bike roulette wheel

so last week on one of my few excursions outdoors, I came upon this marvelous contraption being thrown away on 14th Street. I lugged it home because I am SURE it has something to do with the spindle of necessity that Atropos and Clotho and Lashesis help the Sirens with in the Myth of Er. it's quite beautifully made, spins very nicely. I'm thinking of adding cards perpendicularly that will make a flapping sound, like I had on my bike when I was about nine. I'm also thinking that instead of playing cards, there could be images of the sirens, and whatever card you land on will point to a particular text/music/whatever thing in our eranisteon.

what do you think? have the gods been kind or what!?!

I've been sick with bronchitis for a few weeks, and the advantage of that is that eventually I give up and sit on the couch and read. In Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings I came across mention of a mermaid saint and a google search uncovered this:

And then there's St. Murgen of Inver Ollarba, who garners a mention in the seventeenth-century Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland. Her legend is possibly the most bizarre in hagiography, surpassing even St. Christopher of the Dog's Head, St. James the Cut to Pieces or St. George of Cappadocia with his four separate martyrdoms. Murgen began life as a girl named Liban, whose background is lost in a muddle of folkloric confusion. She seems to have been either of mortal or of Daoine Sidhe parentage, and swept into the sea in the year 90 with her dog, who was transformed into an otter. At some point during her first year underwater, she was turned into a merrow or muirruhgach, the Gaelic word for siren or mermaid. She spent three hundred years with the tail of a salmon, swimming the Irish sea with her pet otter.

Around 390 (or possibly 558), a ship destined for Rome took her in from the seas, having heard her angelic singing. The cleric Beoc, a vicar of Bishop St. Comgall of Bangor, was on board, and she pleaded him to take her ashore at Inver Ollarba up the coast. On his return from Rome, after reporting to Pope Gregory of Comgall's deeds in office, he fulfilled his promise and Liban was taken ashore in a boat half-filled with water by another fellow, Beorn.

Instantly, a dispute started over who had authority over her with Beoc, Beorn and St. Comgall all pressing their case. It fell to Beoc after they placed her in a tank of water on a chariot and the chariot stopped in front of Beoc's parish church. There, she was given the choice of being baptized, after which she would die immediately and go to heaven, or living another three hundred years--the number she had spent as a mermaid--and then going on to paradise. She chose the first, was baptized by St. Comgall with the name of Murgen, or, "sea-born," and died in the odor of sanctity. Of course, this was all in the days before canonizations became the exclusive and infallible province of Rome. That being said, the Teo-da-Beoc, or, church of Beoc, was the site of many miracles wrought in her name, and paintings of this singular saint still remain there to this day.

I wish I knew what to make of all this weirdness: the Bollandists would have a hernia over it. But, se non e vero, e ben trovato, and, suffice to say, I'd like to think that St. Comgall didn't just baptize some wayward manatee.

Gotta love it, no?!?!

archive of (odyssean) exile

I'm beginning to 'get' it, I think - how our material constitutes an 'archive of exile'. The point is that the Odyssey has generated an enormous body of interpretation across time - from the Church Fathers (who see in Odysseus's journey a 'type' of the Christian life) to Lewis Hyde (for whom Odysseus is a manifestation of that disruptive consciousness that he also finds in North American and West African trickster narratives). This great corpus of response is an archive. And, actually, it has a material reality, although it isn't all gathered together in one place. What is more, it is an archive that responds to Odysseus' exile, and this is particularly interesting because it requires a certain effort of reading to make Odysseus into an exile at all. (He does, after all, arrive 'home' at the end of the poem: Clement reads that 'home' as outside this material reality and Hyde sees Odysseus' trickiness as intertwined with his mobility.)

In fact, maybe the archive doesn't constitute the body of responses to the Odyssey in the sense of the Homeric poem. Perhaps it is better to see the Odyssey itself as the first text in the archive - the first one that responds to the myth of Odysseus.

