Chyndonax and the Mystery of the Dijon Druids
According to the author of Le réveil de Chyndonax, on November 2, 1598, in a village near Dijon in eastern France, a farmer working in a vineyard with his two sons ran across a large, heavy obstruction in the ground. After laboriously removing what they thought was just a rock, they found that they had, in fact, removed the lid to a massive funerary urn, containing a glass vessel filled with ashes and fragments of bone. The outer container bore a weathered Greek inscription which included the enigmatic word “Chyndonax.” Guessing that the find had historical rather than monetary value, the farmer brought the artifacts to the house of a local scholar Jean Guenebauld, who investigated and later promoted this archaeological wonder.
Published twenty-three years after the initial discovery, Le réveil de Chyndonax constitutes Guenebauld’s explanation of the burial’s broader religious and cultural significance. He argued that the name Chyndonax invoked in the urn inscription was that of a local high-ranking druid; the inscription was an epitaph celebrating this healer and diviner who served a sun-worshipping community in ancient Gaul. Guenebauld theorized that the society in which the druid lived had developed its religious institutions through close contact with other ancient civilizations. He explored possible connections between these local “Dijon druids” and other communities endowed with Greek literacy and concluded that the druids’ worship of Mithras—who was also mentioned in the epitaph—represented an early appropriation of a Persian analogue to the Greco-Roman Apollo.
Guenebauld articulated his argument through a comparative study of funerary rites from around the world, illustrating how humanity’s relationship with death evolved in parallel with more general religious concerns. He was not shy about linking these historical themes to contemporary issues, either. A loyal Catholic, Guenebauld contrasted the pagan piety evinced by the druids with that of the Huguenots of his day. Protestants were the worst of all faiths owing to their relative lack of reverence for the dead, which Guenebauld blamed on a more fundamental impiety inherent to their reformed confession. The author’s polemic was also meant to attract modern scholarly interest in the region where the urn was discovered. In the volume’s dedicatory letter to the duke Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, Guenebauld considered Le réveil de Chyndonax a contribution to the local history of Burgundy, serving as a reminder of the region’s continuous importance to the French kingdom as a whole.
Like other scholars of classical antiquity preserved in Johns Hopkins’ Bibliotheca Fictiva collection, Guenebauld wanted to document and exalt the status of these ancient Burgundians—and by extension his native region, within the broader sweep of French history—by finally bringing to light their archaic legacy. The Dijonnais physician, like many early modern historians, geographers, linguists, and naturalists, operated within a conceptual universe that privileged the authority to the Bible and treated it as an essential source in world history. The earliest societies to inhabit the Mediterranean were populated by the first wave of Noah’s descendants, who had migrated from the Middle East and carried their ancestor’s monotheistic Hebrew faith with them. Humanist scholars, inspired by biblical and apocryphal narratives, supported this view of cultural diffusion in which the religiously-enlightened ancestral nations of the past gradually gave way to more corrupt ones, as people steadily “forgot” their original ties to Noah’s faith and took up paganism.
Guenebauld was one of many at the time who perpetuated ideologically-driven accounts to fill in the knowledge gaps about Europe’s pre-classical inhabitants. His work hypothesized that the Gauls, presumably as one of Europe’s oldest autochthonous inhabitants, retained a closer link to their enlightented ancestors and were, thus, informed and enriched by a pre-Roman Golden Age. The druids of Dijon, though nominally pagan, retained some memory of the true faith of Noah and his descendants, as monotheists and believers in the immortality of the soul. He conjectured, however, that the historical memory of this ancient rite, like many other pre-classical cults, was forcibly suppressed by Gaul’s Roman oppressors. With the exception of Chyndonax’s epitaph and ashes, all evidence of this most glorious period in Dijon’s history was lost.
Guenebauld’s concerns resemble those of other nationalistic forgeries found in the collection. Its general narrative hearkens back to the scholarship of 15th-century humanist Giovanni Nanni—better remembered as Annius of Viterbo—who concocted a sequence of forged ancient documents to assert a direct link between Noah’s immediate descendants and the indigenous ancient Etruscans of his Tuscan hometown of Viterbo. Nanni’s work influenced the French Orientalist Guillaume Postel, who elaborated upon Annius’s Etrurian theory in a flattering treatise dedicated to Cosimo de’ Medici entitled De Etruriae regionis (Florence, 1551). Postel, in turn, had drawn inspiration from an earlier imaginative patriotic mythology claiming the French to be direct descendants of ancient Trojan refugees, published decades earlier by Jean Lemaire de Belges in his Les illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye. The latter work is represented in the Bibliotheca Fictiva in a handsomely illustrated early Paris edition, c. 1524-28.
