-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
St. James, Moorslayer, and Strike for Spain! It's curious as the dickens that the first Catholic college in the heart of Puritan New England is named Holy Cross and that they named the hill they built on after the patron saint of Spain. All the other Jesuit colleges in the US have benign non-sectarian place names like Georgetown, Fordham, and Boston College or are named after obscure saints. Perhaps it has something to do with Puritan resistance to the college in the first place. In your face Brahmins! The Brahmins wouldn't allow a Catholic college in Boston where a mob had burned the Ursuline Convent in 1834. The inspiration for that debacle was a series of sermons by Yale-man Lyman Beecher, the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was promoting his viciously anti-Catholic A Plea for the West. Beecher claimed there was a Catholic conspiracy to take over America spearheaded by Catholic education, and, by the way, you need to contribute to the seminary I'm building in Cincinnati. Beecher would also inspire another college with a famous connection to African Americans: Oberlin. Unlike daughter Harriet, old Lyman was against mixing races, silent on abolition, and intent on sending free blacks back to Africa. His students at the Lane Seminary revolted against this, seceded and helped start Oberlin College, which openly welcomed African Americans.
Moor on St. James. Although Othello, the Moor of Venice, is often portrayed as a black African, the word Moor has no real ethnological value. The Umayyad Muslims who conquered Spain in the 8th century were primarily white North African Berbers led by an Arab elite. At its pinnacle the Umayyad Caliphate would extend from the Indus River through Persia and Arabia across Nothern Africa into Spain and Southern France. This was not a peaceful conversion. For better or worse, Western Civilization as we know it was saved on the battefields of France and Spain, where the legendary apparition of St. James led a Spanish army to victory over the Islamic invaders.
Spain's troubled relationship with North Africa pre-dates the Umayyads, though. Doesn't everyone with a good classical education know that? Long before Christ and St. James, Celtiberian Spain was conquered by Carthage, the powerful Phoenecian city-state established in Tunsia by colonists from what is now Lebanon. The culture we call Hipsanic today is rooted in the alliance between Spain's Celtiberians and the Romans led by Scipio Africanus, who defeated Carthage and its famous general Hannibal at the battle of Zama on October 19, 202 BC. One can only wonder if Scipio's Celts played ceol baeg on their gaita as they marched into battle. They'll see the Fighting Irish are the Fighting Irish, yet!
While most of us think of Fidel when we hear the word Castro, a Castro is in fact a Celtic hill fort, a la Numantia, the legendary stronghold above the Duero, northeast of Madrid. Voila Mount St. James above the Blackstone. Or should I say, helo aqui!
The Last Days of Numantia -- Alejo Vera
