The Myth and Mystery of Baubo. Reblog

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Baubo is one of the most mysterious characters of the ancient middle east. Her story has been found in Sumerian, Egyptian and Archaic Greek. There are also indications of a similar tale from Japan.

Her story is best shown in with the story of Greek Demeter, goddess of fecundity and nature. Demeter was distraught at the loss of her daughter Persephone. She had been abducted by the god of the Underworld, Hades. Demeter withdrew from the world. Nature died, rivers dried up, nothing would grow. She had withdrawn into herself in distress. To draw her out ‘priestesses’ arranged a party, event, that was raucous and colourful. There was much music, dancing… but nothing could seem to reach her. Then Baubo, an older serving woman, approached. Along with ribald jokes and stories she ended up with baring the lower half of her body to Demeter. Demeter laughed, and with that returned to the world. She kept Baubo with her, as a true restorer of balance and perspective.

What was going on?

There are statues of Baubo, pottery paintings, of this displaying the pubic region. Some statues show a face instead of the stomach. Here we have perhaps a clue.

Demeter’s distress was in losing her daughter, but this also, like an equation, implied the seizure and abduction by Hades. All Baubo stories centre around women withdrawn from men due to some aggressive male act.

The ribald jokes, a crucial part of the Baubo mysteries, were most probably aimed at the stupidity of  male myths of sexual prowess, at their arrogance and supposed superiority. Those were hugely male centred cultures. Women’s roles were relegated and tightly circumscribed.

This has other implications – in those cultures the display of a naked female figure, especially of an older woman, wife, grandmother was considered hugely shameful. There are big suggestions here of ideas of male ‘ownership’, ‘property’ etc of property not to be shared with others. We see here issues of status and identity within cultures, of lack of status, or status that was lesser, or different.

That the women’s rites would play on the male world’s deepest fears of female power and openness, would only seem natural.

I suggest that when the older servant woman Baubo bared herself to Demeter, the folds of her post-partum, post-menopause belly she manipulated to suggest a grotesque face; a face with a bushy pubic beard.

A hugely potent and complex image: how better to mock the pretensions of men then with this gesture: Here is what they lust for; see how ridiculous they are!

The women shared the knowledge of menstrual and physiological processes, they bore the burden that was more cumbersome and physiologically vulnerable, than sexually attractive.

And the narrative of men as mother’s babies, that here is where the ‘great lords of the world’ started off, as puling helpless and fecal beings.

Demeter’s distress was offset by the huge potency of this caricature; she was shocked out her grief, a shock that was primed, prepared for, by the direction of ribald jokes and humour. After this the order and balance was restored to the world.

The mystery of Baubo was at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The ‘face’ became connected with the Gorgon mask, due to the dynamic of the exposure that it contained. It was a face not be looked upon, for fear of great reprisal.

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It is suggested that a memory of the Baubo figure is to be found in the image of the Sheela-na-Gig. Those enigmatic and mostly crudely constructed images of a leering female figure opening an enormous vulva to the spectator (‘male gaze’) are probably half-remembered, barely understood Baubo images. They are for righting imbalances in the world. Now mostly found on churches in Britain and Ireland, they seem relegated by Church Fathers to suggest to celibate monks the Babylonian whorishness of female temptation, and all other such temptations of the flesh.

Celibacy. What can be more unnatural, imbalanced?

And yet for some it remains a preferred state, as it always has done. We do well to cherish the preferred celibates as our ‘peculiars’, that is, ones who can live as we can not. They can have important input; they can restore a sense of proportion to a world out of kilter.

We saw in Aristophanes’ ‘Lysistrata’ the withdrawal of women from men, and the men’s subsequent hopelessness and inadequacy. Brief enforced celibacy to aright the world.

The women withdraw from the men, and the men learned to behave. Do the men learn anything deeper than the need to behave better, treat their women better?

Their women were ‘protected’ by ethical and moral strictures: the naked, exposed female was a deeply unsettling image, dangerous, and hugely ‘shameful’. Was it ‘shame’? Or was there a form of taboo there that we have no name for? Is the narrative saying that it is better to honour women’s role by protecting their physical status? That also implies that the status quo can only be maintained by being flexible.

