A Better, Shorter Review of "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony"

Europa and the Bull, c. 200 BC

One of the entries in Scott Siskind's book review contest this year was a review of Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a famously strange book about the Greek myths. The review is not bad, but it is 8,600 words long and for all its length fails to grapple at all with the questions that I think are at the heart of Calasso's work: what does it mean to say that the modern world is disenchanted? What is enchantment, anyway? Why do ancient myths still fascinate us? and are we rational moderns too different from ancient peoples to understand what they believed, how they felt when they looked at the night sky and saw dots of light that bore the names of gods?

One thing our for-now anonymous reviewer gets right: this book is a carefully constructed work of literature, not a scholarly tome. In form Calasso's book is a retelling of various myths, often giving us two or three different versions of the same story in sequence, or mingling them together. Some of the stories Calasso tells may be unknown to most readers, even those who know something about Greek myth. That's because Calasso's favorite source is the Dionysiaca by Nonnus, a Christian writer who lived in the 400s AD. Some scholars consider Nonnus too late and otherwise suspect to tell us much about the Greek myths as they were known in the time of Herodotus or Plato, let alone Homer. But Calasso simply ignores that and treats Nonnus as an authentic ancient source.

Why does Calasso do that? Does he not understand that stories, even very traditional ones, can change across a thousand years? He does. He just doesn't care. He does not understand myth as something that undergoes historical change in response to economic or political or whatever other factors. To Calasso myth is something so fundamental to humanity that it might as well be outside of history altogether.

One of the things that fascinates Calasso about the Greek myths is their focus on transformation. In the stories, things are always changing into something else. He is hardly the first intellectual to have noticed this theme; Ovid gave us the Metamorphoses more than 2,000 years ago. Just as things in the myths are always changing, transforming, so the myths themselves are always changing and transforming. To freeze them is to destroy them.

Calasso begins with the famous tale of Europa and the bull, in which a Phoenician girl was carried off by Zeus in the form of beautiful bull, then used and abandoned in the new world of Europe. Is this not a very strange tale? Why would a god spend his time seducing and abandoning girls, and why would he have to transform into a bull to do so? Why do all of the women in these early tales end up as abandoned suicides, hanging themselves in the desolate spaces where god or hero abandoned them? The stories do not tell us, and neither does Calasso. Not directly, anyway.

Instead he takes us on a tour of things he finds fascinating about the Greek myths. For example, what is the salient characteristic of the Greek gods?

If, driven by an old compulsion, we were to define what the gods were to the Greeks, we might say, using the principle of Occam’s razor, everything that takes us away from ordinary sensations of life. “With a god, you are always crying and laughing,” we read in Sophocles’ Ajax. . . . When something undefined and powerful shakes mind and fiber and trembles the cage of our bones, when the person who only a moment before was dull and agnostic is suddenly rocked by laughter and homicidal frenzy, or by the pangs of love, or by the hallucination of form, or finds his face streaming with tears, then the Greek realizes he is not alone. Somebody else stands beside him, and that somebody is a god. (243)

The Gods are life at its fullest, life overflowing. (Nietzsche, of course, picked up on this and made it central to his philosophy.)

The Homeric world is not one with much in the way of human agency; instead, it is the operation of the gods that drives the story. And yet the gods were not the ultimate power in the Greek universe. Above and beyond them lay the power that we sometimes call fate:

Whenever the dullness of the profane was left behind, whenever life grew more intense in whatever way, through honor or death, victory or sacrifice, marriage or prayer, initiation or possession, purification or mourning, anything everything that stirred a person and demanded a meaning, the Greeks would celebrate with fluttering strips of wool, white or red for the most part, which they tied around their heads, or arms, or to a branch, the prow of a ship, a statue, an ax, a stone, a cooking pot. The modern eye encounters these woolen strips everywhere in the fragments that have come down to us but doesn’t see them, removes them from the center of attention as mere decorative details, and hence insignificant. To the Greek eye, the opposite was the case; it was those light, fluttering strips of wool that generated meaning, gave it its boundaries, celebrated in. Everything that took place in the soft frame of those woolen strips was different and separate from the rest. What was it those woolen strips, those tassels represented? An excess, a flowing wake that attached itself to a being or thing. And at the same time a tether that bound that being or thing.

Isidore of Seville (c. 600 AD) could still write, “The woolen ties are so called because they bind.” But what was this bond? It was the momentary surfacing of a link in that invisible net which enfolds the world, which descends from heaven to earth, binding the two together and swaying in the breeze. (283-284)

Here is one of Calasso's great themes, the net of destiny that the Greeks called Ananke. Things sometimes happen because the gods will them, but even the gods are caught in the snares of necessity. What happens is what must happen.

Priam, standing with Helen on the walls of Troy, says to her, "It was not your fault; it was the gods."

No psychology since has ever gone beyond this; all we have done is invent, for those powers that act upon us, longer, more numerous, more awkward names, which are less effective, less closely aligned to the pattern of our experience, whether that be pleasure or terror. The moderns are proud above all of their responsibility, but in being so they presume to respond with a voice that they are not even sure is theirs. The Homeric heroes knew nothing of that cumbersome word responsibility, nor would they have believed in it if they had. For them, it was as if every crime were committed in a state of mental infirmity. But such infirmity meant that a god was present and at work. What we consider infirmity they saw as “divine infatuation” – átē. They knew that this invisible incursion often brough ruin: so much so that the word átē would gradually come to mean “ruin.” But they also knew, and it was Sophocles who said it, that “mortal life can never have anything great about it except through átē.” (93-94)

And one more point:

Socrates himself cleared up this point shortly before his death: we enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments. More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us. It is a spell the soul cast on itself. “This risk is fine indeed, and what we must somehow do with these things is enchant ourselves.” . . . “These things,” as Socrates casually puts it, are the fables, the myths. (278-279)

So what was the enchanted world of the Homeric heroes? It was a world in which humans were weak creatures at the mercy of divine whims, whether than meant Zeus carrying off princesses or heroes forced to battle each other so the gods could be entertained. It was a world governed by destiny's grim dictates, symbolized by the streamers of wool that decorated every significant occasion, and by the long list of abandoned, dying heroines. A world in which humans experienced wonder only in the grip of divine madness that also brought them very near to death.