'gustatory, sexual, and scatalogical'

Just another trickster-fragment! When you were over here last month, we talked about the fact that the allure of the sirens is to do with what they *know* rather than any sexual attraction that they might have. Reading Hyde's book, I begin to think that the two kinds of attraction might usefully be seen as mapping on to each other or being entangled in some way. This passage struck me particuarly:

Earlier I suggested that if trickster were free of all appetite he would no longer be trickster. In a sense, this is a matter of definition; the mythology we're looking at is constantly gustatory, sexual, and scatalogical. It seems to require, then, that we connected trickster's inventive cunning to the body's needs.

I don't quite know how I see this working at the moment - it needs some more thought - but it seems interesting that Odysseus has to restrain his desires physically (by having himself bound to the mast) in order to be rewarded with the knowledge that comes from hearing the sirens' song.

Eumaeus and Emmaus

This is turning into a day of frenzied posting but it suddenly struck me that there is an interesting coincidence in the names Eumaeus (the swine-herd who looks after the disguised Odysseus when he first arrives back in Ithaca) and Emmaus (the village on the road to which Jesus appears after the crucifixion). In both cases, the story turns upon non-recognition and the debt of hospitality owed to a stranger.

This coincidence has been noted before and you can actually watch a conference presentation on the subject by Kasper Bro Larsen here. It's the second embedded video on the page. I haven't watched the whole of it yet but Larsen's concern seems to be to read the Emmaus story (which appears in Luke 24, 13-35) in relation to a longer tradition of recognition stories, an early example of which is the story of Eumaeus.

more on food and feasting

I'm becoming a little obsessed with the theme of food and feasting in the Odyssey. The point is that Odysseus lives in a world where there is a kind of ethical obligation to show hospitality to strangers and the poem consistently thematises the treatment of the stranger/guest, the xenos, at the hands of different hosts. Throughout the poem we find descriptions of feasts that are held under a range of different circumstances. What's more, the descriptions resemble each other quite closely with certain motifs reappearing in the different passages (rinsing the hands with water from a silver basin, for example). This is partly because oral epics make extensive use of stock material that can be repeated in different contexts but the repetition does have the effect of inviting readers to compare the different instances of feasting and meditate on the differences.

I think this is interesting because the danger of the sirens is that they will not treat you with hospitality. To land on their island is to attend a non-banquet where the food never arrives. And their lack of hospitality is not just a detail of their particular myth but is highly salient in a text where the feasting of strangers is a recurrent element of the narrative.

I think there are around seven or eight descriptions of feasting in the Odyssey and I'll briefly draw attention to some of them. (I'm going to miss out a couple of feasts that happen when Telemachus visits Menelaus in Sparta because I can't think of anything to say about them.)

Odyssey 1: The suitors who are using up Odysseus' wealth in his absence hold a feast in his house. I've already commented on this here. As I said in that earlier post, this is an interesting one for us because Athena, in disguise and commenting with assumed naivety on what is happening, explicitly says that this cannot be an ἔρανος but must be a γάμος or an εἰλαπίνη. There is an irony to this comment because she knows full well that there is no host at home to offer a γάμος or an εἰλαπίνη (except Telemachus, who is still acting as a boy at this stage).

Odyssey 7: Here, Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians, welcomes Odysseus who has been cast up on his shores after the ship wreck, and it is only when they have eaten that his wife, Arete, asks Odysseus anything about who he is. It is in this context that Odysseus describes what has happened to him since leaving Troy, so the narrative of the inhospitable sirens is, in fact, told there in the midst of Alcinous' hospitality. The Phaeacians are really the template of the ideal hosts - their treatment of Odysseus is exemplary. (Incidentally, Alcinous calls the meal he offers Odysseus a δόρπον (evening meal).)

