Real Feelings About Ersatz History

Sometimes I like to get lost on Wikipedia. I got lost the other day in the "pseudohistory" category, and it was fascinating.

It started with the Ourang Medan. Well, it started on YouTube. I wasn't signed into my Google Account, so I was browsing the home page. A channel with a series of "top 5" lists came up - in fact, the channel is called Top5s.

This is the video I saw.

[If you want to read more about the strange death of Canadian student Elisa Lam in Los Angeles, you may do so at The Vigilant Citizen.]

The evening after I watched the video, I went to bed thinking about the Ourang Medan, the "ghost ship" whose crew was supposedly found dead, with expressions of abject terror on their faces, shortly before the ship exploded and sank. I wondered if the story was true.

I looked it up the next day. According to Wikipedia, there's no evidence that a ship called the Ourang Medan even existed. If it did, it should be listed in Lloyd's Shipping Register, but it isn't.

The categories at the bottom of the entry caught my eye; this is where I noticed the word "pseudohistory." What a fascinating word, I thought: not history that actually happened, but "history" that circulates in human consciousness without apparent basis in fact. I had to know what else belonged to this category.

For the record, I should mention that Wikipedia, as a peer-edited source, doesn't have the same standards for reliability and accuracy that a source with a "gatekeeper"/editor has. Although it has guidelines, it has so many users that it would be virtually impossible to ensure that all the articles adhere to its guidelines at all times. We have to take Wikipedia entries with a grain of salt, but that doesn't mean the categorization itself isn't of interest.

Pseudohistory, it turns out, contains a great many fascinating topics. Some of it has to do with "ancient astronaut theory," as exemplified by Erich von Däniken's 1968 nonfiction book Chariots of the Gods?. (The question mark is part of the title.)

Another large subcategory of pseudohistory is labelled as Priory of Sion Hoax. This has to do with much of the background story that went into Dan Brown's writing of The Da Vinci Code. Another subcategory is the "Shakespeare authorship question." (There's also a Molière authorship question, but hey, I care much less about French literature than English. Cultural bias - sorry.)

Much of the pseudohistory category has to do with religion, much of it to do specifically with Christianity. Take, for example, the brief Babylon Mystery Religion article. Babylon Mystery Religion is a book, now out of print, by Ralph Woodrow published in 1966. Referring to an earlier (1853) book called The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, Woodrow's book linked the Roman Catholic Church to ancient Babylonian rituals. Woodrow later recanted his anti-Catholic views in a second book.

Apparently there are quite a few factual errors in Hislop's book, stemming from misunderstandings about the historical Babylonian culture. Although scholars have subsequently pointed out these errors, the Catholicism=Whore of Babylon theme is still alive and well among some Evangelical Christians and Jehovah's Witnesses.

One of the modern-day adherents to some version of Hislop's ideas is Michael Hoggard, an American (Missouri) pastor with a relatively large following for his radio/YouTube show. The show has more than 20,000 fans on Facebook. He also curates the website http://666alert.net/, which collects uses of images linked to the number 666 as they appear in popular culture.

Hoggard is a Southern Baptist. A related pseudohistorical concept is Baptist successionism, which argues that the Baptist denomination is most direct line between the Christianity of Jesus and the Apostles and modern churches. The work most often associated with this view is The Trail of Blood (1931) by J.M. Carroll. It is not historically accurate, but it remained influential among Southern Baptists well into the late 20th century.

But for me, maybe the most interesting article in all of pseudohistory is the Witch-Cult Hypothesis. Remember when I got my ass handed to me for over-relying on Barbara J. Walker as a source? (If not, you can always read about it here.) Well, Walker is probably an adherent of this theory. It states, essentially, that through the Middle Ages and into the Modern Era, ancient Pagan religions survived in such a way that worshipers of The Horned God of Paganism were mistaken by Christians for worshipers of the Christian devil and subsequently persecuted as witches. This theory came about in the 19th century and was perpetuated into the 20th century, even including the entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica for many years.

(Encyclopedias are them things we used to read before we had Google.)

According to the Wikipedia entry, the Witch-Cult Hypothesis found a champion in British historian/Egyptologist Margaret Murray*, who wrote The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. It is not historically accurate.

Despite its unreliability as history, Murray's book is said, in the Wikipedia entry, to have been influential in the development of the Wiccan religion. Murray's subsequent book, The God of the Witches, introduced the term The Horned God for the male deity worshiped by the alleged witch cult on Western Europe. (She acknowledged that the witch cult also worshiped a goddess, but in her opinion the witches regarded their male deity as the more important of the two.) Gerald Gardner, who was also English and is now considered the founder of modern Wicca (referred to as Gardnerian Wicca), claimed to have found a surviving coven of the kind of witches Murray described, and he started his own coven based on them, in the interest of keeping the religion alive.

But mind you, Wicca, modern witchcraft, and NeoPaganism are 20th century religions. While they revive certain aspects of ancient belief and worship, the rituals and beliefs of modern witches were created in the 20th century. And there's nothing wrong with that. People take what they need from their religions, and a religion doesn't have to be old to meet the needs of its practitioners.

The Wikipedia article on The Horned God states that Gardner, consciously influenced by Murray, borrowed his conception of Wiccan practice from Freemasonry, from the Theosophy movement, from other unnamed occult sources, and from Aleister Crowley's Gnostic Mass. (In 1913, Crowley wrote a mass for the Gnostic church, borrowing from the rituals of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian churches, but replacing Christian concepts with his own Thelema, his "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.")

By the way, Margaret Murray is also in part responsible for the association of Glastonbury, England, with King Arthur and the Holy Grail. I used this legend in Midsummer Night.

https://www.createspace.com/4657847

So dig in to pseudohistory if you like. If you're interested in history - and in the history of ideas - you may find it as fascinating as I did.