What happened to that world? In a word, responsibility. When humans decided that we could and should be captains of our own destiny, the world ceased to be the playground of gods and monsters and became the mundane place that we inhabit.

Calasso finds signs of this shift in the classicial world, and sometimes implies that the 5th century Greece was the first place where at least some humans disenchanted themselves in pursuit of rationality, success, and self-control. But with Calasso linear, historical time is never simple or absolute. To him, the shift from a universe ruled by destiny and divine power to one where men believe themselves to be masters of their own fate has happened and has not happened and is happening in every moment, in every person. These are two sides of a golden coin spinning through time.

That is my interpretation of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. But, really, that is not the point of this book. The point is to be led through the Greek myths by a writer who is an expert of the highest order, yet who cares about getting the myths right only as a doorway through which he shows us glimpses of the deepest human things. If you have any interest in myth and what it means, read this book, because it is wonderful.

My review of Calasso's most famous book, The Ruin of Kasch, is here.

Ogoh-Ogoh

Ogoh-ogoh is a delightful Balinese tradition, the building of temporary sculptures that are paraded during Pangrupukan, a holiday welcoming the new year. Although not very old in its current form – wikipedia says the 1980s – it draws on ancient traditions of appeasing underworld beings and a sort of scapegoating, loading the ills of the past year onto these demonic creatures, which are then burned.

Most of these are still burned at the end of the festival, but now there are museums that preserve some of the best specimens, I suppose for tourists who visit at other times of the year.

And who cares if this is not that old and perhaps now mainly functions as a prop for Bali's sole industry, tourism? It does have roots in Balinese tradition, and it's just cool.

I can't resist adding in Balinese ogoh-ogoh is written like this: ᬑᬕᭀᬄ​ᬳᭀᬕᭀᬄ

Asian Art at Christie's

Large (15 inches) floral scroll dish, 1403-1425 AD

Dragon Moon flask, 1736-1795 (20 inches tall)

Bronze dragon head finial, Han Dynasty or Six Dynasties Period, 206 BC to 589 AD

Figurine of a noblewoman, Han Dynasty, 12 inches tall

Ming Dynasty Horsemen

Striding dragon, gilt bronze, Tang Dynasty

Silvered bronze  mirror with a rabbit doing – well, what?

Pounding something with a mortar and pestle, apparently. A toad watches.

So this lovely being must be Chang'e, the moon goddess, and that must be the rabbit who was the great friend of Chang'e and mixed the elixir of immortality for her when she ascended to the Moon Palace.

The rather late story that Chang'e (an old goddess) ascended from earth to the Moon Palace, there to live forever but with only a rabbit and a toad for company, inspired many poets of the Tang and later periods. Here, via wikipedia, is an example:

Now that a candle-shadow stands on the screen of carven marble
And the River of Heaven slants and the morning stars are low,
Are you sorry for having stolen the potion that has set you
Over purple seas and blue skies, to brood through the long nights?

Thoughts on Vampirism

From a review of a new book by John Blair, Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World. A couple of cases:

There is the record of Michal Kasparak, for example, a wine merchant in the Slovakian town of Lubló, whose death in 1718 didn’t stop him from wreaking havoc; he returned on a white horse from the grave, attacking members of the community, starting fires, collecting debts from those who owed him money, all while also managing to impregnate his widow and four other women. (Only after his heart was burned did Kasparak finally give up the ghost.) And there is the story of Johann Kunze, who was kicked in the testicles by a horse and, despite not sustaining any other injury, died in great pain. On his deathbed he renounced any hope of salvation; as he died a black cat rushed in and scratched his face. The men charged with burying him were disconcerted when one hand repeatedly moved to his genitals, but they managed to get him underground anyway, only to subsequently discover he was a revenant, returning to cause mayhem throughout his hometown of Bennisch in Moravia.

I thought this was interesting:

What separates the vampire from the ghost or the demon is that it’s a corpse. As such, many writers on vampires have focused on physical aspects of decay: A corpse that is unexpectedly preserved or bloated or bloody is often suspected of being a vampire. But Blair argues that this in and of itself is not enough. Rather, he notes, the single most common cause that leads to a revenant body is “uncompleted ritual.” For many cultures, death is not just a physical event; it’s also a social process, and if the burial rites are incomplete, interrupted, or denied, the dead body becomes problematic. The souls or life forces of the departed are now stuck: As Blair explains, they “cannot return to human life, but nor can they move on, so that their needy, envious personalities lurk poisonously in their physical bodies.” Abnormal physical processes during decomposition may strengthen a belief in vampires, but it is the social belief that comes first. After all, why dig up a corpse to check for signs if you didn’t already suspect it of causing trouble?

Several of Blair's cases concern people who cause trouble after death because they were punished for crimes during life by denial of the complete burial ritual.

Individual vampires were often the recently deceased whose misdeeds and poor behavior in life had returned to haunt them: the walking dead, “noxious by nature,” could become “dark mirrors for the noxious living.” Particularly in England, which by the tenth century had started denying burial rites to undesirables such as perjurers, thieves, and philanderers, only to have those same people return as vampires. Belief in vampires became another way of enforcing social mores.

