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.

Protection from Animal Bites in medieval Turkey

This 800-year-old bowl was found at Hasankeyf in southeastern Turkey, in a drain pipe under a small fortress. 

The idea with these bowls, which were common in the medieval Middle East, was that you swirled water in the bowl and then used it to wash wounds or just splashed it on your body protectively. This one, according to excavator Zekai Erdal's reading of the text, was specifically for healing of or protection from animal bites.

Besides the dog in the center it features a tour of greatest hits in magical stuff: a magic knot, a star of David, three pentagrams, a scorpion, a two-headed dragon, two magic squares and some verses from the Koran. Covering all the bases.

The Crane Bag and the Domestication of Myth

The Irish myths are really weird.

They are full of grotesque details, like, when the hero Cuchulainn went into his battle frenzy he had a fountain of frozen blood six feet tall sprouting from his forehead. They loop around in time, so that a man potrayed in one story as another's father will appear later as an infant in the house of his son. People keep being transformed into animals, or dying and being reborn. Sometimes gods create people, but in other stories people create gods. There is no beginning to the unvierse, and no end, just events that echo other events in a pattern more like a four-dimensional weaving than a linear narrative.

Nineteenth-century rationalists argued that this confusion meant the stories had somehow become "corrupted." Some thought this had happened in the course of oral transmission, while others pointed to the moment when they were written down by Christian monks. I subscribe to the view that, no, they were always like this. I think these stories reflect a view of time and the universe developed by the Druids around 500 to 350 BC, when Greek philosophers were also devoting a lot of attention to time and change. The Druids ended up teaching, I think, that linear time is an illusion, and that in a universe with no beginning and no end events keeping moving in cycles that echo, but do not exactly repeat, those of other times.

This brings me to the Crane Bag. In myth there is only one Crane Bag, with a story something like this:

The celebrated bag of Irish tradition was made by Manannán mac Lir and contained many treasures. Aífe [a famous woman] is transformed into a crane by a jealous rival, Luchra; she subsequently spends 200 years in the household of Manannán mac Lir. When she dies, he uses her skin to hold things precious to him. These included his knife and shirt, the king of Scotland's shears, the king of Lochlainn's helmet, the bones of Assal's swine, and the girdle of the great whale's back. At high tide the treasures are visible in the sea, but at ebb tide they vanish. 

Ok, so, on the one hand, this sounds like a bag made of bird skin, but on the other it holds the bones of an enormous whale. Also, it fills with sea water at high tide, and the treasures in the bag are "visible in the sea;" in fact there are a couple of points on the Irish coast that are supposed to be the place from which the treasures are visible.

Many modern interpreters, going back to the eighteenth century, have argued that what the bag actually held was the letters of the Ogham alphabet. There are some obscure verses that may say the form of the letters was copied from the positions of a crane's legs, and some clever person figured out how to connect the objects in the bag (knife, shirt, shears, helmet, pig bones, girdle) to the first six Ogham letters. Well, maybe, but it sometimes seems to me that with a little work you can connect anything in the Irish stories to literally anything else, which, again, may be part of the point. Plus, these clever commentators have not been able to explain why a bag holding the alphabet has tides.

Which brings me to yesterday, when I did a quick search for Crane Bag. (Don't ask.) What I found was, not references to this arcane tradition, but ads from crane bag sellers (the one above could be yours for $75) and instructions on how to assemble the contents of your own. These are, the ads assure me, "traditionally carried by druids."

Here's one example:

My Crane Bag is the size of a small messenger bag and holds some personal spiritual talismans, a few stones and crystals that help me focus, a couple of acorns, a feather, some shells and a few odds and ends. Because I like to strike out into unpopulated spaces, I’m practical, so also carry a Swiss army knife, compass, always a notebook and a couple of pens and pencils and a pencil sharpener since words are my system of divination. The best part? There’s still enough room for my keys and wallet. I’m prepared wherever I go and don’t need to take anything else. This leaves my hands free, so I can touch trees and stones and whatever else draws me.

