Late last year, I was asked if I would consider doing a preface for a book on Tolkien.

I duly received a copy of the text, and replied that I would be delighted to write something. The preface is below, but before that…

I’m tempted to say that the theme of the book is not simply what is announced on the cover. The immediate focus is on the ten days or so that young J. R. R. Tolkien spent in the warm August of 1911 crossing the Alps from Lauterbrunnen to Sion. Surrounding this journey, though, reside the even more pertinent and wider questions: how does inspiration function, and how neatly can it be pinned down?

Of course, I can speak only for myself and in no way intend to generalize, but honestly, I still have no real idea of how inspiration works. (Admittedly, given that it is a process that I rely on professionally, that does seem a little hazardous to say the least. Equally, if I am so circumspect in my affirmations, it is because I know very well that what the artist may put in an image is often not what the viewer sees.)

But first, please allow me to indulge in a bit of etymology:

inspiration (n.)

1. 1300, “immediate influence of God or a god,” especially that under which the holy books were written, from Old Frenchinspiracion“inhaling, breathing in; inspiration” (13c.), from Late Latin inspirationem (nominative inspiratio), noun of action from past-participle stem of Latin inspirare“blow into, breathe upon,” figuratively “inspire, excite, inflame,” from in- “in” (from PIE root *en “in”) + spirare “to breathe” (see spirit (n.)). ,

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. [Genesis ii.7]

The sense evolution seems to be from “breathe into” to “infuse animation or influence,” thus “affect, rouse, guide or control,” especially by divine influence. Inspire (v.) in Middle English also was used to mean “breath or put life or spirit into the human body; impart reason to a human soul.” Literal sense “act of inhaling” attested in English from 1560s. Meaning “one who inspires others” is attested by 1867.^[2]

The shift from the divine to the artist came relatively late, witness to the enduring (and, in the end, accurate) notion that inspiration belongs and yet does not entirely belong to us. The sentiment that inspiration is a connection of some undefinable source beyond our control persists. The embodiment of this connection, which can be tenuous, is the opportunity to perceive unexpected relationships between thins, to connect unsuspected dots, and ultimately “seeing” vividly the result. The relinquishing of control is equally important; you cannot command inspiration.

Inspiration can be a journey, signposted by what you stumble upon, guided by circumstance. Sources of inspiration obey no easily established taxonomy or hierarchy, they simply happen. Perhaps this explains the persistence of the notion of divine involvement, whatever “divine” may be taken to mean. At any rate, even if you do not know where you are going – and it is better not to – inspiration is truly the guide for those wandering but not lost.

But, rather than go on endlessly about it, (my students would be relieved) I leave you with the preface. Information on the book itself can be found at the end.

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THE WILDERLAND OF THE IMAGINATION

I would like to begin this preface with two seemingly contradictory thoughts.

Firstly, I cannot agree with everything in this book. Conversely, I immensely enjoyed reading it and am honoured to have been asked to contribute this preface; it truly is a book long overdue.

When 19-year old J. R. R. Tolkien undertook his 10-day walking tour of the Alps in the fine summer holidays of 1911, he travelled in a very different Switzerland than today. Dr Monsch takes us back, in Tolkien’s company, to a Switzerland that has long since disappeared. It is worth reconsidering “Tolkien’s Switzerland,” for if the silhouettes of the mountains have themselves remained largely unscathed, power lines, ski lifts, panoramic restaurants and hydroelectric dams have left their imprint. The Alps Tolkien experienced was a less domesticated and accessible world, infinitely closer to the novels he was to write decades after his trip.

The very wildness of the landscape must have grandly impressed young Tolkien. Through the filter of his memories, we are no longer strictly dealing with topography, but with archetypes. We are less attempting to identify observable features than dealing with inspirations, which, in themselves, invite extrapolation and distortion of scale. Dr Monsch is not necessarily proposing that every parallel he draws is true, but that all are worthwhile weighing and considering.

What a grand shame Tolkien kept no diary of his alpine escapade! Additionally, he was not leading the expedition, so his memories, when he came to write of it, are vivid but disjointed and delocalized. This is another key to reading Dr. Monsch’s book. Because Tolkien (not unlike Bilbo) wrote about his journey far later in life, the spatial relationship linking experiences, outside of ascent and descent, was blurred by time. (In a letter written to Michael Tolkien in 1967 or 68, Tolkien directly equates Bilbo’s adventure to his own.) The series of impressions that remained from a relatively modest portion of the map had by that time expanded to fill a world. Therefore, if upon the author’s maps, Middle-Earth transposed on the Valais seems an impossible fit, it is necessary to ignore the relative exiguity of the topography and imagine instead a series of loosely conjoined vignettes, excerpts or flashes from a larger narrative.

The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit deal in archetypes, in the symbolism of landscape and in the essence of our relationship to nature. The landscapes of Middle-earth are directly inherited from Romanticism, drawing intimate and essential parallels between each contrée and its lords or denizens. Tolkien claimed to be allergic to allegory, but each land in Middle-earth is the topographical metaphor of the spirit of the peoples that dwell therein. Evaluating the validity of an inspirational landscape is as much down to feeling and impression as it is to feature and contour. How can we hope, a century later, to capture the spirit of the landscape through which Tolkien walked, factoring in the dépaysement of an Englishman abroad for the first time^[3], the strenuous marching and the vigour and enthusiasm of his 19 summers? He says as much himself: the vividness of his experience remained undiminished by time. Perhaps his memories of Switzerland were even enhanced by the passage of time, purified and refined to their essential elements. To judge the validity of Dr Monsch’s proposals, we must abandon a periods-and-commas approach, ignore scale, and adjust our views to a remembered but far-ago world.

Some alpine landmarks are cited by Tolkien as inspiration, the most explicit being the Silberhorn, a side peak of the Jungfrau. “I left the view of Jungfrau with deep regret: eternal snow, etched as it seemed against eternal sunshine, and the Silberhorn sharp against dark blue: the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams.”^[4]  It is a reminder – and a bit of a word of warning – that inspiration does not always follow logic; it was not the obvious and famous mountain trio of Jungfrau, Eiger and Mönch that inspired Tolkien, but rather a side peak of one of these. (Context is all-important here: Tolkien’s comment tells us as much about the light – fleeting and dramatic – as it does about the mountain.) The valley of Lauterbrunnen is a clear candidate for Rivendell. The forest fires of August 1911 might have cast a pall over the country during the time he was present in the Valais. The encroaching and disquieting darkness of the smoke is surely evocative of the tangible Darkness spreading from Mordor as Sauron’s power waxes. If the mountain vista identified as a source for Mordor, above the village of Ferpecle, is rather tamer today, with easy access by paved road, the wilderness of stone below the glacier, devoid of any vegetation, does evoke Mordor, not as a precise topographical anchor point or a literal transposition, but as the incarnation of an atmosphere of mineral desolation that, if applied to an entire landscape, could very well represent the dead and desolate land of Sauron.^[5] In other words, Tolkien did not directly lift sections of landscape from the Swiss Alps and sprinkle them across his far vaster Middle-earth, but took back with him a series of vivid and sublime impressions that may well have resurfaced naturally as he wrote.

Equally, the search for Tolkien’s sources of inspiration, focusing on those aspects of landscape mirrored in Middle-Earth, help us see more clearly the evocative power of the landscape itself. In this sense, Tolkien is a guide who takes us back in time, to better consider the changes the intervening century has wrought.

Today, we have left Romanticism so far behind that Tolkien’s Switzerland is akin to a foreign country. This exploration incites us not so much to check and compare salient features, (although there is a certain satisfaction in trying them on for size, and assuredly this thorough text will be greeted with much nodding and shaking of heads) but to experience the landscape, to erase the pylons and lifts and imagine the Alps as seen in 1911 by a vibrant 19-year old with a vivid imagination and a penchant for storytelling.

Above all, this book is an invitation to consider the narrative qualities of the landscape, its storytelling power to evoke and inspire. Pinpointing a source of inspiration is not as simple as following a watercourse upstream to its fountainhead. Inspiration may go underground, change direction and flow, branch as well as receive tributaries. Inspiration is syncretic, a source may not be exclusive, but a conjoining of impressions. Additionally, fantasy is hardly subject to practical considerations.˜˜˜

On a personal note, I have been wandering, pencils and paintbrushes in hand, for more than four decades in Middle-earth. I know how incidental and serendipitous inspiration can be, and what deep-seated convictions it may reveal. I know the Canadian Rockies as well as the Alps, but they do not work for me as a visual source for Tolkien. The Alps are far more to my liking. I certainly agree there is no real or logically defendable reason for this, it is simply based on the hard-to-define notion of what is “right.” (On the other hand, only Patagonia will do for the mountains of the Second Age, and only New Zealand for the shores of Numenór and Beleriand.) Inspiration can be infinite and intimate. The sweep and the grandeur of the Alps can combine harmoniously with the more personal and secretive landscapes of the Jura, the former providing scope and scale, that later credibility of detail necessary for the willing suspension of disbelief so crucial to fantasy. Where on earth is Middle-earth? As much a landscape of the mind as it is identifiable on a map, it is everywhere that story and narration are present in the landscape.

This book is above all else an invitation to step into Tolkien’s hiking shoes, shoulder his pack, and step back a century into a world which is as far from today as Middle-earth is from our world; a guidebook of impressions, a walking tour of the nature of imagination and the imagination of nature.

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FOOTNOTES

[1] Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown, chapter 8 (1937)

[2] From that helpful resource, the Online Etymological Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com

[3] Although he was born in South Africa, Tolkien had lived in England since the age of three.

[4] Letter to Michael Tolkien, 1967 or 1968

[5] Inspiration may be indirect: Tolkien passed through Switzerland when the Swiss Lake Dwellers enjoyed immense popularity and may have contributed to the imagining of Lake Town. (The piquant fact that the whole notion was based on enthusiastic national rivalry and wishful thinking nonetheless is all the more ironic: historical error begetting enduring fiction.

FOR A CLOSER LOOK AT THE BOOK

English version:

– Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/dp/3907323025

– Amazon.co.uk: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/3907323025

– Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1139862455

– Book Depository (worldwide delivery): https://www.bookdepository.com/book/9783907323021

German version:

– Amazon.de: https://www.amazon.de/dp/3969669057

– Orell Füssli: https://www.orellfuessli.ch/shop/home/artikeldetails/ID152187188.html

– Ex Libris: https://www.exlibris.ch/de/buecher-buch/deutschsprachige-buecher/martin-s-monsch/die-schweiz-in-tolkiens-mittelerde/id/9783969669051

Look inside best through Google Books:

– EN: https://books.google.ch/books?id=5Ic6EAAAQBAJ

– DE: https://books.google.ch/books?id=AxQ5EAAAQBAJ

Adam Nicolson, from The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters

“In the very earliest time
When both people and animals lived on earth
A person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen—
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That’s the way it was.”

Nalungiaq, Inuit woman interviewed by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen in the early twentieth century.

Liminality is one of the most defining aspects of our existence. The frontier between what is and what is not structures our view of all with which we interact.

There are few sensations closer to the sublime than gazing at the inaccessible landscape, the places where we may not go, or only go in spirit. The edge of the sea or a precipice, high mountain or fleeting light we cannot retain but must rapidly savour; the impossibility of doing aught else but gaze places us squarely in the paradox of our presence: the view is beautiful because it is all we are not.

Nicolson places his acute observation in relation to Homer’s “unharvestable sea,” when the traveler stands looking beyond the tamed and bountiful land at one’s back, to the hostile expanse that must be traversed.

In a wider context, we tend to disassemble what we see into manageable portions: the geologist sees strata, the farmer sees land that is tillable or not, the traveler measures the roads and distances. We rarely appreciate the whole of the landscape, which is present principally in myth and poetry, the former by rendering incarnate ocean, sky, earth or seasons as a pantheon of divine beings, the latter through metaphor and symbol.

Liminal places. Where the dialogue is reduced to a few elements, the conversation is clearer

Selflessness of observance requires that we omit ourselves from our view, even though it is unique to each of us. In this, myth and poetry can provide a guide.

The fundamental distancing of humanity from nature does not date from yesterday, and I would in no fashion imagine we can somehow turn back time to a nostalgic and perfectly harmonious past which likely never existed. Nonetheless, it is worth reminding ourselves what happened. With the initial shift of most of humanity to agriculture, our ancestors left behind a world where dialogue was everywhere. Given the fundamental equality of existence of the rock, the river, the fish and the fisherman, everyone talked to everyone. The fish lured to the hook by prayer was thanked as it was eaten.

With the gathering of humans in larger communities and the cultivation of food rather than the gathering, humanity took a step outside nature and created its own version: condensed and potentially bountiful. Humanity also took a step outside of the dialogue and addressed prayer no longer to the grain itself, but to a god on high, who, if pleased, would ensure that the harvest was plentiful. Gods became humanity’s agent and intermediary to the world.

Places in between. The ebbing and flowing conversation of tides and shores.

Humanity took a further step from nature when monotheism granted us dominion over all things, making us creatures of exception. All other creatures, deprived first of speech and now souls, were no longer part of the conversation^[1]. We had only ourselves to talk to, so of course we talked about the world, rather than to the world. We have done that ever since.

In fact, we have become quite good at it. We are, however, not very good at listening. That dialogue is behind us and forever lost. Nonetheless, myth offers clues. Imagining the world as an entity and not simply a sum of constituent elements^[2] would offer it not only a voice, but also a regard. To imagine that when we are enraptured in a landscape, it has the capacity to return our gaze. From there it is but a step to re-imagine voice and dialogue.

Tidal pool. Patient water waiting to rejoin the restless sea.

By this, I of course mean epic, mythic and poetic dialogue, a vade mecum to considering what is not us as a whole, interconnected, in constant conversation. The dialogue of the world with itself escapes most of us; while the butterfly batting its wings in the amazon was a useful metaphor, if only as a thought-provoking conceit, it does not go far enough.

When the Indonesian volcano Tambora erupted in 1815, provoking the famous year without summer, when well-to-do expatriate ennui sparked the writing contest that was to bequeath us Frankenstein, the millions of tons of dust that rose into the atmosphere did not simply make the world uniformly colder. Portions of the world suffered drought, ocean currents were modified, the world stuttered.^[3] Naturally, the dust settled, and after three years, the rhythms resumed.

Tambora highlights the unexpected interconnectedness and causality of climate and change, a reminder that we need to learn to listen once again, in the manner of the once-endless dialogue between us and everything that is not.

In 2015, the Whanganui River in New Zealand was granted the status of a legal person. It is considered a living entity, with representatives who may act and speak for and on behalf of the river. The goal is to safeguard the river’s social, cultural and economic well-being. It is a first step: giving a voice to an entity to which we are no longer willing or able to listen to.

Mess with that river, it will take you to court.

While this offers more efficient legal protection, it also firmly sets out the idea of the river as a living entity, from source to mouth. This is not the anthropomorphizing of a natural feature, it is the enlargement and diversification of our recognition of beings that deserve to be listened to with respect.

Strata. Ongoing conversation between stone, waves and tides.

Myth is simply religion in which people no longer believe, in which religious fervor is no longer invested. Nevertheless, myth and its wilder offspring, poetry, are there to remind us of not only what we humans once thought, but what we should be thinking. Giving a voice and lending an ear to the natural world is one of those things.^[4] We value our interior wild spaces – they are where art lives and thrives – we need to value in equal measure that which is not us. Inside, outside, it is all about borders.

Why liminal spaces and thresholds, edges and frontiers? These have traditionally been the places where the exchanges – between cultures and peoples, myths and epics, have always been the richest. Exchange contains change, enhancement, enrichment; things do not simply pass liminal thresholds intact. They may diminish, they may gather complexity as they pass. Stories barter their way from culture to culture, negotiate, make changes as they go. On the edges of things are the best place to stand and gaze.

Vertical and horizontal: a dialogue of rust, rock and sand.

When I stand on the edge of a landscape, especially one that I cannot simply walk further into, where I must stand on the edge of where I cannot go, I am deafened by the voices and music. A landscape is not unlike an orchestra or a choir. These are the voices of everything that is not us. Everything is speaking, singing, chanting. I wish to understand and be part of the exchange, but cannot. I don’t understand those languages any more. They have been speaking to us for a long time, we have just not been listening. It is time we do.

Windswept. The dialogue of tenacity and relentlessness.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This extended to other humans, those who belief assured us had no souls, therefore justifying slavery no longer as the spoils of the mighty, but also as being in the natural order of things.

[2] It is not that hard, we see ourselves as individuals and not an assemblage of parts.

[3] And Turner painted many famous sunsets. See “Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World” by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, and “The Year Without Summer” by William K. Klingaman

[4] Designating the natural world as “natural” shows how far we have divorced ourselves from it.