*That Madeleine L'Engle's fictional protagonist in The Time Quintet is named Margaret "Meg" Murry is coincidence, I think.

Who Is Lugh, and What's Logi Got to Do With It?

I created a slight neoPagan controversy when I posted a link to "The Loki in Lughnasa," a post I wrote in 2012, on Tumblr. That post relied heavily on Barbara J. Walker's The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, a source I have learned is highly questionable. Since August 1st, I learned that:

- The Celtic god Lugh (sometimes spelled without the "h") is not a fire god.

- The association between the Norse god Loki and the Norse fire giant Logi is an error.

- No solid evidence links Loki in Norse mythology to Lugh in Celtic mythology.

So, who is Lugh? What is he the Celtic god of? Who is Logi? And who confused Logi with Loki? We'll look at each of these questions in turn.

Lugh

In my very first Lughnasadh post, written in 2010 when I was still fairly new to blogging, I wrote:

"The Irish consider it the feast of the god Lugh, who consecrated it in honor of his foster-mother's death. Lugh's foster-mother Tailtiu, "The Great One of the Earth," represents the land of Ireland itself. Thus, her death is symbolic of the harvest: the crops sacrifice themselves so human beings and animals can live. Tailtiu's death was celebrated with feasting, Olympic-style games, bonfires and handfasting ceremonies. Where corn is harvested, the goddess is often visually represented by making corn dolls."

Contemporary corn doll depicting Lugh. Creative Commons image by MountainAsh333

Unfortunately, I didn't happen to note the source of that information. I did better in 2013's Mabon post, when I referred to Lugh's article at Encyclopedia Mythica. It says:

"Lugh is the Celtic lord of every skill. He was patron of Lugodunum (Lyons) in Gaul. He and his nature goddess consort (Rosmerta) were worshipped during the 30 day Lugnasad midsummer feast in Ireland. Fertility magic during this festival ensured ripening of the crops and good harvest. He was called Lamfhada or 'of the long arm' in Gaelic because of his great spear and sling. His animal attributes were the raven and the lynx. Lugh mirrors Hindu Karttikeya, the spiritual warrior, and Roman Mercury, the swift messenger. His exploits are recounted in the Tain Bo Cuailnge, the Cattle-raid of Cooley." - Dave Buchert

So Lugh is a skilled warrior, a swift messenger, and a fertility god. Well, that's minimally informative. Wikipedia is user-generated, and therefore not the most reliable source, but it tells us that:

- Lugh's Welsh counterpart is Lleu Llaw Gyffes. As you may recall from this post, Lleu Llaw Gyffes was the son of the goddess Arianrhod. She cursed him never to marry an earthly woman, so instead he married the unearthly Bloddeuwedd, made from nine different flowers.

- His father, Cian, is of the Tuatha Dé Danann, or "tribe of the goddess Danu." His mother, Ethniu, belongs to the Fomorians, the mythical people who were said to have inhabited Ireland before the Celtic people got there.

- Lugh was given to a foster mother, Queen Tailtiu, to raise, possibly because of a prophecy that his maternal grandfather would be killed by his grandson. Lugh's grandfather Balor was said to have a poisonous eye that killed everyone he looked on it with.

Cú Chulainn by J.C. Leyendecker. Public domain. 

- The king of the Tuatha Dé Danann appointed Lugh to his court because he had so many different skills. The Tuatha Dé Danann are being oppressed by the Fomorians, and Lugh agrees to help the Tuatha Dé Danann regain their freedom.

- In a battle against the Fomorians, Lugh uses a slingshot to shoot out his grandfather Balor's evil eye, causing the Fomorians to lose the battle.

- During the battle, Lugh spares the life of Bres, a former king who agrees to teach the Tuatha Dé Danann the secrets of agriculture. However, Lugh ultimately killed Bres by causing him to drink the poisonous "milk" of 300 wooden cows Lugh had made.

- Later in his life, Lugh instituted the Olympic-style games in memory of his foster mother. August 1 was the conclusion of the games.

- Lugh had several wives, including the daughter of a British king. One of his wives had an affair with Cermait, son of the Irish father-god The Dagda. Lugh killed Cermait, but then Cermait's three sons killed Lugh.

- In some versions, Lugh is the father of the Irish hero Cú Chulainn. When Cú Chulainn is severely wounded in battle, Lugh arrives and heals his wounds.

Mythography says the confusion of Lugh with a deity of the sun may have to do with his nickname, "Shining One." However, the nickname was probably in reference to all his various skills. It also says Lugh ascended to become the leader of Tuatha Dé Danann when the god Nuada was killed in battle.

So that's Lugh - a mythological figure who may have been based on a historical king, but was said to have belonged to the divine tribe of the goddess Danu.

Public domain image by John McColgan.

Logi

Wikipedia says that Logi means "fire" in Old Norse and that the mythological Logi was a fire giant. It says the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturlson describes the eating contest between Logi and Loki. They competed to see who could most quickly eat meat from the bones, and Logi won by consuming meat, bones, and trencher all alike. Not only was Logi a fire giant, he was also the personification of fire itself.

Logi has two brothers, one who rules over the winds and another who rules over the sea. In astronomy, Loge (an alternate spelling) is one of the moons of Saturn.

NorthernPaganism.org adds that Logi was called High-Logi because he was so tall. His wife was named Glow, and they had two daughters named Ashes and Embers. After the death of his wife and daughters, Logi lived alone in a black-rock cave in Muspellheim (the land of fire).

So it seems unlikely Logi has anything at all to do with Lugh. Lugh has an association with blacksmiths, who do use fire, but that has more to do with Lugh's many skills than it does to any elemental connection Lugh might have.

Loki and Sigyn in a painting by Mårten Eskil Winge. Public domain.

The Confusion of Logi With Loki

According to NorseMyth.org,Wagner named a character in the Ring opera cycle Loge and gave him the characteristics of the mythological Loki. Wagner's Loge is a fire sprite.

