The Money Trust: Death Merchants of Venice (Part 3 of 5)

322: Genealogy of Venice, America, Yale, and the King-slayers and in defense of the Jews. Standalone reveal of an Ancient Power Structure.

Preface: A Note on Method

What follows is not a conspiracy theory in the conventional sense. Conspiracy theories, as they exist on the internet, are lazy things. They invoke shape-shifting lizards, fabricated bloodlines, and secret committees that have ruled the world since Babylon. They require no evidence because they are immune to disproof. Their architecture is circular, their conclusions predetermined.

This essay proceeds from a different premise. It employs prosopography—the collective study of a group’s common characteristics through their lives, names, and connections—as its method. Prosopography is a legitimate auxiliary science of history. As the historian Lawrence Stone observed, it serves “in uncovering deeper interests and connections beneath the superficial rhetoric of politics, to examine the structure of the political machine and in analysing the changing roles in society of status groups.” It does not imagine conspiracies; it traces patterns. It asks: when a certain name appears again and again at the site of a certain type of political act, is it reasonable to infer a continuity of institutional knowledge?

The pattern that emerges from this inquiry is not a secret committee directing world affairs from a smoky room. It is something more unsettling: a persistent cultural genotype, a set of rites and assumptions about sovereignty that has survived not despite the transformations of Western civilization but through them, adapting its masks while retaining its core. America is not exempt from this inheritance. America is its current and perhaps final expression.

The ancient historian Herodotus, long dismissed as a teller of fables, recorded the essential clues. Of the Thracians he wrote with the contempt of a civilized Greek:

“The Thracians sell their children and let their maidens commerce with whatever men they please.” (Histories V.6)

Yet he also noted something that has puzzled readers for millennia. Describing the Eneti of the Adriatic, ancestors of the Veneti who would found Venice, he observed:

“The Eneti in Illyria have marriage customs that mirror those of the Babylonians.” (Histories I.196)

This is not a random ethnographic aside. It is the first thread in a tapestry stretching from the Black Sea to the Atlantic. The Babylonian connection was specific. Herodotus had described those customs in detail:

“In every village once a year all the maidens of marriageable age were gathered together in one place, while the men stood round them in a circle. Then a herald called up the damsels one by one and offered them for sale, beginning with the most beautiful. When she was sold for a high price, he offered the next most beautiful, and so on. The wealthy men who wanted wives bid against each other for the loveliest ones, while the commoners who were not interested in beauty took the ugly ones along with some money.” (Histories I.196)

The Thracians, the Eneti, the Babylonians—these were not separate peoples in Herodotus’s ethnographic imagination. They were nodes in a network of shared ritual practice. The civilized Greek chronicler, for all his disdain, preserved the essential clue.

Other ancient writers filled in the portrait. Plato, in his Republic, grouped the Thracians with the Scythians as “extravagant and high-spirited.” In his Laws, he portrayed them as a warlike nation, grouping them with Celts, Persians, Scythians, Iberians, and Carthaginians. Tacitus, in his Annals, wrote of them as “wild, savage and impatient, disobedient even to their own kings.” Polybius noted their trickery with truces. Polyaenus and Strabo described how the Thracians “broke their pacts of truce with trickery.” The Dii tribe, according to ancient Roman sources, was “responsible for the worst atrocities in the Peloponnesian War, killing every living thing, including children and dogs in Tanagra and Mycalessos.” The Dii would “impale Roman heads on their spears and rhomphaias.”

This was not mere barbarism. It was a spiritual technology.

The Greek genealogies of the Illyrians encode a hidden covenant, one-eyed and binding. Two versions survive. The first traces Illyrius through Cadmus and Harmonia—the Phoenician prince who slew the dragon and the goddess of harmony, whose name means "agreement," "covenant." Their union produced a lineage cursed by the fabled Necklace of Harmonia, a gift that brought misfortune to every generation that possessed it. The second version traces Illyrius through Polyphemus and Galatea—the one-eyed giant son of Poseidon, whose name means both "many-voiced" and "out of many, one." The Cyclops, the single-eyed being who sees with a unified vision, fathers the Illyrian people. In both myths, the covenant is concealed. Cadmus brings the Phoenician purple to Greece, the royal dye discovered by Herakles the Tyrian, who presented it to King Phoenix as the mantle of sovereignty—a color so rare that only those who ruled could wear it. The Tyrian Herakles, the philosopher-hero, is the bridge: he discovers the royal sign, he bestows it upon the king, and he vanishes into the genealogy of the one-eyed. The Illyrians, born either from the dragon-slayer's cursed harmony or the Cyclops's singular vision, are the heirs of a covenant that binds sovereignty to sacrifice, kingship to the single eye that watches from the center of the storm. Out of many, one. One eye. One blood. One pact.

