The World of All Souls Page 48
“But I can tell you what to do
to come unchanged from Kirkê’s power
and disenthrall your fighting crew:
take with you to her bower
as amulet, this plant I know—
it will defeat her horrid show . . .
when she turns cruel, coming near
with her long stick to whip you out of doors,
then let your cutting blade appear,
Let instant death upon it shine,
and she will cower and yield her bed—
a pleasure you must not decline,
so may her lust and fear bestead
you and your friends, and break her spell;
but make her swear by heaven and hell
no witches’ tricks, or else, your harness shed,
you’ll be unmanned by her as well.”*
Myth: Odysseus and Circe
Origin: Greek mythology/legend
Background: Odysseus was a legendary Greek hero whose adventures are recounted both in Homer’s Iliad, which takes place during the Trojan War, and in its sequel, the Odyssey, which tells the story of Odysseus’ ten-year journey home afterward. Odysseus was Achilles’ opposite—wily, restrained, and cerebral as well as strong. Odysseus was responsible for the ruse of the Trojan horse, which enabled the Greeks to win the war. The Greeks admired such traits, but the Romans (who called him Ulysses) were not impressed. Odysseus’ tricks offended the Roman sense of honor, and in any case they preferred the Trojan side of the story, because they held themselves to be descendants of the Trojan hero Aeneas.
Circe was known sometimes as a goddess of magic, sometimes as a witch or a sorceress. According to some sources, her mother was Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft. Circe was known for her knowledge of herbs and potions, and she had the ability to turn her enemies into animals. Odysseus and his men visited her island of Aeaea during their voyage to Odysseus’ home, where she transformed some of the men into swine after a feast of wine and cheese (this still happens occasionally). Odysseus did not attend the feast and so did not fall prey to this trick. Before Odysseus confronted Circe, the god Hermes provided him with an antidote to her witchcraft. Hermes also warned that when Circe invited Odysseus to bed, he must make her swear on the names of all the gods not to take his manhood. With this assurance Odysseus remained with Circe for a full year before his men could convince him to move on—while his wife, Penelope, sat at home and weaved.
The story of Odysseus and Circe was another one of the Emperor Rudolf’s suggestions for a spring masque starring himself and Diana Bishop—the idea of begging Diana not to take his manhood held a perverse appeal. She quickly suggested the story of Diana and Endymion, with Rudolf playing the role of Zeus.
See also: Endymion, Achilles
“She saw Valkyries
come from far and wide,
ready to ride
to Goðþjóð.
Skuld held a shield,
and Skögul was another,
Gunnr, Hildr, Göndul
and Geirskögul.”*
Myth: Göndul, Odin’s daughter
Origin: Norse mythology
Background: In Norse mythology Göndul is a Valkyrie, sometimes also referred to as a daughter of the great god Odin. She is mentioned in the Heimskringla, a collection of sagas about the Norse kings written by Snorri Sturluson around the year A.D. 1230, and in a poem in the thirteenth-century Poetic Edda. The word “Valkyrie” comes from the Old Norse Valkyrja, literally “chooser of the slain.” The Valkyries were female warrior goddesses who influenced the course of battle and served Odin’s wishes as to which warriors should live and which would die. The best warriors who died in battle went to Valhalla, Odin’s hall of the slain, so that they could later serve on his side in the eschatological battle that was to end the current cosmic order.
Warriors who wanted to be taken by the Valkyries fought in a terrible trancelike fury, abandoning all humanity. Some, called berserkers (from the Old Norse berserkir, or bear shirts), wore during battle a shirt or coat made from the pelt of a bear. Odin was sometimes represented by a bear, and the berserkers hoped to gain favor with him by wearing its pelt. The Úlfhéðnar (from the Old Norse for wolf hides), on the other hand, dressed in the pelts of wolves. Basically, both groups fought like animals. When Diana Bishop first met Gallowglass, she asked Matthew, “This . . . berserker is your nephew?” Gallowglass mildly replied, “For your information, my people were Úlfhéðnar, not berserkers. And I’m only part Norse—the gentle part, if you must know. The rest is Scots, by way of Ireland.”
Gallowglass once compared Diana with Göndul—fittingly, since the name is said to come from the Old Norse gandr, meaning “magic” or “magic wand.”
See also: Huginn and Muninn
“Hugin and Munin fly each day
over the spacious earth.
I fear for Hugin, that he come not back,
yet more anxious am I for Munin”*
Myth: Huginn and Muninn
Origin: Norse mythology
Background: Muninn derives from the Old Norse for “memory” or “mind,” and Huginn derives from the word for “thought.” In Norse mythology these are the names of the two ravens who fly all over the world to provide intelligence to the god Odin. The ravens are mentioned in a collection of anonymous Old Norse minstrel poems now referred to as the Poetic Edda. The poems were compiled in the thirteenth century from sources whose exact date is not known. The illustration here, from an eighteenth-century Icelandic manuscript, shows them perching on Odin’s shoulders to give him the news of the day.