There are so many myths of Greek male gods seducing mortal women. The implication is of fantasy outlets for strictly circumscribed behavioral practices.

The book cites the Greek use of the word for ‘ashamed’, Aideomai. It can also mean to stand in awe of, or of reverence of, ‘…and was an adjective frequently used for women that meant deserving of respect’ (page 105). As a neutral noun it was used mainly of the genitals, especially the pudenda.

Lubell’s book gives an example of the classical Greek portrayal of male genitals: heroes and Gods always have small, boyish genitals. It is the stock comic figures who have outsize ones. Genitals, we see here, are ridiculous; the hero/God would be disfigured by proper size. Sex was down-played – except for the few occasions when satyrs frolicked, herms were decked erect (another Japanese parallel?), and bacchantes, maenads and bassarids ran wild.

As I write this I can see the cover of a copy of ‘The Odyssey’. It shows a carved relief of Odysseus; he is shown as a middle-aged to older man with a young man’s thinly clothed body. This is a common image of Greek male portraiture: the vanity of the aged male. Gods can never age, but wisdom must be portrayed somehow! As for heroes – their strength and heroic attributes are always shown this way. Codes and short-hand.

Lubell’s book cites a fairly recent event in the Philippines. Dam building was on the cards for a region of a tribal area. The tribal people objected, but were over-ruled in law; and the project went ahead. On the day the workmen arrived in the territory, the tribal women alone confronted them. The stripped off their clothes; the workmen were ashamed to look upon the naked women. The women attacked and seized the men, stripped them naked and threw their clothes away. The men hid in the forest ashamed of their own nakedness, until night fall then made their way home. They dare not go there again.

This huge burden of shame on seeing the naked female body does seem to have nearly universal. Rainforest and aboriginal cultures are the few without it. It is also suggested Inuit cultures were more relaxed here also.

It is this weight of shame that was put in place to protect women, though. We can still detect this taboo in our own societies: the use of the pornographic image gains its power from taboo-breaking. The Femen campaign of baring their bodies gains its power from taboo-breaking. Naturisms’ biggest  wrench is for women participants. To break a taboo was like smashing an atom, the release of energy stored in the image protected, was immense.

From hajib-wearing, to always fully clothed in many layers, despite the heat, shows up how cultures have sought to the protect woman from the male’s lack of self control. The reasons become lost, forgotten over time, and new justifications are proffered, sometimes wholly wayward and ridiculous. All depict the attitudes of their times, attitudes to male-female relations, that is.

Male lack of self control.

Enforced celibacy is an authoritarian nightmare of physical restraint; celibacy must be chosen by the participant. Our culture belittles the maiden aunt, the spinster, finds repellent the never-married elderly man. All are treated with condescension. Where the chaste, celibate life has been chosen, the choice and unique experience of the person needs to be valued.

And taboo-breaking must be controlled, contained, or it loses its energy. We are here all the time circling that other potent Greek image, that of Catharsis.

One major point all taboo-breakers miss, and it is an essential point, is that of laughter, humour.

Review: ‘CRIMSONING THE EAGLE’S CLAW’, by Ian Crockatt.

Author Ian Crockatt has just published these translations of Norse Skaldic verse. Published by Ark Publications.

CRIMSONING THE EAGLE’S CLAW is a new translation of the Norse poems of Rognvaldr Kali Kolsson, Earl of Orkney.
Rognvaldr Kali was nephew of Earl Magnus of Orkney. Both were Norwegian by birth, and inherited the titles of Earl and the lands of Orkney, incorporating Shetland, and parts of Sutherland. Both also became saints. Rognvaldr Kali established St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, where both he and Magnus were interred.

Rognvaldr Kali’s exploits were recorded in the Orkneyinga Saga.

