“… I am the Beauty who is not afraid to utter her name…”

This statement, uttered by a dancing priestess of the cult of the Mother Goddess, perfectly summarizes an entire vision of the world and of life, that of the Sardinians who, in the 3rd and 2nd century BC. opposed the repeated Roman invasion attempts. In these peremptory words there is all the pride of being a Woman in an era and place – Ancient Sardinia – in which every woman was considered a living Divinity. Vanity – the true essence of the Feminine Principle of the Cosmos. Far from being opposed or stigmatized, she was instead absolutely encouraged – in both men and women – as the engine of all things, the real force that leads every living creature to to fully realize itself, and every human being to make his/her life a work of art.

“…Vanity makes flowers bloom and makes the stars shine…
Vanity stimulates a boy to become a Man,
and inspires a girl to transform herself into a magical creature:
the Woman…”

It is no coincidence that in ancient languages the word Vanity has the same etymology of Woman, Vagina, Swan. Just as the fact that the ancient Sardinian tombs were oriented towards the twelve stars of the Cygnus constellation is emblematic of an entire world… an indication of the place to which we will all return: the sweet and welcoming womb of the Great Mother Goddess.

Conversely, it is the vainglory that is stigmatized as a degeneration of vanity. If vanity is what drives us to realize our dreams, making us proud of our marvelous originality, vainglory is what instead delegitimizes these aspirations when ambition turns into an obsession capable of destroying those around us and the world. around us. In the Sandahlia Saga all the characters – male and female, positive and negative – constantly experience this inner conflict, some emerging from it strengthened, others condemning themselves to a constant sense of predestination to defeat.

In a world with these cultural and spiritual foundations, Women and Men, who want to give meaning to their lives, try to standardize their lives respectively to the feminine principle and the masculine principle of the cosmos.

The Woman – Living Divinity – must embody the values of harmony, creative energy and sacredness in the worthiest way possible. These are the values on which the Universe is based on. And Man must literally let himself be invested, influenced, inspired by those values, so that he can ascend to the mystical role of Guardian of the Sacred. The male of the human species, who acts in a self-referential manner, therefore without a Soul, is the most dangerous being in creation. Instead, the man who acts within the framework of the Feminine Principle of the Cosmos will have given the most complete and profound meaning to the very essence of his own virility. “…

“…the Woman is born a Goddess, but the Man can be a Hero…”

The iconic image that best demonstrates this concept, moreover testified by several sources and various archaeological finds, is the Capanna delle Adunanze (the Meeting Hut) at the Sanctuary of Santa Vittoria di Serri, in Southern Sardinia, Italy. In this place, with a circular structure – so as to allow those present to look at each other in the face, without external manifestations of someone’s pre-eminence over the others – the village leaders of the area met to decide the destiny of their territory when a natural disaster or a invasion from outside could endanger its existence. Well, this assembly of leaders and great warriors did not begin if at the center of it there was not the sacred woman who guarded the source of the nuraghe in the area. It was she, with her presence alone, who legitimized that assembly: she alone could decree its beginning, development and conclusion.

“… she may not vote or even intervene,
but it is she, the Shaman, who interrupts with a single glance
the intervention of a warrior who is contrary to the laws of the cosmos
or instead approves the speech of a Chief who is in perfect harmony with them.
She inspires and guides the correct development of that sacred assembly…”

In the world of Sandahlia, so strongly permeated by these suggestions, the women and men of ancient Sardinia follow a so-called poetic vision of existence, which is perfectly consistent with the very essence of their ancestral wisdom: everything is made of Music and that human beings are a living melody, three thousand years before quantum physics came to the same conclusions. In the Sandahlia Saga, the greatest divinity is in fact the Mother Goddess, the Dreaming Absolute, or rather the mystical synthesis of all the melodies of the cosmos.

Nuraghes, sacred wells, giants’ tombs are nothing more than the stone architectures through which the Sardinians dialogued with the Absolute, managing to obtain from the Mother Goddess mystical abilities and divinatory, curative and creative powers through the sacredness of particular Rites.