While Diana and Matthew were in Prague, staying at a house called the Three Ravens, Gallowglass compared himself and Matthew with Odin’s ravens. Fittingly, Gallowglass is Muninn (memory) and the intellectual Matthew is Huginn (thought).
“All they could do was make sure their children knew Dagwanoenyent’s legend, carefully instructing them how to kill such a creature by burning him, grinding his bones into powder, and dispersing it to the four winds so that he could not be reborn.”
Myth: Dagwanoenyent
Origin: Iroquois mythology
Background: Dagwanoenyent is a mythic figure of the Iroquois people. According to a legend of the Seneca tribe, she was the daughter of the wind, a vicious witch who could travel in a whirlwind and could not be killed. One story is that an uncle and a nephew lived near Dagwanoenyent and her child, and the nephew was forbidden any contact with them. The nephew disobeyed, however, and often sneaked off to visit them. When the child turned fifteen, he revealed to the nephew that they were both cousins and that the uncle was Dagwanoenyent’s husband. The boy was upset and pierced a bag of oil that hung over Dagwanoenyent’s head. Later he confessed this to his uncle, who told him they were now in great danger. Soon Dagwanoenyent came to the uncle’s house as a whirlwind and destroyed it, carrying him away. The nephew and his guardian, Mole, searched for the uncle and rescued him from under an elm tree. They went to Dagwanoenyent’s house and killed her by burning her body in a fire of bear oil. She revived, however, and once again the uncle and nephew killed her with fire. Afterward they pounded her bones into a fine powder and divided the powder into three separate bags—one each for uncle, nephew, and Mole. Whenever there is a storm, they must keep the bags apart so that the powder can’t unite and revive Dagwanoenyent.
During the Revolutionary War, it is understandable that the Oneida (who were closely allied with the Seneca) referred to Matthew as Dagwanoenyent. Like her, he is difficult to kill—except perhaps by fire.
History, Magic, Science and Religion
Querie 14. All that the witch-finder doth, is to fleece the country of their money, and therefore rides and goes to townes to have imployment, and promiseth them faire promises, and it may be doth nothing for it and possesseth many men that they have so man
y wizards and so many witches in their towne, and so hartens them on to entertaine him.
Answer. You doe him a great deale of wrong in every of these particulars.*
Title: The Discovery of Witches
Author: Matthew Hopkins (c. 1620–47)
Background: This historical volume, whose title is echoed by the All Souls trilogy’s A Discovery of Witches, was written by the notorious seventeenth-century English witchfinder Matthew Hopkins. It first appeared in print in 1647 and lays out his “revelations” and methods for discovering and prosecuting witches. Matthew Hopkins turned to witch-hunting in 1644 and, along with his associate John Stearne, focused his work on the towns and villages of England’s eastern counties, particularly East Anglia. The huge increase of trials and executions for witchcraft at this time was a direct result of these two men’s investigations. More people were hanged during the short period of their activity than from any of the witch-hunts in the preceding hundred years. But as their reign of terror escalated, voices spoke out against them and the expenses they demanded from each community they passed through.
The Discovery of Witches, laid out as a set of Queries and Answers, reads like a vindication of Matthew Hopkins’s methods and experience, as well as a denial of the accusation that “he must needs be the greatest Witch, Sorcerer, and Wizzard himselfe, else hee could not doe it.” To the relief of many, Hopkins retired soon after its publication and died in obscurity in 1647. Sadly, with the publication of this book, his legacy crossed borders. The witch trials that soon followed in the new colonies of America, particularly New England, adopted his methods, including the Salem Witch Trials, to which Diana’s ancestor Bridget Bishop fell victim later in the century.
“God suffers in the multitude of souls whom His word can not reach. Religious truth is imprisoned in a small number of manuscript books which confine instead of spread the public treasure. Let us break the seal which seals up holy things and give wings to Truth in order that she may win every soul that comes into the world by her word no longer written at great expense by hands easily palsied, but multiplied like the wind by an untiring machine.”
—Johannes Gutenberg
Title: Biblia sacra 1450 or Gutenberg Bible
Printer: Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398–1468)
Background: Matthew de Clermont’s library in Sept-Tours is full of astonishing treasures, his Gutenberg Bible being chief among them. One of the most famous books in the world, and probably one of the most expensive, the Biblia sacra is the first Bible printed using movable type. It marked the birth of mass-produced literature, accelerating the spread of the written word in the West. Systems of movable type had been invented previously in Asia, but the far fewer characters in European languages made it a more viable method that, once perfected, took off in the Western world. Johannes Gutenberg’s complex calculations ensured that the mechanics of the press worked in unison. He based the design on the wine presses of his area, producing metal type that could be applied with the correct and even pressure required not to tear the paper and using oil-based ink that stuck to the type but would transfer easily to the paper without blotting the text.
Copies of the Biblia sacra, or “forty-two-line” Bible (as it is known due to the number of lines per page), were produced in Mainz in the 1450s by Gutenberg and his colleagues Johan Fust and Peter Schoeffer. Printing on vellum and the majority on paper, they combined the old and new, with the text printed on the presses and beautiful illuminations added later by hand in the traditional way. Before Gutenberg’s revolutionary invention, the slow and painstaking process of handwriting works that still prevailed in Europe had made books expensive and exclusive. The printing press changed all that, allowing Renaissance advancements in thought and the ideas of the scientific revolution and the Reformation to be disseminated quickly to a much wider spectrum of people.
