Good Boy

The May edition of the BBC History Magazine carries a portrait of King Charles I on the front cover. To the left of his head the text runs Sorcery in the Civil War, followed by smaller font announcing How King Charles I used witchcraft as a weapon in his clash with parliament.

This is bold stuff indeed, certainly enough to draw the curious inside the covers, anyone beguiled by the suggestion that a British king resorted to witchcraft, especially the only Anglican saint. It might be an excellent editorial hook but, if you do look inside, you are bound to be disappointed; for the whole thing is utterly misleading, grounds for possible prosecution under the Trade Descriptions Act!

The story is not about the king at all – it’s about a dog. Specifically it’s about Boy, the poodle that once belonged to Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the king’s nephew and the leading commander of the Royal cavalry during the English Civil War. In The Prince and the Devil Dog Mark Stoyle, professor of history at Southampton University, examines some of the myths that attached themselves to the poor beast. It has nothing at all to do with Charles but it’s still a jolly good tale about a tail!

Legends still cling to Boy even so far as the present day, some repeated by Terry Deary in The Slimy Stuarts, part of his Horrible Histories series, amusing interpretations of the past for children. There is even confusion over exactly what kind of dog Boy was. In Cromwell, a biopic starring Richard Harris, he is shown as a toy, as if a fighting prince would carry a lapdog into battle! No, though we can’t be precise, Boy was clearly some kind of hunting poodle, more akin to the standard breeds of today. In contemporary engravings he is shown on the ground just to the front of the mounted Rupert.

The interesting thing is that though pamphlets favourable to the parliamentary cause were quick to attribute a satanic quality to the king’s dashing cavalry commander, it was the royalists themselves who brought Boy into the picture in an attempt to poke fun at the superstitious gullibility of the other side. John Cleveland, a Royalist poet and polemicist, penned some verses in late 1642, claiming that the Roundheads all believed in Prince Rupert’s magical powers, and that Boy was his familiar spirit, the demonic shape-shifter that Satan grants to his acolytes. The concept was certainly familiar enough to those reared on traditional fears about witchcraft.

Cleveland had some fun with this, saying that Rupert taught Boy to cock his leg every time the name of John Pym, the leading Parliamentarian, was mentioned. It was a satire suggesting that the Parliamentary party were all superstitious fools, but it came to be regarded by subsequent generations of historians as a true insight into their beliefs, a myth that made it so far into modern English schoolrooms by way of the Horrible Histories.

Cleveland’s satire was such a hit on the Royalist side that by the beginning of 1643, as Stoyle says, they were even drinking toasts to Boy’s health. One anonymous Royalist writer went so far to compose a whole pamphlet about the dog, entitled Observations upon Prince Rupert’s White Dog Called Boy. It was written in the form of a letter, a parody of the canting style favoured by the Puritans, supposedly from a spy in Oxford, the royalist capital, who detailed Boy’s various ‘powers.’ To give a little extra bite the author claimed that Boy was not a real dog at all but a “handsome white woman” in the shape of a dog, a source of sexual favours for the Prince.

It was now that Boy really achieved prominence on both sides, the most familiar familiar England ever produced. It was a huge laugh, a piece of Cavalier condescension at the expense of their opponents, going so far to create a permanent image of the Roundheads. But poor Boy, or Girl, depending on your point of view, came to a sad end, all his powers notwithstanding. He was among the many Cavaliers who fell in July 1644 at the Battle of Marston Moor not far from the city of York. In revenge for the previous mockery Parliamentary writers wrote gleefully of his death.

But Cleveland, and Boy, have had the more lasting revenge, still colouring popular views of their unattractive opponents so far as the present day, still showing the Roundheads as literal-minded, superstitious and joyless fanatics. Well done Boy!

Unicorn Lore

The Natural History of Unicorns is a real treat! Chris Lavers, a writer on science subjects, embarks on an open-minded quest to discover the unicorn; to discover the origins and ‘natural history’ of this fabulous creature, which flits in and out of fact and legend in a tantalisingly elusive way, always just beyond the next horizon, always just at the limits of sight.

The author does not assume anything, does not work backwards from a pre-determined conclusion, but treats his quest in a scholarly though always lively manner. His epigraph is admirable: “There are two things to avoid in dealing with a legend. The first is to make too much of it, the other is to disbelieve it entirely.” And for enthusiasts there is a tantalising promise in his introduction, “For most recorded history people thought that the unicorn existed. Recently we have come to know that it never did: so this book must end in disappointment. Not so. Unicorns did exist. There are photographs.”