Wikipedia's Loki article says Jacob Grimm referred to Loki as a "fire god" in 1835. It also says:

"Famously, Loki appears in Richard Wagner's opera cycle Ring of the Nibelung as Loge (a play on Old Norse loge, 'fire'). He is depicted as an ally of the gods (specifically Wotan's assistant rather than Donner's), although he generally dislikes them and thinks of them as greedy, as they refuse to return the Rhine Gold to its rightful owners. In the conclusion of the first opera Das Rheingold he reveals his hope to turn into fire and destroy Valhalla, and in the final opera Götterdämmerung, Valhalla is set alight, destroying the Gods."

Wagner completed Das Rheingold in 1856, post-Grimm. Collin Cleary's essay "Wagner's Place in the Germanic Tradition" clearly points the finger at Grimm as the source of the confusion between Logi and Loki:

"The Grimms often made imaginative links between names and other elements in the sources they utilized, and this seems to have emboldened Wagner to do the same – achieving a kind of fusion of German and Scandinavian elements. Indeed, some of the inferences or connections Wagner has been criticized for actually have their origin with the Grimms. For example, Wagner also includes a character named 'Loge,' who is the equivalent of the Scandinavian Loki. In fact, there is scant evidence that there was a Loki figure in the German mythological world. However, Jacob Grimm postulated 'Locho' or 'Loho' as possible German equivalents. Wagner didn’t particularly like either, and settled on 'Loge.'

"Purists have long railed against Wagner, however, for making his Loge/Loki a god of fire. Again, however, this has its origin in Grimm. In Scandinavian myth there was a fire giant named Logi, and Grimm thought that there might be a connection to Loki. (More recent scholarship doesn’t support this.) We find the origin of Wagner’s Loge in these words of Jacob Grimm: 'Now a striking narrative . . . places Logi by the side of Loki: a being from the giant province beside a kinsman and companion of the gods. This is no mere play upon words, the two really signify the same thing from different points of view, Logi the natural force of fire, and Loki with a shifting of the sound, a shifting of the sense: of the burly giant has been made a sly, seducing villain.'"

The Brother Grimm. Public domain. 

There we have it: Lugh is not Logi, Logi is not Loki, and Loki is definitely not Lugh.

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The Wheel of the Year is a beginner's guide to celebrating the eight traditional pagan festivals of the the year.

A Lughnasadh Lesson Learned

Yesterday was August 1. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the neoPagan community celebrated the cross-quarter holiday of Lughnasadh. The halfway point between Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox is named for an ancient Celtic celebration of the god Lugh. The Christianized name for this holiday is Lammas, a contraction of "loaf mass," because this grain harvest festival retains the tradition of celebrating with breads and other baked goodies.

At Lughnasadh 2012, I wrote a blog post called "The Loki in Lughnasadh." Yesterday I shared the link on Tumblr, thinking a few neoPagans and Wiccans might be interested. I don't know if you're aware of this, but Loki is pretty popular on Tumblr, as are all things related to The Avengers, the movie.

The little blurb I added to my Tumblr link said:

"Barbara G. Walker notes that Loki was sometimes identified as “Logi,” or “flame.” She associates Loki-as-Logi with Lug (or Lugh), the Celtic god of fire, who was celebrated at Lughnasa/Lughnasadh (Lug’s games) on August 1st."

The response I got was enlightening. Tumblr user Answers From Vanaheim commented:

"Oh no, nonononono Barbara Walker is a terrible source for anything that isn’t about knitting.

"Loki and Logi are separate entities. Loki even competes against Logi in an eating contest (and loses because Logi, being a fire giant, eats his plate as well as the food). Someone (I believe it was Wagner) confused the two, and the association of Loki with fire persists."

Now, I am a humble witch/neoPagan/writer/person and I know I can always learn more from people wiser than myself. I take these comments with my listening ears on, because here I've encountered a new bit of knowledge: that Barbara G. Walker, who's been my go-to reference for years, might be a questionable authority.

I first encountered Walker when, as a student at St. Mary's College of Notre Dame, Indiana, I stumbled upon her Feminist Fairy Tales. I don't remember how I first found The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, but by the time I did, I already had it in my mind that Walker was a feminist scholar. The Encyclopedia is heavily footnoted, but because it was originally written in the early 1980s (when I was a small child), I didn't have access to many of the sources Walker cites in her footnotes.

Goodreads

Let's look at some of the other notes I got from Tumblr users yesterday. Tylluan Faolchú-Gealach, building on what Answers From Vanaheim wrote, said:

"Not to mention that Lugh isn’t a fire god - also a very persistent misconception. When I read that first bit I got mad, Lugh is very dear to me, and no disrespect to Loki intended; but they are two worlds apart. You cannot just toss them on the same pile."

Elder Scrolls Witch says simply, "This causes me physical pain." Well, I do apologize for that, sir. I never meant for my ignorance to cause physical pain.

Gaelic Heathenry writes, "Good heavens! Did she really just equate Loki and Lugh? What?" with the following notes:  #This is painful #Holy different pantheons Batman! #They're not even vaguely similar

#Sorry #I was wrong #My source is controversial #I'm learning

Korrigan adds, "That might be the highest sentence-length-to-false-information ratio I’ve ever seen someone stab my eyes out with the gae assail."

Hyperbole is as common on Tumblr as that photo of Jensen Ackles in gym shorts. The Gáe Assail is Lugh's lightning spear, by the way.

Wikimedia Commons 

About the above image, Wikimedia Commons says, "Illustration of Lugh's magic spear by H.R.Millar, published in Celtic Myth and Legend by Charles Squire (1905), and scanned and made available online at sacred-texts.com, according to whom it is in the public domain in the United States."