More reading:

THE MIGHTY DEAD: WHY HOMER MATTERS by Adam Nicolson, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2015

TAMBORA: THE ERUPTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Princeton University Press, 2015

THE YEAR WITHOUT SUMMER: 1816 AND THE VOLCANO THAT DARKENED THE WORLD AND CHANGED HISTORY by William K. Klingaman & Nicholas P. Klingaman, St. Martin’s Press, 2014

SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND by Yuval Noah Harari, Vintage Publishing, 2016

HOMO DEUS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW by Yuval Noah Harari, Vintage Publishing, 2017

A few years ago, I acquired a couple of books.

I know what you are thinking, and you are right, I have indubitably bought more than that – a healthy amount of books pass though my hands – but these two were special. You see, they had gotten away.

When I was small, I did not have a wealth of children’s books. Of those, I recall a few at most: The Poky Little Puppy, a book done by the incredible Gustaf Tenggren (yes, he of Walt Disney’s Snow White) in 1942; Thornton W. Burgess’ The Adventures of Grandfather Frog (part of a series, if I recall correctly); Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman (originally published in 1892), Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (the Crab and the Animal that came out of the sea gave me nightmares and I felt terribly sorry for the Elephant’s Child, as I did for Burgess’ old-timer frog stuck in the well); possibly a copy of The Wind in the Willows, and certainly a small handful more.^[1]

Then, of course, there were the ones I had forgotten; it is of those I wish to write. You see, I found two of them again.

We do live in a wonderful world, where the definition of what is lost has been redefined by helpfully pernicious algorithms. Chances are that if at least one other person on the planet is interested in the same thing, your cyberpaths will eventually cross.

One of the two books, I purchased for the image on the cover. (I know, one should not be judging a book by the cover, and even worse, buying it for that very reason. I plead guilty to both counts, I am a true serial offender since my teens, when I hunted out paperbacks with covers by artists I admired in the musty aisles and paperback stacks of used-book shops.)

The artwork I rediscovered is by an American artist named Milo Winter. His Wikipedia entry is sparing to say the least: “Winter was born in Princeton, Illinois and trained at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute. He lived in Chicago until the early 1950s, when he moved to New York City. From 1947 to 1949, he was the art editor of Childcraft books and from 1949, was the art editor in the film strip division of Silver Burdett Company.” Other than date of birth and death (August 7, 1888 – August 15, 1956) and a list of a handful of titles and a few illustrations, that is all.

Winter attended Chicago’s School of the Art Institute. From 1947 to 1949, he was the art editor of World Book’s Childcraft series of anthologies for children. From 1949, he was the art editor in the film strip division of Silver Burdett Company. Winter lived in Chicago until the early 1950s, when he moved to New York City. His wife was a “notable sculptress”^.[2] (Their only child, Milo Kendall Winter Jr., born in 1913, went on to attend the Chicago Art Institute and become a watercolour artist. He died in 2002.)

Winter worked extensively for Chicago publishers Houghton Mifflin and Rand McNally. Many of his titles were much-visited classics: Gulliver’sTravels (1912), Tanglewood Tales (1913), Aesop’s Fables (1916), Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales (c. 1916), Alice in Wonderland, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,  The Three Musketeers,  A Christmas Carol, Treasure Island. He also illustrated more contemporary authors: The Wonder Garden and The Book of Elves and Fairies by Frances Jenkins Olcott, and The Trail Book by Mary Austin (1918). He also created simpler illustrations for younger children with titles such as The Three Little Kittensand The Three Little Pigs. All in all, he seems to have had a versatile and long-lived career.^[3]

The book that I had of his, though, turns out to be his very first book: Billy Popgun, which he both wrote and illustrated. I am looking at it now. The book was published by the Houghton Mifflin Company in October 1912; in 60-odd pages, eight chapters recount pyjama-clad Billy’s adventures with a succession of creatures and beings: bull frog, field mouse, bald eagle, sea turtle and other sea creatures, a bumble-dragon and a posse of dwarves, and of course the Bunny on the cover. I undoubtedly had a later edition when I was small.

This is the image that stuck so well in my mind. Everything in it still contains the magic it must have held when I first saw it: the beautiful dawn light, when the sky has just turned to nacre and the shadows retain their blue tint; the warm edges on the objects silhouetted against the sky; the Little Nemo-like character in his footed pyjamas; the energy of the rabbit’s leap. Everything contributes to reality and implausibility combined, the ingredients that make up fairy tales. Even though I had forgotten book and author, it is no wonder I never truly forgot that picture.

Billy Popgun, by Milo Winter, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Chicago, October 1912. Cover, frontispiece & dust jacket

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As for the other book, it had been completely forgotten. Totally and entirely, certainly for decades.

Then, one day, as I was browsing the net, I stumbled on an image, which I immediately recalled the instant I saw it. (Remember, I had completely forgotten its existence.) It was not the cover of the book, but an interior illustration, from a Russian folk tale about a sleigh pursued by wolves. As each wolf is shot, the pack stops to devour it, before resuming the pursuit, until only one wolf is left, having eaten the entire pack, before it is finally shot and the sleigh escapes.

I found the image troubling at the time, but it never occurred to me to wonder how one wolf could have devoured nineteen others (and the tale itself leaves the question rather patronisingly suspended, though I doubt that bothered me at the time either).

What did trouble me was the wounded wolf, curled on its back, with a handful of other wolves abandoning pursuit of the sleigh to turn to devour it. There are a few spots of blood on the snow.

It did not take long to locate the book, author and illustrator. (Thank you algorithms.)

My forgotten book: The Book of Animal Tales, told by Stephen Southwold, with illustrations by Honor C. Appleton. It was published in London by George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, in 1929.

Naturally, I dug one up and ordered it. (How often can you buy a piece of your childhood at such a modest price, postage included?) But first, a word about the illustrator, Honor C. Appleton.

Honor Charlotte Appleton is typical of the multitude of turn-of-the-century women who were just as talented, creative and original as their male counterparts, and who, with far too few exceptions, remain largely forgotten under their shadow. Appleton was born to parents Georgina and John Hoblyn Appleton in Brighton, on February 4^th, 1879. She grew up with two older sisters, Rachel and Alice Mary (known as Sissy), and a younger brother named John. It is very likely that she and her sisters were encouraged to pursue drawing and painting by her mother Georgina.

She began her art studies at the Kensington Schools, before attending Frank Calderon’s School of Animal Painting^[4] and the Royal Academy Schools in London from 1901 to 1906. Her first book, The Bad Mrs. Ginger^[5], was published in September 1902 by Frederick A. Stokes Company, as part of the Dumpy Books for Children series, at the end of her first year at the Royal Academy. He next book would wait until well after the end of her studies, in 1910: Songs of Innocence, by William Blake.

Her most popular books were those in the Josephine series, written by Mrs. H. C. Cradock. Josephine is an only child, with a rich imagination and a big family of dolls. In the four decades of her artistic career, she illustrated over 150 children’s books.

Appleton seems to have lived for most of her life near Hove, on the coast of East Sussex, not far from her sister Sissy. During the war, she was a nurse for the Civil Defence. Honor Appleton does not seem to have married. She died on the 30^th of December 1951.^[6]

Artistically, she is invariably compared to her more famous peers: Kate Greenaway and Jessie Willcox Smith, and considered to be “influenced” by Arthur Rackham and W. Heath Robinson. Quite honestly, I fail to see in what way, other than the fact that they were outstanding artists, so the assumption is that clearly they musthave influenced someone of less renown like Appleton. This, alas, is standard filler text for want of something more serious to write. There is little to determine Appleton’s influences other than those of the times, of her studies, and her professional contacts with London publishers. She is very much her own woman as an artist; her sense of layout and use of space is in no way inferior to Dulac or Booth, her command of black and white stands the comparison to the Robinsons, her drafts(wo)manship is equal to any of the former and her choice and treatment of themes in her illustrations original and often striking.

As for the author of The Book of Animal Tales, Stephen Southwold, he  seems to have been a prolific author writing a variety of genres, from horror and science-fiction to children’s books, under a variety of pseudonyms.^[7]

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Of course, I sat down with the book as soon as it arrived, and while I cannot pretend I recall all the illustrations, I certainly remember all the colour plates and 9 out of 10 black and white drawings. I am moved by the same sentiment of pity I felt at the time for the dead Minotaur and the dragon of Lango, struck by the struggling savagery of the chapter heading vignette of Gehert and Llewellyn, felt the air beneath me as the Black Bull leaped over the Moon. I found the lion cut in half disconcerting, but not so much as Munchausen’s indifference to the halving of his horse, which was unconcernedly drinking at a pool… Upon seeing them again, all those connections were remade afresh. (I do not recall the cover of the book; there were many editions, and I may have had a different one than the one I have now.)

A wholly arbitrary section of images from the book. So many of them troubled me, others mystified me and all of them must have enchanted me. Only a very small handful, all innocuous chapter tailpieces, escaped my recall. 

˜ ˜ ˜

Ultimately, the images are there, it is simply the connection that is lost. This may mean that our brains are a vast storehouse of dormant memories, all waiting for the flick of a switch to come back into the light. How much of it is actually there, in other worlds, how perfect is our memory of anything? Or are they zipped, in a sense, and stumbling on the same or a similar image playing the same role as Stuffit expander, restoring the abbreviated image to its old self? How much space does an image take in our brains? Can it be somehow quantified, like bytes on a drive? What form do they actually take, is there the cerebral equivalent of the jpeg or the pdf?

One helpful note: it seems we recall images more efficiently than we recall words. (I imagine we have evolution to thank for this, we have been processing the abstract much less longer than we have been dealing with the concrete.) Positron emission tomography has shown that the memorising, or encoding of pictures results in greater activity of bilateral visual and medial temporal cortices, whereas encoding of words is associated with increased activity in prefrontal and temporoparietal regions. In other words, images might be more intimately linked to emotions, and distributed more evenly across the brain.

What is clear, is that our brains are formidable memory machines, and can house vast amounts of either pictures, or cues sufficiently elaborate as to reconnect to our memories of them should we encounter them again. What is also clear is that we are often woefully inadequate at maintaining the connections to those images.

Imagine an image is stored in a group of neurones. Parallel to that, in another group of neurones is stored the emotion associated with it. So, if the visual cortex stores an image, neurones in the amygdala store the associated emotion, and so on. These varied files related to the same memory are stored in the regions of the brain that initiated them, and those helpful clumps of neurones are programmed to fire away simultaneously when we recall something. This results in a series of engrams, or memory traces – basically the Finder on your computer, which can allow you to retrieve the image you seek. If one engram is lost, chances are that another, closely associated with a different sensation related to the image, will allow you to find that alternative pathway. (Everyone is familiar with the flood of memory and sensation that can occur when a long-forgotten smell or taste is encountered again.)

Conversely, the augmented disembodiment that is often a feature of digital accessibility, banalisation of circumstance or decontextualisation of  image encoding means that less paths are created, increasing our chances of losing that memory.

This interior entropy has for result that we lose that access to the stored imagery, ample reason to cultivate and work at our use of images and how we acquire and treat them. Ultimately contemplation is a passive act, there is little physical participation in observing a fixed image. Additionally, the inherent disconnect of the internet, (despite those helpful, and I repeat, pernicious, algorithms) means that the number of attendant actions that frame any image are soon lost in our browsing history, itself hardly an easily retraceable path.

To me, this is a call to look at real things, whether printed or original, whether in books or on walls, in order to maintain the context that will allow us multiple paths to retrace our steps and keep those images present. The danger of the infinitely repeated jpeg is that not only is it often stripped of context on the net, simply being available to us principally in that form strips it of all context whatsoever.

This is not the luddite speaking, by the way, our digital connectedness is a wonderful tool if used properly. It is the best resource ever made available to prepare for the encounter with the actual thing itself. Unfortunately, we too often content ourselves with the ersatz, eschewing the real. In expanding our horizons digitally, we risk impoverishing their physicality. While the image may be ultimately disembodied, the context, which allows a strong connection with that image, should not be ignored.

Imagine Leonardo da Vinci had worked digitally. If identical Mona Lisas were in infinite supply the world over, would you make the effort to go farther than three clicks and a keyword or two to see one? But there is only one Mona Lisa, just as there is only one of you. To get there to see it means work, actually seeing it may be a disappointment – crowds, distance of security cordon, lighting – but you have experienced seeing it. To the image itself are attached all the physical events surrounding it. (The Mona Lisa may be a poor example, but the same thoughts apply to any piece of visual art.)

It is all about the encounter to two unique things: you and what you are looking at. Those events, humble or moving, can only take place by contriving for those two unique entities to come face to face, whatever the circumstances. The internet is there to help, not substitute itself for the experience. Do your homework first (that is what the net is for) so that you make it a memorable exercise. You cannot weave a tapestry with only a handful of threads.

Art is all about connections. The more we can establish, the richer the experiencing of that art and the world that produced it will be. Art should be memorable. It is up to us, as viewers, to make it so.

As to how we can be in the world in a meaningful way, whatever our roles as creator or viewer, is material for another newsletter. See you there.

Footnotes:

[1] There were loads of non-fiction books, encyclopedias, atlases, Time-Life books, National Geographic magazines and more.

[2] This is typical of the somewhat frustrating biographical notes on the Winters. His wife was a “notable sculptress” but I have as yet been unable to find either her name or examples of her work.

[3] All of the biographical information I can find does seem surprisingly bland. One regrets, as always in the case of many admirable artists, that they did not leave us a memoir or two.

[4] The school was established in 1894. It was located at 54 Baker Street, where it remained until 1911. Quick and deft sketching was certainly encouraged, as animals are undependable models. It must, though, have been quite exciting. Appleton probably attended classes for ladies only for painting the human figure from the nude (held on Tuesday and Friday afternoons: similar classes for men students took place on Monday and Thursday afternoons.) Male and female students attended the costume and portrait painting class or in the composition class on Wednesdays. (At the time, allowing female students to draw nudes was little short of revolutionary.)

[5] The story is about Anne, a six-inch high girl who lives with a cat, Mrs. Ginger, and is friends with butterflies, cats, birds and mice. She stands up to Mrs. Ginger, when the cat wishes her to catch her friends as food for her kittens. Anne is later spirited away to fairyland.

[6] Hove Library organized a retrospective of her works in 1952

[7] Stephen Southwold was itself a pseudonym; he was born Stephen Henry Critten, in Southwold, Suffolk, in 1887. He died in 1964.

At the annual British Institution exhibition of 1820, a singular tableau by an unheralded artist was on display. Entitled “The Upas, or Poison Tree of the Island of Java”, it was a sensation. For a debut, Irish painter Francis Danby’s was a spectacular one, if gloomy and foreboding. It contained the right dose of Romanticism and exoticism (and a soupçon of horror, with the skeletal remains and the man staggering away from the tree) and is indeed one of those paintings it is difficult to pry one’s gaze from. Of it, the London Magazine stated: “The dinginess of colour in this picture, came over us like the darkness of a thundercloud.” (Danby’s art would not lighten in tone as his career evolved.)

The Upas, or Poison-Tree, in the Island of Java – painting by Francis Danby, oil on canvas, ca. 1820. 160.8 cm x 235.4 cm 

But what exactly was the Upas Tree?

Danby possibly found inspiration in Erasmus Darwin’s book ‘The Loves of the Plants’, written in 1789, consisting of shortverses about plants and flowers arranged in four cantos, and interspersed with extensive descriptive notes; the book is an odd mixture of poetry and botany. Here is the excerpt, followed by the attendant note:

        Where seas of glass with gay reflections smile

220  Round the green coasts of Java’s palmy isle;

         A spacious plain extends its upland scene,

         Rocks rise on rocks, and fountains gush between;

         Soft zephyrs blow, eternal summers reign,

         And showers prolific bless the soil,–in vain!

225  –No spicy nutmeg scents the vernal gales,

         Nor towering plaintain shades the mid-day vales;

         No grassy mantle hides the sable hills,

         No flowery chaplet crowns the trickling rills;

         Nor tufted moss, nor leathery lichen creeps

230  In russet tapestry o’er the crumbling steeps.

        –No step retreating, on the sand impress’d,

         Invites the visit of a second guest;

         No refluent fin the unpeopled stream divides,

         No revolant pinion cleaves the airy tides;

235  Nor handed moles, nor beaked worms return,

         That mining pass the irremeable bourn.–

         Fierce in dread silence on the blasted heath

        Fell UPAS sits, the HYDRA-TREE of death.

        Lo! from one root, the envenom’d soil below,

240  A thousand vegetative serpents grow;

         In shining rays the scaly monster spreads

         O’er ten square leagues his far-diverging heads;

         Or in one trunk entwists his tangled form,

         Looks o’er the clouds, and hisses in the storm.