Yes, it’s a natural history of a particularly fascinating kind; but it is also an examination of symbols, of religious beliefs, of art, of language, of semantics, of exploration and of transformation.

Lavers traces the origins of the legend back to a Greek historian and physician by the name of Ctesias of Cnidus, writing in 398BC. While in Persia , ministering to the king and his court, he wrote of a tale that had come from India of “…certain wild asses which are as large as horses, and larger. Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length.”

It is from this point that the author begins his hunt, with the fauna of India , each and every creature that could in any way resemble that described by Ctesias. We meet the Indian rhino, the Tibetan antelope, the yak and a rather fearsome ass known as a kiang. Trails are followed assiduously back through time, allowing us to discover not one fantastic beast but a range of real ones. They are disassembled and reassembled to give us something unique.

So the journey goes on, as myth and nature come close, but never quite meet. Ctesias’ wild ass even manages to appear in the Bible, though the numerous references to unicorns in the King James Version are based on a mistranslation from the Hebrew to the Greek. Instead of a unicorn the Bible authors were most likely talking about an ox.

Lavers takes us through time and over distance in his quest, passing civilizations and natural habitats, from Asia to the Arctic . The Chimera takes shape out of a variety of sources and a wealth of mythologies. It is this which transforms such mundane objects as the walrus tusk or the narwhal tooth into something quite different. Lavers is at his most compelling in his blend of natural history with local legend; legends which give rise to new legends, new quests, and ever more intriguing transformations.

The unicorn exists, yes; it exists as a symbol of so many things, of nature itself, perhaps, wild and untamable. But in the end it is caught and it is tamed. Its journey through the forests of time and experience end when it sits down in the company of a maiden, becoming a symbol of Christ in the company of Mary. Now mild and meek, it makes its way through Christian hagiography, through medieval iconography into a New Age avatar.

And, yes, there are photographs!

The Danse Macabre-a Legacy of Christian Terror

Death, death; O amiable lovely death!
Thou odouriferous stench! sound rottenness!
Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,
Thou hate and terror to prosperity,
And I will kiss thy detestable bones
And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows
And ring these fingers with thy household worms
And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust
And be a carrion monster like thyself:
Come, grin on me, and I will think thou smilest
And buss thee as thy wife. Misery's love,
O, come to me!
King John, Act III, Scene 4

I had breakfast this morning pouring over a fascinating journal piece on Death and the Danse Macabre. There is a development in the perceptions of death, in the manner in which death related to life. In the Pagan World death is a presence, yes, but one quite different from that of Christian Middle Ages. The Romans, for example, accepted Homer’s identification of Death as the elder brother of Sleep, and the two are often depicted together as winged genii on funeral monuments. The Egyptians, according to Herodotus, were in the habit of introducing a sarcophagus to the festive table as a reminder of the fragility of life;

Behold this image of what you yourself will be; eat and drink therefore and be happy.

Plutarch later took up this notion, though in his account a skeleton was displayed. This was another custom adopted by the Romans, as can be seen in Petronius’ Dinner of Trimalchio, though here a jointed puppet takes the place of the skeleton.

The point to all this was not that death was to be feared: it was no more than the implacable will of the gods. In essence it was a spur aimed at redoubling carnal pleasures in the midst of a transitory existence. It was an invitation, if you like, to even greater sin.

Then, like the ghost of Banqo, Christianity arrived at the feast, with a dead and deadening hand. Now an eternity of suffering was the promised ‘reward’ of carnal sin. Death was thus reborn as a figure of terror, the gatekeeper to a world of even greater terrors. Thus was born the Danse Macabre.

Now the skeleton reappears in paintings and frescos across Europe, leading the living in a gruesome dance. The pageant begins in earnest in the fourteenth century, the age of the Black Death, and continues beyond. The skeleton takes the hand of all, from Emperor to Peasant, leading them onwards in an irresistible caper, often in procession, with the partners walking hand-in hand. Death is not at the end of life; he is there forcing his presence on every scene of pleasure, or of love, or of simple family intimacy. He takes at will; he takes the child from the mother, the wife from the husband; he separates lovers, forcing his own intimate embraces on the one or the other.