But what social mores are being enforced here? Could it maybe be that people were protesting the denial of full burial rites to petty criminals by claiming that those folks were coming back as vampires? If those not buried in consecrated ground come back to haunt the living, doesn't that imply they should have been buried in consecrated ground? 

I think one of the essential points about all such discussions is that past people disagreed about things like ghosts and curses just as much as we do. One model of what is going on here is that people who were suspected of philandering or thievery while they were alive were controversial characters in the village, and that any decision to deny them proper burial would also be controversial, and whether to blame them for any strange incidents that happened after their burials would also be controversial. We know that the people who dug up corpses to see if they were returning often did so at night or otherwise in semi-secrecy, which implies that some people opposed such acts. I find that it sometimes makes sense to see these incidents – digging up corpses, deciding if they had the signs of vampirism, deciding if they were to blame for dead sheep – as points made within an ongoing dispute over the standing of some people in the community.

The Narts

First, ponder that there is a famous group of ancient heroes actually called the Narts.

Well, Nartae in Ossetian, but that's just Nart + plural ending, so Narts. They populate stories told in Ossetia, one of the smaller nations of the Caucasus. The stories were discovered by Russian folklorists in the 1800s and collectors roamed Ossetia throughout the century, badgering old men to tell these tales over and over so they could be written down. A standard Russian translation, based on what were considered the "best" versions, was published under Soviet auspices between 1925 and 1941. Meanwhile French philologist Georges Dumézil learned Ossetian and spent more than a year recording these tales from Ossetians living in Turkey, which led to a book about the Narts published in 1929 and then to the publication of the Nart legends in French. Dumézil made the Narts famous in the west by arguing that these stories preserved remnants of the original Indo-European mythology, and that by comparing them to other early Indo-European stories (Irish, Greek, Germanic, Indian) we can reconstruct the original Indo-European mythos.

Ossetian is an Iranian language; the closest modern parallel is Pashto, spoken in Afghanistan. Many scholars used to think, and some still think, that the Ossetians are the last remnant of the great Iranian-speaking peoples of the steppes: the Scythians, the Sarmatians, and the Alans. One problem with considering the Nart stories to be memories of the ancient Indo-European world is that they are told across the Caucasus by groups who speak unrelated languages, such as the Circassians. Also, the Ossetian versions are full of words and names from other languages, including Turkish and Mongolian. Dumézil's view was that the stories took this form under the last of the great Iranian steppes empires, the Alans. We know that the Alans were a mixed people, with speakers of diverse languages among their armies, so that fits. Persian and Byzantine historians record that after being defeated on the steppes by Franks, Goths and Huns they formed a kingdom in the north Caucasus in the 800s AD.

Anyway, the Nart stories are famous in certain circles, and I read some of them in French back when I first got interested in this sort of thing. But my French was (and is) bad and I was busy with other things, like finishing my Ph.D. and starting a family, so I made little headway. I just discovered last month that a scholarly English translation of the Nart stories, based on that Soviet text, was published in 2016. So I ordered a copy and started to read.

This is not an epic in the sense of the Iliad or the Niebelungenlied, just a bunch of stories about a group of heroes. Nartae is a family name, and it seems that storytellers imagined the Narts as a multi-generation family. Opinions differ as to what "Nart" means, some holding for "manly" and others for "son of the sun." I think "son of the sun" is cooler and one of the stories does feature a being too bright to look at, obviously some sort of sun avatar, so I'm going with that. The foremother of the Narts is the daughter of the sea god, wooed by their founding father after he somehow got trapped in a pearl-lined chamber under the sea.

The Narts live together in a town full of tower houses; the height of the tower is a measure of the importance of the family, and the leading Narts all have towers with seven stories. The towers feature in several tales, with jealous fathers always locking their beautiful daughters into the tops of towers, or hiding treasure up there, so enterprising Narts have to fly up to the top chamber to woo or steal. Besides the houses the other prominent feature of the town in the Field of Games, where they compete against each other.

The Narts have a certain look, a family resemblance that allows people to recognize them even when they have travelled far from home. They all have golden hair and are of course tall, handsome, powerful, and so on. In the stories they do four things: tend their flocks, hunt, hold feasts, and have adventures. The feasts show the wealth and hospitality of the leading men and the prowess of the women, who appear prominently as hostesses in these scenes. In a typical feast there is so much food, mead, and beer that the heroes do not rise from the table for a solid week. I was struck by the repeated phrase, "toasts rolled around in waves." There is also dancing, both ring dances involving men and women and competitive acrobatic dancing by the men:

How skillfully Shoshlan leapt onto a low-three-legged table and whirled round and round on it, then hopped onto the next, and the next, and so on along the whole row. Like a top he spun on the very edge of the table, and not one crust of bread did he touch, and not one goblet did he brush.

(If this represents a real thing that Ossetians did during drunken banquets, I shudder.)

Shoshlan Dancing, Statue in Vladikavkaz

Hunting is often lovingly described, with long chases and clever ambushes, and much verbal artistry is lavished on the qualities of the deer; one trope that appears in several stories is that the fur of the slain deer rings like crystal bells when a hand is run through it.

Tending flocks is what people do between stories.

