An undying interest in vampires

Humanities

October 25, 2021 - Philip Cox

Golz. Credit: UVic Photo Services

Although Halloween comes but once per year, the thirst for stories about vampires never seems to die. This has helped one UVic humanities professor, Peter Golz, to pursue his own passion for the study of these stories in film and literature for more than 20 years. In doing so, he’s made Victoria home to one of North America’s most popular university courses on vampires.

“The figure of the vampire allows students to delve into the desires and fears of particular cultures in particular historical moments,” says Humanities Associate Dean Academic Lisa Surridge. “Peter Golz has created a master class in cultural studies that has stood the test of time.”

More than a librarian of lore

For anyone who has spoken with Golz, it’s not surprising that his office is filled with an impressive range of vampire-related paraphernalia — action figures from popular TV shows like Twilight and Buffy: the Vampire Slayer; a vampire-themed magnetic poetry kit; a Dracula lunch box; a bottle of Dracula-branded wine (red, of course); a ‘little vampire pacifier,’ replete with blood-tipped fangs, still in its original packaging; along with film posters, DVDs and endless rows of books, books, books.

Even backed by this impressive cavern of keepsakes, the breadth and depth of Golz’ knowledge of vampire films, literature, culture and history is endlessly enthralling.

The briefest of conversations with this humble professor about his passion for the subject feels like an immersive symposium in vampirology. And no wonder: Golz has been teaching one of North America’s most popular courses on vampires for 20 years this fall.

When people ask me ‘what do you teach?’ and I say ‘vampire studies,’ they always reply with either ‘oh, that’s so cool!’ or ‘no, seriously, what do you teach?’

— Associate professor and vampirologist Peter Golz

A curriculum of vampires

The course Golz created for UVic’s Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies in 2001, which he’s taught every year since—A Cultural History of Vampires in Literature and Film—has captured the imagination of students, fans and the media alike over the last two decades.

It has been featured by a wide range of national and regional news outlets such as the Globe & Mail, CBC, Times Colonist and CHEK, and appears on countless ‘best course’ lists and vampire fan sites.

In 2014, Warner Brothers approached Golz about including a short clip on the course in the bonus materials of a special 20th anniversary edition BluRay release of the now-classic film Interview with the Vampire, but the deadline for filming was two weeks before the course started that year.

Attention like this, alongside glowing reviews from students, has helped course enrolment swell from 75 students in its first year to over 300 at its peak. When offered online for the first time last year as a result of the pandemic, the course attracted students from across Asia and Europe, as well as North and South America, despite the extreme time differences. Some passions never seem to sleep.

A vampire for every generation

In addition to the media attention and buzz generated on campus by word of mouth, Golz attributes the success of his course in part to the subject matter itself.

“Vampires have become a lot more interesting in the last 20 years, because they are not depicted as the stereotypical Other as they once were,” he says. In line with their famed shapeshifting powers, Vampires have learned to adapt—and fit in. “Now vampires are more likely to live among us, like in the TV series True Blood, the Twilight films or Buffy: the Vampire Slayer. And we are more likely to hear them tell their own story, like in Interview with the Vampire, which makes them more sympathetic characters.”

There is also an ever-growing diversity in the types of vampires, such as the child vampire of 1975’s Salem’s Lot, the ‘psychic vampire’ of Lifeforce and the ‘olfactory vampire’ of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

The characteristics of our imagined vampires shift alongside our times and circumstances. For instance, there’s a growing demand for ‘pandemic vampires,’ Golz says, as seen in films like 2007’s I Am Legend and in TV series like The Strain.

Although this trend clearly speaks to our own time, the concept behind it has a long history. In the classic 1922 German Expressionist silent horror film, Nosferatu, death follows the vampire protagonist Count Orlok indiscriminately when he moves from Transylvania to Germany. The doctors in his town blame these deaths on an unspecified plague brought in by a swarm of rats that arrive with Orlok’s ship.

“Nosferatu was filmed in 1921, just after the Spanish flu epidemic,” Golz explains, “but it was set in the 1830s when there was a big cholera outbreak in Germany, rather than in its present day or in the late 1800s when the novel upon which it was based [Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula] was set. I think the film’s director wanted to make something that was really appropriate for its time, which is a concern we often see reflected in vampire storylines.”

