Neil Philip

The social function of myth is to bind a society together, to act as a charter for its laws and customs, and to embed a culture in its environment. The advantage of myth in performing this role lies in its innate flexibility. Societies and cultures develop and change, sometimes slowly, sometimes in precipitous leaps. Myth is supple enough to accommodate even calamitous change and gloss it over with the appearance of continuity. Egypt during the New Kingdom provides a vivid example of this strength of myth to recover from a point of disaster. The story starts in 1352 BCE with the accession to the throne of Amenhotep IV. The name Amenhotep means literally, “Amun is content”, Amun being the “hidden god” worshipped at the great temple of Karnak, and therefore—because pharaohs ruled from Thebes—the pre-eminent god of the sprawling Egyptian pantheon. Called “the great god who listens to prayers, who comes at the voice of the poor and distressed, who gives breath to the wretched”, Amun was worshipped as the creator of all things, the source and sustainer of all existence, who brought himself into being by saying, “I am!” He was often fused with the sun god Ra, as Amun-Ra. Soon, however, Amun was far from content. For Amenhotep IV changed his name, to Akhenaten, “servant of the Aten”. The word Aten means the disc of the sun—a physical manifestation of the sun god, but not the god himself. During the New Kingdom, however, the Aten had come to be worshipped as a god. Akhenaten’s father, Amenhotep III, called his barge “Aten Gleams”, and built a shine to the Aten at the temple of Amun in Karnak. Akhenaten took this much further, sponsoring a cultural revolution as sweeping and disturbing as that of Mao in twentieth-century China. Amun and all the other gods were downgraded, and the Aten was declared the only true god. A “Hymn to the Aten” exists that is supposed to have been written by Akhenaten himself. It has a number of close parallels with the Biblical Psalm 104, though scholars are divided as to whether this shows direct influence or merely a common literary heritage. What it certainly proves is how close Akhenaten’s thinking had come to monotheism. It addresses the Aten as “sole god”, saying, “You alone made the earth, according to your will.” The Aten was not just another god, who could be incorporated into the crowded ranks of the Egyptian divinities. He was not simply supreme, he was alone. The reality of the other gods was denied, and their names hacked from temple walls in an attempt to literally rub them out and destroy them in the netherworld. This religious revolution had a political element to it, for it gravely diminished the power of the priests of Amun, and re-established the king as the only mediator between the human and the divine. But there is no doubt that Akhenaten was passionately committed to his new religion. Akhenaten was not just a radical thinker—he was a fanatic. His fierce intelligence was offended by the overlapping muddle of Egyptian religion. In its place he set up a more narrowly focussed and logical system of belief, in which all worship and praise was directed, through the king, to the Aten. He swept away the contradictions and nonsenses of the old religion, and with them its humanity, its humour, and its flexibility. The focus of Akhenaten’s worship was a devoted reverence for maat, which in this context is probably best translated as “truth”. Both Akhenaten and the Aten, it was claimed, “lived on maat”. In order not to sully his new religion with the taint of the old, Akhenaten abandoned the old capital of Thebes and built a new city at el-Amarna in honour of the Aten. Here, Akhenaten tried to re-invent Egyptian culture. Not just in religion, but also in behaviour, in art, in language and in literature, he sponsored the new and discouraged the old. The art of his time—the Amarna period—is much more naturalistic, more concerned with literal truth, than that of earlier times. It celebrates the everyday, not the eternal. While Akhenation brooded on the truth, under the glare of the Aten, the empire he had inherited began to fall apart. The Hittites took over Syria and Mitanni; Phoenicia and Palestine fell; the Egyptian garrisons were called home from Asia; the supply of gold from the mines of Nubia and Sudan dried up. At home the old nobility were outraged by the way their positions of power and authority had been usurped by the jumped-up nobodies who filled Akhenaten’s court; the priest were dismayed at the religious revolution and the overthrow of their estates; and the common people were left bemused and uncertain, with no Amun to “give breath to the wretched”. For the last two years of his reign, Akhenaten was persuaded by his mother, Queen Tiy, to appoint his younger brother Smenkhkara as co-regent, and allow him to rule from Memphis and re-establish the worship of Amun, the god whom Akhenaten had yearned so ferociously to wipe out of existence. But when Akhenaten and Smenkhkara died within months of each other in 1336 BCE, things were still in turmoil, and the name of the new king gave cause for fresh concern. It was Tutankhaten, “Living image of the Aten”. In the second year of his reign, the nine-year-old Tutankhaten’s name was changed. No longer the living image of the Aten, he became Tutankhamun, “Living image of Amun.” The worship of Amun was restored, and his temples reopened. An inscription in Tutankhamun’s name describes how, as a result of Akhenaten’s heresy, “The temples of the gods and goddesses fell to pieces. . . . The land was turned topsy-turvy, and the gods turned their backs on it. . . . If anyone prayed to a god or goddess for help, they would not come. Their hearts were broken.” The Egyptians thought that the king must display three essential qualities: hu, sia, and maat—authority, perception, and justice. Akhenaten had concentrated narrowly on just one of these, maat. In doing so he fell into a trap. By earnestly worshipping truth as the be-all and end-all of moral and religious life, he failed to see that maat was not just about truth, but also about balance and order. In doing so, he literally upset the balance of Egyptian culture and society. But while it took more than a simple name change of the boy pharaoh to set things right again, the fluid mythological structure that had served the Egyptians since around 3000 BCE proved resilient enough to re-establish the old order. After Tutankhamun, and the separate reigns of Ay and Horemheb, Tutankhamun’s advisors and putative murderers, a new dynasty, the 19th, took power. The first of these kings, Rameses I, reigned for only two years, but his son, Sety I, set Egypt on the road to recovery, with energetic military campaigns in Syria and Palestine, and a general renewal of Egyptian culture. In the great temple that Sety I built to the ancient gods at Abydos, the list of kings from earliest times to the present simply ignores the Amarna kings, jumping silently from Amenhotep III to Horemheb. It was as if Akhenaten’s revolution had never been, or was a bad dream best forgotten. Akhenaten had simply not understood the strong and subtle ways in which mythology and society were intermeshed. When he abandoned the gods, and the broken-hearted gods abandoned the people, the confidence of the Egyptians in Egypt itself was shaken to the core.

The social function of myth is to bind a society together, to act as a charter for its laws and customs, and to embed a culture in its environment. The advantage of myth in performing this role lies in its innate flexibility. Societies and cultures develop and change, sometimes slowly, sometimes in precipitous leaps. Myth is supple enough to accommodate even calamitous change and gloss it over with the appearance of continuity.

Egypt during the New Kingdom provides a vivid example of this strength of myth to recover from a point of disaster. The story starts in 1352 BCE with the accession to the throne of Amenhotep IV. The name Amenhotep means literally, “Amun is content”, Amun being the “hidden god” worshipped at the great temple of Karnak, and therefore—because pharaohs ruled from Thebes—the pre-eminent god of the sprawling Egyptian pantheon. Called “the great god who listens to prayers, who comes at the voice of the poor and distressed, who gives breath to the wretched”, Amun was worshipped as the creator of all things, the source and sustainer of all existence, who brought himself into being by saying, “I am!” He was often fused with the sun god Ra, as Amun-Ra.

Soon, however, Amun was far from content. For Amenhotep IV changed his name, to Akhenaten, “servant of the Aten”. The word Aten means the disc of the sun—a physical manifestation of the sun god, but not the god himself. During the New Kingdom, however, the Aten had come to be worshipped as a god. Akhenaten’s father, Amenhotep III, called his barge “Aten Gleams”, and built a shine to the Aten at the temple of Amun in Karnak.

Akhenaten took this much further, sponsoring a cultural revolution as sweeping and disturbing as that of Mao in twentieth-century China. Amun and all the other gods were downgraded, and the Aten was declared the only true god.

A “Hymn to the Aten” exists that is supposed to have been written by Akhenaten himself. It has a number of close parallels with the Biblical Psalm 104, though scholars are divided as to whether this shows direct influence or merely a common literary heritage. What it certainly proves is how close Akhenaten’s thinking had come to monotheism. It addresses the Aten as “sole god”, saying, “You alone made the earth, according to your will.”

The Aten was not just another god, who could be incorporated into the crowded ranks of the Egyptian divinities. He was not simply supreme, he was alone. The reality of the other gods was denied, and their names hacked from temple walls in an attempt to literally rub them out and destroy them in the netherworld.

This religious revolution had a political element to it, for it gravely diminished the power of the priests of Amun, and re-established the king as the only mediator between the human and the divine. But there is no doubt that Akhenaten was passionately committed to his new religion.

 Akhenaten was not just a radical thinker—he was a fanatic. His fierce intelligence was offended by the overlapping muddle of Egyptian religion. In its place he set up a more narrowly focussed and logical system of belief, in which all worship and praise was directed, through the king, to the Aten. He swept away the contradictions and nonsenses of the old religion, and with them its humanity, its humour, and its flexibility.

The focus of Akhenaten’s worship was a devoted reverence for maat, which in this context is probably best translated as “truth”. Both Akhenaten and the Aten, it was claimed, “lived on maat”.

In order not to sully his new religion with the taint of the old, Akhenaten abandoned the old capital of Thebes and built a new city at el-Amarna in honour of the Aten. Here, Akhenaten tried to re-invent Egyptian culture. Not just in religion, but also in behaviour, in art, in language and in literature, he sponsored the new and discouraged the old. The art of his time—the Amarna period—is much more naturalistic, more concerned with literal truth, than that of earlier times. It celebrates the everyday, not the eternal.

While Akhenation brooded on the truth, under the glare of the Aten, the empire he had inherited began to fall apart. The Hittites took over Syria and Mitanni; Phoenicia and Palestine fell; the Egyptian garrisons were called home from Asia; the supply of gold from the mines of Nubia and Sudan dried up. At home the old nobility were outraged by the way their positions of power and authority had been usurped by the jumped-up nobodies who filled Akhenaten’s court; the priest were dismayed at the religious revolution and the overthrow of their estates; and the common people were left bemused and uncertain, with no Amun to “give breath to the wretched”.

For the last two years of his reign, Akhenaten was persuaded by his mother, Queen Tiy, to appoint his younger brother Smenkhkara as co-regent, and allow him to rule from Memphis and re-establish the worship of Amun, the god whom Akhenaten had yearned so ferociously to wipe out of existence. But when Akhenaten and Smenkhkara died within months of each other in 1336 BCE, things were still in turmoil, and the name of the new king gave cause for fresh concern. It was Tutankhaten, “Living image of the Aten”.

In the second year of his reign, the nine-year-old Tutankhaten’s name was changed. No longer the living image of the Aten, he became Tutankhamun, “Living image of Amun.”

The worship of Amun was restored, and his temples reopened. An inscription in Tutankhamun’s name describes how, as a result of Akhenaten’s heresy, “The temples of the gods and goddesses fell to pieces. . . . The land was turned topsy-turvy, and the gods turned their backs on it. . . . If anyone prayed to a god or goddess for help, they would not come. Their hearts were broken.”

The Egyptians thought that the king must display three essential qualities: hu, sia, and maat—authority, perception, and justice. Akhenaten had concentrated narrowly on just one of these, maat. In doing so he fell into a trap. By earnestly worshipping truth as the be-all and end-all of moral and religious life, he failed to see that maat was not just about truth, but also about balance and order. In doing so, he literally upset the balance of Egyptian culture and society.

But while it took more than a simple name change of the boy pharaoh to set things right again, the fluid mythological structure that had served the Egyptians since around 3000 BCE proved resilient enough to re-establish the old order. After Tutankhamun, and the separate reigns of Ay and Horemheb, Tutankhamun’s advisors and putative murderers, a new dynasty, the 19th, took power. The first of these kings, Rameses I, reigned for only two years, but his son, Sety I, set Egypt on the road to recovery, with energetic military campaigns in Syria and Palestine, and a general renewal of Egyptian culture. 

In the great temple that Sety I built to the ancient gods at Abydos, the list of kings from earliest times to the present simply ignores the Amarna kings, jumping silently from Amenhotep III to Horemheb. It was as if Akhenaten’s revolution had never been, or was a bad dream best forgotten.

Akhenaten had simply not understood the strong and subtle ways in which mythology and society were intermeshed. When he abandoned the gods, and the broken-hearted gods abandoned the people, the confidence of the Egyptians in Egypt itself was shaken to the core.

A Cultural Revolution in Ancient Egypt

The story of Faust, or Dr Faustus, selling his soul to the Devil has been told many times, notably by Christopher Marlowe and by Goethe. The figure of Faust is supposed to be based on a real-life scholar, Johann Georg Faust (c.1480-1540), but the idea is widespread. The concept of Souls Saved from the Devil takes up types 1170-1199 in Uther’s Types of International Folktales. But there is documented proof of a man who tried but seemingly failed to sell his soul to the Devil. His name was Daniel Lorenz Salthenius (1701-1750), and he was Professor of Theology at the University of Königsberg from 1732 to 1750. Immanuel Kant was one of his pupils, and when he died Salthenius’ personal library of around 22,000 volumes included no fewer than 300 Bibles. M.R. James used the story of Salthenius’s pact with Devil as inspiration for his ghost story “Number 13”. When Salthenius was 17, and a student at the University of Uppsala, wrote two versions of the letter in which he exchanged his soul in return for various gifts. He managed to lose the first letter on his way to the appointed place—an old (sacred?) oak tree in the village of Markem in Sweden, where his father was the priest. So he wrote another shorter one, and pinned that to the oak instead. Salthenius seems to have been quite serious about this. Both letters are written in his own blood. This is the longer one, in the translation given in John Lindow, Swedish Legends and Folktales: I, Daniel Salthenius, desire from you, O Devil, the following items which you shall give me in exchange for payment. 1. You shall now at this time give me a purse which shall never run out of purely minted money, and that money shall remain in my possession or in that of the one I give it to. 2. You shall grant me particular success in the world with gentlemen and ladies of high station, as well as success in hunting and fishing, so that I shall never return empty-handed. 3. That all the arts I already have learned, or later shall learn, I shall retain. 4. That I receive from you now the Black Book. 5. That I can become visible or invisible whenever I wish. 6. You shall also now give me that thing, whatever it may be, that has the quality, that when I have it about my person, I may immediately come to any place I name. In return I promise to serve you during my lifetime as best I can and after my death to belong to you, body and soul. Anno 1718, this I affirm with my signature and blood. Next morning Salthenius returned to the tree, Bible in hand, to receive his gifts, and was immediately arrested by the authorities, who had found both letters. He was tried, and sentenced to decapitation. But then it turned out that as he was a student at Uppsala, and also a minor, the court had no legal jurisdiction in the case, which must be dealt with by the University’s Consistory Court. This took a more lenient approach, and sentenced him to just eight days (some sources say a month) in prison, presumably regarding the whole episode as a juvenile prank. And so Daniel Lorenz Salthenius lived to become a highly respected theologian, rather than the Devil’s thrall.

The story of Faust, or Dr Faustus, selling his soul to the Devil has been told many times, notably by Christopher Marlowe and by Goethe. The figure of Faust is supposed to be based on a real-life scholar, Johann Georg Faust (c.1480-1540), but the idea is widespread. The concept of Souls Saved from the Devil takes up types 1170-1199 in Uther’s Types of International Folktales.

         But there is documented proof of a man who tried but seemingly failed to sell his soul to the Devil. His name was Daniel Lorenz Salthenius (1701-1750), and he was Professor of Theology at the University of Königsberg from 1732 to 1750. Immanuel Kant was one of his pupils, and when he died Salthenius’ personal library of around 22,000 volumes included no fewer than 300 Bibles.

         M.R. James used the story of Salthenius’s pact with Devil as inspiration for his ghost story “Number 13”.

         When Salthenius was 17, and a student at the University of Uppsala, wrote two versions of the letter in which he exchanged his soul in return for various gifts. He managed to lose the first letter on his way to the appointed place—an old (sacred?) oak tree in the village of Markem in Sweden, where his father was the priest. So he wrote another shorter one, and pinned that to the oak instead.

         Salthenius seems to have been quite serious about this. Both letters are written in his own blood. This is the longer one, in the translation given in John Lindow, Swedish Legends and Folktales:

 

I, Daniel Salthenius, desire from you, O Devil, the following items which you shall give me in exchange for payment.

1. You shall now at this time give me a purse which shall never run out of purely minted money, and that money shall remain in my possession or in that of the one I give it to.

2. You shall grant me particular success in the world with gentlemen and ladies of high station, as well as success in hunting and fishing, so that I shall never return empty-handed.

3. That all the arts I already have learned, or later shall learn, I shall retain.

4. That I receive from you now the Black Book.

5. That I can become visible or invisible whenever I wish.

6. You shall also now give me that thing, whatever it may be, that has the quality, that when I have it about my person, I may immediately come to any place I name.

In return I promise to serve you during my lifetime as best I can and after my death to belong to you, body and soul. Anno 1718, this I affirm with my signature and blood.

 

Next morning Salthenius returned to the tree, Bible in hand, to receive his gifts, and was immediately arrested by the authorities, who had found both letters. He was tried, and sentenced to decapitation. 

         But then it turned out that as he was a student at Uppsala, and also a minor, the court had no legal jurisdiction in the case, which must be dealt with by the University’s Consistory Court. This took a more lenient approach, and sentenced him to just eight days (some sources say a month) in prison, presumably regarding the whole episode as a juvenile prank. And so Daniel Lorenz Salthenius lived to become a highly respected theologian, rather than the Devil’s thrall.

A Deal with the Devil

In the summers of 1890 and 1891, anthropologist Franz Boas was researching the Salishan peoples of Washington and Oregon. Among “the once powerful tribes of the Clatsop and Chinook”, he could find only three people who partially remembered the Clatsop language and none who remembered the myths, and only two people, Charles Cultee (Q¡Eltē’) and Catherine, who could still speak Chinook. Even they in their everyday lives spoke the Chehalis language. While he could get nothing from Catherine, in Charles Cultee Boas had found the perfect informant, a man of “remarkable intelligence” who was able to grasp exactly what Boas wanted, and provide him not just with all the material in Chinook Texts (1894) but also all the material in Kathlamet Texts (1901). Boas was able to record two nearly-dead languages and two nearly-forgotten mythologies from a single man, “the only source for two dialects of the Chinookan stock.” Cultee was one of only three people who could still speak the Kathlamet dialect. Charles Cultee is therefore a highly important man, and what interests me particularly about him is that he could hold in his head two separate but related mythologies, in two separate but related dialects, and transmit these to Boas in what Boas calls “a comparatively pure state”. The Chinook texts are fuller and more detailed, but both books are valuable and irreplaceable records. Both sets of myths are set in the time of the animal-people who preceded human beings. A typical Chinook myth begins, “There were Blue-Jay and Iō’i. One night the ghosts went out to buy a wife. They bought Iō’i.” Blue-Jay goes in search of his sister in the town of the ghosts, where he causes trouble by swapping the bones during the day so that when nights fall and they manifest they find they have the wrong head or legs. So Blue-Jay is banished, but is burned to death on the way home and ends up back in the town of ghosts anyway. There is a lot of sometimes macabre humour in these stories, and a fierce poetry. Trickster figures feature prominently—not just Blue-Jay, but also Coyote and Mink. One key tale is the Chinook salmon myth. In Cultee’s telling and Boas’s translation, this starts like a fairytale: “Once upon a time there was a chief who had a daughter. Many people wanted to marry her, but he was unwilling to part with her.” Repeated actions and phrases reinforce the fairytale atmosphere, although the setting is completely in the myth world. The chief sets the suitors an impossible task, to break a pair of elk antlers set up in the middle of the house. All the quadrupeds and all the birds try and fail, until last person, who is covered in sores and boils, is urged to try by Blue-Jay. The person covered in sores rises, shakes himself, and becomes clean and beautiful. He is the salmon, and he breaks the antlers with ease. The couple make a run for it, but are pursued by the disappointed suitors, until Coyote and Badger kill the salmon with an enchanted arrow, and he is eaten by the pursuers. The Crow, the salmon’s aunt, saves a salmon egg, and nurtures this until it grows into a salmon-man, the son of the original salmon. He goes to Coyote’s house, reclaims his father’s bow, and kills Coyote and Badger. Then he goes to the house of the wolves, to rescue his mother and wreak an elaborate revenge on the five wolves who have kept her captive. The salmon and his mother leave in a canoe, and he goes to sleep, warning her not to wake for five days, but, concerned, she wakes him after four, and he turns her into a pigeon, never again to be the wife of a chief. The salmon then marries five sisters, though he only loves the youngest one. His adventures continue when the eldest sister pushes him out to sea in his canoe while he is asleep, and he arrives in an island where he marries another two sisters, before returning home to the original wives and turning the eldest sister into a sea bird. The whole story is very complex and crammed with culturally-significant detail, most noticeably the consistent patterning in fives which holds throughout the Columbia River region. “There were five brothers” is the most common opening in Charles Cultee’s Chinook stories. The Kathlamet salmon myth recorded from Cultee in 1891 begins with bitter matter-of-factness: “The people of mythical times were dying of hunger.” Boas recorded a second version of this myth and one other in 1894, to check on variations of style and substance, and discovered Cultee’s mythtelling to be remarkably stable. What Franz Boas does not explore is what these two bodies of myth and their potent stories of transformation meant to Charles Cultee. Writing generally of Northwest Coast cultures, Dell Hymes writes, “Myths were told on winter nights as a kind of world-renewal rite, yet they were present in the lives of people year-round.” This feeling of myth as a living unseen presence in everyday life comes across very clearly in the homely details of Cultee’s storytelling. To quote Hymes again, “In principle the world of myth is open, any ingredient of the world may enter it; if such a myth is not known to one person, it may be to another. Myth, and narrative generally, close the world, not through content but through form.” There is some overlap between the two books, most notably in the myth in which Coyote discovers the taboos concerning fishing for and eating salmon by questioning his excrements, which appears in both Chinook and Kathlamet versions, with Coyote admitting in both, “Even I got tired.” But in general the two bodies of myth known to Charles Cultee are remarkably separate, especially considering the close cultural and linguistic connections and intermarriage between the Chinook and the Kathlamet. There is a psychological complexity to some of the stories, notably the Kathlamet sun myth , in which a chief sets of in search of the Sun, and eventually finds the house in a girl lives with her grandmother. The old woman goes out every morning wearing a blanket that shines, and comes back every evening, and hangs the blanket up. The chief, after being offered everything in the house, refuses all gifts except the shining blanket. When he reaches his uncle’s town, the Sun urges him to strike the town, and: Then he lost his senses and he broke his uncle’s town and killed all the people. Now he recovered. Had broken all the houses. His hands were full of blood. Then he thought: “Oh, what a fool I was! The thing I wanted is bad.” He tried to throw it away, but it stuck to his flesh. Again and again he tries to get rid of the blanket, and again and again it overwhelms his mind and causes him to destroy the five towns of his relatives. His desperation is palpable. At the last, when all his relatives are dead, the old woman appears, and asks, “why do you cry? You wished for it.” She takes back the blanket and he is left alone. I would love to know exactly what this desolate myth meant to Charles Cultee. And although Boas does not explore such questions, Melville Jacobs does in two later books, The Content and Style of an Oral Literature and The People Are Coming Soon. In both of these he analyses Clackamas Chinook myths, recorded in 1929-30 from another single informant, Mrs. Victoria Howard, again one of the last surviving speakers of a Chinook dialect. Jacobs emphasises the extent to myths are co-created by the mythteller and the audience, “because literary creativity resided as much in the community as in the storyteller of the evening.” It was the audience who decoded the myth as it was told. He also talks about the complete “absence of verbalized emotions” in the Clackamas myths. But in Charles Cultee’s sun myth, we do find verbalized emotion, tersely told but no less effective for that.

In the summers of 1890 and 1891, anthropologist Franz Boas was researching the Salishan peoples of Washington and Oregon. Among “the once powerful tribes of the Clatsop and Chinook”,  he could find only three people who partially remembered the Clatsop language and none who remembered the myths, and only two people, Charles Cultee (Q¡Eltē’) and Catherine, who could still speak Chinook. Even they in their everyday lives spoke the Chehalis language. 
    While he could get nothing from Catherine, in Charles Cultee Boas had found the perfect informant, a man of “remarkable intelligence”  who was able to grasp exactly what Boas wanted, and provide him not just with all the material in Chinook Texts (1894) but also all the material in Kathlamet Texts (1901). Boas was able to record two nearly-dead languages and two nearly-forgotten mythologies from a single man, “the only source for two dialects of the Chinookan stock.”  Cultee was one of only three people who could still speak the Kathlamet dialect. 
    Charles Cultee is therefore a highly important man, and what interests me particularly about him is that he could hold in his head two separate but related mythologies, in two separate but related dialects, and transmit these to Boas in what Boas calls “a comparatively pure state”.  The Chinook texts are fuller and more detailed, but both books are valuable and irreplaceable records. 
    Both sets of myths are set in the time of the animal-people who preceded human beings. A typical Chinook myth begins, “There were Blue-Jay and Iō’i. One night the ghosts went out to buy a wife. They bought Iō’i.”  Blue-Jay goes in search of his sister in the town of the ghosts, where he causes trouble by swapping the bones during the day so that when nights fall and they manifest they find they have the wrong head or legs. So Blue-Jay is banished, but is burned to death on the way home and ends up back in the town of ghosts anyway. 
    There is a lot of sometimes macabre humour in these stories, and a fierce poetry. Trickster figures feature prominently—not just Blue-Jay, but also Coyote and Mink. 
    One key tale is the Chinook salmon myth.  In Cultee’s telling and Boas’s translation, this starts like a fairytale: “Once upon a time there was a chief who had a daughter. Many people wanted to marry her, but he was unwilling to part with her.”  Repeated actions and phrases reinforce the fairytale atmosphere, although the setting is completely in the myth world. 
The chief sets the suitors an impossible task, to break a pair of elk antlers set up in the middle of the house. All the quadrupeds and all the birds try and fail, until last person, who is covered in sores and boils, is urged to try by Blue-Jay. The person covered in sores rises, shakes himself, and becomes clean and beautiful. He is the salmon, and he breaks the antlers with ease. 
    The couple make a run for it, but are pursued by the disappointed suitors, until Coyote and Badger kill the salmon with an enchanted arrow, and he is eaten by the pursuers. The Crow, the salmon’s aunt, saves a salmon egg, and nurtures this until it grows into a salmon-man, the son of the original salmon. He goes to Coyote’s house, reclaims his father’s bow, and kills Coyote and Badger. Then he goes to the house of the wolves, to rescue his mother and wreak an elaborate revenge on the five wolves who have kept her captive.  
    The salmon and his mother leave in a canoe, and he goes to sleep, warning her not to wake for five days, but, concerned, she wakes him after four, and he turns her into a pigeon, never again to be the wife of a chief. The salmon then marries five sisters, though he only loves the youngest one. His adventures continue when the eldest sister pushes him out to sea in his canoe while he is asleep, and he arrives in an island where he marries another two sisters, before returning home to the original wives and turning the eldest sister into a sea bird. 
    The whole story is very complex and crammed with culturally-significant detail, most noticeably the consistent patterning in fives which holds throughout the Columbia River region. “There were five brothers” is the most common opening in Charles Cultee’s Chinook stories.  
    The Kathlamet salmon myth recorded from Cultee in 1891 begins with bitter matter-of-factness: “The people of mythical times were dying of hunger.”  Boas recorded a second version of this myth and one other in 1894, to check on variations of style and substance, and discovered Cultee’s mythtelling to be remarkably stable. 
    What Franz Boas does not explore is what these two bodies of myth and their potent stories of transformation meant to Charles Cultee. Writing generally of Northwest Coast cultures, Dell Hymes writes, “Myths were told on winter nights as a kind of world-renewal rite, yet they were present in the lives of people year-round.”  This feeling of myth as a living unseen presence in everyday life comes across very clearly in the homely details of Cultee’s storytelling. To quote Hymes again, “In principle the world of myth is open, any ingredient of the world may enter it; if such a myth is not known to one person, it may be to another. Myth, and narrative generally, close the world, not through content but through form.”  
    There is some overlap between the two books, most notably in the myth in which Coyote discovers the taboos concerning fishing for and eating salmon by questioning his excrements, which appears in both Chinook and Kathlamet versions, with Coyote admitting in both, “Even I got tired.”  But in general the two bodies of myth known to Charles Cultee are remarkably separate, especially considering the close cultural and linguistic connections and intermarriage between the Chinook and the Kathlamet. 
    There is a psychological complexity to some of the stories, notably the Kathlamet sun myth , in which a chief sets of in search of the Sun, and eventually finds the house in a girl lives with her grandmother. The old woman goes out every morning wearing a blanket that shines, and comes back every evening, and hangs the blanket up. The chief, after being offered everything in the house, refuses all gifts except the shining blanket. When he reaches his uncle’s town, the Sun urges him to strike the town, and:

Then he lost his senses and he broke his uncle’s town and killed all the people. Now he recovered. Had broken all the houses. His hands were full of blood. Then he thought: “Oh, what a fool I was! The thing I wanted is bad.” He tried to throw it away, but it stuck to his flesh.

    Again and again he tries to get rid of the blanket, and again and again it overwhelms his mind and causes him to destroy the five towns of his relatives. His desperation is palpable. At the last, when all his relatives are dead, the old woman appears, and asks, “why do you cry? You wished for it.” She takes back the blanket and he is left alone.  
    I would love to know exactly what this desolate myth meant to Charles Cultee. And although Boas does not explore such questions, Melville Jacobs does in two later books, The Content and Style of an Oral Literature and The People Are Coming Soon. In both of these he analyses Clackamas Chinook myths, recorded in 1929-30 from another single informant, Mrs. Victoria Howard, again one of the last surviving speakers of a Chinook dialect. 
    Jacobs emphasises the extent to myths are co-created by the mythteller and the audience, “because literary creativity resided as much in the community as in the storyteller of the evening.”  It was the audience who decoded the myth as it was told. He also talks about the complete “absence of verbalized emotions” in the Clackamas myths.  But in Charles Cultee’s sun myth, we do find verbalized emotion, tersely told but no less effective for that.