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Rognvaldr Kali has been translated before; we have versions in ‘THE TRIUMPH TREE, Scotland’s Earliest Poetry, 550-1350′. The collection is edited by Thomas Owen Clancy, and published by Canongate Classics, 1998.
There is also another version of translations, available online at the Skaldic Project: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/skaldic/

What is special about Ian Crockatt’s book, a lovely production by Arc complete with illustrations by the author’s accomplished partner Wenna Crockatt, is that these translations have been made using the actual Skaldic metres and verse forms.

Ian Crockatt has divided Rognvaldr Kali’s oeuvre into nine sections: Early Poems; Incidents in the Earl’s Daily Life; Shetland Shipwreck; The Lady Ermingerd; Seafaring and Piracy; Jerusalem; Sailing to Byzantium; Illness, Loss; In Praise of Rognvaldr (this last is a collection of poems by other skalds in praise of Rognvaldr Kali).

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The verse form is, the Introduction notes, ‘defined entirely by sound pattern and rhythm‘. It has not been possible to use the exact rhyme forms, or reproduce the actual authentic sound of the originals (although for cognoscenti originals in old Norse are printed here per poem) so compromises have been sought. Crockatt has been scrupulous in this; he has not deviated from the original forms of metre, rhyming scheme or line length.

To give an example of the strict measures he reproduces Crockatt gives us this example:

Muck, slime, mud. We waded
for five mired weeks, reeking,
silt-fouled bilge-boards souring
in Grimsby bay. Nimbly
now, our proud-prowed, Bergen-
bound Sea-Elk pounds over
wave-paved auk-moors, locks horns
with foam-crests, bows booming.

(reproduced with permission of author)

He keeps this level of patterning and beat throughout each of the forty-one poems he has translated here. This is surely a tremendously skillful feat!

The poems are written as couplets, stitched together as a unit and as a quatrain, with sound, metre and image. It can be seen that the eight line poems break into two, not always exact, halves. In the above example we have predicament/description, followed by resolution. In general the poems act as subject address/ rumination/ open statement, and personal response.

One distinctive element of the poems is the use of the lacuna/intercalation; most poems incorporate an aside, comment, apostrophising of the subject of the verse, that is interpolated mid sentence.

There are one or two problems in such concentrated forms: no poem is longer than eight six-syllable lines, the poem construction follows strict rules of rhyme, alliteration, half-rhyme, internal rhyme and trochaic ending per line.
Such concision depends upon kennings to communicate fully. Ian Crockatt lists the one’s used at the end of the book eg foam-stallions for ships etc.

The book title Crimsoning the Eagle’s Claw is taken from a kenning used by Rognvaldr Kali. To crimson the claws comes from providing corpses for the eagle’s to feed on, that is, the killing of enemies.
Can we ask Why eagles, and not crows, or ravens even? Is it eagles because the enemies slain were another king’s favourite warriors? Or were eagles more plentiful on the battlefield than the crow family? Might it be a reflection back on the prowess and status of the victor himself, that whomever he kills is made up to better status by his act?
I suspect it is the latter: the poems are in essence boasting poems.

Also, if we take into consideration that poetry was considered Odin’s mead, and that Odin appeared at times in the guise of an eagle… then we have the eagle providing the inspiration, and the skald providing the corpses for the eagle: the poems as the remnants of that inspiration. These poems by Rognvaldr Kali are those corpses.

This gives an example of how complex a keening can be. What we read into, behind, beside, each poem is a wealth of back-story. If we read the Ermingerde poems in this way, do we begin to glimpse the woman herself, the woman in relation of the northern warrior, an Earl maybe, yet one from a different climate/world ?

On one occasion this concision and kenning does trouble the translation. How are we to read the poem His first encounter with the monks on Westray (page 32)?

The Skaldic Project gives us:

I have seen sixteen [women] all at once, denuded of {the old age {of the ground of {the serpent-field}}} [GOLD > WOMAN > BEARD], and [they had] a fringe on their forehead, walking together. We bore witness to the fact that, here in the west, most maidens are bald; that island lies out in the direction of storms.

