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Saturday, 21 June 2025

I Only Learned of the Star Spangled Story from "El pendón estrellado"


Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: If Demons Go, Will Protesters or ICE Lose Energy? · New blog on the kid: I Only Learned of the Star Spangled Story from "El pendón estrellado"

I checked out what the melodic similarity was between Star Spangled Banner and We Wish You a Merry Christmas. Both involve a dance rhythm known as polonaise mostly and in Swedish as polska. I think there are some bars that coincide too. Others don't.

But there is a spiritual connection. Perhaps of parody or substitute religion, or perhaps, like I hope, of a godwilled echo.

What Francis Scott Key saw across a battlesmoke, that is pretty precisely what God's good angels saw on Christmas day or over Calvary. Or what Gabriel saw in Mary: one undefeated and undefiled by Satan. It is also what St. Helen saw when digging in Calvary's ground.

And precisely, Francis Scott Key wrote the poem on September 14, the feast recalling how the Holy Cross found by Helen was solemnly elevated in the Cathedral of Jerusalem. The finding itself is commemorated May 3rd. Most flags across Christendom echo the labarum of Constantine, and his mother Helen found the original behind that labarum.

Fort McHenry ... is best known for its role in the War of 1812, when it successfully defended Baltimore Harbor from an attack by the British navy from Chesapeake Bay on September 13–14, 1814.


Perhaps not totally unfittingly, since the independence began at Boston, a city named for a city named for an exorcist. You see, Boston is not the first place which is called Boston. An older Boston had begun in Lincolnshire, and in 1460, you find Botulfeston mentioned as sometimes contracted to Boston.

[The town] ... is often linked to the monastery established by the Saxon monk Botolph at "Icanhoe" on the Witham in AD 654 and destroyed by the Vikings in 870, but this is doubted by modern historians.


Why so?

The early medieval geography of The Fens was much more fluid than it is today, and at that time, the Witham did not flow near the site of Boston.


OK, in other words, Boston was displaced after Viking destruction in a way that followed the displacement of the Witham? Makes sense, if true. Or, perhaps, they prefer imagining it was in Suffolk? Well, I've seen Swedish historians say Ansgar came to a Situna close to an Uppsala, not in the Mälar Valley, but in Westrogothia. Popular theory when I was a teen, now largely abandoned.

Botolph founded the monastery of Icanho. Icanho, which means 'ox hill', has been identified as Iken, located by the estuary of the River Alde in Suffolk; a church still remains on top of an isolated hill in the parish. At the time, the site was a tidal island all but surrounded by water, but Botolph attracted other monks and hermits and together they turned areas of marsh and scrub into productive grazing and farm land. The monks built several structures, and the monastery grew. Botolph also worked as an itinerant missionary in East Anglia, Kent and Sussex.


So, earlier identification of Icanho, Boston of Lincolnshire. What wiki doesn't mention is, when St. Botolph arrived, the place was infested with demons and he singlehandedly made an exorcism, delivering the place.

He is regarded as the patron saint of boundaries, and by extension, of trade and travel,[3] as well as various aspects of farming. His feast day is celebrated either on 17 June (England) or 25 June (Scotland).


Of boundaries? Well, the one between US and UK seems to have been more stable than the one between US and Spanish immigrants (or in some same states also not least Spanish first-arrivers). And of trade? Well, that was the quarrel between England and US back in 1773. Tax on traded goods.

Whatever outcome you hope for in the quarrels in the US, how about invoking St. Botulph?

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Aloysius Gonzaga*
21.VI.2025

PS, the distance from Iken to Boston is c. 111 miles, depending on road choice. The story of St. Botwulf as an exorcist, see paper from Suffolk institute. If Iken was the original place for the monastery, it is possible that monastery or community around it were refounded elsewhere after the Viking raid. It would if so parallel how, if Dörpfeld is right, the original Ithaka of Ulysses was Santa Maura or Leucada, while Thiaki got the name later, when Santa Maura was under Doric domination after the Doric invasion. The Ionic islands are a Catholic enclave in Greece./HGL

* The feast day of this Latino is four days before or after the Saxon or Englishman I mentioned above.

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