The Narts usually go adventuring out of boredom. Shoshlan, one of the top heroes, heads out looking for trouble when he has bested all the other Narts at shooting, riding, and wrestling and needs a new challenge. The transition from the Nart town to the world of adventure is always clearly marked, often with a verbal tic like, "how long he travelled, no one can say." The standard enemies are giants and gigantic beasts. The storytellers had fun coming up with ways to emphasize the size of these monsters, like, a man so large that his fishing rod was an oak tree and he used a whole ox for bait. One giant goat gets a man stuck in its hoof and doesn't notice. Sometimes the Narts defeat even giant enemies with superior strength, or stealth archery – which is just as boring in the Nart stories as it is in video games – but in the grander tales the enemies are simply too powerful for that. Cleverness is required, including old standbys like flattering opponents into revealing their weaknesses or tricking them into attempting impossible feats. When additional help is required, the Narts seek out wise women to consult. Sometimes these are sea goddesses or hags that dwell on mountaintops, but most often they turn to their matriarch Shatana. Shatana seems to know the secrets of every monster and robber baron, and she will issue detailed instructions on how they are to be defeated. Nobody knows quite what to make of Shatana, and scholars dispute whether she is a mother goddess, a goddess of wisdom, a witch, a weird version of the Virgin Mary, or what have you. I was struck that she often acts in secret for vaguely anti-establishment reasons, like helping younger brothers outwit their kin to get an inheritance. She knows what must happen, and sometimes that is not what the her husband and the other male Nart leaders want, so she has to act behind their backs to puts things on the proper course.

I did not find most of these stories very compelling. The world, though, is quite interesting, a mix of what seems like a semi-real society of warior/herders and, a journey of unknown length away, lands full of wonders. Some of the wonders are indeed wonderful: talking birds with diverse grievances against men, beasts that transform into people, magic treasures, strange signs that must be interpreted by one of the wise women, spells cast by the baking of three cakes, and more. Delightfully weird, just the kind of folklore I enjoy.

And here are my thoughts on what about these stories seems to be truly ancient:

• The story arc of a hero leaving home and journeying to some other land for adventure;
• Heroes wooing the daughters of gods or monsters to be their wives, sometimes with insane bride prices;
• Heroes getting into trouble by killing men "beloved of the gods";
• Giants;
• Heroes seeking advice from wise crones or other fey women;
• Infants with extraordinary strength who smash their cribs and head out to do great deeds; 
• Heroes cleverly tricking enemies into betraying their secrets;
• The power of music over certain beings.

The Sunken Lands of Cardigan Bay

Er Lannic, Brittany

One of my favorite types of myth concerns lost kingdoms drowned under the waves. Not only are these stories cool, they raise in a stark way one of the best questions about myth: to what extent is it a kind of history?

Humans lived through one of the great land-drownings in earth's history, the 100 meter (330 feet) sea-level rise at the end of the last Ice Age. This was not, in the grand scheme of things, so long ago; in my part of the world the Chesapeake Bay was just a river valley until around 8,200 BC. Doggerland, a lost chain of islands in the North Sea, may have drowned around the same time. The Black Sea does not seem to have been joined to the Mediterranean until about 5600 BC, and some people think that event was accompanied by catastrophic flooding. Most glacial melting was complete by 5000 BC, but in some areas there has been more localized sea level rise even more recently. It seems plausible to me that these events were remembered.

Which brings me to the west coast of Wales, and Cardigan Bay in particular. The Celts had multiple stories about drowned cities, provinces, and kingdoms. The most famous concern Ker Ys in Brittany, but Cardigan Bay has its own cluster of legends.

Consider this excerpt of a medieval map of Britain. Called the Gough Map, it was made sometime between 1300 and 1350. It is quite good as medieval maps go; all of the hundreds of towns and rivers it names actually existed. So why does it show two substantial islands in Cardigan Bay?

Wikipedia has a good summary of the main local legend, under the heading Cantre'r Gawelod:  

Cantre'r Gwaelod, also known as Cantref Gwaelod or Cantref y Gwaelod (Welsh for 'The Lowland Hundred'), is a legendary ancient sunken kingdom said to have occupied a tract of fertile land lying between Ramsey Island and Bardsey Island in what is now Cardigan Bay to the west of Wales. It has been described as a "Welsh Atlantis" and has featured in folklore, literature, and song.

There are several versions of the myth. The earliest known form of the legend is usually said to appear in the Black Book of Carmarthen, in which the land is referred to as Maes Gwyddno (Welsh for 'the Plain of Gwyddno'). In this version, the land was lost to floods when a well-maiden named Mererid neglected her duties and allowed the well to overflow.

The popular version known today is thought to have been formed from the 17th century onwards. Cantre'r Gwaelod is described as a low-lying land fortified against the sea by a dyke, Sarn Badrig ("Saint Patrick's causeway"), with a series of sluice gates that were opened at low tide to drain the land.

Cantre'r Gwaelod's capital was Caer Wyddno, seat of the ruler Gwyddno Garanhir. Two princes of the realm held charge over the dyke. One of these princes, called Seithenyn, is described in one version as a notorious drunkard and carouser, and it was through his negligence that the sea swept through the open floodgates, ruining the land.

My favorite detail is that the church bells of Cantre'r Gwaelod were said to ring out when enemies or storms are approaching, warning people on shore of danger.

What really makes these stories compelling is the physical evidence one can find all around Cardigan Bay. There is quite a bit of shallow water in the bay, as this chart of the northern half shows.

There is also physical evidence one might interpret as the remnants of sunken lands. First, there are a lot of rocks. There are what look like rock piles in water shallow enough that the rocks are visible when the tide is low and the water clear, and two places where they are exposed at low tide (above). Many older sources, such as the 1846 Topographical Dictionary of Wales, describe these rock piles as the remnants of sunken cities or castles:

In the sea, about seven miles west of Aberystwyth in Cardiganshire, is a collection of loose stones, termed Caer Wyddno, "the fort or palace of Gwyddno;" and adjoining it are vestiges of one of the more southern causeways or embankments of Catrev Gwaelod. The depth of water over the whole extent of the bay of Cardigan is not great; and on the recess of the tide, stones bearing Latin inscriptions, and Roman coins of various emperors, have been found below high-water mark: in different places in the water, also, are observed prostrate trees.