This continual evolution of vampire mythology has helped to keep both vampire stories and Golz’ course content fresh over the decades.

A famous vampire scholar, Nina Auerbach, once said that there is a vampire for every generation, which I think is quite right. I also think there is a vampire for everyone, really. We have vampire westerns, vampire science-fiction, vampire romances, vampire parodies…. There is no shortage of vampire sub-genres for every audience.

— Golz

The future of the darkness seems bright

Given the course’s longevity and sustained popularity, it’s hard to believe that it took Golz eight long years to develop and get it approved by university administrators.

“Some of my colleagues were very much against this course, which is part of the reason I had to have “literature” in the course title — it had to have a literary component to give it credibility,” Golz recalls. “Now there are a lot of courses throughout Canada and the US that focus on vampires, zombies and other fantasy- and horror-based works. It has become a very popular topic with a very bright future.”

When asked about the brightest moments in his own career, Golz can list many: that time when Ballet Victoria invited him to introduce their new Dracula ballet and to bring his entire class to one of their performances, or the half-dozen presentations by leading vampire scholars that Golz has brought to UVic as part of the Lansdowne Lecture series, or the novel ideas of students who have sat in his classroom and shared with him their own passion for the shadowy underworld of the undead.

“This course is a lot of fun for me and I get to work with students who are really interested in the topic and do great work, so as long as I’m here I will continue to teach this course,” Golz states.

“But, I am obviously not a vampire, so it has to end at some point. But, maybe then it will be reborn. Who knows?”

Prince George teacher taking his witch trials studies to Oxford

His interest in witch trials has led Aaron Larsen, local teacher and UNBC graduate, to do his doctoral research at the University of Oxford , one of the most prestigious schools on the planet.

Christine Dalgleish

Jun 20, 2021 5:54 AM

Aaron Larsen, a local teacher at the Indigenous Choice school, will take his witch trials studies to Oxford as he works towards his doctorate.UNBC photo

His interest in witch trials has led Aaron Larsen, a local teacher and UNBC graduate, to do his doctoral research at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, one of the most prestigious schools on the planet.

It all began as an undergraduate assignment for a UNBC history class where he studied a witch trial that took place in Zug, Switzerland in 1737.

Larsen will continue his work as a PhD student at Oxford under the supervision of Regius Professor of History Lyndal Roper, one of the foremost experts in witchcraft, religion, and gender in early modern Europe.

“My nine years at UNBC have prepared me immeasurably to continue my studies at Oxford,” Larsen said. “The combination of phenomenal courses in the department of history, dedicated faculty, and exceptional peers has allowed me to flourish in academia, building the confidence and breadth of understanding that I will need to thrive at Oxford.”

Larsen started studying history at UNBC in 2012. He graduated in 2017 with his bachelor of arts, finished his education degree in 2019 and has been a School District 57 teacher ever since while still working on his master of arts at UNBC.

Through the research of the witch trial, Larsen is looking to map the lives of the nine women and one man that were accused of witchcraft. As he combines their testimony with geographic information, he’s seeking to get a better understanding of their everyday lives.

“My research provides insights into the geographic world of lower status women living in eighteenth-century Switzerland, recreating the cosmos of people whose lives and experiences are so often lost to the past,” he says. “I am looking into both the borders of their world and their conceptions of the spaces in which they lived, all tied to the fantasy of witchcraft.”

Larsen’s interest in history was instilled by his grandfather Lloyd Comish, who began sharing picture books about the Titanic with Larsen when he was young and they explored other areas of interest as he grew up in Prince George.

“Though he passed away in November of 2020, my grandfather was always eager to hear about my research,” Larsen said. “I am so thankful that he lived long enough to know I had been encouraged by one of the top scholars in my field to apply for doctoral studies at the best school in the world, since this journey truly began with him.”

Larsen said he is grateful for the opportunities he had at the local university.

“My years at UNBC have given me a direction in life and the skills to pursue anything I could dream of,” Larsen said. “Over nine years and three degrees, I have gained so much through interdisciplinary research, community service on campus, and the tutelage of phenomenal professors.”

