Hi Rich
apparently the study of Juan Antonio Jiménez Sánchez de la Profesor titular
Departamento de Prehistoria, Historia Antigua y Arqueología Doctor en Geografía
e Historia por la Universidad de Barcelona has determined that the name Magonia
is a mistake made by Agobardo in his text. really the term would be Maonia.
Interesting.
MAONIA????
Copyright
2022, José Antonio Caravaca
No. I
was not mistaken when I wrote it. Magonia, the mythical kingdom that inspired
Jacques Vallée for the title of his book Passport to Magonia (1969) never existed,
at least not with that name.
An
interesting study by Juan Antonio Jiménez Sánchez of the Department of
Prehistory, Ancient History and Archaeology, PhD in Geography and History at
the University of Barcelona, shows that it was probably a mistake by Agobardo
de Lyon when transcribing the story of some villagers who told him about beings
that with magical arts stole their crops.
In a
documented work entitled "Magonia or Maonia? On the origins of the name of
a mythical land" (25/06/2020), Jiménez Sánchez said that: "The name
of Magonia, the mythical country from which some flying ships arrived whose
aeronauts carried away the fruits fallen by the action of hail, has become
extraordinarily famous in recent centuries, especially among the ufologists of
the 20th century, who have tirelessly cited it as an example of UFO sightings
in medieval times.
However,
this oft-repeated name actually corresponds to a hapax [said only once] that we
only document in Agobardo of Lyon, who cites it on a single occasion in his De
grandine et tonitruis (written ca. 816).
After
the discovery of Agobardo's works in 1605, the toponym gained in importance to
the point that the famous ufologist Jacques Vallée entitled his best known work
Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (1969); moreover, one of
the best known magazines on the subject is also called Magonia. Florus of Lyons
(ix century) also included the name of this land in a scholium to a work by
Augustine of Hippo, although on this occasion the deacon of Lyons called this
land Maonia as well as its inhabitants Maones -Agobard, on the other hand, only
alluded to the name of the land, but never to that of its inhabitants, who by
logic should be "Magonians"-.
These
differences lead us to ask ourselves what was the original name of this place
and how this toponym came to be, questions to which, as far as possible, we
intend to offer an answer in these pages".After studying all the
historical sources, the historian managed to find the first reference: "The
first testimony is documented in the Vita Richarii primigenia, the oldest of
the biographies we have preserved about Ricarius, the founder of the monastery
of Centula (today's abbey of Saint Ricarius, in Picardy) ca. 625.
According
to Albert Poncelet (1903, 184), the writing of this uita should be placed at
the end of the 7th century. In its second chapter, the anonymous author
narrates the conversion to Christianity of Ricarius thanks to the preaching of
Ficor and Caidoc, two Irish missionaries who had come to evangelize the county
of Ponthieu. However, once there, they were received in a hostile manner by the
inhabitants of the territory, who accused them of being dusi - the name given
to witches - and hemaons. They were saved from the aggression of the locals only
thanks to the timely intervention of the young Ricarius (...)
As we
can see, the name hemaones appears here associated with the theft of crops.
This association is confirmed in other sources of the following century".
Another source found by the scholar corresponds to the missionary monk
Pirminius that his work Scarapsus (Composed in the second quarter of the 8th
century between 725 and 750). In chapter 22: "Pirminius censured some of
the customs that the Christians of his time had inherited from their pagan
ancestors. Among them was the belief in the tempestarians, individuals capable
of provoking storms with their will alone. Pirminius also asked the faithful
not to give anything to those who claimed that the maons could take away the
fruits of the harvest - and that, consequently, in exchange for payment they
could prevent them from being stolen". The references to the term mauones
continue: "We also document this term with slight differences in the other
testimony of the viii century. It is an anonymous sermon that has not yet been
fully edited. It was partially published by Wilhelm Levison in 1946 (...)
In a
passage of this sermon, the anonymous preacher begs his listeners not to
believe in mauons, who are said to be able to steal crops, since this is a superstition
inherited from the pagans that anyone in his right mind would reject without
hesitation (...) In this case, the dialectal variant corresponds to mauons, but
the meaning remains the same: thieves of crops by magical means".-The name
Magonia would have been created and Latinized from the first part of
maganwetar, which would have lost its second half". And were they magical
beings: "Monica Blöcker (1981, 124) connected the name Magonia with the
maones spoken of by Pirminius and considered that these crop thieves were
linguistically and factually appropriate to the country of Magonia ("Zu
dem Land Magonia passen sprachlich und sachlich die maones, die
Ernteräu[1]ber").
Karl
Heidecker (1995, 179) also made the same association and raised the interesting
question as to whether perhaps, underneath the belief in the maones - the
itinerant criminals suspected of stealing the harvest through their demonic
powers - what was actually hidden was the fear of the vagabond people who were
thought to cheat and steal the harvest in order to make a living." He only
said that they came to the diocese of Lyon in ships that flew over the clouds
in order to carry away the fruits fallen by the hail, which in turn had been
caused by the storms; he did include, however, the name of his native land. But
it is very likely that when he heard that the peasants told him that his name
was Maonia, Agobardo thought that this name did not make any kind of sense
(perhaps because he considered that the rustics did not pronounce it well?), so
he decided to modify it in order to give it some logical meaning. And
considering that the Maons were magicians, Agobardo thought that his homeland
should be called Magonia, that is, "Land of the Magicians", and so he
wrote it down in his work.
Consequently,
this name had an eventful history. It had its most remote origin in a real
toponym -Hemonia (or Thessaly), the cradle of magic-, to later lose this
generic component -so that the Hemaones or Maones would be just another
category of magicians- and recover it in the 9th century with Agobardo, through
the creation of the name of a land already absolutely mythical and fabulous,
Magonia, the place from which some ships came flying above the clouds".
Passport to Maonia ....
JAC