Guenebauld’s work is also remarkable for its attention to material culture. His study conformed with 17th-century scholarly trends by way of his analyses of ancient inscriptions and the exploration of distant cultures through their artifacts and the social conventions that they implied or otherwise documented. By basing his theory on an archeological discovery, rather than claiming a long-lost textual tradition, Guenebauld anticipated the strategy of his close contemporary, the forger Curzio Inghirami, who falsified the discovery of hundreds of “ancient” time capsules he called “scariths” on his family’s Tuscan estate. Like Guenebauld, Inghirami analyzed these “burials” in the Ethruscarum antiquitatum fragmenta (“Frankfurt,” i.e., Florence, 1637), further bolstering Nanni’s claims about Tuscany’s exceptionally ancient cultural heritage. Within the scariths, Inghirami claimed to have found prophecies about Italy’s future and its future destiny as a font of Christianity, ostensibly written by “Prospero,” an initiate in the Etruscan divinatory arts.
In other ways, though, Le réveil de Chyndonax is exceptional among the works in the Bibliotheca Fictiva. Unlike most historical forgeries, which are often meant to provide unambiguous, “smoking gun” evidence of the forger’s claims, the epitaph of Chyndonax bears relatively little connection to the author’s final conclusions. At the time of its supposed discovery in 1598, Chyndonax’s tomb generated a significant amount of interest in Dijon’s local history. According to Guenebauld, rumors about the discovery spread by word of mouth to the Parliament of Burgundy, causing functionaries and other regional notables to stream into his Dijon estate for a glimpse of the urn. Even the relentless humanist “hammer of forgers,” Isaac Casaubon, made the long journey from Geneva to inspect this archaeological gem.
Another of these visitors, the royal counselor and distinguished historian of his own times Jacques Auguste de Thou, made a transcription of the urn texts, which he sent to the epigrapher Jan Gruter who, in turn, dutifully included it in his foundational work on ancient inscriptions, Inscriptiones antiquae totius orbis Romani, published in Heidelberg in 1603, some twenty years prior to the appearance of Guenebauld’s book. These multiple, separate reports of the Dijon urn have fed into a contentious debate, lasting well into the 20th century, about Guenebauld’s complicity in producing and subsequently promoting a fake. Modern philology provides little support for the author’s thesis that the druidic civilization implied by the urn held any substantial connection to the religious mysteries of the Middle East. Instead, scholars today assert that the likeliest explanation for the artifact’s reference to both druids and Mithraism is that Guenebauld, or an earlier forger, carved a Greek passage on an authentic ancient Gaulish object, passing it off as real. According to a contemporary, Guenebauld later gave the urn to the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu in exchange for a benefice; its present whereabouts are unknown. These literary remains preserved in the Bibliotheca Fictiva are, thus, the sole-surviving historical witnesses to this classic forged narrative of patriotic myth-making.
—Filip Geaman
Guenebauld provided a French verse translation of the “ancient” Chyndonax inscription:
En ce tombeau, dans le sacré boccage
Du Dieu Mithra, est contenu le corps
De Chyndonax grand Prestre: meschant hors,
Les Dieux Sauveurs le gardent de dommage.
Translation:
In this tomb, within the sacred grove
Of the god Mithra, is housed the body
Of Chyndonax, grand priest; evildoers, away!
The gods of salvation protect him from injury.
Bibliography
Arthur Freeman, Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts relating to Literary Forgery, 44 BC–AD 2000 (Quaritch, 2014), nos. 251, 254. Wilhelm Froehner, Kritische Analekten (Göttingen: Dieterichsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1889); Bernard de Montfaucon, Palaeographia Graeca, sive De Ortu Et Progressu Literarum Graecarum (Paris: 1708); William Stenhouse, “The Greekness of Greek Inscriptions: Ancient Inscriptions in Early Modern Scholarship,” in Natasha Constantinidou and Han Lamers (eds.), Receptions of Hellenism in Early Modern Europe: 15th-17th Centuries, (Brill, 2020): 323-34; Walter Stephens, “When Pope Noah Ruled the Etruscans: Annius of Viterbo and his Forged ‘Antiquities’,” MLN 119.1 (2004): 201-23; Philippus a Turre, Monumenta Veteris Antii Commentario (Rome, 1724); W. Vollgraff, “Le Réveil de Chyndonax,” L’Antiquité Classique 1 (1949): 55-78