[_Upas_. l. 238. There is a poison-tree in the island of Java, which is said by its effluvia to have depopulated the country for 12 or 14 miles round the place of its growth. It is called, in the Malayan language, Bohon-Upas; with the juice of it the most poisonous arrows are prepared; and, to gain this, the condemned criminals are sent to the tree with proper direction both to get the juice and to secure themselves from the malignant exhalations of the tree; and are pardoned if they bring back a certain quantity of the poison. But by the registers there kept, not one in four are said to return. Not only animals of all kinds, both quadrupeds, fish, and birds, but all kinds of vegetables also are destroyed by the effluvia of the noxious tree; so that, in a district of 12 or 14 miles round it, the face of the earth is quite barren and rocky, intermixed only with the skeletons of men and animals; affording a scene of melancholy beyond what poets have described or painters delineated.^[1]Two younger trees of its own species are said to grow near it. See London Magazine for 1784, or 1783. Translated from a description of the poison-tree of the island of Java, written in Dutch by N.P. Foersch. For a further account of it, see a note at the end of the work.]^[2]

Foersch had travelled extensively in Java around 1775,  and published an account of the poisoned valley. So deadly were the exhalations from the Upas tree that no living thing could exist nearer than fifteen miles of it. That the whole country nearby was a lifeless, barren waste, strewn with the bones of animals, birds and human beings. Criminals condemned to death were offered freedom and a full pardon in exchange for procuring some of the Upas poison. It was the duty of an old priest, living on the confines of this “valley of death,” to prepare the Upas hunters, and administer last rites before they undertook their perilous task.

Donning a leathern mask or cowl, and carrying a box to contain the poison, they would set out when a favourable wind blew towards the tree. If a man possessed a robust constitution and strong will he might return safely, otherwise his bones would join those already under the tree. According to the priest, in the three decades of his tenure, only one man in ten had returned alive.

The Road to the Deadly Upas Tree by Albert Goodwin (1845-1932)

In the words of Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-1828), the famous Swedish botanist, “the Upas tree… is easily recognized at a great distance. The ground around it is sterile, and looks as if it had been burned. The sap is of a dark brown colour, and becomes liquid by heat, like other resins. Those who gather it, have to employ the greatest care; covering the head, the hands, the whole body, to protect themselves from the poisonous emanations of the tree, and especially from the drops which fall from it. They avoid even approaching too near, and they provide themselves with bamboos tipped with steel heads, having a groove in the middle. A score of these long spears are stuck into the tree, the sap runs down the grooves into the hollow bamboo, until it is stopped by the first joint of the wood. The spears are left sticking in the trunk for three or four hours, so that the sap may fill up the space prepared for it, and have time to harden, alter which they are drawn out. The part of the bamboo which contains the poison is then broken off, and covered up with great care”.

He adds: “Persons passing beneath the branches bare-headed lose their hair. A single drop falling on the skin produces inflammation. Birds can with difficulty fly over the tree, and if they by any chance alight on its branches, they fall dead. The soil around is perfectly sterile to the distance of a stone’s throw.”

A Medicinal Upas: The Vaccine Upas Tree from the Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Lantern slide, early 1900s.

What the 19^th century knew of the Upas is summed up by Richard Redgrave, in A Century of Painters of the English School published in 1866: “This fabulous tree was said to grow on the island of Java, in the midst of a desert formed by its own poisonous exhalations. Its poison was considered precious, and was to be obtained by piercing the bark, when it flowed forth from the wound. So hopeless …. and so perilous was the endeavour to obtain it, that only criminals sentenced to death could be induced to make the attempt, and as numbers of them perished, the place became a valley of the shadow of death, a charnel-field of bones.”

An Allegorical Upas: The Deadly Upas Tree of Wall Street by Joseph Ferdinand Keppler, Illustration from Puck, v. 11, no. 286, August 30, 1882

Trees in mythology have almost universally positive roles. World-Trees (and their geological cousins, World-Mountains) hold up the Sky and provide stability and structure in the universe. As symbolic columns, they are mirrored in architecture; gazing up at the interlocking arches of any cathedral nave, it is easy to imagine why, symbol aptly echoing structural requirements. The Norse Yggdrasil is the framework upon which the Nine Worlds of the Eddas are hung, from the crown where perches the eagle Perun, to the deep roots endlessly gnawed in Niflheim by the death-eater Nidhoggr. The Babylonians placed a similar tree near Eridu, near the Euphrates’ mouth. Its roots descend into a watery abyss, dwelling-place of Ea, god of Wisdom. On the crown reposed the primeval mother Zikum. Earth, like the Middle Earth of the Eddas, was situated midway between the two. Belief in the world-tree Irminsul persisted amongst the Saxons until the time of Charlemagne.

Yggdrasil, the World-Tree by Franz Stassen

Trees of Life are a ubiquitous theme, found the world over, as are sacred groves. The structure of the tree is universally anthropomorphized, its sap echoes the human circulation system, its upright stature our own. In temperate zones, the seasonal changes of trees serve as a mirror of human activity. The sturdiness and seeming eternal nature of long-lived trees makes them perfect symbols not only of permanence, but renewal.

While forests are often depicted as foreboding and gloomy places, the daily fare of folk and fairy tale, the bewilderment they embody relies on the accumulation of trees, and the resulting and directionless darkness under their eaves. Trees may also be portals: a tree either located at the end of a valley or on a cliff near the sea is a gateway to the Underworld, according to Hawaiian tradition. All in all, though, trees are eminently positive symbols.

Nonetheless, the Upas Tree does have companions, spread the world over.

Not content with deadly exhalations, some trees could be actively menacing. Mrs. J. H. Philpot, in The Sacred Tree^[3], tells of one specimen in Bengal folklore that was so infested by evil spirits it would reach out and throttle all who approached it by night.

The Jubokko trees of Japan have branches strangely reminiscent of grasping hands and fingers. Human remains pile up around its roots, all that remains of its victims once it has drained the blood from their bodies.

The carnivorous Madagascar tree, though, was a journalistic invention. It appeared in an article in the daily New York World on 26 April 1874, and in the weekly edition two days later, this time accompanied by a letter from a purported German explorer named Karl Leche or Liche, supposed eye-witness of a sacrifice made by the “Mkodo tribe” to the tree. “The slender delicate palpi, with the fury of starved serpents, quivered a moment over her head, then as if instinct with demoniac intelligence fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her neck and arms; then while her awful screams and yet more awful laughter rose wildly to be instantly strangled down again into a gurgling moan, the tendrils one after another, like great green serpents, with brutal energy and infernal rapidity, rose, retracted themselves, and wrapped her about in fold after fold, ever tightening with cruel swiftness and savage tenacity of anacondas fastening upon their prey.”

Some trees inspire superstitious fear: the hawthorn possesses powerful apotropaic properties against vampirism, although these also make it a dwelling place for evil spirits. The Carob and the Sycamore Fig are abodes of devils in Middle Eastern folklore. In Croatia, the ghosts of witches buried beneath the roots of trees would rise up and inhabit the trees themselves. Tribal tradition in Western India warns against sitting in the shade of the Saptaparna tree in India, as it is a preferred abode of devils.

Speaking of the Devil, he has his very own tree, which sinks its roots into the fires of Hell. The Tree of Zaqqum receives several mentions in the Quran; its fruits have the shapes of devil’s heads. Eaten by the unfortunate inhabitants of Hell, the bitter fruit causes their bellies to burst and their faces and bodies to disintegrate. Reduced to a heap of melted flesh and bone, they of course eventually become whole once more, and are able to partake again and again.

The Tree of Zaqqum, modern depiction (Wikipedia)

Alexander the Great meets with a talking tree in the pages of the Shanameh, the Persian national epic. Known at the Vaq Vaq tree (“vaq” is the Farsi equivalent of “bow-wow”) the barking tree bears a crop of monstrous heads: human, animal and fantastical. Endowed with the powers of prophecy, the tree foretells Alexander’s death. According to some versions, it looks like an ordinary tree during the day, the heads only appearing at night.

Eskandar (Alexander the Great) contemplates the Talking Tree from the epic poem ‘The Shahnameh’ by Ferdowsi.Shiraz, Iran, c.1430 CE. Illuminator : Nasr al-Soltani. Opaque watercolours, ink and gold on paper

‘Outside a city at the edge of the known world is a tree with miraculous powers , for the fruits it produces are the talking heads of men, women and monstrous animals that are blessed with the powers of prophecy. When Alexander the Great visited the tree he heard the prophecy of his own death ‘

The Wak-Wak tree appears in Arab legends. On an island of the same name grows “a species of large tree… which bear a fruit similar to a gourd, but larger and having the appearance of a human figure. When the wind shook it there came from it a human voice…” The 12^th-century Kitab al-Jughrafiya (Book of Geography) tells of a tree in the isles of Waq-waq whose fruits are in the form of young maidens “more beautiful than words can describe. …At the moment of falling to the ground they utter two cries: ‘Waq-waq!’ When they have fallen to the ground, flesh without bones is found.”  Even the Thousand and One Nights mentions them. “After which there will be a vast mountain and a running river, which extend to the Islands of Wak Wak. On the banks of the river is a tree called Wak Wak, whose branches resemble the heads of the sons of Adam. When the sun riseth those heads all cry out: Wak Wak!” To hear these rough voices heralding dawn is an ill omen.

Even more frightening is the Yataveo tree described in Sea and Land, a travelogue by  J. W. Buell. Growing in Africa and Central America, its branches resemble “many huge serpents in an angry discussion, occasionally darting from side to side as if striking at an imaginary foe.” Anyone foolhardy enough to stray within reach is immediately seized and devoured.

Depiction of a man being consumed by a Yateveo (“I see you”) carnivorous tree found in both Africa and Central America, from Sea and Land by J. W. Buel, 1887

The Hantu Tinggi or Hantu Galah of Malaysia is a ghostly spirit in the shape of a bamboo or a tree trunk. This spindly  “Tall Ghost” is apt to strangle passers-by who gaze at it too intently; even passing by in its proximity can cause illness.

Less sinister, the first Dragon’s Blood trees of the island of Socotra (Yemen) were created from the blood of a dragon that was wounded when it fought an elephant.^[4]

The Dragon’s Blood Tree of the Island of Tenerife, from The Picture Magazine, 1894

For centuries, Barnacle Geese were though to grow on trees. The Welsh monk Giraldus Cambrensis was the first to record the legend in his Topographia Hibernae in 1188: “There are here many birds that are called “Barnacles” [barnacoe] which in a wonderful way Nature unnaturally produces; they are like wild geese but smaller. For they are born at first like pieces of gum [pitch] on logs of timber washed by the waves.  Then enclosed in shells of a free form they hang by their beaks as if from the moss clinging to the wood and so at length in process of time obtaining a sure covering of feathers, they either dive off into the waters or fly away into free air … They derived their food and growth from the sap of the wood or from the sea, by a secret and most wonderful process of alimentation. I have myself seen many times with my own eyes more than a thousand minute corpuscles of this kind of bird hanging to one log on the shore of the sea, enclosed in shells and already formed. … They do not breed and lay eggs like other birds, nor do they ever hatch any eggs, nor do they seem to build nests in any corner of the earth. Bishops and religious men in some parts of Ireland do not scruple to dine off these birds at the time of fasting, because they are neither flesh, nor born of flesh.”

The Barnacle tree, or the tree bearing geese.

John of Mandeville repeated the legend: “I tolde hem of als gret a marveylle to hem that is amonges us; and that was of the Bernakes. For I tolde hem that in our Contree weren Trees, that beren a Fruyt that becomen Briddes fleeynge; and tho that fallen in the Water lyven, and thei that fallen on the Erthe dyen anon; and thei ben right gode to mannes mete. And here of had thei als gret marvaylle, that sume of hem trowed, it  were an impossible thing to be.”

Despite denunciations by more rigorous naturalists, the legend would continue well into the 18^th century. (There was of course, an eminently practical consideration: deemed to be fish rather than fowl, the Barnacle Goose could thus be consumed during Lent.)

Another wondrous, if equally fanciful tree is described in Mandeville’s Travels, a curious tree in the land of Cathay that bears lambs in lieu of fruit:“…a lytylle Best in Flessche in Bone and Blode as though it were a lytylle Lomb, withouten Wolle.”  Mandelilles marvellous tree is a confabulation based on cotton plants or possibly silkworms, both unknown in Western Europe at the time.

John of Mandeville’s lamb-bearing tree

˜ ˜ ˜

Prosaically, some of these extraordinary trees really do exist. Poisonous trees abound, even the familiar yew deserves caution. A number of trees, including the Upas tree, whose real name is Antiaris toxicaria, provide a powerful toxin, but they are certainly not in the centre of a circle of barrenness and death.

While it is true in myth that nearly everything has its opposite, trees remain intrinsically positive symbols; there are no evil mythical trees. While a certain dualism is reflected in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, clearly implying that human judgement is the key, just as the Sefirot “tree” has its darker pendant, the Qliphoth, in Kabbalistic tradition, unequivocally devilish trees are few in number. Truly evil, carnivorous and deathly trees are confined to the wild hedgerows of legend and folklore. Their twisted and greedy roots are anchored not in the new and fertile Earth of the creation myth, but in the troubled loam of superstition, exoticism and the irresistible frissons of the uncanny.

The monstrous exercises a fascination that provides not only a foil for the valorization of the wholesome and offers ample material for moralizing, but responds to our desire to occasionally believe that the fantastical (and in this case deadly) can intrude in an otherwise well-ordered universe. If nothing else, these wild seeds indicate the borders of the well-tilled fields of our minds – they grow in the trackless and untended spaces beyond.

Footnotes:

[1] Young Danby must have felt this last remark constituted a perfect challenge.

[2] The note itself is exceedingly long, sensationalist and not a little tedious. I have not included it here.

[3] Philpot, Mrs. J. H., The Sacred Tree, or The Tree in Religion and Myth, London; MacMillan and Co., Limited, 1897

[4] A similar tree, the drago or dragon tree, is found in the Canary Islands

Mythology, in the words of one uncompromising scholar, is nothing but religion in which no one believes any more. Here, we are not far from Hulme’s qualifying of Romanticism as “spilt religion”, since the ultimate concerns of both poetry and mythology are nature and the infinite, weighed against the finitude of human existence.

Hume goes farther, comparing Classicism to a well and Romanticism to a bucket – wells do not spill; buckets, with their hectic and hurried porters, often do. It is as if, along the path from the far wellspring of man’s first consciousness of self, his path is damp from beliefs spilled along the way, as he heads back again and yet again to let down his frayed rope and battered bucket to fill with water of truth…

A bough for the Underworld: The Golden Bough by John Mallord William Turner, exhibited 1834. The Sibyl, holding her golden sickle, displays the freshly cut bough in front of Lake Avernus, gateway to the Underworld. The Fates dance in the background.

˜ ˜ ˜

Gold and silver are prominently placed on mythology’s periodic table, their most obvious role being symbols of the sun and moon. Mythology speaks of boughs of gold or silver and apples of gold as well, precious branches and fruits that are nonetheless somehow accepted as natural (in other words: fashioned by gods) and not made by the clever hands of men. And there are associations:  gold and ivory, or ivory and horn, as if the symbolic nuptials of two dissimilar substances can somehow evoke the dualist nature of life, the two sides of the coin, the contradictions, aspirations, illusions and contrasts of myth.^[1]

Once religion becomes myth, once the fervor and the requirement to believe, the obligation to adhere, and above all the inherent exclusion clause of orthodoxy have all fallen by the wayside, what is left is the stuff of dreams and poetical truth. This multiplicity of belief, drawn from that bottomless well that reflects the sky, was above all initially considered as an entertaining facet of ethnology, lauded if Egyptian or Greek, or noted with a wry superior smile if typecast as primitive. (Mythography, like geology, tends to lay epochs out in tidy sedimentary layers.)  George Frazer, who sat like a spider at the center of a word-spanning web of hunter-gatherers of folk tale and ritual, was convinced that these two unwritten legacies could inform us of the nature of the myths that lie at their wellheads. Of course, he was wrong; but on the way, his encyclopedic ramblings, entitled The Golden Bough, grew to thirteen volumes, a treasure spun of golden thread, perhaps the richest study of its kind.^[2]

When Aeneas wishes to speak with the shade of his dead father, he is told by the Cumaean Sybil Delphobe that he must take as a gift to Proserpina a golden bough from a tree growing nearby. Aided by two doves sent by Venus, he finds the tree and breaks off a branch – branch immediately replaced by the growth of a new one, a good omen for his quest. Aeneas, guided by Delphobe, descends to the Underworld. She presents the branch to Charon, who allows them aboard his craft; she throws a drugged cake to Cerberus, who devours it and falls asleep. After what amounts to a brief guided tour of hell, Aeneas places the golden bough above the arched door of Pluto’s palace, and goes through to the Elysian Fields, where he converses with his father Anchises. Aeneas returns to the world through a gate of ivory.

Left: Aeneas and the Sybil by an anonymous artist, circa 1800. The painting was formerly attributed to John Martin.

Centre: Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn: The Palace of Sleep, dwelling place of the Oneiroi, the offspring of Hypnos. The Gate of Ivory is on the left and the Gate of Horn on the right. The plate is part of “The Temple of the Muses”, an illustrated book of Ovid’s more popular tales, published in Amsterdam by the French engraver Bernard Picart in 1733. The plate is accompanied by a caption in French, English, German and Dutch.