A Man of Two Mythologies

I've just written a chapter on underworld journeys and the like, of which this is an excerpt. I see that the longer quotes, though separated by line spaces, are no longer indented, but I hope it's still clear what's a quote and what's not. I also hope you are all coping with this strange in-between time of lockdown. Knud Rasmussen’s Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos examines closely the 1920s beliefs about death of this Inuit people of Nunavut. The Iglulingmiut did not fear death, but they did fear the newly dead, for the soul of a good man “can turn upon the living as an evil and ruthless spirit.”[i] This fear explained the many taboos surrounding the treatment of corpses. One of Ramussen’s most eloquent sources, the shaman Aua, explained: We know that men perish through age, illness, or accident, or because another has taken their life. All this we understand. Something is broken. What we do not understand is the change which takes place in a body when death lays hold of it. It is the same body that went about among us and was living and warm and spoke as we do ourselves, but it has suddenly been robbed of a power, for lack of which it becomes cold and stiff and putrefies. Therefore we say that a man is ill when he has lost a part of his soul, or one of his souls; for there are some who believe that man has several souls. If then that part of a man’s vital force be not restored to the body, he must die. Therefore we say that a man dies when the soul leaves him.[ii] Despite this, Aua said, “We believe that men live on after death here on earth, for we often see the dead in our dreams fully alive.”[iii] There were two places to which an Iglulik might go after death: the Land of Day, which is in the sky, and the Narrow Land, which is under the sea. Life was pleasant in both these places, the main difference being that those in the Land of Day mostly hunted land animals, and those in the Narrow Land mostly hunted the beasts of the sea; which one you went to mostly depended on how you died. Given a choice, most Iglulik preferred to go to the Land of Day, where the dead constantly play ball, laugh, and sing. Iglulik shamans often made the journey to the Land of Day, both for pleasure and to obtain luck and blessings, or aid in curing a sick patient. A shaman wishing to make this journey was bound, and watched over by others who sat in silence in total darkness: But after a time, strange sounds are heard by the listening guests; they hear a whistling that seems to come far, far up in the air, humming and whistling sounds, and then suddenly the shaman calling out at the top of his voice: “Halala—halalale, halala—halalale!” And at the same moment all visitors in the house must cry: “Ale—ale—ale!”; then there is a sort of rushing noise in the snow hut, and all know that an opening has been formed for the soul of the shaman, an opening like the blowhole of a seal, and through it the soul flies up to heaven, aided by all those stars which were once human beings. And all the souls now pass up and down the souls’ road, in order to keep it open for the shaman; some rush down, others fly up, and the air is filled with a rushing, whistling sound: “Pfft—pfft—pfft!” That is the stars whistling for the soul of the shaman, and the guests in the house must then try to guess the human names of the stars, the names they bore while living down on earth; and when they succeed, one hears two short whistles: “Pfft—pfft!” and afterwards a faint, shrill sound that fades away into space. That is the stars’ answer, and their thanks for being still remembered.[iv] The shaman is then free to visit the Land of Day, and commune with the happy dead, before returning to his body and telling the assembled guests all he has seen and heard there. On January 1, 1889, a Numu (Northern Paiute) medicine man named Wovoka fell into a trance during a solar eclipse. He was said to have died, to have talked with God, to have saved the world by preventing the moon from devouring the sun, and then to have come back to life. God gave him “the power to destroy this world and all the people in it and have it made over again.”[v] If the Indians danced as Wovoka instructed them, soon a new world would roll in on a whirlwind, covering the old, exhausted earth and sweeping the whites and their world into the east. All the Indians who had died would be reborn, and a new age of peace and plenty would begin. People from many Indian nations came to hear Wovoka’s message of hope. When he waved an eagle feather over his upturned sombrero, many of those who looked in saw the whole spirit world and all their ancestors; some saw just an empty hat. Wovoka’s new spiritual movement became known as the Ghost Dance, and found great popularity not just among the Paiute and other Great Basin tribes but on the Plains, where it was taken up with particular enthusiasm by the Arapaho and the Lakota. A date was set for the new world to arrive, in the spring of 1891, when the grass was an inch high. It was while the Ghost Dance followers were in this state of feverish anticipation that the Seventh Cavalry of the U.S. Army massacred a peaceful band of more than 300 Miniconjou Lakota, at what became known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, though the Lakota were mostly unarmed, and many were women and children, some wearing the special Ghost Dance shirts that were supposed to make them invulnerable to bullets. In the words of Black Elk, “A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”[vi] Wovoka’s Ghost Dance religion was a new expression of the oldest themes in Numu myth. The God who gave Wovoka the power to light his pipe from the sun and form icicles in his hand was the Numu creator, Wolf, the sun, addressed by the Numus as Our Father. Wovoka was identified with the Rainmaker, a mysterious messiah figure from the Numu creation myth, and Numus addressed him, too, as Tamme Naa’a, Our Father. The Ghost Dance was not even a new concept to the Numus. A generation earlier, in 1870, a prophet named Wodziwob had proclaimed an earlier Ghost Dance, preaching that dancing would bring back the dead and establish a new paradise of eternal life on earth. When Wodziwob’s paradise failed to materialise, he visited the happy land of the dead one last time, only to find a spoiled world of empty shadows. There were no happy ancestors, no dancing, no laughter—only the Owl, harbinger of death, blinking his blank stare.[vii] Wovoka, in contrast, never lost faith in his vision. When the silent-film actor Tim McCoy met him in 1924, he was still firmly convinced that the new earth he had been promised was coming. When they parted, Wovoka dropped a cake of sacred red paint from Mount Grant, the place of the Paiute creation, into McCoy’s pocket, and whispered, “I will never die.”[viii] The promise of a happy afterlife has been one of the great driving forces in the spread of many religions, and the particular promise of salvation gave impetus to the spread of both Christianity and Islam. In CE 627, King Edwin of Northumbria held a council to decide whether to convert to Christianity. One of his followers compared the life of man to that of a sparrow through a banqueting hall. Who knew what happened in the darkness before or after? “If this new teaching can reveal any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.”[ix] Coifi, the high priest of the pagan gods, himself profaned their temple at Goodmanham by casting a spear into it, thus desecrating Woden’s shrine with Woden’s own weapon. This hope for renewed life after death is one of the most powerful reasons for the persistence of religious belief. People are frightened to think that, as the Earl of Rochester put it in a translation of Seneca, “After death nothing is, and nothing, death.”: Dead, we become the lumber of the world, And to that mass of matter shall be swept Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept. Devouring time swallows us whole; Impartial death confounds body and soul. For Hell and the foul fiend that rules God’s everlasting fiery jails (Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools), With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door, Are senseless stories, idle tales, Dreams, whimseys, and no more.[x] The logical positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer was such a staunch non-believer that he declared in his book Language, Truth, and Logic that even to say “There is no God” was completely meaningless.[xi] Yet when he had a near-death experience in 1988, he confided to his doctor, “I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.”[xii] Ayer remained an atheist to the end, but this incident shows how mythological thinking persists in even the most ruthlessly logical mind. When Ayer wrote his own account of “What I Saw When I Was Dead” he omitted mention of this Divine Being, but his account of a painful red light, of meeting the guardians of the universe, of struggling to cross a river, are fairly generic components of near-death experiences (NDEs). These experiences have something profound to tell us about the shaping of mystical thought in the human mind. The psychiatrists Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew B. Newburg, writing on “the biology of religious experience”, say that: “The notion that NDEs represent some type of spontaneous mystical experience is based on the similarity of NDEs to high meditative states.”[xiii] They also compare modern accounts of near-death experiences—both the more familiar positive ones of journey through a dark tunnel to a realm of light and the less familiar but apparently common negative ones which involve either being trapped in a great cosmic nothingness, or witnessing scenes of torture—to passages in the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. They note that medieval European accounts of such experiences tend to travel through the negative into the positive: Typically the experiencer first encountered a series of hellish visions involving fiendish tortures, dismemberments, the tearing and burning of flesh, and others horrors before they had a glimpse of heavenly glory.[xiv] d’Aquili and Newburg postulate near-death experiences as activating pre-programmed Jungian-style archetypes of “dissolution” and “transcendent integration”.[xv] I do not find this argument very convincing, because it depends on accepting that near-death experiences follow the same pattern across cultures and times, and this is far from proved. A. J. Ayers’ experience was influenced by his classical education and ideas of crossing the river Styx; the medieval accounts with their tortures are verbal equivalents of Dooms painted on church walls; and Wovoka’s life-changing visit to heaven, though tinged with Presbyterianism, Shakerism and Mormonism, was soaked in traditional Numu belief. [i] Ramussen 1929, 93 [ii] Ramsussen 1929, 93 [iii] Rasmussen 1929, 93 [iv] Rasmussen 1929, 129-30 [v] Hittman 1997, 10 [vi] Neihardt 1979, 270 [vii] See Hittman 1997, 96-7, 173 [viii] Hittman 1997, 168 [ix] Crossley-Holland 1982, 159 [x] Vieth 1968, 150-1 [xi] Ayer 1936, PAGE [xii] Cash 2001, retrieved 28/05/2020 [xiii] d’Aquili & Newburg 1999, 128 [xiv] d’Aquili & Newburg 1999, 126; they are drawing here on the research in Zaleski 1987 [xv] d’Aquili & Newburg 1999, 134

I've just written a chapter on underworld journeys and the like, of which this is an excerpt. I see that the longer quotes, though separated by line spaces, are no longer indented, but I hope it's still clear what's a quote and what's not. I also hope you are all coping with this strange in-between time of lockdown.

 

         Knud Rasmussen’s Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos examines closely the 1920s beliefs about death of this Inuit people of Nunavut. The Iglulingmiut did not fear death, but they did fear the newly dead, for the soul of a good man “can turn upon the living as an evil and ruthless spirit.”[i] This fear explained the many taboos surrounding the treatment of corpses.

         One of Ramussen’s most eloquent sources, the shaman Aua, explained:

 

We know that men perish through age, illness, or accident, or because another has taken their life. All this we understand. Something is broken. What we do not understand is the change which takes place in a body when death lays hold of it. It is the same body that went about among us and was living and warm and spoke as we do ourselves, but it has suddenly been robbed of a power, for lack of which it becomes cold and stiff and putrefies. Therefore we say that a man is ill when he has lost a part of his soul, or one of his souls; for there are some who believe that man has several souls. If then that part of a man’s vital force be not restored to the body, he must die. Therefore we say that a man dies when the soul leaves him.[ii]

 

Despite this, Aua said, “We believe that men live on after death here on earth, for we often see the dead in our dreams fully alive.”[iii]

         There were two places to which an Iglulik might go after death: the Land of Day, which is in the sky, and the Narrow Land, which is under the sea. Life was pleasant in both these places, the main difference being that those in the Land of Day mostly hunted land animals, and those in the Narrow Land mostly hunted the beasts of the sea; which one you went to mostly depended on how you died. Given a choice, most Iglulik preferred to go to the Land of Day, where the dead constantly play ball, laugh, and sing. Iglulik shamans often made the journey to the Land of Day, both for pleasure and to obtain luck and blessings, or aid in curing a sick patient.

         A shaman wishing to make this journey was bound, and watched over by others who sat in silence in total darkness:

 

But after a time, strange sounds are heard by the listening guests; they hear a whistling that seems to come far, far up in the air, humming and whistling sounds, and then suddenly the shaman calling out at the top of his voice:

       “Halala—halalale, halala—halalale!”

       And at the same moment all visitors in the house must cry: “Ale—ale—ale!”; then there is a sort of rushing noise in the snow hut, and all know that an opening has been formed for the soul of the shaman, an opening like the blowhole of a seal, and through it the soul flies up to heaven, aided by all those stars which were once human beings. And all the souls now pass up and down the souls’ road, in order to keep it open for the shaman; some rush down, others fly up, and the air is filled with a rushing, whistling sound:

       “Pfft—pfft—pfft!”

       That is the stars whistling for the soul of the shaman, and the guests in the house must then try to guess the human names of the stars, the names they bore while living down on earth; and when they succeed, one hears two short whistles: “Pfft—pfft!” and afterwards a faint, shrill sound that fades away into space. That is the stars’ answer, and their thanks for being still remembered.[iv]

 

         The shaman is then free to visit the Land of Day, and commune with the happy dead, before returning to his body and telling the assembled guests all he has seen and heard there.

         On January 1, 1889, a Numu (Northern Paiute) medicine man named Wovoka fell into a trance during a solar eclipse. He was said to have died, to have talked with God, to have saved the world by preventing the moon from devouring the sun, and then to have come back to life. God gave him “the power to destroy this world and all the people in it and have it made over again.”[v]

         If the Indians danced as Wovoka instructed them, soon a new world would roll in on a whirlwind, covering the old, exhausted earth and sweeping the whites and their world into the east. All the Indians who had died would be reborn, and a new age of peace and plenty would begin.

         People from many Indian nations came to hear Wovoka’s message of hope. When he waved an eagle feather over his upturned sombrero, many of those who looked in saw the whole spirit world and all their ancestors; some saw just an empty hat.

         Wovoka’s new spiritual movement became known as the Ghost Dance, and found great popularity not just among the Paiute and other Great Basin tribes but on the Plains, where it was taken up with particular enthusiasm by the Arapaho and the Lakota. A date was set for the new world to arrive, in the spring of 1891, when the grass was an inch high.

         It was while the Ghost Dance followers were in this state of feverish anticipation that the Seventh Cavalry of the U.S. Army massacred a peaceful band of more than 300 Miniconjou Lakota, at what became known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, though the Lakota were mostly unarmed, and many were women and children, some wearing the special Ghost Dance shirts that were supposed to make them invulnerable to bullets. In the words of Black Elk, “A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”[vi]       

         Wovoka’s Ghost Dance religion was a new expression of the oldest themes in Numu myth. The God who gave Wovoka the power to light his pipe from the sun and form icicles in his hand was the Numu creator, Wolf, the sun, addressed by the Numus as Our Father. Wovoka was identified with the Rainmaker, a mysterious messiah figure from the Numu creation myth, and Numus addressed him, too, as Tamme Naa’a, Our Father.

         The Ghost Dance was not even a new concept to the Numus. A generation earlier, in 1870, a prophet named Wodziwob had proclaimed an earlier Ghost Dance, preaching that dancing would bring back the dead and establish a new paradise of eternal life on earth. When Wodziwob’s paradise failed to materialise, he visited the happy land of the dead one last time, only to find a spoiled world of empty shadows. There were no happy ancestors, no dancing, no laughter—only the Owl, harbinger of death, blinking his blank stare.[vii]

         Wovoka, in contrast, never lost faith in his vision. When the silent-film actor Tim McCoy met him in 1924, he was still firmly convinced that the new earth he had been promised was coming. When they parted, Wovoka dropped a cake of sacred red paint from Mount Grant, the place of the Paiute creation, into McCoy’s pocket, and whispered, “I will never die.”[viii]

         The promise of a happy afterlife has been one of the great driving forces in the spread of many religions, and the particular promise of salvation gave impetus to the spread of both Christianity and Islam. In CE 627, King Edwin of Northumbria held a council to decide whether to convert to Christianity. One of his followers compared the life of man to that of a sparrow through a banqueting hall. Who knew what happened in the darkness before or after? “If this new teaching can reveal any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.”[ix] Coifi, the high priest of the pagan gods, himself profaned their temple at Goodmanham by casting a spear into it, thus desecrating Woden’s shrine with Woden’s own weapon.

         This hope for renewed life after death is one of the most powerful reasons for the persistence of religious belief. People are frightened to think that, as the Earl of Rochester put it in a translation of Seneca, “After death nothing is, and nothing, death.”:

 

Dead, we become the lumber of the world,

And to that mass of matter shall be swept

Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.

       Devouring time swallows us whole;

Impartial death confounds body and soul.

       For Hell and the foul fiend that rules

       God’s everlasting fiery jails

       (Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),

With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,

       Are senseless stories, idle tales,

                Dreams, whimseys, and no more.[x]

 

         The logical positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer was such a staunch non-believer that he declared in his book Language, Truth, and Logic that even to say “There is no God” was completely meaningless.[xi] Yet when he had a near-death experience in 1988, he confided to his doctor, “I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.”[xii] Ayer remained an atheist to the end, but this incident shows how mythological thinking persists in even the most ruthlessly logical mind.

         When Ayer wrote his own account of “What I Saw When I Was Dead” he omitted mention of this Divine Being, but his account of a painful red light, of meeting the guardians of the universe, of struggling to cross a river, are fairly generic components of near-death experiences (NDEs). These experiences have something profound to tell us about the shaping of mystical thought in the human mind.

         The psychiatrists Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew B. Newburg, writing on “the biology of religious experience”, say that: “The notion that NDEs represent some type of spontaneous mystical experience is based on the similarity of NDEs to high meditative states.”[xiii] They also compare modern accounts of near-death experiences—both the more familiar positive ones of journey through a dark tunnel to a realm of light and the less familiar but apparently common negative ones which involve either being trapped in a great cosmic nothingness, or witnessing scenes of torture—to passages in the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. They note that medieval European accounts of such experiences tend to travel through the negative into the positive:

 

Typically the experiencer first encountered a series of hellish visions involving fiendish tortures, dismemberments, the tearing and burning of flesh, and others horrors before they had a glimpse of heavenly glory.[xiv]

 

d’Aquili and Newburg postulate near-death experiences as activating pre-programmed Jungian-style archetypes of “dissolution” and “transcendent integration”.[xv] I do not find this argument very convincing, because it depends on accepting that near-death experiences follow the same pattern across cultures and times, and this is far from proved. A. J. Ayers’ experience was influenced by his classical education and ideas of crossing the river Styx; the medieval accounts with their tortures are verbal equivalents of Dooms painted on church walls; and Wovoka’s life-changing visit to heaven, though tinged with Presbyterianism, Shakerism and Mormonism, was soaked in traditional Numu belief.

 

 

[i] Ramussen 1929, 93

[ii] Ramsussen 1929, 93

[iii] Rasmussen 1929, 93

[iv] Rasmussen 1929, 129-30

[v] Hittman 1997, 10

[vi] Neihardt 1979, 270

[vii] See Hittman 1997, 96-7, 173

[viii] Hittman 1997, 168

[ix] Crossley-Holland 1982, 159

[x] Vieth 1968, 150-1

[xi] Ayer 1936, PAGE

[xii] Cash 2001, retrieved 28/05/2020

[xiii] d’Aquili &amp; Newburg 1999, 128

[xiv] d’Aquili &amp; Newburg 1999, 126; they are drawing here on the research in Zaleski 1987

[xv] d’Aquili &amp; Newburg 1999, 134

Adventure in the Land of Day

We are used to thinking of humans and other animals as two mutually exclusive categories. The idea that the human-animal barrier can be breached, and that one category of being can transform into the other, survives only in the idea of the werewolf, and the idea of the werewolf is a literary and filmic device rather than a living belief. Yet in many mythologies, especially those of peoples who are primarily hunter-gatherers, the notion of an early race of beings who live in the flux of creation and who are able to manifest both as human and as animal is central to the lived belief of the modern humans who came after them. In 1923 the ethnologist Knud Rasmussen, leader of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, spent seven months among the Netsilingmiut in the Canadian Arctic, collecting material for his book The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture. Much of that time was spent in the snow hut of Nâlungiaq and her husband Inũtuk. Once they knew each other very well, Nâlungiaq felt comfortable enough with Rasmussen to speak openly and freely about her beliefs. She was not a shaman, and had never had visions; she described herself as “just an ordinary woman.” She claimed no special knowledge, but instead that what she telling him “is something that is known to every child.”[i] In the very first times, she told him, both people and animals lived on the earth, but there was no difference between them. A person could become an animal and an animal could become a human beings: “sometimes they were people and other times animals, and there was no difference.”[ii] Stories of such therianthropic first beings, with their raw powers of transformation and creation, are crucially important to the mythology and the worldview of cultures ranging from the Americas to Africa and to Australia. Their activities in the creation-time shape the world and establish its laws. As Nâlungiaq put it, “That was the time that magic words were made.”[iii] In California, for instance, Istet Woiche’s Achumawi “history of the universe” covers 160 pages. Human beings only enter the story on page 159. Most of the book is taken up with the doings of the First People, who are half-human, half-animal. It is only after a world flood that almost all the First People turn into animals, and the Real People emerge. The Karok call this time before the coming of humans Pikavahairak. After the creation is stabilized, the First People typically turn into animals, birds, rocks, landmarks, or disembodied spirits. But generally they remain a source of sacred power, to be called on, and perhaps mimicked or embodied in rituals and dances. People with animal characteristics depicted in both Ice Age cave paintings and cave paintings of the San in southern Africa are thought to represent shamans whose identification with prey animals is so acute they undergo a process of psychic or even actual transformation. Such extreme sensitivity of the hunter for the hunted manifests itself among the San as “Bushmen’s letters” or “tappings”[iv], sympathetic responses that link hunter to prey through shared sensation: We have a sensation in our feet, as we feel the rustling of the feet of the springbok with which the springbok come, making the bushes rustle. We feel in this manner, we have the sensation in our heads, when we are about to chop the springbok’s horns. We have a sensation in our face, on account of the blackness of the stripes of the springbok. We feel a sensation in our eyes, on account of the black marks on the eyes of the springbok.[v] This oh-so-subtle attunement is described by Neil Bennum as “a kind of transformation.”[vi] A similar process of transformation among the Siberian Yukhaghirs is witnessed by Rane Willerslev at the start of his profound study Soul Hunters: Watching Old Spiridon rocking his body back and forth, I was puzzled whether the figure I saw before me was man or elk. The elk-hide coat worn with its hair outward, the headgear with its characteristic protruding ears, and the skis covered with an elk’s smooth leg skins, so as to sound like the animal when moving in snow, made him an elk; yet the lower part of his face below the hat, with its human eyes, nose, and mouth, along with the loaded rifle in his hands, made him a man. Thus it was not that Spiridon had stopped being human. Rather, he had a liminal quality: he was not an elk, and yet he was also not notan elk. He was occupying a strange place in between human and nonhuman identities.[vii] Willerslev eloquently describes a world in which “humans and animals can move in and out of different species’ perspectives by temporarily taking on each other’s bodies.”[viii]Tales told by a Tundra Yukaghir man, Innocent Karyakin, to Waldemar Bogoras in 1895 feature a shaman who turns into a fox, and a human boy who is born to a reindeer, demonstrating that this species-mutability has been a longterm feature of Yukaghir thought.[ix] It is sometimes hard in myths to tell whether beings given the names of particular animals are supposed to have the form of those animals or human form. The name of Ture, the trickster of the Zande of the Sudan, means Spider, just like the name of the Asante trickster Ananse. E. E. Evans-Pritchard tried to ascertain whether storytellers actually envisaged Ture as a spider, and was told that “the character has the name Ture because he was so clever, like the spider which can make a web out of itself. Also, in the stories he is invariably given the human personal pronoun koand never the animal pronoun u.”[x]The other animal characters in the Ture stories, however, though they speak and act like people, are definitely thought of as animals, though “in the telling of the tale, in the situation of the drama, they are both.”[xi] Writing about the Nuxalk (Bella Coola) in the 1920s, the anthropologist T. F. McIlwraith noted a marked difference in their attitude to animals. “They regard them as possessing human mentality, and even the ability to assume human form if they so desire. In fact, they believe that animals merely appear to them in the shape of beasts, but can change to human, or other form and behave accordingly whenever they wished to do so.”[xii]Only shamans could lift the veil between the human and animal worlds, and perceive the animals as they really were, living quasi-human lives in their own homes. [i]Rasmussen 1931: 207 [ii]Rasmussen 1931: 208 [iii]Rasmussen 1931: 208 [iv]See Guenther 2020: I:227-233 [v]//Kabbo quoted in Bleek and Lloyd 1911: 335 [vi]Bennum 2004: 358 [vii]Willerslev 2007: 1 [viii]Willerselv 2007: 2 [ix]Bogoras 1918: 20-25 [x]Evans-Pritchard 1967: 23 [xi]Evans-Pritchard 1967: 25 [xii]McIlwraith 1992: vol 1: 70 [With apologies for leaving such a long time between between updates; work is now proceeding well after a period when caring duties made it almost impossible to get anything done]

We are used to thinking of humans and other animals as two mutually exclusive categories. The idea that the human-animal barrier can be breached, and that one category of being can transform into the other, survives only in the idea of the werewolf, and the idea of the werewolf is a literary and filmic device rather than a living belief.

         Yet in many mythologies, especially those of peoples who are primarily hunter-gatherers, the notion of an early race of beings who live in the flux of creation and who are able to manifest both as human and as animal is central to the lived belief of the modern humans who came after them.

         In 1923 the ethnologist Knud Rasmussen, leader of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, spent seven months among the Netsilingmiut in the Canadian Arctic, collecting material for his book The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture. Much of that time was spent in the snow hut of Nâlungiaq and her husband Inũtuk. Once they knew each other very well, Nâlungiaq felt comfortable enough with Rasmussen to speak openly and freely about her beliefs. She was not a shaman, and had never had visions; she described herself as “just an ordinary woman.” She claimed no special knowledge, but instead that what she telling him “is something that is known to every child.”[i]

         In the very first times, she told him, both people and animals lived on the earth, but there was no difference between them. A person could become an animal and an animal could become a human beings: “sometimes they were people and other times animals, and there was no difference.”[ii]

Stories of such therianthropic first beings, with their raw powers of transformation and creation, are crucially important to the mythology and the worldview of cultures ranging from the Americas to Africa and to Australia. Their activities in the creation-time shape the world and establish its laws. As Nâlungiaq put it, “That was the time that magic words were made.”[iii]

         In California, for instance, Istet Woiche’s Achumawi “history of the universe” covers 160 pages. Human beings only enter the story on page 159. Most of the book is taken up with the doings of the First People, who are half-human, half-animal. It is only after a world flood that almost all the First People turn into animals, and the Real People emerge. The Karok call this time before the coming of humans Pikavahairak.

         After the creation is stabilized, the First People typically turn into animals, birds, rocks, landmarks, or disembodied spirits. But generally they remain a source of sacred power, to be called on, and perhaps mimicked or embodied in rituals and dances.

         People with animal characteristics depicted in both Ice Age cave paintings and cave paintings of the San in southern Africa are thought to represent shamans whose identification with prey animals is so acute they undergo a process of psychic or even actual transformation. Such extreme sensitivity of the hunter for the hunted manifests itself among the San as “Bushmen’s letters” or “tappings”[iv], sympathetic responses that link hunter to prey through shared sensation:

 

We have a sensation in our feet, as we feel the rustling of the feet of the springbok with which the springbok come, making the bushes rustle. We feel in this manner, we have the sensation in our heads, when we are about to chop the springbok’s horns. We have a sensation in our face, on account of the blackness of the stripes of the springbok. We feel a sensation in our eyes, on account of the black marks on the eyes of the springbok.[v]

 

This oh-so-subtle attunement is described by Neil Bennum as “a kind of transformation.”[vi]

         A similar process of transformation among the Siberian Yukhaghirs is witnessed by Rane Willerslev at the start of his profound study Soul Hunters:

 

Watching Old Spiridon rocking his body back and forth, I was puzzled whether the figure I saw before me was man or elk. The elk-hide coat worn with its hair outward, the headgear with its characteristic protruding ears, and the skis covered with an elk’s smooth leg skins, so as to sound like the animal when moving in snow, made him an elk; yet the lower part of his face below the hat, with its human eyes, nose, and mouth, along with the loaded rifle in his hands, made him a man. Thus it was not that Spiridon had stopped being human. Rather, he had a liminal quality: he was not an elk, and yet he was also not notan elk. He was occupying a strange place in between human and nonhuman identities.[vii]

 

Willerslev eloquently describes a world in which “humans and animals can move in and out of different species’ perspectives by temporarily taking on each other’s bodies.”[viii]Tales told by a Tundra Yukaghir man, Innocent Karyakin, to Waldemar Bogoras in 1895 feature a shaman who turns into a fox, and a human boy who is born to a reindeer, demonstrating that this species-mutability has been a longterm feature of Yukaghir thought.[ix]

         It is sometimes hard in myths to tell whether beings given the names of particular animals are supposed to have the form of those animals or human form. The name of Ture, the trickster of the Zande of the Sudan, means Spider, just like the name of the Asante trickster Ananse. E. E. Evans-Pritchard tried to ascertain whether storytellers actually envisaged Ture as a spider, and was told that “the character has the name Ture because he was so clever, like the spider which can make a web out of itself. Also, in the stories he is invariably given the human personal pronoun koand never the animal pronoun u.”[x]The other animal characters in the Ture stories, however, though they speak and act like people, are definitely thought of as animals, though “in the telling of the tale, in the situation of the drama, they are both.”[xi]

         Writing about the Nuxalk (Bella Coola) in the 1920s, the anthropologist T. F. McIlwraith noted a marked difference in their attitude to animals. “They regard them as possessing human mentality, and even the ability to assume human form if they so desire. In fact, they believe that animals merely appear to them in the shape of beasts, but can change to human, or other form and behave accordingly  whenever they wished to do so.”[xii]Only shamans could lift the veil between the human and animal worlds, and perceive the animals as they really were, living quasi-human lives in their own homes.

 

[i]Rasmussen 1931: 207

[ii]Rasmussen 1931: 208

[iii]Rasmussen 1931: 208

[iv]See Guenther 2020: I:227-233

[v]//Kabbo quoted in Bleek and Lloyd 1911: 335

[vi]Bennum 2004: 358

[vii]Willerslev 2007: 1

[viii]Willerselv 2007: 2

[ix]Bogoras 1918: 20-25

[x]Evans-Pritchard 1967: 23

[xi]Evans-Pritchard 1967: 25

[xii]McIlwraith 1992: vol 1: 70

[With apologies for leaving such a long time between between updates; work is now proceeding well after a period when caring duties made it almost impossible to get anything done]

Animals that become human, humans that become animals

I think it fair to describe mythologies as belief systems. They are flexible and subject to change both over time and between communities and even individuals, but they contain within themselves a whole world view, coherent and complete in itself. But are different mythologies incompatible with each other? The answer, surprisingly, is no. One mythology can simply swallow another whole, as happened when the Assyrians conquered Babylon, and all the mythology of Marduk, chief god of Babylon, was re-assigned to the Assyrian god Assur. Or mythologies can blend and intertwine, as happened when the Romans incorporated Greek mythology into their pre-existing religious and cultural thinking. They can crash and fuse, as with the Greeks and the Minoans. I have two books by the American ethnologist Franz Boas, Kathlamet Texts and Chinook Texts. The interesting thing about these books is that the informant for both was the same person, Charles Cultee. He had carried these mythologies in separate compartments of his mind, and was able to transmit them untarnished; when Boas did his research, Cultee was one of only 3 speakers of Kathlamet, and in everyday life spoke his wife’s language, Chehalis. Another Native American example is even more striking. John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks of 1932 introduced Hehaka Sapa or Black Elk as the leading authority on Sioux spirituality, a position sealed by the publication of Joseph Epes Brown’s The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux. There is no reason to doubt Black Elk’s knowledge or authority on the matters of which he speaks in these two outstanding books. But it is also true that while fully believing and respecting the Lakota teachings which he transmitted, and keeping faith with the vision he was granted of the “living light” of the Ghost Dance, in December 1904 Black Elk was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and devoted many years to instructing fellow Lakotas in Catholic doctine. He was able to hold both belief systems in his head without conflict, even with some crossover and integration, as in his assimilation of the Two Roads picture catechism to his own Ghost Dance vision. I’m reminded of Helgi the Skinny, a Viking who in the changeover period between Norse and Christian belief, “believed in Christ, but prayed to Thor on sea journeys and in touch stituations.” Silversmiths at the time made amulets that could be regarded as Thor’s hammer or Christ’s cross, as the believer wished.

I think it fair to describe mythologies as belief systems. They are flexible and subject to change both over time and between communities and even individuals, but they contain within themselves a whole world view, coherent and complete in itself.

            But are different mythologies incompatible with each other? The answer, surprisingly, is no. One mythology can simply swallow another whole, as happened when the Assyrians conquered Babylon, and all the mythology of Marduk, chief god of Babylon, was re-assigned to the Assyrian god Assur.

            Or mythologies can blend and intertwine, as happened when the Romans incorporated Greek mythology into their pre-existing religious and cultural thinking. They can crash and fuse, as with the Greeks and the Minoans.

            I have two books by the American ethnologist Franz Boas, Kathlamet Texts and Chinook Texts. The interesting thing about these books is that the informant for both was the same person, Charles Cultee. He had carried these mythologies in separate compartments of his mind, and was able to transmit them untarnished; when Boas did his research, Cultee was one of only 3 speakers of Kathlamet, and in everyday life spoke his wife’s language, Chehalis.

            Another Native American example is even more striking. John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks of 1932 introduced Hehaka Sapa or Black Elk as the leading authority on Sioux spirituality, a position sealed by the publication of Joseph Epes Brown’s The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux. There is no reason to doubt Black Elk’s knowledge or authority on the matters of which he speaks in these two outstanding books. But it is also true that while fully believing and respecting the Lakota teachings which he transmitted, and keeping faith with the vision he was granted of the “living light” of the Ghost Dance, in December 1904 Black Elk was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and devoted many years to instructing fellow Lakotas in Catholic doctine. He was able to hold both belief systems in his head without conflict, even with some crossover and integration, as in his assimilation of the Two Roads picture catechism to his own Ghost Dance vision.

            I’m reminded of Helgi the Skinny, a Viking who in the changeover period between Norse and Christian belief, “believed in Christ, but prayed to Thor on sea journeys and in touch stituations.” Silversmiths at the time made amulets that could be regarded as Thor’s hammer or Christ’s cross, as the believer wished.

