Lives of the Necromancers: Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head

More from Lives of the Necromancers (1834) by William Godwin. See Orpheus for an introduction to Godwin and the book.

Alexander the Paphlagonian

“At about the same time with Apuleius (note: the Numidian writer in Latin, circa 124 – 170 AD) lived Alexander the Paphlagonian, of whom so extraordinary an account is transmitted to us by Lucian (note: also alive during the events he recorded, circa 125 – 180 AD). He was a native of an obscure town, called Abanotica, but was endowed with all that ingenuity and cunning which enables men most effectually to impose upon their fellow-creatures. He was tall of stature, of an impressive aspect, a fair complexion, eyes that sparkled with an awe-commanding fire as if informed by some divinity, and a voice to the last degree powerful and melodious. To these he added the graces of carriage and attire. Being born to none of the goods of fortune, he considered with himself how to turn these advantages to the greatest account; and the plan he fixed upon was that of instituting an oracle entirely under his own direction. He began at Chalcedon on the Thracian Bosphorus; but, continuing but a short time there, he used it principally as an opportunity for publishing that Aesculapius, with Apollo, his father, would in no long time fix his residence at Abanotica…

… coming to Pella in Macedon, [he] found that the environs of this city were distinguished from perhaps all other parts of the world, by a breed of serpents of extraordinary size and beauty. Our author (Lucian) adds that these serpents were so tame, that they inhabited the houses of the province, and slept in bed with the children. If you trod upon them, they did not turn again, or shew tokens of anger, and they sucked the breasts of the women to whom it might be of service to draw off their milk. Lucian says, it was probably one of these serpents, that was found in the bed of Olympias, and gave occasion to the tale that Alexander the Great was begotten by Jupiter under the form of a serpent.

The prophet bought the largest and finest serpent he could find, and conveyed it secretly with him into Asia. When he came to Abonotica, he found the temple that was built surrounded with a moat; and he took an opportunity privately of sinking a goose-egg, which he had first emptied of its contents, inserting instead a young serpent just hatched, and closing it again with great care. He then told his fellow-citizens that the God was arrived, and hastening to the moat, scooped up the egg in an egg-cup in presence of the whole assembly. He next broke the shell, and shewed the young serpent that twisted about his fingers in presence of the admiring multitude. After this he suffered several days to elapse, and then, collecting crowds from every part of Paphlagonia, he exhibited himself, as he had previously announced he should do, with the fine serpent he had brought from Macedon twisted in coils about the prophet’s neck, and its head hid under his arm-pit, while a head artfully formed with linen, and bearing some resemblance to a human face, protruded itself, and passed for the head of the reptile. The spectators were beyond measure astonished to see a little embryo serpent, grown in a few days to so magnificent a size, and exhibiting the features of a human countenance.

Contemporary (2nd century AD) statue of Alexander’s snake-god-puppet Glycon. From the National History and Archaeology Museum, Constanţa, Romania.

Lives of the Necromancers: Orpheus

William Godwin.

Some interesting stuff from Lives of the Necromancers (1834) by William Godwin, the proto-anarchist and father of Mary “Frankenstein” Shelley, nee Godwin. Well, interesting if you’re into necromancers anyway. And who isn’t interested in necromancers? Nobody I want to hang out with, is the answer.

William Godwin also wrote a novel called St. Leon (1799), about a man who artificially attains immortality. Without taking anything away from Mary– she was undoubtedly the most talented of the famous four who played at writing stories near Lake Geneva in 1816, not to mention being only eighteen years old at the time– it’s obvious that her super cool father with his love of fringe science and radical politics was a big influence on her. Godwin’s wife and Mary’s mother was the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, though Mary senior sadly died of septicaemia shortly after giving birth and so never knew her daughter. Oh, to be a dinner guest at that household…

Orpheus

But anyway: Orpheus. Having screwed up a rescue of his late wife Eurydice from the underworld, according to many stories he henceforth restricted himself to male company. The Maenads– female followers of the ecstatic god Dionysus, whose name literally means “the raving ones” or “ravers”– decided to get crunk with Orpheus whether he liked it or not:

As has been said, he fell a sacrifice to the resentment and fury of the women of his native soil. They are affirmed to have torn him limb from limb. His head, divided from his body, floated down the waters of the Hebrus, and miraculously, as it passed along to the sea, it was still heard to exclaim in mournful accents, Eurydice, Eurydice! At length it was carried ashore on the island of Lesbos. Here, by some extraordinary concurrence of circumstances, it found a resting-place in a fissure of a rock over-arched by a cave, and, thus domiciliated, is said to have retained the power of speech, and to have uttered oracles. Not only the people of Lesbos resorted to it for guidance in difficult questions, but also the Asiatic Greeks from Ionia and Aetolia; and its fame and character for predicting future events even extended to Babylon.

More necromancers to come…

Doctor What?

The first physician whose name appears in the historical record practised in Sumeria (modern day Iraq), circa 2700 BC. His name was Lulu. That is all, carry on.

Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s AD 99

In 1973 archaeologists digging at Vindolanda– the former site of a Roman fort, about halfway along Hadrian’s Wall in the North of England– uncovered a store of letters and files on wooden tablets. Between about AD 85 and 122 the wall was being built to mark the farthest extent of the Roman empire. Boudicca and the Iceni had kicked off and destroyed several Roman cities only a few decades previously, and the tribal people of Britain were still far from pacified or assimilated, but Hadrian made the strategic decision to physically isolate the Picts who lived in what is now called Scotland because they were even more troublesome. Most of the tablets seem to date from roughly this frontier period. Ironically the documents may have been preserved because they were dumped out periodically with the rubbish, which led to them being buried instead of taken away or lost.