“…With his own words, dances and melodies,
Man fecundates the melodies of heaven and earth,
creating the en-chantment and making everything sacred…
the Miracle of life lies in the encounter
between the Music of Man and the Music of the Absolute…”

When Rome – and Carthage before it – tried unsuccessfully to conquer Sardinia, it did not find itself colliding with people, who simply yearned for their own freedom and autonomy, but against an entire universe of Ancestral Traditions and mystical suggestions that made their vision of the world and of life absolutely opposite and irreconcilable with the Roman one, and which can be easily summarized in the different consideration that the two peoples had of the female figure: in Rome, a woman was a “thing” that passed from the father’s patrimony to that of the husband; in Sandahlia, she was the center of everything.

But even if the Romans never managed to triumph in Sardinia, the time was now ripe for a certain way of seeing things – Roman, in fact – to spread everywhere, condemning the then known world to a more cynical and obtuse approach on a spiritual level, and rational and leveling on the cultural level. A development of historical events for which we are paying the consequences today, with a Planet and a Humanity that are devastated by the triumph of the worst aspects of the Masculine Principle of the Cosmos. However, it is precisely in the very essence of Ancient Wisdom that Hope germinates: Everything is cyclical, even the boring and dangerous banality of the System in which we live. And from those places in ancient Sardinia, never defeated by Roman imperialism, the music and the songs that still praise the Dreaming Absolute, our Great Mother Goddess do rise:

“…Over time, Sandahlia
attracted the rapacious gazes of Punics and Romans…
many, along the coasts, succumbed
to the lure of gold or the threat of arms
But in the heart of Sandahlia
free tribes of holy warriors
stood up with honor to the old and new invaders…
On the score of their souls,
one melody towered over all the others:
the Dreaming Absolute…”

THE SAGA OF SANDAHLIA
BETWEEN HYSTORY AND NARRATIVE FICTION

A DIFFERENT READING OF THE EVENTS

Sandahlia is the historical-epic saga that tells the epos of the people who dared to challenge Rome: the Sardinian people of the 3rd and 2nd centuries. B.C. These are historical events almost completely unknown to the general public, including the Sardinians themselves. And this is already sufficient motivation to set in motion one’s creative and organizational energies to give life to a project of such proportions.

The goal is precisely to open a window (and from this window to be able to look with different eyes) on a historical period that almost all of the official academic historiography wanted to focus on Rome and its rise, first in Italy and then in the Western Mediterranean area, following the three victorious wars fought with the other great power of the future mare nostrum: Carthage. And yet, I think it is necessary to underline how, from a careful analysis of the sources at our disposal, we can calmly affirm that in the heart of the Mediterranean, on the island of Sardinia, a people strenuously defended their cultural, political, social and spiritual originality, giving life to a very tough opposition to the attempts of the Roman domination. An epic, in fact, dotted with 11 major conflicts between Sardinians and Romans, between the second half of the third century B.C. (period of Roman infiltration) and the second half of the following century.

It is quite clear that a historiographical (and narrative) operation of this kind would in any case be useless if the magnifying glass (i.e. the interpretative perspective) with which we look at these historical events could not free itself from an approach, totally dominant among the academics, imbued with a Philosophy of History which sees in Rome the providential instrument of a destiny of progress and prosperity for the human race. This vision is so conditioned as to concentrate its studies and conclusions, in fact, only on the times and modes
of Roman affirmation in the known ancient world.

On the other hand, we want to go beyond certain fences that are too presumptuously raised and too passively accepted, proposing a different (and equally valid) interpretation of the events and a consequently different philosophy of history with which to frame and define them. Because only through a more balanced vision of history and historical sources will we be able to restore dignity to the centuries-old war between Sardinians and Romans for the dominion of the island and perhaps (why not?) even arrive at affirming the very daring (but absolutely legitimate, as the others) of a Central Sardinia, what in the Saga is called “the dark green heart of Sandahlia” (Marghine, Goceano, Barbagia, Ogliastra) which in reality never underwent the Roman conquest, placing the Romans (exactly as what happened in the Scottish Highlands with the construction of Hadrian’s Wall and with the Germans after the defeat of Teutoburg) in the delicate (but necessary) situation of having to abandon any intention of domination of central Sardinia in exchange for an (almost completely) peaceful acceptance of the respective areas of influence. A thesis that does not appear so bold, if we start from the consideration, hypothesized and developed by the great Sardinian archaeologist prof. Giovanni Lilliu, according to whom there is a thin red thread (the constant of resistance, as it is defined) that links the great past of the Nuragic civilization to another epic, the judicial one of the medieval era. About 3000 years, therefore, in which so many and such analogies between Nuragic Sardinians and Giudicali Sardinians must be noted, from both a political-institutional and anthropological and social point of view, as to affirm that probably a certain part of our island was never really Romanized (or Latinized). This consideration is also supported by the toponymy of the inland areas, if it is true that great linguists such as M. L. Wagner, H. J. Wolf and Massimo Pittau detect a very high percentage (33%) of pre-Latin toponyms, which can be traced back to clear Indo-European origins and, at least as regards the phytonyms, of probable pre-Indo-European Mediterranean origin.