The Triumph Tree:

I’ve seen sixteen women¹
at once with forelock on forehead¹,stripped of the old age² of the land³
of the serpent-field⁴, walk together.
We bear witness
that most girls here —
this isle lies against the storms
out west — are bald⁵.

¹ Religious clothing, and Celtic tonsure
² clean shaven
³ women
⁴ gold on which dragon’s lie
⁵ tonsured

Tonally it all hinges on the last few lines: Ian Crockatt has:

…… We skaldsmen
guffaw — gales of laughter
goad them west — Shaven! Blessed!

The versions shift between bewildered acceptance, outright scorn, and mockery that borders on acceptance.

It is hard for us now to imagine a world where for each man to go out killing on such a scale, of barely met others, was accepted and expected. What must this have done to their sensibilities?The scale of social grief and grieving must have been deafening to any with ears to hear it.
Here we begin to detect the challenge to sensibilities in the meeting with the monks. Of the need for the monks, also, to begin to approach a sense of solace, perhaps.

In France – Ermingerde’s home – it was the time of amour courtois, of the Troubadours and Trouveres already well established when Rangnvaldr Kali came on the scene. It is also the period of a flowering of Arabic and Jewish poetry, philosophy and music.

I think the music of Ragnvaldr Kali’s poetry can now, thanks to Ian Crockatt, take its place amongst them.

Cornelia Parker, Sculptor

I started to take notice of Cornelia Parker’s work with her exploding shed of the 1990s: COLD DARK MATTER: AN EXPLODED VIEW, 1991.

This was a simple wooden garden shed, exploded from the inside.
The explosion was carefully documented by film and camera; then the pieces collected (she used an Army demolition crew – they knew how to collect meticulously) and then arranged.
The sheer skill that went into all of this – in particular the arrangements – was outstanding. The shattered pieces were hung/suspended at various heights and distances. This was like a captured explosion, without the obscuring of smoke and detonation.

Each piece/fragment had to be relocated to its original position as near as identifiably possible, and its arranged position proportionally placed.

The end result was one of contained violence, suspended force: arrested destruction.

The work was then lit from the inside with a single source of light.
We had the suspension of materials, and we also had the shadow effect – an extra dimension of chiaroscuro that shifted the cognitive possibilities of the piece beyond metaphorical implication, beyond but including connotative implications.

Thinking entropically that arrested position is ours: in the cosmic entropy of our entire universe, we exist, our lives are lived, in what appears to us as a stable system; and yet how we see it is as a fractional moment in the movement of its great unwinding. We have the sun or big bang centre of the universe, and around it our solar system, and/or the current state of expansion, caught.

We also have here the fragility of our world, the penchant for destructiveness of its inhabitants, and a pointed reference to destructiveness of closed mind-sets.

Our experience of the work constantly shifts between interpretive models, visually arresting phenomena, awe, and appreciation of the technical accomplishment – this last engaging our mechanical and spatial aesthetic modes.

This exhibit not only depicts basic and stereotyped gender attitudes: destructive and creative attitudes, but goes beyond that to posit an energising creative-through-destructive approach to knowledge and experience.

OK, hyperbole over-load!

‘The Army was deeply unpopular at the time, she says, ‘and I was aware that this would feed into the perennial debate about whom you could or couldn’t accept as a sponsor for your art.’ Even more provocatively, she comments, ‘I needed to elicit the expertise of an explosives engineer. Perhaps I could use special-effects people, or a demolition crew, The IRA….’
As it was she used the Army School of Ammunition. And Semtex. What we have then, is a cross between the IRA, and the British Army.

‘The two parts of the title together sound like,’ she comments, ‘a forensic examination of an emotional state or a murder, an attempt to measure something you can’t measure…’ (all quotes from CORNELIA PARKER,  by Iwona Blazwick, Thames and Hudson, 2013).

Some ten years later she produced another exhibit – a re-visiting almost of an aspect of the exploding shed, in THE EXPLOSION DRAWINGS, 2001.
The exhibit consists of three glass sheets; and splattered centrally on one is a solution – charcoal on one; on another sulphur; and the last saltpetre. All are combined with fixing agent. How is your chemistry? Combined they constitute gunpowder.
They are held separate – three solutions held as three ingredients in one solution, as we see them superimposed on each other. And yet it is an arrested solute. It is a potential explosion.