This is an entirely modern tradition; there is in Irish myth only one Crane Bag, and it was not carried by a druid. I am not sure when this habit of making and carrying these bags developed, but so far as I can tell it is post-World War II. The obvious source for this kind of thing is Native American spirit bundles.

Here's a modern Druid who at least understands that this is a distortion of the myth:

Symbolically speaking, the Crane Bag isn’t a bag to hold things. The concept is actually closer to the Irish version of the Grail. According to legend, it appears and disappears, shifts guardianship and even shifts worlds – from sea to land, from god to hero. The crane is associated with death and rebirth and the labyrinth path between the worlds. So when you think on that, basically, the concept encompasses all the realms and planes and really becomes a representation for the interconnectedness of everything and the unity and harmony between all things in one.

Now, I don't want to tell other people how to be spiritual, and really what they choose to carry in their $75 bags is none of my business.

But I wanted to comment on this because it represents a human tendency that I think constantly gets in the way of understanding myth: taking things literally. You know, Plato tries to tell a story about an imaginary perfect city,  and the next thing you know people are diving off the Azores and claiming to find pieces of it. The Voyage of Saint Brendan is a distorted narrative of an actual journey to America. Robin Hood was really [insert the historical Robert you prefer]. 

The basic structure of this discourse is: X is really Y. 

One of the most common forms in this genre is the search for the oldest form of a myth, the most authentic form, which is sometimes dubbed the "original" version. If there are five different stories about the great magician Math son of Mathonwy, in some of which he is clearly human, in others apparently immortal, well, there must be an original version in which he was one or the other. 

Caesar tells us that the Druids refused to write down their doctrines. I understand their thinking, because as soon as you write something down, even something as bizarre as the old Irish myths, somebody comes along as says, "Oh, you really meant this." Or, "Why is your teaching so garbled? It must have gotten corrupted. Here, let me help you reconstruct the original version."

(The druids throw up their hands and stomp away, muttering, We had better rebel against this Caesar fellow before he and all the other rationalists ruin Gaul. Call Vercingetorix.)

Sometimes X may actually be a distorted memory of Y; that happens a lot in myth. But that doesn't in any way imply that you can understand the meaning of X, to the person who told the story, by reference to Y. 

After forty years of thinking about Celtic myth, and myth in general, I believe more and more that the details of the stories matter very little. When you are presented with half a dozen similar stories about similar-sounding people, you should probably not obsess over the differences. Don't try to put them in order; don't try to figure out which is more authentic. Don't try to arrange the characters in a neat family tree. If a story makes no sense to you, maybe rather than trying to "figure it out" you should step back and ask what kind of feeling it evokes, just as it is. Let the words wash over you; let the story shock you and move you.

Don't, whatever else you do, try to put it in a bag.

Mirror Worlds

John Dee's obsidian mirror, made in Mexico

If you want a simple definition of magical thinking, try this: the world we see can't possibly be all there is.

This basic belief manifests in a thousand different ways, but the one I'm going to focus on today is this: there are other worlds besides the one we live in, and there are ways to cross from one world to another, in both directions. To which a common corollary is, magical power comes from other worlds. The basic paradigm here is the shaman, whose souls leaves his or her body and travels to other worlds in search of knowledge and power, but there are of course many other versions. 

In worldwide folklore, one way to access other worlds is with a mirror. This idea appears to be extremely ancient, and it persists to this day in the form of superstitions about covering mirrors after a death in a house and so on. Horror movies love it. One of the amusing things I stumbled across researching this post was detailed instructions on how to create a photograph that seems to show your face and its monstrous reflection.

Egyptian mirror, c. 1500 BC

Mirrors have been endlessly fascinating to humans since we first learned to make them, and they appear in our lore in, again, a million ways. They are just cool objects to play with and think about. 

J.W. Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, detail

Our reflections fascinate us. What are they, and what is their connection to us? There is worldwide folklore that associates the reflection with the soul and asserts that injuries to the reflection can hurt the person. (E.g., vampires have no reflections because they have no souls.) There is an even vaster lore in which the reflection soul is trapped, either by an enemy sorceror or a sinister being residing in the reflecting pool. One school of thought maintains that the story of Narcissus as it comes down to us is an altered, civilized version of an ancient story in which Narcissus' soul was trapped by the spirit of a pool. Which is, incidentally, an important caveat about mirror lore, especially in the modern world, which is that it sometimes gets mixed up with denunciations of vanity.