Right: Questions in Delphi: Lycurgus Consulting the Pythia by Eugène Delacroix, painted between 1835 and 1845. John Collier painted his Priestess of Delphi in 1891. He dutifully included all the elements believed to play a role in the depiction of the Pythia: the laurel branch, the tripod on which she sits, the bowl of water from the Spring of Enthusiasm and above all the sacred vapours drifting up from the fissures. Carter the Great presents the Modern Priestess of Delphi, circa 1926. The Secrets of the Delphi Oracle, Fate Magazine, July 1955.

There are two gates to the land of Sleep and Dreams: one of ivory, one of horn. They first appear in the Odyssey. Of them, Penelope says: “Stranger, dreams verily are baffling and unclear of meaning, and in no wise do they find fulfilment in all things for men. For two are the gates of shadowy dreams, and one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those dreams that pass through the gate of sawn ivory deceive men, bringing words that find no fulfilment. But those that come forth through the gate of polished horn bring true issues to pass, when any mortal sees them. But in my case it was not from thence, methinks, that my strange dream came.”

 Socrates adds, in his dialogue Charmides: “Listen then,” I said, “to my dream, to see whether it comes through horn or through ivory.”

Why Virgil sends Aeneas back through the gate of deception is a mystery:

“There are two gates of sleep: one is called the Gate of Horn and it is an easy exit for true shades; the other is made all in gleaming white ivory, but through it the powers of the underworld send false dreams up to the heavens. Here on the night did Anchises walk with his son and with the Sibyl and spoke such words to them as he sent them on their journey through the Gate of Ivory.”

In the waking world, gold and ivory define Chryselephantine sculpture, originating in Archaic Greece from the 2^ndmillennium B.C., combined gold and ivory (representing mortal or immortal flesh and armour & divine accoutrements). Of the most famous, the Athena Parthenos of Phidias, remains only the hole in the temple floor that affixed the wooden structure of the statue, and Pausanias’ description: “…The statue is created with ivory and gold. On the middle of her helmet is likeness of the Sphinx…and on either side of the helmet are griffins inrelief. … The statue of Athena is upright, with a tunic reaching to the feet, and on her breast the head of Medusa isworked in ivory. She holds a statue of Victorythat is approx. four cubitshigh, and in the other hand a spear; at her feet lies a shield and near the spear is a serpent. This serpent would be Ericthonius. On the pedestal is the birth of Pandora inrelief.”

Chryselephantine sculpture is one of the more neglected of art forms of Ancient Greece. While much is made of Phidias’ masterpieces, they were far from alone, the desire to commission sculptures in gold and ivory swept through the ancient world. Ivory, this time, was not seen as deceptive, but as being the closest incarnation of human flesh, and the golden hair, garments and accoutrements brought the spirit of the observer into the very company of the gods. Philostratos states in his Vita Apollonii: “As for myself, I would far rather enter a temple, no matter how small, and behold in it a statue of  ivory and gold, than behold one of pottery and bad workmanship in a vastly larger one.”Chryselephantine considered to approach achieropoieta (“not fashioned by human hands”), in sum, gifts from the divine, enhanced by the fact that neither ivory nor gold are native to the Greek world.

The most complete accounts are to be found in Pausanias, notably his thousand-word description of Phidias’ Zeus at Olympia. Begun around 448 B.C., a  decade before the Athena Parthenos. In Pausanias’ words:

“The image of the god is in gold and ivory, seated on a throne. And a crown is on his head imitating the foliage of the olive-tree. In his right hand he holds a Victory in ivory and gold, with a tiara and crown on his head; and in his left hand a sceptre adorned with all manner of precious stones, and the bird seated on the sceptre is an eagle. The robes and sandals of the god are also of gold; and on his robes are imitations of flowers, especially of lilies. And the throne is richly adorned with gold and precious stones, and with ebony and ivory. And there are imitations of animals painted on it, and models worked on it. There are four Victories like dancers, one at each foot of the throne, and two also at the instep of each foot; and at each of the front feet are Theban boys carried off by Sphinxes, and below the Sphinxes, Apollo and Artemis shooting down the children of Niobe. And between the feet of the throne are four divisions formed by straight lines drawn from each of the four feet. In the division nearest the entrance there are seven models,—the eighth has vanished no one knows where or how. And they are imitations of ancient contests, for in the days of Phidias the contests for boys were not yet established. And the figure with its head muffled up in a scarf is, they say, Pantarces, who was a native of Elis and the darling of Phidias. This Pantarces won the wrestling-prize for boys in the 86th Olympiad. And in the remaining divisions is the band of Hercules fighting against the Amazons. The number on each side is 29, and Theseus is on the side of Hercules. And the throne is supported not only by the four feet, but also by four pillars between the feet. But one cannot get under the throne, as one can at Amyclæ, and pass inside; for at Olympia there are panels like walls that keep one off. Of these panels the one opposite the doors of the temple is painted sky-blue only, but the others contain paintings by Panænus. Among them is Atlas bearing up Earth and Heaven, and Hercules standing by willing to relieve him of his load; and Theseus and Pirithous, and Greece, and Salamis with the figure-head of a ship in her hand, and the contest of Hercules with the Nemean lion, and Ajax’s unknightly violation of Cassandra, and Hippodamia, the daughter of Œnomaus, with her mother; and Prometheus still chained to the rock, and Hercules gazing at him. For the tradition is that Hercules slew the eagle that was ever tormenting Prometheus on Mount Caucasus, and released Prometheus from his chains. The last paintings are Penthesilea dying and Achilles supporting her, and two Hesperides carrying the apples of which they are fabled to have been the keepers. This Panænus was the brother of Phidias; and at Athens in the Painted Stoa he has painted the action at Marathon. At the top of the throne, Phidias has represented above the head of Zeus the three Graces and three Seasons. For these too, as we learn from the poets, were daughters of Zeus. Homer in the Iliad has represented the Seasons as having the care of Heaven, as a kind of guards of a royal palace. And the base under the feet of Zeus (what is called in Attic [Greek]) has golden lions engraved on it, and the battle between Theseus and the Amazons,—the first famous exploit of the Athenians beyond their own borders. And on the platform that supports the throne there are various ornaments round Zeus, and gilt carving,—the Sun seated in his chariot, and Zeus and Hera; and near is Grace. Hermes is close to her, and Vesta close to Hermes. And next to Vesta is Eros receiving Aphrodite, who is just rising from the sea and being crowned by Persuasion. And Apollo and Artemis, Athene and Hercules, are standing by, and at the end of the platform Amphitrite and Poseidon, and Selene apparently urging on her horse. And some say it is a mule and not a horse that the goddess is riding upon; and there is a silly tale about this mule.

 I know that the size of the Olympian Zeus both in height and breadth has been stated; but I cannot bestow praise on the measurers, for their recorded measurement comes far short of what any one would infer from looking at the statue. They make the god also to have testified to the art of Phidias. For they say that when the statue was finished, Phidias prayed him to signify if the work was to his mind; and immediately Zeus struck with lightning that part of the pavement where in our day there is a brazen urn with a lid.

And all the pavement in front of the statue is not of white but of black stone. And a border of Parian marble runs round this black stone, as a preservative against spilled oil. For oil is good for the statue at Olympia, as it prevents the ivory being harmed by the dampness of the grove. But in the Acropolis at Athens, in regard to the statue of Athene called the Maiden, it is not oil but water that is advantageously employed to the ivory; for as the citadel is dry by reason of its great height, the statue being made of ivory needs to be sprinkled with water freely. And when I was at Epidaurus, and inquired why they use neither water nor oil to the statue of Æsculapius, the sacristans of the temple informed me that the statue of the god and its throne are over a well.”

Unfortunately, given the nature of construction of chryselephantine sculpture, plaques of  ivory and gold panels affixed to a wooden framework, no monumental sculptures have survived. We do not know what became of the Zeus, it may have been dismantled when pagan temples were closed by Theodosius in 391 AD, it may have been transported piecemeal to Constantinople and perished in the fire of the Palace of Lausus in 475. It is unlikely we will ever know. (As for the Athena Parthenos, Lachares, tyrant of Athens, stripped the gold to pay his troops in 296 B.C., a fire further damaged the statue in about 165 B.C., and afterword, it disappears from history.) Few serious studies of chryselephantine statuary have ever been made.

Nonetheless, the notion of that statuary made to reproduce, or at least echo, godliness for the contemplation of human eyes, underlines the notion of the divine in the work of the artist, of the surpassing of nature in order to attain the ideal. In the artist, ecstasy and intellect combine to create art, an act that has magical properties and is intimately linked to the upper spheres.

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But back to apples.

When Melanion feared he would lose the footrace against Atalanta, Aphrodite gave him three golden apples. One by one, he dropped them to distract her, and won the race. A golden apple was at the origin of the tale of the Judgement of Paris. Idunn, one of the eight goddesses at the banquet in Asgard, possesses a tree of golden apples, which guarantee the immortality of the Aesir. Kidnapped by the giant Pjazi, she is rescued by Loki. A similar tree is found in the Gardens of the Hesperides, under the guard of the drakon Ladon.

Left – Discord in the Garden: The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides, by Joseph Mallord William Turner, exhibited in 1806. The three daughters of Hesperus tended a tree of golden apples on the slopes of Mount Atlas. Eris, goddess of Discord, plucks an apple, setting off the events leading to the Trojan war.

Centre – Trouble for the Hesperides, left to right: John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925) Atlas and the Hesperides 1922-25. The Garden of the Hesperides by Frederick, Lord Leighton, 1892. The Garden of Hesperides by Albert Herter. Hercules in the garden of Hesperides by Rupert Bunny, c. 1922

Right – First to the finish: Atalanta’s Race, by John Dickson Batten, 1922.

That particular garden is the source of the Apple of Discord, which led to the Trojan War. The apple that Eris tossed into the midst of Thetis and Peleus’ wedding feast immediately sewed dissention. Here is the episode in the words of Josephine Preston Peabody (1874-1922), from Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew, 1897.

Stories of the Trojan War: I. The Apple of Discord

“There was once a war so great that the sound of it has come ringing down the centuries from singer to singer, and will never die. 

The rivalries of men and gods brought about many calamities, but none so heavy as this; and it would never have come to pass, they say, if it had not been for jealousy among the immortals, all because of a golden apple! But Destiny has nurtured ominous plants from little seeds; and this is how one evil grew great enough to overshadow heaven and earth.

The sea-nymph Thetis (whom Zeus himself had once desired for his wife) was given in marriage to a mortal, Peleus, and there was a great wedding-feast in heaven. Thither all the immortals were bidden, save one, Eris, the goddess of Discord, ever an unwelcome guest. But she came unbidden. While the wedding-guests sat at feast, she broke in upon their mirth, flung among them a golden apple, and departed with looks that boded ill. Some one picked up the strange missile and read its inscription: For the Fairest; and at once discussion arose among the goddesses. They were all eager to claim the prize, but only three persisted.

Venus, the very goddess of beauty, said that it was hers by right; but Juno could not endure to own herself less fair than another, and even Athena coveted the palm of beauty as well as of wisdom, and would not give it up! Discord had indeed come to the wedding-feast. Not one of the gods dared to decide so dangerous a question, not Zeus himself, and the three rivals were forced to choose a judge among mortals.

Now there lived on Mount Ida, near the city of Troy, a certain young shepherd by the name of Paris. He was as comely asGanymede himself, that Trojan youth whom Zeus, in the shape of an eagle, seized and bore away to Olympus, to be a cup-bearer to the gods. Paris, too, was a Trojan of royal birth, but like Oedipus he had been left on the mountain in his infancy, because the Oracle had foretold that he would be the death of his kindred and the ruin of his country. Destiny saved and nurtured him to fulfil that prophecy. He grew up as a shepherd and tended his flocks on the mountain, but his beauty held the favor of all the wood-folk there and won the heart of the nymph Œnone.

To him, at last, the three goddesses entrusted the judgment and the golden apple. Juno first stood before him in all her glory as Queen of gods and men, and attended by her favorite peacocks as gorgeous to see as royal fan-bearers.

“Use but the judgment of a prince, Paris,” she said, “and I will give thee wealth and kingly power.”

Such majesty and such promises would have moved the heart of any man; but the eager Paris had at least to hear the claims of the other rivals. Athena rose before him, a vision welcome as daylight, with her sea-gray eyes and golden hair beneath a golden helmet.

“Be wise in honoring me, Paris,” she said, “and I will give thee wisdom that shall last forever, great glory among men, and renown in war.”

 Last of all, Venus shone upon him, beautiful as none can ever hope to be. If she had come, unnamed, as any country maid, her loveliness would have dazzled him like sea-foam in the sun; but she was girt with her magical Cestus, a spell of beauty that no one can resist. 

Without a bribe she might have conquered, and she smiled upon his dumb amazement, saying, “Paris, thou shalt yet have for wife the fairest woman in the world.”

At these words, the happy shepherd fell on his knees and offered her the golden apple. He took no heed of the slighted goddesses, who vanished in a cloud that boded storm.

From that hour he sought only the counsel of Venus, and only cared to find the highway to his new fortunes. From her he learned that he was the son of King Priam of Troy, and with her assistance he deserted the nymph Oenone, whom he had married, and went in search of his royal kindred.

For it chanced at that time that Priam proclaimed a contest of strength between his sons and certain other princes, and promised as prize the most splendid bull that could be found among the herds of Mount Ida. Thither came the herdsmen to choose, and when they led away the pride of Paris’s heart, he followed to Troy, thinking that he would try his fortune and perhaps win back his own.

The games took place before Priam and Hecuba and all their children, including those noble princes Hector and Helenus, and the young Cassandra, their sister. This poor maiden had a sad story, in spite of her royalty; for, because she had once disdained Apollo, she was fated to foresee all things, and ever to have her prophecies disbelieved. On this fateful day, she alone was oppressed with strange forebodings.

But if he who was to be the ruin of his country had returned, he had come victoriously. Paris won the contest. At the very moment of his honor, poor Cassandra saw him with her prophetic eyes; and seeing as well all the guilt and misery that he was to bring upon them, she broke into bitter lamentations, and would have warned her kindred against the evil to come. But the Trojans gave little heed; they were wont to look upon her visions as spells of madness. Paris had come back to them a glorious youth and a victor; and when he made known the secret of his birth, they cast the words of the Oracle to the winds, and received the shepherd as a long-lost prince.

 Thus far all went happily. But Venus, whose promise had not yet been fulfilled, bade Paris procure a ship and go in search of his destined bride. The prince said nothing of this quest, but urged his kindred to let him go; and giving out a rumor that he was to find his father’s lost sister Hesione, he set sail for Greece, and finally landed at Sparta.

There he was kindly received by Menelaus, the king, and his wife, Fair Helen.

This queen had been reared as the daughter of Tyndarus and Queen Leda, but some say that she was the child of an enchanted swan, and there was indeed a strange spell about her. All the greatest heroes of Greece had wooed her before she left her father’s palace to be the wife of King Menelaus; and Tyndarus, fearing for her peace, had bound her many suitors by an oath. According to this pledge, they were to respect her choice, and to go to the aid of her husband if ever she should be stolen away from him. For in all Greece there was nothing so beautiful as the beauty of Helen. She was the fairest woman in the world.

Now thus did Venus fulfil her promise and the shepherd win his reward with dishonor. Paris dwelt at the court of Menelaus for a long time, treated with a royal courtesy which he ill repaid. For at length while the king was absent on a journey to Crete, his guest won the heart of Fair Helen, and persuaded her to forsake her husband and sail away to Troy.

King Menelaus returned to find the nest empty of the swan. Paris and the fairest woman in the world were well across the sea.”

Byzantine Circular Pyxis. This circular Pyxis or box depicts two scenes. This scene presents the Olympian gods feasting around a tripod table holding the golden Apple of the Hesperides.

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A bough of silver is needed “to enter the Otherworld before the appointed hour marked by death,”in The Voyage of Bran.

Three Calls to Cormacstates that Manannán mac Lir offers “a branch of silver with three golden apples”to King Cormac mac Airt. When the branch is shaken, is makes a music that induces sleep; the branch is the talisman to enter the world of dreams. Lady Gregory describes it as a “shining branch having nine apples of red gold.”

 While gold and silver are considered “precious” metals, a myth of worth to which much of mankind has long subscribed to such a degree that it has become indissociable from notions of value: golden ages, golden means, golden and silver anniversaries, both are so much a part of everyday language that it is difficult to consider them afresh.

William Butler Yeats comes perhaps the closest to the true nature of the myth, combining precious metals, deeply symbolic fruit and the two celestial bodies closest to us, if not in distance, at least in significance. He is speaking of poetic truth, the kind that provides solace only through acceptance of our mortality and our spiritual ambiguity. He reminds us that although we are the children of Enlightenment and Science, we are nevertheless the siblings of the Romantics. No other movement has explained with such welcome and ambiguous lucence the ambiguities of our relationships with the “real” and the “other than real.”