Belief Systems

While it has proved possible for Christianity in a few cases to absorb the energies and mould itself to the mental patterns of existing belief-structures, as with the Zinacantecs in Mexico or the Nuxalk in British Columbia, more usually Christianization has required a complete break with the previous “pagan” religion. The anthropologist Raymond Firth was able to observe this process up close with the Tikopia in the Solomon Islands, to whom he devoted a lifetime’s study. Although Tikopia is in Melanesia, its culture is essentially Polynesian. When Firth first went there in 1928, the island had a population of about 1,200. Every aspect of Tikopia life was governed by a complex ritual cycle known as the Work of the Gods, which has affinities with other Polynesian ritual systems such as the Makahiki of Hawaii or the Inasi of Tonga. The Work of the Gods was divided into two six-week ritual cycles, the Work of the Trade-Wind and the Work of the Monsoon, during which time the whole of Tikopian society devoted itself to the performance of the necessary rites. Major rites included the re-dedication of the sacred canoes, the re-consecration of the temples, harvest and planting rites, and the ritual manufacture of turmeric, which was used as a ritual body paint and as a sacred dye. Simply remembering the intricate sequence of ritual performances, and ensuring that all were carried out correctly, involved an impressive collective act of memory and commitment. The purpose of it all was to maintain contact with the atua, powerful spiritual beings whose favour was required to feed the Tikopia and guard their health. These gods and spirits were appeased with food and kava, and asked with elaborate formality to ensure plentiful harvests of crops such as breadfruit or yams. The rituals of the Work of the Gods were not simply acts of worship; they were part of a logical system of trade between the Tikopia and the atua. The Tikopia performed the rituals for the gods, and in return the gods granted the Tikopia the necessities of life. It was a system in which ritual performance and economic activity, such as food production, were inextricably combined. Although the ostensible sacrifice to the gods was of food and kava, in fact most of this was consumed by the participants in the rite. The real sacrifice was of time and energy, but even this was not wasted, as most ritual activities—such as plaiting mats, making thatch, or repairing canoes—were in themselves economically valuable. For the Tikopia, mythology, religion, economics, social status, community values, and simple survival were all bound together in the Work of the Gods. The rites were said to have been instituted by a man named Saku, the culture hero of the Tikopia. Saku (whose name was a sacred taboo, and never uttered), gave the people clothing, and by doing so awoke their human consciousness, giving them “minds.” He made the sacred adzes, and established the Work of the Gods. In those early days, everything in the world had a voice, even the trees and the rocks, but Saku ordered them to be silent. He then ordered the rocks to form a pile, and the earth to cover it, forming a platform where the temple of the Kafika clan was raised. Saku had a companion in his exploits, Te Samoa, said to be an immigrant from Samoa. Many of the myths tell of their friendly rivalry, until finally Saku trapped Te Samoa in a pit beneath the tree used as the supporting post for the temple of Kafika. Te Samoa pleaded to be released, but Saku told him, “Sleep then, friend! Your house which stands here shall obey you!” When Saku died, in a dispute over territory, he flew to the gods, to be cleansed by Atua Fafine, the female deity who was half of the ancestral couple of the Tikopia. When the island of Tikopia was pulled up from the sea, Atua Fafine was sitting on it plaiting a pandanus leaf mat, with her husband Atua i Raropuka beside her, plaiting coconut sinnet cord. Because Saku allowed himself to die, rather than rising up to kill his opponent, he arrived among the gods unpolluted, and was able to say to each of them in turn, “Give me your mana”, that is, their supernatural powers. And so, renamed Mapusia, he became the most powerful of them, to be appeased and feared, and only named in ritual contexts, as, “When I utter his name he hears in the heavens, and bends over to listen to what is being said.” Out of such contexts, the name Mapusia was rarely used. He was Te Atua I Kafika, “the Deity of Kafika”, or, to the Ariki Kafika, “My Sacred Chief”. He was also Te Ariki Fakamataku, “the Fear-Causing Chief”, who caused the thunder by clattering his staff from side to side in the heavens. Mapusia was not only the principal god of the Kafika, but was regarded as the god above all others in Tikopia: “No god can come and supplant him; he is high because he is strong.” The anger of Mapusia was terrible. An individual who offended him might be struck down with illness or death; if society as a whole failed to appease him, he might send drought, pestilence, or a tropical cyclone. The island of Tikopia is particularly vulnerable to tropical storms and subsequent famines, as was demonstrated in December 2003, when the island was devastated by Cyclone Zoë. Whole villages were swept away, and the fertile land soaked with salt water, from which it takes three years to recover. Because Mapusia was the principal atua of the Kafika clan, the chief of that clan, the Ariki Kafika, acted as the high priest of the Work of the Gods. It was the Ariki Kafika who decided when to “throw the firestick” to set the ritual sequence in motion. Turmeric, used as a sacred dye and as ritual body paint, was said to be the perfume of Mapusia, and the ritual extraction of turmeric took place over several days in the trade-wind season. “I eat ten times your excrement, My Sacred Chief,” chanted the priest, offering food and kava to the god, “Your turmeric-making will be prepared.” Whether we translate the word atua as god or spirit, the atua were not simply abstract concepts of divine or supernatural power; they were thought to be as real as human beings. One of the ceremonial dances of the monsoon season was the Taomatangi, the dance to quell the wind. The atuawere believed to be present at this dance, sitting with their backs against sacred stones, the male atua cross-legged, the female atua with their legs stretched out in front of them. When Raymond Firth took photographs of this dance, the Tikopia were amazed that the atua, whom they could collectively see, were not visible to the camera. Throughout the twentieth century, this deeply-engrained system of belief was eroded by Christianity. Gradually the community will to perform the rites dwindled away. After an epidemic in 1955 in which 200 people died, including the Ariki Kafika and other chiefs, there were simply not enough believers left to carry out the Work of the Gods. The remaining chiefs performed a final kava ceremony, the “kava of parting”, to inform the atua that their rites were being abandoned, and they should drink their kava and retire to rest forever in their spirit homes.

While it has proved possible for Christianity in a few cases to absorb the energies and mould itself to the mental patterns of existing belief-structures, as with the Zinacantecs in Mexico or the Nuxalk in British Columbia, more usually Christianization has required a complete break with the previous “pagan” religion. The anthropologist Raymond Firth was able to observe this process up close with the Tikopia in the Solomon Islands, to whom he devoted a lifetime’s study.

         Although Tikopia is in Melanesia, its culture is essentially Polynesian. When Firth first went there in 1928, the island had a population of about 1,200. Every aspect of Tikopia life was governed by a complex ritual cycle known as the Work of the Gods, which has affinities with other Polynesian ritual systems such as the Makahiki of Hawaii or the Inasi of Tonga.

         The Work of the Gods was divided into two six-week ritual cycles, the Work of the Trade-Wind and the Work of the Monsoon, during which time the whole of Tikopian society devoted itself to the performance of the necessary rites. Major rites included the re-dedication of the sacred canoes, the re-consecration of the temples, harvest and planting rites, and the ritual manufacture of turmeric, which was used as a ritual body paint and as a sacred dye. Simply remembering the intricate sequence of ritual performances, and ensuring that all were carried out correctly, involved an impressive collective act of memory and commitment. The purpose of it all was to maintain contact with the atua, powerful spiritual beings whose favour was required to feed the Tikopia and guard their health. These gods and spirits were appeased with food and kava, and asked with elaborate formality to ensure plentiful harvests of crops such as breadfruit or yams.

         The rituals of the Work of the Gods were not simply acts of worship; they were part of a logical system of trade between the Tikopia and the atua. The Tikopia performed the rituals for the gods, and in return the gods granted the Tikopia the necessities of life. It was a system in which ritual performance and economic activity, such as food production, were inextricably combined. Although the ostensible sacrifice to the gods was of food and kava, in fact most of this was consumed by the participants in the rite. The real sacrifice was of time and energy, but even this was not wasted, as most ritual activities—such as plaiting mats, making thatch, or repairing canoes—were in themselves economically valuable.

         For the Tikopia, mythology, religion, economics, social status, community values, and simple survival were all bound together in the Work of the Gods. The rites were said to have been instituted by a man named Saku, the culture hero of the Tikopia. Saku (whose name was a sacred taboo, and never uttered), gave the people clothing, and by doing so awoke their human consciousness, giving them “minds.” He made the sacred adzes, and established the Work of the Gods.

         In those early days, everything in the world had a voice, even the trees and the rocks, but Saku ordered them to be silent. He then ordered the rocks to form a pile, and the earth to cover it, forming a platform where the temple of the Kafika clan was raised. Saku had a companion in his exploits, Te Samoa, said to be an immigrant from Samoa. Many of the myths tell of their friendly rivalry, until finally Saku trapped Te Samoa in a pit beneath the tree used as the supporting post for the temple of Kafika. Te Samoa pleaded to be released, but Saku told him, “Sleep then, friend! Your house which stands here shall obey you!”

       When Saku died, in a dispute over territory, he flew to the gods, to be cleansed by Atua Fafine, the female deity who was half of the ancestral couple of the Tikopia. When the island of Tikopia was pulled up from the sea, Atua Fafine was sitting on it plaiting a pandanus leaf mat, with her husband Atua i Raropuka beside her, plaiting coconut sinnet cord. Because Saku allowed himself to die, rather than rising up to kill his opponent, he arrived among the gods unpolluted, and was able to say to each of them in turn, “Give me your mana”, that is, their supernatural powers. And so, renamed Mapusia, he became the most powerful of them, to be appeased and feared, and only named in ritual contexts, as, “When I utter his name he hears in the heavens, and bends over to listen to what is being said.”

       Out of such contexts, the name Mapusia was rarely used. He was Te Atua I Kafika, “the Deity of Kafika”, or, to the Ariki Kafika, “My Sacred Chief”. He was also Te Ariki Fakamataku, “the Fear-Causing Chief”, who caused the thunder by clattering his staff from side to side in the heavens.

       Mapusia was not only the principal god of the Kafika, but was regarded as the god above all others in Tikopia: “No god can come and supplant him; he is high because he is strong.” The anger of Mapusia was terrible. An individual who offended him might be struck down with illness or death; if society as a whole failed to appease him, he might send drought, pestilence, or a tropical cyclone. The island of Tikopia is particularly vulnerable to tropical storms and subsequent famines, as was demonstrated in December 2003, when the island was devastated by Cyclone Zoë. Whole villages were swept away, and the fertile land soaked with salt water, from which it takes three years to recover.

         Because Mapusia was the principal atua of the Kafika clan, the chief of that clan, the Ariki Kafika, acted as the high priest of the Work of the Gods. It was the Ariki Kafika who decided when to “throw the firestick” to set the ritual sequence in motion.

         Turmeric, used as a sacred dye and as ritual body paint, was said to be the perfume of Mapusia, and the ritual extraction of turmeric took place over several days in the trade-wind season. “I eat ten times your excrement, My Sacred Chief,” chanted the priest, offering food and kava to the god, “Your turmeric-making will be prepared.”

         Whether we translate the word atua as god or spirit, the atua were not simply abstract concepts of divine or supernatural power; they were thought to be as real as human beings. One of the ceremonial dances of the monsoon season was the Taomatangi, the dance to quell the wind. The atuawere believed to be present at this dance, sitting with their backs against sacred stones, the male atua cross-legged, the female atua with their legs stretched out in front of them. When Raymond Firth took photographs of this dance, the Tikopia were amazed that the atua, whom they could collectively see, were not visible to the camera.

         Throughout the twentieth century, this deeply-engrained system of belief was eroded by Christianity. Gradually the community will to perform the rites dwindled away. After an epidemic in 1955 in which 200 people died, including the Ariki Kafika and other chiefs, there were simply not enough believers left to carry out the Work of the Gods. The remaining chiefs performed a final kava ceremony, the “kava of parting”, to inform the atua that their rites were being abandoned, and they should drink their kava and retire to rest forever in their spirit homes.

Christianity and Paganism

Ever since the death of Queen Elizabeth II, it has been evident how completely British attitudes to the Royal Family are suffused with magical thinking. The newspapers have been full of omens and portents, while hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have queued for 14 hours to walk past the Queen's closed coffin, most looking rigidly ahead, not even glancing at the coffin itself, as if it were not for the likes of the common people to even gaze on such a sacred scene. These attitudes, bolstered by the many stories of minor encounters with the Queen related in so breathless a manner you would think they were recounting miraculous acts, have absolutely nothing to do with the Monarch's actual constitutional role. Instead, they align the Queen with the Divinely Ordained kings of the past. Folklorists are going to have a field day with all of this, but I have been thinking about it in the context of rulers regarded as living representatives of the gods. An interesting example can be found in the Babylonian New Year Festival, the Akitu. On the fifth day of this twelve day festival, which in essence ensured the continuance of time in the renewal of the year, the king of Babylon went to the temple of the god Marduk to ritually abdicate his throne. The king was stripped of his royal emblems and humiliated by the priest, who abused him and slapped his face. Then the king knelt before the statue of Marduk, and swore to uphold his sacred office with honour and justice. He was reinvested with his royal regalia, and then the priest struck him again. It was thought lucky if this slap stung so sharply it induced tears. It was a reminder that the king was merely a slave of the god. The kings of ancient Egypt, or pharaohs are they came to be called, were regarded as gods in both life and death. Each king was supposed to be "the living Horus"—an incarnation of the god Horus, the son of Osiris. The king was humanity’s link to the gods. He stood in a special relation to each of them, and it was through him alone that the gods could be contacted. The temples were quite literally homes for the gods, rather than places of worship for the people. In theory every ritual act, designed to please the gods and keep them interested in human affairs, was carried out by the king himself, although in practice most were enacted by priests in his name. The king of Egypt had a heavy duty to maintain what the Egyptians called maat—a word which means that which is right, true, just, and proper. This religious and moral burden was as serious an element of the kingship as exercising power, administering the kingdom, or maintaining law and order. It was this awesome task that humbled the Eyptian kings before the divine powers. The rites which took place daily in Egyptian temples were repetitions of mythical acts that laid the foundations of maat. This repetition, done by or in the name of the king, secured those foundations, and therefore maintained the balance of the cosmos. To daily recall and re-enact the creation was, as it were, to keep the clockwork of the universe wound up. It is this almost magical power to keep things going that people are ascribing to the late Queen when they say things like “She’s always been there”. Her loss is felt to leave the world out of balance, and acts such as the long pilgrimage to file past her coffin, undertaken by individuals but on behalf of society as a whole, are understood to be necessary to restore that balance. Many people interviewed in the queue have brought photographs of their mothers or grandmothers on that pilgrimage with them, as if the dead, too, have their role to play. The maintenance of continuity is seen in Britain today not as the province of parliament, but of the monarchy, in much the same way as it was in Babylon or Egypt in ancient times.

Ever since the death of Queen Elizabeth II, it has been evident how completely British attitudes to the Royal Family are suffused with magical thinking. The newspapers have been full of omens and portents, while hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have queued for 14 hours to walk past the Queen's closed coffin, most looking rigidly ahead, not even glancing at the coffin itself, as if it were not for the likes of the common people to even gaze on such a sacred scene. These attitudes, bolstered by the many stories of minor encounters with the Queen related in so breathless a manner you would think they were recounting miraculous acts, have absolutely nothing to do with the Monarch's actual constitutional role. Instead, they align the Queen with the Divinely Ordained kings of the past.

 

Folklorists are going to have a field day with all of this, but I have been thinking about it in the context of rulers regarded as living representatives of the gods. An interesting example can be found in the Babylonian New Year Festival, the Akitu. On the fifth day of this twelve day festival, which in essence ensured the continuance of time in the renewal of the year, the king of Babylon went to the temple of the god Marduk to ritually abdicate his throne. The king was stripped of his royal emblems and humiliated by the priest, who abused him and slapped his face. Then the king knelt before the statue of Marduk, and swore to uphold his sacred office with honour and justice. He was reinvested with his royal regalia, and then the priest struck him again. It was thought lucky if this slap stung so sharply it induced tears. It was a reminder that the king was merely a slave of the god.

 

The kings of ancient Egypt, or pharaohs are they came to be called, were regarded as gods in both life and death. Each king was supposed to be "the living Horus"—an incarnation of the god Horus, the son of Osiris. The king was humanity’s link to the gods. He stood in a special relation to each of them, and it was through him alone that the gods could be contacted. The temples were quite literally homes for the gods, rather than places of worship for the people. In theory every ritual act, designed to please the gods and keep them interested in human affairs, was carried out by the king himself, although in practice most were enacted by priests in his name.

 

The king of Egypt had a heavy duty to maintain what the Egyptians called maat—a word which means that which is right, true, just, and proper. This religious and moral burden was as serious an element of the kingship as exercising power, administering the kingdom, or maintaining law and order. It was this awesome task that humbled the Eyptian kings before the divine powers. The rites which took place daily in Egyptian temples were repetitions of mythical acts that laid the foundations of maat. This repetition, done by or in the name of the king, secured those foundations, and therefore maintained the balance of the cosmos. To daily recall and re-enact the creation was, as it were, to keep the clockwork of the universe wound up.

 

It is this almost magical power to keep things going that people are ascribing to the late Queen when they say things like “She’s always been there”. Her loss is felt to leave the world out of balance, and acts such as the long pilgrimage to file past her coffin, undertaken by individuals but on behalf of society as a whole, are understood to be necessary to restore that balance. Many people interviewed in the queue have brought photographs of their mothers or grandmothers on that pilgrimage with them, as if the dead, too, have their role to play.

 

The maintenance of continuity is seen in Britain today not as the province of parliament, but of the monarchy, in much the same way as it was in Babylon or Egypt in ancient times.

Divine kingship?

On Tuesday 11 October, The Watkins Book of English Folktales was published, a re-vamping of a book first published 30 years ago as The Penguin Book of English Folktales. The first edition vanished into the void; this new one, helped by a Neil Gaiman foreword and a marvellously supportive publisher, is getting rapturous acclaim. I was supposed to be giving a talk at the Bodleian Library in Oxford on publication day, alongside another Unbound author, Elizabeth Garner, whose beautiful book of retold folktales Lost & Found was published last month. We thought it would be interesting to have the contrasting views of a scholar and a storyteller on essentially the same material. Sadly, personal circumstances meant I had to withdraw at short notice, but Professor Diane Purkiss of the Oxford University English Faculty delivered my talk for me. Some of you may well have been among the online audience, but for anyone who wants it, here it is: Sorrow and Love: The Poetry of the English Folktale On 26 September 1914, an English Romany named Gus Gray told a story called “Sorrow and Love”. It’s an English version of an international folktale type, known as “The Search for the Lost Husband”, or sometimes after its first known incarnation in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, as “Cupid and Psyche”. It was a Scottish story of this type, “The Black Bull of Norroway” that gave Tolkien his idea of the eucatastrophe, the happy ending achieved after much sorrow and hardship. Gus Gray told the collector T. W. Thompson nine stories in this one storytelling session. Thompson regarded his narrative skills very highly, describing him as “even in ordinary conversation... a man of beautiful speech”, who was capable in his storytelling of rising to heights of poetry. Thompson writes: “I remember particularly (who could forget it?) his description of Squire King Kaley’s mare in ‘Sorrow and Love’ as the rider reined her in to keep pace with the old farmer’s cob. ‘The bit was hard back in her mouth, and the foam flying like big flakes o’ snow; the veins on her neck was standing out like rope; the sweat dripping off her like a hail o’ bullets; her chestnut coat black wi’ sweat, and shiny like jet. She was all of a dither; at a touch she’d ha’ jumped out’n her skin.’” This is an example of one of the kinds of poetry that is evident in the English folktale, the poetry of verbal dexterity and daring, the creation of a vivid picture or a dramatic scene on the wings of the moment. Another kind of poetry can be found in the way the stories unfold in what Joseph Jacobs called “bright trains of images”. A Derbyshire version of “Beauty and the Beast”, “The Small-Tooth Dog” demonstrates this well. When the dog rescues a merchant who has been beset by thieves, the merchant offers him anything he wants in return. A fish that can speak twelve languages; a goose that lays golden eggs; a mirror in which you can see what anybody is thinking about. But the small-tooth dog refuses them all; what he wants is the merchant’s daughter. These bright trains of images can be expressed in vivid language that is highly personal to the individual storyteller, which will vary according to the context and audience for each particular narration. But they can also be told in a language of inherited phrases and formulae. This is particularly obvious in the formal openings and closures of many tales. Here, for instance, is the opening of a version of “Jack the Giant Killer”, collected in Herefordshire in 1909 from W. Colcombe. “Once upon a time—a very good time it was—when pigs were swine and dogs ate lime, and monkeys chewed tobacco, when houses were thatched with pancakes, streets paved with plum puddings, and roasted pigs ran up and down the streets with knives and forks on their backs crying ‘Come and eat me!’ That was a good time for travellers. “Then it was I went over hills, dales, and lofty mountains, far farther than I can tell you tonight, tomorrow night, or any other night in this new year. The cocks never crew, the winds never blew, and the devil has never sounded his bugle horn to this day yet. “Then I came to a giant castle; a lady came out of the door with a nose as long as my arm. She said to me, she says, ‘What do you want here? If you don’t be off from my door I’ll take you up for a pinch of snuff.’ But Jack said ‘Will you?’ and he drew his sword and cut off her head.” One of the interesting things about this opening is the way it works its way by means of formulae into the fairy tale proper, the moment when “I” becomes “Jack”. So there is verbal creativity involved in folktale narration, but also verbal memory, and these two elements are differently balanced in every single telling. Some may be surprised to learn of the existence of a whole range of English folk narrative, including jokes, anecdotes, local legends, stories of ghosts, fairies, mermaids and witches, as well as fairy tales with all their magic and wonder. If we had a time machine and could go back to almost any moment in English history before the societal disruption of the Industrial Revolution, and the cultural disruption of near-universal literacy, what riches of oral literature would be revealed. As it is, scholars and storytellers alike have had a struggle to document a barely visible tradition of English folktales. To compile The Watkins Book of English Folktales required research in many different kinds of documents—diaries, autobiographies, and memoirs; the endnotes to a volume of Hungarian folktales; scrappy collections of antiquarian lore. In some cultures, storytelling has a distinct cultural value, and storytellers are highly regarded. Storytelling in England seems, from the written record, to have been much more informal and ad hoc. Stories were told as the occasion arose, in the fields, or at work, or at nighttime to a child, as a natural element of daily life. We know that stories were told in the casual wards of workhouses, in prisons and on transport ships, on coaches, in pubs, and in other situations where people were crowded together with no entertainment other than their own wits. Albert Smith’s 1848 novel Christopher Tadpole describes an excursion party which provides a typical image of English storytelling. After “the jolly man” has told a sensational story of an attempted robbery: “such an impetus had been given to the narrative faculties of the van party that they all began to tell stories at once, of things that had happened to them. And after this they dropped down to anecdotes and witty sayings, and finally sang songs.” One typical setting for storyelling was the dinner table. The gossipy Victorian clergyman Augustus Hare was much in demand as a dinner guest because of his fund of stories, recorded in his voluminous autobiography, The Story of My Life. Hare specialised in scary stories, which he used as currency to “sing for his supper”. “The Tell-Tale Sword”, for instance, learned from Mrs Hall Dare, tells of a young woman who practises folk magic in order to summon her future husband. He duly appears through the locked door, a young man in uniform. The girl faints, but in the morning finds the young man’s sword lying on the floor. Next year, she meets the same young man in real life, they marry and are happy, until the time comes to pack up their possessions when they move. When her husband sees the sword, he asks how she came by it, and she tells him the whole story. “He was rigid. He said, ‘I can never forgive it; I can never see you again;’ and nothing she could say or do could move him. ‘Do you know where I passed that terrible night?’ he said; ‘I passed it in hell!’He has given up three-quarters of his income to her, but she has never seen him since.” Although this is told as a true story about a friend of the storyteller, it is recognisably a folktale in shape and form; there is an Irish version of essentially the same tale in Michael J. Murphy’s My Man Jack. In his Foreword to The Watkins Book of English Folktales, Neil Gaiman recalls how when he was a child, he thought that “folk stories and fairy tales came from somewhere else, not England.” When he read the book in its first incarnation thirty year ago, “it changed the inside of my head”. Reverberations from this can be felt in Gaiman’s Sandman, in his novella Snow, Glass, Apples(inspired by Traienti Lovell’s version of “Snow-White”), and in Coraline, in which Coraline’s scary “other mother” with her big black button eyes has her roots in “The Pear-Drum”, with its ghastly new mother “with glass eyes and a wooden tail”. “The Pear-Drum” is an interesting example of how stories dip in and out of the oral and written traditions, from mouth to page and back again. It started out as a literary fairy tale, “The New Mother”, published by Lucy Clifford in 1899. It haunted the imagination of the historian of children’s literature, F. J. Harvey Darton, who wrote that, “Getting on for fifty years after I met her first, I still cannot rid my mind of that fearful creation.” J. Y. Bell contributed an orally transmitted version of the story, now called “The Pear-Drum”, to the journal Folklore in 1955. Since then it has turned into Alan Garner’s “Iram, Biram” as well as morphing into an elemental strand of Coraline. The poet John Clare provides another example of this cross-fertilization. Clare knew folktales both from oral narration (his father had a store of them) and from chapbook retellings. When he writes about Cinderella in The Shepherd’s Calendar, he mixes details derived from Perrault’s “Cendrillon”, such as the pumpkin carriage and rat coachmen, with elements from a different, local, version, in which it is a “golden glove” that Cinderella loses at the ball, not a glass slipper. The tale of Cinderella told The winter thro and never old The faireys favourite and friend Who made her happy in the end The pumpkin that at her approach Was turned into a golden coach The rats that faireys magic knew And instantly to horses grew And coachmen ready at her call To drive her to the princes ball With fur changd jackets silver lind And tails hung neath their hats behind Where soon as met the princes sight She made his heart ach all the night The golden glove wi fingers small She lost while dancing in the hall That was on every finger tryd And fitted hers and none beside When cinderella soon as seen Was woo’d and won and made a queen. The imaginations of writers such as Clare, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Dickens were suffused with English folktales—The Watkins Book of English Folktales contains two stories from Hardy, “The Ghostly Woolpack” and “The Haunted Barn”, evidently gleaned from local sources, and two from Dickens, “Captain Murderer” and “Chips”. Both of these gruesome stories were told to him by his childhood nurse, Mary Weller, who seems to have specialised in “frighteners”. Dickens recalled how she told him “Captain Murderer” hundreds of times, with “a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember—as a sort of introductory overture—by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan.” This reminds us, of course, that oral storytelling is not solely about words, but that it incorporates gestural and performative elements too. Shakespeare knew and referred to English folktales, often in an obliquely allusive way that suggests he expected his audience to be familiar with them too. So a throwaway line in Hamlet, “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter,” turns up as a folktale in both Gloucestershire, in which the mean baker’s daughter is transformed into an owl by “Our Saviour” himself, and in Herefordshire, where the punishment is inflicted by a fairy. Just as writers from Chaucer and the Gawain Poet, through to Shakespeare and George Peele, right up to Dickens and Hardy, have taken inspiration from our rich and strange folktale tradition, so it is hoped that the unvarnished folktales in The Watkins Book of English Folktales—in which nothing is retold, summarised, altered or “improved” in any way—will be a source of inspiration for novelists and poets and today’s thriving band of oral storytellers. For the point of presenting authentic texts of the tales, with detailed notes on their origins and variants, was not to preserve them in aspic, but to offer them as armature for creative interpretation by new voices and new imaginations. Emily Dickinson wrote that, A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day. The same is true of a folktale. When it is written down, turned from living words on the air to frozen words on the page, it is in a kind of enchanted sleep, waiting behind a hedge of type to be woken once more, whether by a prince or in Taimi Boswell’s skit on the tale type, by Lousy Jack, the youngest of twelve sons, who makes his way through the barrier of thorns because he liked “a good scratching because he was lousy.” This comic text seems to have been a parody of another tale, “The Castle o’ the Golden Phoenix, the Bottle o’ Eversee Water and the Three Sleeping Beauties”, known to have been in the repertoire of both Taimi Boswell and another Romany storyteller, Jimmy Smith, whose version apparently took six hours to tell; unfortunately no text survives of this longer tale. In Gus Gray’s “Sorrow and Love”, the strong and resourceful heroine loses her true love because she is one second late to their rendezvous. “He got off his horse, took hold her hand, removed her glove, and then bit off the end of her little finger. With it he made three bloodstains on the front of his white shirt. Then he jumped on his horse, ‘My name is Squire King Kaley: if you ever find me again then I’ll make you my wife.’” And so begin her terrible trials, as she tramps through the land with just a pair of thin slippers on her feet. When she finally tracks down Squire King Kaley, she finds she has a rival, and takes a job as her servant. Among other things, she has to cry a bowl full of tears. But at the end, “Squire took bride in his arms and kissed her. ‘You’ve had your sorrow; now you are going to have love.’” And there is Tolkien’s eucatastrophe, “the sudden joyous ‘turn’” at the end of a fairy tale, yielding “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” Both sorrow and love. Be bow bend it, My tale’s ended. If you don’t like it, You may mend it.

On Tuesday 11 October, The Watkins Book of English Folktales was published, a re-vamping of a book first published 30 years ago as The Penguin Book of English Folktales. The first edition vanished into the void; this new one, helped by a Neil Gaiman foreword and a marvellously supportive publisher, is getting rapturous acclaim. I was supposed to be giving a talk at the Bodleian Library in Oxford on publication day, alongside another Unbound author, Elizabeth Garner, whose beautiful book of retold folktales Lost &amp; Found was published last month. We thought it would be interesting to have the contrasting views of a scholar and a storyteller on essentially the same material. Sadly, personal circumstances meant I had to withdraw at short notice, but Professor Diane Purkiss of the Oxford University English Faculty delivered my talk for me. Some of you may well have been among the online audience, but for anyone who wants it, here it is:

 

Sorrow and Love: The Poetry of the English Folktale

 

On 26 September 1914, an English Romany named Gus Gray told a story called “Sorrow and Love”. It’s an English version of an international folktale type, known as “The Search for the Lost Husband”, or sometimes after its first known incarnation in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, as “Cupid and Psyche”. It was a Scottish story of this type, “The Black Bull of Norroway” that gave Tolkien his idea of the eucatastrophe, the happy ending achieved after much sorrow and hardship.

         Gus Gray told the collector T. W. Thompson nine stories in this one storytelling session. Thompson regarded his narrative skills very highly, describing him as “even in ordinary conversation... a man of beautiful speech”, who was capable in his storytelling of rising to heights of poetry. Thompson writes:

 

 “I remember particularly (who could forget it?) his description of Squire King Kaley’s mare in ‘Sorrow and Love’ as the rider reined her in to keep pace with the old farmer’s cob. ‘The bit was hard back in her mouth, and the foam flying like big flakes o’ snow; the veins on her neck was standing out like rope; the sweat dripping off her like a hail o’ bullets; her chestnut coat black wi’ sweat, and shiny like jet. She was all of a dither; at a touch she’d ha’ jumped out’n her skin.’”

 

         This is an example of one of the kinds of poetry that is evident in the English folktale, the poetry of verbal dexterity and daring, the creation of a vivid picture or a dramatic scene on the wings of the moment. Another kind of poetry can be found in the way the stories unfold in what Joseph Jacobs called “bright trains of images”. A Derbyshire version of “Beauty and the Beast”, “The Small-Tooth Dog” demonstrates this well. When the dog rescues a merchant who has been beset by thieves, the merchant offers him anything he wants in return. A fish that can speak twelve languages; a goose that lays golden eggs; a mirror in which you can see what anybody is thinking about. But the small-tooth dog refuses them all; what he wants is the merchant’s daughter.

         These bright trains of images can be expressed in vivid language that is highly personal to the individual storyteller, which will vary according to the context and audience for each particular narration. But they can also be told in a language of inherited phrases and formulae. This is particularly obvious in the formal openings and closures of many tales. Here, for instance, is the opening of a version of “Jack the Giant Killer”, collected in Herefordshire in 1909 from W. Colcombe.

 

         “Once upon a time—a very good time it was—when pigs were swine and dogs ate lime, and monkeys chewed tobacco, when houses were thatched with pancakes, streets paved with plum puddings, and roasted pigs ran up and down the streets with knives and forks on their backs crying ‘Come and eat me!’ That was a good time for travellers.

         “Then it was I went over hills, dales, and lofty mountains, far farther than I can tell you tonight, tomorrow night, or any other night in this new year. The cocks never crew, the winds never blew, and the devil has never sounded his bugle horn to this day yet.

         “Then I came to a giant castle; a lady came out of the door with a nose as long as my arm. She said to me, she says, ‘What do you want here? If you don’t be off from my door I’ll take you up for a pinch of snuff.’ But Jack said ‘Will you?’ and he drew his sword and cut off her head.”

 

         One of the interesting things about this opening is the way it works its way by means of formulae into the fairy tale proper, the moment when “I” becomes “Jack”.

         So there is verbal creativity involved in folktale narration, but also verbal memory, and these two elements are differently balanced in every single telling.