The Women's Encyclopedia has 88 reviews on Amazon U.S., with 45 5-star reviews and 19 1-star reviews, with an average rating of 3.6 stars. An anonymous Amazon customer wrote in 2002:

"I picked up this book in 1987, and was quite excited at first. My own research, however, quickly proved The Encyclopedia to be highly unreliable as a jumping-off point of feminist/pagan scholarship. A small amount of digging into B. Walker's sources will immediately prove how little research actually went into this work. The actual sources cited in Walker's footnotes frequently don't support her suppositions, and her etymology is just plain fanciful. She seems to feel that, if one word sounds like another word, they must necessarily be related. Ouch!

"Check this out for yourself. Pick a few entries, then look up all of the footnotes in your local university library. How many of Walker's sources have ANYTHING to do with the subject in question, let alone support her theories? It's a disappointing, but necessary, exercise for anyone determined to see The Encyclopedia honestly.

"Enjoy this book for its empowering (and fun) ideas, but don't place any weight on its 'scholarship.' It's a house of cards."

That's a clear enough message to inform me that Walker's writings are to be taken with a grain of salt, just like using a Wikipedia article as a reference - a fine start, but in need of more reliable back-up.

On Goodreads, the Encyclopedia has 826 ratings and 53 reviews. With an average of 4.27 stars, it has 266 5-star reviews and 12 1-star reviews. The 1-star review that pops up first, written by Colleen the Contrarian, reads:

"Barbara Walker has an obvious bias against all things male and/or Christian. She rewrites myth and history to make everything female-supreme, Goddess centric, anti-male, and full of sexual womyn power. Now, before someone dismisses me as 'obviously anti-female and deluded by patriarchy' or some such, I should state that I am a female neo-pagan with no love for the Church and/or the views it supports towards women. That said - I don't like made up or revisionist history, even if it does stroke the ego a bit. She bases everything on the supposed Pre-historical Matriarchy - which has little to no archeological evidence to truly support in the grand scale she portrays it.

"But besides that, her Encyclopedia and Dictionary are a mish-mash of cultural hodge-podge! She acts as if gods and goddesses from varying cultures are generally interchangeable, offering nothing for the cultural differences which give birth to their own representations of deity. She has butchered myths, made up 'alternate versions' which have no founding anywhere except her own imagination, ignored important details of myths which don't mesh with her agenda, and basically perverted the symbols she pretends to represent.

"Bad scholarship is bad enough... but her fabrications and invented history and myths are just a disgrace to the pagan community, and, in my opinion, an insult to women and to the goddess and gods which exist without the clap-trap found in this book. It does not present women as strong and/or empowered to rely on revisionist pseudo-history, no matter how good it may sound.

"There are many strong female figures out there...many strong goddesses of all ilks. This book does not do them justice."

I never knew! But now I do. See, this is why witches need communities, even if they are virtual ones. We can learn so much from each other, and it's a lifelong process.

Tomorrow: Disambiguation. Who is Logi, who is Lugh, and how did Loki get mixed up in all of this?

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An Erotic Challenge (Explicit Language)

"Pleasure in the thought of a thing’s existence, if it stimulates desire for that thing, depends upon a person’s susceptibility and the presence of the object. The pleasure is therefore sensual, a matter of feeling and not of mind."

- Translated by Raymond Blakney, and quoted in Blakney’s An Immanuel Kant Reader

So said the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reasoning, 1788). As a philosopher, Kant was interested in the logical underpinnings of morality. Any undergraduate Philosophy major could tell you that Kant’s philosophy was not of the Hedonistic school. Nor was Kant a stripper or a porn star.

If you are an undergraduate Philosophy major, struggling to pay your way through college, then you may well consider getting a part-time job as a stripper or porn star. If you do, and you are a woman, consider using the stage name Immanuela Kunt. Think of Kunt in the Inga Muscio sense*.

But this is not the challenge.

Rather, the challenge is to stimulate desire and provoke the sensual pleasures of the feelings in your lover with a specially prepared meal. This meal is inspired by a game played by Philosophy majors and non-Philosophy majors alike in the dining halls of undergraduate schools across the nation.

If your lover is aroused by women, then you will prepare a meal of foods that evoke the shapes and textures of the vulva and vagina. If your lover is aroused by men, then you will prepare a phallic meal. If your lover is bisexual, then the choice is yours, depending on which feelings and desires you would like to provoke.

Creativity is key. Perhaps the first food that springs to mind when considering the vaginal meal is raw oysters, with their slippery texture and bivalve shape somewhat suggestive of a woman’s parted legs. Oysters alone cannot be the whole meal, though. There must be a variety of foods, all of which suggest female genitals in some way. The leaves of a red cabbage, skillfully arranged on a plate Judy Chicago-style, bring to mind a vulva. Foods with a hole, such as doughnuts and certain breakfast cereals, resemble a vaginal opening, and so much more so if they are pink.

Barbara Walker’s The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets is a treasure trove of inspiration when it comes to foods associated with the female anatomy. Some of its suggestions: eggs, the red fruits (especially apples and pomegranates) traditionally associated with the uterus and/or menstrual blood, and cherries. You may also serve fava beans. Fava is Italian slang for a woman’s genitals, according to the Encyclopedia.

Likewise, it is not enough to simply serve hot dogs or other sausages for the phallic meal. Consider carrots, bananas, cucumbers, zucchinis, and bread sticks. Be creative and diverse. Include not just penis-shaped foods, but also foods whose shape and texture suggest the scrotum and testes, such as figs and prunes. Don’t forget that milk and creamy white foods (ranch dressing, for example, or tapioca pudding) suggest semen. For dessert, consider Twinkies, for their phallic shape and cream filling.

Serve this specially prepared meal to your lover, and watch for the reaction. Pleasure? And if so, is it pleasure of the mind, or of the senses?