To understand the latter, we must at least attempt to understand the former. “Real” is defined as “actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed”  or “having objective independent existence” And “not artificial, fraudulent, or illusory.”

This of course defines everything that Romanticism is not. Yeats is not asking us to accept palpable existence of the sublime, but like all those tellers of tales before him, he is offering us a branch laden with metaphor. In our minds, we may imagine what we can grasp and what we cannot, what we can hold in our hands and what we can only hold in our minds: the tangible and the sublime.

Romanticism is about infusing the personal with the universal, finding the points where those two dissimilar things come into contact. Romanticism is acceptable in modest dosage, too much would either dull the senses or drive one to utter distraction. To have none at all is a grand shame; we have so ably domesticated our existences as to erase most of the moments when we can find ourselves in a place to appreciate it, we have to a large degree turned our regard, that once was outward-facing, inwards, confusing the richness of the Freudian trinity of ego, super-ego and id with the riches of the world.

As well, Yeats cautions us against wilfully ignoring the darker side of Romanticism, the silver apples of the moon. Art historians have often dismissed Romanticism as a certain endeavour in languid futility, the desire to push back against the inevitable of urbanisation by extolling the virtues of nature, rather than engaging in pre-modernism, taking the industrial bull by the horns, so to speak. This is a profound error; the clearest intuitions are rarely statements of fact, but restrained reminders of what will soon be gone, admissions of the inevitable loss as part of life, whether it be the life of the world, or the brief span of human life.

We should consider the spirit of Romanticism as something precious, a gift or a guarded treasure: like Yeats’ golden and silver apples, gifts infused with a sense of loss, eternity mixed with the brevity of human existence. That encounter of opposites sparks all things that are not “real”: spirituality, poetry, myth and of course Romanticism.

The twin gates of ivory and horn temporize. All is not romantic impulse: visions can be inexact or misinterpreted. The Greek world saw a constantly evolving attitude towards death and the otherworld, and towards the neighbouring land: that of dreams and visions. The pythoness of Delphi is defined by her ambiguity, although the sceptics, citing Plutarch, attributed the visions of the oracles to hallucinogenic fumes issuing forth from crevices under the temple. Others suggested that oleander leaves, either chewed or burned, explain Pythia’s enigmatic connection with the divine. Chances are, though, that the long-flourishing tradition, which clearly survived Apollo’s slaying of Python,^[3]is simply witness to the ever-increasing complexity of dealing with the future and the past.

Both sets of symbols combined are there to remind us that the poetic impulse is not far from madness. They dance closely together, separated only by the desire, in the case of the former, to celebrate the brevity of human existence as part of the eternal (“until time and times are done”), and in the latter, to acquire immortality and prescience, talents reserved for the gods and the mad.

Cautionary tales about dealing with what is not “real” do not apply to poetry, which seeks no practical application in the world beyond the riches of the spirit. Poets who voyage in the otherworld inevitably return through the gate of ivory, only those whose urges are unclear are faced with a choice, and the anguish that follows.

In this sense the poetic impulse is inherently a generous one, based in part on personal interrogation of infinite spaces, whether they be interior or exterior, translated into golden or silver things that we can grasp. One might call it the permanent hiraeth of the soul, the longing to return to where we have never been, the desire to become once again what we never were.

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The title is taken from the final two lines of William Butler Yeats’ poem The Song of Wandering Aengus, first published in his 1899 collection The Wind Among the Reeds.

I  WENT out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

nd pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

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The theme of artistic creation (or sub-creation, as Tolkien has put it, implying a divine influence, once removed, the artist as a sort of second cousin to God) is a theme I have often touched upon. Here are a few recent newsletters.

HERMENAUTICA: TRAVELLING WITH THE TRICKSTER

https://www.john-howe.com/blog/2018/05/03/hermenautica-travelling-with-the-trickster/

HIRAETH, OR HEKATE AS THE MUSE

https://www.john-howe.com/blog/2017/09/14/hiraeth-or-hekate-as-the-muse/

STORIES TOLD

https://www.john-howe.com/blog/2017/07/01/stories-told/

WE ARE THE RAVEN-FED

https://www.john-howe.com/blog/2016/11/15/we-are-the-raven-fed/

THE SPELL OF DISENCHANTMENT

https://www.john-howe.com/blog/2016/03/15/the-spell-of-disenchantment/

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Further reading:
Chryselephantine Statuary in the Ancient Mediterranean World, FOOTNOTESby Kenneth D. S. Lapatin,Oxford University Press, 2002

Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, by Enst Kris and Otto Kurz, Yale University Press, 1979

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FOOTNOTES

[1]The Euhemerist explanation would be that these “golden” fruit are in reality simply exotic fruit accorded divine status by populations unfamiliar with them. As is often the case, this sells our ancestors short and focuses on their supposed gullibility as the primary motivating force to create powerful mythological symbols.

[2]The Golden Bough was first published in two volumes in 1890, in three volumes in 1900 and in twelve volumes in the third edition, published between 1906 and 1915. Volume XIII, entitled Aftermath, was added in 1936. (I have a copy from the 1930’s, purchased from a used-book shop in Wellington, New Zealand; Frazer occupied a full suitcase on the trip home.)

[3]Apollo’s killing of Python is symbolic of the solar deity replacing some older god or more likely goddess in the 8^thcentury BC. The laurel replaced the oak at Delphi at a similar time.

Opening lines of The Defence of Guenevere, from The Defence of Guenever and Other Poems by William Morris, Bell & Daldy, 1858

He crouched down low at Jason’s feet, fitted the arrow-notch to the bowstring, the stretching his bow wide in two hands shot straight at Medea. Her spirit was seized by speechless stupor. Eros darted back out of the high-roofed palace with a mocking laugh but his arrow burned deep in the girl’s heart like a flame.

Jason and the Golden Fleece, Vv. 280 ff., translation by Richard Hunter, Oxford World Classics, 2009

The Argo, by Konstantinos Volanakis (1837–1907).

The Argonautica, by Apollonius of Rhodes, was written in the 3rd century BC. The original epic poem runs close to 6000 lines; it comprises the principal source of our knowledge of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts. The story is familiar to everyone: Valorous Jason, captain of the talking ship Argo, retrieves the Golden Fleece from the dragon-guarded sacred grove in Colchis. He has some help. The story does not end well.

Medea, who is instrumental in Jason’s success, is an enigmatic character. What we know of her reflects more the moeurs of the age in which her story is told than her true personality. The following is a (modest) attempt to peel away the darkened varnish of the many teller’s tales and encounter Medea herself, the woman behind the stories.

MEDEA THE WITCH

1. Frederck Sandys’ Medeawas modelled on Keomi Gray, a Romani woman whom Sandys had met in Norwich and taken back to London to sit for many of his paintings. According to a critic in The Times, 1 May 1869: “it shows the enchantress Medea …in the act of incantation, the baleful light of her chafing-dish playing in the folds of her robe, and making the pale cheeks look paler, and the ashy lips more ashy, and kindling the array of foul ingredients and witch’s properties that surround her tripod – foul toads and strange roots, and images of strange gods, and quaint shells filled with evil compounds.”
2. Medea the Sorceress – Valentine Cameron Prinsep (1838–1904 Here Medea gathers poisoned fungi from a serpent filled forest, which she will use to poison Glauce and her father.
3. Medea, painted in 1886 by Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919) oil on canvas, 148 x 88 cm, Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead, England. De Morgan, who painted Medea in a quattrocento style, was a prolific painter of women from mythology and allegory, and a major figure in the Pre-Raphaelite movement. On her seventeenth birthday, August 30th 1872, she wrote in her diary: “At the beginning of each year I say ‘I will do something’ and at the end I have done nothing. Art is eternal, but life is short”.
4. Medea’s Cauldron, illustration by Warwick Goble for Legend of Good Women: Part !V The Legend of Hipsypyle and Medea, from The Modern Reader’s Chaucer: The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer by John S. P. Tatlock and Percy MacKaye, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1912

As for the story itself, it is a typical hero quest. Here are the bare bones.

The Hellespont: five miles wide, full of tides and currents, where Helle slipped off the back of the ram, her fingers numbed from clutching Phrixos’ tunic. She sank without a trace, but, as she was a myth, she left her name on the waters. The ram carried her brother all the way to Colchis, at the far side of the Black Sea. There, the golden-fleeced ram instructed the boy to sacrifice him to the gods, and hang the hide from the oaken branches of the sacred grove of Ares. The flying golden-fleeced ram Krios Khrysomallos, wedding gift from Poseidon, was as fantastical as his mistress, the cloud-nymph Nephele. After an angry dispute with her husband Athamas, who repudiated her to marry Ino, Nephele feared for the lives of her two children (and rightly so; Ino had conspired to wither all crops, and then reveal an oracle had told her only the sacrifice of Phrixos would appease the gods) and sent the wondrous ram to spirit them away. As recognition of his sacrifice, Khrysomallos is now the constellation Aries, but it’s his fleece that interests us here.^[1]

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Sent by his wicked uncle Pelias, Jason and his fellow-adventurers^[2] have arrived in Colchis to claim the fleece.^[3]

King Aeëtes of Colchis has welcomed him warily and set him three tasks, but they are daunting and Jason despairs of accomplishing them. Naturally the gods lend a hand (or interfere, but the Greek gods are always eager to meddle in the lives of men and heroes). Aphrodite causes Medea, Aeëtes’ daughter, to fall in love with Jason. Medea vows to help him in his quest. Jason accomplishes the first two challenges, yoking the Khalkotauroi,^[4] bronze-hoofed, bronze-mouthed fire-breathing oxen, and ploughing a field, then sowing it with dragon’s teeth. (These came from a dragon Cadmus killed; Athena had divided up the teeth, giving half to Cadmus, who sowed them straight away, and half to Aeëtes, who kept them.) Medea provides Jason with a potion to protect him from the oxen’s fiery breath.  When Jason sows the teeth, fierce warriors spring up from the earth, but he tosses a stone in their midst; thinking themselves attacked, they slay each other to a man. These two deeds fulfilled, the Argonauts set out on the third and most dangerous task.

MEDEA THE HELPER MAIDEN

Jason looks on eagerly as Medea carefully adds ingredients to a potion. Jason and Medea, by John William Waterhouse, 1907.

They near the Rock of Typhaon, where blood from that monster’s huge head had dripped when Zeus struck him with his thunderbolts. The sacred grove is just beyond. (Diodorus Siculus tells us that there was a great wall about the place, erected by Aeëtes, guarded by fire-breathing bulls, although he cautiously states this to be a myth, inspired by the cruelty of the Taurians, who watch over the sacred precinct.) There, in the midst of the grove hangs the Golden Fleece, on the branches of a sacred oak. Around it, lying in endless coils, the never sleeping, ever vigilant “four nostrilled snake,”^[5]  the Colchian Dragon, Drakon Kholkikos, offspring of Typhon and Echidna.^[6]

No one tells it better than Apollonius himself:

“A path led them to the sacred wood, where they were making for the huge oak on which the fleece was hung, bright as a cloud incarnadined by the fiery beams of the rising sun. But the serpent with his sharp unsleeping eyes had seen them coming and now confronted them, stretching out his long neck and hissing terribly…

The monster in the sheath of horny scales rolled forward his interminable coils, like the eddies of black smoke that spring from smouldering logs and chase each other from below in endless convolutions. But as he writhed he saw the maiden take her stand, and heard her in her sweet voice invoking Hypnos, the conqueror of the gods to charm him. She also called on the night-wandering Queen of the world below to countenance her efforts. Jason from behind looked on in terror. But the giant snake, enchanted by her song was soon relaxing the whole length of his serrated spine and smoothing out his multitudinous undulations, like a dark and silent swell rolling across a sluggish sea. Yet his grim head still hovered over them and the cruel jaws threatened to snap them up. But Medea, chanting a spell, dipped a fresh sprig of juniper in her brew and sprinkled his eyes with her most potent drug; and as the all-pervading magic scent spread round his head, sleep fell on him. Stirring no more, he let his jaw sink to the ground, and his innumerable coils lay stretched out far behind, spanning the deep wood. Medea called to Jason and he snatched the golden fleece from the oak. But she herself stayed where she was, smearing the wild one’s head with a magic salve, till Jason urged her to come back to the ship and she left the sombre grove of Ares.”

MEDEA SPELL-WEAVER AND SNAKE CHARMER

1. Jason and Medea stealing the Golden Fleece by Henry Fuseli, 1806, Oil, one sheet affixed onto another. Medea on the right, with upraised and left arm, is pouring liquid from a vessel to send the guardian dragon asleep, while Jason reaches over and takes the Golden Fleece.
2. Orpheus And Medea Charm the Snake that Guards the Golden Fleece by John D. Batten, Illustration from “The Book of Wonder Voyages,” 1919
3. Sir William Russell Flint’s depiction of Medea, Orpheus and Jason securing the Golden Fleece, 1910

When Jason stole the fleece, the tree “uttered a groan and a gloomy darkness closed upon it.”^[7] The magic was gone, and the story did not end well either.

The Argo flees, pursued by Aeëtes. Medea murders her younger brother Apsyrtus and tosses his dismembered body overboard. Tarrying to gather the grisly pieces, Aeëtes falls behind and the Argo escapes. Jason’s homecoming ends badly, with the death of Pelias and the couples’ exile to Corinth. Finally betrayed by Jason, who falls in love with Glauce, King Creon of Corinth’s daughter,  Medea murders their two children, and flees to Athens. (I’ve always felt sorry for Medea, she epitomizes all those women who give up everything to help their hero attain his goals and the bastard leaves them in the lurch anyway…) As for Jason, increasingly the melancholy outcast, he wanders alone, finding refuge under the hulk of the Argo, deserted and rotting on a beach. One day, the stern falls on him, killing him in his sleep.

MEDEA PURSUED

The Golden Fleece by Herbert James Draper, 1904. Oil on canvas, 155 x 272.5 cm. Exhibited at the Royal Academy on 1904, Draper’s painting was accompanied by the  following text: “Now when they were hotly pursued by the King her father Medea did cast her brother into the sea to drown, that the king should rescue his son’s body and the pursuit be delayed.” Although Draper enjoyed considerable acclaim around 1900, he rapidly became unfashionable as the century progressed. At the time of his death in 1920, the Times did not even bother to print an obituary.

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What Medea is doing in the story is entirely another matter. Her genealogy is not clear; only one thing is certain: she is a direct descendant of Helios, her father Aeëtes is one of the four children of the sun god and his wife Perses.  Mortal with divine ancestry or goddess herself (according the Hesiod’s Theogony) she is an intruder in her own story, a spectator of her own destiny, before being the unwilling, or unwitting and despised anti-heroine of the later Greek tragedians.

Medea is classified as a “helper maiden”, the chanced-upon subservient savior of the errant hero from afar, as Nausicaa is for Odysseus, or Ariadne for Theseus. She possesses the knowledge and skills to help him succeed in his impossible quest, but she wields no power over him – it seems that many quests in ancient legend are inside jobs. First though, she must fall in love with the brave stranger. Cupid of course sees to that.

Cupid himself is a suspicious little fellow. Offspring of Venus and Mars,^[8](his Greek counterpart is Eros^[9]) Cupid has progressively aged in reverse, from a slender youth to a chubby putto, as if the sexuality he embodies is too uncomfortably incarnate. In many depictions he is blindfolded, and always winged – in other words, arbitrary and flighty.

In the Argonautica, he is a little like the naughty child who has escaped his nurse and wanders among the guests at a party, unnoticed in a forest of legs. But Cupid is armed with the arrows of love, and his aim is unerring. Medea is struck.

That Medea, a sorceress so well-versed in spells and potions, should be vulnerable to Cupid’s arrow, is a pernicious aside and a cautionary note: love potions are inherently suspicious attempts to mold or guide fate, and poetic justice demands that the sorceress who trades in them receive a dose of her own medicine. To make matters worse, Apollonius hints that the vengeful goddess Hera is behind it all. Hera, outraged at King Pelias, determines that Jason shall bring the girl back as part of the curse she lays upon him. She causes Medea to fall in love so that Jason may succeed in his quest. Medea has no say in the matter.

And succeed they do, Jason flees aboard the Argo with his lover and the Fleece, Aeëtes in hot pursuit. This is where the tragedians truly take over: to escape, Medea slays and dismembers her younger brother Apsyrtus and casts the pieces into the sea. When her father halts to retrieve them, the fugitives escape. (The Argonautica has Apsyrtus confront Jason, who slays him. The lovers halt on the island of Medea’s aunt Circe to be cleansed of their sin. In both scenarios, he dies.)

They finally reach Jason’s homeland of Iolcus. (Medea, in passing, dispatches the bronze giant Talos^[10] in Crete.)

