The Jacobin Church, Toulouse

If, like me, you associate the word "Jacobin" with certain radicals of the French Revolution, the name of the Jacobin Church probably puzzles you. But the revolutionary Jacobins took their name from the place where they met, an old Dominican monastery. The original Jacobins were the French Dominicans, who acquired that name because their Parisian headquarters was on the Rue de St. Jacques. And that is why this wonderful church bears the name of the bunch of Revolutionary atheists.

The Dominican Order was founded in Toulouse in 1215 by Dominic of Osma, to combat the Cathar heresy through preaching. They later came to be associated with the Inquisition, which is why the French revolutionaries suppressed them in 1789. But at the time of their founding they were a small order of wandering preachers. So their first church. built beginning in 1230, was a modest brick structure. Since they still took their vows of poverty seriously, it was also very plain.

But as these things went, they got richer and more famous and more proud, and their church grew and grew. First nave was lengthened to more than twice that of the whole original church. Then, in 1275 to 1292, it was made much taller, and the wonderful glass windows were installed. There were some problems with raising the walls that much higher on the original foundation, so a row of pillars was built to hold the roof.

Including this pillar, known as the palm tree.

And of course side chapels were added, especially one to Stain Antonin, a local martyr.  The surviving paintings, made in 1335-1341, are what drew me.

Details.

In 1368 the relics of St. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican, were translated to this church, and there they remain.

But someone was not especially impressed; directly behind St. Thomas' is this amusing bit of sculpture, known as the Little Crushed Man. Feeling the weight of all that Scholastic logic?

Now a museum, this looks like a delightful place to visit.

Gloom from the CIA

From the assessment of the world situation the US intelligence agencies issue every 4 years:

During the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has reminded the world of its fragility and demonstrated the inherent risks of high levels of interdependence. In coming years and decades, the world will face more intense and cascading global challenges ranging from disease to climate change to the disruptions from new technologies and financial crises.  These challenges will repeatedly test the resilience and adaptability of communities, states, and the international system, often exceeding the capacity of existing systems and models. This looming disequilibrium between existing and future challenges and the ability of institutions and systems to respond is likely to grow and produce greater contestation at every level.

In this more contested world, communities are increasingly fractured as people seek security with like-minded groups based on established and newly prominent identities; states of all types and in all regions are struggling to meet the needs and expectations of more connected, more urban, and more empowered populations; and the international system is more competitive—shaped in part by challenges from a rising China—and at greater risk of conflict as states and nonstate actors exploit new sources of power and erode longstanding norms and institutions that have provided some stability in past decades. These dynamics are not fixed in perpetuity, however, and we envision a variety of plausible scenarios for the world of 2040—from a democratic renaissance to a transformation in global cooperation spurred by shared tragedy—depending on how these dynamics interact and human choices along the way.  

Here's an interesting observation:

Large segments of the global population are becoming wary of institutions and governments that they see as unwilling or unable to address their needs. People are gravitating to familiar and like-minded groups for community and security, including ethnic, religious, and cultural identities as well as groupings around interests and causes, such as environmentalism.

Of course one factor driving ethnic conflict is migrant flows; as of 2020, 270 million people are living in states they migrated to, 100 million more than in 2000.

So at the CIA they think 

1) Globalization, technological change and climate change are going to keep throwing crises at us,

2) while our confidence in governments to solve these problems declines, leading more and more people to turn toward other sorts of solutions, such as ethnic separatism,

3) and the old-fashioned threat of Chinese nationalism simmers.

Have a nice day!

Data on the Non-Religious in the US

Three recent surveys have put the number of people in the US with no religion as 21%, 25%, and 32%. The usual explanation for the broad spread is that people are still sorting out how they feel about religion, so their answer is quite sensitive to how the question is asked. The Cooperative Election Study offered respondents three separate possibilities: atheist, agnostic, and "nothing in particular." It fascinates me that "nothing in particular" was one of the most common responses at 21%, about the same as Catholic or Evangelical. (Atheist got  6%, Agnostic 5%) This suggests to me that the majority of "nones", as pollsters call them, are people who just never think about religion at all.

