trinity. What exactly did Giordano Bruno confess to that they felt it necessary to extinguish his exceptional brilliance? History is not without its sources that escape the book burnings and bannings in spite of the Church being very thorough in its eradication programs. Many of the clues as to what Giordano Bruno did during those two years in Prague that finally sealed his fate can be read in the book Shadows of Trinity released by Eloquent Books. Bruno was a complex and complicated man, who took a path which led him to his own personal salvation. What he learned about the Trinity in Prague sealed his fate. The two men he befriended while there were feared by the Church as much as he was because they had the capacity to teach Giordano something not even science could provide; the Truth. One was a Karaite Prince, the other the son of the famous seer Nostradamus. United, they were the Trinity. The book is available at the publisher's website http://www.eloquentbooks.com/ShadowsOfTrinity.html or from Amazon Books and Barnes and Noble. Two years in Prague that ultimately changed the world and only then can you appreciate and understand the man, the genius, and the reason the Church feared him most. Once you've read Shadows of Trinity, then the secret that led to his final comment to his inquistors as the flames ringed his body when he stated, “I believe you fear me more than I could ever fear this sentence?”

Religious Intolerance

It's old advice not to talk religion or politics unless you're prepared to lose more friends than make them. But what if you combine them both. Does that make you ultimately friendless? I guess we'll have to explore that hurdle when you come to it.
I found it interesting yesterday that a colleague in the writing venue decided to do a rant on her blog spot when she encountered religious intolerance. She was the victim of someone that painted themselves as a 'good' Christian versus her pagan idolatrous beliefs. Of course her beliefs were neither pagan nor idolatrous but merely the common vogue of espousing the sayings of Nostradamus and talking about the Mayan calendar's prediction of 2012 as the year the world ends. I really don't place much faith in the latter since the Mayans couldn't even predict their own eradication at the hands of the Aztecs. If they couldn't see that coming then I doubt they could predict the end of the world.
Anyways, to make a long story short, this 'good' Christian was offended that someone could believe they knew when the end of the world was coming, since she quoted that no man or woman knows the time when Jesus will return. And anyone that says they do is a false prophet. Funny that! I'd hate to think that the only reason Jesus would return would be so that he could witness the end of the world. Seems like a waste to me.
But focusing back on the intolerance part, why can't someone be allowed to believe in something other than the New Testament end of the world without being the target of abuse and derision? I hardly believe that was what Jesus was trying to teach his followers.
So where's this all leading...good question. It's leading to my comment of how little we understand prophecy in general, especially Nostradamus. As is clearly evident in Shadows of
Trinity, so many of Nostradamus's prophecies were intended to help his son survive the persecution of the Church by guiding him through certain episodes he would encounter. Not predictions of events five hundred years in the future but only several decades after his own death. When placed in their proper context, the quatrains become more of an "Oh Yeah, that was pretty obvious!"
As a Karaite, one of 30,000 remaining in the world, I know what intolerance is all about. We've borne it for two thousand years. Ever since my ancestor Ishmael ben Phiabi turned his back on the Tannim of the time and basically told them that their interpretation of the messiah prophecy was full of s**t, we've encountered that religious and political intolerance from both our own civilisation and that of the outside world. The Kahana Chronicles is a record of that intolerance and it is meant to be held up as a mirror of society. Perhaps if enough people can look at the reflection and decide that they don't like what they see, we can make the world a better place!

Incredible Journey:
Since the first book of the Kahana series has been published (Blood Royale) the question has been frequently asked, where do these ideas come from. The answer to that question is dealt with numerous times in conversations with John Pearce that narrate most of the stories. The tales themselves were passed down, inherited, encoded and for lack of a better word, 'infused.'
For those that have seen the family tree unrolled, it is an impressive sight. Two meters in height and almost five meters fully laid flat in length, it contains close to 50,000 names. With that many names, there's going to be alot of history to write about.
But the problem with history as we're taught it today is that it's viewed under a glass dome as if it's complete, finished; nothing more to learn about it. Sadly, that is far from the truth and most teachers can't comprehend that history is a living, breathing entity that we've only scratched the surface of. For every story of a Tacitus, Herodotus from ancient times or a Gibbons to give it a more modern spin, there are squirrled away somewhere a hundred or so other documents on the same subject, providing a vantage point from a completely different perspective. You have to remember, anything of a differing opinion was publicly burnt well into the eighteenth century. Thousands upon thousands of books, manuscripts and letters with differing opinions. But no matter how hard you try to eradicate those other truths, as the Nag Hamadi findings, the Dead Sea Scolls, the hidden manuscripts of Nostradamus, etc., have shown us, somewhere, someplace, are the original manuscripts just waiting to be discovered.
In that sense we are all on this voyage of discovery. How far that voyage will take us is yet to be determined. And the consequences of those future discoveries will be both amazing and world-defining.
As a young boy, my third great grandfather found a set of books that had been hidden away by his own father and a few generations that preceded him. They were a collection of books considered heretical, and a letter of introduction to the Hapsburg Royal family that was passed down from Emperor Rudolf II of the sixteenth century. A letter which he used to gain entry to the academic world by attending the University of Leipzig and then later to become of service to the Emperor Franz Josef, the decendant of that same Hapsburg family. As for the heretical books he had discovered, they were also from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Passed down by his ancestor of the time to remind him that in spite of living in a Jewish world under the influence of the Rabbis, he in turn was a Karaite and that he must never forget that. The revelation turned him into an outlaw, with an arrest warrant issued by his own hometown should he ever return. He made a decision of conscience, a decision of truth, and as he went forward in his life, becoming a professor at the University of Vienna, I doubt very much he regretted his decision.
Now oddly, I still come across the same prejudices of erroneous Rabbinical teaching that Karaites aren't Jews, Karaites don't exist, or that Karaites were the cause of all the social ills and problems that affected mainstream Jewish society. It's my turn to pick up the guantlet where my third great grandfather left off. To expose the histories that have been buried, to rewrite what currently exists in order to nullify the misconceptions. SHADOWS OF TRINITY is the first to have a major public release to do so. And as they celebrate the events of the 400th anniversary of the Maharal's death in Prague this year, let them answer the questions raised in the book regarding this highly esteemed individual. "If you create a monster to kill, does that not make you a monster in turn?" Once you've read the book, you'll have to answer that question for yourself.