Much has happened since Jason set out on his impossible quest, quest that Pelias had considered so certainly to be a death sentence that he had not envisaged the hero’s return. The homecoming is no cause for joy. Of course, it does not end well. Euripides takes up the tale after the heroic quest is all but forgotten: Aeson, informed by Pelias that the Argo had been lost, has committed suicide by poison. Pelias refuses to give up his throne; Medea conspires to have his daughters slay him, pretending she can resurrect him as a young man. Medea resurrects Aeson, but breaks her word and leaves Pelias dead.

MEDEA EXILED

Anselm Feuerbach (1829–1880), Medea (1870), oil on canvas, 198 × 396 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. The model for Feuerbach’s Medea was named Lucia Brunnacci, whom he met in Rome. Feuerbach painted Medea four times; once sitting alone, her knife fallen on the ground beside her; once with the urn depicting a murder scene, and another, lost in 1945, similar to the one in the Neue Pinakothek. In a letter dated November 1869, Feuerbach listed possible scenes: “Medea before the deed, Medea after the deed, Medea fleeing by the seashore at night, Medea as a loving mother, as a murderous fury” before concluding: “A history painting should portray a life in a situation, it should point to the future and the past and stand… for all eternity.”

Jason and Medea are driven out of Iolcos because of Medea’s vengeance. They are fugitives. Euripides’ play is set in Corinth. Wayward Jason falls in love with Glauce, the daughter of King Creon. Medea murders the king, his daughter (with a poisoned garment) and her own two sons by Jason, fleeing on a chariot drawn by winged serpents, gift of her grandfather Helios. She takes refuge with King Aegeus of Athens, and becomes his wife, but he drives her away when she tries to poison his son Theseus. Finally, she is exiled to Asia. ^[11]

MEDEA FUGITIVE

1. Lucanian Red Figure Krater, attributed to the Policor Painter, c. 400 B.C. According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, “Medeia slew Kreon (Creon), Glauke (Glauce) and her sons by Iason (Jason), and escaped to Athens on a chariot drawn by winged Drakones which she had received from Helios.” Medea flees on her flying chariot, leaving a nurse to tear her hair in grief over the bodies of her two children on a sacrificial altar. Jason approaches from the left. Two Poenae, symbols of retribution, witness the scene. Medea and her chariot, a gift from her grandfather Helios, are encircled by the aureole of the sun.

2. Medea Flees on her chariot, a book illustration by Harry Rountree, circa 1917. Rountree (1878 – 1950) was a prolific New Zealand illustrator, mainly for children. In 1901, he emigrated to England to attend the Regent Street Polytechnic under Percival Gaskell.One-time President of the London Sketch Club, Rountree was late largely forgotten and died in relative poverty in St Ives, Cornwall in 1950.

Once the tragedists take up Medea’s tale, it goes from bad to worse with each telling. Witch, necromancer, infanticide, she is a lifetime away from the hopeful maiden who fell in love with the glorious stranger. While Ovid maintains her ambiguity, Seneca definitively condemns her when he has her declare, when she decides to kill her children: Medea nunc sum. “Now I am Medea.”

MEDEA MURDERESS

1. Eugène Delacroix shows a semi-naked Medea clutching her screaming children in his 1838 painting Médée Furieuse. The dramatic lighting, the vertical knife, all underline her unbridled folly and the imminent murder of her sons. Delacroix worked on the large painting (260 x 165 cm) from 1836 to 1838. It was a subject that had been on his mind for some time; as early as 1818, Medea appears in his sketchbooks. By 1828, he had done studies of the general composition, various details and finally the face. (A painted sketch and 31 preparatory drawings are conserved at the museum of Fine Arts in Lille.) The painting was well received at the Salon, and was also exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in 1855. “And she hates her children now and feels no joy at seeing them; I fear she may contrive some untoward scheme; for her mood is dangerous nor will she brook her cruel treatment; full well I know her, and I much do dread that she will plunge the keen sword through their hearts, stealing without a word into the chamber where their marriage couch is spread, or else that she will slay the prince and bridegroom too, and so find some calamity still more grievous than the present; for dreadful is her wrath; verily the man that doth incur her hate will have no easy task to raise o’er her a song of triumph.”– From the first scene of Medea by Euripides

2. Sarah Bernhardt as Medea, by Alphonse Mucha, 1898. When Medea is abandoned by Jason for Glauce, she presents her rival with a dress steeped in poison. Mucha depicts Medea standing over her victim, holding the dagger with which she killed her children. The bracelet worn by Medea is the prototype of Mucha’s Snake Bracelet, commissioned by Sarah Bernhardt from the jeweller Georges Fouquet. Mucha and Berhardt met for the first time in late 1894, when Mucha created the poster for her production of Gismonda. The poster proved incredibly popular as soon as it appeared in the streets of Paris on Jan 1^st, 1895; Bernhardt offered Mucha a contract to create more, as well as costumes and stage designs. Mucha produced six more posters: La Dame aux Camélias (1896),Lorenzaccio (1896), La Samaritaine (1897), Médée (1898), La Tosca (1898) and Hamlet (1899).

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The true tragedy of Medea is that she is far from powerless, but her position renders that power a weapon that can only be ill-used. Presumably she is as skilled at healing as well as she is unhesitant at taking lives (she does bring Aeson back from the dead) but her skills bring only treachery and death. This may reflect the increasingly masculine nature of medicine in the Greek and Roman worlds, a wrestling of power of healing from feminine hands, and a demonization of their skills, the transformation from healer to witch. Pausanias, for example, tells us the death of her children is the result of a botched attempt to render them immortal (Medea is, after all, the granddaughter of a god) and not a murder of innocents.

Nor did she travel well across epochs. The difficulty with Medea in the Middle Ages was that although classical texts were a principal and much-valued means of learning Greek and Latin, the pantheist and pagan subject matter did not always sit comfortably with the Church. Focusing on Medea as a witch and a murderess served to eliminate any appeal she may have had. Aiding and abetting was the demonization of female sexuality, an aggravating factor in the ready condemnation of Medea.

Nonetheless, her complexity and depth led 19th-century artists to interrogate their preconceptions inherited from the rather less inquisitive (but more inquisitional) 17^thand 18^thcenturies. Much of what we feel we know about Medea comes from revisitings of the classical myth, and reinterpretations of the original folklore, beginning with Shakespeare, but above all from the Romantic and Victorian eras, periods of ambiguous attitudes towards women who escape social norms. Medea is never redeemed, but the blame is spread wider, the nature of her fate is examined, the figure of the witch is redefined. (Oddly enough, Medea would even become popular with the suffragette movement, lauded for her rebellion against male domination, despite her sulfurous reputation.)

Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite painters contributed to a great degree in our notions of classical myth, far more than their predecessors. How regrettable that principally men depicted Medea, that so few women painters sought her out as a subject. The modernity of her love at first sight, as told in the Argonautica, is striking. Small wonder it was not truly approved or understood for two millennia. She is the tragic heroine who has no good choices left once she has fallen irredeemably in love.

MEDEA THE MADWOMAN

Lady Hamilton as Medea by George Romney. Born Amy Lyon in 1765 and daughter of a blacksmith, “Emma” Hamilton was of the most celebrated personalities of her time. Born Amy Lyon in 1765, daughter of a blacksmith, she was first mistress and later wife of the British envoy to Naples, Sir William Hamilton. (She was also the mistress of Horatio Nelson, until his death at Trafalgar in 1805.) She was renowned for her “attitudes,” a series of dramatic poses that wordlessly acted out mythological characters. George Romney first met her when her lover, George Grenville, brought her by his studio in 1782. She became a long-standing model and muse for Romney, who did hundreds of sketches and portraits of her, notably Circe (1782), a bacchante (1785), Miranda, Cassandra and Titania (1792). In a letter dated 1786, Romney wrote that his work on a series of her attitudes was progressing well, especially her re-enactment of Medea, that Romney describes as “Medea with her hair floating in the air.” The collaboration of Romney and Lady Hamilton is described as one of the most fruitful ones in English portraiture. Romney died in 1802, Lady Hamilton in 1815.

Whatever the complexities of Medea’s origins, her metamorphoses and contradictions, she is destined for simplification and ultimately despair and madness, the only way for the later tragedians to make sense of her contradictions. It is that Medea, pared to the bone, trapped in a supporting and insupportable role, that defines her today.

Perhaps the other lesson, or at very least a cautionary note, is that gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, exist as multiform and plural beings, they are syncretic, accretive, they pick up tales and attributes like a steamer trunk does labels, like a ship’s hull barnacles from every sea it crosses. There is no one Medea, she is multitude. And, while they are often powerful figures, they are compliant, relying on the voices, and later the writings, of tellers of tales, to take life in story. They play the roles they are given. Our advantage is we have that multiplicity of story annotated by history to not only entertain us, but to enlighten us.

William Morris provides us with clues in his 1858 poem The Defence of Guenevere, examining the motivations guiding and the constraints limiting Guenevere’s course. At the end, we are not so sure of her supposed betrayal of Arthur, and above all, we are forced to re-examine our own preconceptions.

As listeners, we remember what we like or what we can. Reducing myth to a manageable form means eliminating the contradictory elements, signposting against the detours and simplifying the characters, in order for the story itself to flow unhindered. Stories, though, are not tidy watercourses with regular embankments, they are meandering, sometimes rough, sometimes languid, always full of twists and turnings.

We are not obliged to accept any one version, any more than the original storytellers did, and we owe it to the figures of myth and legend to follow their entire careers, both in story and in history, appreciating each appearance at its own value. They are actors after all, and faithful to their lines. They deserve that we listen carefully to what they have to say.

 – POSTSCRIPTUM –

There are innovative and compelling modern retellings of classical myth. I recommend The Song of Achilles and Circeby Madeline Miller, and Caitlin Sweet’s innovative and captivating retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur: The Door in the Mountainand The Flame in the Maze.

In the meantime…  a postcard from Iolcus, addressed to C, Isle of Aeaea, by Mishi Bellamy:

Ma chère tante Circe….ça va?

OMG. I am so done with travelling.

Having lugged the Unmentionable around with me these past few months it now smells horribly ripe, suggest you think ancient feta cheese and rancid butter, undertone of school dinners. The gold is a joke, just glitter stuck in the fat. Blech!

Helped with the fire-breathing oxen, though. I smothered Jase in lanolin. Thx for that tip. Was only slightly singed. Eyebrows will grow back. Had a hoot with the daft dragon’s teeth soldiers, btw. Sewing confusion always make me happy. Entropy Rules! I looked that up, btw. Chaos too small a word. Haha.

Honestly, my ma is SUCH a pain. Jase had to thwack the sleeping dragon to get the Unmentionable, and you know how allergic he is to scales (well, the tiny dracomites inhabiting them, mostly) and the merest hint of sulphuric breath always floors him – so I had make another batch of potion, which does my head in as it takes forever collecting the right herbs and grinding bones of endangered species to a fine powder. Your idea about boiling small black kittens was vetoed by the Argonauts (oh, what a bunch of utter wusses) so I changed the recipe to three rats and two fruit bats. Kittens would have been so much quicker……sigh. :<()

Honestly, I’ve no idea why I’m in love with J….beginning to think Aphrodite spiked MY drink. She’s a pain, too. Really, it’s not safe to go out in the evenings anymore. I must say Our Hero has an amazing knack of getting into trouble and expecting me to hand him a bottle of something to flatten his enemies. My bro, Apsyrtus – the one you don’t like, who stole your iPod – has come to a sticky end. Did you hear? I sent u a txt. Well, I ain’t crying. He went to clock Jase on the head, but missed and hit Atalanta instead, nearly killed her and then tripped into a vat of potion I’d left simmering. I was hacked off, as you can imagine. All that work for nothing, ruined. But not surprised as he was a brat and Pa, Mighty King of Whatever spoiled him from Day One. My thought. His slutty ma wasn’t fit to iron my toga – well, you knew her, auntie darling. Lucky you left Colchis before I did. Was a bit of a witch-hunt after she went missing………….Oh, & PS as to what an’ all was in the pot. It was Pelias. Complicated story but his card was marked. Had to deal with it. Magic employed. His daughters though he was a young ram, caught and chopped him up for dins, in MY pot. So all in all the pot had more ingredients than were called for. I gave it to the Argonauts for lunch. They are stomachs on legs. Duh.

Was SO great to see you, been too long. Off to Corinth now. More later. Love to Telegonus. Miss you. Write soon? xxx

– FOOTNOTES –

[1]Pausanias, who decidedly has little patience with marvels, claims that the two siblings crossed the Hellespont on a ship with a ram-shaped prow, and that Helle was so seasick she leaned too far over the ship’s rail, fell overboard and drowned. As for the origin of the golden ram, well… it’s complicated, as it always is when the gods are involved. Poseidon, lusting after Theophane, the beautiful daughter of Bisaltes, King of Bisaltia, abducts her and flees to the island of Crumissa, pursued by her suitors. Once there, he transforms himself into a ram, Theophane into a ewe, and the inhabitants of the isle into cattle and sheep. The suitors arrive. Mystified to find no inhabitants, they set up camp and begin to slaughter sheep for food. Poseidon transforms them into wolves and has his way with Theophane. The fruit of their union is the golden ram Khrysomallos.

[2]The Argonauts, the crew of the magical ship Argo, deserve a tale in themselves. Rarely has such a patchwork collection of heroes been united on a single cruise. Many are offspring of gods and humans; Herakles is briefly part of the crew (he is put ashore mid-voyage), as well as Orpheus, Theseus, the ship’s builder Argus, and even Atalanta (included on the list by Pseudo-Apollodorus, but dismissed by Apollonius, whoclaims that Jason forbade her because as a woman she would cause strife in the otherwise all-male crew).

[3]Power-hungry Pelias wished dominion over all of Thessaly. He imprisoned the rightful king, Jason’s father Aeson, who sent his son to the centaur Chiron, to keep him out of harm’s way. Pelias achieved his ends, but was warned by an oracle to beware of a man wearing only one sandal; years later, Jason, hurrying to arrive at the Olympic games, lost one of his sandals helping an old woman cross a river. (The old woman was the goddess Hera in disguise.) Jason’s arrival in Iolcus was noted, and the king alerted. When Pelias asked Jason how he would deal with a man destined to be his downfall, Jason replied he would dispatch him to seek the Golden Fleece, sealing his own fate.

[4]The Khakotauroi were a gift to Aeuetes from Hephaestus. “He Hephaistos had also made for him Aeëtes king of Kolkhis bulls with feet of bronze the Khalkotauroi and bronze mouths from which the breath came out in flame, blazing and terrible. And he had forged a plough of indurated steel, all in one piece.” (Apollonius Rhodia, Argonautica 3.215)

[5]Lycophron, Alexandra 1308 ff

[6]Echidna and Typhon produced a profusion of monsters, many of them amongst the most famous in Greek myth: Cerberus, the Lernean Hydra, the Chimera, the Sphinx, Scylla, Gorgon, Ladon (guardian of the golden apples of the Hesperides), the Caucasian Eagle (who daily ate Prometheus’ liver) and several others. Hesiod describes “the goddess fierce Echidna” as a flesh eating “monster, irresistible”, who was like neither “mortal men” nor “the undying gods”, but was “half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful, with speckled skin.” Typhon is just as fierce. Hesiod again: Strength was with his hands in all that he did and the feet of the strong god were untiring. From his shoulders grew a hundred heads of a snake, a fearful dragon, with dark, flickering tongues, and from under the brows of his eyes in his marvellous heads flashed fire, and fire burned from his heads as he glared. And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable; for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing aloud in proud ungovernable fury; and at another, the sound of a lion, relentless of heart; and at another, sounds like whelps, wonderful to hear; and again, at another, he would hiss, so that the high mountains re-echoed.”

[7]Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 8. 54 ff

[8]Or Ares and Aphrodite, Heaven and Earth, Night and Ether or Strife and Zephyr, depending on the writer.

[9]Eros is a primordial god, the fourth to come into existence, at least according to Hesiod. He is also depicted as the child of Night and father of humanity, in the words of Aristophanes: “At the beginning there was only Chaos, Nyx (Night), Erebus (Darkness), and Tartarus (the Abyss). Earth, the Air and Heaven had no existence. Firstly, blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Darkness, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Eros with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in the deep Abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light.”

[10]Talos, or Talus, is another curiosity of Greek myth. A giant automaton of bronze with a curious Achilles heel – a nail that sealed the vein that ran from his neck to his foot. He guarded the island of Crete, making three circuits a day around its shores. When the Argo tried to land, Talos kept the ship at bay by hurling great boulders at it. According to pseudo-Apollodorus, Talos was slain when Medea deceived him into believing that she would make him immortal by removing the nail. In the Argonautica, Medea, from aboard the Argo, raised the keres, female death-ghosts and goddesses of violent death that were known to haunt battlefields. Talos was driven to madness and dislodged the nail, and “theichor ran out of him like molten lead”. Other than his death at Medea’s hands and two differing versions of his origins, little is known of him.