(Here is an excellent Japanese folktale about a mirror spirit that traps humans in a well. If you want more, James Frazier collected hundreds of examples in The Golden Bough, along with the often parallel lore of shadows.)

Mirrors can show you ghosts, or fairies; they can show you the past or the future; they can show you the truth or confound you with demonic lies; they allow sorcerors to project their power out of their bodies, but they can also become gateways that allow enemies to come in and make mischief.

Mirrors, as reflective surfaces, can be used as traps. The most common interpretation of the mirrors Mongolian shamans wear on their costumes is that they hold the helping spirit that guides the shaman through the other worlds, or else the "wind horse" on which the shaman rides. But it is typical of mirror lore that other shamans have different views, for example that mirrors confuse evil spirits, allowing the shaman to bypass them. The mirror is an object of power in a way that seems to transcend the particular interpretation put on it.

The Chinese have what may be the most extensive mirror lore, along with a great many surviving bronze mirrors. These were retained in families for generations and became part of ancestor worship, on the theory that they retained some essence of all the people who had gazed into them.

The Aztec and Maya loved mirrors; that's a Maya king above, staring at a propped-up mirror.

This was a magical, shamanistic act, as you can see in this wonderful painting. On one side of the mirror is the shaman, on the other jaguar spirit that resides in the other lands; speech flowing from this being shows that he is imparting knowledge to the shaman.

One thing that makes modern mirror lore different from older stories is that we have much better mirrors. Many old stories depend on the ambiguity of what could be seen an in imperfect surface like a bowl of water or a polished disk of bronze. For example, one of the standard tricks of "cunning folk" across Europe was to catch thieves by asking victims to stare at the image on a small piece of tin and identify the face they saw; one supposes that they saw the person they already suspected. One could search for one's future spouse in the same way.

So it was a commonplace that what was gleaned from gazing into mirrors might be obscure. As St. Paul wrote, seeing "through a glass darkly" is quite different from seeing face-to-face. 

These days mirror lore is dominated by the monstrous: ghost stories, urban legends like Bloody Mary, horror movies with mirror monsters, and so on. Mirrors have joined the vast horror complex by which we make our safe lives more interesting.

The theme of the monster in the mirror has spun off into a hundred metaphorical uses, from a way of understanding anorexia and poor self esteem – which spawned a Sesame Street meme in which Elmo is the monster in the mirror, telling kids that they are ok – to an article I just found called  "Covid-19 is our monster and our mirror."

All of which, I think, points to something important about folklore and magical thinking: the what (mirrors are magical) has a way of overriding the why and the how. There is something interesting, uncanny, hard to grasp: dreams, reflections, coincidences. Around these basic themes stories grow like thorny vines around Sleeping Beauty, reflecting the preoccupations of the people who tell the stories. A mirror can hold a shaman's wind horse or a Confucian gentleman's great-grandfather; it can be a symbol of faith or self-loathing; it can be an instrument of power or a crack that allows in demons from hell. It can be, really, anything we can imagine.

Carl Krenek

Carl Krenek (1880-1948) was an Austrian illustrator. Above, his Sleeping Beauty, which is all over the internet these days.

My sources say this is an illustration of "Hans and the Maneater," a tale I have never heard of, so I assume it is just a 20th-century translation of "Jack and the Beanstalk." 

Hansel and Gretel

Women and Cows

I believe I have already noted here somewhere that the most basic Celtic word for “beloved,” in the romantic sense, literally translates to “cattle.” Oh, my darling, my cattle. But I had no idea how deep this equation goes into the mythic past.