Author's Note: I originally wrote this post for a website called "The Erotic Challenge" or something similar, long defunct. Later, it was published in the online magazine Lucrezia, which sadly is also now defunct. - Erin O'Riordan

* Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, 1998

Great Books for Women's History Month, Updated for 2014

Happy Women's History Month 2014! In March 2011, I wrote "Great Books For Women's History Month" for David Weisman's book blog Breaking in Before Breaking Down. It's still a great list, so please don't be out off by the fact that it's labeled 2011.

The original list included:

A Woman's Book of Life: The Biology, Psychology, and Spirituality of the Feminine Life Cycle

- The author, Joan Borysenko, also wrote the wonderful A Woman's Journey to God. Visit this post to read a short excerpt from that one.

Feminist Fairy Tales

Goddesses in Everywoman

- Read more about this one in "Twilight of the Goddesses."

Letters to Ms., 1972-1987

QPB Anthology of Women's Writing

Sacred Voices

She's a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock and Roll

- You can read little excerpts of this one in my book review of Dead is a Battlefield and this post about Jewish lesbians.

The American Women's Almanac

- Read a snippet of this one in the post that links James Jones' Whistle to The Hite Report.

The Great Women Superheroes

The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

- I use this encyclopedia as a reference book All. The. Time. The last book on the original list is

Wild Women: Crusaders, Curmudgeons, and Completely Corsetless Ladies in the Otherwise Virtuous Victorian Era

...and since then, I've added these little beauties to the stable of women's history and feminist books.

In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler

Princesses Behaving Badly by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

What are your favorite books for Women's History Month?

Enter to win Midsummer Night - Pagan Spirits Book 2 - from Goodreads through March 27

The Fifth Element

This post is a follow-up to yesterday's Vampire Academy book review. It has to do with the elemental magic practiced by Richelle Mead's Moroi - vampires who are living, mortal beings and self-appointed guardians of the earth. I may make occasional reference to the 1997 Luc Besson movie titled The Fifth Element, starring Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich, and Gary Oldman (which, I'll have you know, I think is a very good movie).

We can learn much of interest about the Classical four elements by referring to Barbara G. Walker's wonderful resource The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.

The Four Elements

Walker's encyclopedia entry on "elements" informs us of the following:

- Naming the four elements as water, fire, earth, and air was common to many ancient civilizations, including the Chinese, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Hindus, Aztecs, and some other North American indigenous tribes. These four elements were commonly thought to make up everything that exists.

- Ancient Hindus believed the goddess Kali created the four elements. By inscribing symbols to represent them on her necklace of skulls, Kali brought the Sanskrit alphabet into being.

Public domain image by Ambereen21

- Kali is sometimes portrayed as holding one of four objects in each of her four hands: a bowl of blood symbolizing water, a lightning bolt-shaped scepter symbolizing fire, a lotus wheel representing earth, and a sword representing air.

- Kali's four symbols, once adapted by Europeans, evolved into the cup, wand, wheel (pentacle), and sword used on the Tarot deck. These, in turn, became the hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades of the modern playing card deck.

- Water and earth were feminine, and air and fire were masculine. This is why hearts and diamonds are red (feminine) and clubs and spades are black (masculine) - analogous to the concepts of yin and yang. In Hindu philosophy, the feminine elements were creative/benevolent  and the masculine elements destructive/cruel. However, to the ancient Greeks, the feminine elements were passive and the male elements were active.

- The combination of water and fire - male and female - represented sexual union. Together they made blood, which was red like fire yet tasted like ocean water.

- The "four humors" used by Western medicine are each related to one of the four elements. Blood was air, phlegm was water, yellow bile was fire, and black bile was earth. A predominance of blood in the body led to the sanguine temperament (cheerful), phlegm the phlegmatic (calm, cool, composed, imperturbable), yellow bile the choleric (irritable), and black bile the melancholic (tending toward depression).

Personification of the four temperaments. Title page of 'The Seven Planets' by Adriaen Collaert, 1581. Public domain image. 

 - In Christian iconography, the four Gospel writers (or Four Evangelists) are represented as a bull (ox), lion, serpent (according to other sources, an eagle), and a man or angel. These symbols represent earth, fire, water, and air as well as the Gospels of Luke, Mark, John, and Matthew.

The Four Evangelists depicted in the Book of Kells. Public domain image. 

The Moroi in the Vampire Academy series each specialize in one type of elemental magic in their teen years, similar to reaching puberty. Christian Ozera, for example, has fire magic, and Victor and Natalie Dashkov both specialize in earth magic. Lissa, however, has no specialization. She has some control over all four elements, but her true specialization is the rare fifth element, spirit.

The Fifth Element

According to Walker, the ancient Greeks characterized the fifth element as "ether," which means "heavenly." The gods and goddesses were thought to be made of ether - so I wasn't completely wrong in my movie review when I characterized Lissa as having an "ethereal" quality.

In the Luc Besson movie, the fifth element is both embodied in a person - Leeloo - and also representative of love itself.

Leeloo cosplay, complete with Multipass. Creative Commons image by Christopher Michel

Walker's encyclopedia entry for quintessence describes the substance variously as the blue blood of the gods (also known as ichor), specifically as the menstrual blood of the Goddess, or as the sacred wine or ambrosia consumed by the gods. Walker claims that in Homeric poetry, ichor is described as being made by the honeybees of Aphrodite. "Blue blood" is said to be the reason both the Hindu deity Krishna and the Gnostic creator-god known as the Demiurge were depicted as blue-skinned, and why ancient Celts painted themselves blue in religious ceremonies and in battle. Celts killed in battle hoped to be resurrected like the immortal gods.

Walker goes on to write that in medieval alchemy, quinta essentia or quintessence referred to a blue elixir associated with both bodily resurrection and spiritual illumination. She also writes that quintessence is used to reference the fifth trump suit or Major Arcana of the Tarot deck.