[11]Medea’s dragon-drawn chariot is a recurring theme; she uses it when seeking the secret and sacred herbs for her potion-making. It also serves her swift escape when she tricks Pelias’ daughters into slitting his throat, and finally, to flee through the sky to Athens. For her final exile in Asia, the land she chooses is called Media, later, the Medes would be thought to have derived their name from hers.

Hermes on the road. Archaic bearded head of Hermes from a herm, early 5th century BC. “Herma” signifies “pile of stones”, or “cairn.” The term hermai came to define markers conventionally associated with Hermes. They took the form of a simple square stone pillar surmounted with a carved head of the god and a phallus on the column at the appropriate height.

Hermes is witness to the ever-growing difficulty of humanity to decide what to do with borders. Archaic Greece had no need of psychopomps and the gods, when they wished to speak with humans, came down in person. Little by little, though, things grew more complicated. Propitiation and ritual placated the shades of the afterlife, but clumsy ceremony and forgetfulness could see them return and loiter on the edges of sleep, until their desires were satisfied. Gods grew loftier and required messengers, the places of souls’ crossing-over became fraught – pennies for the ferryman – and even fate could occasionally be negotiated.

Hermes was also a syncretic being – as Hermes Trismegistos (Thrice-Great Hermes) his cult merged with that of Thoth in Hellenistic Egypt, with its centre in Khemnu, which the Greeks called Hermopolis, prefiguring Hermeticism. The writings attributed to him have guided Western esoteric tradition, with ups and downs, since their inception. Three is not a number associated with Hermes, who prefers four, but the “three parts of wisdom of the whole universe”: alchemy, astrology and theurgy (the practice of rituals) form the basis of much of it, with excursions and detours, via the Trinity and ritual, into Christian thought.^[3]

Hermes mixes things up. Hermes Trismegistus, floor mosaic in the Cathedral of Siena. Thrice-Great Hermes rapidly dons all the medieval trappings of wisdom: beard and robes and mystically mysterious air.

The Romans of course knew him as Mercury – mercurial, volatile and impertinent messenger between the divine and the mundane. Mercury is the golden-tongued patron of poetry and travelers, trade, trickery and deceit. He has the same attributes: talaria and petasos, but displays an augmented volatility, until it becomes his true essence: a mercurial god who leaped straight across the Ionian Sea, from Greece to Rome.^[4]

Mercury chats with a serpent. Mercury, painted between 1870 and 1873 by Pre-Raphaelite artist Evelyn de Morgan, often inadequately described as a “follower” of Edward Burne-Jones. He is depicted carrying the caduceus, wearing winged sandals and petasus. The model is Evelyn De Morgan’s brother, Spencer Pickering. The staff of Mercury is recognised at a symbol of balance, peace and union, though here Mercury has let one of the serpents escape.

Art is a negotiation between the everyday and the liminal, between the mundane and the sublime, it is the domain of Hermes, of Raven, of Loki, Anansi, Eshu, Coyote or Susano’o. In the words of Ursula K. LeGuin: “The way of art, after all, is neither to cut adrift from the emotions, the senses, the body, etc., and sail off into a void of pure meaning, nor to blind the mind’s eye and wallow in the irrational, amoral meaninglessness – but to keep open the tenuous, difficult, essential connections between the two extremes. To connect. To connect the idea with value, sensation with intuition, cortex with cerebellum.”^[5]

Art means traveling with Hermes and his crowd. (A motley lot, one might add, as even the most varied of myth-cycles have a trickster god, trickster goddesses are much scarcer. The trickster’s role is not necessarily to upset established order, to uproot world-trees or precipitate the world’s ending, though he can, by his meddling, provoke both nobler and more villainous spirits to do so.) Art means rocking boats, not so much they upset and sink, but to remind the passengers that complacency is dangerous, that alertness and eyes on horizons are necessary.

Hermes is psychopomp and psychogogue: aiding the souls of the dead to make the passage to the afterlife, but equally a guide to souls through the underworld. He is also Hermes Oneiropompus – guide through dreams.

Hermes helps out. “Souls on the Banks of the Acheron” by Hungarian Symbolist Adolf Hiremy-Hirschl. Oil on canvas, 85 x 134 in.Hermes Necropompos guides the souls of the reluctant dead to Hades. In the distance, Charon’s barque can be seen approaching,

The same stories told again are only the same if nothing changes between the two tellings, if the ritual is so entrenched it has lost all meaning. Art isn’t necessarily about telling new stories, it is about finding new ways to tell the ones that have been being told since storytelling began. This is why it is Hermes’ territory, the land of In-Between, where meanings are double, where the wider order of things is not questioned, but the connections are continually tested. Hermes wanders between ordained fate and luck, between established order and willful disruption. Hermes is a precursor of the modern supervillain who never undermines the status quo despite all the mayhem. (The modern superhero is also singularly ineffectual – they never eradicate social injustice or disease or durably improve humanity’s lot.)

Hermes, Coyote, Raven and their patchwork coterie of knaves and thieves are there to remind us to stay alert, to remind us of our embodiment and disembodiment, to recall that we are creatures of illogic and passion, of clairvoyance and intuition of intelligence and superstition. Journeying with Hermes is to tread the paths of sub-creation, that term so dear to Tolkien, part conceit and part sincere, that defines humankind’s telling of tales.

Loki goes fishing. Illustration from the Icelandic Edda dated 1760. Ólafur Brynjúlfsson – Sæmundar og Snorra Edda, 1760

When stories were told, before they were affixed in writing, the tellers knew them by heart, but were also not shy about changing them to suit circumstance; so well-versed were they in the context that if a line or a rune did not materialize from memory, they could nevertheless tell the story – different words, but same path. The listeners might recognize the change, but knew it was without importance; the world was a predictable yet uncertain place, a little latitude was part of it. (Orthodoxy had not yet been invented, that was to come from that all-powerful hegemonic alliance of men and books.)

We humans are creatures in perpetual movement, everything about us is movement: we grow, age, we change, we evolve, willingly or unwillingly. That is the reason we yearn so heartily for stability and certainty, the framework in which our changes can be meaningful.

From left to right: Loki being Loki. “Ohé! Ohé! Horrible dragon O swallow me not! Spare the life of poor Loge!” “The Rhine’s pure-gleaming children Told me of their sorrow.”  Arthur Rackham’s Illustrations from “The Rhinegold & the Valkyrie” by Richard Wagner, London: William Heinemann, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1910

Loki sleeps around. Loki’s Offspring by Carl Emil Doepler, Illustration from “Walhall: Die Götterwelt der Germanen” by Wilhelm Ranisch, 1905. Loki is the father of Hel, eponymous goddess of the Underworld, of the wolf Fenrir, and the world serpent Jörmungandr, all three by the giantess Angerbotha. By his wife Sigyn, Loki is the father of Narfi (also called Nörr, who is in turn the father of Nótt, the night incarnate, herself mother of Thor). In a brief transgender idyll, Loki takes the form of a mare and mates with the stallion Svathlifari, becoming the motherof Sleipner, Odin’s eight-legged steed.

Loki’s comeuppance. Loki and Sigyn, by Carl Emil Doepler, Illustration from “Walhall: Die Götterwelt der Germanen” by Wilhelm Ranisch, 1905. The gods of Asgard finally grow tired of Loki’s antics. Following the death of Baldr the Beautiful, he is chained to a cliff, where a serpent drips venom in his face. Loki’s wife Sigyn catches the venom as best she can, but when she must empty the bowl, the drops that fall on Loki’s face burn him so fiercely his writhing causes earthquakes.

Art is, in that sense, paradoxical. Product of fleeting beings, art’s main goal is permanence. (This is especially true for all ephemeral art, performances, happenings; the goal of permanence residing not in the art itself but in the recording of it.) These pebbles strewn along the path are the witness to our impermanence and imperfections, as Hermes takes pleasure in reminding us.

That is why he is the perfect guide through Art. Hermes deflates the pompous, punctures the certitudes of the complacent, pries loose the stones at the foundation of the establishment. He and his travelling companions are the friends of the outcasts, the outsiders, the ones who do not fit in; Coyote laughs at others, but also at himself. Raven is both cunning and naïve, he has street sense, but is as gullible as those who are the butt of his jokes.

Susano-o takes on a sea dragon. A painting by Kawanabe Kyōsai (May 18, 1831 – April 26, 1889) depicting Susano-o no Mikoto subduing Yamata no Orochi the eight-headed serpent. Meiji period, 1887

Nonetheless, good comes of his pranks. When he steals the sun from the cedar chest, he does so by trickery. Fleeing before Eagle, he drops half of it; that part shatters on the ground and rebounds into the night sky: moon and stars. The remaining half he abandons in the morning sky: the sun. Why attribute such a tale to Raven, why not simply have an all-seeing god distribute the heavenly bodies? The logic that makes them a product of raven’s brazen theft and subsequent clumsiness is that we must not expect anything by divine right, these things are not our due, they are the product of strife and circumstance. The universe itself needs watching out for (read about Jung and the Navajo elder Mountain Lake for that particular story) and must not be taken for granted. Our lives must be cosmologically meaningful, and one of the paths towards that meaning is Art. The artistic impulse, simultaneously supra-personal and intimate, is one of mankind’s most constant and earnest endeavours. Like the sun, moon and stars, it simply is. Making art is akin to making the sun rise and the moon and stars appear. In Jung’s words: “The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens onto their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of ordinary health and human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle.” This process is not “reasonable,” it is as natural as breathing:  “We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this becomes a real art… Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, never leaving the single growth of the psychic processes in peace.” 

Raven goes home. In 2010, the 140-year-old raven totem pole that was erected in Jasper National Park in Alberta in 1919 has made its way home to the people of Haida Gwaii in Old Massett, B.C. Raven is figured with the children he rescued from a flood in one of his adventures. They are standing on the back of a frog.

Bound up in all this as well is Jung’s notion of pursuit of the archetype: “Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring.” He adds:“All art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness.”

These are exactly the tricks of the trickster’s trade: playing the wise fool, telling the same story ad aeternum because neither teller nor listeners are twice the same, reminding us to keep our eyes peeled, that things are not necessarily what they seem. Art is the point of contact with the cosmos and the artist’s agent is a trickster, because art is not straightforward. Art’s very ambiguity is a catalogue of the complexities, strengths, failings and inconsistencies of the human spirit. This is the sacredness of the secular.

Hermes causes confusion. Hermes Kriophoros (Late Roman marble copy of the Kriophoros of Kalamis, Museo Barracco, Rome)The  image of Hermes carrying a ram to sacrifice has often been interpreted as the rather more benign “good shepherd.” Nonetheless, this resonates with Hermes’ role as psychopomp, though his flock is not sheep or goats, but departing souls, and their transhumance the journey to the afterland.

In the words of Le Guin: “Our culture doesn’t think storytelling is sacred; we don’t set aside a time of year for it. We don’t hold anything sacred except what organized religion declares to be so. Artists pursue a sacred call, although some would buck and rear at having their work labeled like this. Artists are lucky to have a form in which to express themselves; there is a sacredness about that, and a terrific sense of responsibility. We’ve got to do it right. Why do we have to do it right? Because that’s the whole point: either it’s right or it’s all wrong.”

That is the point of any journey: the company you keep on the road.

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Footnotes:

[1]There is something inherently backwards in this reasoning; difficult to imagine that an anonymous figure should be thus so widely represented and eventually become the name of a god.

[2]He is nonetheless present in the form of hermai, initially heaps pf stones or simple wooden or stone posts; later forms are squared stone columns (four was sacred to Hermes) with a bearded head and male genitals. Hermes is a true flouter of norms: the child he fathers on Aphrodite is the androgynous Hermaphroditus.

[3]Hermetic thought is incredibly complex and this is hardly the place for it.

[4]As befits a trickster, Mercury lets both Julius Caesar and Tacitus lead us astray with their comments to the effect that he is respectively the god of Celts and Germans. What they likely meant is that these peoples prided themselves on their talent fro commerce.

[5]Ursula K. LeGuin. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, HarperCollinsPublishers, 1989 (revised edition)

The sun is warm enough to take the bite off the Peloponnesian winter air, the pack of stray dogs that accompanied us from the entrance has disappeared: potential snacks were clearly not forthcoming, and besides, they have likely heard the guide before. The other members of our tour group are nodding thoughtfully at each observation: the gist of the expostulation is that the lower rows of seats measure exactly 1.618 times the height of the upper tier. If you measure the human body, the guide is explaining, the distance from the head to the knees is exactly the golden ratio as well (more thoughtful nods). Additionally, if you compare… I lose interest in this interminable dithyramb to the inexplicable genius of the Ancient Greeks. My mind wanders.

Limestone Seats and Golden Means: The Theatre of Epidaurus

If you take into account that the upper tier of seats, so crucial to the calculation, was added by the Romans close on five centuries later, so much for the Golden Ratio. Polykleitos’ original structure, built around 340 BC, had thirty-four rows, the Romans added twenty-one more in the 2^nd century AD, but it is likely the additions were guided more by the height of the hill than by considerations of ideal proportion. The theatre at the Sanctuary saw use for seven hundred years, until the Goths invaded the Peloponnese in 395 AD. Thirty years later, Theodosius the Great banned all pagan activities throughout Greece and the Sanctuary was abandoned. Asleep under a tree-covered slope on Mount Kynortio the theatre remained miraculously intact until 1881, when it was excavated and restored under the auspices of the Greek Archaeological Society.^[1]

The acoustics are truly astonishing and the guide’s delivery would not make any ancient tragedian blush. The nature and structure of the limestone seats (their incline is 26 degrees) dull the lower frequencies and allow the higher to rebound. It is an engineering marvel, and one that has been stumping observers for a long time. In Vitruvius’ words: “By the rules of mathematics and the method of music, they sought to make the voices from the stage rise more clearly and sweetly to the spectators’ ears… by the arrangement of theatres in accordance with the science of harmony, the ancients increased the power of the voice.”  They also discovered “virtual pitch” without naming it, when the brain, filling in the missing frequencies, perceives an enhanced impression of clarity.

The Expensive Seats: the dignitaries’ benches in the theatre

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We wander off, up the tiers; half the group remains in an informal queue as acquaintances and family take up stations in the hollow to hear hands clap, coins drop, or respond by gesture to hellos from the stage. Natural one-way sound is a novel experience, though it is unlikely that, contrary to popular belief, matches striking and whispers carry much farther than the first rows.

My mind is here and it is not, as with every place where residual human experience is so concentrated. I arrive at the last row of seats, the cheap ones, where you get not the best view, but the widest, where the action remains framed by the context and above all the consciousness of your own position in relation.

That is how we see history, from those cheap seats. The front row seats have long been vacated, we are spectators embedded in context and signification. The action itself takes on a supporting role in a wider scene, our position tends to place context above all else. (Decontextualization of history is usually done for political, or most especially, religious reasons, the goal being a foreshortening of time to restore the immediacy of a tragic, unjust, miraculous or otherwise significant event.)

 Romantics Abroad: View of the Acropolis from the Pnyx, by the Swiss painter Rudolph Müller (1802–1885) Oil on canvas, 87 x 62 cm, 1863

History is syncretic, gathering to itself the elements of its own after-the-fact clarity (or lack of) to acquire meaning. History makes better reading abridged, so we take the best bits, we personalize (unconsciously), we politicize (intentionally) or we subscribe to schools of thought because we are happy to delegate the hard work of making sense of things to others. We end up being our own tour guides through history, simultaneously expostulating and nodding thoughtfully as we tell ourselves stories. Or nodding off, as I am tempted to do as the guide drones on.

Post-Romantics and Traffic Jams: today’s Acropolis from the Plaka

As for the Golden Mean, it is as seductive as it is elusive.^[2]  Despite its presence in Ancient Egypt and in Pythagorean tradition, Euclid is the first to furnish a definition. Luca Pacioli penned the earliest known treatise on the subject: Divina Proportione, in the late 15^th century. Nonetheless, we have to wait three more centuries for the first published use, in Martin Ohm’s 1835 Pure Elementary Mathematics.

It is variously referred to as the golden or divine ration, mean, proportion, number, section or cut. The symbol for the equation is tau τ (the cut) or phi Φ, the first letter of the name of the near-legendary Greek sculptor Phidias. So much has been written about the Golden Mean that I won’t try to resume it here, but much scholarship takes coincidence for divine design and assigns intent to happenstance. It is a mixed bag at 1.618… more interesting philosophically than mathematically, though there is an undeniable poetry to the mathematics. While it is more Euclid than Fibonacci, whose spiral is best approached in nature, it remains a quintessentially human proportioning of our view of the universe and our eternal quest for meaning through recognition of form.^[3]

But we are back on the bus, and my musings are interrupted by the guide who is recounting the tale of Argos and its storied past.

In an Ideal(ised) World: an almost Elysian vision of Ancient Greece. Mycenae, from The Life and Culture of the Ancient Greeks by Jacob von Falke, translated by N. G. Politis, 1887.