The ‘exploded’ theme has also been revisited – for instance in HEART OF DARKNESS, 2004; and ANTI-MASS, 2005.
This last consists of ‘Suspended charcoal retrieved from a Kentucky church burnt by arsonists’ (ibid). Here I ask you to note the word play on Mass. She writes, ‘The aging black congregation had suffered years of intimidation…’ at the hands of a gang of bikers, ‘who made a sport out of racial harassment.’ What we see and what we interpret are disturbing: the social and racial evil is depicted as an anti-Mass. In physics terms anti-mass, like anti-matter, is a negation of our positive state, destructive to it. And yet a part of its nature.

The former, HEART OF DATRKNESS, we are informed ‘uses the charred remains of a forest fire in Florida.’ It was a controlled burn whipped up by sudden winds. This particular fire caused a huge blaze which became known as ‘The Impassable One’. ‘At the time it seemed … an appropriate metaphor for the butterfly effect of political tinkering, from Florida’s hanging chads…’ the anomaly that meant George W Bush became elected President… ‘and the ongoing war in Iraq, to the cutting down of the rainforests to grow bio-fuels…’ (ibid).

What we see in all these examples are challenge, controversy, and great skill and craftsmanship.

Cornelia Parker’s parentage intrudes on occasion – describing her video animation from 2010, DOUBTFUL SOUND, she says, ‘… Like a waking nightmare, this is the unheimlich – the ‘unhomely’ or uncanny space.’ German mother and English father, Cheshire farm background. This dislocation from the English heartland, from central location in full English culture and tradition, have perhaps helped develop a unique slant on culture in general. Hence we have SUBCONSCIOUS OF A MONUMENT, 2001-5, which uses ‘Earth excavated from underneath the Leaning Tower of Pisa…’. There are many such instances.

What is pertinent here is that each piece is not the Duchampian thing-of-itself, but derives its meaning, impact, resonance from its context, its wider perspective. The works are apart from and yet still remain part of the world. We see the uniqueness of for example the chalk dust micro-photograph of Einstein’s working on his blackboard, the rubbed-off tarnish from James Bowie’s Soup Spoon, but these objects are also invoked as part only of the matrix of their relevance in time, meaning, and space.

To eat…

            T
       o
 e
a
is to   kill.        t     Is to begin. 
And then it all unravels, evolving.
How many Edens have grown over 
worlds previously destroyed ? And are, 
therefore, their ruined soils, seas, skies, 
what make now our normality ? Is it, 
this apple, chock-full of the old 
stuff: adulterated genes; 
super-bugs? Is this that 
 knowledge?

Medici Money, by Tim Parks. Reblog

In 2005 English writer Tim Parks, long resident in Italy, published MEDICI MONEY (Profile Books, 2005).

This book offers another take on Renaissance Italy, Florence, the Medicis, and the complexities of the period. It was also very prescient as major Western banks go bust, (and still wobble) much as the Medici, and before them the Bardi and Peruzzi banks had gone bust.

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The Medicis’ added little if anything to the practice of banking. All innovations had already occurred by their time: double-entry book-keeping, bill of exchange (cheque), letter of credit, deposit account. In the Medici long-game of power-acquisition, marriage was arranged between Cosimo and the available daughter of the long-established Bardi banking family. Nothing, it would seem, was beyond them in the build-up and establishment of the family name, wealth and prestige.

But banking was always a risk business; the bank cannot predict how their customers will behave in uncertain situations. Means can be developed to ensure that customers/clients are only of repute, and liquidity. But neither kings nor cardinals were beyond unscrupulous, unwise acts and projects.

Tim Parks traces the English contribution to the cause of an earlier bank collapse. He writes: The Bardi and Peruzzi banks (… ) both collapsed in the 1340s, when Edward III of England reneged on huge debts.