Fear of death, even in an age when the Danse Macabre has been consigned to the edges of consciousness, is arguably the most lasting Christian legacy

An Evergreen Myth

Oh, yes, of course Atlantis exists; you will find it to the north of Utopia and to the east of Erewhon! Yes, it exists; it existed in the imagination of Plato, just as the latter two places existed in the imagination of Sir Thomas Moore and Samuel Butler.

There is nothing, no mention of Atlantis whatsoever, in the literary or historical record prior to the composition of Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and the unfinished Critias. Quite simply it is Plato’s Utopia, set up as a mirror to contemporary Greece . It fell in the end, Plato concluded, because of its impiety, a warning to his fellow countrymen. It was, in other words, simply a dialectical device, one the author used to illustrate and develop his political theories.

So, that’s it. There is no archaeological evidence, no chronicles, no remains, no coins; absolutely nothing. The only dispute amongst serious scholars is the extent to which Plato based his literary invention on older stories or some specific historical event, possibly the eruption of Santorini in the Cyclades Islands in 1500BC, which caused widespread devastation in the Aegean region, and is thought to have led to the beginning of the end of the Minoan civilization on Crete.

The idea was taken up, of course, by those who followed Plato, often only to be parodied and dismissed, beginning with Theopompus, who invented Meropis, his own fantastic world beneath the ocean. The current obsession probably dates no further back than the publication in the seventeenth century of The New Atlantis by Sir Francis Bacon.

And so it went on. Those who believe in Plato’s fiction are in the company of Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi ideologue, and other such inspired mystics!

But, hey-what the hell?-when a myth is up and running it is impossible to knock down. :-))

The Legend of Joseph of Arimathea

I was thinking about Joseph of Arimathea, of whom almost nothing is known and yet much has been written.

Joseph simply appears in the Gospels as a wealthy man who allowed his own prepared tomb to be used for the burial of Jesus. There is really not much to go on, and the story itself may have been inserted in confirmation of prediction contained in the Book of Isaiah. But on such simple foundations an ice-cream castle has been erected, one in which Joseph has links with Britain, King Arthur and the Holy Grail.

The mythology begins with the apocrypha and un-canonical texts, works like the Acts of Pilate, The Gospel of Nicodemus and The Narrative of Joseph. There are also several fanciful references in the writings of the early church historians.

The first reference to Joseph in connection with Britain comes in the ninth century in The Life of Mary Magdalene, written by Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz. The story was taken up by William of Malmesbury in The Chronicles of the English Kings, where Joseph and eleven companions are said to be responsible for the foundation of Glastonbury Abbey.

But it was Robert de Boron, a French poet who lived in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, who associated Joseph with the Grail for the first time in his Joseph d’Arimathe, amplifying on aspects of the Acts of Pilate.

In Boron’s account Joseph, imprisoned by the Jewish elders, is sustained during his captivity by the Grail. On his release he brings the sacred vessel with him on his journey to Britain. Legend then became truth and truth legend as the Grail cycle spun ever more elaborate threads. John of Glastonbury claims Joseph as an ancestor of King Arthur. For Elizabeth I his missionary work allowed her to assert that Christianity came to England before the Roman Church. So, the new Holy Grail was the foundation of an English National Church, with Joseph as it’s cup-bearer and prophet!

Faust Emerging From Hell

I first came across the story of Faust when we studied Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus when I was at school. I was attracted to the supernatural elements, the idea that it was possible to obtain earthly power by a form of demonic pact; attracted and repelled at one and the same time.

Being as I am I could not leave it at that, so I started to root around, eventually reading Goethe’s version of the legend in his two part masterpiece. I can’t say I fully understood it at the time-I was only fourteen years old-but I was immediately aware, especially after reading part two, that this was an infinitely more complicated and interesting Faust than that of Marlowe. More than that, I could see that the story itself had undergone a deep transformation; that the fable of good and evil, a fable based on the dangers of seeking hidden powers, had been stripped away. In Goethe’s play Faust is redeemed, but the redemption, true redemption, is in the attainment of the higher forms of freedom and self-understanding. It was an end of both Medieval imagination and the simpler forms of Christian morality.