You might think that the decline is focused in young people, especially young liberals, but that is not so; faith is declining is every ethnic, age, economic and political category. Pew's data looks like this:

The decline over the last decade in the share of Black (-11 percentage points) and Hispanic adults (-10 points) who are Christians is very similar to the decline among white adults (-12 points). The number of college graduates leaving the faith (-13 points) is similar to those without degrees (-11 points). The decline in organized religion is indeed much bigger among Democrats (-17 points) than Republicans (-7 points) and among Millennials (-16 points) compared to Baby Boomers (-6 points), but the trend is very broad.

The CES survey (remember they found the largest percentage of "nones") shows even less variation across these groups, and in particular almost identical declines in every age group.

None of these surveys finds any evidence that the decline is slowing; CES finds it accelerating, with numbers that make "nones" the majority in a decade. Gallup just reported that less than half of Americans belong to a religious congregation of any sort, for the first time ever, so maybe that makes sense. There is plenty of data showing that faith fades rapidly among those who have no religious affiliation.

As to where this will take us, I think we can already see. The right wing will become less traditionalist and more nationalist, or Trumpist. For a decade at least Republicans will continue to support "religious freedom" to keep Evangelical votes, but what happens after that is unclear to me; a split between tough-guy nationalists and people who believe in faith and old-fashioned ("classical") education seems plausible.

Meanwhile religion's substitutes will continue to appeal very broadly but especially on the left: anti-racist wokeness is one powerful version, and various groups are trying to make longing for a Revolution another. 

The one thing I do not think will happen is that a decline in religiosity will lead to a major increase in rationality. Or happiness.

Links 16 April 2021

Ivan Bilibin, Saints Boris and Gleb, 1926

Short video of a lightning strike destroying a tree, stunning.

Archaeologists say 100,000-year-old footprints found on an ancient Spanish beach represent a clan of 36 Neanderthals, the adults walking in straight lines and children frolicking among them.

Eight-minute video of an animated show depicting the life of Vincent Van Gogh, using 600 lighted drones.

According to this story, many psychologists think teenagers won't suffer from their "lost year" unless grown-ups constantly harp on how bad it was. (New York Times)

Maryland repeals its "Police Bill of Rights," enacts stricter limits on police violence.

There is a drug that makes opioid pain relievers more effective, giving people better relief at much lower doses: amphetamines. This has, I discover, been known for 50 years. Of course learning enough about the details of the best regimen has been a bit of a challenge, but it looks like this is still worth it. (Via Scott Siskind's monthly link post)

Roman strongbox – basically a stoutly made chest with a lot of metal fittings – from the 4th century AD found in Spain.

Is American politics too meta?

Giant Pterosaurs raise a lot of questions, including, how could they carry prey without snapping their meters-long necks? New CT scans of vertebrae reveal complicated structures that provide part of the answer. 

And a 2019 New York Times piece on the evidence that pterosaur babies could fly right out of the egg.

Something I knew nothing about: the hunting traditions of Taiwan's indigenous people and the conflict over them. (New York Times)

Syrian/French artist Khaled DAWWA has turned his experience with various forms of detention into a series of sculptures called "Compressed."

Thomas Edsall examines the contradictions of "woke capitalism." (New York Times)

Agarwood, rare, valuable, fascinating. And Swamp Kauri.

Another writer rather mysteriously maintains that "The risks associated with the literary and artistic vocation have risen." Indeed there is still censorship, and indeed there is still risk in art, but we have now hardly compares to, say, the 16th century, or the Cultural Revolution. The need some people have to think things are getting worse has always puzzled me.

Biden promises complete withdrawal from Afghanistan: "We're going to zero troops by September."

London's COVID Memorial Wall, with 150,000 painted hearts.