I was, for no particular reason, perusing a 1975 article by Bruce Lincoln on the ancient Indo-European myth of the original cattle theft. This concerns a hero whose most ancient name seems to be “Third” – Trita, Thraetaona – who battles a monster that is usually some kind of serpent and often has three heads. Lincoln:

One element is completely lacking in the Armenian version, and in my opinion it is a crucial one: the booty won in the encounter. Moreover, our Indian and Iranian sources leave some ambiguity on this point, for while the Indian story of Trita’s victory states that cattle were the plunder, the Iranian version tells how two women previously taken from Yima by Azi Dahaka were won back by Thraetaona. Given this set of facts, some scholars have been led to see both “cattle” and “women” as symbolic forms referring back to natural phenomena, specifically the storm or the seasonal freeing of the waters. The myth is taken as allegory, *Vrtaghna and *Trita being identified with the storm, *Aghi with the clouds, and the cows or women with the rain. While the myth may have taken on this allegorical coloring in some variants under the impact of later Indian speculative thought, it is doubtful that this is the original meaning. Rather, the alternation between cows and women can be explained in quite another fashion.

In order to appreciate this, it is instructive to look at the specific term used to describe the women won by Thraetaona, Avestan vanta. Bartholomae, following Darmesteter’s line of investigation, glosses this word as “die Geliebte, Frau.” [the beloved, the woman] But when one analyzes the word, it is clear that it is nothing more than the feminine form of a past passive participle of the verb *van-, “to wish for, desire,” as Bartholomae himself noted. Thus, in reality it means no more than “the female who is desired.” Such a term could surely apply to bovines as well as to humans under certain circumstances.

A similar term is Indo-Iranian *dhainu, one of the most frequent terms for “cow.” Yet, as Benveniste has show, the word means nothing more than “one who lactates, gives milk,” being derived from the verb “to give milk, nourish” (Skt. *dhai). As such, it may be used for the female of any species, Homo sapiens included, and in a very important verse from the Rg Veda (5.30.9) the parallel term dhena, usually rendered “cows,” is used to describe two women who have been captured by Dasa enemies.

As I commented recently, among grain farmers the beloved might be compared to a shock of barley, but among herders cows and women were equally plausible meanings for a word that might be best translated as “heart's desire.” The hero slew the dragon and attained his heart's desire, and we leave it up to you to imagine whether that was in the human or bovine form.

The Potters of Horezu

Wonderful piece in the NY Times by Chantel Tattoli, about the Romanian town of Horezu and its traditional potters. Horezu is a town of about 6,000 in the foothills of the Carpathians where about 50 people carry on a craft that UNESCO has declared an "Intanglible Cultural Heritage." The piece has little videos so you can see how some of this is done; the image above comes from one of them.

The potting industry in Horezu goes back, various internet sources say, 200 to 300 years. That seems right to me because the style of ceramic made there looks very much like what was made across Europe in the 1600s and early 1700s. Part of what makes this wonderful to me is because I have been finding sherds like these for 30 years but have never seen anyone make some of these designs.

The Horezu potteries are family affairs. Most of the potting is done by men, the decorating by women, and the most common arrangement is husband and wife teams. The men also dig the clay, which has come from the same area for the whole history of the industry.

This is very much a folk thing. Most of the pieces are sold at markets in nearby Romanian towns.

A few western galleries have started selling Horezu pieces, but you can buy dishes like these on Etsy for $35 to $50. The pattern above is made by placing thick rings of glaze on the plate and then drawing a tool across them.

A range of vessels.

Wood-fired kiln.

One thing I love about the world is the range of skills that people have, the amazing numbers of people who can do remarkable things. I love it that people learn these skills and practice them and then pass them on to others. To watch someone lay out a perfect spiral of glaze on a spinning pot makes me happy, and I hope these potteries long endure.

Forgetting about Plumeria

Botanical science says that the beautiful flowering shrubs of genus Plumeria – in English, frangipani – come from central America and the Caribbean. Scientific sites list about a dozen species, all native to that region.

But these days Plumeria species grow around the world. In Polynesia, they are commonly used to make leis. And in southeast Asia they have been widely planted in graveyards and around temples and have acquired a whole folklore of associations with ghosts and the afterlife. People say this is because they grow readly from a cutting stuck in the ground, the same reason usually given for willow having the same associations. In the Phillipines Plumeria is called "temple flower." According to this unreliable-looking website, frangipani is the national flower of Laos (as well as Nicaragua, besides being the city flower of Palermo, Sicily).