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The past is a foreign country we enthusiastically explore, eager tourists guided as much by instinct as by knowledge, as much by story as by history. We have been digging and poking around in the past for a long time, both figuratively and physically, our interrogations driven by greed for antiquities and knowledge, often in a brazen combination of high-handed entitlement and genuine passion. Happily, modern armchair forays into the past do far less damage. Nonetheless, we are inattentive archaeologists in our diggings, burrowing single-mindedly through layer upon layer, just as Heinrich Schliemann did at Hisarlik, pursuing his dreams of Troy.^[4] In 1873, only three people in the world, Heinrich Schliemann and Frank and Frederick Calvert, the landowners of a desolate stretch of terrain near Tenedos on the Turkish coast, believed that Troy might have been an actual city. The intellectual community scoffed at the idea it was more than legend. Schliemann‘s conviction was based on a romantic reading of the Iliad; simultaneously fervent secular hermeneut and pragmatic euhemerist, his hunch was right. In exchange for his firman, or permission to dig, he promised the Turkish government that he would turn over all treasure he discovered, but when he stumbled on the funerary urn containing “Priam’s treasure,” he packed it up in a basket and he and his wife sped under cover of darkness to the coast and a waiting boat – thief in the night, a dreamer with dirt under his nails.

The New Helen: Sophia Schliemann (née Engastromenos) wearing treasures unearthed at Hisarlik.

Consequently persona non grata in Turkey, Schliemann became something of an archaeological refugee. He tried Knossos, but Evans was already there, digging and dreaming of minotaurs and labyrinths and creating an idealized Art Nouveau vision of the Minoans. Schliemann turned his mind to Mycenae.

And I too… we are herded back on our bus (the dogs reappear, just in case snacks might miraculously materialize) and we continue on. Next stop: Mycenae. The bus speeds past Tiryns: massive cyclopean walls glimpsed though a chain link fence. The driver has no plans to stop, he has a schedule to respect.

Schliemann also saw Tiryns en passant, although he certainly lingered far longer than we. “In the south-eastern corner of the plain of Argos, on the west and lowest and flattest of those rocky heights which here form a group, and rise like islands from the marshy plain, at a distance of 8 stadia, or about 1500 m. from the Gulf of Argos, lay the prehistoric citadel of Tiryns, now called Palaeocastron.” (Heinrich Schliemann; Tiryns; 1885)

Pausanias had visited well before him. In the 2^nd century it was already a place of legend: “Going on from here^[5] and turning to the right, you come to the ruins of Tiryns… The wall, which is the only part of the ruins still remaining, is a work of the Cyclopes made of unwrought stones, each stone being so big that a pair of mules could not move the smallest from its place to the slightest degree. Long ago small stones were so inserted that each of them binds the large blocks firmly together.” (Pausanias; Description of Greece)

Tiryns was of course the seat of Eurystheus. Herakles dwelled twelve years in the city, instructed by the Pythia of Delphi to do so after his madness had caused him to slay his own children. “And she told him to dwell in Tiryns, serving Eurystheus for twelve years and to perform the ten labours imposed on him, and so, she said, when the tasks were accomplished, he would be immortal.” (One imagines Herkales, slipping and cursing in the mud, dragging a reluctant hellhound Cerberus across the marshy plain to manhandle him, claws scrabbling on the tiled floors, before his master in the Megaron. Indeed, Eurystheus may have regretted some of the challenges – he took refuge in a large jar when Herakles dragged home the Erymanthian Boar. As for Cerberus, he was returned to Hades afterwards.)

The Grand Tour: illustrations from GREECE: Painted by John  Fulleylove,  R.I.
Described  by the  Rev.
J. A. M”Clymont, M.A., D.D.,
published by A. AND  C.
Black, London, 1906

From left to right, following the cover and the Acropolis, Athens; I have kept the original captions.

THE THEATRE OF EPIDAURUS: Presumably the work of the younger Polykleitos; the auditorium (koilon) hollowed out of the side of the hill, as is usual in Greek theatres. In the diazoma, or horizontal gangway, half-way up the side of the auditorium, are thrones or seats of honour. The orchestra, marked by a circle of white marble, is clearly shown, and also the foundations of the stage buildings. By an act of barbarism, which has sadly ruined the artistic interest of this, the most beautiful ancient Greek theatre, the marble proscenium decorated with engaged Ionic columns has been removed, as not being part of the original design of the building. One of the great gateways opening into the passage (parados) leading to the orchestra occupies the lower middle part of the drawing.

TIRYNS. THE GATE OF THE UPPER CASTLE: The gate post to the left (west) 10½ feet high, is complete, with the rebate and the hole for the insertion of the strong bar to secure the gate. Only half of the right (eastern) post remains. Over it we see the massive outer rampart between the main gate and the gate of the Upper Castle.

THE ACROPOLIS OF MYCENÆ FROM THE SOUTH-WEST, BACKED BY THE IMPOSING FORM OF MOUNT ELIAS: The gorge to the right is the valley which served as a defence for the Acropolis on the south side. The piece of road to the left is within a few paces of the famous bee-hive tomb known as the Treasury of Atreus.

MYCENÆ, SHOWING THE SITE OF THE FAMOUS DISCOVERIES OF SCHLIEMANN: The mass of so-called cyclopean masonry, on the right, buttresses the upper part of the Acropolis of Mycenæ. The wall at right angles to it contains the Lion Gate, and the large triangular stone above the lintel is the back of the well-known relief of lions or lionesses regardant, probably the most ancient piece of sculpture in Greece. In the foreground is shown the singular double wall and gateway of the enclosure, called by Schliemann the Agora, within which he found the treasures of Mycenæan art now in the Central Museum in Athens.

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My mind moves on from Herakles as the bus climbs from the Argolid plain, Mycenae is unspectacular, despite the steep climb; set, as Homer says, “in a nook of Árgos,” with a natural citadel formed by the ravines between the mountains of Hagios Elias (Ayios Ilias) and Zara, which overshadow it to the left and right. The bus pauses near the Treasury of Atreus. This is the aperitif, a cyclopean tomb built into the hill facing the acropolis. It is otherworldly, if only by the size of the blocks – the slab of the lintel alone weighs some 120 tons – and the unusual triangular aperture above it, necessary to distribute weight to the walls. Each course of blocks overlaps the lower, creating layer upon corbelled layer until they meet in the middle, the lofty dome is nearly 12 meters above our heads. Its emptiness (except for tourists with cell phones and cameras) creates a prodigiously otherworldly space, there is nothing for the eye to measure and compare; it could have been built by Polyphemus and his kind.

Regal: The Acropolis of Mycenae

It is a tholos, or beehive tomb. Built around 1250 BC, it remained the tallest and widest dome for over a thousand years, until the construction of the Temple of Hermes in Baiae, near Naples, locality famous for Caligula’s expensive stunt in rebuttal of the acerbic observation of Thrasyllus of Alexandria. The top of the dome would have projected above the hill, and been plastered white, like some gigantic egg half-buried. As for us, we clamber back on the bus to drive a few yards to the last stop: Mycenae itself.

Monumental: The Treasury of Atreus

According to tradition, Perseus, exiled from Argos, set up house just across the plain. He is reputed to have brought in foreign help – the Cyclopes – to build the walls of Mycenae.^[6] As you approach, it certainly seems an apt description. The cyclopean style is mixed with the later ashlar: in the former, the courses are wandering and irregular, the latter uses blocks of a similar size, but laid in straight course. Neither depended on the use of mortar. The walls are thick, as much as 20 to 30 feet in places, the interiors filled with smaller blocks and rubble. The Mycenaeans essentially built rugged cliffs around their cities.

What it actually resembled in its heyday may well reside forever in the realm of speculation, but it must certainly have been impressive. The Mycenaeans were barbarian kings in gilded halls, burying their dead in shaft, covering their dead kings’ faces with masks of beaten gold. Of gold and bronze they had aplenty, but no iron. In Hesiod’s words: “Their gear was of bronze, they had bronze houses; they tilled the soil with bronze; black iron there was none.” They wore helmets made of the tusks of boars, and wore odd cylindrical shells of bronze into battle. They are a far cry from our traditional visualization of the Iliad; they fought as far away as Egypt, and certainly traded and traveled throughout the Middle East, and far north perhaps as the Danube and by sea as far west as Italy and perhaps Spain.

The King in the Golden Mask: the so-called Mask of Agamemnon, discovered by Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae.

At the height of its power, around 1350 BC, the citadel and settlement may have housed thirty thousand people. The period known as Mycenaean Greece, the last centuries of the Bronze Age, are generally considered to have spanned half a millennium, from 1600 to 1100 BC. They kept the first written Greek records. They were a people to be reckoned with. They overtook Minoan Crete, occupying Knossos, even establishing bases as far away as Rhodes. The rulers of Mycenae wielded real power.

Mycenae: The Lion Gate

It is not hard to imagine now. The headless lions still twist their necks to face us, their powerful forelimbs resting on the altars that hold the column between them. They are, with the exception of the heads, surprisingly intact.^[7] The lines are clean and sophisticated, but the symbolism is archaic. The column is found elsewhere, and from far back in history, it is the tree guarded by griffons in Mesopotamia, the symbol upholding the roof of the kingdom, but also the roof of the world. The approach to Mycenae, the passage under the Lion Gate and the winding street up to the Megaron must have been awe-inspiring.

Then, for a reason which eludes historians even today, the empire declined. The period following, from the 11^th to the 8^th centuries BC is commonly known as the Greek Dark Ages, followed by the rise of Classical Greece.^[8] Whatever the causes, Mycenae receded into a land of myth and grazing sheep, the fate of so many once-great bastions, where their deeds are celebrated in legend and shepherds camp within their broken walls.

It slumbered, except in the pages of Homer. Pausanias passed by around 160 AD, but only 1500 years later do we find the next mention by Franceso Grimani, in 1700. (Grimani used Pausanias’ description of the Lion gate to identify the ruins: “Parts Of The City Wall Remain, Among Them The Gate, Surmounted By Lions. They Say It Is The Work Of The Cyclopes, Who Made For Proteus the Walls at Tiryns.”)

Mycenae sleeping: little changed from the time of Pausanias. Views in Greece, from Drawings by Edward Dodwell Esq. F.S.A &c., London, Rodwell and Martin, 1819.

 Then, Schliemann arrived and industriously set to work. Here is an excerpt from his journal, published in 1878:

“Mycenae, Sept. 30, 1876.

Since the 9th inst. I have continued the excavations with the greatest energy, employing constantly125 workmen and five horse-carts, and the weather being beautiful I have made excellent progress. In the Treasury, in which Mrs. Schliemann is excavating, we work with thirty labourers and two horse-carts, and find the very greatest difficulty in removing the hundreds of huge wrought stones which have fallen from the vault…”

 He dug here and there outside the walls, then moved into the citadel. He excavated the shaft graves just to the right inside the Lion Gate; in Grave V he found his grail: the golden Mask of Agamemnon. As was the case for Priam’s Treasure (in which he dressed his wife Sophia, dubbing her a “second Helen”) Schliemann felt he was finally holding the veritable proof of the underlying truth of the Iliad. It was wishful thinking of course, the mask is indeed royal, but of the wrong date to grace Agamemnon’s royal visage, had he existed.

The Foreign Country of the Past:Tourist seeking a better seat

Nor can we count on the Trojan war as a real event, although there is proof enough that one of the many layers that compose the tell of Hissarlik was set afire, the events described by Homer are historically ambiguous.

Mycenae began its journey into epic legend and myth long ago. It was remembered as the Third or Bronze Age of Hesiod. In his poem Works and Days, Hesiod listed Five Ages. The first was the mythical Golden Age, or age of Cronus, precursor of the Christian Paradise before the Fall; the Sliver Age, under the dominion of Zeus, when humans lived a century. The men of the Bronze Age were battle-hardened, eager for war, their souls destined for Hades. Their Age was destroyed by Zeus, who unleashed the Flood of Deucalion. The Heroic Age, the time of the heroes of the Trojan War, and after death could hope for an eternity in the Fields of Elysium. The fifth age, the Age of Iron, was Hesiod’s own.

Monumental: Polyphemus’ handiwork

So even in the 7^th century, Mycenae had receded into a world grander than history, straddling two mythic ages that paralleled history: the early immigrants from the Anatolia, the Caucasus and Iran, wielding weapons and tools first of copper, then bronze, and the Mycenaean kingdoms with their cultural inheritance from the Minoans, barbarian kings in golden halls, belligerent rulers of the Aegean, their ranks filled with heroes.

Modern archaeology brings their reality back to life, inevitably confronting history and story, the former somehow insinuating that the latter is less useful to our modern sensibilities. To me it seems they need to be treated with the same respect, because neither is entirely true or wholly false.

Because, when the dust settles, it is without importance. Was there a real King Arthur, a real Robin Hood or a William Tell? Whatever individuals may have existed, their existences are relatively unremarkable components of something far richer, and the fierce debates to prove some version of them actually lived and breathed are largely pointless quarrels. Their mist-shrouded origins are the source of their syncretic power. Alexander the Great, for example, or Charlemagne, gathered marvels in their wakes, but as their real lives are well-described, they have little room in their baggage for anything more than the occasional anecdote.

Our personal nostalgia avidly inserts itself into the wider horizons of things past. We are the willing prisoners of linearity, of the instant fled, of things slipping though our grasp. Now wonder the Romantic landscape was one of lone and level sands… we shelter in the shadow of those trunkless legs of Shelley’s Ozymandias. Forays into history are rarely dispassionate affairs.

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In the words of Ursula K. LeGuin: “History is one way of telling stories, just like myth, fiction, or oral storytelling. But over the last hundred years, history has pre-empted the other forms of storytelling because of its claim to absolute, objective truth. Trying to be scientists, historians stood outside of history and told the story of how it was. All that has changed radically over the last twenty years. Historians now laugh at the pretense of objective truth. They agree that every age has its own history, and if there is any objective truth, we can’t reach it with words. History is not a science, it’s an art.”

We file back to board the bus, the trip back to Athens, punctuated by the inevitable and excruciating shopping stop at a pottery shop in a nearby town, ends in traffic jams and darkness, until we are dropped at our hotel. The guide had rambled a little less than as Epidaurus; marrying fact to fancy in Mycenae is best left to the imagination.

The world is full of such places, places where we can gain a glimpse of that intangible entelechy that suddenly juxtaposes history and story. Both contain elements of truth of differing nature. The past is a foreign country, the present is the temporal telescope through which we see what we can, or, for the majority of us, as we are not historians, make do with what we are offered: the view from the cheap seats.

……………FOOTNOTES……………..

[1] The restoration was undertaken in several stages: in 1907, 1957 and most recently from 1988 to 2016. Modern performances began in 1960, with Maria Callas performing Norma in 1960 and Medée in 1961.

[2] Anecdote: I initially typed in “eleusive,” a tempting Freudian neologism to synthesize Eleusis with wider mysteries. Happily, the spelling corrector dispelled such a notion.

[3] The Golden Section has been applied, more or less generously and often quite leniently, to literally everything, from the pyramids at Giza to the chambered nautilus and more, though to my knowledge, it has been little applied to the architecture of the Far East.

[4] Schliemann was an inveterate embroiderer of tales, so often repeating the story of his childhood discover of the Trojan War and dreaming dreams filled with Greek heroes that he may actually have come to believe it himself. Vocation and passion have a way of sending roots deep into our childhoods.

[5] Pausanias was travelling in the opposite direction, from Argos to Epidaurus.

[6] For such gigantic beings, the Cyclopes are hard to pin down as well. Described by Homer as an indolent race of man- eating shepherds in south-western Sicily, of whom we know only one by name: the one-eyed Polyphemus who is famously blinded by Odysseas. Homer neglects to tell us if Polyphemus’ one eye was a feature of his kind. Later tradition describes them as servants of Hephaestus, happily laboring under Aetna. No longer shepherds, they are makers of weapons and armour for the gods. Two are named: Pyracmon and Acamas. The Cyclopes who built Argos, Tiryns and Mycenae hail from Thrace, their name derived from a King Cyclops.

[7] The heads were apparently made of a different stone or perhaps of gold, affixed to the main limestone relief. There is some speculation that they also had eagle’s heads, and are not lions, but wingless griffins or even that they had human heads. The lintel upon which they rest, secure in their corbelled triangle, weighs some 18 tons.

[8] The Classical Greeks ascribed the decline to the Dorian Invasion around 1100 BC, the 19^th century to the mysterious Sea Peoples; it is very likely a combination of internecine strife, changing maritime influence and population shifts. We may never know for certain. It sent contingents to Thermopylae and Plartea during the Persian Wars. When it was besieged and thrown down by neighbouring Argos in 468 BC, it was no longer a center of power. Later. It was reoccupied during the Hellenic Period; a theatre being built over top of the Tomb of Clymenestra. When Pausanias stopped by, it was inhabited only by sheep.