Odyssey 10: Circe offers Odysseus food (and the image of the servant with the silver bowl appears here just as it did in the two earlier examples). But, since she has turned his men into swine by feeding them φάρμακα mixed with a strange concoction of cheese, barley, and honey, he doesn't have much appetite. There is something strange and complex about Circe's hospitality. She rivals Alcinous in her treatment of Odysseus but her treatment of his men is a kind of grotesque parody of the act of feasting the xenos. In the end, it is the fact that Odysseus won't accept her food that leads her to free his men, entertain them all, and provide advice about how to avoid the sirens. Circe actually uses the expression 'eating [your] heart' (θυμὸν ἔδων) to describe Odysseus' fretfulness and unwillingness to take her hospitality.

Odyssey 16: Now we're back in Ithaca and Odysseus has arrived home unrecognised. He stays with the swine-herd, Eumaeus, who does not know who he is. But Eumaeus understands the laws of hospitality and offers the stranger bread (σῖτος) and wine (οἶνος). And, when Odysseus thanks him, he says:

"ξεῖν᾽, οὔ μοι θέμις ἔστ᾽, οὐδ᾽ εἰ κακίων σέθεν ἔλθοι,
ξεῖνον ἀτιμῆσαι: πρὸς γὰρ Διός εἰσιν ἅπαντες
ξεῖνοί τε πτωχοί τε: δόσις δ᾽ ὀλίγη τε φίλη τε
γίγνεται ἡμετέρη [...]"

"It's wrong, my friend, to send any stranger packing -
even one who arrives in worse shape than you.
Every stranger and beggar comes from Zeus
and whatever scrap they get from the likes of us,
they'll find it welcome."

As in Phaeacia, the sharing of food leads on to the telling of stories, but here Odysseus makes up a tale so that he isn't forced to reveal his true identity too soon.

This is taking longer than I'd intended, so I'll break off and perhaps say something about the other scenes of feasting later. The main point is that the sirens' lack of hospitality is described in a text that is, in many ways, about the question of how strangers are to be treated and in which in the sharing of food is the sign of the hospitality one owes to them.

on food and eating

Since we met up earlier this month, I've been trying to avoid adding yet more siren-texts to the existing collection - in the manner so aptly satirised by Despina! - and focusing instead on the texts we have.

As I thought about them, it struck me that there is something interesting going on with food. If you give in to the lure of the sirens you end up dying of starvation, but, if you do as Odysseus did, and listen to them with restraint, then you can assemble an eranos, which is a meal to which many people contribute. Instead of becoming hypnotised by the monstrous singers who will not feed you, you can take nourishment from a wide array of voices.

I was in the Castle Market here in Sheffield over the weekend and the plenitude of old-fashioned food stalls - butchers, fishmongers, grocers, bakers, confectioners, and all - made me think of this idea of a world in which voices are food and the ideal life is one in which you pass through taking nourishment wherever you can find it.

more on the eranos

The term eranos appears in the first book of the Odyssey, when Athena appears to Odysseus' son, Telemachus, disguised as Mentes, an old friend (xenos) of the family. S/he asks him what is happening in Ithaca and, in particular, what all the suitors are doing there. And, in that context, s/he says: 'Is this an eilapinē or a gamos? It clearly isn't an eranos':

τίς δαίς, τίς δὲ ὅμιλος ὅδ᾽ ἔπλετο; τίπτε δέ σε χρεώ;
εἰλαπίνη ἠὲ γάμος; ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἔρανος τάδε γ᾽ ἐστίν:
ὥς τέ μοι ὑβρίζοντες ὑπερφιάλως δοκέουσι
δαίνυσθαι κατὰ δῶμα.

The point is that the other two types of feast are ones offered by a single host, whereas the eranos involves some kind of collectivity. Since the suitors are living at Odysseus' expense, they are not engaged in an eranos. Here are some notes on this provided by Perseus. (Click on them for the full size image.)

Sirens and Owls

In reading through Ovid again today, I noticed that right before we hear about the Sirens, we learn about Ascalaphus, a son of Acheron, the same river god who is also posited as the father of the Sirens. Ascalaphus is the tattle-tale who tells that Proserpina had eaten seven pomegranate seeds in the underworld. (Jupiter had said if she hadn't tasted the food of the Underworld, she could come home.) Proserpina punishes Ascalaphus by turning him into an owl:

foedaque fit volucris, venturi nuntia luctus,
550
ignavus bubo, dirum mortalibus omen.