Brazilian phot0ographer Vitor Schietti's "Dancing Light Paintings"

Against apocalyptic thinking, pretentious and literary but still interesting

John McWhorter is posting excerpts from his new book on his substack; the book argues that woke anti-racism, which he calls Electism, is racist and horrible for black people. 

Trying to cleanse computer science of racist language: master, slave, blacklist, etc. The immediate problem is that since the IETF can't agree on new terms, various programming groups are inventing their own, raising the possibility of much misunderstanding (New York Times)

More Spring

Scott Siskind on Próspera

Próspera ia a planned "Charter City" on an island off the coast of Honduras. At the moment it is a very small deal, just 58 acres with three buildings. But its backers, mostly rich libertarians, want to make it a beacon of good government and prosperity, transform by example the badly-governed parts of the world, etc. Its opponents come from two camps, the anti-colonial nationalists who think this infringes Honduran sovereignty and smacks of colonialism, and the leftists who think it portends a corporate-dominated anti-utopian nightmare.

The people of Próspera will mostly be Honduran citizens, and Honduran criminal law will apply. It will not have its own port or international airport, so entry will still be controlled by Honduras. It's a pretty limited sort of autonomy. But the backers still think they can create such a good business climate that people will flock there.

I think it is unlikely to amount to much of anything. But if I lived in Honduras, I would be intrigued; equally if I lived in Nigeria, Mali, Myanmar, or any of the other countries in the world where the people are suffering from bad government, bad institutions, and bad history. If you don't like this scheme, what's your plan for helping people in those countries lead decent lives? Complaining that the whole problem with those countries is centuries of outside meddling is not helpful; even if that is true, the meddling happened and it can't be undone now. I can see worrying that more outside meddling is inevitably going to screw things up just like it has in the past, but, again, what is the alternative? Waiting for the government of Honduras to become wise, and its drug gangs to become pacifists?

Scott Siskind has a long look at the project, going at least a little into the weeds of the legal and political background. Here is his conclusion:

Thousands of Hondurans make the dangerous journey to the United States in search of freedom, safety, and a living wage. They're tired of poverty and murder and corruption and think that a well-run polity with capitalist institutions can help them build a better life. I can’t blame them one whit. America is a better place to live than Honduras. This isn't because Americans are smarter, or harder-working, or morally superior. It's because Honduras has bad institutions.

But these people will probably or get turned away at the border, or languish in ICE detention camps, or die en route. Right now, we’re failing these people, not to mention the thousands more who wish they could make the same journey but are too scared to try. Próspera wants to give these people a better option by bringing American-style institutions to Honduras. They're not going to displace any existing residents or include anyone who doesn't want to be included. They just want to give people who have been ill-served by statism and nationalism a choice other than traveling three thousand miles and scrambling over barbed wire fences.

If you were a completely ordinary Honduran, making $1,300 a year, having a medium lifetime risk of being murdered, with the government occasionally taking your land and killing you if you complained - would you want the option of moving to Próspera? With its civil rights, property rights, strong security, good education, and higher salaries? I have these things right now in America and they're great. I can't imagine wanting these privileges for myself and also working to deny them to others. The people who like statism, ultra-nationalism, and the status quo have an entire world to play around in, and it's turned out...well, you can see how it's turned out. The Prósperans want 58 acres to try something different.

I am not nearly this optimistic. The first problem scenario that comes to mind concerns those very wealthy and powerful drug gangs; what happens when they move into Próspera? Will the administrators go to war against them, or try to cut a corrupt deal? Either choice looks bad to me. And what happens when the next populist leftist becomes President of Honduras on a platform of sticking it to foreign interests? 

One reason Hong Kong and Singapore (two of their models) were successful is that they were backed by the British Empire, which protected them militarily, invested heavily in their infrastructure, and funneled trade to them. A handful of rich libertarians hardly compare as a base. 

I suspect this will have very modest success, perhaps as a center of medical tourism, but then either go bankrupt, be taken over, or fade away.