For further evidence, I turned to The Book of Alchemy: Learn the Secrets of the Alchemists to Transform Mind, Body, and Soul by Francis Melville. It says, "Of all the philosophical principles, none is as mysterious and intangible as the quintessence, the fifth essence or element, which is concealed within the four philosophical elements and equates with the secret fire, the spark of divinity within all things."

If Lissa Dragomir's quintessence is the spark of the divine, it certainly explains what our narrator Rose feels when she experiences Lissa's healing: a sense of all the good, wonderful, happy things in the world, a beautiful bliss.

Melville further writes, "The four elements conceal within them a fifth element, known as the quinta essentia, the quintessence, or Azoth. This has the connotation of being the absolute essence of a thing and, as such, many alchemical magisteries (products or medicines) are called quintessences, particularly those that have been distilled, because distillation releases the soul and spirit from matter. Some alchemists call the spirit of wine (distilled brandy) a quintessence, and, indeed, it fulfills the criteria described by Isaac Newton:

"'Quintessence is a thing that is spiritual, penetrating, tinging, and incorruptible, which emerges anew from the four elements when they are bound to each other.'

"Paracelsus considers it to be the extract of the elements, their incorruptible, eternal substratum. Manfred Junius calls it 'The origin and goal of all things.'

"It is often said that the quintessence is not a product of the elements, but one of the three philosophical principles. In fact, it is all three: the trinity is everything. The quintessence is the soul and spirit within all things. It is also the salt that allows it to emerge through the four elements. This reveals it to be nothing less than the secret fire, the spark of eternal light from the first combustion of creation. It is the divinity in all things, the inner sun in which all things find their true identity. Alchemists give it many names: Universal Spirit, Never-failing Source...key of the philosophers, nursery of the world, heavenly substance, Mother of the Waters and, even, Mercurius [identified with the Egyptian wisdom god Thoth, the Greek god Hermes, and the Roman god Mercury].

"The quintessence can be symbolized by the pentagram, the figure that most perfectly divides the circle. It represents the microcosm, the individual containing the whole universe within itself."

If Lissa's spirit is the "extract of the elements," that explains why she and the other spirit-users (Saint Vladimir and Sonya Karp) have weak control over all of the four other elements. By alchemy is very esoteric and every one of its symbols and terms means different things to different alchemists, and now the exact nature and meaning of the fifth element may be murkier than ever.

I'll have to read the rest of the Vampire Academy series to found out if Richelle Mead sheds any more light on it.

Shadow-Kissed Anna

That said, it may be worth noting that St. Vladimir's Dhampir guardian, according to Mead, was called Anna. Walker tells us in her entry on St. Anne (the mother of the Virgin Mary) that Anne/Anna is a name associated with the "grandmother goddess." Analogous names include the Canaanite goddess Anat, the Roman goddess Anna Parenna (Grandmother Time), the Celtic goddess Ana or Anu who made up one third of The Morrigan, Morg-Ana ("invincible Queen Death") in Arthurian legend, and even Angurboda ("hag of the iron wood") the mistress of Loki and the mother of Hel. The pentacle (a pentagram inside a circle, according to modern Wiccan usage) was the symbol common to St. Anne and Morgana, and is the ancient Egyptian symbol for the Underworld.

Shadow-kissed Anna, Ms. Karp, and Lissa make up a kind of trinity. Anna is a legendary figure from long ago, a sort of ancestor or grandmother. She was a guiding light who kept St. Vladimir from giving in to madness. Ms. Karp is like the mother-figure of the trinity, although the madness swallowed her and she became Strigoi. Lissa is the maiden figure whose spirit-power is still largely untested. "Shadow-kissed" means brought back from the land of the dead, so naturally, Anna has an association with the Underworld.

As we know from a long line of myth and literature, there is always a heavy cost to be paid for bringing anyone back to life from the Underworld - a cost that will no doubt have to be paid by Lissa and Rose, since Rose herself is shadow-kissed.

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Happy Feast Day of St. James the Greater! Book Excerpt

July 25th is the feast day of St. James the Greater in the Roman Catholic church and other Western churches that observe saints' feast days. You may also remember that St. James's Day is the title of the third book in the Pagan Spirits novel series.

The name of the novel comes from a planned 12-book series in which each novel would have a title related to a folkloric holiday. Book One, Beltane, featured the Neopagan holiday of Beltane prominently, and represents the month of May. Midsummer Night is named for the June holiday of the summer solstice, and features a prominent reference to William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. July doesn't have a prominent Pagan holiday, but I incorporated some of the folklore of the feast day of St. James, as well as naming a major character James.

Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Creative Commons image by Luis Miguel Bugallo Sanchez 

At the moment the book series has been pared down to a trilogy. If I ever write a fourth volume, its probable title would be Lammas Night.

St. James's Day is fully written and edited, although it needs at least two more edits. Right now, Tit Elingtin and I plan to publish a revised version of Beltane (already revised, but not yet formatted), then a revised Midsummer Night, then St. James's Day.

A short excerpt. It's a work in progress, so this may not be the final version:

 “I always forget how little of the stars we can see in the city,” Gillian said. “Look, I think we can see the Milky Way.”

Zen looked up and smiled. “Gillian, do you remember the ancient Celtic legend about the Milky Way?”

She did, but suspected it would make Zen feel better if she could tell the story. “Not quite.”

“When you stand on the western coast of the Atlantic and look across the ocean, the Milky Way seems to follow the path of the sun westward. The ancient Celts said when they died, those whose souls were worthy would travel across the ocean on the Milky Way to the land of the dead, Brigid’s land.”

“What happened if you were unworthy?” Ramesh asked, with a bit of a chuckle in his voice.

“Then you were left stranded on the shore. The funny thing is, this is one of those Pagan legends that was adapted by the Christians, at least in Spain. Their symbolic version of the path to the Afterlife is the Way of Santiago, or Saint James.”

“Really?” Gillian said. She’d almost forgotten about the Evangelical Church of Saint James. “What did St. James have to do with Spain?”