In the light of all these considerations, the question arises: how was such an extraordinary work of resistance possible? The most frequent (and a little too hasty) answer, based on the particular orography of the territory of Central Sardinia, is that the Romans, quite simply, gave up any desire to conquer a harsh and difficult area in which to maneuver and that, after all, it did not justify in their eyes a serious military commitment for the conquest and a serious administrative commitment for the maintenance of the dominion. This thesis does not seem to be supported by some indisputable facts: first of all the Roman stubbornness in trying, always and in any case, to impose its dominion by force, together with clamorous cases of Roman victories over peoples settled in territories with equally difficult orography, the Samnites on all. If the Romans failed to impose themselves on “Barbagia”, the answer to this historical fact, in itself quite exceptional, must be sought in other types of motivation. My answer, as the author of the Sandahlia Saga, and which also constitutes the input and leitmotif of the entire editorial and cinematographic project, is that the Sardinians managed to oppose the invaders because they were inspired by a vision of the world and of life ( therefore spiritual and moral, as well as material) so antithetical to the pragmatic and imperial Roman vision, as to justify any effort and sacrifice in order not to give in to an idea of submission. Just as, animated by the same values, they managed to oppose the attempts at hegemonic infiltration by the Carthaginians for five hundred years.

A reply that finds serious analogies only with the already mentioned cases of the proud and hostile populations who lived outside the Roman Empire, beyond the Rhine River, in Germany, and beyond Hadrian’s Wall, in Scotland.

In short, perhaps the time has come to recognize our ancestors’ ability to have accomplished extraordinary deeds, managing to resist the greatest military power of the ancient world, and which is confirmed in the splendid, as well as suggestive, affirmation of the historian Salvatore Merche, according to which … the Sardinian Warriors prefer to die with honor on the battlefield, rather than accept a defeat and live the rest of their days as slaves…

In the narrative fiction of the Saga, to tell the truth, we go even further, assuming that there were moments in which the turn of events, and some protagonists of those events, pushed their dreams and ambitions to the point of imagining being able to extend to the entire Mediterranean its own spiritual vision of life, once the Roman legions had been definitively defeated at Sandahlia and driven back to sea once and for all. And justify in this way, in the eyes of contemporaries and posterity, their legitimate aspirations to eternity.

AMSICORA, A SARDINIAN HERO

At this point it is necessary to introduce the pivotal character, the one around whom the narration of the Saga revolves: Amsicora. This protagonist is located right in the middle of those 3000 years of continuity (which we mentioned just above) which range from the beginning of the Nuragic era to the end of the Giudicati one: that is, in that stormy III century BC. which saw Sardinia at the center of expansionist aims, first of the Carthaginians (by now having reached their swan song) and then of the Romans. It is almost as if Amsicora was the ideal junction point between the great Nuragic civilization, which had just preceded him, and the Sardinians of the following decades, that saw in him the example and the model that is always valid for anyone wishing to defend their prerogatives of freedom and the sacrosanct right to exist as a people creating of their own destiny.

Little or nothing is known about Amsicora, this is necessary to anticipate. The only certainty is on his personality (a cultured, fascinating man with great charisma) and on the main event of his life: the battle of Cornus in 215 BC in which Amsicora opposed the Roman consul Tito Manlio Torquato a coalition of Sardinians of various origins which were later joined by the Punics of Annone from Tharros and Asdrubale, brother of Hannibal. This absence of certain news about the man Amsicora has opened up an almost unlimited field of narrative possibilities, developed however keeping in mind some firm points.