Heinrich Vogeler

Heinrich Vogeler (1872-1942) was a German artist who had two distinct careers. As a young man he was much taken up with Romanticism and did illustrations for fairy tales and the like. World War I turned him toward political activism. He took up pacifism, and then communism. In 1931, with Hitler on the rise, he fled Germany for the Soviet Union. When Germany invaded the USSR in 1941 all German citizens in the nation were shipped to Kazakhstan, where Vogeler died in 1942. (Portrait of his first wife, 1897)

Landscapes and garden studies of the 1890s and 1900s

Witch with Owl, 1895

Illustrations

And one work from his activist period, The Third Reich, 1934

A Hymn to Hestia

Hestia I turn to; Muses, let
My mouth be chaste and pure as she is -
Let me dress in white wool garments
And bind my brow with myrtle-leaves
Before I sing the inviolate goddess,
Hestia, bringing riches in her train.
She is oldest of gods, youngest too:
First to be born to lovely Rhea,
Last to issue forth from the belly
Of crooked-minded Cronus
Through black-cloud Zeus’s clever trick.
And so when men fend off hunger-pangs
They pour libations in Hestia’s name
Both first and last - as they sit at table
And as they rise, heavy with wine,
To totter home in half-dawn light.
Such was the will of Zeus the king
On the day he handed out rights and fiefdoms
To all the gods. None there was,
Lesser or greater, who did not long
To claim the hand of lady Hestia:
Apollo the shining sought to court her
And bade her share his bed of sheepskins
At Pytho, where of late he slew the serpent.
But though he was comely, with golden locks
And well-oiled skin, Hestia fled him
And crouched in supplication at Zeus’ knees -
Nor would she rise, until the Thunderer
Granted her wish that she never know
Aught of love, aught of desire.
To Apollo, in lieu of Hestia’s hand,
The son of Cronus with his close-packed counsels
Granted the first of blazing hearths,
And to this day it burns at Delphi
Deep within the innermost shrine,
Nor will the shrine-maidens let it go out
Lest they anger the veil-draped goddess.
Tell me, Muses, when do men
Who eat bread and toil on the rich black earth
Most revere the name of Hestia?
When winter comes, and icy sleet
Beats against the outer walls
Of every cottage, every farmstead.
Shrieking winds probe every chink
Between the boards - the husband hurries
To patch them tight with sticky clay.
His children huddle tight around
Their mother’s knees, as she tosses kindling
Onto the hearth. Orange and gold
It blazes up, and, mesmerized
By dancing flames, she calls upon
Rhea’s daughter to defend the household.
Nor is Hestia heedless.
From the corner where she sits
She stretches out her hand in blessing,
Warding off the deadly frost.
Through her power children grow strong,
Bear children of their own; the name
Of household, clan, even of city
Is not extinguished, so long as men
Are wise enough to tend her flame.
Hestia, defend my line,
My hearth and home; and in return
My hymn will keep your fame undying
Even as I turn to another song.

One of the "Homeric" Hymns, translated by The Lion of Chaeronea

The Dry Club

 From wikipedia, a description of an interesting organization:

One was an English group called the "Dry Club," which had philosopher John Locke, William Popple, and Benjamin Furly among its members during the 1690s. It met one evening a week for two hours at a time and required that its members reply affirmatively to the following questions:

Whether he loves all Men, of what Profession or Religion soever?

Whether he thinks no person ought to be harmed in his Body, Name, or Goods, for mere speculative Opinions, or his external way of Worship?

Whether he loves and seeks Truth for Truth's sake; and will endeavour impartially to find and receive it himself, and to communicate it to others?

Each member of the club would take turns proposing topics for discussion and moderating these discussions. The discussions were to be held in a spirit of open-minded tolerance:

That no Person or Opinion be unhandsomely reflected on; but every Member behave himself with all the temper, judgement, modesty, and discretion he is master of.