         Some may be surprised to learn of the existence of a whole range of English folk narrative, including jokes, anecdotes, local legends, stories of ghosts, fairies, mermaids and witches, as well as fairy tales with all their magic and wonder.

         If we had a time machine and could go back to almost any moment in English history before the societal disruption of the Industrial Revolution, and the cultural disruption of near-universal literacy, what riches of oral literature would be revealed. As it is, scholars and storytellers alike have had a struggle to document a barely visible tradition of English folktales. To compile The Watkins Book of English Folktales required research in many different kinds of documents—diaries, autobiographies, and memoirs; the endnotes to a volume of Hungarian folktales; scrappy collections of antiquarian lore.

         In some cultures, storytelling has a distinct cultural value, and storytellers are highly regarded. Storytelling in England seems, from the written record, to have been much more informal and ad hoc. Stories were told as the occasion arose, in the fields, or at work, or at nighttime to a child, as a natural element of daily life. We know that stories were told in the casual wards of workhouses, in prisons and on transport ships, on coaches, in pubs, and in other situations where people were crowded together with no entertainment other than their own wits. 

         Albert Smith’s 1848 novel Christopher Tadpole describes an excursion party which provides a typical image of English storytelling. After “the jolly man” has told a sensational story of an attempted robbery:

 

“such an impetus had been given to the narrative faculties of the van party that they all began to tell stories at once, of things that had happened to them. And after this they dropped down to anecdotes and witty sayings, and finally sang songs.”

 

         One typical setting for storyelling was the dinner table. The gossipy Victorian clergyman Augustus Hare was much in demand as a dinner guest because of his fund of stories, recorded in his voluminous autobiography, The Story of My Life. Hare specialised in scary stories, which he used as currency to “sing for his supper”. “The Tell-Tale Sword”, for instance, learned from Mrs Hall Dare, tells of a young woman who practises folk magic in order to summon her future husband. He duly appears through the locked door, a young man in uniform. The girl faints, but in the morning finds the young man’s sword lying on the floor. Next year, she meets the same young man in real life, they marry and are happy, until the time comes to pack up their possessions when they move. When her husband sees the sword, he asks how she came by it, and she tells him the whole story.

 

         “He was rigid. He said, ‘I can never forgive it; I can never see you again;’ and nothing she could say or do could move him. ‘Do you know where I passed that terrible night?’ he said; ‘I passed it in hell!’He has given up three-quarters of his income to her, but she has never seen him since.”

 

Although this is told as a true story about a friend of the storyteller, it is recognisably a folktale in shape and form; there is an Irish version of essentially the same tale in Michael J. Murphy’s My Man Jack.        

In his Foreword to The Watkins Book of English Folktales, Neil Gaiman recalls how when he was a child, he thought that “folk stories and fairy tales came from somewhere else, not England.” When he read the book in its first incarnation thirty year ago, “it changed the inside of my head”. Reverberations from this can be felt in Gaiman’s Sandman, in his novella Snow, Glass, Apples(inspired by Traienti Lovell’s version of “Snow-White”), and in Coraline, in which Coraline’s scary “other mother” with her big black button eyes has her roots in “The Pear-Drum”, with its ghastly new mother “with glass eyes and a wooden tail”.

         “The Pear-Drum” is an interesting example of how stories dip in and out of the oral and written traditions, from mouth to page and back again. It started out as a literary fairy tale, “The New Mother”, published by Lucy Clifford in 1899. It haunted the imagination of the historian of children’s literature, F. J. Harvey Darton, who wrote that, “Getting on for fifty years after I met her first, I still cannot rid my mind of that fearful creation.” J. Y. Bell contributed an orally transmitted version of the story, now called “The Pear-Drum”, to the journal Folklore in 1955. Since then it has turned into Alan Garner’s “Iram, Biram” as well as morphing into an elemental strand of Coraline.

         The poet John Clare provides another example of this cross-fertilization. Clare knew folktales both from oral narration (his father had a store of them) and from chapbook retellings. When he writes about Cinderella in The Shepherd’s Calendar, he mixes details derived from Perrault’s “Cendrillon”, such as the pumpkin carriage and rat coachmen, with elements from a different, local, version, in which it is a “golden glove” that Cinderella loses at the ball, not a glass slipper.

 

         The tale of Cinderella told

         The winter thro and never old

         The faireys favourite and friend

         Who made her happy in the end

         The pumpkin that at her approach

         Was turned into a golden coach

         The rats that faireys magic knew

         And instantly to horses grew

         And coachmen ready at her call

         To drive her to the princes ball

         With fur changd jackets silver lind

         And tails hung neath their hats behind

         Where soon as met the princes sight

         She made his heart ach all the night

         The golden glove wi fingers small

         She lost while dancing in the hall

         That was on every finger tryd

         And fitted hers and none beside

         When cinderella soon as seen

         Was woo’d and won and made a queen.

 

         The imaginations of writers such as Clare, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Dickens were suffused with English folktales—The Watkins Book of English Folktales contains two stories from Hardy, “The Ghostly Woolpack” and “The Haunted Barn”, evidently gleaned from local sources, and two from Dickens, “Captain Murderer” and “Chips”. Both of these gruesome stories were told to him by his childhood nurse, Mary Weller, who seems to have specialised in “frighteners”. Dickens recalled how she told him “Captain Murderer” hundreds of times, with “a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember—as a sort of introductory overture—by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan.” This reminds us, of course, that oral storytelling is not solely about words, but that it incorporates gestural and performative elements too.

         Shakespeare knew and referred to English folktales, often in an obliquely allusive way that suggests he expected his audience to be familiar with them too. So a throwaway line in Hamlet, “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter,” turns up as a folktale in both Gloucestershire, in which the mean baker’s daughter is transformed into an owl by “Our Saviour” himself, and in Herefordshire, where the punishment is inflicted by a fairy.

         Just as writers from Chaucer and the Gawain Poet, through to Shakespeare and George Peele, right up to Dickens and Hardy, have taken inspiration from our rich and strange folktale tradition, so it is hoped that the unvarnished folktales in The Watkins Book of English Folktales—in which nothing is retold, summarised, altered or “improved” in any way—will be a source of inspiration for novelists and poets and today’s thriving band of oral storytellers. For the point of presenting authentic texts of the tales, with detailed notes on their origins and variants, was not to preserve them in aspic, but to offer them as armature for creative interpretation by new voices and new imaginations. Emily Dickinson wrote that,

 

         A word is dead

         When it is said,

         Some say.

         I say it just

         Begins to live

         That day.

 

The same is true of a folktale. When it is written down, turned from living words on the air to frozen words on the page, it is in a kind of enchanted sleep, waiting behind a hedge of type to be woken once more, whether by a prince or in Taimi Boswell’s skit on the tale type, by Lousy Jack, the youngest of twelve sons, who makes his way through the barrier of thorns because he liked “a good scratching because he was lousy.” This comic text seems to have been a parody of another tale, “The Castle o’ the Golden Phoenix, the Bottle o’ Eversee Water and the Three Sleeping Beauties”, known to have been in the repertoire of both Taimi Boswell and another Romany storyteller, Jimmy Smith, whose version apparently took six hours to tell; unfortunately no text survives of this longer tale.

         In Gus Gray’s “Sorrow and Love”, the strong and resourceful heroine loses her true love because she is one second late to their rendezvous.

 

“He got off his horse, took hold her hand, removed her glove, and then bit off the end of her little finger. With it he made three bloodstains on the front of his white shirt. Then he jumped on his horse, ‘My name is Squire King Kaley: if you ever find me again then I’ll make you my wife.’”

 

And so begin her terrible trials, as she tramps through the land with just a pair of thin slippers on her feet.  When she finally tracks down Squire King Kaley, she finds she has a rival, and takes a job as her servant. Among other things, she has to cry a bowl full of tears. But at the end, “Squire took bride in his arms and kissed her. ‘You’ve had your sorrow; now you are going to have love.’”

         And there is Tolkien’s eucatastrophe, “the sudden joyous ‘turn’” at the end of a fairy tale, yielding “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” Both sorrow and love.

 

         Be bow bend it,

         My tale’s ended.

         If you don’t like it,

         You may mend it.

English Folktales Lost & Found

The foundation myths of city-states were crucial to the morale of the citizens, binding patriotism and common interest with a thread of divine authority. When we think of the mythology of the ancient Greeks, we think of a pantheon of gods and a sequence of stories about them. But to the Greeks themselves, myth was intensely local. Pausanias's Guide to Greece chronicles all kinds of local cults, from the bronze nanny-goat worshipped by the vine-growers of Phlious, to the sanctuary of the rural god Melampous at Aegosthena. The Greek polis, or city-state, of which there were over a thousand, was built on myth. Each had a ktistes, a civic founder, whose deeds were achieved with the help of a god, who became the city's patron and protector. The guardian deity of the city of Mantineia, for instance, was Poseidon Hippios (Poseidon the horseman). His image was on the city's coinage; his sanctuary-forbidden on pain of death to all but his priest-was at the city's gates. As the god of both underground water and of horses, Poseidon-conventionally thought of as the god of the sea-was a good choice of patron for a horse-breeding people living in an inland city with problematic drainage. The topography of a city's site, its setting in its environment, is always an element in its mythology. The founding myth of the polis of Megara is a good example. Pausanias tells us how: The Megarians have another akropolis named after Alkathous. . . . They point out a hearth of the gods of "Before Building", and tell you that Alkathous was the first to sacrifice to them, when he was going to begin building the wall, Near this hearth is a stone on which they say Apollo put his harp when he helped Alkathous with the building. . . . When Apollo was helping him build the wall, he laid his harp on a stone, and if you hit this stone with a pebble it twangs like a struck harp-string. The myth explains the musical stone; the stone proves the myth; and both establish Megara as a city of harmonia-harmony, well-constructedness. In every Greek city, geological and geographical features, ancient tombs, temples, buildings and boundaries interconnect in a web of myth that animates the city's sense of identity and uniqueness. In terms of the desire to create a universal, pan-Hellenic level of accepted myth-which is achieved in the works of Homer and Hesiod-these local, parochial myths could be a stumbling block. Many cities might compete, for instance, for the honour of being the birthplace of a particular god, and when one was chosen as the "official" birthplace, the others were not simply snubbed, their very sense of their own importance was impaired. Megara had a long-standing tradition that the Greek forces gathered to fight the Trojan war had set off from Megara. When the text of the Iliad reached its final form, the pan-Hellenic consensus was that the expedition was launched from Aulis. Megara continued to assert its claim, but with damaged confidence. Athens was the city of the goddess Athena, and its most important temple, the Parthenon, was dedicated to Athena Parthenos-Athena the virgin. Olympia was the city of Zeus, and held the Olympic games in his honour. Corinth was under the protection of the sea god Poseidon; Argos of the goddess Hera; Epidaurus of the god Asclepius; Delphi of the god Apollo. In each of these cities, the relative importance of the gods of the Greek pantheon was skewed in favour of that city's special protector, and his or her alliances and enmities among the community of gods. One significant role of the major competitive games such as the Olympics, or the Panathenaia in Athens, was that although dedicated to the patron gods of the host cities, Zeus and Athena, the festivals themselves were pan-Hellenic events, tying all the city-states into communion with each other. Just as the overarching pan-Hellenic myths of Hesiod and Homer are modelled on the template of the myths of the individual city-states, so the myths of the polis were enlarged versions of the essential unit of Greek mythology, the myths of the family or kinship group. The loyalty to family and blood-kin before everything else is stressed by Plato in the Laws. To secure the favour of the gods of birth, a man must honour and respect "his family and all who join in the worship of the family gods and all who share the same blood." In other words the whole structure of Greek society and Greek mythology is composed of a series of widening ripples outward from the smallest unit; individual and local beliefs shaped the grander pan-Hellenic beliefs, rather than the other way round. This element of Ancient Greek thought remains in the modern concept of parea, for which there isn't really an adequate English translation. It means something like "intimate community". Greek mythology is in fact much more similar to the "emplaced" mythology of the Australian Aborigines than would appear from a cursory comparison of the grand sweep of the Iliad with the intensely local nature of an Aboriginal Dreaming. The way in which kinship systems enmesh Aborigines with their human ancestors and their Dreaming ancestors, and with the Country they belong to and have responsibility for, and the songs and stories and dances and rituals that belong to that Country, is not all that different from the way the myths of the polis sustained and empowered the people. For the citizens of a Greek city-state, locally-based myth offered a pattern of being and a way of thinking that tied past, present, and future into a single powerful knot, located precisely in the akropolis where offerings were made to the gods. And these were not just pan-Hellenic gods such as Apollo, but locally recognised gods such as the gods of "Before Building" honoured at Megara.

The foundation myths of city-states were crucial to the morale of the citizens, binding patriotism and common interest with a thread of divine authority. When we think of the mythology of the ancient Greeks, we think of a pantheon of gods and a sequence of stories about them. But to the Greeks themselves, myth was intensely local. Pausanias's Guide to Greece chronicles all kinds of local cults, from the bronze nanny-goat worshipped by the vine-growers of Phlious, to the sanctuary of the rural god Melampous at Aegosthena. 

The Greek polis, or city-state, of which there were over a thousand, was built on myth. Each had a ktistes, a civic founder, whose deeds were achieved with the help of a god, who became the city's patron and protector. The guardian deity of the city of Mantineia, for instance, was Poseidon Hippios (Poseidon the horseman). His image was on the city's coinage; his sanctuary-forbidden on pain of death to all but his priest-was at the city's gates. As the god of both underground water and of horses, Poseidon-conventionally thought of as the god of the sea-was a good choice of patron for a horse-breeding people living in an inland city with problematic drainage.

The topography of a city's site, its setting in its environment, is always an element in its mythology. The founding myth of the polis of Megara is a good example. Pausanias tells us how:

The Megarians have another akropolis named after Alkathous. . . . They point out a hearth of the gods of "Before Building", and tell you that Alkathous was the first to sacrifice to them, when he was going to begin building the wall, Near this hearth is a stone on which they say Apollo put his harp when he helped Alkathous with the building. . . . When Apollo was helping him build the wall, he laid his harp on a stone, and if you hit this stone with a pebble it twangs like a struck harp-string.

The myth explains the musical stone; the stone proves the myth; and both establish Megara as a city of harmonia-harmony, well-constructedness.

In every Greek city, geological and geographical features, ancient tombs, temples, buildings and boundaries interconnect in a web of myth that animates the city's sense of identity and uniqueness. In terms of the desire to create a universal, pan-Hellenic level of accepted myth-which is achieved in the works of Homer and Hesiod-these local, parochial myths could be a stumbling block. Many cities might compete, for instance, for the honour of being the birthplace of a particular god, and when one was chosen as the "official" birthplace, the others were not simply snubbed, their very sense of their own importance was impaired. Megara had a long-standing tradition that the Greek forces gathered to fight the Trojan war had set off from Megara. When the text of the Iliad reached its final form, the pan-Hellenic consensus was that the expedition was launched from Aulis. Megara continued to assert its claim, but with damaged confidence.

Athens was the city of the goddess Athena, and its most important temple, the Parthenon, was dedicated to Athena Parthenos-Athena the virgin. Olympia was the city of Zeus, and held the Olympic games in his honour. Corinth was under the protection of the sea god Poseidon; Argos of the goddess Hera; Epidaurus of the god Asclepius; Delphi of the god Apollo. In each of these cities, the relative importance of the gods of the Greek pantheon was skewed in favour of that city's special protector, and his or her alliances and enmities among the community of gods.

One significant role of the major competitive games such as the Olympics, or the Panathenaia in Athens, was that although dedicated to the patron gods of the host cities, Zeus and Athena, the festivals themselves were pan-Hellenic events, tying all the city-states into communion with each other.

Just as the overarching pan-Hellenic myths of Hesiod and Homer are modelled on the template of the myths of the individual city-states, so the myths of the polis were enlarged versions of the essential unit of Greek mythology, the myths of the family or kinship group. The loyalty to family and blood-kin before everything else is stressed by Plato in the Laws. To secure the favour of the gods of birth, a man must honour and respect "his family and all who join in the worship of the family gods and all who share the same blood." In other words the whole structure of Greek society and Greek mythology is composed of a series of widening ripples outward from the smallest unit; individual and local beliefs shaped the grander pan-Hellenic beliefs, rather than the other way round. This element of Ancient Greek thought remains in the modern concept of parea, for which there isn't really an adequate English translation. It means something like "intimate community".

Greek mythology is in fact much more similar to the "emplaced" mythology of the Australian Aborigines than would appear from a cursory comparison of the grand sweep of the Iliad with the intensely local nature of an Aboriginal Dreaming. The way in which kinship systems enmesh Aborigines with their human ancestors and their Dreaming ancestors, and with the Country they belong to and have responsibility for, and the songs and stories and dances and rituals that belong to that Country, is not all that different from the way the myths of the polis sustained and empowered the people. For the citizens of a Greek city-state, locally-based myth offered a pattern of being and a way of thinking that tied past, present, and future into a single powerful knot, located precisely in the akropolis where offerings were made to the gods. And these were not just pan-Hellenic gods such as Apollo, but locally recognised gods such as the gods of "Before Building" honoured at Megara.

Greek city-states and emplaced myth

Happy New Year, one and all. Some of you might be interested in this interview I did with the excellent Folklore Podcast: http://www.thefolklorepodcast.com/episode-121.html I trust that link will work, but if not, it's easily googled.

Happy New Year, one and all. Some of you might be interested in this interview I did with the excellent Folklore Podcast:

http://www.thefolklorepodcast.com/episode-121.html

I trust that link will work, but if not, it's easily googled.

Happy New Folktales

Hello supporters. This is just to say, when I post updates, I am more than happy to be corrected if I have or seem to have something wrong, and will always respond positively to your suggestions about further lines of enquiry. I know many, perhaps all, of my early backers have specialised information I don't have, and will be grateful for any helpful criticism.

Hello supporters. This is just to say, when I post updates, I am more than happy to be corrected if I have or seem to have something wrong, and will always respond positively to your suggestions about further lines of enquiry. I know many, perhaps all, of my early backers have specialised information I don't have, and will be grateful for any helpful criticism.

I appreciate correction and new information

“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.” So opens a famous poem by Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”. Mythologies, as well as being concerned with the mysteries of Creation, are also vehicles for mankind’s theories about Destruction. The end of all things in Norse myth is heralded by the dreaded fimbul-winter: “there will be a wind-age and a wolf-age before the world is wrecked” (Kevin Crossley-Holland’s translation in his Norse Myths). But as is often the way, the end will usher in a new beginning, for two people, Lif and Lifthrasir, will survive to repopulate the world, and six of the gods also survive or come back to life, finding among the ruins of Asgard the golden playing pieces with which the gods used to play the chess-like board game hnefatafl. C. S. Lewis echoes this detail in the scene in which the children in The Silver Chair return to Narnia after the passage of hundreds of years, to discover in the ruins of their castle “one of the golden chessmen we used to play with when we were Kings and Queens at Cair Paravel.” Usually one thinks of mythologies as endemic to a particular culture or religion, so that the Norse “twilight of the gods” Ragnarok is representative of Viking thought in general, rather than the personal belief of one particular Viking. But just as mythologies are interpreted in different ways by different people, they can also be extremely personal, the idiosyncratic beliefs of a unique individual. I’ve just come across such a mythology in the work of Samuel Johnson—not the famous lexicographer, but his namesake, the Cheshire dancing master and playwright (1691-1773). This Samuel Johnson had a hit on the London stage with his entertaining nonsense play Hurlothrumbo in 1729, the central theme of which is that “This World is all a Dream, an Outside, a Dunghill paved with Diamonds.” Now, Samuel Johnson was so eccentric and had such odd notions that he was nicknamed Maggoty Johnson (a maggot in this context being a strange fancy, as in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel Mr Fortune’s Maggot), and the wood in which he chose to be buried is known as Maggoty’s Wood. Johnson himself preferred to call himself by the name of his character in Hurlothrumbo, Lord Flame. I’ve been reading Johnson’s works not for The Hidden Matrix but because of their correlation with the writings of Alan Garner, and in particular his deeply strange and strangely deep new novel, Treacle Walker. I haven’t received my copy yet of Johnson’s Vision of Heaven, which has been compared to Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but I anticipate a roller-coaster of a book. Yesterday I read his 1732 play The Blazing Comet. I do this as a public service so you don’t have to! The play is awful, but there is a strikingly beautiful passage in the fulsome dedication to the Duchess of Richmond, and here is where Lord Flame crosses over into Hidden Matrix territory. He embarks on a long metaphorical passage in which he regards her husband as the Sun and her as the Moon. “And thus may you live above the World, till Time himself shall die away ... when Light will dissolve itself in Air.” When Light will dissolve itself in Air—what a singular vision of the end of all things, and one which seems to have come from one man’s imagination rather than from any tradition, or religious teaching, or scientific enquiry.

“Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.”

 

So opens a famous poem by Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”. Mythologies, as well as being concerned with the mysteries of Creation, are also vehicles for mankind’s theories about Destruction. The end of all things in Norse myth is heralded by the dreaded fimbul-winter: “there will be a wind-age and a wolf-age before the world is wrecked” (Kevin Crossley-Holland’s translation in his Norse Myths). But as is often the way, the end will usher in a new beginning, for two people, Lif and Lifthrasir, will survive to repopulate the world, and six of the gods also survive or come back to life, finding among the ruins of Asgard the golden playing pieces with which the gods used to play the chess-like board game hnefatafl. C. S. Lewis echoes this detail in the scene in which the children in The Silver Chair return to Narnia after the passage of hundreds of years, to discover in the ruins of their castle “one of the golden chessmen we used to play with when we were Kings and Queens at Cair Paravel.”

 

Usually one thinks of mythologies as endemic to a particular culture or religion, so that the Norse “twilight of the gods” Ragnarok is representative of Viking thought in general, rather than the personal belief of one particular Viking. But just as mythologies are interpreted in different ways by different people, they can also be extremely personal, the idiosyncratic beliefs of a unique individual. I’ve just come across such a mythology in the work of Samuel Johnson—not the famous lexicographer, but his namesake, the Cheshire dancing master and playwright (1691-1773). This Samuel Johnson had a hit on the London stage with his entertaining nonsense play Hurlothrumbo in 1729, the central theme of which is that “This World is all a Dream, an Outside, a Dunghill paved with Diamonds.”

 

Now, Samuel Johnson was so eccentric and had such odd notions that he was nicknamed Maggoty Johnson (a maggot in this context being a strange fancy, as in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel Mr Fortune’s Maggot), and the wood in which he chose to be buried is known as Maggoty’s Wood. Johnson himself preferred to call himself by the name of his character in Hurlothrumbo, Lord Flame.

 

I’ve been reading Johnson’s works not for The Hidden Matrix but because of their correlation with the writings of Alan Garner, and in particular his deeply strange and strangely deep new novel, Treacle Walker. I haven’t received my copy yet of Johnson’s Vision of Heaven, which has been compared to Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but I anticipate a roller-coaster of a book. Yesterday I read his 1732 play The Blazing Comet. I do this as a public service so you don’t have to! The play is awful, but there is a strikingly beautiful passage in the fulsome dedication to the Duchess of Richmond, and here is where Lord Flame crosses over into Hidden Matrix territory.

 

He embarks on a long metaphorical passage in which he regards her husband as the Sun and her as the Moon. “And thus may you live above the World, till Time himself shall die away ... when Light will dissolve itself in Air.”

 

When Light will dissolve itself in Air—what a singular vision of the end of all things, and one which seems to have come from one man’s imagination rather than from any tradition, or religious teaching, or scientific enquiry.

Light and Air

It’s very easy when writing about a mythology to present it as a coherent monolithic belief system. I try to be constantly alert to the flexibility of myth, the way it mutates and transforms, not just over time but in the perception of different groups and different individuals. A new book, Myth, Materiality and Lived Religion in Merovingian and Viking Scandinavia (ed. Wikström af Edholm et. al., Stockholm University Press) has a whole section on “Myths and Lived Religion” that explores the way myth intersects with the lives of individuals and communities. One essay, “Configurations of Religion in Late Iron Age and Viking Age Scandinavia” by Andreas Nordberg is particularly perceptive about the way in which Old Norse religion, far from being a one-size-fits-all affair, was made up of “partly parallel patterns of religious experience, beliefs, and behaviour.” Nordberg identifies four overlapping “religious configurations” in the Viking Age: of the farmstead, of the warband, of the hunting and fishing grounds, and a fourth “mythological” configuration. In the life of the farmstead, the most basic foundation of society, religious aspiration was for “cosmic order, prosperity, and the regeneration of the crop and animal stock, as well as the well-being of land and people”. Local deities and spirits related to these aspirations might have “played a more prominent part in everyday religion than did the higher gods”. And of those gods, it is those related to the earth and sky, such as Freyr, Freyja, and Thor, who are shown by surviving placenames to have been most important to the religious configuration of the farmstead. For the aristocratic warband, with its hall culture, the pre-eminent god was Odin, who “represented all the characteristics of the at times capricious life in the warband community.” Through death in battle, warriors initiated into Odin’s service “achieved complete communion with their god.” Initiation rituals included a ritual drama in which the would-be warrior was transformed into a wolf or a bear, and received a new name attesting to this experience. While the warriors alternated between the configurations of farmstead and hall, for ordinary people the religious configuration of the warband was of little relevance, and they had no profound ties to Odin, the god of battle, poetry, and mead. Nordberg suggests, though, that both ordinary people and warriors alternated between the religious configuration of the homestead and that of the hunting and fishing grounds. The evidence for hunting and fishing traditions, rituals, and taboos in pre-Christian Scandinavia is scant, but Nordberg argues convincingly, I think, that a wealth of such traditions did exist, centred probably around ways of pleasing and appeasing the supernatural owners of the fish and prey, and the spirits of the land and water. In hunting and fishing—a hugely important survival activity—the gods of mythology seem to have been largely irrelevant. Are those mythological gods evidence of a fourth “mythological configuration”? Nordberg thinks so, because the world of the gods is “a mythical universe ... which partly resembles human society, but is also part of a totally different world.” Many of the myths recount events “that had no or few parallels in religious practice”, and furthermore many of the gods and supernatural beings who feature in the myths “were not the subject of actual worship.” Mythology and mythical storytelling, while overlapping with the religious configurations of homestead and hall, were in many ways separate from the concerns of “lived religion.” Myth and religion in Viking Age Scandinavia were not, in Nordberg’s view, homogeneous, either for society or the individual, but instead a set of overlapping belief systems “formed (and transformed) by their day-to-day livelihoods, subsistence, and affiliation to social groups.” I would suggest there must have been at least one more religious configuration—that of the lived religion of women. The Norse myths as they have been handed down to us are very male dominated, but Snorri Sturluson tells us that the goddesses, the Asyniur, were just as important as the male gods: “No less holy are the Asyniur, nor is their power less.” This is a very interesting way, I think, to break down a society, a mythology, and a religion into their interrelated component parts. I won’t think about Norse mythology in quite the same way again, having read Andreas Nordberg’s thought-provoking essay.

It’s very easy when writing about a mythology to present it as a coherent monolithic belief system. I try to be constantly alert to the flexibility of myth, the way it mutates and transforms, not just over time but in the perception of different groups and different individuals. 

 A new book, Myth, Materiality and Lived Religion in Merovingian and Viking Scandinavia (ed. Wikström af Edholm et. al., Stockholm University Press) has a whole section on “Myths and Lived Religion” that explores the way myth intersects with the lives of individuals and communities. One essay, “Configurations of Religion in Late Iron Age and Viking Age Scandinavia” by Andreas Nordberg is particularly perceptive about the way in which Old Norse religion, far from being a one-size-fits-all affair, was made up of “partly parallel patterns of religious experience, beliefs, and behaviour.”

Nordberg identifies four overlapping “religious configurations” in the Viking Age: of the farmstead, of the warband, of the hunting and fishing grounds, and a fourth “mythological” configuration.

 In the life of the farmstead, the most basic foundation of society, religious aspiration was for “cosmic order, prosperity, and the regeneration of the crop and animal stock, as well as the well-being of land and people”. Local deities and spirits related to these aspirations might have “played a more prominent part in everyday religion than did the higher gods”. And of those gods, it is those related to the earth and sky, such as Freyr, Freyja, and Thor, who are shown by surviving placenames to have been most important to the religious configuration of the farmstead.

For the aristocratic warband, with its hall culture, the pre-eminent god was Odin, who “represented all the characteristics of the at times capricious life in the warband community.” Through death in battle, warriors initiated into Odin’s service “achieved complete communion with their god.” Initiation rituals included a ritual drama in which the would-be warrior was transformed into a wolf or a bear, and received a new name attesting to this experience.

While the warriors alternated between the configurations of farmstead and hall, for ordinary people the religious configuration of the warband was of little relevance, and they had no profound ties to Odin, the god of battle, poetry, and mead. Nordberg suggests, though, that both ordinary people and warriors alternated between the religious configuration of the homestead and that of the hunting and fishing grounds.

 The evidence for hunting and fishing traditions, rituals, and taboos in pre-Christian Scandinavia is scant, but Nordberg argues convincingly, I think, that a wealth of such traditions did exist, centred probably around ways of pleasing and appeasing the supernatural owners of the fish and prey, and the spirits of the land and water. In hunting and fishing—a hugely important survival activity—the gods of mythology seem to have been largely irrelevant.

Are those mythological gods evidence of a fourth “mythological configuration”? Nordberg thinks so, because the world of the gods is “a mythical universe ... which partly resembles human society, but is also part of a totally different world.” Many of the myths recount events “that had no or few parallels in religious practice”, and furthermore many of the gods and supernatural beings who feature in the myths “were not the subject of actual worship.” Mythology and mythical storytelling, while overlapping with the religious configurations of homestead and hall, were in many ways separate from the concerns of “lived religion.”

Myth and religion in Viking Age Scandinavia were not, in Nordberg’s view, homogeneous, either for society or the individual, but instead a set of overlapping belief systems “formed (and transformed) by their day-to-day livelihoods, subsistence, and affiliation to social groups.”

I would suggest there must have been at least one more religious configuration—that of the lived religion of women. The Norse myths as they have been handed down to us are very male dominated, but Snorri Sturluson tells us that the goddesses, the Asyniur, were just as important as the male gods: “No less holy are the Asyniur, nor is their power less.”

This is a very interesting way, I think, to break down a society, a mythology, and a religion into their interrelated component parts. I won’t think about Norse mythology in quite the same way again, having read Andreas Nordberg’s thought-provoking essay.

Lived Religion

Well, it is that time of year again, of Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Midwinter, Merry Christmas, and all the rest of the nice things that can be wished. I particularly wish all my friends and supporters a happy, healthy, creative and fulfilled New Year. 2022 has been, to be honest, an awful year for me, and I am very much hoping things will look up in 2023. The article I am linking to is one I wrote for the excellent children's literature magazine Books for Keeps (to which I have contributed for years beyond count), about re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis. I hope you will find it interesting. https://booksforkeeps.co.uk/article/i-know-neither-the-sea-nor-the-stars/

Well, it is that time of year again, of Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Midwinter, Merry Christmas, and all the rest of the nice things that can be wished. I particularly wish all my friends and supporters a happy, healthy, creative and fulfilled New Year. 2022 has been, to be honest, an awful year for me, and I am very much hoping things will look up in 2023.