Part I: The Wolf-Skin and the Name

The Thracians and their northern cousins, the Dacians and Getae, were not a unified nation but a constellation of tribes sharing a common spiritual technology: the wolf-warrior initiation. The Dacian name itself, as recorded by Hesychius of Alexandria and analyzed by the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, derives from the Phrygian word daos, meaning “wolf.” The Dacians were, literally, “the wolves.” Their young men underwent an initiation, perhaps lasting a year, during which they lived as outlaws—as wolves—circling villages and taking what they needed. Hittite laws referred to such fugitive outlaws as “wolves.” The initiation was a ritual death and rebirth, a transformation into a predator.

Traces of this cult appear in the Neolithic Vinča culture: wolf statues, figurines of dancers wearing wolf masks. The items, archaeologists suggest, “could indicate warrior initiation rites, or ceremonies in which young people put on their seasonal wolf masks.” The element of unity, Eliade argued, was “the magical-religious experience of mystical solidarity with the wolf by whatever means used to obtain it.” All such cults, he observed, “have one original myth, a primary event.”

The Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh contains the story of a shepherd transformed into a wolf by the goddess Ishtar, becoming a predator to his own flocks. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, in the Old Testament account, suffered a mental collapse in which he “was driven from human society to live among wild beasts,” taking on the behavior of an animal—a narrative widely linked to ancient werewolf legends. The wolf-transformation was not folk superstition; it was embedded in the highest levels of Near Eastern royal ideology.

This was a Männerbund—a secret brotherhood of warriors bound by a shared ordeal rather than mere blood. Eliade called it “a military initiation, potentially reserved to a secret brotherhood of warriors.” The wolf-skin was the badge of membership. The act of killing and taking trophies—heads, scalps, sacred objects—was the sacrament.

Part II: The Geography of the Wolves

To understand the elite, one must draw a boundary around their crucible. The territory forms a rough arc stretching from the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea, through the Carpathian basin, down into the Balkans, and across into northwestern Anatolia. In modern terms, this encompasses Moldova, Transylvania (central Romania), southern Ukraine, northeastern Greece, European Turkey, and the Anatolian shore of the Black Sea. This is the land of the wolf.

The timeline of the tribes that inhabited this zone reveals a continuous pattern of predation, migration, and absorption:

3500 BC: The Thracian culture emerges during the early Bronze Age. From it develop the Getae, the Dacians, and other regional tribal groups. Archaeological records indicate the culture flourished in the third and second millennia BC.

8th-7th centuries BC: The migration of the Scythians from the east into the Pontic Steppe pushes the Agathyrsi, a Scythic people, westward into the territories of present-day Moldavia, Transylvania, and possibly Oltenia. There they “mingled with the indigenous population which was of Thracian origins,” eventually becoming “completely assimilated by the Geto-Thracian populations.” The fortified settlements of the Agathyrsi become “the centres of the Getic groups who would later transform into the Dacian culture.” An important part of the Dacian people was descended from the Agathyrsi.

7th century BC: The Thracian Treres tribe crosses the Bosporus and invades Anatolia. Under their king Kobos, in alliance with the Cimmerians and the Lycians, they attack Lydia and capture Sardis, the Lydian capital. The Lydian king Ardys may have been killed in this attack. Herodotus, our witness, records the Babylonian-Lydian customs that permeated this region—the marriage markets, the sacred prostitution, the cult of the great goddess.

513 BC: Darius I of Persia crosses the Bosporus and campaigns against the Scythians. Most eastern Thracian tribes submit, except the Getae, who are defeated. The new satrapy, named Skudra, is created—derived from the Scythian name Skuδa, the self-designation of the Scythians. The Thracians and Scythians are administratively fused under Persian rule.

5th century BC: The Odrysian kingdom emerges as the first large political entity in the eastern Balkans. Thucydides records that it was “very powerful, and in revenue and general prosperity exceeded all the nations of Europe which lie between the Ionian Sea and the Euxine.” A new and powerful elite accumulates “a wealth of precious artifacts of both local and regional origin.” Their tombs contain “splendid sets of head and body ornaments” and “finely crafted and rather impressive gold funeral masks.” These are warrior burials with weapons and gold pectorals.