“St. James was one of the original disciples of Jesus, a fisherman who answered Jesus’s call to throw away his net and become a ‘fisher of men.’ After he died, the body of St. James was placed in a fishing boat and allowed to drift at sea. Miraculously, the body reached the shores of Spain, where the village of Compostela built a cathedral around the saint’s relics.”

“His dead body,” Ramesh clarified, slightly grossed out.

“You can ask Orlando: every Catholic altar contains some piece of a dead saint or a martyr, or at least their clothing.”

Gillian winced. “I prefer my Wiccan altars, made of good, clean earth, water, fire and wind.”

“So the people of Compostela made their altar around compost,” Ramesh joked. “And Western people mock Hindus because of the linga in our temples.”

“What the hell’s a linga?” Mike asked.

“The image of a phallus, representing Shiva,” Zen explained. “In Hinduism, the gods are often represented by the union of male and female, Shiva and Kali, his linga and her yoni. It‘s sort of the Indian version of yin and yang.”

“I’d rather worship in front of a stone dick than a pile of bones any day,” Ramesh said.

Even Zen laughed a little. “The Catholics may have been a little more morbid than the Pagans, but Brigid’s starry path was not forgotten. Even today, pilgrims follow the Milky Way toward the ocean when they walk the Way of St. James.”

“That’s beautiful,” Gillian said.

Ramesh wrapped his arms around Zen tightly. “You’re shivering. Let’s get you inside.”

****

The 25th of July was chosen as St. James's feast day because it's supposed to have been the day of the saint's martyrdom. The execution of James by Herod Agrippa is Biblically recorded in Acts 12:2, "And he killed James the brother of John with the sword" in the King James translation. I know this because I read it on the blog Executed Today.

Executed Today isn't something I normally read; it's something I stumbled across in the sidebar of a writing blog I was reading. The blogger known as the Headsman writes, "It's certainly plausible--though impossible to substantiate--that James evangelized in Spain prior to his execution. The whole Mediterranean was a Roman lake. More toward the outlandish is the patriotic story that James's relics were miraculously discovered there in 813 at the moment when Muslim expansion into Iberia gave the hard-pressed Christian kingdoms the greatest possible need for a morale boost."

Headsman notes that St. James is the main saint venerated today, but it is also the feast day of St. Christopher of 3rd-early 4th century Rome. In a possible nod to the dog days of summer, this particular St. Christopher is sometimes depicted with a dog head, a la Anubis.

The article also mentions that the path on which St. James's remains were taken was beset by "dragons, pagans and wagons," with a link to an excerpt from The Golden Legend translated by William Granger Ryan at Julie Golick's The Pocket Bard blog. It tells of a Queen Lupa of Spain, unhappy that her people have converted to Christianity, who tells the corpse-bearers to yoke certain oxen they find in the mountains to the wagon that will bear the body. These oxen are wild; she hopes the men will be killed and the body lost. The men encounter and kill a fire-breathing dragon on their way, and when they make the sign of the cross to the wild oxen, the oxen are instantly tamed and, without even having to be driven, bear the body of St. James directly to Lupa's palace. Lupa becomes a believer and converts to Christianity herself.

"Lupa," of course, means "she-wolf" in Latin. "Queen Lupa" probably isn't meant to represent any historical person, but to be a stand-in for the pre-Christian religion of Iberia in general. They may have worshiped a goddess they called Lupa. Barbara J. Walker writes that Lupa was the "sacred She-Wolf of Roman legend, nurse of the foundling twins Romulus and Remus. Lupa's temple harlots were lupae, sometimes called Queens (or high priestesses) in outlying towns of the empire. Lupa's greatest festival was the annual Lupercalia*, celebrated in the Grotto of the She-Wolf with orgiastic rites to insure the year's fertility." Lupa's consort was called Lupus (the Wolf), Feronius, or Dis Pater. Dis was originally the Etruscan god of the dead who had a wolf head and lived underground; via the Romans, Dis was worshiped by the Gallic Celts and in England, says Walker.

(Encyclopedia Mythica says Dis was simply the name the Romans attached to the most prominent god of the Gallic Celts, and it's unclear which Celtic god this referred to - maybe Dagda, who held the title of "All Father.")

St. James is the patron saint of Spain, and his feast day is usually a national celebration. However, there was a terrible high-speed train accident in Spain (in the region of Galicia, on the way to Santiago de Compostela) yesterday that killed more than 70 people, and this nation is in mourning rather than in any mood for a celebration.

In happier times, St. James's Day might call for a seafood feast. Because James and his brother John were fishers, a symbol for St. James is the scallop shell. (The scallop shell is also a symbol of Brigid, and like Brigid, St. James is considered the patron of blacksmiths.) He's sometimes depicted wearing cockleshells, and in England, eating oysters today is considered good luck.

*I mentioned the Lupercalia as being associated with Pan the other day. This Lupercalia essay by Caroline Wise explains the link between Lupa and Pan. Pan - Faustus to the Romans - was the shepherd who lived near Lupa's wolf-den (her luperca) and found the twins the wolf had nursed. Faustus and his wife Fauna raised the twins to adulthood.

Read St. James' Day (Pagan Spirits #3) here:

Apple Books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/st-james-day/id6445005544

Everand (Scribd): https://www.everand.com/book/613027583/St-James-Day-Pagan-Spirits-3

Fable: https://fable.co/book/x-9798215439876

Kobo (Rakuten): https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/st-james-day

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1250919

Tolino: https://www.thalia.de/shop/home/artikeldetails/A1067302221

Vivlio: https://shop.vivlio.com/product/9798215439876_9798215439876_10020/st-james-day

Imbolc, Buddy Holly and Human Sacrifice

Please leave a comment on yesterday's post for a chance to win a copy of Summer Spirit by G. Jay (romantic suspense).

