These are the legends about Charlemagne and his Paladins, not the actual history, so there will be dragons, monsters and magic. FOR MY FIRST CHAPTER ON CHARLEMAGNE’S PALADINS CLICK HERE.
ASTOLPHO RESTORES ROLAND’S SANITY – Picking up where we left off, the Paladin Astolpho and St. John returned from the moon in the latter’s flying chariot and entered the saint’s palace on a mountaintop. (Yes, I just typed those words.)
Astolpho carried with him the bottle filled with Roland’s sanity from the moon’s Valley of Lost Things. St. John, who was ready to return to Heaven now, parted company with Astolpho by giving him a salve which would heal the blindness of the Abyssinian (Ethiopian) King Senapus.
Mounting his winged hippogriff (part horse, part eagle), our hero flew down from the mountaintop and returned to the court of King Senapus. When he used the salve to cure the king’s blindness, Senapus felt doubly indebted to the Paladin.
Not only had Astolpho driven off or killed all of the Furies preying on Abyssinia, but now that he had restored King Senapus’ vision, he granted the Frankish warrior a boon. Continue reading
ASTOLPHO IN THE VALLEY OF LOST THINGS – When we left Emperor Charlemagne’s Paladin Astolpho, he had flown his hippogriff to the peak of the Mountain of the Furies where he was greeted by the one and only St. John the Apostle. 
Balladeer’s Blog continues its examination of the many facets of Fool Killer lore.
PART SEVEN: The seventh surviving Fool Killer Letter. (See Part One for an explanation.) 
ASTOLPHO IN ETHIOPIA – When we left Charlemagne’s Paladin Astolpho, he had just vanquished the evil sorcerer Atlantes, then freed all of the captives in his invisible castle. Among those captives was the great Roland, the Emperor’s nephew and most accomplished warrior. 
These are the legends about Charlemagne and his Paladins, not the actual history, so there will be dragons, monsters and magic. 
In the Zoroastrian version of the end times the Big Event will happen 3,000 years after Zoroaster/ Zarathustra introduced the world to the belief system that bears his name. For those who date Zoroaster’s birth to around 1,000 BCE that means the end could come any year now, but for those who date his birth closer to 600 BCE the world still has hundreds of years to go. 
CHUP – The sun god of the Ainu. His wife is Tombe, the moon goddess. Ainu homes orient their sacred window toward the east to greet the rising sun. Until recent decades it was customary to salute the sun upon exposure to its rays, similar to the practice of genuflecting to the center of an altar, but done without kneeling. 
Labor Day weekend is the appropriate time to post this look at neglected working class folk hero Joe Magarac. This figure was the Steel Mill equivalent of Paul Bunyan and John Henry. 
As a lame play on words since this is Labor Day season I’ll present Joe Magarac’s origin and then depict his tales as “Labors” like in The Labors of Hercules. 
The Etruscan people, who were a bit of a bridge between the ancient Greek world and the emerging Roman world long ago, remain a historical enigma in so many ways. 
TINIA – The Chief of the Etruscan deities, like Zeus to the Greeks and Jupiter to the Romans. In the Etruscan creation myth Tinia separated the Earth from the sky and delineated borders between nations. Tinia ruled the sky and wielded three sorts of lightning bolts – one sort for warnings, one sort for intervening in affairs of gods or men for good or ill and one sort for inflicting catastrophes. 
3. SILA – The god of the weather and of the animating life-force, frequently manifested as the winds, which were looked on as the “breathing of the world.” For this reason he was also the deity governing the breathing of humanity and animals as well, since breath flows like wind in and out of us all. The life force was said to come from Sila and flow back into Sila after death, and then, through the lesser deities, was eventually sent back into the world via reincarnation. Because singing, humming and tale-spinning are also done with the breath Sila was also seen as the god of songs, tales, music and other creative inspiration. 
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