Out of the classroom Larsen joined many student-led organizations, served on the UNBC Senate, created a history conference that ran for a number of years before the pandemic and won an award for campus leadership as a result of the volunteer work he’d done in the university community.

Larsen believes his volunteerism in the community contributed to being accepted into Oxford.

He works at Nusdeh Yoh (House of the Future), the local Aboriginal Choice Program School.

“I trained as a high school social studies teacher,” Larsen said. “Since graduating from the education program I’ve been teaching in a variety of positions at Nusdeh Yoh - resource teaching, Grade 4/5 teaching and right now I am an English Language Learning teacher.”

Larsen said he’s really proud to work at an Indigenous choice school and enjoys working with the children there.

“It’s been really cool to work with children to help immerse them in their culture and help bring the history of their culture to life,” Larsen said. “It’s a really powerful feeling to help keep the history alive.”

A Study in Occultism: The Art of Jean Delville

The Belgian Idealist sought to depict the elevation of the human spirit in his art, believing that the defiance of base desires could lead to spiritual enlightenment


Benjamin Blake Evemy / MutualArt
Jul 23, 2021

Jean Delville, Self Portrait, 1887, Unknown Collection

Viewers of art often derive their own interpretations and meanings from the pieces that hang before them. At times, speculations on what the artist was trying to say, are exactly that — speculation — and bear no reflection on what the creator’s actual artistic intentions or motivations were for picking up the paintbrush. It is a common practice, which at times is not unlike staring at a page of text written in a foreign language and exacting an arbitrary translation, then telling those around oneself that the translation is indeed accurate. The truth is that there are some painters who simply paint what they feel, and any profoundly detailed interpretation is, by nature, inaccurate. Then, in contrast, there are other painters that have something very specific to express through their brushstrokes, whether the viewer realizes it or not. This is exemplified in pieces created from the core beliefs of the artist. And if one knows what those core beliefs are, interpretation becomes both easier and more accurate. One of those artists whose paintings are easier to interpret when delving into the spirituality of their creator, is Belgium-born symbolist painter, poet, Theosophist, and occultist, Jean Delville.

Jean Delville led the Belgian idealist movement in the 1890s and believed that art should be representative of a higher spiritual truth, expressed through the ideal, through a beauty indicative of belief. And while Delville discussed his spiritual beliefs frequently and openly, he was rather reticent when it came to discussing his paintings, preferring for the viewer themselves to form their own interpretation. Somewhat ironically, the clues needed to interpret their painter’s motivations, and subsequently the painting’s ‘true’ meaning, are hidden in plain sight.


Mysteriosa or The Portrait of Mrs. Stuart Merrill, 1892, pencil, pastel and coloured pencil on paper, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

Perhaps Jean Delville’s most well-known painting, Mysteriosa or The Portrait of Mrs. Stuart Merrill is a simplistically composed, albeit fascinating piece. A young, fiery-headed medium clutches a leatherbound black book, its cover inscribed with only a simple triangle, her eyes tilted up as if they are about to disappear completely into the back of her head in a trance-like state. The triangle is representative of Delville’s belief in the idea of ‘perfect human knowledge’ attained through occult practices, and the technique used in making the subject’s hair seem to radiate and bleed into the space around her shows that Mrs. Merrill is indeed transcending into a plane that is not that of the still-breathing mortal. The slender hands that clutch the book are pale and almost spectral, hinting at the divine power hidden within its pages. While little is known of Mrs. Stuart Merrill herself, her husband was a Symbolist poet who had works published in Paris and Brussels. The painting’s air of mystery had led it to be sometimes referred to as the ‘Mona Lisa of the 1890s.’

In the early stages of his artistic career, Delville was influenced by the writings and teachings of such renowned esotericists and occultists as Éliphas Lévi and Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, and later by Theosophists such as Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant. Great emphasis on the theme of the transfiguration of the soul toward a higher purpose is evident throughout his work. Delville believed that the true purpose of man was to seek spiritual enlightenment, and that the base desires, such as sexual pleasure, the attainment of power, and the accumulation of wealth, all kept mankind from achieving that enlightenment. This ideology is evident in his 1895 painting, Sathan’s Treasures (Les Trésors de Sathan).