The article I am linking to is one I wrote for the excellent children's literature magazine Books for Keeps (to which I have contributed for years beyond count), about re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis. I hope you will find it interesting.

https://booksforkeeps.co.uk/article/i-know-neither-the-sea-nor-the-stars/

Lost in Narnia

A controversial book by psychologist Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, has brought back into vogue the ideas about mythology as embodying universal mental archetypes first put forward by Carl Jung, and promulgated by Joseph Campbell. Now, I don’t want to get into a whole review of Maps of Meaning, except to say that I fundamentally disagree with this approach, and any attempt to meld superficially similar myths from different cultures into what Campbell called a “monomyth”. If myths are maps of meaning, they are as particular and localised as a real map. It is because myths are attached to a particular place, a particular people, even a particular individual, that they gain their undoubted universal force. If you reduce the myths of different cultures to a “monomyth”, you empty them of meaning. Such a method is simplistic and reductive, and by ignoring the way myth is calibrated to culture, risks misinterpretation. Peterson—who rather oddly doesn’t seem to have noticed any writers on myth since Campbell and Eliade—devotes 20 pages to an account of the Babylonian creation myth the Enuma elish. His approach is to use this text as a way to reveal the deep forces of the human psyche. He says, for instance, that the generation of gods born from the primal couple Tiamat and Apsu “should therefore be regarded as embodiments of the archaic transpersonal intrapsychic phenomena that give rise to human motivation, as well as those aspects of the objective world that activate those intrapsychic systems.” Broad assertions like this seem to me almost meaningless. In essence, I think he is looking at the Enuma elish through the wrong end of the telescope, and the best way to understand its relevance to us today is to ask the simple question, What did it mean to the Babylonians? So here is my attempt to answer that question. The Babylonians, inheritors of the great cultural legacy of ancient Sumer, were a supremely confident people. This confidence—like that of the Egyptians—was built on an armature of mythology, which was expressed in the architecture of the city, in its customs, and most fully in its elaborate New Year festival, the Akitu, held at the spring equinox. Both in its mythology and its ritual, the Akitu was fundamentally about legitimising kingship. The Babylonian king held his authority directly from the gods. King Hammurabi claimed to have received the laws enshrined in the Code of Hammurabi directly from the hand of the sun god Shamash. This sense of divine authority has been utilised in recent years by Saddam Hussein, who explicitly compared himself to King Nebuchadnezzar (who ruled Babylon from 605 to 562 BCE), to justify his own dictatorship of Iraq. The text of the underlying myth of the Babylonian New Year festival, the Epic of Creation, has survived. Known as the Enuma elish from the opening words—which mean “When on high...”—it was ritually chanted, with the force of a magical incantation, on the fourth day of the twelve-day festival. The sequence of rituals and events was organized by the priests of the great temple of Marduk, the House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth within the Esagila, or temple complex. The purposes were several. On one level, the festival marked the spring barley harvest, and therefore the continuing fertility of the land. On the tenth day, a rite of union between the god and the fertility goddess Ishtar was celebrated, possibly by ritual copulation of the king and a priestess. But the essence of the festival was less to do with fertility than with the affirmation of power and the establishment of order, among gods and men. On the fifth day, following the previous day’s recitation of the Epic of Creation, the king of Babylon went to the temple of Marduk to ritually abdicate his throne. The king was stripped of his royal emblems and humiliated by the priest, who abused him and slapped his face. Then the king knelt before the statue of Marduk, and swore to uphold his sacred office with honour and justice. He was reinvested with his royal regalia, and then the priest struck him again. It was thought lucky if this slap stung so sharply it induced tears. It was a reminder that the king was merely a slave of the god. Just as the king was re-affirmed as the bearer, on Marduk’s behalf, of the sacred duties of kingship, so his ministers and subjects renewed their oaths to him, and kissed his feet, just as the gods of heaven and earth submitted to Marduk. The key element of the Babylonian New Year festival was simply that it did mark the New Year—not in a simple calendrical movement from one year to the next but in a fundamental, ritualised recreation and re-energising of the cosmos, the first four days of which were regarded as outside the calendar. During this period the god Marduk was confined “in the mountain”, meaning the underworld; he was only liberated on the seventh day, by his son Nabu, the scribe of the destinies. Nabu’s statue was brought in procession for this purpose on the previous day, from his cult centre in Borsippa. In preparation for this, the empty temple of Nabu in the Esagila was ritually purified by the decapitation of a sheep. On the eleventh day of the New Year festival, Marduk settled the destinies of the stars and planets for the year ahead. The festival’s re-enactment of his myth was an essential part of that process by which Marduk was enabled to keep the primal forces of chaos in check, “until time is old”. By reciting or enacting scenes from the Epic of Creation, recreating Marduk’s triumph over the creator Tiamat, the centrality of Babylon was also re-affirmed. When Marduk overthrew Tiamat and her army, he seized the tablet of destinies with which he then established the cosmos, before founding the city of Babylon to be his home. Therefore Babylon was literally the centre of the universe. Marduk represented the very essence of what made Babylon Babylon. So intimately were god and city entwined that the first act of any invading army was to carry off the cult statue of Marduk from his temple, thus plunging the city into mourning. The Babylonian text of the Enuma elish was found on seven tablets during the excavation of Nineveh in the nineteenth century. It begins when there was no earth or sky, nor any gods. There were just Apsu, the freshwater ocean, and Tiamat, the saltwater ocean. Apsu begets a series of deities on Tiamat: Lahmu and Lahamu, the silt that forms at the junction of the sea and rivers; Anshar and Kishar, the horizons of the sky and the earth. It is Anshar and Kishar who give birth to Anu, the god of the sky, and Anu in turn begets Nudimmud, which is an alternative name of Ea (Sumerian Enki), the god of the freshwater ocean beneath the earth, of wisdom, and of magic. In one of those genealogical confusions that beset such myths, although Ea/Nudimmud is described as the son of Anu, when the action gets going it is to Anshar that he turns for a father’s help. The younger gods are a rowdy crew, disturbing Apsu and Tiamat with their noisy play. Outraged, Apsu demands that Tiamat join with him to destroy them, but she will not. Apsu refuses to accept this, and secretly takes council with his vizier Mummu (“mist”), who is another of his children by Tiamat. But before Apsu and Mummu can put their plot into action, the wise Ea finds out about it. Using his magical powers, Ea casts a spell of sleep on Apsu and Mummu. He steals Apsu’s belt and crown and mantle of radiance, then slays him, and enslaves Mummu with a nose-rope. At the place where he has slain Apsu, Ea creates his sacred chamber, and names it “Apsu”. Here he lives in splendour with his consort Damkina, and here their son Marduk is born. Marduk is “so perfect that his godhead was doubled”. Ea creates the four winds as Marduk’s playthings, and Marduk sets them free to create whirlwinds and tidal waves. The older gods are more offended than ever by this new tumult. Unable to sleep, they go to Tiamat, reproaching her for allowing Apsu to be killed, and demanding that she wage war upon the younger gods. In preparation for this conflict, Tiamat creates all kinds of dreadful monsters to fight on her side, such as the scorpion-man, whose image was engraved on Babylonian seals and boundary stones. Tiamat appoints her son Qingu (Kingu) as her war leader, and arms him with the tablet of destinies, the source of all order in the universe. When Ea hears of this army gathered against him, he turns to his “father” Anshar, “the unfathomable fixer of fates” for advice. Anshar tells him to take the battle to Tiamat. First Ea and then Anu set out to challenge Tiamat but each turns back when he sees the strength of Tiamat’s army. The younger gods are horrified, and cast about for another champion. And it is at this point, when the generational conflict between the gods has reached its crisis point, that Marduk steps forward as the hero. Marduk agrees to take on Tiamat and her army on condition that the other gods accept him as their leader. At a banquet of the gods, Marduk is acclaimed as king, with “sovereignty over all of the whole universe”. Riding his storm chariot, and with his weapons such as the winds and floods, Marduk takes the fight to Tiamat. At his approach, her army loses morale, but Tiamat herself tries to wheedle Marduk into submission. Marduk demands single combat, and kills Tiamat by making her swallow the evil imhullu-wind and then firing an arrow into her distended stomach. Marduk then demolishes Tiamat’s army, capturing Kingu in a net of winds, and taking the tablet of destinies from him. He then splits Tiamat’s body in two “like a fish for drying”, using half of it to create the sky and presumably—although this is not specifically stated—the other half to create the earth; the rivers Tigris and Euphrates spring from Tiamat’s eyes. Marduk then determines the courses of the stars, the sun, and the moon, and in doing so sets time going. At a great feast of celebration, all the gods, both the Igigi of the sky and the Anunnaki of the underworld, kiss Marduk’s feet, and swear obeisance to him as king of the gods. Marduk declares his intention to create a magnificent home above Ea’s chamber Apsu: Whenever you come up from the Apsu for an assembly, Your night’s rest shall be in it, receiving you all. Whenever you come down from the sky for an assembly, Your night’s rest shall be in it, receiving you all. I hereby name it Babylon, home of the great gods. We shall make it the centre of religion. After his acclamation as king, Marduk exercises judgment over the fate of Qingu, Tiamat’s lover and war leader. Qingu is executed, and from his blood, at Marduk’s instigation, Ea creates mankind to serve the gods. Nevertheless it is the gods themselves who build Babylon from mud bricks, and raise the Esagila temple complex to be Marduk’s home, establishing inside it the temples of Anu, Ellil (Sumerian Enlil) and Ea, and shrines for all the gods. The ziggurat of the Esagila is identified with the Tower of Babel of Hebrew myth. Then the gods sing a hymn of praise to Marduk, praising his fifty great names, of which one is Bel, meaning Lord; it is the same root word as Ugaritic Baal. The inner power of a myth such this Babylonian Epic of Creation was so potent that it could even be appropriated by a conqueror and absorbed into the worship of another god. This fate, in which one god is as it were swallowed whole by another, happened to Marduk in 691 BCE, when Babylon was conquered by King Sennacherib of Assyria. From then on, the hero of the Epic of Creation was the Assyrian god Assur. The Enuma elish, so intimately entwined with the ritual of the Akitu, was for the Babylonians less a primal psychodrama than it was an assertion of continued power, status, and stability. The combination of myth and ritual explained Babylon to itself.

A controversial book by psychologist Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, has brought back into vogue the ideas about mythology as embodying universal mental archetypes first put forward by Carl Jung, and promulgated by Joseph Campbell. Now, I don’t want to get into a whole review of Maps of Meaning, except to say that I fundamentally disagree with this approach, and any attempt to meld superficially similar myths from different cultures into what Campbell called a “monomyth”. 
    If myths are maps of meaning, they are as particular and localised as a real map. It is because myths are attached to a particular place, a particular people, even a particular individual, that they gain their undoubted universal force. If you reduce the myths of different cultures to a “monomyth”, you empty them of meaning. Such a method is simplistic and reductive, and by ignoring the way myth is calibrated to culture, risks misinterpretation. 
    Peterson—who rather oddly doesn’t seem to have noticed any writers on myth since Campbell and Eliade—devotes 20 pages to an account of the Babylonian creation myth the Enuma elish. His approach is to use this text as a way to reveal the deep forces of the human psyche. He says, for instance, that the generation of gods born from the primal couple Tiamat and Apsu “should therefore be regarded as embodiments of the archaic transpersonal intrapsychic phenomena that give rise to human motivation, as well as those aspects of the objective world that activate those intrapsychic systems.” 
    Broad assertions like this seem to me almost meaningless. In essence, I think he is looking at the Enuma elish through the wrong end of the telescope, and the best way to understand its relevance to us today is to ask the simple question, What did it mean to the Babylonians? 
    So here is my attempt to answer that question.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Enuma_elish_-_1.jpg?v=1690911195" width="300" height="160">


The Babylonians, inheritors of the great cultural legacy of ancient Sumer, were a supremely confident people. This confidence—like that of the Egyptians—was built on an armature of mythology, which was expressed in the architecture of the city, in its customs, and most fully in its elaborate New Year festival, the Akitu, held at the spring equinox. 
    Both in its mythology and its ritual, the Akitu was fundamentally about legitimising kingship. The Babylonian king held his authority directly from the gods. King Hammurabi claimed to have received the laws enshrined in the Code of Hammurabi directly from the hand of the sun god Shamash. This sense of divine authority has been utilised in recent years by Saddam Hussein, who explicitly compared himself to King Nebuchadnezzar (who ruled Babylon from 605 to 562 BCE), to justify his own dictatorship of Iraq. 
    The text of the underlying myth of the Babylonian New Year festival, the Epic of Creation, has survived. Known as the Enuma elish from the opening words—which mean “When on high...”—it was ritually chanted, with the force of a magical incantation, on the fourth day of the twelve-day festival.  
    The sequence of rituals and events was organized by the priests of the great temple of Marduk, the House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth within the Esagila, or temple complex. The purposes were several. On one level, the festival marked the spring barley harvest, and therefore the continuing fertility of the land. On the tenth day, a rite of union between the god and the fertility goddess Ishtar was celebrated, possibly by ritual copulation of the king and a priestess. But the essence of the festival was less to do with fertility than with the affirmation of power and the establishment of order, among gods and men. 
    On the fifth day, following the previous day’s recitation of the Epic of Creation, the king of Babylon went to the temple of Marduk to ritually abdicate his throne. The king was stripped of his royal emblems and humiliated by the priest, who abused him and slapped his face. Then the king knelt before the statue of Marduk, and swore to uphold his sacred office with honour and justice. He was reinvested with his royal regalia, and then the priest struck him again. It was thought lucky if this slap stung so sharply it induced tears. It was a reminder that the king was merely a slave of the god. 
    Just as the king was re-affirmed as the bearer, on Marduk’s behalf, of the sacred duties of kingship, so his ministers and subjects renewed their oaths to him, and kissed his feet, just as the gods of heaven and earth submitted to Marduk.  
The key element of the Babylonian New Year festival was simply that it did mark the New Year—not in a simple calendrical movement from one year to the next but in a fundamental, ritualised recreation and re-energising of the cosmos, the first four days of which were regarded as outside the calendar. During this period the god Marduk was confined “in the mountain”, meaning the underworld; he was only liberated on the seventh day, by his son Nabu, the scribe of the destinies. Nabu’s statue was brought in procession for this purpose on the previous day, from his cult centre in Borsippa. In preparation for this, the empty temple of Nabu in the Esagila was ritually purified by the decapitation of a sheep. 
On the eleventh day of the New Year festival, Marduk settled the destinies of the stars and planets for the year ahead. The festival’s re-enactment of his myth was an essential part of that process by which Marduk was enabled to keep the primal forces of chaos in check, “until time is old”. 
    By reciting or enacting scenes from the Epic of Creation, recreating Marduk’s triumph over the creator Tiamat, the centrality of Babylon was also re-affirmed. When Marduk overthrew Tiamat and her army, he seized the tablet of destinies with which he then established the cosmos, before founding the city of Babylon to be his home. Therefore Babylon was literally the centre of the universe. 
    Marduk represented the very essence of what made Babylon Babylon. So intimately were god and city entwined that the first act of any invading army was to carry off the cult statue of Marduk from his temple, thus plunging the city into mourning.  
    The Babylonian text of the Enuma elish was found on seven tablets during the excavation of Nineveh in the nineteenth century. 
    It begins when there was no earth or sky, nor any gods. There were just Apsu, the freshwater ocean, and Tiamat, the saltwater ocean. Apsu begets a series of deities on Tiamat: Lahmu and Lahamu, the silt that forms at the junction of the sea and rivers; Anshar and Kishar, the horizons of the sky and the earth. It is Anshar and Kishar who give birth to Anu, the god of the sky, and Anu in turn begets Nudimmud, which is an alternative name of Ea (Sumerian Enki), the god of the freshwater ocean beneath the earth, of wisdom, and of magic. In one of those genealogical confusions that beset such myths, although Ea/Nudimmud is described as the son of Anu, when the action gets going it is to Anshar that he turns for a father’s help. 
    The younger gods are a rowdy crew, disturbing Apsu and Tiamat with their noisy play. Outraged, Apsu demands that Tiamat join with him to destroy them, but she will not. Apsu refuses to accept this, and secretly takes council with his vizier Mummu (“mist”), who is another of his children by Tiamat. But before Apsu and Mummu can put their plot into action, the wise Ea finds out about it. Using his magical powers, Ea casts a spell of sleep on Apsu and Mummu. He steals Apsu’s belt and crown and mantle of radiance, then slays him, and enslaves Mummu with a nose-rope. 
    At the place where he has slain Apsu, Ea creates his sacred chamber, and names it “Apsu”. Here he lives in splendour with his consort Damkina, and here their son Marduk is born. Marduk is “so perfect that his godhead was doubled”. 
    Ea creates the four winds as Marduk’s playthings, and Marduk sets them free to create whirlwinds and tidal waves. The older gods are more offended than ever by this new tumult. Unable to sleep, they go to Tiamat, reproaching her for allowing Apsu to be killed, and demanding that she wage war upon the younger gods. In preparation for this conflict, Tiamat creates all kinds of dreadful monsters to fight on her side, such as the scorpion-man, whose image was engraved on Babylonian seals and boundary stones. 
    Tiamat appoints her son Qingu (Kingu) as her war leader, and arms him with the tablet of destinies, the source of all order in the universe. 
    When Ea hears of this army gathered against him, he turns to his “father” Anshar, “the unfathomable fixer of fates” for advice. Anshar tells him to take the battle to Tiamat.  First Ea and then Anu set out to challenge Tiamat but each turns back when he sees the strength of Tiamat’s army. The younger gods are horrified, and cast about for another champion. And it is at this point, when the generational conflict between the gods has reached its crisis point, that Marduk steps forward as the hero. 
    Marduk agrees to take on Tiamat and her army on condition that the other gods accept him as their leader. At a banquet of the gods, Marduk is acclaimed as king, with “sovereignty over all of the whole universe”. 
    Riding his storm chariot, and with his weapons such as the winds and floods, Marduk takes the fight to Tiamat. At his approach, her army loses morale, but Tiamat herself tries to wheedle Marduk into submission. Marduk demands single combat, and kills Tiamat by making her swallow the evil imhullu-wind and then firing an arrow into her distended stomach. 
    Marduk then demolishes Tiamat’s army, capturing Kingu in a net of winds, and taking the tablet of destinies from him. He then splits Tiamat’s body in two “like a fish for drying”, using half of it to create the sky and presumably—although this is not specifically stated—the other half to create the earth; the rivers Tigris and Euphrates spring from Tiamat’s eyes. Marduk then determines the courses of the stars, the sun, and the moon, and in doing so sets time going. 
    At a great feast of celebration, all the gods, both the Igigi of the sky and the Anunnaki of the underworld, kiss Marduk’s feet, and swear obeisance to him as king of the gods. Marduk declares his intention to create a magnificent home above Ea’s chamber Apsu:

    Whenever you come up from the Apsu for an assembly, 
    Your night’s rest shall be in it, receiving you all. 
    Whenever you come down from the sky for an assembly, 
    Your night’s rest shall be in it, receiving you all. 
    I hereby name it Babylon, home of the great gods. 
    We shall make it the centre of religion.

    After his acclamation as king, Marduk exercises judgment over the fate of Qingu, Tiamat’s lover and war leader. Qingu is executed, and from his blood, at Marduk’s instigation, Ea creates mankind to serve the gods. 
    Nevertheless it is the gods themselves who build Babylon from mud bricks, and raise the Esagila temple complex to be Marduk’s home, establishing inside it the temples of Anu, Ellil (Sumerian Enlil) and Ea, and shrines for all the gods. The ziggurat of the Esagila is identified with the Tower of Babel of Hebrew myth. 
Then the gods sing a hymn of praise to Marduk, praising his fifty great names, of which one is Bel, meaning Lord; it is the same root word as Ugaritic Baal. 
    The inner power of a myth such this Babylonian Epic of Creation was so potent that it could even be appropriated by a conqueror and absorbed into the worship of another god. This fate, in which one god is as it were swallowed whole by another, happened to Marduk in 691 BCE, when Babylon was conquered by King Sennacherib of Assyria. From then on, the hero of the Epic of Creation was the Assyrian god Assur. 
    The Enuma elish, so intimately entwined with the ritual of the Akitu, was for the Babylonians less a primal psychodrama than it was an assertion of continued power, status, and stability. The combination of myth and ritual explained Babylon to itself.

Maps of Meaning?

To define myth in a single sentence is as foolhardy as to attempt to define poetry—which doesn’t, of course, stop people trying. The definition of myth that has always rung truest for me is that of the filmmaker and anthropologist Maya Deren. In the 1940s, Maya Deren plunged headfirst into the whirlpool of Haitian voodoo, in an attempt to understand myth from the inside. When she re-emerged—having herself experienced the spirit possession that gave her the title for her book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti—she wrote that, “Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.” Voodoo in its various forms is a religion without any formal structure. It is essentially a religion of divine possession, in which the ecstatic dancers circling a post that links earth and heaven are “ridden” by the spirits of the lwa. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries CE, 12 million black Africans were transported to the Caribbean and North America, where those who survived the terrible journey were enslaved. They included men, women, and children from many different tribes, speaking many different languages. A large proportion were Fon, Yoruba, and Ewe tribespeople, from West Africa’s notorious “slave coast”. They took their gods with them into exile. In the crucible of slavery, the myths and rituals of these West African peoples fused into a new religion. Kept hidden from the slave-masters, it celebrated the slaves’ African identity, and served as a source of independence and rebellion. In North America and Haiti this religion is called voodoo or vodou; in Brazil, candomblé; in Cuba, santería; in Jamaica, obeayisne; and in Trinidad, shango cult. The word voodoo derives from the Fon vodun, the gods or spirits. The slaves were forbidden to practice their own rituals, and therefore the voodoo religions took shape under the cover of Christianity. In Haiti, the gods of the Fon, Arada, Nago, Congo, Ibo, Bomba, Limba, and Bambara mingled with those of the Carib Indians who were also enslaved there, to produce voodoo. While Catholic priests have made strenuous efforts to stamp out voodoo, Catholicism is an essential part of voodoo itself. Each of the voodoo gods or lwa is identified with a Catholic saint. Thus Legba the keeper of the crossroads between the human and supernatural worlds is identified with St. Peter and St. Andrew; Azaka the lwa of agriculture with St. Isidore; Gédé, the lwa of the dead, with St. Expedit; Ezili, the lwa of love, with the Virgin Mary. The fusion of African and Christian beliefs is exemplified in the story of Robert Johnson, “the King of the Delta Blues”. The illegitimate son of a plantation worker, he was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, on 8 May 1911—exactly 44 years before me, though Johnson had been dead for nearly 18 years by the time I was born. In his late teens, he started to play the guitar, and hang around with older blues musicians such as Son House and Charley Patton. Son House recalled what a “racket” Johnson made on the guitar. “I’d scold him about it. ‘Don’t do that, Robert. You drive the people nuts. You can’t play nothing.’” Johnson then disappeared from view for a year. When he returned, he was transformed. He had turned from a stumbling novice into an electrifying performer, who left the others open-mouthed, with his haunted eyes, his eerie wail, and his slender fingers fluttering across the frets. In songs such as “Cross Road Blues”, “Me and the Devil Blues”, and “Hellhound on My Trail”, Robert Johnson hinted at how he had acquired his supernatural skills. He said that he went down to a lonely crossroads at midnight and sold his soul to the Devil in return for musical mastery. This was the moment when he embraced the complex, bitter, rich legacy of his African heritage. For the being Robert Johnson met at the crossroads was not the Biblical Satan, but the West African trickster god of fate, the messenger and mediator between gods and men, who became known in slave religion by his Fon name, Legba. Among the Yoruba, this god is named Eshu, and his errand boys are precisely the muses invoked by the blues: “Death, Disease, Loss, Paralysis, Big Trouble, Curse, Imprisonment, Affliction.” Many characteristics of African music persist in the blues, for instance the flattened thirds and fifths referred to as “blue notes”. In the case of Robert Johnson, the African influence is particularly noticeable in the way his instrument seems to come alive to answer and respond to his vocal performance. And the supernatural source of his inspiration would be perfectly familiar to an African musician—for instance Mali’s Ali Farka Touré tells how, “It was the spirits who gave me the gift.”

To define myth in a single sentence is as foolhardy as to attempt to define poetry—which doesn’t, of course, stop people trying. The definition of myth that has always rung truest for me is that of the filmmaker and anthropologist Maya Deren.

In the 1940s, Maya Deren plunged headfirst into the whirlpool of Haitian voodoo, in an attempt to understand myth from the inside. When she re-emerged—having herself experienced the spirit possession that gave her the title for her book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti—she wrote that, “Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.”

Voodoo in its various forms is a religion without any formal structure. It is essentially a religion of divine possession, in which the ecstatic dancers circling a post that links earth and heaven are “ridden” by the spirits of the lwa.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries CE, 12 million black Africans were transported to the Caribbean and North America, where those who survived the terrible journey were enslaved. They included men, women, and children from many different tribes, speaking many different languages. A large proportion were Fon, Yoruba, and Ewe tribespeople, from West Africa’s notorious “slave coast”. They took their gods with them into exile.

In the crucible of slavery, the myths and rituals of these West African peoples fused into a new religion. Kept hidden from the slave-masters, it celebrated the slaves’ African identity, and served as a source of independence and rebellion. In North America and Haiti this religion is called voodoo or vodou; in Brazil, candomblé; in Cuba, santería; in Jamaica, obeayisne; and in Trinidad, shango cult. The word voodoo derives from the Fon vodun, the gods or spirits.

The slaves were forbidden to practice their own rituals, and therefore the voodoo religions took shape under the cover of Christianity. In Haiti, the gods of the Fon, Arada, Nago, Congo, Ibo, Bomba, Limba, and Bambara mingled with those of the Carib Indians who were also enslaved there, to produce voodoo. While Catholic priests have made strenuous efforts to stamp out voodoo, Catholicism is an essential part of voodoo itself. Each of the voodoo gods or lwa is identified with a Catholic saint. Thus Legba the keeper of the crossroads between the human and supernatural worlds is identified with St. Peter and St. Andrew; Azaka the lwa of agriculture with St. Isidore; Gédé, the lwa of the dead, with St. Expedit; Ezili, the lwa of love, with the Virgin Mary.

The fusion of African and Christian beliefs is exemplified in the story of Robert Johnson, “the King of the Delta Blues”. The illegitimate son of a plantation worker, he was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, on 8 May 1911—exactly 44 years before me, though Johnson had been dead for nearly 18 years by the time I was born. In his late teens, he started to play the guitar, and hang around with older blues musicians such as Son House and Charley Patton. Son House recalled what a “racket” Johnson made on the guitar. “I’d scold him about it. ‘Don’t do that, Robert. You drive the people nuts. You can’t play nothing.’” Johnson then disappeared from view for a year. When he returned, he was transformed. He had turned from a stumbling novice into an electrifying performer, who left the others open-mouthed, with his haunted eyes, his eerie wail, and his slender fingers fluttering across the frets.

In songs such as “Cross Road Blues”, “Me and the Devil Blues”, and “Hellhound on My Trail”, Robert Johnson hinted at how he had acquired his supernatural skills. He said that he went down to a lonely crossroads at midnight and sold his soul to the Devil in return for musical mastery. This was the moment when he embraced the complex, bitter, rich legacy of his African heritage. For the being Robert Johnson met at the crossroads was not the Biblical Satan, but the West African trickster god of fate, the messenger and mediator between gods and men, who became known in slave religion by his Fon name, Legba.

Among the Yoruba, this god is named Eshu, and his errand boys are precisely the muses invoked by the blues: “Death, Disease, Loss, Paralysis, Big Trouble, Curse, Imprisonment, Affliction.”

Many characteristics of African music persist in the blues, for instance the flattened thirds and fifths referred to as “blue notes”. In the case of Robert Johnson, the African influence is particularly noticeable in the way his instrument seems to come alive to answer and respond to his vocal performance. And the supernatural source of his inspiration would be perfectly familiar to an African musician—for instance Mali’s Ali Farka Touré tells how, “It was the spirits who gave me the gift.”

Myth and the Blues

Because we mostly encounter myths as written texts, we are inclined to regard them as essentially narratives made out of words. But of course the printed text on the page radically misrepresents the essential nature of mythtelling. Even if a myth is delivered as an oral narrative, it is a spoken text, and dependent on all kinds of variables to do with audience, context, purpose, and the teller themselves. Myths can be sung, or danced, enacted as ritual, or encoded as visual art. And in myth-drenched societies, myth also acts as a constant cultural reference point. A fascinating method of mythtelling was observed by Roy Franklin Barton among the Ifugao people of Luzon Island in the Philippines. Almost every adult male Ifugao became a priest and learned the myths. At an Ifugao myth recitation, it was mutually agreed which priest would tell which myth, and then: "Each priest recites his myth simultaneously with the rest and when he has finished one myth, he begins another. The result is a babble in which the words are indistinguishable. "If you should approach one of the little villages in which a myth recitation is going on, you would first hear a faint hum like that of swarming bees. As you came nearer, the hum would grow into a murmur and the murmur would grow into a roar like that of an approaching mob on the stage. Arriving in the village you would note that, despite the fact that the stories were all being lost in a general jumble, there would nevertheless be an audience of women and children sitting underneath neighbouring houses, gathered to listen. "Aside from the fact that the monotony of daily life is broken by them, the Ifugao enjoys myth recitations because he appreciates the babble of them as a rising and falling sound. The voices, he says, 'rise and fall like the sound of the bamboo harp.'"

Because we mostly encounter myths as written texts, we are inclined to regard them as essentially narratives made out of words. But of course the printed text on the page radically misrepresents the essential nature of mythtelling. Even if a myth is delivered as an oral narrative, it is a spoken text, and dependent on all kinds of variables to do with audience, context, purpose, and the teller themselves. Myths can be sung, or danced, enacted as ritual, or encoded as visual art. And in myth-drenched societies, myth also acts as a constant cultural reference point.

A fascinating method of mythtelling was observed by Roy Franklin Barton among the Ifugao people of Luzon Island in the Philippines. Almost every adult male Ifugao became a priest and learned the myths. At an Ifugao myth recitation, it was mutually agreed which priest would tell which myth, and then:

"Each priest recites his myth simultaneously with the rest and when he has finished one myth, he begins another. The result is a babble in which the words are indistinguishable.

"If you should approach one of the little villages in which a myth recitation is going on, you would first hear a faint hum like that of swarming bees. As you came nearer, the hum would grow into a murmur and the murmur would grow into a roar like that of an approaching mob on the stage. Arriving in the village you would note that, despite the fact that the stories were all being lost in a general jumble, there would nevertheless be an audience of women and children sitting underneath neighbouring houses, gathered to listen.

"Aside from the fact that the monotony of daily life is broken by them, the Ifugao enjoys myth recitations because he appreciates the babble of them as a rising and falling sound. The voices, he says, 'rise and fall like the sound of the bamboo harp.'"

Mythtelling

Happy New Year, everyone. Here are a few thoughts about Navajo rugs and their mythological significance, indebted to an excellent book Navajo Weaving Way by Noël Bennett and Tiana Bighorse. Diné (Navajo) life is founded on a simple philosophical principle: sa’ah naagháí bik’eh hózhóón; in English, “the beauty of life created by the application of teachings that work.” In action, this principle has enabled them to adapt to change over the centuries, incorporating what is compatible into the Diné way, and rejecting the rest. The most famous art form of the Diné, the Navajo rug, emerged when the Diné settled down from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle they lived when they first arrived in the Southwest in the fourteenth century CE. During what is known as the Gobernador Phase (c. 1650-1775), the Diné learned to cultivate corn and squash, and adopted many ceremonies and rituals from the Pueblo peoples with whom they came into contact. This new agrarian existence gave the Diné their common name, for the word Navajo comes from the Tewa for “cultivated fields”; it was the Spaniards who termed them, Apaches de Navajó. At the same period, the Diné began to herd horses and sheep, both brought to the New World by the Spanish, and it was from sheep’s wool that Diné women began to weave their blankets and rugs. Weaving was the gift of Spider Woman, who in Diné mythology spun the rope ladder by which the People climbed up into this world at the Emergence. Spider Woman is revered throughout the Southwest; to the Keres, she is even the creator, Thinking Woman, who spun the world from her own thoughts; the Diné also believe that Spider Woman wove the universe on her loom. The Diné never kill spiders, which help human beings by catching insects, flies, and mosquitos; a child who does kill a spider will grow up with crooked teeth, because Spider Woman’s teeth slant backward to prevent her prey escaping. Diné girls are encouraged to rub spiders’ webs on their arms to make them tireless weavers. Weaving involves the whole of a woman’s being, and Diné weavers must weave a line into the pattern that makes a pathway for her spirit to come back out to her. As one weaver from Tuba City put it: Some people just weave and weave and weave all the time. And sometimes they think they might just weave their life away. So they put that line in so they can escape, or they think they might weave themselves into the rug. And they put the line in so they can get out. This Weaver’s Pathway, often found in the top right corner, is a feature of traditional Navajo rugs. In the 1930s, roughly seven out of eight rugs contained it. Nowadays it is much less common, both because some modern weavers reject it as old-fashioned superstition, and because traders saw the pathway as a flaw in the design, and would pay less for “imperfect rugs.” The earliest surviving Navajo textiles are the blankets left undisturbed with the bodies of Diné slaughted by the Spanish in 1804, in Massacre Cave in the Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. These were recovered a century later by a local trader, Sam Day, who sold the blankets to museums across the United States. The role of traders in commodifying Navajo rugs, and of collectors in driving up their financial value, is controversial. For the Diné, weaving maintains the balance and harmony of the world, by celebrating the relationships that tie all living beings together in the web of life. The value of the rugs is in the process of creation, a process which is never finished while the pattern itself is left unfinished, with a Weaver’s Pathway. The traders who wholesaled the rugs by weight, the collectors who avidly purchased them, even the museum curators who have preserved them and turned them into art objects, are all irrelevant to the essential meaning of these textiles. Some Diné weavers say they feel as if they are “selling their minds” when they sell their rugs. Charles Loloma, a Hopi silversmith, quoted his weaver father as saying, “It’s not enough to weave beautiful rugs. You have to think beautiful thoughts while weaving them.” Throughout the Southwest, weaving has a spiritual aspect, because it is the gift of Spider Woman. The Diné weaving chant Halo of the Sun concludes: With beauty before me, it is woven With beauty behind me, it is woven With beauty above me, it is woven With beauty below me, it is woven And in beauty, it is finished

Happy New Year, everyone. Here are a few thoughts about Navajo rugs and their mythological significance, indebted to an excellent book Navajo Weaving Way by Noël Bennett and Tiana Bighorse.