I think it's a curious coincidence that this nasty owl appears right before the talk of the Sirens in Book V. Ovid doesn't tell us the Sirens are daughters of Acheron, we get that from the Argonautica (and elsewhere), but I'm wondering if the sibling relationship of sirens and owls we find in Ovid parallels the Septuagint writers' use of sirens as owl-like creatures?

Odysseus chooses a new soul

(in the Republic, Book X, in the Myth of Er, we see various people choosing their next lives, and here's what happens with Odysseus: how cool is this?!?!)

κατὰ τύχην δὲ τὴν Ὀδυσσέως λαχοῦσαν πασῶν ὑστάτην αἱρησομένην ἰέναι, μνήμῃ δὲ τῶν προτέρων πόνων φιλοτιμίας λελωφηκυῖαν ζητεῖν περιιοῦσαν χρόνον πολὺν βίον ἀνδρὸς ἰδιώτου ἀπράγμονος, καὶ μόγις εὑρεῖν κείμενόν που καὶ παρημελημένον [620δ] ὑπὸ τῶν ἄλλων, καὶ εἰπεῖν ἰδοῦσαν ὅτι τὰ αὐτὰ ἂν ἔπραξεν καὶ πρώτη λαχοῦσα, καὶ ἁσμένην ἑλέσθαι.


And it fell out that the soul of Odysseus drew the last lot of all and came to make its choice, and, from memory of its former toils having flung away ambition, went about for a long time in quest of the life of an ordinary citizen who minded his own business, and with difficulty found it lying in some corner disregarded by the others, [620d] and upon seeing it said that it would have done the same had it drawn the first lot, and chose it gladly.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0167%3Abook%3D10%3Asection%3D620c

siren references

A classified list of references to the Sirens:

http://www.theoi.com/Pontios/Seirenes.html

pagan places

I've been thinking about the christianization of pagan places and feeling a bit frustrated by my lack of knowledge. There are some examples (like Knowlton and Rudston) where a church has been built in a place that obviously had some kind of significance already. But there are also places that are *thought* of in this way but where the history is difficult to prove and, indeed, disputed. For example, there are quite a lot of 'holy wells' in Britain which are dedicated to one or other saint. There's a commonly held belief that these were 'stolen' by early Christians and were originally pagan sites. But some historians have suggested that this is a myth propagated by different people for different purposes. This includes the neo-pagan movement, so - in an odd way - it may actually be that it is paganism that is appropriating Christian sites rather than the other way round. I gather that the historian, Ronald Hutton, has written about this kind of thing, so I'll see if I can get hold of his book on the pagan religions of Britain.

Persephone

I found the post you did yesterday very useful. I have to admit that I hadn't really remembered (or perhaps ever understood) Persephone's role in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. I had just been thinking of Persephone and Eurydice as equivalent figures - exiles in the underworld but within different myths. However, it's interesting that it was Persephone that Orpheus needed to persuade when he came down to rescue Eurydice: one exile adjudicating on the fate of another.

Persephone and Orpheus

Reading through your posts on Orpheus this morning, I'm getting all mushed up in Greek stories, so I'm writing this here to try to get a bit of a handle on it...

The Sirens' songs can be thought of as a call to Persephone.

Here is the relevant text from Ovid (Metamorphoses Book V):

Whence have you, daughters of Acheloüs, feathers and the feet of birds, since you have the faces of maidens? Is it because, when Proserpine was gathering the flowers of spring, you were mingled in the number of her companions? After you had sought her in vain throughout the whole world, immediately, that the waters might be sensible of your concern, you wished to be able, on the support of your wings, to hover over the waves, and you found the Gods propitious, and saw your limbs grow yellow with feathers suddenly formed. But lest the sweetness of your voice, formed for charming the ear, and so great endowments of speech, should lose the gift of a tongue, your virgin countenance and your human voice still remained.

(from http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/21765)

Orpheus' songs defeated the power of the Sirens' songs when the Argonaut passed by.