Jean Delville
Belgian, 1867 - 1953
Sathan’s Treasures (Les Trésors de Sathan), 1895, oil on canvas, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

At first glance, Sathan’s Treasures appears to be simply a fantasy piece. A devil or demon cavorts above a stream of nude figures, against the backdrop of a mystical undersea land. And even though that may in fact be what the piece depicts, there is more to the painting than meets the eye. The unclothed figures represent the base nature of mankind, those carnal desires we all possess, and which subsequently come under the jurisdiction of Satan. The Great Deceiver has lured these souls away from the path of enlightenment, and into his underwater lair. Here, they are his ‘treasure,’ hence the painting’s title. Delville expressed his belief in these sentiments in an 1893 article, published in the journal Le Mouvement Littéraire:

“Erotic fever has sterilized most minds. One ordinarily thinks of himself as virile because he satisfies a woman’s unquenched bestial desires. Well, that’s where the great shame of the cerebral degeneration of our time starts…”


L’Homme-Dieu (Man-God), 1903, oil on canvas, Groeninge Museum, Bruges

Composed strikingly in a palette of pastel colors, Delville’s L’Homme-Dieu simply depicts the process of apotheosis. In the painting’s lowest third, its subjects are preoccupied with the animalistic aspects of existence, in the throes of copulation, pain, childbirth, and the like. This morphs into the second third of the painting, the subjects here raising their hands to the heavens, seeking wisdom and enlightenment to be imparted upon them. And once it has, and they have truly understood the spiritual truth of the universe, they can then transcend into a god-like being themselves, all-knowing from where they stand on the highest point of the spiritual ladder. This makes up the uppermost part of the painting. L’Homme-Dieu was painted when Delville’s interest in Theosophy increased, the religion’s followers believing that men, through a process of spiritual enlightenment, can become spiritual masters, similar to the beliefs of the Buddhists.

Jean Delville died in Brussels, Belgium, on January 19, 1953, at the age of 86. And even though he was a driving force in the Belgian idealist movement, he never quite achieved the same fame as his contemporaries. A large part of this was simply due to the fact that he wasn’t interested in doing so. While many Belgian Idealist artists exhibited their work within the highly commercialized exhibition societies, Delville never did so — simply because of his beliefs. Materialistic and monetary gain were not conducive while slowly and steadily travelling up the path of enlightenment. In fact, they were quite the opposite. He believed that art should be used as tool in which to educate society, a beauty created for posterity. He once summed up the sentiment perfectly in his writings:

“There will be nothing to prevent art increasingly to become an educative force in society, conscious of its mission. It is time to penetrate society with art, with the ideal and with beauty. Today's society tends to fall increasingly into instinct. It is saturated with materialism, sensualism and ... commercialism.”

Which unfortunately sounds like it could be referring to a time similar to that in which we currently live in, and most-likely always will.

Book Review: Spirits Of The Underworld: A Grimoire Of Occult Cocktails & Drinking Rituals


Jason Marshall

Lifestyle | October 25, 2021
Editor’s Note: This book was provided to us as a review sample by Prestel. This in no way, per our editorial policies, influenced the final outcome of this review. t should also be noted that by clicking the buy link towards the bottom of this review our site receives a small referral payment which helps to support, but not influence, our editorial and other costs.

I can still remember going to my first guitar lesson. I was a teenager and had just spent the summer mowing lawns, painting garages, and tending to any sort of chore that my neighbors didn’t want to deal with around their houses. No job was too small, and before I knew it, I had conquered the market in being a surrogate grandson to lonely grandparents with ungrateful grandchildren who never visited let alone helped around the house. I was determined with my eye on the prize of a used guitar that I saw hanging on the wall at the local music shop.

I had never even touched a guitar before, but I was certain that this instrument would get me on MTV. I saved and visited my future ticket out of this town until finally it was mine. As I was rung up on that day, the sales person asked me what my intentions were now that I was well on my way. I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but they let me know that they also offered lessons and had an opening if I was interested. I then understood that just holding my precious in my hand did not suddenly make me able to play, so what was cleaning out a few more gutters. Sign me up!