And there are these linear rock features, known as Sarnau, which run hundreds of meters out into the sea. Modern geologists say they are just unusual glacial deposits, but you can see why medieval people thought they might be ancient causeways leading to now vanished islands. 

The "Submerged Forest of Ynyslas"

But what has gotten a lot of attention in recent years is the sunken trees. Starting around 2010, a series of storms, culminating in the hurricane of 2019, have exposed the remains of what people call "the submerged forest at Ynyslas." This was a temperate forest, with oak, pine, birch, willow and hazel trees. Radiocarbon dating places its drowning around 4000 to 5000 years ago. 

So far as I can tell, there is no agreement about whether there might have been solid land in Cardigan Bay in 1300. But there are scholarly articles arguing that there was. If so, it would have been quite low-lying, and notice that the Gough Map does not show any village on the islands. So if there was land, it was presumably marshy and used mainly for grazing cattle.

So many stories in the world, so much history, so much to occupy my mind.

Hell in Nineteenth-Century China

Life is Short, a demon

In his amazing history of what we usually call the Taiping Rebellion, God's Chinese Son: the Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan, (1996) Jonathan Spence takes a long look at the ritual calendar of southern China in the early 1800s. It was astonishingly dense. Essentially every day was sacred to some being or another, from Bodhisattvas to the spirits of local springs, so a superstitious person of the era must have been very busy propitiating all those powers. For example, the first day of the first lunar month belongs to the Maitreya Buddha, who rules the future, usually depicted as a fat and smiling man; he should be propiated with prayer and by vows to respect the will of heaven. 

The eighth day, in contrast, belongs to Yan Luo, known to all as the king of hell. Strangely, though, the Jade Record notes that Yan Luo has lost his former proud position as lord of the first of the hellish palaces. In that role, long ago, he proved too compassionate to those who had been unjustly killed, and allowed them simply to return to earth again to lead new lives.

This Jade Record was one of the most widely circulated religious Chinese tracts in the 1820s and 1830s. Because its folk Buddhist theology seemed to Spence to be important background to the rise of Hong Xiquan and his loosely Christian "Heavenly Kingdom," he devoted several pages to its horrifically detailed description of what happened to souls in the afterlife. This disgression within a digression is my favorite part of God's Chinese Son, which may say something interesting about my own taste in history.

According to the text, those who spread copies of the Jade Record and encourage others to read it

not only escape the worst torments of hell, and bring prosperity to their families and descendants, but in the transmigration of their souls may be reborn as human beings, or even move to higher stages of life – men to the happy lands, and women to the lives of men.

but

those who ignore, deface, or mock the tracts will find no such mercy, but be condemned at death to descend to the lower layers hell and, according to their crimes on earth, move through each of the ten hellish places in turn.

Pictures in the Jade Record show, for those who cannot read, how the judged souls are transformed. Only a few return as happy, healthy humans. Of the others, some are allowed to stay human, yes, but condemned to be ugly, misshapen, poor, and ill; while many, according to their sins, return as horses, dogs, birds, fish, or creeping things.

Near the palace of the first hell is a tower 63 measures tall (= 9x7, so the product of two magical numbers; among their other accomplishments the Chinese created the world's most extenisve numerology). Devils take the unfortunate souls to the top of the tower, from where they can view the families they left behind and see that rather than mourning their loss they are 

cursing the dead one's memory, defying his instructions, selling off the goods and property he so painfully acquired, and battling through lawsuits for what is left.

After this discouragement they are assigned to one of sixteen dungeons.

Under the Highest God's general supervision, each of the other nine gods of hell has his holy day, and an invocation that, if correctly and respectfully uttered, may war off his rage. Cumulatively, among themselves, they judge every foible of which humans are capable, and few will escape bing punished by them. The role of the god who rules the first hell is a prelimninary scrutiny of the newly dead, prior to passing them on to others. In his palace hangs a mirror, called the Mirror of Reflection, where all must see their own sins through their own eyes. 

The catalog of sins and sinners in the Jade Record is very extensive:

Thither go the quack doctors, the priests who deceive children of either sex to be their acolytes, people who sequester other's scrolls or pictures, marriage go-betweens who lie about their clients charms. Hither come shop clerks who deceive their customers, prisoners rightfully condemned who escape from jail and avoid punishment, grave robbers, tax evaders, posters of abusive bills, and negotiators of divorce. . . .

Death Has Gradations, another demon

Souls are guided through this process by two demons known as Life is Short (that's him at the top of the post) and Death Has Gradations, above. 

It is always hard to know what to make of such notions. On the one hand, there was no shortage in China of all the things the lords of hell were supposed to punish, so the warnings may not have been very effective. On the other, people have devoted a remakable amount of effort to propitiating unseen powers: building temples, performing pilgrimages, carrying out rites of a thousand kinds. Belief, as I have said many times, is a hard thing to quantify, but there are certainly senses in which it matters a great deal.

The Fairy Melusine, the House of Lusignan, and the Château de Saint-Jean-d’Angle

The Château de Saint-Jean-d’Angle is a modest castle in the west of France, surrounded by salt marshes along the Seudre River, near the mouth of the Garonne. The original castle was a plain shell keep, a type more common in England than France. The exact date of its contruction is much disputed, with various sources offering dates from the 980s to the 1280s; I lean toward the reign of Henry II of England, 1154-1189. Much of what you see today dates to a major restoration completed in 1624, as shown by a dated stone in the foundation of the hall. But anyway the castle might be quite old, which is crucial to its contemporary reputation. 