431-404 BC: The Peloponnesian War. The Dii, a Thracian tribe, commit the worst atrocities of the conflict, killing every living thing at Tanagra and Mycalessos. Athens hires these Thracian mercenaries as instruments of state terror. The war is a feeding ground for the wolf-warriors, who learn the vulnerabilities of the Greek city-states firsthand. The Spartan-led Peloponnesian League, the ultimate victor, is entangled with Thracian and Illyrian alliances throughout. Plato, writing in the aftermath, groups the Thracians with Scythians, Persians, and Celts as the warlike nations.

4th century BC: Celtic groups push into the Carpathian region and the Danube basin. The Boii and Volcae, two large Celtic confederacies, move south via two major routes: one following the Danube, another eastward from Italy. According to legend, 300,000 Celts move into Italy and Illyria. By the 4th century BC, the Adriatic Veneti have been so Celticized that Polybius writes they are “identical to the Gauls except for their language.” Yet Strabo connects these Adriatic Veneti to the Celtic Veneti of Armorica on the Atlantic coast—a closed circuit of maritime warrior-merchants stretching from the Black Sea to Brittany.

279 BC: The Gallic invasion of Greece. Celtic tribes raid Dardania on their way to plunder the treasuries of Greek temples. An unnamed Dardanian king offers 20,000 soldiers to help the Macedonians, but Ptolemy Keraunos refuses and dies fighting the Celts. The Celts are eventually defeated at Delphi and withdraw north, passing through Dardania, where they are “completely destroyed by the Dardani.” Some Celts cross into Anatolia and settle in the region named after them: Galatia.

By the middle of the 4th century BC: A Getic kingdom thrives for a century, with its capital at Helis, housing some 10,000 inhabitants. The first Getic king to appear in the sources is Cothelas, who marries his daughter Meda to Philip II of Macedon.

The threads are now visible. The Scythians, Thracians, Dacians, Getae, Celts, and Illyrians are not separate peoples. They are overlapping waves of the same predatory elite culture, sharing wolf-initiation rites, trophy-taking practices, and a common relationship to the civilized states to their south. The Peloponnesian War was their laboratory. The Macedonian court was their gateway. Rome would be their vehicle.

Part III: Armorica and the Atlantic Circuit

Armorica is the missing link that closes the circuit. The name itself is a Latinized form of the Gaulish Aremorica, literally “place in front of the sea.” The Slavs use a similar formation, Po-mor-jane, to designate the inhabitants of Pomerania(Slavs)—”those in front of the sea.” The Gaulish and Slavic peoples, seemingly separated by half a continent, share a linguistic DNA that points to a common maritime orientation.

Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, claims Armorica was the older name for Aquitania and states its southern boundary extended to the Pyrenees. He lists the Celtic tribes living in the area: the Boii, the Senones, the Veneti, and others. The Boii and Senones are the same tribal names that appear in the Gallic invasions of Italy and the Balkans. The Veneti of Armorica share their name with the Veneti of the Adriatic. Strabo explicitly connects them, conjecturing that the Adriatic Veneti were descended from Celts related to the Armorican tribe of the same name.

The Armorican Veneti were a maritime power. Caesar describes their ships, built of solid oak with iron chains for rigging and leather sails, designed to withstand Atlantic storms. They controlled the trade between Armorica and Britain, a connection described by Diodorus Siculus and implied by Pliny. Caesar notes that “continued resistance to Roman rule in Armorica was still being supported by Celtic aristocrats in Britain.” The channel between Brittany and Cornwall was not a barrier but a highway.

Archaeological sites along the south coast of England, notably at Hengistbury Head, show connections with Armorica as far east as the Solent. This prehistoric connection between Cornwall and Brittany “set the stage for the link that continued into the medieval era.” Still farther east, the typical Continental connections of the Britannic coast were with the lower Seine valley—Armorica, again.

When the Roman legions withdrew from Britain in 407 AD, the local elite expelled the civilian magistrates. Armorica rebelled in the 430s and again in the 440s, throwing out Roman officials just as the Romano-Britons had done. At the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451, the Roman coalition under Aetius included “Armoricans and other Celtic or German tribes,” as recorded by Jordanes in his Getica.

Then, during the poorly documented period of the fifth to seventh centuries, the Armorican peninsula came to be settled with Britons from Britain. Even in distant Byzantium, Procopius heard tales of migrations from the island of Brittia. The settlers made their presence felt in the naming of the westernmost provinces: Cornouaille, meaning “Cornwall,” and Domnonea, meaning “Devon.” These names are a living map of an elite migration that maintained its identity across the sea.