The contribution of some historians has been illuminating, among whom I would like to mention Francesco Casula, in particular his essay: “Amsicora, Sardinian hero or Carthaginian askar?” in which, together with the resizing of Tito Livio as a truly objective historian (at least as regards the Sardinian events), a whole series of arguments are illustrated through which Casula demolishes the fragile foundations of the historiographical thesis according to which Amsicora would have been a Sardinian-Punic landowner or a Carthaginian magistrate. Without going too far, it is sufficient here to report at least the argument most worthy of being taken into consideration: if Amsicora had really been of Punic origin, says Casula, or even born in Carthage, he would never have been able to involve in the anti-Roman coalition the Sardinian Pelite tribes of the inland areas, animated by an aversion to the Punic invaders which was in no way inferior to that of the Roman newcomers, and which was nourished by more than five centuries of conflicts. The Carthaginians were also considered responsible for the deforestation of a large part of the Sardinian forests (to favor the cultivation of cereals) and therefore the main cause of the spread of malaria, the first consequence of deforestation and very little attention to the balance of those mistreated lands.

The opposite is much more probable: Amsicora was an important member of the most ancient aristocracies of our land and that by virtue of this indisputable origin, combined with his diplomatic skills and his charisma, he represented a sufficient guarantee, in the eyes of local tribal chiefs, to accept his war proposal to Rome and his leadership on the battlefield. From this point of view (and therefore from a different interpretation of historical facts) the war of 215 can no longer be seen as an episode of the second Punic war, and therefore as a Carthaginian attempt to bring Sardinia back into the sphere of influence of their maritime and commercial empire, but rather as an independent episode of another conflict, for us much more worthy of note and therefore worthy of being brought to the attention of our contemporaries: namely the war of the Sardinians against yet another invader of their land. And so, coherently with this interpretative point of view, the alliance of Amsicora with Carthage should no longer be seen as a strategic option of an alleged Carthaginian leader who tries to help the motherland in war with Rome, but rather as the only valid tactical option pursued by a man, our Amsicora precisely, shrewd enough and aware of military matters, to understand that “if the enemy of your enemy is your (possible) friend”. Then Carthage can be a valid ally
in the attempt to nullify forever any expansionist ambitions of Rome on our land.

But then why did the Latin sources (since we don’t have anything else) hand him down to us as a Carthaginian leader (sometimes even outlined in gloomy colors, as an ambiguous and corrupt man)? Here too the answer appears quite obvious if we allow ourselves to be guided by a pinch of logic and a careful evaluation of Roman wartime behavior. What observers of political and military affairs of the third century they could not understand how it was possible that Rome, after the repeated and close defeats suffered by Hannibal at Ticino River, at Trebbia River, at Lake Trasimeno and at Canne, not only had not surrendered, but determined, more than ever, to bring back a victory. Well, the Romans were perhaps the first people of antiquity to understand how victory in war does not coincide with the outcome of one or more battles, but instead depends on the most complete involvement of the moral forces of their citizens. That is: it doesn’t matter if you lose almost all the battles. What matters is to always resist and recover your strength to win the decisive battle: the last one. And it is clear that no resistance and no recovery are possible if the moral forces necessary for these two purposes are not supported by an authentic hope and faith in a final victory. After the four very tough defeats against Carthage, the unexpected victory of Cornus arrived in 215 BC against the Sardinian army of Amsicora. Never was the occasion more propitious to deploy the full potential of Roman propaganda. Amsicora could not be a simple Sardinian prince, but had to become Carthaginian in the eyes of the Romans, so that the consul Titus Manlius Torquatus, who had defeated him at Cornus, could celebrate his triumph in Rome by stating that he had defeated a Carthaginian leader and thus overturned the adverse fate, achieving a victory over the age-old enemy after so many defeats suffered. Nothing strange, therefore, that a damnatio memoriae of the man and the leader Amsicora was immediately followed, aimed, also and above all, at erasing forever any reference to his true origins: Sardinian, native, Nuragic ones. One of the goals of our Cultural Project is  to set new historiographical objectives, a different philosophy of history and an alternative interpretation of the historical events and of the sources that have handed them down to us: all obviously supported by narrative fiction.