It has been a long time since then, and I was reminded of that while perusing a new cocktail book that had come my way. Not because I had signed a deal with the Devil, or my musical lessons had anything to do with the Occult, it was because of the first question my new instructor asked me when I sat down to learn in the back of that music shop: “ What do you want out of the guitar?” He went on to tell me that every note that can possibly be played has been heard, and every combination of those notes have already been played next to each other, so why am I here? This may have been a little too existential for a teenager, and he answered his own question as I sat there slack-jawed. “ The only thing that you can do differently is to have your own tone”.

This has stuck with me more than any diminished chord that I learned from him, and has been the motivation behind many creative endeavors. The ‘tone’. The personality. The color. Sharing things with the world through your particular tint of glass, that is creativity. And, that is what I saw in Spirits of the Underworld: A Grimoire of Occult Cocktails & Drinking Rituals.

The authors of this book certainly come by this honestly. They run a bar ( The Last Tuesday Society, London) that is located inside The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History. They have also opened Devil’s Botany, London’s first dedicated absinthe distillery. All of these endeavors with a penchant toward the macabre, and their cocktail book certainly follows that tone.

There is no mention of ‘Spooky season’ and not a single recipe features pumpkin spice, but what they do is weave a timeline of drinking rituals and history through a correlated history of people trying to make sense of the world around them. 50 cocktail recipes are divided into 5 chapters that tell the stories of cocktails and the occult in the ancient world, the Dark Ages, Renaissance, New World discovery, and the Modern era. All with well articulated tales to accompany each concoction.

While each recipe isn’t difficult ( the mention in the preface that they shouldn’t be any more difficult than a cup of tea), they are intricate, involved, and interesting. I was going to evaluate a couple of the recipes by making them, but I did not have any raisin infused Old Forester or Primum Ens Melissa Tincture on hand. But, I do have the recipe now and am looking forward to trying them out. They do feature products from their distillery quite often, (who can blame them), but do also offer alternative suggestions as well. The stories are great with a plethora of acknowledged classics, as well as plenty of new interpretations.

What I am most looking forward to is sharing this with a bar team and relating ways to find inspiration, to find your tone, and to have a lot of fun while doing so.

Smells like witch spirit: How the ancient world’s scented sorceresses influence ideas about magic today

Perfumes, potions and witches have been entwined for centuries.

  Frederick Stuart Church/Smithsonian American Art Museum/Wikimedia Commons

Most perfume ads suggest that the right scent can make you sexy, alluring and successful. A blend by Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs, meanwhile, offers to make you smell like Hecate, the three-faced Greek goddess of witchcraft.

As a classics scholar who studies both magic and the senses in the ancient world, this idea of a witch-inspired perfume fascinates me – and “Hecate” is just one of many magic-inspired fragrances available today.

What does a witch smell like, and why would you deliberately perfume yourself like one?

Smells are impossible to see or touch, yet they affect us emotionally and even physically. That’s similar to how many people think of magic, and cultures around the world have connected the two. My current research is focused on how magic and scent were linked in ancient Rome and Greece, ideas that continue to shape views of witches in the West today.

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Greeks and Romans of all walks of life believed in magic and used spells ranging from curses to healing magic and garden charms. Magical handbooks from the time show that Greco-Egyptian magicians used fragrance extensively in their rituals, even scented inks, and doctors believed strong-smelling plant species to be more medically effective than others. The gods themselves were thought to smell sweet, and places they touched retained a pleasant odor, making scent a sign of contact with the divine.
Witches wielding perfumes

Professional magicians in the ancient world claimed they could curse enemies, summon gods, heal the sick, raise ghosts, tell the future and accomplish various other miraculous feats. Surviving descriptions suggest that a majority of them were men, although certainly not all.

When it comes to Greek and Roman fiction, however, most magicians are women.

Witches in ancient literature use smells even more aggressively than their real-life counterparts did. Medea, for example – the most famous witch of antiquity – casts magic through scent repeatedly in Apollonius’ epic poem “Argonautica,” about the hero Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece. To help him, Medea puts the dragon guarding the fleece to sleep by chanting spells and drizzling herbal potions in its eyes. The odor of her herbal concoctions finally overcomes the monster.

Medea’s perfumed magic helped her lover overcome a dragon – and kill her brother.

  Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys/Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery/Wikimedia Commons

Later in the poem, more ominously, Medea scatters herbs into the wind, and their scent lures her own brother into an ambush. Medea has run off with Jason by this point, and he kills her brother to prevent her from being forced to return home.