Paula McLain, "The Paris Wife"

The Hemingways in 1925, on Vacation in Austria

As I finished The Paris Wife, a huge bestseller in 2011, I found myself wondering how many other men had finished it. Can't be very many, I thought. Not that it's a bad book – there is much about it that is good, and it was a pleasant companion on a weekend of long drives. It is, though, pretty much the definition of a woman's book, one guaranteed to be much more popular with women than men. 

Here, to take just one example, is a sentence I am willing to bet no man has ever written: our heroine, holding her infant son while gazing at her husband, thinks, "Now there are two men, and they're both mine."

In these pages we meet Hadley Richardson, who narrates her five-year marriage with Ernest Hemingway. We travel to Paris in the 1920s, full of ex-pat writers: Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and several now-forgotten others. Hemingway befriends them, tries to learn from them, but also competes with them, tries to distinguish himself from them, eventually alienating most of them. He struggles to write, getting conflicting advice from a dozen directions but eventually breaking into his own with The Sun Also Rises (1926). 

So here is the plot, the skeleton of so many stories: there is a woman, directionless, lost, at least a little sad. She is beautiful and capable, but as yet nobody recognizes this. She meets a man who is dynamic and knows very well where he wants to go. He recognizes her special qualities and romances her, whisking her out of her boring life and into some sort of adventure. But he also needs her, because under his dynamic exterior he is a wounded emotional wreck. With the woman's help, he achieves something great. Sometimes they end up living happily after; sometimes there is a shipwreck, and the woman tells the story looking backward, sad that it ended but sure it was wonderful and important in its time.

And the reason Hadley and Ernest make a good subject for such a novel is that it is, so far as I can tell, true. She was lost and directionless, and when she met Ernest she had just spent months tending her dying mother. He wooed her in person and then with a torrent of letters. In The Paris Wife all of Hadley's friends warn her against Ernest; I have no idea if that is true, but I can well believe it, given that he was a wounded ex-soldier with no money and an abrasive personality, much given to alcohol and women. Plus he really was, under his bluster, an emotional wreck, desperately needing a woman's love to carry him through his darkness. He dedicated The Sun Also Rises to Hadley and signed all the royalties over to her, crediting her with sustaining him through years of poverty and struggle to that consummation. Of course we know that this can't be the happily every after sort of romance, since Hemingway had four wives and then killed himself. So it is a backward look at a hard but wonderful time, living in dingy little apartments, getting by with nothing, enduring emotional highs and lows, seeing triumph and tragedy; from her old age, Hemingway already dead, Hadley muses that she had the best of him; that those five years in Paris were the best of both their lives.

What some critics dislike about the book is the portrayal of Hadley. She drinks along with Ernest and the rest of that hard-drinking crew, but otherwise she comes across as sort of stodgy, the straight woman among eccentric rogues. She does lack an edge, and her speech is mostly bland and pleasant until her marriage breaks up and she lets loose a flood of bitterness. I thought it worked, that you can see why the dubiously sane, madly ambitious Hemingway was attracted to an old-fashioned, slightly boring woman who was untroubled by serving as a man's helpmeet. But Hadley actually did have a creative side, which she expressed by playing the piano well enough that her artistic friends were always badgering to perform professionally. Paula McLain, so far as I can tell, knows nothing about music or musicians; her Hadley plays a lot, in various moods, but the music never seems to mean anything to her, and she never tries to speak through it. In fact music is weirdly missing across the whole story: this is the Jazz Age, but with no jazz.