Diné (Navajo) life is founded on a simple philosophical principle: sa’ah naagháí bik’eh hózhóón; in English, “the beauty of life created by the application of teachings that work.” In action, this principle has enabled them to adapt to change over the centuries, incorporating what is compatible into the Diné way, and rejecting the rest. 
    The most famous art form of the Diné, the Navajo rug, emerged when the Diné settled down from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle they lived when they first arrived in the Southwest in the fourteenth century CE. During what is known as the Gobernador Phase (c. 1650-1775), the Diné learned to cultivate corn and squash, and adopted many ceremonies and rituals from the Pueblo peoples with whom they came into contact. This new agrarian existence gave the Diné their common name, for the word Navajo comes from the Tewa for “cultivated fields”; it was the Spaniards who termed them, Apaches de Navajó. 
    At the same period, the Diné began to herd horses and sheep, both brought to the New World by the Spanish, and it was from sheep’s wool that Diné women began to weave their blankets and rugs. Weaving was the gift of Spider Woman, who in Diné mythology spun the rope ladder by which the People climbed up into this world at the Emergence. 
    Spider Woman is revered throughout the Southwest; to the Keres, she is even the creator, Thinking Woman, who spun the world from her own thoughts; the Diné also believe that Spider Woman wove the universe on her loom. 
    The Diné never kill spiders, which help human beings by catching insects, flies, and mosquitos; a child who does kill a spider will grow up with crooked teeth, because Spider Woman’s teeth slant backward to prevent her prey escaping. Diné girls are encouraged to rub spiders’ webs on their arms to make them tireless weavers. 
    Weaving involves the whole of a woman’s being, and Diné weavers must weave a line into the pattern that makes a pathway for her spirit to come back out to her. As one weaver from Tuba City put it: 

Some people just weave and weave and weave all the time. And sometimes they think they might just weave their life away. So they put that line in so they can escape, or they think they might weave themselves into the rug. And they put the line in so they can get out.

This Weaver’s Pathway, often found in the top right corner, is a feature of traditional Navajo rugs. In the 1930s, roughly seven out of eight rugs contained it. Nowadays it is much less common, both because some modern weavers reject it as old-fashioned superstition, and because traders saw the pathway as a flaw in the design, and would pay less for “imperfect rugs.” 
    The earliest surviving Navajo textiles are the blankets left undisturbed with the bodies of Diné slaughted by the Spanish in 1804, in Massacre Cave in the Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. These were recovered a century later by a local trader, Sam Day, who sold the blankets to museums across the United States. 
    The role of traders in commodifying Navajo rugs, and of collectors in driving up their financial value, is controversial. For the Diné, weaving maintains the balance and harmony of the world, by celebrating the relationships that tie all living beings together in the web of life. The value of the rugs is in the process of creation, a process which is never finished while the pattern itself is left unfinished, with a Weaver’s Pathway. The traders who wholesaled the rugs by weight, the collectors who avidly purchased them, even the museum curators who have preserved them and turned them into art objects, are all irrelevant to the essential meaning of these textiles. Some Diné weavers say they feel as if they are “selling their minds” when they sell their rugs. 
    Charles Loloma, a Hopi silversmith, quoted his weaver father as saying, “It’s not enough to weave beautiful rugs. You have to think beautiful thoughts while weaving them.” Throughout the Southwest, weaving has a spiritual aspect, because it is the gift of Spider Woman. The Diné weaving chant Halo of the Sun concludes:

With beauty before me, it is woven 
With beauty behind me, it is woven 
With beauty above me, it is woven 
With beauty below me, it is woven 
And in beauty, it is finished

Navajo rugs

Dear friends and supporters, This is to wish you all health and happiness at this Winter Solstice, and all my best wishes to you and yours for Christmas, Yule, Hanukkah, Pancha Ganapati, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, the birth of Sol Invictus, or any other festival of light and friendship. I have been working on a new update about therianthropes—beings that can be both human and animal—and their crucial importance in so many mythologies, especially those of peoples who are essentially hunter-gatherers. But I can see it is not going to be ready before Christmas. I have been a bit lax in rewarding your support with new material, because my work on this book—which I am still as excited about as ever—has been hampered by dealing with an ongoing family crisis. I could really do with some extra days in the week. If you want to see what I am thinking about day-by-day, consider following me on Twitter @neilphilip myth. I tweet mostly about mythology, folklore, children’s books and literature generally, and retweet things I find interesting from archaeologists, medievalists and the like. All best, Neil

Dear friends and supporters,

This is to wish you all health and happiness at this Winter Solstice, and all my best wishes to you and yours for Christmas, Yule, Hanukkah, Pancha Ganapati, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, the birth of Sol Invictus, or any other festival of light and friendship.

I have been working on a new update about therianthropes—beings that can be both human and animal—and their crucial importance in so many mythologies, especially those of peoples who are essentially hunter-gatherers. But I can see it is not going to be ready before Christmas.

I have been a bit lax in rewarding your support with new material, because my work on this book—which I am still as excited about as ever—has been hampered by dealing with an ongoing family crisis. I could really do with some extra days in the week.

If you want to see what I am thinking about day-by-day, consider following me on Twitter @neilphilip myth. I tweet mostly about mythology, folklore, children’s books and literature generally, and retweet things I find interesting from archaeologists, medievalists and the like. 

All best, Neil

Peace and goodwill

No sooner did I send out the update on my upcoming lecture on fairytales for the National Center for the Study of Children's Literature than Pacific Time has gone to Daylight Saving, meaning that the UK is now only 7 hours ahead of San Diego. So the correct time for my lecture if watching in the UK is 7 p.m. on Thursday 18 March (the lecture is happening at noon in San Diego time). I'm so sorry to have made this elementary error.

No sooner did I send out the update on my upcoming lecture on fairytales for the National Center for the Study of Children's Literature than Pacific Time has gone to Daylight Saving, meaning that the UK is now only 7 hours ahead of San Diego. So the correct time for my lecture if watching in the UK is 7 p.m. on Thursday 18 March (the lecture is happening at noon in San Diego time).

I'm so sorry to have made this elementary error.

Revised time for Unhappy Ever After lecture

Dear friends and supporters, I am sorry I have been a bit silent recently - my personal life has been very difficult. I'm working every day on the book, but progress is much slower than I would wish. There's no real chance of it being finished and published this year, so think 2022! In the meantime, I thought I would share something with you which isn't part of The Hidden Matrix at all. It's my short biography of the extraordinary self-created storyteller and singer Ruth Tongue, for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, who have kindly agreed to make it open access for a short period. As soon as I heard recordings of Ruth in the BBC archives nearly 40 years ago, with her middle class, educated voice, suddenly modulating into "Mummerzet" when she performed, I knew she was a fake. I didn't include any of her stories in my English Folktales. But my attitude towards her has changed, because I realise she was both fake and real - her storytelling talent was true, but her stories about her songs and stories were not. She just really did not distinguish between creation and collection. Katharine Briggs was completely taken in by her, in a way which makes their joint Folktales of England the weakest of all the volumes in Richard Dorson's Folktales of the World series (University of Chicago Press or Routledge, depending on which side of the pond). My thinking about Ruth Tongue has been partly influenced by discovering the writer David Southwell and his imaginary county of Hookland, in which "nothing is made up, just remembered differently". Ruth was the mistress of remembering things differently. I hope you will find this interesting: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-63241

Dear friends and supporters, I am sorry I have been a bit silent recently - my personal life has been very difficult. I'm working every day on the book, but progress is much slower than I would wish. There's no real chance of it being finished and published this year, so think 2022! In the meantime, I thought I would share something with you which isn't part of The Hidden Matrix at all. It's my short biography of the extraordinary self-created storyteller and singer Ruth Tongue, for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, who have kindly agreed to make it open access for a short period. As soon as I heard recordings of Ruth in the BBC archives nearly 40 years ago, with her middle class, educated voice, suddenly modulating into "Mummerzet" when she performed, I knew she was a fake. I didn't include any of her stories in my English Folktales. But my attitude towards her has changed, because I realise she was both fake and real - her storytelling talent was true, but her stories about her songs and stories were not. She just really did not distinguish between creation and collection. Katharine Briggs was completely taken in by her, in a way which makes their joint Folktales of England the weakest of all the volumes in Richard Dorson's Folktales of the World series (University of Chicago Press or Routledge, depending on which side of the pond). My thinking about Ruth Tongue has been partly influenced by discovering the writer David Southwell and his imaginary county of Hookland, in which "nothing is made up, just remembered differently". Ruth was the mistress of remembering things differently. I hope you will find this interesting: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-63241

Ruth Tongue

Actions that breach a society's sense of morality may cause outrage or amusement; actions that undermine a society's sense of mythology may cause it to doubt its own validity. When the Emperor Caligula fell in love with his horse Incitatus, it was seen as an eccentric joke; distasteful, but nothing to get worried about. But when in CE220, the Emperor born Varius Avitus Bassianus married the Vestal Virgin Julia Aquilia Severa, the transgression convulsed Rome with shockwaves of shame and alarm. For the virginity of the Vestals was crucial to Rome's sense of its own survival. Bassianus was the hereditary high priest of the god Elagabal (god of the mountain), whose cult centre was at Emesa (modern-day Hims) in the Syrian desert. As Emperor of Rome, he was crowned Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, though he is more commonly known as Elagabalus or Heliogabalus (a scornful nickname meaning Scoundrel of the Sun); for simplicity's sake, I shall continue to call him Bassianus. He became Emperor by means of old-fashioned behind-the-scenes politicking, following the assassination of Caracalla, his first cousin once-removed, in CE217. Caracalla was killed while on his way to the city of Harran in northern Syria, to make a sacrifice to the moon god Sîn; although Sîn's main temple was at Ur, Harran had become an important cult centre of this ancient Mesopotamian god in the Neo-Babylonian Period. That a Roman Emperor's worship should be focussed on a god dating back to Ancient Sumer is not unusual; this was a period at which the religions of Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia were profoundly influential through the Roman Empire, and even at Rome itself. And most of these religions had roots in Mesopotamian myth. The cult of Elagabal, for instance, was influenced by that of the Babylonian sun god Shamash, while his main festival, celebrated in mid-summer, showed great similarities with the Babylonian New Year Festival. Caracalla's father, Septimius Severus, had commanded a legion in Syria; his mother, Julia Domna, was the daughter of Elagabal's high priest. As Juvenal had written a century before, "The Syrian Orontes has been disgorging into the Tiber for a good while now." It was Bassianus's grandmother, Julia Maesa, who manoeuvred him into power in CE218, ousting Caracalla's murderer and successor, Macrinus. The teenage Bassianus, however, was truly devoted to the sun god Elagabal, and refused to leave behind the conical black meteorite (baetyl) which was the sacred embodiment of the god. It was worshipped, according to Herodian "as though it were sent from heaven; on it are some small projecting pieces and markings that .... people would like to believe are a rough picture of the sun". A number of such baetyls were the objects of cults in the Levant (for instance that of the god Dusares in Arabia); an important one that survives to this day-co-opted into Islam-is the Black Stone in the Kaaba in Mecca. Bassianus took the baetyl of Elagabal to Rome, in a flamboyant procession across Asia Minor that took over a year to complete, as the teenage Emperor insisted on sacrificing to the god at every opportunity. When at last he arrived in Rome, he immediately established a sanctuary for the baetyl, the Elagabalium, beside the imperial palace. From now on, Elagabal Sol Invictus (Elagabal the Unconquered Sun) was to be the chief god of Rome, superior even to Jupiter Capitolinus; all the other gods were mere servants of Elagabal. Each day the perfumed emperor, caked in make-up, dressed in silk robes and baggy Persian trousers, sacrificed bulls, sheep, and wine to his god, dancing and singing in the language of the Bedouins to the exotic rhythms of cymbals and timbrels. In the way of Syrian, and indeed Egyptian, gods, Elagabal was worshipped at Emesa as the head of a triad of deities, alongside the warrior goddess Allat and the moon goddess Astarte (also called Caelestis, and identified with Venus). Some sources say that the triad was Elagabal, Astarte, and the great mother Atargatis (Dea Syria), but it seems more likely that aspects of Atargatis were simply fused with Astarte. To recreate this symmetry, Bassianus moved the Palladium-the idol of Pallas Athena supposedly brought from Troy by Aeneas-from the temple of the Vestals to the Elagabalium, to wed her to his god. And then from Carthage he imported the cult statue of Tanit-Caelestis, a form of Astarte already identified with Roman Juno, to be Elagabal's second wife. This profound rearrangement of the divine order-replacing the Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva with Elagabal, Tanit, and Athena-was reflected in the scandalous behaviour of the new emperor, who is recorded in the uncomprehending biographies of writer such as Cassius Dio as perhaps the most perverted and cruel of all the Roman emperors. Bassianus is said, for instance, to have installed a brothel in the imperial palace, in which he prostituted himself, and also to have planned to castrate himself and pleaded with his physicians to create a vagina for him. However much truth there is in the lurid tales of Bassianus's behaviour (it is possible, for instance that stories of his intended or actual castration are simply mistaken interpretations of his circumcision, demanded by his god), they point to various practices that are well-attested in Eastern religions of the time. The priests of Cybele, and those of her Syrian equivalent Atargatis, castrated themselves in her honour, while temple prostitution was a feature of many oriental religions, including the worship of Isis and Astarte. Bassianus's desecration of the temple of Vesta, by removing the Palladium, was completed by his marriage to one of Vesta's sacred virgins. The outcry was so great that he put her aside, only to re-marry the following year. Such determined flouting of Rome's most sacred traditions can only be explained by Bassianus's urgent need to shore up the worship of his own god by allying himself with the most powerful Roman divinities, and co-opting them to the worship of Elagabal. To the Romans, this was a vile sacrilege. To Bassianus, it was a sacred marriage. If he could not persuade his surgeons to perform a sex change he could, by effectively turning Julia Aquilia Severa from a virgin dedicated to Vesta into a sacred prostitute in the service of the Emesan triad, divert the most sacred streams of Roman worship into Syrian channels. Cassius Dio quotes him as claiming that "I did it in order that godlike children might spring from me, the high priest, and from her, the high-priestess." His grandmother Julia Maesa, herself a thoroughly Romanized woman with little time for Syrian religion, eventually despaired of Bassianus's religious and personal excesses, and had him murdered in CE22. He was replaced by his moderate cousin Severus Alexander, whose first act as emperor was to send the baetyl of Elagabal back to Emesa.

Actions that breach a society's sense of morality may cause outrage or amusement; actions that undermine a society's sense of mythology may cause it to doubt its own validity. When the Emperor Caligula fell in love with his horse Incitatus, it was seen as an eccentric joke; distasteful, but nothing to get worried about. But when in CE220, the Emperor born Varius Avitus Bassianus married the Vestal Virgin Julia Aquilia Severa, the transgression convulsed Rome with shockwaves of shame and alarm. For the virginity of the Vestals was crucial to Rome's sense of its own survival.

Bassianus was the hereditary high priest of the god Elagabal (god of the mountain), whose cult centre was at Emesa (modern-day Hims) in the Syrian desert. As Emperor of Rome, he was crowned Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, though he is more commonly known as Elagabalus  or Heliogabalus (a scornful nickname meaning Scoundrel of the Sun); for simplicity's sake, I shall continue to call him Bassianus. He became Emperor by means of old-fashioned behind-the-scenes politicking, following the assassination of Caracalla, his first cousin once-removed, in CE217.

Caracalla was killed while on his way to the city of Harran in northern Syria, to make a sacrifice to the moon god Sîn; although Sîn's main temple was at Ur, Harran had become an important cult centre of this ancient Mesopotamian god in the Neo-Babylonian Period. That a Roman Emperor's worship should be focussed on a god dating back to Ancient Sumer is not unusual; this was a period at which the religions of Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia were profoundly influential through the Roman Empire, and even at Rome itself. And most of these religions had roots in Mesopotamian myth. The cult of Elagabal, for instance, was influenced by that of the Babylonian sun god Shamash, while his  main festival, celebrated in mid-summer, showed great similarities with the Babylonian New Year Festival. 

Caracalla's father, Septimius Severus, had commanded a legion in Syria; his mother, Julia Domna, was the daughter of Elagabal's high priest. As Juvenal had written a century before, "The Syrian Orontes has been disgorging into the Tiber for a good while now."

It was Bassianus's grandmother, Julia Maesa, who manoeuvred him into power in CE218, ousting Caracalla's murderer and successor, Macrinus. The teenage Bassianus, however, was truly devoted to the sun god Elagabal, and refused to leave behind the conical black meteorite (baetyl) which was the sacred embodiment of the god. It was worshipped, according to Herodian "as though it were sent from heaven; on it are some small projecting pieces and markings that .... people would like to believe are a rough picture of the sun". A number of such baetyls were the objects of cults in the Levant (for instance that of the god Dusares in Arabia); an important one that survives to this day-co-opted into Islam-is the Black Stone in the Kaaba in Mecca.

Bassianus took the baetyl of Elagabal to Rome, in a flamboyant procession across Asia Minor that took over a year to complete, as the teenage Emperor insisted on sacrificing to the god at every opportunity. When at last he arrived in Rome, he immediately established a sanctuary for the baetyl, the Elagabalium, beside the imperial palace. From now on, Elagabal Sol Invictus (Elagabal the Unconquered Sun) was to be the chief god of Rome, superior even to Jupiter Capitolinus; all the other gods were mere servants of Elagabal. Each day the perfumed emperor, caked in make-up, dressed in silk robes and baggy Persian trousers, sacrificed bulls, sheep, and wine to his god, dancing and singing in the language of the Bedouins to the exotic rhythms of cymbals and timbrels.

In the way of Syrian, and indeed Egyptian, gods, Elagabal was worshipped at Emesa as the head of a triad of deities, alongside the warrior goddess Allat and the moon goddess Astarte (also called Caelestis, and identified with Venus). Some sources say that the triad was Elagabal, Astarte, and the great mother Atargatis (Dea Syria), but it seems more likely that aspects of Atargatis were simply fused with Astarte. To recreate this symmetry, Bassianus moved the Palladium-the idol of Pallas Athena supposedly brought from Troy by Aeneas-from the temple of the Vestals to the Elagabalium, to wed her to his god. And then from Carthage he imported the cult statue of Tanit-Caelestis, a form of Astarte already identified with Roman Juno, to be Elagabal's second wife.

This profound rearrangement of the divine order-replacing the Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva with Elagabal, Tanit, and Athena-was reflected in the scandalous behaviour of the new emperor, who is recorded in the uncomprehending biographies of writer such as Cassius Dio as perhaps the most perverted and cruel of all the Roman emperors. Bassianus is said, for instance, to have installed a brothel in the imperial palace, in which he prostituted himself, and also to have planned to castrate himself and pleaded with his physicians to create a vagina for him. 

However much truth there is in the lurid tales of Bassianus's behaviour (it is possible, for instance that stories of his intended or actual castration are simply mistaken interpretations of his circumcision, demanded by his god), they point to various practices that are well-attested in Eastern religions of the time. The priests of Cybele, and those of her Syrian equivalent Atargatis, castrated themselves in her honour, while temple prostitution was a feature of many oriental religions, including the worship of Isis and Astarte.

Bassianus's desecration of the temple of Vesta, by removing the Palladium, was completed by his marriage to one of Vesta's sacred virgins. The outcry was so great that he put her aside, only to re-marry the following year. Such determined flouting of Rome's most sacred traditions can only be explained by Bassianus's urgent need to shore up the worship of his own god by allying himself with the most powerful Roman divinities, and co-opting them to the worship of Elagabal.  
To the Romans, this was a vile sacrilege. To Bassianus, it was a sacred marriage. If he could not persuade his surgeons to perform a sex change he could, by effectively turning Julia Aquilia Severa from a virgin dedicated to Vesta into a sacred prostitute in the service of the Emesan triad, divert the most sacred streams of Roman worship into Syrian channels. Cassius Dio quotes him as claiming that "I did it in order that godlike children might spring from me, the high priest, and from her, the high-priestess."

His grandmother Julia Maesa, herself a thoroughly Romanized woman with little time for Syrian religion, eventually despaired of Bassianus's religious and personal excesses, and had him murdered in CE22. He was replaced by his moderate cousin Severus Alexander, whose first act as emperor was to send the baetyl of Elagabal back to Emesa.

Scoundrel of the Sun

Well, dear friends and subscribers, after six months of feeling rotten and getting very little done, I seem to have turned a corner. So I was able to fulfil my commitment to give a talk to the Keble College/University of Oxford conference organised by Diane Purkiss last week. The title of the talk was "All that he owned": Alan Garner and the Sentient Landscape. Many of you will know of my longterm interest in this great writer, so I imagine there will be some overlap here. If anyone wants the whole thing, let me know, but here is a section I thought might be of interest. In Garner’s novel The Owl Service, set in a claustrophobic Welsh valley that is haunted by the ghosts of the past and the pent-up energy of a myth that must be reinacted and relived by each generation, he uses the word "own" in an intense scene between the adolescent Gwyn and the man he does not yet know is his father, the gardener Huw Halfbacon. Gwyn says abruptly, “You don’t own the place, man.” Huw’s reply is: “’Don’t I?’ . . . ‘Oh, their name is on the books of the law, but I own the ground, the mountain, the valley: I own the song of the cuckoo, the brambles, the berries: the dark cave is mine!’” [73] And this passage echoes through Garner’s most recent novel, Treacle Walker, in which the boy Joseph Coppock follows the call of a cuckoo into an alder bog where he meets Thin Amren, a bog body who is a kind of ancestral keeper of the land. Thin Amren has been woken by the cuckoo’s call, and later in the book Joseph must stake his body back into the bog in which Thin Amren “dreams all that is and is not”. [143] If he does not do this, “Then cuckoo shall rule over nothingness.” [143].This magical cuckoo has been summoned into being by Joseph playing its song on a flute made from the shin-bone of an unnamed “man that sang”. [16] He plays the flute in the sacred space of the central chimney of the Old Medicine House at Blackden, the Axis mundi, “the heart of all that is”. [63] After Joseph has a moment of deep visionary connection with that landscape.”He went back down, by Little Sand Field and Big Sand Field, Well Meadow, over the plank bridge into Rough Meadow to Common Dean, along the path between the marl pits’ black and flat waters without life.” [93-4] Thin Amren’s alder bog also features in Garner’s story-cum-memoir, “The Common Dean”, in the collection of woodland writing Arboreal, edited by Adrian Cooper. For it is the alder bog on Garner’s property Blackden, which is now the Blackden Trust, and that property is also the house where Joseph Coppock lives and the land he “owns”. Here is Alan Garner, writing of himself in the third person, coming back from the “black water and black mud” [268] of the alder bog: “Then, he left the coppice and went along the valley of the Common Dean, following the brook upstream by the old road through the tunnel under the railway, its arch curtained with a drape of ivy, to the trees of the marl pits. Here the world was different. There was no guzzling bog, but a green causeway reclaimed by bramble and alder; sycamore, hazel, ash, and strays seeded by birds, with space and light to grow; and celandine in season, and the wild garlic smell. And on either side of the causeway lay the pools of the pits, eyes of black water dug to get marl, the lime-rich clay beneath the silt, to fetch life to the hungry sands of the field.” [269] This subtlety of observed detail is crucial to a writer whose storytelling is quickened to life by landscape. Indeed in his earliest books, the landscape is almost more compelling and vivid than the characters. It is significant, I think, that in Garner’s first book, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published in 1960, the first thing the reader encounters is not a descriptive sentence or a character, but a map—a map of the Edge, Alderley Edge, Garner’s spiritual home, and the surrounding countryside in which and below which the children in the book experience their thrilling adventures.

Well, dear friends and subscribers, after six months of feeling rotten and getting very little done, I seem to have turned a corner. So I was able to fulfil my commitment to give a talk to the Keble College/University of Oxford conference organised by Diane Purkiss last week. The title of the talk was "All that he owned": Alan Garner and the Sentient Landscape. Many of you will know of my longterm interest in this great writer, so I imagine there will be some overlap here. If anyone wants the whole thing, let me know, but here is a section I thought might be of interest.

In Garner’s novel The Owl Service, set in a claustrophobic Welsh valley that is haunted by the ghosts of the past and the pent-up energy of a myth that must be reinacted and relived by each generation, he uses the word "own" in an intense scene between the adolescent Gwyn and the man he does not yet know is his father, the gardener Huw Halfbacon. Gwyn says abruptly, “You don’t own the place, man.” Huw’s reply is:

 

“’Don’t I?’ . . . ‘Oh, their name is on the books of the law, but I own the ground, the mountain, the valley: I own the song of the cuckoo, the brambles, the berries: the dark cave is mine!’” [73]

 

And this passage echoes through Garner’s most recent novel, Treacle Walker, in which the boy Joseph Coppock follows the call of a cuckoo into an alder bog where he meets Thin Amren, a bog body who is a kind of ancestral keeper of the land. Thin Amren has been woken by the cuckoo’s call, and later in the book Joseph must stake his body back into the bog in which Thin Amren “dreams all that is and is not”. [143] If he does not do this, “Then cuckoo shall rule over nothingness.” [143].This magical cuckoo has been summoned into being by Joseph playing its song on a flute made from the shin-bone of an unnamed “man that sang”. [16] He plays the flute in the sacred space of the central chimney of the Old Medicine House at Blackden, the Axis mundi, “the heart of all that is”. [63]

 

After Joseph has a moment of deep visionary connection with that landscape.”He went back down, by Little Sand Field and Big Sand Field, Well Meadow, over the plank bridge into Rough Meadow to Common Dean, along the path between the marl pits’ black and flat waters without life.” [93-4]

 

Thin Amren’s alder bog also features in Garner’s story-cum-memoir, “The Common Dean”, in the collection of woodland writing Arboreal, edited by Adrian Cooper. For it is the alder bog on Garner’s property Blackden, which is now the Blackden Trust, and that property is also the house where Joseph Coppock lives and the land he “owns”. Here is Alan Garner, writing of himself in the third person, coming back from the “black water and black mud” [268] of the alder bog:

 

“Then, he left the coppice and went along the valley of the Common Dean, following the brook upstream by the old road through the tunnel under the railway, its arch curtained with a drape of ivy, to the trees of the marl pits.

       Here the world was different. There was no guzzling bog, but a green causeway reclaimed by bramble and alder; sycamore, hazel, ash, and strays seeded by birds, with space and light to grow; and celandine in season, and the wild garlic smell.

       And on either side of the causeway lay the pools of the pits, eyes of black water dug to get marl, the lime-rich clay beneath the silt, to fetch life to the hungry sands of the field.” [269]

 

This subtlety of observed detail is crucial to a writer whose storytelling is quickened to life by landscape. Indeed in his earliest books, the landscape is almost more compelling and vivid than the characters. It is significant, I think, that in Garner’s first book, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published in 1960, the first thing the reader encounters is not a descriptive sentence or a character, but a map—a map of the Edge, Alderley Edge, Garner’s spiritual home, and the surrounding countryside in which and below which the children in the book experience their thrilling adventures.

Sentient landscape?

Sorry I haven’t been posting updates—I have been working steadily but slowly on the book, as best as my current very trying circumstances allow. The short piece below about the Ancient Egyptian myth of Seth and the Seed Goddess, part of a much larger argument about sex and myth, has taken me all week to write. This is partly because every single source I consulted told me completely different things about it. Even Lise Manniche’s excellent Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt (1987) still thinks that the goddess with whom Seth mates is Anat, rather than the unnamed Seed Goddess, who seems to be an aspect of Hathor; still thinks that the Great God who is out walking and sees the goddess is Re, not Seth; still thinks that the God Above is the sun not the moon. I find Jacobus van Dijk’s 1987 essay very convincing on all these points. But to give you a window on my life, this piece of writing will probably not even make it into the book—I was just trying to work out for myself what the heck a particularly compressed and confusing myth was actually about, and it has involved five days with my desk piled high with contradictory books on Egyptian mythology. I enjoyed it, though. And it may prove useful to any of you unlucky enough to be bitten by a scorpion. Thank you again for your patience. Someone bitten by a scorpion in the reign of Rameses II in Ancient Egypt might well have had a magical incantation spoken over them four times to counter the poison. It is a long spell, and one of the interesting things about it is that it doesn’t mention scorpions at all.[i] The myth, or historiola, embedded in this and several other healing spells is rather obscure, but its function is to provide a paradigm of the desired healing, in this case the expulsion of poison from the body. It tells how the ever-lustful Seth seeing the Seed Goddess bathing, copulates with her “like a ram”[ii]. The Seed flies up into his forehead, thus poisoning him. The goddess Anat, one of Seth’s consorts, goes to plead with her father Ra, who is aged and tired at the end of the day, to cure him, and though initially reluctant he sends the goddess Isis to do so with a magical litany.[iii]The Seed that lodges in Seth’s forehead is in fact the seed of Ra’s rebirth.[iv] There is another myth in which Isis cures the child Horus of a scorpion bite, and there was also a protective goddess Serqet who was especially associated with the scorpion, and whose priests had a role in the treatment of poisonous bites and stings. So what is the point of introducing this myth of Seth and the Seed Goddess, a deity who can be identified with Hathor, who received the setting sun and protected him until he was born again in the morning? It plays on the fact that the same word, metut (or mtwt) means both poison and semen.[v]Semen is the great creative force in the very beginning of the Egyptian universe, when the sun god creates the first gods, Shu and Tefnut by an act of masturbation or auto-fellation, spitting them out of his mouth. In their Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods, Meeks and Favard-Meeks note how not just semen but all the bodily fluids of the gods have creative potency: “Blood, sweat, tears, and spit never went to waste.”[vi] In the myth of Seth and the Seed Goddess, the goddess is ready to receive the semen not of Seth but of “the God Above”, who will impregnate her with fire. Jacobus van Dijk convincingly argues that this God Above is not the sun but the moon; van Dijk sees this as the nocturnal manifestation of Ra, and it is worth noting that Khons, the god of the swelling moon, is particularly associated with semen[vii]. This ties the myth in with the part in The Contendings of Horus and Seth where Seth has been tricked into swallowing the semen of Horus, and when the moon god Thoth summons it to appear, it does so as a golden disc on Seth’s brow; Thoth seizes it and places it on his own head. So we have in this one short myth rebirths of both sun and moon, and a symbolic rebalancing of the cosmic order, ma’at, which has been unbalanced by Seth’s chaotic impulses. A similar rebalancing must take place for the victim of the scorpion’s venom to recover. These deities are abstract concepts, personified ideas, complex emotional and psychological vortices—they can coalesce and separate, they can die and come back to life—but they are also grossly human. They have sex, they get old and tired, they take to their beds when they get ill. Although there are magical, supernatural, hyper-unrealistic elements, the myth of Seth and the Seed Goddess is also profoundly human: a seductive woman, a man overcome with desire, punishment for transgression, a sick husband, a daughter pleading with her grumpy old father. [i] The spell is in the fragmentary 19th Dynasty Chester-Beatty Papyrus VII in the British Museum. Kaster 1968, 144-8. See also Manniche 1987, 54 [ii] van Dijk 1986, 33 [iii] This myth is extensively discussed in Jacobus van Dijk “cAnat, Seth, and the Myth of Prēc” in H.L.J. Vanstiphout, K. Jongeling, F. Leemhuis, and G.J. Reinink, Scripta Signa Vocis (Groningen, 1986); Manniche 1987, 54 still refers to the earlier interpretation that it is a myth about Seth raping Anat [iv] van Dijk considers this myth and the myth of the death and resurrection of Osiris to be “two divergent mythical statements of one and the same myth”. van Dijk 1986, 43 [v] Nunn 1996, 53 [vi] Meeks & Favard-Meeks 1997, 70 [vii] Roberts 1995, 78

Sorry I haven’t been posting updates—I have been working steadily but slowly on the book, as best as my current very trying circumstances allow. The short piece below about the Ancient Egyptian myth of Seth and the Seed Goddess, part of a much larger argument about sex and myth, has taken me all week to write. This is partly because every single source I consulted told me completely different things about it. Even Lise Manniche’s excellent Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt (1987) still thinks that the goddess with whom Seth mates is Anat, rather than the unnamed Seed Goddess, who seems to be an aspect of Hathor; still thinks that the Great God who is out walking and sees the goddess is Re, not Seth; still thinks that the God Above is the sun not the moon. I find Jacobus van Dijk’s 1987 essay very convincing on all these points. But to give you a window on my life, this piece of writing will probably not even make it into the book—I was just trying to work out for myself what the heck a particularly compressed and confusing myth was actually about, and it has involved five days with my desk piled high with contradictory books on Egyptian mythology. I enjoyed it, though. And it may prove useful to any of you unlucky enough to be bitten by a scorpion. Thank you again for your patience.