Remarkable as their survival is, what’s really amazing about them is the way they connect us so intimately to people who’ve been dead for about two thousand years. They weren’t concerned with Imperial policy except in a pragmatic way, and for the most part they weren’t philosophising about huge historical issues. They weren’t Ciceros or Caesars. They were exactly like us. Soldiers wrote racist assessments of the spear-chucking natives. They invited their sister for a birthday piss up. They complained. Their mums sent them underpants and socks to keep them warm in Britain’s horrible climate.

These translations and images are from Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier: Vindolanda and its People, by Alan K. Bowman, published by the British Museum Press.

The Britons

… the Britons are unprotected by armour. There are very many cavalry. The cavalry do not use swords, nor do the wretched Britons mount in order to throw javelins.

(The writer calls the natives Brittunculi, which is a contemptuous diminutive form of the more proper Brittones.)

Memorandum on the Britons.

Poetic squashing

Nearly 2400 years have passed since Aristotle perfectly summed up good and bad writing in The Poetics, and yet still we get narrative disasters like (for example) Prometheus. Aristotle obviously didn’t know Hollywood existed and yet he describes it perfectly in the first paragraph quoted below. He even tells us how to do “villain crushed by a huge object” correctly…

“Of simple plots and actions those that are episodic are the worst. By an episodic plot I mean one in which the sequence of the episodes is neither probable nor necessary. Plays of this kind are written by bad poets because they cannot help it, and by good poets because of the actors; writing for the dramatic competitions, they often strain a plot beyond  the bounds of possibility, and are thus obliged to dislocate the continuity of events.

However, tragedy is the representation not only of a complete action, but also of incidents that waken fear and pity, and effects of this kind are more heightened when things happen unexpectedly as well as logically, for then they will be more remarkable than if they seem merely mechanical or accidental. Indeed, even chance occurrences seem most remarkable when they have the appearance of having been brought about by design– when, for example, the statue of Mitys at Argos killed the man who had caused Mitys’s death, by falling down on him at a public entertainment. Things like this do not even seem mere chance occurrences. Thus plots of this type are necessarily better than others.”

I wasn’t able to find out who Mitys was or why he had a statue big enough to kill somebody; it seems he’s only remembered to history via this reference by Aristotle, as the chap whose statue killed the man who killed him.

Edward Gorey: “After it had passed, Lord Wherewithal was found crushed beneath a statue blown down from the parapet.” from ‘The Secrets: Volume One, The Other Statue,’ 1968.

Staring at a wall for nine years

Bodhidharma, a woodblock print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1887. Bodhidharma was a semi-legendary– or at least subsequently surrounded by myth)– Indian Buddhist monk credited with bringing Ch’an Buddhism (later, in Japan, Zen) to China, with beginning the tradition of fighting Shaolin monks (so indirectly we can thank him for Hong Kong kung fu films), with contemplating a blank wall in silence for nine years, and for being a bit of an old bastard by the sound of it. (Very comprehensive Wikipedia page.) Also a Bear icon avant la lettre, and if you don’t know what a Bear is already then you’re probably über-straight and you also probably won’t want to Google it if you’re at work or your wife is in the room. Anyway, I swear that’s not why this picture was hanging around on my hard drive.

He’s omnipresent in Japanese life and iconography in the form of daruma, the rotund, goggle-eyed papier mache dolls intended to motivate or attract success: you draw one eye on at the beginning of your venture, then draw the other eye on when you succeed. One bit of folklore suggests that daruma have no arms and legs because Bodhidharma’s own limbs atrophied and disappeared during his years of wall-staring. This is equal parts adorable and disturbing. You know, Japanese.

Daruma dolls. Photo by Alistair Gentry.

A bit like playing World of Warcraft

Herodotus, 5th century BC:

“In the days of Atys the son of Manes (note: a long time before Herodotus was born, therefore even in the 5th century BC more in the realm of mythology than in verifiable fact), there was great scarcity through the whole land of Lydia. For some time the Lydians bore the affliction patiently, but finding that it did not pass away, they set to work to devise remedies for the evil. Various expedients were discovered by various persons; dice, and knuckle-bones, and ball, and all such games were invented, except tables, the invention of which they do not claim as theirs. The plan adopted against the famine was to engage in games one day so entirely as to not feel any craving for food, and the next day to eat and abstain from games. In this way they passed eighteen years.” The Histories, Book One.

She said she was going to have “a little go” on Angry Birds. In this way she passed eighteen years.

Kids today… (in the Assyrian Empire, 2800 BC)

(Photograph ©Alistair Gentry)

“Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”

From an Assyrian clay tablet, circa 2800 BC. The Assyrian Empire’s capital (Nineveh, now gone but the site is adjacent to modern day Mosul in northern Iraq) was captured over two thousand years later by a loose alliance including Babylonians, Cimmerians and Scythians. We should all be so lucky as to have our civilisation take so long in (supposedly) degenerating. Ashur-uballit II held onto one last city as a bastion of Assyrian culture for a while, but the empire was finally overcome in its entirety by Babylon in 605BC. The empire ended and was replaced by another, but the world didn’t end. Some useful perspective for all the middle aged-to-elderly whiners who say the world isn’t what it used to be, that the interests and recreations of young people don’t bear comparison to those of one’s own youth, or that basically everything has turned into a load of shit since they were young.

Well, guess what? The world has always been ending and it’s always been mostly crap, teenagers have always been stupidly dressed, disrespectful pains in the arse and there have always been boring old farts who felt threatened by the energy and ambition of the young.

On the other hand, I totally understand my anonymous Mesopotamian colleague’s exasperation at everybody thinking they can and should write a book. Knock that shit off, nobody wants to read your pathetic attempt at writing a novel.