The original Faust-indeed if there ever was an original Faust-is thought to be one Georg or Johannes Faust, an alchemist who once attended the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Widely known for his skill in magic, he died under mysterious circumstances in about 1540. This was a time when belief in the diabolical pact was at its height; witches were regularly accused of entering into such arrangements.

The elements of Faust’s story, both fact and fancy, were finally set down in the Historia von Dr Johan Fausten, a chapbook published in Frankfurt in 1587. In this he is depicted as an amoral rogue who enjoyed twenty-four years of perversion and excess as well as becoming the most notable astrologer of his day, one whose predictions were never wrong.

Unlike witchcraft, whose practitioners suffered repeated persecution, alchemists stood on the frontier of what was and what was not permissible, sometimes stepping over in their thirst for knowledge. Knowledge, the limits of inquiry, better said, had long been determined by the church. Those who have read Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose will recall the figure of Venerable Jorge, who insisted that there was no progress in Knowledge, only endless and divine recapitulation. Faust, if you like, represents the rebellious and the restless, a figure who was determined to escape from the limitations of recapitulation, divine or otherwise. He had to start as a villain, a monster of pride; he had to end as a hero, a harbinger of a new age.

Death, Doom and the Dutchman

I love the stories and legends concerning ghost ships. Not surprisingly these are particularly strong in the west of England, specifically in the county of Cornwall, whose long coast has seen many ships wrecked over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design. The theme is also popular in poetry, and I’m thinking specifically of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner";

The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;
Yet never a breeze up blew;
The mariners all 'gan to work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools -
We were a ghastly crew.

But it’s the story of The Flying Dutchman that intrigues me most, a story that inspired Wagner to compose the one opera in his repertoire that does not drive me to complete distraction!

There are several versions of the legend. The version used by Wagner concerns a captain by the name of Hendrik Vanderdecken, condemned to sail the seas until doomsday for cursing God.

The story of the Dutchman first appeared in print in 1795 in George Barrington’s Voyage to Botany Bay;

I had often heard of the superstition of sailors respecting apparitions, but had never given much credit to the report; it seems that some years since a Dutch man of war was lost off the Cape of Good Hope, and every soul on board perished; her consort weathered the gale, and arrived soon after at the Cape. Having refitted, and returning to Europe, they were assailed by a violent tempest nearly in the same latitude. In the night watch some of the people saw, or imagined they saw, a vessel standing for them under a press of sail, as though she would run them down: one in particular affirmed it was the ship that had foundered in the former gale, and that it must certainly be her, or the apparition of her; but on its clearing up, the object, a dark thick cloud, disappeared. Nothing could do away the idea of this phenomenon on the minds of the sailors; and, on their relating the circumstances when they arrived in port, the story spread like wild-fire, and the supposed phantom was called the Flying Dutchman. From the Dutch the English seamen got the infatuation, and there are very few Indiamen, but what has some one on board, who pretends to have seen the apparition

There were numerous sightings in the decades that followed. In 1880 it was supposedly seen by the future King George V while sailing on the flagship Inconstant off the coast of Australia. However, the records of the voyage show that the sighting was not by George himself but by some of the seamen on board, who reported a strange red light as of a “phantom ship all aglow.”

Such sightings, according to the novelist Sir Walter Scott, among others, are a portent of death or disaster for the seamen involved. Yes, it may be so; for the sailor on the Inconstant who first saw the ghost ship died soon after in an accident. And so the legend sails on!

The Wandering Jew

I’m completely fascinated by the story of the Wandering Jew, the man who allegedly mocked Christ on his way to the Crucifixion. He was promptly cursed, doomed to wander the earth, without rest, until the Second Coming.

The legend is most likely of ancient provenance, but it first written reference dates to the thirteenth century, to Flores Historiarum, the chronicle of Roger of Wendover, an English monk. In this he is said to have been a shoemaker by the name of Cartaphilus.

The story first made it into popular consciousness at the beginning of the seventeenth century, with the publication of a pamphlet in German. From Germany the legend spread rapidly across Europe, though the Jew in question is now known as Ahaserus. The pamphlet quotes Matthew Chapter sixteen, verse twenty-eight, which many have taken to be the source of all that followed;

Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here, which shall not taste death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.

Wander he did, over the whole of Europe and beyond. There were reports of sightings as late as the nineteenth century. Seemingly he even made it to Salt Lake City in 1868. Perhaps he is now a Latter Day Saint? :))