To recap: in the Saga of Sandahlia, and in the cultural project linked to it, Amsicora is a prince of ancient Nuragic extraction, deeply tied to the cultural and spiritual heritage of his land, of which he considers himself the heir and guardian. The emblematic image (present in the short film with which we present the saga project) of our Amsicora who silently contemplates and listens to the voices of his ancestors (represented by the long row of Giants’ Statues of Mont’è Prama) is the perfect metaphor of what we intend to convey: Amsicora represents a universe of values (obviously the Nuragic ones of a sacred relationship between Man, Nature and the Cosmos) that cannot accept the submission that men belonging to civilization models that are completely foreign to our land would like to impose on it: the Punic shadow worshipers with their mercantile and material empire, and the power-worshipping Romans, obsessed with pragmatism at any cost and with their imperial politics. A man, our hero Amsicora, who, by virtue of his resolute will to resist, is willing to put all of himself on the line, up to the extreme sacrifice, in order not to disfigure in front of his ancestors and the people he intends to lead and protect.

A DIFFERENT VERSION OF THE WORLD

The link between Amsicora and the Nuragic tradition is obviously omnipresent in our project and finds expression not only in the “scenography” that forms the background for the protagonists and events (the natural one of our scenic beauty and the material one, represented by architectural structures, votive statuettes, , etc..), but also, and above all, in the other protagonists who revolve around the figure of Amsicora and who, all together, like the concert played by a single orchestra, give life to the true protagonist of the Saga, i.e. Sandahlia herself. It is above all the ancient spirit of our ancestors and of our land that we intend to revive, cleaning it from the dust of the centuries and stripping it of that annoying patina, made up of mystifications and partial interpretations of our history.

But let’s go back to the other protagonists who, together with Amsicora, live and act on the ideal stage of our film project: each of them represents a fundamental segment of that ancient universe in which they are immersed: Bèina, the Warrior Virgin; Thorben, chief of the Molossian-Men clan; Nertha, priestess and wife of Amsicora; Gunnar, tragic living hero of Sandahlia; Marcusa, the shaman guardian of the sacred spring of the Nuraghe di Mem; and Grimasso, the mad jester-warrior of Thurgal, inseparable sideguard of Amsicora; and then the enemies of Amsicora: Adelkor, warrior of the clan of the Men-Molossus (as well as son of Thorben); Vindex, the renegade shaman of Kehremann Forest; the Punic merchant Ammone, master of intrigues and robberies against the Sandahlic villages; and the Roman consul Tito Manlio Torquato, a real historical figure, a classic representative of the Roman elite, who was sent to Sardinia by the Senate both in 235 and 215 BC. It was he who faced Amsicora on the bloody battlefield of the fateful Cornus.

Altogether, the heroes of Sandahlia and their adversaries create an ideal choreography of men and women who dance to the rhythm of melodies from a pre-Christian world, in which, following the example of the Homeric heroes (who in the Iliad and in the Odyssey introduce us to the value system of the ancient world), the true meaning of life lies in fully realizing oneself (the innate goal of every creature, underlines Aristotle) replacing the very Christian sense of guilt (which the Heroes of Sandahlia would find absurd and almost inconceivable) with a latent sense of predestination to defeat, which emerges clearly with all its explosive charge when the course of events in one’s life puts us, at a certain point, in front of the evident frustration and unachievability of our dreams and desires. The heroes of Sandahlia, but obviously also their enemies (because they are all part of the same ideal universe), therefore follow the compass of the precept: “Discover who you are… do what you are… rejoice in your victories and pity yourself if you don’t realize your aspirations…”

Regarding the specific topic represented by the world of Sandahlia, therefore the Sardinian tribal society of the III century BC, we have tried as much as possible (perhaps allowing us some necessary poetic license) to stick to the results of those studies and those reflections which see the Civilization Nuragica as an extraordinary and suggestive result of a fusion (probably occurred in 2000 BC) between the autochthonous Mediterranean peoples, inspired by a religiosity linked to the cults of earth and water, with the nomadic populations of Indo-European origin, bearers of a very profound and different spirituality, inspired by the observation of the sky and the stars. The result is a rather fascinating world, marked by the recognized importance of both principles, the masculine and the feminine, in defining every creative and representative aspect of the Cosmos.