On the other hand McLain knows a lot about writers and writing. I was impressed by her treatment of the relationships between these writers, a brew of mutual admiration and jealousy. There are three or four short sections written from Ernest's point of view, in a good approximation of his style. There is a great scene of Fitzgerald and Hemingway pouring over a manuscript together, oblivious to everything else as they discuss whether one whole section should be removed. I loved what she did with The Sun Also Rises, which was loosely based on Hemingway's actual Paris friends, and on a trip he took with several of them to Pamplona for the festival that includes the Running of the Bulls. Somewhere in the middle of the book anyone who has read The Sun realizes that we are in that world. Two drunken men spar over a promiscuous woman, Brett in Hemingway's book but here called Duff, while their friends try to smooth things over and the woman refuses to take any responsibility. McLain's Hadley notices that Ernest is intrigued by Duff and experiences some jealous pangs. Then she reads the manuscript and recognizes her own recent past, except that she has been completely excised, leaving just Duff and the quarreling men. Hemingway's own stand-in, Jake Barnes, has been rendered impotent by his war wounds.

What is she to make of this? At first she is hurt to be left out, but then she sees the truth of Ernest's explanation that this is the story of people headed for rock bottom. Hadley is too sane to do that, and her love keeps the real world Ernest from doing that. So she has to be removed and the story stripped down to four ruined people, or the depths will never be reached. Duff intrigues Ernest, not as a potential love interest, but as a woman who is as broken and ruined as the men who fight over her. It's a fine account of how a serious writer transmutes his own experience into fiction, and also of how this might be wounding to people standing too close to the transmuting fires.

I thought The Paris Wife was ok, an interesting romance if you're into that sort of thing, and especially if you're interested in both romance and the 1920s. But mainly it set me musing on the differences between men's and women's stories. I think The Sun Also Rises and even more For Whom the Bell Tolls are definitive men's books, the sort I can't imagine a woman writing. So perhaps it is a useful corrective to revisit those years from the point of view of Hemingway's first wife, written in a way that, I think, only a woman would write it.

Car Commercials

The latest car ad YouTube foisted on me – mind you this was for a perfectly ordinary small SUV, no kind of sports car – went something like, "You deserve a car that thrills you, that puts goosebumps on your goosebumps."

Now, if there is one thing I do not want from my car it's goosebumps; what that phrase brings to my mind is all the years I drove worn out beaters, worrying that they might break down at any moment and strand me by the side of the highway.

I know I am not alone; I have in fact seen data on car buyers that rank performance pretty far down on down the list of things most car buyers want, well below dependability and price. So why aren't there any ads that say, "It's not much to look at or very fast, but it's cheap and reliable!"

Neil Price, "The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia"

The Viking Way is an amazing, impressive, fascinating and profoundly learned book, but not always in a good way.

It started as Neil Price's dissertation back in the 1990s, and a first edition appeared in 2002. At that time it was a standard-sized academic book, with very few illustrations. The second edition of 2019 is a large format book full of pictures, including amazing drawings of burials by Thorhallr Thrainson, and it also has added text and a new final chapter. In Price's praise, I will say this: I have been reading about the Vikings for going on forty years, and I learned many new things from this book.

But. 

It starts badly, because it still has the first chapter from that dissertation, one of the most appalling strings of flattering citations I have ever waded through; if I had been on his committee I would have told him to throw it out. Price seems very worried that you, the reader, might think he had not read a single important work about the Vikings, so they all get at least a sentence. He wants you to know that he is a scholar of great breadth, so he name checks Braudel, Simone Beauvoir, Konrad Lorentz, Foucault, and on and on. But he is also politically up-to-date and lectures us about the perils of western scholars using their knowledge of indigenous peoples to misrepresent them, or colonize them, or whatever. He is hip to Queer Studies. He seems positively terrified of offending any scholar currently working on Viking religion and magic, so he cites them all. There are a lot.

Modern Reconstruction of a Norse Magical Staff

Parts of the book are little encyclopedias. I enjoyed some this material: the list of all Odin's known names and titles, and those of the Valkyries; the description of every single iron staff recovered from a Norse grave (36 pages of iron staffs); the categorizing of every type of magic performed by Norse sorceresses. But it is certainly not light reading. Even harder going is the discussion of the words for Norse magic and magical practitioners. It is not Price's fault that the terminology varied across time and space in ways we need to understand if we want to read the sources properly, but the topic is very obscure and Price's account is hard to follow.