For some basic background information on the 1st and 2nd of February, variously celebrated as Groundhog Day, Brighid Day, Candlemas and Imbolc, please see this post.

One day in August last year, I fell down the rabbit hole and stumbled upon several conspiracy theory blogs. I linked to several of them, including VISUP, which features an intriguing post about death symbolism in the Christian Bale movie The Prestige. (Don't read it unless you've seen The Prestige, because it spoils the major plot twist.) About two weeks ago, I stumbled back onto VISUP a 4-part series of posts called "How the Music Died."

Ostensibly, "How the Music Died" is about the February 3, 1959 plane crash that killed rock 'n' roll performers Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson and references to the tragic event in the song "American Pie" by Don McLean. What's interesting about the series is how the author, who  goes by the pen name Recluse, links the January 31 date to the traditional celebration of Imbolc. (You'll notice me referring to Recluse without pronouns, since I do not know this person's gender.)

In the first article, Recluse links Holly's name with the ancient folklore of the Holly King (or Holly Knight) and the Oak King (or Oak Knight). These figures have an annual battle on the first of May (Beltane) or at Midsummer, in which the Holly King beheads the Oak King and takes over the Oak King's kingdom. The Holly King's literary descendant is the Green Knight of Arthurian literature; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (composed in Middle English by a poet or poets whose names are lost) has been translated by literary luminaries including J.R.R. Tolkien and W.S. Merwin. (You can download a copy as inexpensively as 99 cents for Kindle. In fact, here is a free version.) 

Recluse associates the Green Knight with death and rebirth, an association similar to the folkloric character known as The Fool, celebrated at the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia (December 17-24). In the second article, Recluse explains that the Oak King and the Holly King do battle not only once, but twice a year, endlessly beheading one another and each time returning from the dead. The second battle takes place at Midwinter, or the Winter Solstice. The Green, or Holly, Knight is also associated with the folkloric figure of the Green Man.

The Saturnalia custom was for social class distinctions to be temporarily suspended, so that slaves and their masters reveled together freely. The festivities also included the choosing of a mock king, perhaps representing the god Saturn, who was empowered to give commands (typically ridiculous, silly ones) to festival guests. This custom survived as the "Lord of Misrule" tradition in medieval and Renaissance Europe, associated with the Feast of Fools, which was especially popular in France. 

Saturnus by  Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, 16th century. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons

According to Wikipedia, James Frazer in The Golden Bough associated the Lord of Misrule with an annual ritual sacrifice performed in ancient Rome - in other words, after serving his ceremonial function, the man chosen as the Fool or Lord of Misrule was sacrificed. However, Clement A. Miles disputes this in Christmas Customs and Traditions: Their History and Significant. Miles writes, "Dr. Frazer's theory, dependent for its evidence upon the narrative of the martyrdom of a fourteenth-century saint, Dasius by name, has been keenly criticized by Dr. Ward Fowler. He holds that there is nothing whatever to show that the 'Saturn' who in the fourth century, according to the story, was sacrificed by soldiers on the Danube, had anything to do with the customs of ancient Rome."

Miles does note that one holly-related tradition was to take the holly decorations down at Candlemas/Imbolc. According to The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker, holly has traditionally been considered feminine; the masculine equivalent is ivy. Walker considers the word "holly" itself etymologically related to a Germanic word, Hohle, which meant the grove or cave sacred to the Goddess (a vaginal symbol as well as a geographic location), and to the name of the Germanic goddess Holle, or Hel, who governed the Underworld in Norse mythology. (You may remember Hel as one of the children of Loki.)

Whether the sacrifice is associated with the masculine Saturn or the feminine Hel, Recluse's implication is that Buddy Holly's tragic accident is a kind of human sacrifice in honor of Imbolc. Recluse notes that the goddess generally associated with Imbolc is "Bright" (likely a misspelling of "Brighit"), also known variously as Briid, Bride (pronounced "Breed"), Brigid, etc. The goddess, Recluse notes, is one third of the Triple Muse, the Celtic holy trinity. A connection is made between the trio of Holly, Valens and Richardson and the goddesses' feast night.

Although their deaths are recorded as having occurred in the early hours of February 3, the February 2 date of Imbolc had just passed. Who carried out the sacrifice and how exactly it was achieved in the form of an aircraft accident are not explained. Parts 3 and 4 depart from "American Pie" and focus on the Blue Oyster Cult (BOC), music with which I personally am wholly unfamiliar. (I mean, I've heard "Don't Fear the Reaper" on the radio before, but that's about it.)

Mention of the goddess is made again in Part 4, which equates "Susie," a mysterious woman mentioned in BOC songs, with the "sacred prostitutes" of antiquity, temple priestesses whose sexual favors were a form of action-prayer intended to link the worshiper to the goddess (as, perhaps, Mary Magdalene). Another song character is "Charles the grinning boy," which Recluse associates (rather freely) with a sacrificial victim.

The reasoning is rather interesting: Recluse claims the phrase "grin like a Cheshire cat" predates Lewis Carroll and referred at one time, gruesomely, to those who'd had their throats cut. This mode of execution is associated with the Celts, Recluse says, and can be seen in ancient sacrificial victims whose preserved bodies have been found in peat bogs. (This may remind you of the "Old Man" in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, if you've read Ransom Riggs' charming YA novel.)

Brigid's Cross, woven from rushes. Author: Culnacreann via Wikimedia Commons

Even if Imbolc was associated with human sacrifice in the distant past (and I think you can conclude the link between the two is rather tenuous), I don't want it to be something you think of as eerie or frightening. Let's remember the true meaning of Imbolc (in the Northern Hemisphere, especially if you live in a temperate climate): gratitude to some Higher Power (whichever one you like) that winter is loosening its grip on the world, that spring is coming, new life is on its way, and the forces of nature are already turning the days longer and the world warmer and greener.