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? :))