What redeems The Viking Way is Price's profound enthusiasm for his subject. I have never read a scholar who conveyed more love for his material than Price does. He thinks Viking magic is absolutely the most fascinating thing in the world, and he has thrown his whole soul into mastering everything there is to know about it. 

A strange burial from Sweden: a young woman buried sitting on an older man's lap, with a speak thrust into the ground above them, perhaps dedicating them to Odin

The main organizing theme of The Viking Way is shamanism, and the main question is: to what extent was Viking magic and religion shamanistic? This matters, says Price, because shamanism is not a random assemblage of techniques; it makes sense only if you believe certain things about the universe. Shamans imagine a universe full of spirits, and they believe that the actions of those spirits determine much of what happens to humans. The shamanistic universe is not friendly, but full of terrors, and they tend to think the whole universe will end badly, its fate is already fixed. The powers of a shaman can be used to mitigate, a little, the suffering of people trapped on this cruel planet; but shamans are just as likely to be troublemakers who are actively making things worse.

Viking shamanism has been debated for a century because it is a great problem. There is much evidence one could bring up to defend the notion. First and foremost is the story of Odin, chief of the Norse gods, who repeatedly acts exactly like a shaman. He rides on an eight-legged horse, as many Siberian shamans did in their visions. He has animal familiars. He hung himself on a tree for nine nights to obtain wisdom; for some shamans this was not a metaphor but something they actually did, spending many days and nights, tied to trees or standing on platforms, seeking. In one of the most famous Norse poems Odin describes all the magic spells he knows, and all can be found in the literature of Siberian shamanism. I find it hard to see how anyone could argue that Odin is not a shamanistic figure, although of course people do argue that.

The Norse were intimately acquainted with shamanistic neighbors, the Sami. The archaeology suggests that the Sami used to live farther south than they have in historic times, and Price has examples of what look like contemporary Norse and Sami communities on opposite sides of the same lake in central Sweden. The sagas tell us that Norwegians sometimes hired Sami magicians to cast spells for them, and several Norse sorcerers are said to have been trained by the Sami. So the medieval Norse must have known quite a lot about shamanism in its Sami form.

Norse magical practitioners made a habit of prophesying about the future, staging rituals that have much in common with those some Siberian shamans used when they predicted the future.

One of the most striking things about shamanism among Siberian peoples and Native Americans is its connections to sexuality and gender identity. In many cultures shamans are notoriously horny, and their public performances often involve simulated sex. In other places they must be completely chaste.  Many shamans are bisexual, and many dress as the opposite sex when performing their rituals. Among the Chukchi of eastern Siberia the most powerful male shamans stop being men and pass into a third gender, the "soft men," from then on dressing as women and doing women's work. Similar ideas are found among some Native Americans.

(Contemporary trans people are very interested in these gender shifts, but it should be noted that all these communities thought shamans were crazy, and gender transformation was often viewed as traumatic; among the Chukchi the process began when the shaman was raped and subjugated by a powerful demon while in a trance, and informants said this is so awful that a majority who experience it commit suicide.)

And there is a lot of sexuality and sexual identity swirling around Norse magic. Price cites a Norwegian law code that listed two insults so heinous one could legally respond to them with immediate violence: to call a man a passive homosexual, or to call him a sorcerer. The insinuation is that this was the same thing. There are several hints in the sagas (which were written by Christians and are reticent about sex) that male sorcerers were homosexual. Female sorcerers were often thought of as promiscuous. I think Price makes the case that the sexual issues surrounding Norse magic are parallel with those of Siberian shamanism.

But here's the problem: there is not, in Norse literature, a single clear description of a seer or seeress going into a trance state and returning from it with knowledge gathered in the Other Lands. Since that is the fundamental act that defines shamanism, how can we say that the Vikings were shamanistic?