The circuit is now complete. The Veneti of the Adriatic, the Veneti of Armorica, the Veneti of the Vistula (whom Tacitus connects with the Slavs)—all derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root wen-, meaning “to strive, to wish for, to love,” yielding Sanskrit vanas- “lust, zest,” Old Irish fine “kinship, kinfolk, alliance, tribe, family,” and Old English wine “friend.” The root encodes the bond of the Männerbund: kinship by initiation, alliance by oath, tribe by shared ordeal. VENI, VEDI, VECI?

Armorica is the Atlantic terminus of a maritime network that stretched from the Black Sea to the British Isles. The wolf-warriors who crossed the Bosporus in the seventh century BC, the Celtic confederacies that invaded Greece in the third century BC, the Venetic merchants who plied the Adriatic, and the British chieftains who resisted Rome—they were all nodes in the same circuit. The elite did not migrate in a single direction. It circulated.

Part IV: The Macedonian Marriage and the Lion-Skin

The Getic king Cothelas made a decision that would alter the course of Mediterranean history: he married his daughter Meda to Philip II of Macedon. This was not a trivial diplomatic arrangement. Philip, the conqueror of Greece, took a Getic princess as his wife—after Olympias, the mother of Alexander. The marriage “probably happened during or shortly after Philip’s conquest of the Odrysians.” It was an alliance, but more than an alliance: it was an injection of the wolf-bloodline into the Argead royal house.

When Philip died, Meda committed suicide, according to N.G.L. Hammond, “so that she would follow Philip to Hades.” The Macedonians, “who were not used to such honours to their kings by their consorts, buried her with him at the Great Tumuli of Vergina, in a separate room.” The second larnax found in the tomb, with its gold myrtle wreath, may belong to her. The Getic princess was given a royal burial in the heart of Macedonian power.

Alexander the Great conquered the Achaemenid Empire and died without a clear heir. Into the vacuum stepped the Diadochi. Among them was Cassander, educated alongside Alexander under Aristotle at the Lyceum in Macedonia. Cassander would prove the most ruthless executor of what we must now call a pattern.

Cassander systematically murdered the Argead dynasty. He had Alexander IV, the legitimate heir, poisoned along with Roxana. He allowed Olympias to be executed. When Polyperchon promoted Heracles, Alexander’s illegitimate son, as the true heir, Cassander bribed Polyperchon to kill the boy. Diodorus Siculus records that Cassander was “responsible for the deaths of more Argeads than other Diadochi.”

What did Cassander place on his coins? The lion-skin cloak. He “followed Alexander’s own precedent and had himself or the dead king wearing a lion-skin cloak stamped on one side of his coins.” The lion-skin is the attribute of Herakles, the hero who performed twelve labors, who served a lesser king, who wore the skin of the Nemean lion he had strangled with his bare hands.

But Herakles is not merely a Greek myth. He is the Hellenization of an older figure: Sandon, the indigenous Luwian/Anatolian god of Tarsus, depicted on fourth-century BC coins standing on a horned lion, holding a sword or double-axe. The Persian satraps of Cilicia—Datames and Mazaeus—minted these coins using Greek engravers and Greek inscriptions, creating the iconographic bridge between the Anatolian god and the Greek hero. Sandon himself is a local manifestation of Nergal, the Mesopotamian god of war and the underworld, whose consort is Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead.

Herakles, the lion-slayer, the one who wears the beast’s skin, is the recurring idol of this elite. He appears as Sandon in Tarsus, as Nergal in Babylon, as the Tyrian Herakles who discovered the purple dye and presented it to King Phoenix, as the Herakles whom Alexander the Great claimed as his ancestor, as the Herakles whose lion-skin Cassander stamped on his coins. He appears in the founding myth of Eraclea, the first capital of Venice, a city whose very name means “City of Herakles” and whose official designation was Civitas Nova Heracliana—”New City of Herakles.”

When Alexander the Great wore the lion-skin, he was not merely imitating a Greek myth. He was signaling his membership in a fraternity that stretched back through the Persian satraps of Cilicia to the Anatolian god-kings and forward to the Venetian Doges. The lion-skin is the wolf-skin, sublimated. The predator’s pelt is the badge of sovereignty.

Part V: The Name as Cipher

The Roman naming system was a genealogical archive. The praenomen was the personal name; the nomen indicated the gens; the cognomen specified the family branch. Certain names were closely guarded, passed down as markers of identity.