“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”*
Title: De consolatione philosophiae or Consolation of Philosophy
Author: Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, commonly known as Boethius (c. 480–524)
Background: When Matthew abruptly left Sept-Tours after his encounter with the vampire Domenico, a grief-stricken Diana perused the contents of his study in an effort to know him better. On a shelf holding a wooden toy that had belonged to Lucas, Matthew’s long-dead human son, Diana found a copy of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. She instantly realized the significance of the work: “I imagined Matthew, bereft of Blanca and Lucas and bewildered by his new identity as a vampire, reading words written by a condemned man.”
Boethius was an imperial official under Theodoric the Great, Ostrogoth ruler of Rome, in the early sixth century. He became a senator at the age of twenty-five and held a number of important offices, but in a spectacular fall from favor he was imprisoned for alleged treason in the year 523. A year later Boethius was executed without a trial. It was during that time that he wrote the Consolation.
Boethius was fluent in Greek and had studied the Platonic dialogues, in which characters discuss moral and philosophical problems. Consolation was written in the form of a dialogue between Boethius and Lady Philosophy, and it described the peace that can be found through a contemplative state of mind. Boethius’s ethical discussions resonate to this day. Are human beings essentially good? Does man possess free will? God is not mentioned, nor religion, but the work was a major influence on the Christianity of the Middle Ages. It also influenced the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, was cited in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and is reflected in “Boethian” remarks by characters in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Clearly it influenced the young vampire Matthew, who anguished over the senseless loss of his innocent wife and child and his own attempted suicide.
“There will be some men or other, superstitious and blind, who see life plain in even the lowest animals and the meanest plants, but do not see life in the heavens or the world. . . . Now if those little men grant life to the smallest particles of the world, what folly! what envy! neither to know that the Whole, in which ‘we live and move and have our being,’ is itself alive, nor to wish this to be so.”*
Title: The Book of Life or De vita libri tres (Three Books of Life)
Author: Marsilio Ficino (1433–99)
Background: This is the work from which the final book in the trilogy takes its title. The Book of Life, made up of three volumes and published in 1489, is a broad and significant work by one of the leading humanist intellectuals of the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino. Based in Florence in the fifteenth century, Ficino was a philosopher, scholar, and priest under the patronage of the powerful Medici. Cosimo de Medici chose him to head up his Platonic Academy in Florence. Like all the humanists of his age, Ficino combined study of the classics with a Christian worldview, and he was famous for his translations of Plato’s work, bringing him back to the fore in Renaissance thought, and reviving his ideas about the immortality of the soul. Ficino’s studies also ranged from astrology to medicine (undoubtedly influenced by his father, who had been a physician to the Medici).
The Book of Life is Ficino’s all-encompassing guide on how to live a healthy, fulfilling life, both physically and mentally. Split into three books, De vita sana (On Healthy Life), De vita longa (On Long Life), and De vita coelitus comparanda (On Obtaining Life from the Heavens), the entire volume is a complicated mix of medical, philosophical, astrological, and magical advice. Ficino also endorsed a natural magic, which looked for remedies in the natural world and the movement of the planets but stayed away from magic that involved the “worship of daemons.” From letters of the time, it seems the astrological and magical elements in the book still sparked unwelcome murmurings of heresy that concerned Ficino, but fortunately these did not come to anything.
“Letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak
to us the words of the absent; for they introduce words by the eye, not by the ear.”*
Title: Etymologiae (The Etymologies)
Author: Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636)
Background: Alone in Matthew’s study after he left Sept-Tours to investigate the break-in at Oxford, Diana discovered a manuscript copy of Etymologiae. “It represented Isidore of Seville’s attempt to capture all of human knowledge, and it would have appealed to Matthew’s endless curiosity.” Matthew was eager to learn everything there was to know after his rebirth as a vampire, and this seventh-century equivalent of the internet was a good start. Indeed, in 1997 Pope John Paul II suggested that Isidore be recognized as the patron saint of the internet, though this has not yet been formalized.
Isidore was the archbishop of Seville from about the year 600 until his death in 636. He is now known mainly for his authorship of Etymologiae, a twenty-volume compendium of writings dating from the fourth century to the sixth. Isidore’s purpose was to set down all the knowledge of his time, probably to provide an education for clergy. For centuries his encyclopedia was a principal reference source and a staple of almost every monastic library. Nearly a thousand manuscript copies survive today, and it was among the earliest books to be printed (1472).
The Etymologiae contain the lore of the late classical world beginning with the Seven Liberal Arts: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. They also cover such disparate topics as road making, agriculture, clothing, and games. The work consists almost entirely of excerpts and paraphrases from earlier writers; for example, books 12 through 14 come mainly from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. Isidore acknowledged Pliny but not three other main sources, and much of his material was derived from writers of earlier encyclopedias, whom he also left unacknowledged.