Neil Price goes at this question from every angle he can think of. He pays particular attention to archaeology. A great deal of magical paraphernalia has been excavated from Norse tombs, including several women who seem to have been sorceresses. (See here on the Sorceress of Fyrkat, the most famous.) I love this stuff: the detailed analysis of amulets and seeds, the question of whether artifacts grouped together were in bags or hung from belts, how to tell a magical iron staff from a roasting spit.

The archaeology confirms the picture we get from the sagas, which is that the Norse believed in magical powers, and that practitioners were common and important figures. But it doesn't really tell us if anyone was a shaman in the full sense.

This brings us to Price's second main thesis about the Viking world, the centrality of violence. Other than the myths about Odin, the one place where we clearly see Vikings acting like shamans is on the battlefield. Berserks who fought in self-induced battle fury, beyond fear or pain, communing with the battle spirits (Valkyries) that haunted every warzone but could only be seen by the wise, are the mostly clearly shamanistic figures in the Norse world. To Price this makes perfect sense, because he believes the lives of Norse men (and warrior women, whom he believes in very much) were built around a cult of killing and death. Price's Odin is a death god first, and second and third, too. The Norse understood that shamanism was a way of seeking wisdom; that, after all, is what they imagined Odin doing, and there is a famous poem called Voluspa in which a seeress lays out the future doom of the world. But for themselves they were mainly interested in magic as a way of inflicting harm.

So to Price, Norse shamanism was a way they understood the cruel, violent universe in which they lived, and a way in which they sought to inflict more cruelty and violence on their enemies.

For a book like The Viking Way, though, a summary of the argument misses much of the point. The point is to ponder images of shamans in bear costumes set beside fragmentary felt masks from the Viking age, to read the roll of Odin's 215 titles, to imagine a seeress speaking from the high seat about the year to come, to imagine the king's berserks in the prow of his ship, shrieking and clashing their weapons as they try to enter a state of battle madness. To imagine ourselves as the archaeologist whose trowel uncovers the face of a sacrificial victim, dedicated to Odin by a spear thrust into the ground above her. It is the details that tell the story, and there are few books with more grand details than this one.

LInks 9 April 2021

The clipper ship Cutty Sark under sail

The medieval penitential "is sex sin" flowchart.

Excerpt from John Boehner's memoir describing the Republicans' turn toward craziness in 2010.

The History Blog: "The wooden lifeboat that carried the crew to safety after their ship wrecked off the western coast of Australia in 1891 has been found intact in the rafters of a hay shed."

The meter-wide, featureless, gelatinous blobs occasionally seen floating in the sea off Norway have been the subject of scrutiny and conspiracy theories for 35 years. They have now finally been identified as the egg sacs of a common squid, Illex coindetii

Many deep sea bacteria are completely invisible to the human immune system.

Interview with Pete Buttigieg about his new job as Secretary of Transportation (Washington Post)

Anger on the right: “Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”

Reaching the deepest known shipwreck.

Trying to redeem social psychology after the replication crisis.

Denver Riggelman is a former Republican Congressman who lost a primary in 2020 to a far-right character and now devotes himself to fighting QAnon and other disinformation. (New York Times)

I complained a while back that nobody knows how to move artifacts between museums with style any more. I was wrong.

Mysterious medieval seal depicting an elephant. 

The booming business of selling longleaf pine needles for mulch. (Washington Post)

The toxic mess in Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal is finally being cleaned up. In a New York desperate for more housing the de Blasio administration plans to rezone the surrounding area for 8,000 apartments and condos. Residents, of course, are suing to block the plan. (New York Times)

Spring Comes to the Woods

Green in the trees.

Green along the mill race trail.

Wildflowers. Today.

Carlo Labruzzi

Carlo Labruzzi (1748-1817) was a Roman draughtsman and painter best known for his scenes of ancient Roman ruins, including a series of 226 scenes along the Appian Way. Above, view of Rome from the Palatine Hill. You can access a whole book of his work here.