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Category Archives: Antiquity

The Four Seasons: from Darkness into Light

15 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by michelinewalker in Angels, Antiquity, Feasts, Sharing

≈ Comments Off on The Four Seasons: from Darkness into Light

Tags

archangels, Books of Hours, equinox, Kômos, Saturnalia, Satyr, solstice, The Gregorian Calendar, The Julian Calendar, WordPress

 

Running Warrior, by Colmar Painter

Running Warrior by Colmar painter

From time immemorial, seasons, or more precisely, darkness and light, have determined the days on which humankind placed its festivities, regardless of cultures and religions.  In fact, nature has always prevailed, bestowing unity upon diversity.  And it most certainly dictated the moments when festivities were held.

The Solstices

Winter Solstice

The Winter solstice (December 21/22 for the Northern Hemisphere; June 20/21, for the Southern Hemisphere)

Humankind has always celebrated the longest night and the longest day.  In ancient Greece, comedies and satires were associated with the winter solstice:  Kômos, or Cômos, and Satyrs.  And in the Rome of antiquity, Saturnaliæ occurred on the day of the longest night.  On that day, the universe was upside down.  Therefore, in certain cultures, the master was suddenly slave.  In more ancient cultures, an old king was replaced and, at times, sacrificed, so a new king could be enthroned.  The old king was the pharmakos or scapegoat.

Judaism placed Hanukkah very close to the longest night as did Christianity.  In fact, Christianity celebrated the twelve days Christmas.  In the Western Church, Christmas, the birth of Christ, has been celebrated on December 25th, but in the Eastern Church, January 6th, Epiphany, is the day on which the birth of Christ has been celebrated.

—ooo—

Julius Cesar (the Julian Calendar) situated the winter solstice on December 25th, but in time, Christmas was celebrated several days before December 25th.  See Winter solstice.  Consequently, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII (the Gregorian Calendar) brought the winter solstice back to December 22nd and, as per the directives of Council of Nicea of 325, in the Western Church, Christmas has since been celebrated on December 25th.

  • The Summer  Solstice (June 20/21, for the northern hemisphere; December 21/22, for the Southern Hemisphere)

As for the longest day, for Christians, it is la Saint-Jean, St John’s Day, and various other feasts.

Ring Sundial

The Equinoxes, or equinoctial points

  • The Vernal Equinox (March 20/21, for the Northern Hemisphere; September 22/23, in the Southern Hemisphere)

The day on which darkness and light are of more or less equal length (equi =equal), Judaism celebrates Passover and Christians, Easter.  Easter is the day of the resurrection of Christ.  Consequently, the night before Easter Sunday, a mass is celebrated during which the Church is momentarily in complete darkness and gradually lit a candle at a time.  In earlier times, a lamb was sacrificed:  the sacrificial lamb.

When Julius Caesar established his calendar in 45 BC, he fixed the Spring equinox on March 25th, but the Council of Nicea of 325 corrected that date.  In Western cultures, we use the Gregorian calendar (Gregory XIII, 1582) which is based on the determinations of the Council of Nicea.

  • The Autumnal Equinox   (September 22/23; March 20/21)

As for the Autumnal equinox, it is the Judaic Rosh Hashanah.  In Christianity, the day is marked by la Saint-Michel, on September 29th or the now nearly-forgotten Michaelmas.  In the Roman Catholic Church, Michael is one of three archangels, the other two are Gabriel (March 24th) and Raphael (October 24th).  But Christianity also has its archangel of death, or Esdras, the “avenging angel,” or archangel of death, named Azrael in Hebrew culture.

In Islamic culture, the four archangels are Gabriel, Michael, Raphael and Azrael.  There are slight variations in the spelling of Azrael, variations that are consistent with national languages.  The Greek Orthodox Church honours the archangels on November 8th.

The solstices and the equinoxes do not occur on a fixed and permanent day.  However, nations have situated official feasts on fixed dates.

—ooo—

For the moment, my purpose is

  • first to provide a background, vague as it may be, for liturgical and secular Books of Hours.  Liturgical Books of Hours are, among other texts, the Breviary and the Liber Usualis.  Moreover Benedictine monks and other monks observe the Canonical Hours during which psalms are recited.  Secular Books of Hours, such as Les Très Riches Heures de Jean de France, duc de Berry, are exquisitely-decorated books, books with enluminures or illuminations.  As we have seen, Bestiaries are also richly-decorated manuscripts, a pleasure to the eye.
  • Second, it seemed important to write about humanity’s universal observance of feasts that are embedded in the seasons, or in the degree of darkness and light.  Nature is the template.

In short, seasons and feasts correspond to natural phenomena, i. e. the degree of darkness and light.  All cultures have let the cycles of nature dictate the dates of their feasts and, as trivial as it may seem Calendars are a cultural monument.  They resemble Books of Hours and are, generally, illustrated or “illuminated.”