Here's the section of the Argonautica that describes the encounter with the Sirens:

(Argonautica ll. 885-921) Now when dawn the light-​bringer was touching the edge of heaven, then at the coming of the swift west wind they went to their thwarts from the land; and gladly did they draw up the anchors from the deep and made the tackling ready in due order; and above spread the sail, stretching it taut with the sheets from the yard-​arm. And a fresh breeze wafted the ship on. And soon they saw a fair island, Anthemoessa, where the clear-​voiced Sirens, daughters of Achelous, used to beguile with their sweet songs whoever cast anchor there, and then destroy him. Them lovely Terpsichore, one of the Muses, bare, united with Achelous; and once they tended Demeter's noble daughter still unwed, and sang to her in chorus; and at that time they were fashioned in part like birds and in part like maidens to behold. And ever on the watch from their place of prospect with its fair haven, often from many had they taken away their sweet return, consuming them with wasting desire; and suddenly to the heroes, too, they sent forth from their lips a lily-​like voice. And they were already about to cast from the ship the hawsers to the shore, had not Thracian Orpheus, son of Oeagrus, stringing in his hands his Bistonian lyre, rung forth the hasty snatch of a rippling melody so that their ears might be filled with the sound of his twanging; and the lyre overcame the maidens' voice. And the west wind and the sounding wave rushing astern bore the ship on; and the Sirens kept uttering their ceaseless song. But even so the goodly son of Teleon alone of the comrades leapt before them all from the polished bench into the sea, even Butes, his soul melted by the clear ringing voice of the Sirens; and he swam through the dark surge to mount the beach, poor wretch. Quickly would they have robbed him of his return then and there, but the goddess that rules Eryx, Cypris, in pity snatched him away, while yet in the eddies, and graciously meeting him saved him to dwell on the Lilybean height. And the heroes, seized by anguish, left the Sirens, but other perils still worse, destructive to ships, awaited them in the meeting-​place of the seas.

(from http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/830)

And Orpheus' song convinced Persephone to allow Orpheus to take Euridice out of the underworld. It wasn't a failure of song, but a failure of trust that caused Orpheus to fail to bring Euridice back to life.

Clement on Orpheus

I've been looking at Elizabeth Henry's book, Orpheus with his Lute: Poetry and the Renewal of Life. She covers a wide range material relating to Orpheus but I was interested to read her discussion of Clement of Alexandria:

The bringer of [...] spiritual liberation and health must, in the early Christian age, have appeared to possess either divine grace or magical powers. The perplexity of a devout Christian is seen in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, on other Greek myths and cultic heroes as well as the Orpheus story. In his Stromata (Miscellanies) of about 200 AD Clement speaks of 'Orpheus the theologian' as one who (like Plato) 'prepared the way' for the Gospel. Such Greek teachers were at this time declared by Clement to be prophets in direct line of descent from Moses. The status of Orpheus is not the equivalence with Christ which we find many centuries later in the Morte Christi celebrata, but that of 'prefiguration', as a divinely sent forerunner who was to show the nature of the Christ to come. This position was not easily maintained, as Clement's (apparently) later Protrepticon (Exhortation to the Greeks) makes clear. This work was a reply to the attack on Christianity by the Platonist Celsus, also of Alexandria, in which he declared Orpheus more worthy of worship than Jesus Christ. The vehemence of Clement's reply is itself a witness to the continuing potency of the Orphean figura:

"A Thracian, cunning master of his art (he also is the subject of a Hellenic legend) tamed the wild beasts by the mere might of song, and transplanted trees - oaks - by music ... How, let me ask, have you believed vain fables, and supposed animals to be charmed by music, while Truth's shining face alone is looked on with credulous eyes? ... To me that Thracian Orpheus seems to have been a deceiver ... enticing men to idols ... But not such is the song of Christ, which has come to loose the bitter bond of tyrannising demons. It alone has tamed men, the most intractable of animals; the frivolous among them answer to the fowls of the air, deceivers to reptiles, the irascible to lions, the voluptuous to swine, the rapacious to wolves. The silly are stocks and stones ... Behold the might of the new song! It has made men out of stones, men out of beasts. Those that were as dead, not being partakers of the new life, have come to the true life, simply by becoming listeners to this song."