In fact the mythic associations of Plumeria are so strong that many people in Southeast Asia refuse to believe they were imported. Somebody inserted this paragraph into wikipedia's article:

In Southeast Asia the plumeria tree and flower are considered sacred. A relief in the Penataran temple ruins in East Java shows a plumeria tree with its distinct flower petals and skeleton-like branches. A relief in the Borobudur temple, at the west side 1st zone, also depicts plumeria. These reliefs were created before European exploration. Borobudur was constructed in the 9th century and Penataran in the 14th century. Taken together, their dates fail to establish when plumeria came to Southeast Asia. 

Above is one of the reliefs in question, from that temple on East Java. Modern botanists seem unimpressed and say that could be a lot of plants.

I'm obviously no expert, but I strongly suspect that the botanists are right. People very quickly forget that things are new and came from outside; as soon as they become central to the culture, they are assumed to be ancient. The best example I know is that by the 1890s horses featured in Sioux creation myths; their way of life was impossible without horses, so obviously the gods must have provided tham at the beginning.

It is actually true that by 1840 many Irish peasants had no idea that potatoes were a recent introduction. Another great example is hot peppers, which many people in Asia and Africa still insist are native even though modern genetics shows that all the known varieties come from the New World and spread within the past 500 years. I especially like the story of peppers because there is essentially no written evidence; educated botanists were not much interested in hot peppers, so I imagine they were spread by common sailors, under the elite radar.

Plumeria growing in a graveyard in Penang, Malaysia

The story of Plumeria is probably similar, although in this case there is actual documentation. The Spanish quickly became fans of these plants, using them to make perfume and medicine, and records indicate they had been taken to the Phillipines by 1600. That gives them plenty of time to have been adopted into Asian cultures before modern botanists started poking their noses into temple courtyards, applying Latin names to the plants they found.

Some Ineffective Turkish Engineering

Amulet against the evil eye found embedded in the concrete of a building that collapsed during Turkey's recent earthquake.

And here's another strange image from the earthquake; notice the way this building just walked a few steps toward the street, ending up on top of thesecars.

Zorats Karer, the Army of Ghosts

Zorats Karer is a complicated arrangement of megalithic stones in Armenia. This is one of those sites about which every amateur archaeologist in the country has an opinion, and you see all kinds of crazy claims about what is was and how old it is. The best guess seems to be that it is both a royal tomb and a site for astronomy-related rituals, dating to between 2000 and 1000 BC.

The site has had a bunch of names, including Ghoshun Dash, which means ‘Army of Stones’ in a Turkic dialect, and Karahundj or Carahunge, which was dreamed up by a twentieth-century archaeologist because it includes a word for ‘stone’ and an Armenian suffix that makes the whole word sound like Stonehenge. But it seems that some of the locals call it Zorats Karer, the Army of Ghosts, and who can argue with that?

Aerial view showing the complexity of the site.

View of the smaller circle in the center of the complex.

One of the fascinating things about the site is the holes that were carefully drilled through several of the menhirs. Look through these in the right way and you can get all sorts of site lines toward things like the midsummer sunrise or the setting of the Pleiades on the first day of spring. Such alignments are the obvious reason to have gone to all this trouble, but the bewildering variety of claims I found in half an hour online gives me pause. Especially since some of the alignments work better if you postulate dates like 33,000 BC. So I am afraid the exact use of these features remains a mystery.

Another thing that interested me was wikipedia's account of how the site has been interpreted. The first scholar to publish about the site said it was a corral for cattle, which is in "there is nothing so stupid that some scientist has not said it" territory. In the 1950s some locals said it was a burial place, but they thought the people buried there were Armenians who had fought the Turks in recent times. Archaeologists are under a lot pressure these days to consult the local people and get their indigenous wisdom before offering any hypothesis, but when it comes to things 3,000 years old, that usually doesn't get you very far. But then they weren't any farther off than that first anthropologist.

And to think that I never heard of it until today.