In the narrative fiction of our Saga, this universe which is Sandahlia, is inhabited by Sacred Warriors and Warrior Virgins who defend the values of Tradition and of the Spirit, by LadyShamans and LordShamans who orchestrate the life of single individuals and entire communities, and by Priestesses who daily dance the sacred union between heaven and earth. A world of values and suggestions, we have already said it but it is worth emphasizing it again here, which does not in the least intend to accept a passive submission to different models of civilization which, in the eyes of the heroes of Sandahlia, primarily Amsicora, would only be able to alter the profound balance that the Sardinians have managed to create between themselves and the entire universe in which they live and are immersed.

To worthily represent, and in a clear and immediately perceptible way, those values and that vision of the world and of life, our project was characterized by a research for the most suitable language to represent it, rather than by a research on the Sardinian language. It is in fact almost impossible to know the language of our ancestors of that time, having almost nothing available on Nuragic and immediately post-Nuragic idioms, apart from that 33% of toponyms (mostly limited to Barbagia) which, according to the authoritative studies of Wagner and Wolff would be clearly pre-Latin.

Language, on the other hand, was an interesting challenge, and perhaps we managed to overcome it or at least to face it in a dignified and satisfactory way. Using as a compass the assumption according to which “the language of each people expresses the vision of the world and of the life of that people”, we have created divinities and verbal expressions capable of immediately transmitting the fundamental idea that animates the spirituality of Sandahlia :  the Universe was born from the Spirit of Music; the highest divinity is the Dreaming Absolute ( the mystical synthesis of all melodies) and the world is nothing but condensed music, in which every aspect of what is material (plants, animals, men, stars and planets) and what is immaterial (ideas, feelings, dreams, desires and memories) is composed of a music that has given it life according to its own specific melody: its and its alone. The Dreaming Absolute then expresses itself through its four different aspects: Memory (the Mirror of Memories), Thought (the Celestial Arch), Power (the Thundering Sword) and Desire (the Claw of Fire).

Obviously we have not invented anything, apart from language. Such a cosmogony, with the profound spirituality that derives from it, belongs to the mystical universe of almost all ancient peoples (with the due differences, obviously, above all lexical ones) as well as peoples (American Indians and Australian aborigines, above all) who have preserved their tribal and spiritual identity up to the last century, and who, with their language, their myths and their way of life, have passed on to us a heritage of symbols, semantic and otherwise, capable of revealing the best key to interpreting the world of our Sardinian ancestors.

Going into detail, and consistently adapting to this vision of events and of the world, the Saga of Sandahlia expresses its own interpretation (completely peculiar, but legitimate as the others) of the meaning of the Nuraghes and therefore of the use that was made of them. Since each Nuraghe corresponded to a source or pool of sacred water, which the Nuraghe itself guarded, and since water is the universally recognized symbol of memory, in our vision the Nuraghes (especially the single-tower ones) have a divinatory function which is implemented through the support-contribution of sacred women, defined as shamans. But let’s not go further, leaving the reader with the curiosity to discover, through the narrative fiction of this novel, the special interpretation of the great monuments that our Ancestors have left us: the Nuraghi, in fact, but also the Tombs of the Giants, the Sacred Wells and Statuary in general. With a thought always turned to what is the real premise to always keep in mind when approaching the reading of a novel of this kind: namely that the world of our ancestors (and the Ancient one in general) was a universe studded with symbols, and of given values of those symbols, in which a real poetic Vision of Existence stood out, which never disregarded the sacred character inherent in the universe in its entirety and in every aspect of it. If, therefore, we can indicate an additional purpose that we have set ourselves to pursue with this work, in addition to that of looking at our Past with different eyes, it is precisely that of presenting to modern readers a feeling and an approach towards the cosmos that very it is probably what we need most today, at a time when Humanity and the Planet are inexorably running towards the abyss, having nothing to hold on to in order to stop this senseless and catastrophic racing. From my point of view, the sensitivity and the universe of values of the Ancients represent an essential lifeline.