In other words, as humankind progressed through milennia, it amassed traditions we must never forget.  They shape our lives and inhabit the imagination of all human beings, climbing every mountain and crossing every border.

For information on ancient practices perpetuated through religious rituals, tales, and literature in general, one’s best source is Sir James George Frazer’s (1 January 1854, Glasgow – 7 May 1941, Cambridge) The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and Religion, published between 1890 and 1915.  The Golden Bough is a Project Gutenberg‘s publication.

Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, Winter, Largo

Satyr, Colmar Painter

Satyr, by Colmar painter

© Micheline Walker
15 Novembre 2011
WordPress

 

 

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Metamorphism: Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche

03 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by michelinewalker in Antiquity, Literature

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

antiquity, Apuleius, magical realism, metamorphism, Ovid, The Golden Ass

love-and-psyche-1899

Cupid and Psyche

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1889
www.wikipaintings.org
 

We associate metamorphism with Ovid (20 March 43 BCE –  17/18 CE) and Apuleius (c. 125 – c. 180 CE), but metamorphism is also frequent in fairy tales and has a dark side in lycanthropy, or werewolf stories.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is our fundamental text on this subject.  There were Greek stories of metamorphoses, but Greece did not have an Ovid.  Nor did it have an Apuleius.  For the time being, I will leave Ovid’s Metamorphoses aside and take a peak at Apuleius’s version of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. That story is a ‘digression’ in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, a novel in which a man becomes a donkey, at least temporarily.

Apuleius:  The Golden Ass

Apuleius’s Golden Ass is the only complete novel we have inherited from Greco-Roman antiquity.  It was written in the 2nd century AD.  Its structure resembles that of Ibn Al-Muqaffa’s Tales of Kalilah wa Dimna.  There is a main story in which are inserted many stories or ‘digressions.’  For this reason, it could be labelled a picaresque novel, except that an old woman tells the myth of Psyche and Cupid, as a digression, which seems very odd, given the outer narrative and other inner stories.

The Outer Story

In the outer story, the protagonist is Lucius who wishes to become a witch so he can transform himself into a bird.  He is told my his friend Milo that Milo’s wife is a witch who can transform herself into a bird.  Lucius watches her turning herself into a bird and, accidentally transforms himself into a donkey.  At the end of the novel, after all sorts of trials and tribulations, Lucius retrieves his human self, assisted by Isis, a goddess and a magician.

The Inner Stories

As for the inner stories, they too are lewd, except for the beautiful myth of Cupid and Psyche, the last of the inner stories.  It is told by an old woman through several books and it resembles fairy tales.

As the story goes, Venus (Aphrodite), the goddess of love, is jealous of a human who is the most beautiful woman in the world, Psyche, and claims to be more beautiful than Venus.

Venus is jealous and therefore sends her son Cupid (Eros) to kill Psyche with one of his arrows.  However, Cupid, who has made himself invisible to perform his dastardly deed, falls in love with Psyche and takes her to a castle.  They become man and wife, but he only visits with her in the night.  Moreover, she is directed not to look at him during his nightly visits.  One night she is fooled by her sisters into carrying a candle and killing Cupid who, they claim, is a monstrous serpent. She does as her sisters suggest, sees that her husband is Cupid and burns him with her candle.  She falls in love, but Cupid leaves her as he had warned.

After she has been abandoned, Psyche goes to Venus to request help.  Venus tells her to perform four impossible tasks, three of which she performs through the mediation of ants, a river god and an eagle.  But the fourth task is truly impossible.  Venus asks Psyche to fetch beauty from Proserpina (Persephone), Queen of the Underworld, which means that Psyche must die.  So she climbs to the top of a tower and is about to throw herself down when the tower starts to speak.  She is told how to go to the Underworld.  However, the box she is given does not contain beauty;  it contains infernal sleep.  She therefore falls into a coma.

By then, Cupid (Eros), who has wings has forgiven her and flies to rescue her.  He goes to Jupiter (Zeus) to ask the gods’s permission to transform Psyche into a goddess.  Jupiter and the other gods deliberate and end up granting Cupid’s request.  Psyche is therefore transformed into a goddess by drinking ambrosia.  She has escaped the human condition:  mortality.

* * *

Questions

In Greek mythology, Psyche is the soul.  Her role in the myth we have just glimpsed is therefore quite different.  In fact, she is a human being, but a human being promoted to the state of godliness, which is the reverse of most myths.  Usually, gods lose their godliness though sexual contact with a human.

The myth of Cupid and Psyche is part of mythology and does not seem to belong to folklore.  As in The Golden Ass, the narrative seems once again out of place, yet is not.  Could this be an early manifestion of magical realism?  I must investigate further.

There is definitely more to metamorphism than meets the eye.

* * *

November 2, 2011

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