 

Someone bitten by a scorpion in the reign of Rameses II in Ancient Egypt might well have had a magical incantation spoken over them four times to counter the poison. It is a long spell, and one of the interesting things about it is that it doesn’t mention scorpions at all.[i]

         The myth, or historiola, embedded in this and several other healing spells is rather obscure, but its function is to provide a paradigm of the desired healing, in this case the expulsion of poison from the body. It tells how the ever-lustful Seth seeing the Seed Goddess bathing, copulates with her “like a ram”[ii]. The Seed flies up into his forehead, thus poisoning him. The goddess Anat, one of Seth’s consorts, goes to plead with her father Ra, who is aged and tired at the end of the day, to cure him, and though initially reluctant he sends the goddess Isis to do so with a magical litany.[iii]The Seed that lodges in Seth’s forehead is in fact the seed of Ra’s rebirth.[iv]

         There is another myth in which Isis cures the child Horus of a scorpion bite, and there was also a protective goddess Serqet who was especially associated with the scorpion, and whose priests had a role in the treatment of poisonous bites and stings. So what is the point of introducing this myth of Seth and the Seed Goddess, a deity who can be identified with Hathor, who received the setting sun and protected him until he was born again in the morning?

         It plays on the fact that the same word, metut (or mtwt) means both poison and semen.[v]Semen is the great creative force in the very beginning of the Egyptian universe, when the sun god creates the first gods, Shu and Tefnut by an act of masturbation or auto-fellation, spitting them out of his mouth. In their Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods, Meeks and Favard-Meeks note how not just semen but all the bodily fluids of the gods have creative potency: “Blood, sweat, tears, and spit never went to waste.”[vi]

         In the myth of Seth and the Seed Goddess, the goddess is ready to receive the semen not of Seth but of “the God Above”, who will impregnate her with fire. Jacobus van Dijk convincingly argues that this God Above is not the sun but the moon; van Dijk sees this as the nocturnal manifestation of Ra, and it is worth noting that Khons, the god of the swelling moon, is particularly associated with semen[vii]. This ties the myth in with the part in The Contendings of Horus and Seth where Seth has been tricked into swallowing the semen of Horus, and when the moon god Thoth summons it to appear, it does so as a golden disc on Seth’s brow; Thoth seizes it and places it on his own head. So we have in this one short myth rebirths of both sun and moon, and a symbolic rebalancing of the cosmic order, ma’at, which has been unbalanced by Seth’s chaotic impulses. A similar rebalancing must take place for the victim of the scorpion’s venom to recover.

         These deities are abstract concepts, personified ideas, complex emotional and psychological vortices—they can coalesce and separate, they can die and come back to life—but they are also grossly human. They have sex, they get old and tired, they take to their beds when they get ill. Although there are magical, supernatural, hyper-unrealistic elements, the myth of Seth and the Seed Goddess is also profoundly human: a seductive woman, a man overcome with desire, punishment for transgression, a sick husband, a daughter pleading with her grumpy old father.

[i] The spell is in the fragmentary 19th Dynasty Chester-Beatty Papyrus VII in the British Museum. Kaster 1968, 144-8. See also Manniche 1987, 54

[ii] van Dijk 1986, 33

[iii] This myth is extensively discussed in Jacobus van Dijk “cAnat, Seth, and the Myth of Prēc” in H.L.J. Vanstiphout, K. Jongeling, F. Leemhuis, and G.J. Reinink, Scripta Signa Vocis (Groningen, 1986); Manniche 1987, 54 still refers to the earlier interpretation that it is a myth about Seth raping Anat

[iv] van Dijk considers this myth and the myth of the death and resurrection of Osiris to be “two divergent mythical statements of one and the same myth”. van Dijk 1986, 43

[v] Nunn 1996, 53

[vi] Meeks &amp; Favard-Meeks 1997, 70

[vii] Roberts 1995, 78

Seth and the Seed Goddess (or where did a week go?)

Friends and supporters – sorry to have left so long between updates. I haven’t been very well so far this year, which has meant the list of undone and half-done things has grown and grown! One of the things I have been amusing myself with while under par has been making some versions, for my own pleasure, of poems by Rilke. I’ve done half a dozen of these in the past, but never tackled the Duino Elegies or Sonnets to Orpheus, so have been tentatively circling them. After doing the first of the Sonnets (well, not actually the first, I started with II: 13, the one Rilke said “includes all the others”), I veered off-course to tackle the longer poem from Neue Gedichte, “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes”. Rilke asks a question in this poem that I can’t find in any of the classical references to the Orpheus myth or the Orphic mystery religion, which is whether Eurydice actually wants to be brought back from the dead. She has already forgotten Orpheus, and when Hermes tells her in anguish that “He has looked back”, she whispers, “Who?” Earlier, before we come to this realisation, it is prefigured in the marred world that Orpheus creates with the desolate music of his lyre: And from that grief a world was remade— everything was restored, woods, valleys, roads, villages, beasts and fields and streams— a world round which a sun and heavens turned, but this was a grief-heaven with scarred stars. Again, I think this is Rilke’s added touch to the familiar myth. Now, in recent years, philosophers and scientists have started to wonder whether the world we experience is objectively real or a simulation (for a hilarious 2021 April Fool’s Day take on this, google Fouad Khan’s “Confirmed: We Live in a Simulation” in Scientific American). The “simulated world” hypothesis is really a modern version of Plato’s myth of the cave The Republic, in which the world shackled mankind takes for reality is merely shadows cast on the wall of the cave by a flickering fire. I was reminded, thinking about Orpheus’s world made from grief, and Plato’s world of shadowy simulacra, of the myths of the Akimel O’odham (Pima) of the American southwest. Excellent accounts of Akimel O’odham mythology can be found in Frank Russell’s The Pima Indians (originally published in the 26th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1904-1905, republished in 1975 by University of Arizona Press) and The Short Swift Time of Gods on Earth by Donald Bahr et. al. (University of California Press, 1994). Russell recorded his myths from Thin Leather, and Bahr makes use of these texts and two later versions from the same source, but his book relies mostly on a 1935 version, narrated in Pima by Juan Smith, translated into English by another Pima, William Allison, and recorded by the archaeologist Julian Hayden. Smith, Allison, and Hayden are credited as Bahr’s co-authors. In this intriguing and complex mythology, the world is created by Jewed Ma:kai, Earth Doctor (the word ma:kai can be translated as doctor, medicine man, or shaman). In Juan Smith’s version, Earth Doctor is called to make the world by Jeoss (God), who was “nothing but pure spirit, like the wind”. The first being Earth Doctor creates is Siuuhu, Elder Brother, and together they make the first man and woman out of clay. The songs that Earth Doctor and Elder Brother sing as they make the earth and the heavens are very beautiful. At first the land is completely flat, but Earth Doctor creates the Buzzard (Nui) to fly across the land and fashion it into mountains and valleys. “He was sitting with streams of light coming out of his eyes, with which he sees everything. He reached and got some of this light and made a buzzard with it.” As in so many mythologies, the world goes through cycles of creation and destruction, in which the people who are created disappoint Earth Doctor and all has to be made anew. The ancestors of the Akimel O’odham escape into the earth from the great flood that destroys the second creation, and the people who are made in their place are the Hohokam, the Finished-ones. By this time Siuuhu has emerged as the most powerful of the gods who survive the flood (Earth Doctor, Siuuhu, and Coyote, who is the child of the sun and moon; Jeoss remains a remote figure removed from the physical world). Siuuhu makes various Indian nations, ending with the Hohokam (who are, confusingly, called Pimas in the texts). He sings: I just now made the world And in that world I have gotten everybody to sleep And the breath of man in that darkness went out with more understanding. Instructed by Siuuhu, the Hohokam establish a civilisation based on farming and irrigation, with set laws and customs, particularly to do with marriage and sexual relations. But once his work of creation, and ridding the world of monsters, is done, Siuuhu’s place in the world he has made becomes unstable. The Hohokam conspire to kill him, in various ingenious ways, either because, in the Christian-influenced version of Juan Smith, “the medicine men... thought they knew more than he did”, or in the earthier version of Thin Leather, because the unmarried Siuuhu was making a nuisance of himself with girls at the fiestas. First they club Siuuhu to death, but the next day he reappears. Then they cut him into pieces and grind up his bones, but the next day he is back again. Then they kill him and burn the body, but still he comes back to life. So they go to Buzzard and ask for his help, as he survived the flood, and so must have magic power equivalent to that of the gods. To prove his powers, in the fullest Thin Leather version, “he made a little world in his house for them to look at, with sun, moon, and stars working just as our sun and stars work; and everything was exactly like our world.” Buzzard then climbs the threads of the four winds up into the sky, and gets the sun to spit on Siuuhu and kill him (or alternatively shoots him with a magic lightning bow). Siuuhu lies dead for four years, his skeleton exposed to the elements. But then he revives, reclaims all his former powers, and goes down into the underworld to fetch forth the Akimel O’odham to reclaim their land from the Hohokam. This myth of creation, rebellion, and resurrection can be interpreted many ways, but the thing that interests me today is Buzzard’s way of demonstrating his power, by making a miniature, simulated world exactly like this one: the ultimate act of creation. And who knows, perhaps it is Buzzard’s world we are living in now...

Friends and supporters – sorry to have left so long between updates. I haven’t been very well so far this year, which has meant the list of undone and half-done things has grown and grown! One of the things I have been amusing myself with while under par has been making some versions, for my own pleasure, of poems by Rilke. I’ve done half a dozen of these in the past, but never tackled the Duino Elegies or Sonnets to Orpheus, so have been tentatively circling them. After doing the first of the Sonnets (well, not actually the first, I started with II: 13, the one Rilke said “includes all the others”), I veered off-course to tackle the longer poem from Neue Gedichte, “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes”. Rilke asks a question in this poem that I can’t find in any of the classical references to the Orpheus myth or the Orphic mystery religion, which is whether Eurydice actually wants to be brought back from the dead. She has already forgotten Orpheus, and when Hermes tells her in anguish that “He has looked back”, she whispers, “Who?” Earlier, before we come to this realisation, it is prefigured in the marred world that Orpheus creates with the desolate music of his lyre:

 

And from that grief a world was remade—

everything was restored, woods, valleys, roads, villages,

beasts and fields and streams—

a world round which a sun and heavens turned,

but this was a grief-heaven with scarred stars.

 

Again, I think this is Rilke’s added touch to the familiar myth. Now, in recent years, philosophers and scientists have started to wonder whether the world we experience is objectively real or a simulation (for a hilarious 2021 April Fool’s Day take on this, google Fouad Khan’s “Confirmed: We Live in a Simulation” in Scientific American). The “simulated world” hypothesis is really a modern version of Plato’s myth of the cave The Republic, in which the world shackled mankind takes for reality is merely shadows cast on the wall of the cave by a flickering fire.

 

I was reminded, thinking about Orpheus’s world made from grief, and Plato’s world of shadowy simulacra, of the myths of the Akimel O’odham (Pima) of the American southwest. Excellent accounts of Akimel O’odham mythology can be found in Frank Russell’s The Pima Indians (originally published in the 26th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1904-1905, republished in 1975 by University of Arizona Press) and The Short Swift Time of Gods on Earth by Donald Bahr et. al. (University of California Press, 1994). Russell recorded his myths from Thin Leather, and Bahr makes use of these texts and two later versions from the same source, but his book relies mostly on a 1935 version, narrated in Pima by Juan Smith, translated into English by another Pima, William Allison, and recorded by the archaeologist Julian Hayden. Smith, Allison, and Hayden are credited as Bahr’s co-authors.

 

In this intriguing and complex mythology, the world is created by Jewed Ma:kai, Earth Doctor (the word ma:kai can be translated as doctor, medicine man, or shaman). In Juan Smith’s version, Earth Doctor is called to make the world by Jeoss (God), who was “nothing but pure spirit, like the wind”. The first being Earth Doctor creates is Siuuhu, Elder Brother, and together they make the first man and woman out of clay.

 

The songs that Earth Doctor and Elder Brother sing as they make the earth and the heavens are very beautiful. At first the land is completely flat, but Earth Doctor creates the Buzzard (Nui) to fly across the land and fashion it into mountains and valleys. “He was sitting with streams of light coming out of his eyes, with which he sees everything. He reached and got some of this light and made a buzzard with it.”

 

As in so many mythologies, the world goes through cycles of creation and destruction, in which the people who are created disappoint Earth Doctor and all has to be made anew. The ancestors of the Akimel O’odham escape into the earth from the great flood that destroys the second creation, and the people who are made in their place are the Hohokam, the Finished-ones.

 

By this time Siuuhu has emerged as the most powerful of the gods who survive the flood (Earth Doctor, Siuuhu, and Coyote, who is the child of the sun and moon; Jeoss remains a remote figure removed from the physical world). Siuuhu makes various Indian nations, ending with the Hohokam (who are, confusingly, called Pimas in the texts). He sings:

 

I just now made the world

And in that world I have gotten everybody to sleep

And the breath of man in that darkness

went out with more understanding.

 

Instructed by Siuuhu, the Hohokam establish a civilisation based on farming and irrigation, with set laws and customs, particularly to do with marriage and sexual relations. But once his work of creation, and ridding the world of monsters, is done, Siuuhu’s place in the world he has made becomes unstable. The Hohokam conspire to kill him, in various ingenious ways, either because, in the Christian-influenced version of Juan Smith, “the medicine men... thought they knew more than he did”, or in the earthier version of Thin Leather, because the unmarried Siuuhu was making a nuisance of himself with girls at the fiestas.

 

First they club Siuuhu to death, but the next day he reappears. Then they cut him into pieces and grind up his bones, but the next day he is back again. Then they kill him and burn the body, but still he comes back to life. So they go to Buzzard and ask for his help, as he survived the flood, and so must have magic power equivalent to that of the gods. To prove his powers, in the fullest Thin Leather version, “he made a little world in his house for them to look at, with sun, moon, and stars working just as our sun and stars work; and everything was exactly like our world.”

 

Buzzard then climbs the threads of the four winds up into the sky, and gets the sun to spit on Siuuhu and kill him (or alternatively shoots him with a magic lightning bow).

 

Siuuhu lies dead for four years, his skeleton exposed to the elements. But then he revives, reclaims all his former powers, and goes down into the underworld to fetch forth the Akimel O’odham to reclaim their land from the Hohokam.

 

This myth of creation, rebellion, and resurrection can be interpreted many ways, but the thing that interests me today is Buzzard’s way of demonstrating his power, by making a miniature, simulated world exactly like this one: the ultimate act of creation. And who knows, perhaps it is Buzzard’s world we are living in now...

Simulated worlds

It seems that intelligent use of social media is crucial to creating the kind of buzz that makes a crowdfunded project such as this one succeed. I've already joined Twitter @neilphilipmyth, and have now created a dedicated Facebook page for The Hidden Matrix at https://www.facebook.com/neilphilipmyth/ I'm already very grateful to those of you who have shown faith in the book by pledging early, and will be even more grateful if you feel able to share the link to this page https://unbound.com/books/the-hidden-matrix/ on whichever social media platforms you use. That way, news about the book will reach many more people, and with any luck the process of securing full funding will be that much quicker. Thanks again, Neil

It seems that intelligent use of social media is crucial to creating the kind of buzz that makes a crowdfunded project such as this one succeed. I've already joined Twitter @neilphilipmyth, and have now created a dedicated Facebook page for The Hidden Matrix at https://www.facebook.com/neilphilipmyth/

I'm already very grateful to those of you who have shown faith in the book by pledging early, and will be even more grateful if you feel able to share the link to this page https://unbound.com/books/the-hidden-matrix/ on whichever social media platforms you use. That way, news about the book will reach many more people, and with any luck the process of securing full funding will be that much quicker.

Thanks again, Neil

Social media

Sorry for the long delay between Unbound updates - I've been working so hard on the book, and the tweets and what-have-you, I realise I have been short-changing my long-suffering subscribers. So here are some thoughts on myth and science. I expect the section on Isaac Luria's mythological "big bang" will evolve, as a new book on his kabbalistic thought arrived just this morning, and a translation of the earlier kabbalistic Book of Creation, Sefer Yetzirah, is on its way. If versions of the Big Bang theory were being collected from scientists by ethnologists from one of the parallel universes whose existence is suggested by the superstring theories of quantum physics, they would classify them as variant myths, not as scientific facts. These myths of the Big Bang would be printed alongside the Orphic theogony, in which Time “in his boundless coils” is born from “ancient Chaos”,[i]or the Hindu creation, in which the mysterious First Cause creates the Golden Nucleus (Hiranyagarbha, which can equally be translated Golden Egg, Golden Embryo, Golden Womb, or Golden Germ), in which Brahma, the first consciousness, sleeps in nothingness until he wakes, and breathes out the universe, which will last for a day of Brahma—two billion years—before he breathes it back in, in a never-ending cycle of creation.[ii] Jewish tradition already has its own version of the Big Bang theory, in the sixteenth-century kabbalistic thinking of Isaac Luria, who imagined a kind of mythological “big bang”. In Luria’s thinking, God, is an infinite being, beyond existence and time yet also containing and sustaining “all that is, was, or could be.”[iii]In a paradox worthy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, this infinite being must contract and withdraw to make a void in which finite worlds can exist. As Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav taught: “Now this void was essential for Creation, for without it there would have been no room for the universe to exist.”[iv] The primal elements of this creation were the ten Sefirot, vessels for the infinite divine light. However, when God refilled the void with the light he had withdrawn, they shattered, in what Luria called “the Breaking of the Vessels.” Everything was rent asunder in a great cataclysm that sent shards of the vessels tumbling through the void, capturing as they fell sparks of the divine light. These sparks, encased a lifeless outer shell, were separated from God. Luria’s vision is of a world in which every element is in exile, and everything is out of place. The role of mankind is to mend the world, in act of tikkun, restoration, freeing the imprisoned sparks of divine light and reuniting them with God. “In so doing, mankind completes creation and, in a fashion, gives full actuality to God himself.”[v] In the Lurianic myth, God is both Being and Nothingness, a being that causes itself.[vi] The complexity of Isaac Luria’s thought, of which the above is a highly-contracted summary, shows that behind the dogma of scriptural authority, in the Genesis account of creation, there is still room for mythmaking and mythtelling. The subtleties of Jewish commentary on Bible stories allow this myth-space to open up, and enrich the scriptural account. This is in sharp contrast to the literal interpretation of the metaphors in the Biblical myth exhibited by Christian fundamentalists, who use the same text to underpin the anti-scientific doctrines of Creationism and Intelligent Design. A fundamentalist interpretation of any myth is a simplistic misreading of that myth, for the essence of myth is multi-layered and ambiguous. For instance, the fundamentalist rejection of evolution was pre-empted c.400 CE by the Jewish commentary on Genesis known as the Genesis Rabba, which says that while God created Adam in his own image, this likeness to God only lasted until Enosh, son of Adam’s third son Seth, after which humanity degraded and acquired faces like apes. The Genesis Rabba also says that early humans had tails like animals.[vii] Interestingly, the very first line of the Genesis Rabba is. “It is forbidden to enquire what existed before creation.” [i]Colavito,2011, p.1. [ii]See Dimmitt & van Buitenen 1978, pp.16-19, p.32 [iii]Sanford L. Drob, “The Lurianic Metaphors, Creativity and the Structure of Language”, 2003, newkabbalah.com, accessed 13.11.18 [iv]Green 1992, p.311, quoting the 64thteaching in Liqquṭey MoHaRaN. [v]Sanford L. Drob, as noted above. [vi]The ens causa sui, in Sartre’s terminology, Sartre 1943, p.XX. [vii]Genesis Rabba XXIII.6, XIV.?

Sorry for the long delay between Unbound updates - I've been working so hard on the book, and the tweets and what-have-you, I realise I have been short-changing my long-suffering subscribers. So here are some thoughts on myth and science. I expect the section on Isaac Luria's mythological "big bang" will evolve, as a new book on his kabbalistic thought arrived just this morning, and a translation of the earlier kabbalistic Book of Creation, Sefer Yetzirah, is on its way.

         If versions of the Big Bang theory were being collected from scientists by ethnologists from one of the parallel universes whose existence is suggested by the superstring theories of quantum physics, they would classify them as variant myths, not as scientific facts.

         These myths of the Big Bang would be printed alongside the Orphic theogony, in which Time “in his boundless coils” is born from “ancient Chaos”,[i]or the Hindu creation, in which the mysterious First Cause creates the Golden Nucleus (Hiranyagarbha, which can equally be translated Golden Egg, Golden Embryo, Golden Womb, or Golden Germ), in which Brahma, the first consciousness, sleeps in nothingness until he wakes, and breathes out the universe, which will last for a day of Brahma—two billion years—before he breathes it back in, in a never-ending cycle of creation.[ii]

         Jewish tradition already has its own version of the Big Bang theory, in the sixteenth-century kabbalistic thinking of Isaac Luria, who imagined a kind of mythological “big bang”. In Luria’s thinking, God, is an infinite being, beyond existence and time yet also containing and sustaining “all that is, was, or could be.”[iii]In a paradox worthy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, this infinite being must contract and withdraw to make a void in which finite worlds can exist. As Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav taught: “Now this void was essential for Creation, for without it there would have been no room for the universe to exist.”[iv]

         The primal elements of this creation were the ten Sefirot, vessels for the infinite divine light. However, when God refilled the void with the light he had withdrawn, they shattered, in what Luria called “the Breaking of the Vessels.” Everything was rent asunder in a great cataclysm that sent shards of the vessels tumbling through the void, capturing as they fell sparks of the divine light. These sparks, encased a lifeless outer shell, were separated from God.

         Luria’s vision is of a world in which every element is in exile, and everything is out of place. The role of mankind is to mend the world, in act of tikkun, restoration, freeing the imprisoned sparks of divine light and reuniting them with God. “In so doing, mankind completes creation and, in a fashion, gives full actuality to God himself.”[v]

         In the Lurianic myth, God is both Being and Nothingness, a being that causes itself.[vi]

         The complexity of Isaac Luria’s thought, of which the above is a highly-contracted summary, shows that behind the dogma of scriptural authority, in the Genesis account of creation, there is still room for mythmaking and mythtelling. The subtleties of Jewish commentary on Bible stories allow this myth-space to open up, and enrich the scriptural account. This is in sharp contrast to the literal interpretation of the metaphors in the Biblical myth exhibited by Christian fundamentalists, who use the same text to underpin the anti-scientific doctrines of Creationism and Intelligent Design. A fundamentalist interpretation of any myth is a simplistic misreading of that myth, for the essence of myth is multi-layered and ambiguous.

         For instance, the fundamentalist rejection of evolution was pre-empted c.400 CE by the Jewish commentary on Genesis known as the Genesis Rabba, which says that while God created Adam in his own image, this likeness to God only lasted until Enosh, son of Adam’s third son Seth, after which humanity degraded and acquired faces like apes. The Genesis Rabba also says that early humans had tails like animals.[vii] Interestingly, the very first line of the Genesis Rabba is. “It is forbidden to enquire what existed before creation.”

 

[i]Colavito,2011, p.1.

[ii]See Dimmitt &amp; van Buitenen 1978, pp.16-19, p.32

[iii]Sanford L. Drob, “The Lurianic Metaphors, Creativity and the Structure of Language”, 2003, newkabbalah.com, accessed 13.11.18

[iv]Green 1992, p.311, quoting the 64thteaching in Liqquṭey MoHaRaN.

[v]Sanford L. Drob, as noted above.

[vi]The ens causa sui, in Sartre’s terminology, Sartre 1943,  p.XX.

[vii]Genesis Rabba  XXIII.6, XIV.?

Some Thoughts on Myth and Science

Making preparations this week for the funeral of my father-in-law, who has passed away at the age of 99, I’ve naturally been thinking about ideas of death and the afterlife in other cultures. Not just the great texts such as the Bardo Thodol or the Book of Coming Forth By Day, respectively known as the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead, but also mysterious items such as the gold plates buried with Orphic initiates to guide them on their underworld journey. A particularly interesting after-death journey in the Guarayú culture of Eastern Bolivia is described by Alfred Métraux in his book The Native Tribes of Eastern Bolivia and Western Matto Grosso; the relevant passage is printed as “Journey to the Land of the Grandfather” in Mircea Eliade’s anthology Essential Sacred Writings from Around the World(first published asFrom Primitives to Zen). Among the Guarayú, after burial the liberated soul sets on a long journey to the west, to the land of Tamoi, the Grandfather. The way is beset with dangers. First the soul must choose between two paths—one wide and easy, the other narrow and overgrown. The narrow path is the one to take, and it leads to a river which contains a large alligator; the soul must mount on the alligator’s back to cross the river, but this can only be achieved if the soul knows how to accompany the alligator’s chant by rhythmically stamping a bamboo tube. Then comes a second river, to be crossed by leaping onto a fast-floating tree trunk. If the soul unbalances and falls into the river, it is torn to pieces by palometa fish. If the soul manages the crossing, it then approaches the home of Izoi-tamoi, Grandfather of Worms. If it is the soul of a good man, Izoi-tamoi looks enormous from a distance, but gets smaller and smaller as the soul approaches. If it was a bad man, the opposite happens, and the Grandfather of Worms swells to gigantic size, and cleaves the soul in two. Next, the soul has to travel through a dark region, lighting its way by burning straw that has been placed in the grave for this purpose; but the torch must be held behind the back, to prevent it being extinguished by huge bats. If the soul makes it through the darkness, it arrives at a beautiful tree full of hummingbirds. After washing itself in a brook, the soul shoots a few of these birds, without hurting them, and plucks some feathers for Tamoi’s feathers. Then the soul kicks the tree trunk, to notify its relatives it has arrived at the ceiba tree. Next the soul must slip between two rocks that continually clashed and recoiled on the path, allowing only a short time for passage, if the soul knows how to address them. Reaching a crossroads, the soul is examined by a gallinazo bird, who makes sure the soul has perforated lips and ears, as all good Guarayú have. If it does not, the bird will misdirect the soul. Three more ordeals must be passed. The soul has to be bear being tickled by a monkey without laughing. Then it has to walk past a magic tree without looking at it and without listening to the voices that issue from it, telling all the secrets of the soul’s past life. To resist the voices, the soul pounds its stamping tube on the ground. Lastly, coloured grasses try to blind the soul and cause it to lose its way. All these dangers withstood, the soul arrives an avenue of blossoming trees fill with singing birds. It has arrived at the land of the Grandfather, who welcomes it with kind words, and washes it with magic water that restores its youth and looks. From then on, the soul lives happily in the land of the Grandfather, drinking chicha and living much the same life it enjoyed on earth. The elaboration of all these horrors and dangers has a real poetry to it. I really don’t want to ever encounter the Grandfather of Worms! But then I don’t much fancy Whinny-muir or the Brig o’ Dread in the Lyke-Wake Dirge, either, our Yorkshire version of the soul’s journey into the afterlife.

Making preparations this week for the funeral of my father-in-law, who has passed away at the age of 99, I’ve naturally been thinking about ideas of death and the afterlife in other cultures. Not just the great texts such as the Bardo Thodol or the Book of Coming Forth By Day, respectively known as the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead, but also mysterious items such as the gold plates buried with Orphic initiates to guide them on their underworld journey.

         A particularly interesting after-death journey in the Guarayú culture of Eastern Bolivia is described by Alfred Métraux in his book The Native Tribes of Eastern Bolivia and Western Matto Grosso; the relevant passage is printed as “Journey to the Land of the Grandfather” in Mircea Eliade’s anthology Essential Sacred Writings from Around the World(first published asFrom Primitives to Zen).

         Among the Guarayú, after burial the liberated soul sets on a long journey to the west, to the land of Tamoi, the Grandfather. The way is beset with dangers. First the soul must choose between two paths—one wide and easy, the other narrow and overgrown. The narrow path is the one to take, and it leads to a river which contains a large alligator; the soul must mount on the alligator’s back to cross the river, but this can only be achieved if the soul knows how to accompany the alligator’s chant by rhythmically stamping a bamboo tube.

         Then comes a second river, to be crossed by leaping onto a fast-floating tree trunk. If the soul unbalances and falls into the river, it is torn to pieces by palometa fish. If the soul manages the crossing, it then approaches the home of Izoi-tamoi, Grandfather of Worms. If it is the soul of a good man, Izoi-tamoi looks enormous from a distance, but gets smaller and smaller as the soul approaches. If it was a bad man, the opposite happens, and the Grandfather of Worms swells to gigantic size, and cleaves the soul in two.

         Next, the soul has to travel through a dark region, lighting its way by burning straw that has been placed in the grave for this purpose; but the torch must be held behind the back, to prevent it being extinguished by huge bats. If the soul makes it through the darkness, it arrives at a beautiful tree full of hummingbirds. After washing itself in a brook, the soul shoots a few of these birds, without hurting them, and plucks some feathers for Tamoi’s feathers. Then the soul kicks the tree trunk, to notify its relatives it has arrived at the ceiba tree.

         Next the soul must slip between two rocks that continually clashed and recoiled on the path, allowing only a short time for passage, if the soul knows how to address them. Reaching a crossroads, the soul is examined by a gallinazo bird, who makes sure the soul has perforated lips and ears, as all good Guarayú have. If it does not, the bird will misdirect the soul.

         Three more ordeals must be passed. The soul has to be bear being tickled by a monkey without laughing. Then it has to walk past a magic tree without looking at it and without listening to the voices that issue from it, telling all the secrets of the soul’s past life. To resist the voices, the soul pounds its stamping tube on the ground. Lastly, coloured grasses try to blind the soul and cause it to lose its way.

         All these dangers withstood, the soul arrives an avenue of blossoming trees fill with singing birds. It has arrived at the land of the Grandfather, who welcomes it with kind words, and washes it with magic water that restores its youth and looks. From then on, the soul lives happily in the land of the Grandfather, drinking chicha and living much the same life it enjoyed on earth.

         The elaboration of all these horrors and dangers has a real poetry to it. I really don’t want to ever encounter the Grandfather of Worms! But then I don’t much fancy Whinny-muir or the Brig o’ Dread in the Lyke-Wake Dirge, either, our Yorkshire version of the soul’s journey into the afterlife.