The Roman poet Horace wrote several poems about a character named Canidia, who is a more horrific witch than Medea: Her teeth are black, and she uses her long fingernails to dig up graves.

In one poem, Canidia and her friends murder a child so they can use his liver and bone marrow in a magical perfume to re-enchant her lover, who has left her. In another poem, Horace even describes Canidia attacking him with scent. She made him ill with her odors, he writes, in return for his unflattering descriptions of her.
Women’s wiles

In the patriarchal societies of Rome and Greece, women were regarded with general suspicion, especially in matters of self-control like sex, money and drinking. Not only were women considered liable to weakness, but they were likely to lead men into self-indulgence as well.

Stories about magical scents encode these ideas, especially fears about the dangers of sexually alluring women. It was said that women who used perfumes and cosmetics could seduce men into behaving in ways they would not choose to if they were in their right minds. Roman writer Pliny the Elder commented that the best perfume was one that made all the men in the area forget what they were doing when a women wearing it walked by. The poet Ovid suggested that if you want to get rid of love, you should pay your girlfriend a surprise visit to catch her without her makeup – her “blended potions.”

Medea’s odoriferous potions and Canidia’s fragrant spells resemble ordinary women’s perfumes, but exaggerated to supernatural levels. The same misogynistic fear that women have the power to enchant men’s minds underlies both stories of witches and stories of ordinary seduction. In the “Iliad,” the goddess Hera distracts her husband, Zeus, from the Trojan War by seducing him. Her preparations include cleansing and perfuming herself with divinely fragrant ambrosia as well as borrowing a magical, lust-inducing belt from Aphrodite. Zeus falls asleep in Hera’s arms, unaware that a battle rages.

Becoming the witch

The association of fragrance and magic persisted long after the end of the Greek and Roman world. In C. S. Lewis’ 1953 novel “The Silver Chair,” for example, a witch appears who could be Medea’s cousin. She throws a green powder onto a fire to produce a “sweet and drowsy” scent, which makes the characters more and more confused.

These days, however, smelling like a witch has its attractions. Misogynistic stereotypes of seductive enchantresses and evil crones have been reclaimed as feminist symbols, and the modern proliferation of perfume blends named for witches, spells and potions suggests that many people find their associations empowering.

Modern perfumes evoking magical imagery are often presented with a feminist twist, reclaiming ancient stereotypes. Another scent from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, “Medea,” describes her as “the embodiment of ruthless power, indomitable will and furious vengeance.” Aether Arts Perfume’s “Circe” is based on Madeline Miller’s novel about the great witch of “The Odyssey” and describes her as “a woman of power and strength.” “Harry Potter” fans can find all sorts of Hermione-themed scented candles online.

Like costumes, perfumes offer a way to try on a persona for a little while. Maybe you want to feel like a powerful goddess, someone with a library full of magical tomes, or a seductive monster. But while costumes are obvious to other people, only the wearer knows what a perfume “means” – and perhaps that’s half the fun of smelling like Hecate.

Author

Britta Ager
Assistant Professor of Classics, Arizona State University

October 20, 2021 

The Year of Witch Lit: Weird Women Dominated New Stories of Suspicion and Rupture


ARTS & CULTURE / BOOKS


Three novels about confusion, distrust, and fear mirror our pandemic moment
BY ALIX HAWLEY
ILLUSTRATION BY CELESTE COLBORNE

Published  Dec. 17, 2021

THE WALRUS

FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS around 2000, I lived in Mistley, a pretty village just outside Manningtree, one of England’s smallest towns. Famous for its swans and its pair of elegant eighteenth-century towers, Mistley sits on the Stour Estuary, about an hour’s train ride east of London. My British partner and I lived in a semidetached place in a row of houses at the top of a hill, which petered out into fields. Our next-door neighbour operated a home hair salon, and one weekend she painted her half of the house ivory, so our side looked like a dirty face.