I'm interested in this image of the 'song of Christ', especially the moment where Clement says 'Behold the might of the new song!'

fraudulent voices

Even the fraudulent image of the crucified Orpheus can be thought of as an utterance - a sort of iconographic and textual lie. And, because a particular collector believed the lie, the seal ended up in the archive - more specifically, the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, where it was studied by Otto Kern and transcribed in his collected edition of orphic fragments published in 1922. In fact, I'm really *very* interested in this. It foregrounds the materiality of voices - the fact that they exist in records which may be real or may be forgeries, which may survive or be destroyed, that may be transcribed and translated more or less accurately. And all of these processes are, of course, functions of the practice of archiving voices.

orpheus and odysseus

This is just a quick note to gather together some of my thoughts on this pair of Siren-heroes: Odysseus and Orpheus. What strikes me is that they fulfil different symbolic functions for Early Christian commentators. Odysseus is the *human* figure, in exile in the world, avoiding attachments that would enmesh him too closely in the texture of earthly life. Orpheus is the *Christ*, entering the underworld to bring back his bride, herself a symbolic representation of humankind, exiled in a dark place and in need of redemption. But if the patterns of identification here are different - Odysseus and humankind, Orpheus and Christ - they are not simple, because the figure of Odysseus at the mast evokes the figure of Christ on the Cross, and Orpheus, in fact, failed to bring Eurydice out of the underworld, thus manifesting as a human shadow of Christ, the divine.

I suppose this complexity shouldn't be surprising because, in Christianity, Christ is both human and God, both the same as and different from us. What is more, the interaction of Christian and pre-Christian material draws out a kind of exilic dimension in both bodies of narrative. And, as I've said before, there are voices everywhere - the voices of the Sirens, the songs of Orpheus, bodies of narrative moving back and forth across languages and interpretive traditions, narratological layers in both the classical and the Christian texts, a layering of voices that might perhaps be thought of as an archive.

forgery

I've found a website that discusses the image of Orpheus crucified. It refers to an article which was published in Aγγελος as early as 1926 and which asserts that the seal is fake. This judgement was made on the basis of the iconography. Interestingly, one of the key points is that the 'sagging' figure (with bent arms and legs) is characteristically medieval and not attested in late antique images of the crucifixion. The page is here:

http://www.bede.org.uk/orpheus.htm

Christ/Orpheus

I wanted to find an image of the 'iron cylinder' with the representation of Christ as Orpheus Bacchicus. (It's mentioned in the quotation from Rahmer I posted here.) I found an online copy of a book called Orpheus - the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism by Robert Eisler, published in London in 1921, and it includes an image answering to the description Rahmer gives. Eisler says that the object in question is a 'seal cylinder' and that it is made of hematite, that is iron oxide. This is the engraving that appears in Orpheus - The Fisher:






While this is quite an intriguing object, I've come across suggestions on the web that it is a fake and, at the moment, have no way of knowing whether that's true or not. So... not necessarily authentic but kind of interesting even if it isn't. What would like behind the faking of an artifact like this?

serpent on a pole

OK, I may be showing my ignorance here but I wasn't entirely clear about the reference to the 'brazen serpent on a pole' in the hymn I've just quoted. For the record, it's a reference to the story in Numbers 21, 8-9, where God tells Moses how to protect the people from serpents:

And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.
And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.

There is a reference to this passage in John 3, 13-14, where the serpent on the pole is identified with Christ on the cross. It is the sequence where Jesus speaks with Nicodemus, the Pharisee:

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up:
That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

So the hymn that I quoted alludes to two exilic experiences, one Jewish - the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness - and one Greek - Eurydice's exile in the underworld. This makes me think of Levinas and Derrida, but let's not go there this morning :o)