In the 1470s we find the Medici bank in the same straits, through a similar source, this time King Edward IV of England. At this point in time it seems the London branch of the Medici bank was already owing huge amounts to the Rome branch. Agnolo Tani, ex-banker was brought in to clear up the mess. As he made his way from the London branch to Rome, the War of the Roses broke out in its second phase. Of course, Edward was financed by the Medici banks, and when he lost the throne, the chances of repayment also fell. He re-grouped, fought back and regained the throne.

There was also the little matter of who financed his opponents – the Medici bank, of course. They were, after all, nobles, titled men from established families.

A no-win situation, because whoever won power was at the expense of their opponents; the bank lost either way. To regroup and regain Edward needed money – once more he borrowed heavily from the bank.

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The English main produce was finished wool cloth. There was a hair-raising interlude when Florence branch general director Francesco Sassetti refused to advance monies for cloth, until, he asserted, the cloth had been sold. Merchants and bankers could not be relied on to be in synch; the whole history of banking relates the discordant harmonies of these two.

Previous to finished wool cloth the main English export had been bulk wool. The key to wool use is in the treating. This is a science in itself – how to get the course, wiry, lanolin-rich wool into usable state. The Scots Gaelic Waulking Songs all came out of this home industry. They used the livers of dogfish.

Working in bulk, though – the importers had to discover the best and easiest means of treatment. It was found to be alum.

As much as there was a fortune to be made from wool, the ownership of the source of alum became a key factor. And this is what we find in the book. At a later stage in the Medici bank history we see Lorenzo currying favour with a Cardinal by granting him an alum mine.

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One of the main sticking points in early banking was how to make a profit on what was entrusted to them.

Clearly, charging interest was out – Jesus expelling the money-lenders from the temple ruined that one. St Luke wrote: Give, without hope for gain. The Lateran Church Council of 1179 denied Christian burial to usurers; the General Church Council of Lyon, 1274, confirmed the ruling.

The way round this was intriguing. And Cardinals, even a Pope, benefitted from it. It was to use the exchange rates of different  States, countries. This meant that quantities of money in various forms, that is, acceptable to the source banks, had to be conveyed around Europe, from banking centre to banking centre. Each destination was chosen for its productive rate of exchange. This proved a workable system.

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Another interesting insight to come out of this is how unsteady the economy proves to be.
In diaries from the last thirty to forty years I notice approximately ten-yearly cycles of recession. How easily we forget once employment is the norm once again.

Consider:

Most people imagine that if they borrow from a bank, they are borrowing other people’s money.  In fact, when banks and building societies make any loan, they create new money.  Money loaned by a bank is not a loan of pre-existent money; money loaned by a bank is additional money created.” Michael Rowbotham, Grip of Death (1998)

“Where did the money come from? It came – and this is the most important single thing to know about modern banking – it came out of thin air.  Commercial banks – that is, fractional reserve banks – create money out of thin air.” Murray Rothbard, The Mystery of Banking (2008)

“… by far the largest role in creating money is played by the banking sector… When banks make loans they create additional deposits for those that have borrowed the money.” Paul Tucker

And the payoff to this, to use a phrase that shows how of deeply ingrained financial methods have become to us, consider the following:

With respect that the above implications have with respect to our national debt, it should now be obvious that any attempt to pay off our national debt will ultimately be deleterious, as paying of debt is tantamount to extinguishing it from circulation which will  collapse the supply of money available.  This is how depressions arise due to there being a shrinkage of the money supply due to banks failing to lend.

So, I wondered, if money is created, how come we are not swimming in it by now?
The Bank of England site tells us:
This also means as you pay off the loan, the electronic money your bank created is ‘deleted’ – it no longer exists. You haven’t got richer or poorer. You might have less money in your bank account but your debts have gone down too. So essentially, banks create money, not wealth.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-is-money-created

Money is: 3% notes and coins, 18% reserves, and 79% bank deposits.

Do we now have to consider a life flipped where red is black, in accounting terms?
Have we perhaps been living there for longer than we imagine, going off the above quotes?