Because whenever it was built, it belonged to the Lords of Lusignan. The Lusignan family was famous for two things. First, their part in the Crusades and the Latin East in general; one branch became the Kings of Jerusalem when that title meant ruling mainly over Cyprus. Second, they are supposed to have been made great by the Fairy Melusine. One of the things Melusine is supposed to have done is built a bunch of castles for her Lusignan husband, and the propaganda of the privately owned castle proudly proclaims it the only Lusignan castle remaining from the time of Melusine.

The earliest full version of the Melusine story was The Romance of Poitou or Lusignan, alias the Tale of Melusine, composed around 1390 by Jean d'Arras. Arras said he was following "old chapbooks and spinning tales," and there is no reason to doubt him, since various elements of the story are ancient and widespread. The first historical figure in the House of Lusignan was Hugh I, who would have lived around 900 AD. In fact the first six Lords of Lusignan were all named Hugh, which creates certain difficulties for tying the legend to history, since in the Romance the Lord of Lusignan is named Raymondin. But who cares! Let's just say our castle dates to "the time of Melusine" anyway.

The story of Melusine starts like this:

One day while King Elainas was out hunting he stopped to quench his thirst at a spring, whereby he heard the voice of a woman singing. Here he met the fairy Pressine, though he questioned her he could not learn from where she came. They were married with the one condition that Elainas promise to never interrupt her while she was lying-in. Pressine gave birth to triplets, three daughters; Melusine, Meliot, and Palatine. Upon hearing the news that Pressine had given birth, Elainas could not contain his joy and burst in upon her while she was bathing her daughters. Pressine flew into a wrath of anger and promised that from then on her descendants would avenge her. She left with her daughters for the home of her sister the Queen of the Lost Island.

Medieval illustrators loved this discovery scene

The theme of broken taboos repeats twice more in the story, always leading to disasters. Melusine's personal curse, acquired by violating one of her mother's prohibitions, is that every Saturday her lower body turns into a snake. She eventually marries Raymondin of Lusignan, strictly prohibiting him from ever seeing her on Saturday, which of course he eventually does, but not until after they have had ten sons, each with a different strange deformity, and she has made the family rich and powerful. The Lusignans have lots of descendants, including both the Hapsburgs and the English royal line, so the story became quite famous across Europe.

My personal favorite story from the Romance concerns Geoffrey of the Giant Tooth, one of Melusine's sons, who went crazy and massacred a hundred monks over an incident invovling one of the monastery pigs. Incidentally Melusine didn't die at the end but only sank into a rock, and if you find her golden key you can set her free and marry her. But I'm not sure I recommend her as a spouse.

As a prominent house the Lusignans had many homes much grander than our little castle. Their main seat, Lusignan, is illustrated in the Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry, but nothing of it remains standing.

But back to Le Château de Saint-Jean-d’Angle. Poitou was fought over for centuries by the kings of England and France, and one assumes that the castle had some role in these wars, but neither the usual online sources nor the PowerPoint-mad local historian of Belle Saintonge has any details.

The first known fight at the castle took place in 1568, when it was besieged by Protestant forces during the Wars of Religion. This did "significant damage" to the castle, which is presumably why it needed the major restoration of 1624. The restoration was carried out by Charlotte Saint-Gelais de Lusignan, about whom I have been able to find out nothing else. At that time the castle acquired a carving showing Melusine in her bath, or so written sources say, but it must not look like much because I can't find a picture of it.

By 1990 the castle is pretty bad shape, as this image shows. Removal of the vegetation, I read, revealed "catastrophic" conditions.

In 1994 it was acquired by a businessman named Alain Rousselot. Rousselot got some grants from the French government and restored it, turning it into a "medieval theme park" with trebuchet demonstrations and the like.

Whatever it takes, I guess. And if "from the time of Melusine" helps draw people in, I'm not really going to complain about that, either.

The Battle of Summerdale and the Witch's Prophecy

In 1529 there was a small battle on the Island of Orkney, known as the Battle of Summerdale. This was, in the best tradition, a fight about taxation. The Earl of Orkney was at that time a young boy, so the right to collect his taxes had been sold to tax farmers who were widely hated. Two illegitimate half-brothers of the Earl eventually rebelled. They seized control of Orkney and declared 1) they were now in charge; and 2) taxation was eliminated and the tax farmers outlawed. But the friends of the Earl's mother responded by raising a force of 500 men under the command of the Earl of Caithness and invading Orkney. The story:

It was said that when the Earl of Caithness and his troops landed in Orphir, a witch walked before them on the march.

The crone unwound two balls of wool - one blue, the other red. The red ball was the first to run out and the witch assured the Earl that the side whose blood was spilled first would certainly be defeated.

It would appear that the Earl put great faith in the witch's proclamation. So much so that he was determined to slay the first Orcadian he met - man, woman or child - to ensure his victory on the day.

The first person he met was a defenceless young herd boy. The Caithness men fell on the hapless youth and murdered him. Only after the lad lay dead at their feet did they learn from the witch that their victim was no Orcadian - he was a Caithness boy who had taken refuge in Orkney.

Unnerved by this event, the Caithness men quickly broke when the fighting started, casting their weapons into Kirbister Loch and fleeing. Those who did run fast enough were killed.

Lewis Hyde, "Trickster Makes this World"

Trickster Makes this World (1998) is a semi-famous book about twentieth-century art, 90 percent of which focuses on the worldwide myth of the Trickster. The book has been extravagantly praised, but not by anthropologists or folklorists; it is artists and writers who love it. I am enough of a folklorist and anthropologist to understand why it might bother academic researchers – and, I imagine, storytellers rooted in Native traditions – but taken for what it is, it is quite wonderful.

