The Garduña - More Black Legend

[Menydh]

Originally Posted by M.R.

Btw, I heard Camorra orriginates from Spain and simmilar Spanish organization in late middle-ages called Garduna.

The word that you mean is Garduña. It was unknown to me, so I did some searching.

Most I could find as Garduña or Garduna (as the 'ñ' is interpreted as 'n' on search engines, and on internet in general) was garduña as an animal which in English it's known as beech marten.

Then I used a combined search for garduña+camorra, and most I came with was some lousy web pages in Italian that did not give any sources for those claims; and then on the Dutch wikipedia a full article on the said organization.

No much information in Spanish, except for a few more lousy pages with no source. Both the Italian and Spanish pages belonged to the realm of secret conspiracies and even esoterism.

Very strange that such an organization ever existed in Spain and I have never, ever seen it mentioned in one book in my entire life. But some further search got me from a history forum to a book written by one historian, Hipólito Sánchiz, Una Historia de las Sociedades Secretas Españolas.

On an interview, the author answers to the question of La Garduña:

The historian Hipólito Sánchiz, Chair of the Universidad San Pablo CEU, has written, together with the novelist León Arsenal, "A History of the Spanish Secret Societies" (ed. Zenith). His conclusions are interesting, as he upholds that the Garduña and the Ángel Exterminador are two fabrications of the Liberals to discredit their enemies, the Catholics and the Absolutists. As it could be expected there are numerous pages dedicated to the Freemasonry as well as to the neo-templarian societies and the false military orders.


Q.: In your book you describe the eclosion of secret societies in Spain starting after the French invasion and until the reign of Alfonso XII. Is it possible to write the History of Spain in the XIXth century without mentioning the freemasons, carbornari and comuneros?

A.: I don't think that it is possible, especially the history of the first third of the XIXth century where both the phenomenon of Romanticism and the politics of that time made that these secret societies had an excellent culture medium. In fact all the chain of revolutions in Europe which took place around 1820 is closely linked with Freemasonry, including our trienio liberal.

[...]

Ghosts that only existed on paper

Q.: You reveal that a secret society linked to the Inquisition, the Garduña, never existed and that it is only manipulations of the liberals to discredit their enemies. How is it that others have accepted its existance without putting it into doubt? interests? idleness?

A.: Although both myths have a common base, they are developed in a different way. In both cases these are secret societies which have been invented or taken out of the context in order to use them as a political weapon by the Liberals against the Absolutists. However, the case of the Garduña, which origin is a novel with the title of Misterios de la Inquisición y otras sociedades secretas ("Misteries of the Inquisition and Other Secret Societies"), reminds me of phenomena like the "Da Vinci's Code". I have found students at the university asking me seriously (sometimes even convinced) if the assertions on this book, a mere novel around the figure of Christ, were true. That is, there is a fabrication of a liberal myth in the literature, which serious historians rarely mention, but which authors dedicated to esotericism and to secret societies repeat insistently.

As a secret society, the Garduña is very attractive for the "conspiracy addicts": it is supposed that it was a criminal organization that was active for over 400 years in Spain and which, among other things, it carried out the dirty job of the Inquisition. However, when we read serious studies about bandolerismo (highwaymen) and social disorders (very frequent in Andalucia in the XIXth century) we don't find one single mentioning of the said society. How come? Very easy... The historians who research the phenomenon of the social conflicts work with the documents of the time, which in the case of the Garduña there is no one single document. The survival of this false secret society until the XXIth century is due to the trend among some researchers of esotericism and of secret societies to write copying each other without ever checking the sources, and also to its [commercial] attractive.

I'm not surprised to have found that the Dutch have been so quick on taking up on a fabricated legend and written an article on wikipedia (Garduna - Wikipedia). Nor that the English have done the same (Garduna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).