The Afterlife Journey

Folk and fairy tales are classified by ATU numbers after the listings in Hans-Jörg Uther's The Types of International Folktales (which updates the earlier Aarne-Thompson Types of the Folktale). ATU 825 is The Devil in Noah's Ark. A 1959 study of this tale by Francis Lee Utley was able to was able to draw on 275 recorded variants, largely but not exclusively from Eastern Europe. This version comes from Romania. When Noah had built the ark, he kept the door wide open the animals to enter. After they had all gone in, his own family came, and last of all his wife. Noah said to her, “Come in.” She obstinately said, “No.” Noah again said, “Come in.” She again said, “No.”. Noah, getting angry, said, “Oh, you devil, come in.” The was just what the Devil was waiting for. He knew that Noah would not allow him to come in otherwise, and so he was lurking outside, waiting for an invitation. Not needing be asked twice, the Devil slipped onto the ark in the form of a mouse. When the Devil has nothing to do, he weighs his tail. But here he found plenty to do, for, he thought, now is an opportunity of putting an end to the whole of God’s creatures. So he started gnawing on one of the planks, trying to make a hole in it. When Noah surprised him at this devilish work he threw his fur glove at him. It turned into a cat, and, in the twinkling of an eye, the mouse was in the mouth of the cat. But Noah could not allow the peace of the ark to be broken, the animals had to live in peace with one another. So he seized the cat, with the mouse in her mouth, and flung her out of the ark into the water. The cat swam to the ark and, getting up to the doorstep, climbed on to the sill and lay down there to bask in the sun. There she remained until the water had subsided—and ever since then, the cat hates getting wet, and prefers to lie on the doorstep of the house in the sun. Utley's study can be found in Alan Dundes, ed., The Flood Myth, 1988, a book which gathers together many fascinating essays on flood myths in world cultures; Erich Kolig's "Noah's Ark Revisited: On the Myth-Land Connection in Traditional Australian Aboriginal Thought" is particularly rivetting. The Romanian tale "Why Does a Cat Sit on the Doorstep in the Sun?" is part of a sequence of related stories in Moses Gaster, Rumanian Bird and Beast Stories, 1915. In 2001 I wove Gaster's stories into the text for a picture book, Noah and the Devil, illustrated by Isabelle Brent. I apologise for my lack of updates recently. While I am well, and working away, caring responsibilities have been consuming great swathes of time and energy, making progress slower than I would like. Meanwhile the piles of books to be read grow steadily higher! I've just acquired The Chariot of the Sun and other Rites and Symbols of the Northern Bronze Age by Peter Gelling and Hilda Ellis Davidson, a book that had somehow passed me by, though I knew Hilda Ellis Davidson quite well. It attempts to reconstruct the mythic world of Bronze Age Scandinavia, largely from the evidence of rock engravings.

Folk and fairy tales are classified by ATU numbers after the listings in Hans-Jörg Uther's The Types of International Folktales (which updates the earlier Aarne-Thompson Types of the Folktale). ATU 825 is The Devil in Noah's Ark. A 1959 study of this tale by Francis Lee Utley was able to was able to draw on 275 recorded variants, largely but not exclusively from Eastern Europe. This version comes from Romania.

When Noah had built the ark, he kept the door wide open the animals to enter. After they had all gone in, his own family came, and last of all his wife. 
    Noah said to her, “Come in.” She obstinately said, “No.” Noah again said, “Come in.” She again said, “No.”. Noah, getting angry, said, “Oh, you devil, come in.” The was just what the Devil was waiting for. He knew that Noah would not allow him to come in otherwise, and so he was lurking outside, waiting for an invitation. Not needing be asked twice, the Devil slipped onto the ark in the form of a mouse. 
    When the Devil has nothing to do, he weighs his tail. But here he found plenty to do, for, he thought, now is an opportunity of putting an end to the whole of God’s creatures. So he started gnawing on one of the planks, trying to make a hole in it. When Noah surprised him at this devilish work he threw his fur glove at him. It turned into a cat, and, in the twinkling of an eye, the mouse was in the mouth of the cat. 
    But Noah could not allow the peace of the ark to be broken, the animals had to live in peace with one another. So he seized the cat, with the mouse in her mouth, and flung her out of the ark into the water. 
    The cat swam to the ark and, getting up to the doorstep, climbed on to the sill and lay down there to bask in the sun. 
    There she remained until the water had subsided—and ever since then, the cat hates getting wet, and prefers to lie on the doorstep of the house in the sun.

Utley's study can be found in Alan Dundes, ed., The Flood Myth, 1988, a book which gathers together many fascinating essays on flood myths in world cultures; Erich Kolig's "Noah's Ark Revisited: On the Myth-Land Connection in Traditional Australian Aboriginal Thought" is particularly rivetting. The Romanian tale "Why Does a Cat Sit on the Doorstep in the Sun?" is part of a sequence of related stories in Moses Gaster, Rumanian Bird and Beast Stories, 1915. In 2001 I wove Gaster's stories into the text for a picture book, Noah and the Devil, illustrated by Isabelle Brent.

I apologise for my lack of updates recently. While I am well, and working away, caring responsibilities have been consuming  great swathes of time and energy, making progress slower than I would like. Meanwhile the piles of books to be read grow steadily higher! I've just acquired The Chariot of the Sun and other Rites and Symbols of the Northern Bronze Age by Peter Gelling and Hilda Ellis Davidson, a book that had somehow passed me by, though I knew Hilda Ellis Davidson quite well. It attempts to reconstruct the mythic world of Bronze Age Scandinavia, largely from the evidence of rock engravings.

The Devil in Noah's Ark

One of the most interesting aspects of living mythological systems is how flexible and adaptable they are, easily able to accomodate new realities. I've just come across a charming example of this in The Faith of a Coast Salish Indian by Diamond Jenness. Published in 1955 as Anthropology in British Columbia Memoir no. 3, this monograph was based on interviews in 1936 with "Old Pierre, a Katzie man about 75 years of age who enjoyed a wide and honourable reputation as a medicine man both on Vancouver Island and on the Mainland." Jenness lists all the spirit guardians that Old Pierre had seen portrayed in the winter dances - land animals, sea mammals, fish, birds, insects, reptiles, forces of nature, and mythical creatures such as the two-headed snake. The last of these spirit guardians seems anomalous: locomotive. "When a half-breed Indian living near Abbotsford claimed it during one of the winter dances, the other Indians laughed at him. He insisted, however, that it enabled him to control the weather, because a locomotive goes everywhere through rain and sunshine; and he said that because they had mocked him, he would make the weather very cold for two months. When snow fell the next day and the weather did remain cold for two months, the Indians believed him." Old Pierre's account of how he achieved his shamanic power is truly poetic. This is just one incident, in which he stands before "the father of all trees, invisible to mortal eyes": "For a long time I stood there waiting. Finally the tree spoke: 'O poor boy. No living soul has ever seen me before. Here I stand, watching all the trees and all the people throughout this world, and no one knows me. One power, and one only, I shall grant you. When you are treating the sick, you shall see over the whole world; when the mind of your patient is lost, you shall see and recapture it. Remain here for a while till someone comes with a noise like the rushing of a great wind - someone who always rests on top of this tree. Do not look until I bid you. "I waited. There came a sound as of a great wind at the top of the tree. 'Now look,' said the tree. I looked. On its summit stood a great white horse. Its hoofs were red, and two persons sat on its back. 'That horse flies all over the world,' said the tree. 'I shall not give you its power, for you would not live long.'" After a series of hardships, purifications, and visions, "I awoke and found myself lying on the ground. Now I had power - power in my hands and wrists to draw out sickness, power in my mouth to swallow it, and power to see all over the world and to recover minds that had strayed from their bodily homes. I was a medicine-man."

One of the most interesting aspects of living mythological systems is how flexible and adaptable they are, easily able to accomodate new realities. I've just come across a charming example of this in The Faith of a Coast Salish Indian by Diamond Jenness. Published in 1955 as Anthropology in British Columbia Memoir no. 3, this monograph was based on interviews in 1936 with "Old Pierre, a Katzie man about 75 years of age who enjoyed a wide and honourable reputation as a medicine man both on Vancouver Island and on the Mainland."

Jenness lists all the spirit guardians that Old Pierre had seen portrayed in the winter dances - land animals, sea mammals, fish, birds, insects, reptiles, forces of nature, and mythical creatures such as the two-headed snake. The last of these spirit guardians seems anomalous: locomotive. "When a half-breed Indian living near Abbotsford claimed it during one of the winter dances, the other Indians laughed at him. He insisted, however, that it enabled him to control the weather, because a locomotive goes everywhere through rain and sunshine; and he said that because they had mocked him, he would make the weather very cold for two months. When snow fell the next day and the weather did remain cold for two months, the Indians believed him."

Old Pierre's account of how he achieved his shamanic power is truly poetic. This is just one incident, in which he stands before "the father of all trees, invisible to mortal eyes":

"For a long time I stood there waiting. Finally the tree spoke: 'O poor boy. No living soul has ever seen me before. Here I stand, watching all the trees and all the people throughout this world, and no one knows me. One power, and one only, I shall grant you. When you are treating the sick, you shall see over the whole world; when the mind of your patient is lost, you shall see and recapture it. Remain here for a while till someone comes with a noise like the rushing of a great wind - someone who always rests on top of this tree. Do not look until I bid you.

"I waited. There came a sound as of a great wind at the top of the tree. 'Now look,' said the tree. I looked. On its summit stood a great white horse. Its hoofs were red, and two persons sat on its back. 'That horse flies all over the world,' said the tree. 'I shall not give you its power, for you would not live long.'"

After a series of hardships, purifications, and visions, "I awoke and found myself lying on the ground. Now I had power - power in my hands and wrists to draw out sickness, power in my mouth to swallow it, and power to see all over the world and to recover minds that had strayed from their bodily homes. I was a medicine-man."

The Father of All Trees

In 1734, in his Principles of a New Science, Giambattista Vico launched the search for a universal “language of the mind”. This quest was pursued in the 20th century by scholars of linguistics, such as Noam Chomsky. When I conceived this book, my idea of myth as “the hidden matrix” of the human mind was consciously modelled on Chomsky’s notion of universal grammar, an inbuilt linguistic instinct shared by all humanity. Daniel Everett’s 2008 account of a remote Amazonian tribe, the Pirahãs, (Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes) has thrown Chomsky’s theories into doubt, by demonstrating that the Pirahã language lacks recursion (the ability to fold one sentence, grammatically, into another), which Chomsky had identified as the key component of human language and linguistic creativity. Whether or not this fatally compromises the whole idea of universal grammar, Everett’s revelation that the Pirahãs are a people without myths certainly shook my notion of the primacy of story and the hidden matrix. Here is a culture seemingly immune to myths, or fiction of any kind. Asked what came first, the Pirahãs had no sacred stories about cosmic eggs or primal oceans. Pressed, the best they could come up with was “bananas”.The Pirahãs have no concept of a creator. As they have no myths, so they have no religion, and have been steadfastly resistant to generations of Christian missionaries, including Daniel Everett, who was alarmed to find that, instead of converting the Pirahãs, he was steadily losing his own faith. This resistance to the idea of a god or gods, and lack of interest in ideas of creation and the cosmos must in some way be connected to, or derive from, or be the reason for, the peculiarities and limitations of the Pirahã language, which is an isolate, seemingly unrelated to any other human tongue. This language has not developed recursion, which essentially enables us to express two ideas at once, and its speakers have not developed myths, which can be seen as ways of mediating between two opposite notions. I had thought, and still think, that telling and listening to stories was one of the essential attributes that define our humanity. It may be that a clue to their aversion to fiction lies in the Pirahãs’ reluctance to experience deep sleep; instead they nap from fifteen minutes to two hours at a time, all through the day and night. The likely result of this is that they spend much more time than most other human beings in the REM dreaming stage of sleep, which may heighten their susceptibility to hallucinatory states, while possibly depriving them of some other element provided by deep sleep that is necessary to the creative imagination. The Pirahãs’ lack of any creation or foundation myths is very striking and unusual, but their perception of a spirit world that interrelates with the human one, but is not inhabited by gods, is not. They do believe in spirits, dividing the entities that inhabit their world into two categories: xíbiisi (entities that have blood, such as the Pirahãs themselves, or the animals of the forest), and xíbiisihiaba (entities without blood, the spirits). They see these spirits in their mind, and converse with them. Any Pirahã male may be possessed by a spirit called a kaoáíbógí (“fast mouth”) which speaks through him. These spirit voices offer advice and guidance to the villagers. While the Pirahãs are an extreme, and probably unique case, in their insistence that narratives must be completely factual, it is worth noting that both encounters with spirits and what happens in their own dreams count as fact, not fiction. The Pirahãs are an eloquent demonstration that human beings can live happily without myths and folktales, but I believe that their privileging of dream life as equal to waking life, and their strong mental links to the spirit world, are both indicators of a kind of mythological thinking. Last year Daniel Everett published a new book, How Language Began, which I have ordered but not yet read. No doubt he will shed more light on the mystery of the tribe who don't tell stories.

In 1734, in his Principles of a New Science, Giambattista Vico launched the search for a universal “language of the mind”. This quest was pursued in the 20th century by scholars of linguistics, such as Noam Chomsky. When I conceived this book, my idea of myth as “the hidden matrix” of the human mind was consciously modelled on Chomsky’s notion of universal grammar, an inbuilt linguistic instinct shared by all humanity.

Daniel Everett’s 2008 account of a remote Amazonian tribe, the Pirahãs, (Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes) has thrown Chomsky’s theories into doubt, by demonstrating that the Pirahã language lacks recursion (the ability to fold one sentence, grammatically, into another), which Chomsky had identified as the key component of human language and linguistic creativity.

Whether or not this fatally compromises the whole idea of universal grammar, Everett’s revelation that the Pirahãs are a people without myths certainly shook my notion of the primacy of story and the hidden matrix. Here is a culture seemingly immune to myths, or fiction of any kind. Asked what came first, the Pirahãs had no sacred stories about cosmic eggs or primal oceans. Pressed, the best they could come up with was “bananas”.The Pirahãs have no concept of a creator. As they have no myths, so they have no religion, and have been steadfastly resistant to generations of Christian missionaries, including Daniel Everett, who was alarmed to find that, instead of converting the Pirahãs, he was steadily losing his own faith.

This resistance to the idea of a god or gods, and lack of interest in ideas of creation and the cosmos must in some way be connected to, or derive from, or be the reason for, the peculiarities and limitations of the Pirahã language, which is an isolate, seemingly unrelated to any other human tongue. This language has not developed recursion, which essentially enables us to express two ideas at once, and its speakers have not developed myths, which can be seen as ways of mediating between two opposite notions.

I had thought, and still think, that telling and listening to stories was one of the essential attributes that define our humanity. It may be that a clue to their aversion to fiction lies in the Pirahãs’ reluctance to experience deep sleep; instead they nap from fifteen minutes to two hours at a time, all through the day and night. The likely result of this is that they spend much more time than most other human beings in the REM dreaming stage of sleep, which may heighten their susceptibility to hallucinatory states, while possibly depriving them of some other element provided by deep sleep that is necessary to the creative imagination.

The Pirahãs’ lack of any creation or foundation myths is very striking and unusual, but their perception of a spirit world that interrelates with the human one, but is not inhabited by gods, is not. They do believe in spirits, dividing the entities that inhabit their world into two categories: xíbiisi (entities that have blood, such as the Pirahãs themselves, or the animals of the forest), and xíbiisihiaba (entities without blood, the spirits). They see these spirits in their mind, and converse with them. Any Pirahã male may be possessed by a spirit called a kaoáíbógí (“fast mouth”) which speaks through him. These spirit voices offer advice and guidance to the villagers. 

While the Pirahãs are an extreme, and probably unique case, in their insistence that narratives must be completely factual, it is worth noting that both encounters with spirits and what happens in their own dreams count as fact, not fiction. The Pirahãs are an eloquent demonstration that human beings can live happily without myths and folktales, but I believe that their privileging of dream life as equal to waking life, and their strong mental links to the spirit world, are both indicators of a kind of mythological thinking.

Last year Daniel Everett published a new book, How Language Began, which I have ordered but not yet read. No doubt he will shed more light on the mystery of the tribe who don't tell stories.

THE HIDDEN MATRIX?

Myth establishes ties of mutual obligation between mankind and the gods, establishes cultural cohesion, and shapes the cycle of the year. The social function of myth is to bind a society together, to act as a charter for its laws and customs, and to embed a culture in its environment. The ritual year is not an abstraction, but an armature on which our lives are sculpted. Even the days of our week recall gods we no longer recognize—Tiw’s day, Woden’s Day, Thunor’s Day, Frigg’s Day, Saturn’s Day—while our year is punctuated with rituals both religious—Easter, Christmas, Diwali, Eid—and secular, from Valentine’s day to Halloween. There are cultures where the ritual requirements are so complex and time-consuming many years may be required for a complete cycle—among the Elema of Papua New Guinea, the hevehe ritual dance cycle, in which dancers in elaborate masks communicated with sea spirits, lasted between seven and twenty years. But most cultures have used the turning of the seasons as the armature of their religious life, and to talk about the ritual year seems natural to us . Ovid’s long poem Fasti examines the myths, legends, and rites of the Roman year, though sadly he only wrote the first six books, from January to June. Fasti begins with a long dialogue with “Two-headed Janus, source of the silent-gliding year,” and proceeds day-by-day in wonderful detail. For instance 15 March (the Ides of March, the day on which Julius Caesar was assassinated, though Ovid tells us that it was only his shadow that was struck down, the man himself being whisked away to the court of Jupiter by the goddess Vesta) was the feast of Anna Perenna, eternal Anna, a goddess of the year who was worshipped in a sacred grove on the Via Flaminia. Ovid vividly describes the merrymaking that marked this feast day of the common people, the plebs, who sang, danced, and got drunk along the banks of the Tiber. Ovid tells three myths about Anna Perenna with great pleasure. In the first of these, Anna’s story links back to the very beginning of Rome, for she was originally the sister of Dido, the queen of Carthage who was the doomed lover of Aeneas. Fleeing after Dido’s suicide, Anna eventually came to Latium, where Aeneas recognised her and took her into his household. But the blood-stained ghost of Dido appeared to her in the night, warning her that Aeneas’s jealous wife Lavinia was planning to kill her. So Anna fled, only to be raped by the horned river god Numicius, who subsequently transformed her into a nymph, Anna Perenna, a kind of demi-goddess who aged in phase with the moon. Ovid’s two other myths both tell of Anna in her old age. In one, she is an old woman of Bovillae who cooked food for the plebs when they had fled to the top of the Sacred Mountain (Mons Sacer) and were in danger of starvation. This explains why the plebs would especially celebrate her festival, though it doesn’t really link up with the story about her being Dido’s sister. The other myth of Anna Perenna is a comic tale in which Mars, having fallen in love with Minerva, begs Anna for her help. She strings him along, and at last tells him that Minerva has agreed to be his. But when in the bedroom Mars lifts the bridal veil, it is Anna’s wrinkled old face he sees, not that of the goddess. It is because of this bawdy trick, Ovid tells us that “old jokes and obscene verses” are chanted at Anna’s feast. The Anna Perenna who fools the amorous Mars could be either Anna of Carthage or Anna of Bovillae, but Ovid throws out other options too—some say Anna is Luna, the moon, others that she is the Greek goddess Themis, others that she is Io, and yet others identify her with the nymph Azanis “who gave Jupiter his first food.” All of these mythic identities are equally valid to Ovid, and he doesn’t try to make us or the plebeian revellers by the Tiber choose between them. The important thing is that the feast has this mythic backdrop, not that one story should outweigh any other. Ronald Hutton's The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, is a kind of British version of Fasti, and a similar study could be made of any culture, revealing a complex web of inherited attitudes and beliefs, as expressed in rituals and customs.

Myth establishes ties of mutual obligation between mankind and the gods, establishes cultural cohesion, and shapes the cycle of the year.

The social function of myth is to bind a society together, to act as a charter for its laws and customs, and to embed a culture in its environment. The ritual year is not an abstraction, but an armature on which our lives are sculpted. Even the days of our week recall gods we no longer recognize—Tiw’s day, Woden’s Day, Thunor’s Day, Frigg’s Day, Saturn’s Day—while our year is punctuated with rituals both religious—Easter, Christmas, Diwali, Eid—and secular, from Valentine’s day to Halloween.

There are cultures where the ritual requirements are so complex and time-consuming many years may be required for a complete cycle—among the Elema of Papua New Guinea, the hevehe ritual dance cycle, in which dancers in elaborate masks communicated with sea spirits, lasted between seven and twenty years. But most cultures have used the turning of the seasons as the armature of their religious life, and to talk about the ritual year seems natural to us .

Ovid’s long poem Fasti examines the myths, legends, and rites of the Roman year, though sadly he only wrote the first six books, from January to June.

         Fasti begins with a long dialogue with “Two-headed Janus, source of the silent-gliding year,” and proceeds day-by-day in wonderful detail. For instance 15 March (the Ides of March, the day on which Julius Caesar was assassinated, though Ovid tells us that it was only his shadow that was struck down, the man himself being whisked away to the court of Jupiter by the goddess Vesta) was the feast of Anna Perenna, eternal Anna, a goddess of the year who was worshipped in a sacred grove on the Via Flaminia. Ovid vividly describes the merrymaking that marked this feast day of the common people, the plebs, who sang, danced, and got drunk along the banks of the Tiber. Ovid tells three myths about Anna Perenna with great pleasure.

         In the first of these, Anna’s story links back to the very beginning of Rome, for she was originally the sister of Dido, the queen of Carthage who was the doomed lover of Aeneas. Fleeing after Dido’s suicide, Anna eventually came to Latium, where Aeneas recognised her and took her into his household. But the blood-stained ghost of Dido appeared to her in the night, warning her that Aeneas’s jealous wife Lavinia was planning to kill her. So Anna fled, only to be raped by the horned river god Numicius, who subsequently transformed her into a nymph, Anna Perenna, a kind of demi-goddess who aged in phase with the moon.

         Ovid’s two other myths both tell of Anna in her old age. In one, she is an old woman of Bovillae who cooked food for the plebs when they had fled to the top of the Sacred Mountain (Mons Sacer) and were in danger of starvation. This explains why the plebs would especially celebrate her festival, though it doesn’t really link up with the story about her being Dido’s sister. The other myth of Anna Perenna is a comic tale in which Mars, having fallen in love with Minerva, begs Anna for her help. She strings him along, and at last tells him that Minerva has agreed to be his. But when in the bedroom Mars lifts the bridal veil, it is Anna’s wrinkled old face he sees, not that of the goddess. It is because of this bawdy trick, Ovid tells us that “old jokes and obscene verses” are chanted at Anna’s feast.

         The Anna Perenna who fools the amorous Mars could be either Anna of Carthage or Anna of Bovillae, but Ovid throws out other options too—some say Anna is Luna, the moon, others that she is the Greek goddess Themis, others that she is Io, and yet others identify her with the nymph Azanis “who gave Jupiter his first food.” All of these mythic identities are equally valid to Ovid, and he doesn’t try to make us or the plebeian revellers by the Tiber choose between them. The important thing is that the feast has this mythic backdrop, not that one story should outweigh any other.

        Ronald Hutton's The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, is a kind of British version of Fasti, and a similar study could be made of any culture, revealing a complex web of inherited attitudes and beliefs, as expressed in rituals and customs.

The Ritual Year

When the philosophical or religious foundation of a mythology is under severe stress, either from reform or attack from within, from the pressures of war, famine, or plague, or from usurpation by a rival mythology, that mythology can either implode or explode. Myth erupts into everyday life with powerful forces of creation and destruction. This is what happened in the Amarna period in Ancient Egypt when the pharaoh Akhenaten swept aside the chaotic sprawl of competing divinities in favour of the worship of a single god, the Aten. An inscription in his successor Tutankhamun’s name describes how, as a result of Akhenaten’s heresy, “The temples of the gods and goddesses fell to pieces. . . . The land was turned topsy-turvy, and the gods turned their backs on it. . . . If anyone prayed to a god or goddess for help, they would not come. Their hearts were broken.” There are many instances, particularly in the story of Christianity, where the shockwave of the arrival of a new faith causes a catastrophic failure of the old. In 627 CE, when the pagan high priest Coifi counselled King Edwin of Northumbria to convert to Christianity, he himself desecrated the altar of the god Woden with Woden’s own sacred weapon, the spear. The English Revolution of the mid-17th century brought a convulsion within Christianity itself. Myth erupted onto the streets of London with a swaggering confidence. The city was teeming with “false Christs, and false prophets and prophetesses, and counterfeit Virgin Maries”, in the words of John Reeve, who himself believed that he and his cousin Lodowick Muggleton, both tailors, were directly commissioned by God as the “two last Spiritual witnesses” foreseen in the Book of Revelation. In February 1651 (1652, new style) when God revealed their commission to John Reeve, their first task was to assert their new power to bless or to curse men and women to eternity in visits to two other prophets. The first was the goldsmith TheaurauJohn Tany, who since 1649 had proclaimed himself the Lord’s High Priest, charged to gather together the scattered tribes of the Jews and lead them to Jerusalem. The second was John Robins, a Ranter who, according to Muggleton, “declared himself to be God Almighty, and that he was the Judge of the Quick and of the Dead, and that he was that first Adam that was in that innocent state, and that his Body had been dead for Five Thousand, Six Hundred and odd Years, and now he was risen again from the Dead.” Robins raised so many of the Old Testament Prophets from the dead that Muggleton recorded, “I have had Nine or Tenn of them at my House at a time.” In this mythological context, to deny that Robins was God, Reeve and Muggleton were forced to declare him not simply an ordinary man, but the Antichrist, or the Man of Sin spoken of in Thessalonians. This extraordinary upsurge of millenarian fever in Revolutionary England is directly linked to radical social changes experienced in a “world turned upside down”, in Christopher Hill’s phrase. The works of Tany, Reeve, and Muggleton make clear that it was as much a mythological movement as a theological one. Reeve and Muggleton were not even London’s first “last witnesses”. In 1636 two weavers named Richard Farnham and John Bull had already claimed this role, were imprisoned and—ironically given their Biblical destiny as bringers of plagues—died of the plague. But their death was disputed. Farnham’s followers testified to his resurrection on 8 January 1642, and the pair were said to have sailed away in vessels made of bulrushes, to convert the lost tribes of Israel. They sailed, as TheaurauJohn Tany was also to do, out of the world of material reality, and into the world of pure myth. The Muggletonians for a time offered a serious challenge to the emerging Quakers. Both were pacifist movements, though the Muggletonians preferred eating, drinking, and singing “Divine Songs” to sitting in Quaker silence. Lodovick Muggleton so enraged William Penn he provoked him to swear. But the premature death of their prophet John Reeve meant the movement lost momentum, and the very last Muggletonian, Philip Noakes, died in 1979. Muggletonian thought, however, survives strongly in the poetry and symbolism of William Blake. In his book Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, E.P. Thompson teases out many connections between Blake’s ideas and his way of expressing them with Muggletonian writings and beliefs. He suggests that Blake’s mother Catherine Hermitage and her family were quite probably Muggletonians—a George Hermitage was a composer of divine songs—and that Blake “in his childhood was made familiar with the structure of antinomian thought and the central images of Genesis and Revelation in a Muggletonian notation”. It’s worth noting that one Muggletonian sect, the Reevites, believed they could converse with angels and have visions of the dead.

When the philosophical or religious foundation of a mythology is under severe stress, either from reform or attack from within, from the pressures of war, famine, or plague, or from usurpation by a rival mythology, that mythology can either implode or explode. Myth erupts into everyday life with powerful forces of creation and destruction. 
    This is what happened in the Amarna period in Ancient Egypt when the pharaoh Akhenaten swept aside the chaotic sprawl of competing divinities in favour of the worship of a single god, the Aten. An inscription in his successor Tutankhamun’s name describes how, as a result of Akhenaten’s heresy, “The temples of the gods and goddesses fell to pieces. . . . The land was turned topsy-turvy, and the gods turned their backs on it. . . . If anyone prayed to a god or goddess for help, they would not come. Their hearts were broken.”  
    There are many instances, particularly in the story of Christianity, where the shockwave of the arrival of a new faith causes a catastrophic failure of the old. In 627 CE, when the pagan high priest Coifi counselled King Edwin of Northumbria to convert to Christianity, he himself desecrated the altar of the god Woden with Woden’s own sacred weapon, the spear. 
    The English Revolution of the mid-17th century brought a convulsion within Christianity itself. Myth erupted onto the streets of London with a swaggering confidence. The city was teeming with “false Christs, and false prophets and prophetesses, and counterfeit Virgin Maries”, in the words of John Reeve, who himself believed that he and his cousin Lodowick Muggleton, both tailors, were directly commissioned by God as the “two last Spiritual witnesses” foreseen in the Book of Revelation. 
    In February 1651 (1652, new style) when God revealed their commission to John Reeve, their first task was to assert their new power to bless or to curse men and women to eternity in visits to two other prophets. The first was the goldsmith TheaurauJohn Tany, who since 1649 had proclaimed himself the Lord’s High Priest, charged to gather together the scattered tribes of the Jews and lead them to Jerusalem.  The second was John Robins, a Ranter who, according to Muggleton, “declared himself to be God Almighty, and that he was the Judge of the Quick and of the Dead, and that he was that first Adam that was in that innocent state, and that his Body had been dead for Five Thousand, Six Hundred and odd Years, and now he was risen again from the Dead.”  Robins raised so many of the Old Testament Prophets from the dead that Muggleton recorded, “I have had Nine or Tenn of them at my House at a time.”  In this mythological context, to deny that Robins was God, Reeve and Muggleton were forced to declare him not simply an ordinary man, but the Antichrist, or the Man of Sin spoken of in Thessalonians. 
    This extraordinary upsurge of millenarian fever in Revolutionary England is directly linked to radical social changes experienced in a “world turned upside down”, in Christopher Hill’s phrase.  The works of Tany, Reeve, and Muggleton make clear that it was as much a mythological movement as a theological one. Reeve and Muggleton were not even London’s first “last witnesses”. In 1636 two weavers named Richard Farnham and John Bull had already claimed this role, were imprisoned and—ironically given their Biblical destiny as bringers of plagues—died of the plague. But their death was disputed. Farnham’s followers testified to his resurrection on 8 January 1642, and the pair were said to have sailed away in vessels made of bulrushes, to convert the lost tribes of Israel. They sailed, as TheaurauJohn Tany was also to do, out of the world of material reality, and into the world of pure myth. 
    The Muggletonians for a time offered a serious challenge to the emerging Quakers. Both were pacifist movements, though the Muggletonians preferred eating, drinking, and singing “Divine Songs” to sitting in Quaker silence. Lodovick Muggleton so enraged William Penn he provoked him to swear. But the premature death of their prophet John Reeve meant the movement lost momentum, and the very last Muggletonian, Philip Noakes, died in 1979. 
Muggletonian thought, however, survives strongly in the poetry and symbolism of William Blake. In his book Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, E.P. Thompson teases out many connections between Blake’s ideas and his way of expressing them with Muggletonian writings and beliefs. He suggests that Blake’s mother Catherine Hermitage and her family were quite probably Muggletonians—a George Hermitage was a composer of divine songs—and that Blake “in his childhood was made familiar with the structure of antinomian thought and the central images of Genesis and Revelation in a Muggletonian notation”.  It’s worth noting that one Muggletonian sect, the Reevites, believed they could converse with angels and have visions of the dead.

Thoughts about the Muggletonians

Friends and supporters, you might like to know that I will be on zoom on Thursday 18th March (8 pm UK time, noon Pacific time) talking on the subject of fairytales that go wrong, and end in grief or disappointment. Not all fairytales end happily - even some Cinderella variants have unhappy endings. This will be a Visiting Scholar's Lecture for the National Center for the Study of Children's Literature in San Diego, but it is open and free to all. You do need to register your interest beforehand in order to receive a zoom invitation. With any luck if you follow this link it will allow you to do this: https://twitter.com/josephsdsu/status/1370252987545788416

Friends and supporters, you might like to know that I will be on zoom on Thursday 18th March (8 pm UK time, noon Pacific time) talking on the subject of fairytales that go wrong, and end in grief or disappointment. Not all fairytales end happily - even some Cinderella variants have unhappy endings. This will be a Visiting Scholar's Lecture for the National Center for the Study of Children's Literature in San Diego, but it is open and free to all. You do need to register your interest beforehand in order to receive a zoom invitation. With any luck if you follow this link it will allow you to do this: <a href="https://twitter.com/josephsdsu/status/1370252987545788416">https://twitter.com/josephsdsu/status/1370252987545788416</a>

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