I can remember first encountering traditional trickster tales and being both baffled and disgusted. In some traditions, stories of characters like Raven, Coyote, and Rabbit are the most holy lore, told only in winter, in complete darkness. Some of them concern first things: creation, the separation of earth from heaven, the origin of death. And yet, they are bizarre, ridiculous, disgusting, and immoral. In various stories Coyote plucks out his eyes and sends them for a walk, eats his way out from under a mountain of shit, burns his own anus when he mistakes it for a monster's mouth, lies, steals, cheats, disobeys direct orders from the high gods, and violates every taboo. Coyote is a creature of monstrous appetites for food, sex, and fun, frequently unable to restrain his desires. There is a whole class of stories in which somebody tells Coyote, "but above all, don't do X," whereupon Coyote immediately does X.

Why would sacred stories of cosmic origins be mixed up with such nonsense?

When Christian missionaries encountered such stories, first in Africa and then around the world, they often associted Trickster deities with Satan. They weren't just demonizing the enemy, but had understood something vital about these myths. In the Christian tradition it is the temptation of Adam and Eve by the Serpent that sets human history in motion, breaking the perfect sterility of life in Eden and launching us onto the path of birth, death, creation, and destruction. Many Tricksters do the same. As the missionaries saw, they played the part of Satan, evoking and invoking the desire that condemns humanity to life in a world where we can walk freely, but which is walled around with time and death.

One way to think about life is to imagine a balance between order and chaos; too much of either is intolerable. Other gods have a strong tendency toward order. Trickster upsets their orderly systems, breaks their rigid rules, and helps turn a perfect but perfectly boring universe into the crazy one we know. 

To Hyde, this is what avant garde art does. It shakes up our world by breaking rules and pointing the way from sterile stasis toward something more vibrant and interesting. Some modern artists, notably Picasso, have embraced this role and publicly identified with the Trickster. I wrote here several years ago that I see Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei as a Trickster figure, joking his way through a profound challenge to Chinese authority.

In one interesting section Hyde asks why avant garde art has often been criticized for obscenity. Systems of order, he writes, are often inscribed on bodies; the way people dress and carry themselves is often seen as the most powerful expression of social control:

It should by now be easier to see why there will always be art that uncovers the body, and artists who speak shamelessly, even obscenely. All social structures do well to anchor their rules of conduct in the seemingly simple inscrption of the body, so that only after I have covered my privates am I allowed to show my face to the world and have a public life. The rules of bodily decorum usually imply that the cosmos depends on the shame we feel about our bodies. But sometimes the lesson is a lie, and a cunningly self-protecting one at that, for to question it requires self-exposure and loss of face, and who would want that? Well, trickster would, as would all those who find that they cannot fashion a place for themselves in the world until they have spoken against collective slience. We certainly see this – not just the speaking out but the self-exposure – in Allen Ginsberg. . . . To the degree that other orders are linked to the way the body is inscribed, and to the degree that the link is sealed by rules of silence, the first stuttering questioning of those orders must always begin by breaking the seal and speaking about the body. (p. 172)

That's a typical bit of Hyde on art, using the cosmic significance of Trickster's ludicrous amorality to deepen our understanding of art from which many people have recoiled.

Another theme Hyde finds in Trickster stories is a dialogue about power, fate, and divinity. Many West Africans, and their New World descendants, use divination via lots to ascertain the will of the gods. But in many stories, the gods themselves resort to divination. What are they consulting, if not themselves? In the African traditions, divination was created by the Trickster figure – Eshu, Legba – when he separated the human and divine worlds. The most important conduit between heaven and earth, therefore, passes through the unreliable hands of the Trickster. Tricksters represent the limits on the Gods' power; they can do many things, but not control Raven, Coyote, or Eshu. This is why Trickster figures are abhorent to the Abrahamic faiths, which cannot accept any limit on God's majesty, and do not admit that there any situations when divine commandments should be disobeyed.

But if the Gods are good, and all powerful, and love us, why are things the way they are? Maybe because Trickster screwed up the Plan. In so doing, he gave us the opportunity to live freely, and to make choices that matter. But his gifts bear with them shreds of the original chaos against which the other Gods erected their creation. We may be free to walk along the cosmic border for a while, but in the world Trickster made we never cross to safety, and eventually fall back into the void.

Father Jetté wanted very much to make a collection of tales, but there were difficulties. The Ten'a were reluctant to let the Raven stories be put in writing, for one thing (though another group of tales – "the inane stories," Jetté calls them – could be had for the asking). Jetté tried to transcribe tales as they were being told, but the utter darkness frustrated him. Nobody would repeat the stories in daylight, and at night whenever he struck a match to light a candle, the storyteller fell instandly silent.

Coptic Magical Papyri

I just discovered the web site of the Coptic Magical Papyri project, devoted to assembling all of the known Coptic magical texts from late antique Egypt. They have cataloged about 600 of these texts, mainly spanning the 3rd to 7th centuries AD, with a few from later centuries. Most are written on papyrus but a few were scratched onto potsherds.

The collection spans the transition from paganism to Christianity to Islam; the texts note the changes in the names of the beings evoked, but otherwise remain much the same. Of the text above they write:

on the left is a prayer attributed to the Archangel Michael (depicted at bottom right, with his two "powers"), while on the right are a series of recipes for which the prayer can be used – a curse to put someone into a coma-like state, a reconciliation spell, a spell to ensure fidelity, another to protect animals from evil sorcery, one to protect a children in childbirth, and a general ritual of protection.

In this blog post, they explore the different kinds of spells in their collection. As you would expect, healing and protection are the most common types, with a lot of overlap between them. "Unlcear" are mainly prayers, which they say are probably also protective. The most fun categores are love spells and curses, especially the curses aimed at breaking up couples or ruining their sex lives. Fascinating that they have a few spells that were supposed to give the patron a better voice; whether this was for singing or speaking is not specified.

The web site opens a door into a scholarly kingdom of magic, with links to other digital projects, conferences, printed collections, and so on. Most of these people justify themselves by saying the magical texts are great sources for social history, but it seems to me that many of them just love reading spells and incantations in arcane languages. There is no topic in this field that somebody is not investigating, from the role to scent in magical ritual to the law surrounding cursing. To give you an idea of the depth of this scholarship, consider this article:

The Greek magical papyri are full of marginalia, in which scribes make notes to themselves, or correct or add to the text, but these have generally been ignored in the past since they are almost invisible in the existing editions and translations. This article provides a detailed overview of the marginal notes in the manuscripts of the Theban Magical Library.

The project blog actually covers a wide variety of magical texts, including Aramaic incantation bowls, one of which includes this text:

By my door I sit, I, Gusnazdukt daughter of Ahat; the Babylonian (spell) I cast. In the rubbish I sit, I Gusnazdukt daughter of Ahat; the (spell) of Borsippa I cast into the crumbling earth, I whom no-one restrains.

The importance of gates of various kinds, including ordinary doorways, might be one of the "principles" of magic that I always mourn the absence of. And shouldn't there be some kind of demonic being called "I whom no-one restrains"?

The Monkey King

I just finished reading Monkey, I am glad I did. This is Arthur Whaley's abridged, 300-page translation of a Chinese classic titled Journey to the West, generally known in English as The Monkey King. It appeared in 1592. The manuscript of this 1,000-page epic was not signed, but most authorities think it was written by a gentleman named Wu Cheng'en. That doesn't settle the question of authorship, though, because people have been debating for 430 years how much of the story Wu (or someone else) took from older texts and oral folktales and how much he made up.

The Monkey King is a very weird story.

It has three parts that are quite different from each other. In the first, the Monkey King wakens from stone and gathers all the monkeys around him in a kingdom where they eat fruit and have fun all day. Then they have some trouble with their neighbors and end up forming a military state, and their king becomes an invincible warrior.

But Monkey is restless and ambitious and after a few centuries of ruling the monkeys he decides he wants to become immortal. So he enters into study with a great Taoist sage. What he studies and how is left very vague, but anway he somehow acquires an array of magic powers known as the 72 Transformations and gets himself invited up to heaven. The story's heaven is a bizarre mishmash of Chinese traditions, ruled by the Jade Emperor (a Confucian figure) with a whole court of generals, bureaucrats, scholars, and hangers on; Lao Tzu and his Daoist friends are there, mixing elixirs of immortality. Monkey goes on a sort of rampage, eating all the peaches in the garden of immortality, ruining the Emperor's annual feast, and so on. The Emperor sends his 40,000 immortal soldiers against Monkey, but they cannot defeat him. So the Emperor has to call in Buddha, who challenges Monkey to race across a vast plain toward four distant mountains. Monkey does so and thinks he has proved his prowess, until Buddha reveals that he has been running for weeks across the Buddha's palm. His power demonstrated, Buddha seals Monkey under a stone mountain for 500 years.

After 500 years Buddha finally releases Monkey to undertake a mission, accompanying a monk Whaley calls Tripitaka on a journey to India to acquire Buddhist scriptures. Together with two other demonic persons and a dragon transformed into a horse (see image at top), Monkey escorts Tripitaka to his destination and back, rescuing the unworldly monk from one disaster after another. In the original they have 81 separate misadventures, 81 being a sacred Buddhist number, and end up as immortal Buddhist sages.

This "journey to the west" is based on a true story. During the Sui (581-618) and Tang (618-907) Dynasties, China went big for Buddhism, which became a deep part of the culture and the main focus of religion in the court. But their knowledge of Buddhism was, many felt, limited by the poor quality and limited number of Buddhist texts they had available. So a monk named Xuanzang (602–664) undertook a journey to India to obtain better texts. He left in 629, defying the emperor, who had, in a classic Chinese move, banned all travel to other nations on the grounds that foreign influences were corrupting Chinese culture.

Xuanzang was gone from 629 to 645, and he returned with what sounds like a wagon-load of texts. These comprised what were called in Sanskrit the Tripitaka, that is, the Threefold Way. Xuanzang was lionized by the Tang court and quite a few statues of him were set up, some of which survive. An account of his journey was written by court scholars, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions. This is one of those fascinating medieval travelogues that mixes up what seem to be authentic descriptions of foreign lands with outlandish bits, like a race between dragons. The monks of one temple tell Xuanzang that Buddha preached in their land while flying in the air, because his footsteps caused earthquakes.

This event made such an impression in China that it acquired the vast array of folk embellishment that Wu Cheng'en recorded. Along the way Xuanzang lost his name and took on that of the scriptures he acquired, Tang Sanzang, which is just the Chinese transliteration of Tripitaka. 

The story is hugely popular across East Asia, and there are many versions in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. The most recent is Dragonball, a Japane manga and then anime that has spawned more than 300 televised episodes and half a dozen movies. In this version a human boy named Goku, with a monkey tail, lives out the story from Journey to the West, helping a sage search for the Dragonball. I watched bits of this over my sons' shoulders and knew vaguely that it was based on the Monkey King, but I just discovered that Goku-son is how the Chinese characters for Monkey King would be pronounced in Japanese.

I don't recommend Monkey as a story for your reading pleasure; it is too weird, absurd, and repetitive for modern readers. But I found it to be a fascinating glimpse into Asian folklore and in particular to beliefs about magic, immortality, and heaven. It will be good fodder for my own stories and games.