I often thought my own face might be dirty given how I seemed to perplex people in the streets or the shop. I knew I was a complete outsider with my Canadian accent and my jogging. Someone once opened his door to ask what I was running for, and it took me months to learn that “Yallright” was a greeting, not a question. The swans were ruthless and terrifying, chasing me whenever I passed with a bag of groceries. When I ran near Mistley Heath, a wolfhound sometimes appeared out of the woods to chase me too, nipping at my legs. I walked down the hill to Manningtree most mornings and often saw a man in a grey overcoat following me. A low-level paranoia grew in me: Was I literally being chased out?

I found out later that Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled “Witchfinder General” of the 1640s, was buried somewhere behind our house; his grave and most of the adjacent church were lost to trees and grass. He’d conducted interrogations at a nearby inn, sending some 100 people to be hanged for allegedly consorting with the devil. Once I knew that, I wondered whether the presence of his bones might have had some effect on me. I could never get warm in the house although it was well heated and not old for England. I wondered sometimes if it was mildly haunted. I had a hard time sleeping. Was I the problem? Or was my suspicion the problem?

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I’ve been reminded of my life in Mistley during the pandemic—the slow-rising fear, the mistrust of others, the general bafflement. Even after lockdowns began to end last year, I spent most of my time holed up inside my home in British Columbia. I insulated myself with old BBC detective shows, and my reading gravitated toward the criminal too. True crime felt too hard to take, so I stuck to fiction, mainly mysteries that felt more solvable than the present. Checking out new-books lists in hopes of anything to take me away, I noticed a thread of literary novels about witches. Witch hunts are detective stories of a kind—as readers parse notions of reality and supposition—which was probably what grabbed me first, but these books are very different. Not the witches of fantasy or of children’s lit, the characters of three 2021 novels are victims of historical persecutions in England, America, and Germany. The stories evoke a deep confusion about what’s happening and whether there’s any way to fix it, echoing so many questions of our current moment.

A. K. Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches depicts Matthew Hopkins himself, but it’s much more intensely focused on some of the women he pursued. A passionately expressive novel with a bold energy, the book is mainly in the voice of one of the teenage girls accused of witchcraft. Rebecca West lives with her odd, “formidable” mother in Manningtree while they try to make ends meet with sewing and laundry. The girl is smart mouthed, adolescent, and alive, her observations of neighbours and nature full of cockeyed detail. (She wouldn’t mind seeing “an imp streaking red across the damp lawn.”) She has a crush on the clerk who tutors her, and she is too smart for her own good in a small town where the atmosphere is increasingly claustrophobic, with the English Civil War boiling in the background. Matthew, a thin man perpetually dressed all in black, arrives to collect information on suspect happenings—a sickened child, a possible case of possession. Rebecca, who he thinks has “a weird look to her,” is among those rounded up for imprisonment and trial.

These novels are all about rupture and its effects. In The Manningtree Witches, the war is a major split, but gender is another obvious divide. The majority of Matthew’s victims are women, and Rebecca notes wryly, “The men will not save you.” At heart, though, the books are about storytelling itself. Blakemore slyly shows Matthew inventing reasons behind random events and connecting dots to cohere his grand story of evil versus good. He was, after all, a writer too, author of The Discovery of Witches, a kind of how-to guide to hunting them down. But Matthew is a deliberately flattened character: although he often conjures dreamscapes about witch sex, the sections from his perspective are dialled far down compared with those from Rebecca’s. Observing him, Rebecca says, “I can find nothing there.” The book also makes witches into a kind of nothing, just a narrative device: as Rebecca’s mother half-laughs, “Witch is just their nasty word for anyone who makes things happen, who moves the story along.” This story moves along with some shifts and gaps between scenes and includes brief excerpts from real-world trial documents. The structure emphasizes the way we all try to fill in holes however we can. Black rabbits wouldn’t appear around town if there weren’t witches about; cases of the novel coronavirus, some claimed, would spike because of God’s punishment. The subtitle to Matthew Hopkins’s own book is In Answer to Several Queries—he’s just providing the facts behind the question of why the world suffers.

Hopkins’s guide had a large New England fandom, and Chris Bohjalian’s Hour of the Witch takes place in this infamous hunting ground in the mid-1600s. Mary Deerfield has emigrated with her well-off British merchant parents to a purer life in Boston. In this society, talk of the devil is as expected as chat about the weather. Mary marries an older man, Thomas, who proves domineering and abusive, frequently complaining that her brain is made of cheese and that she fails to produce children. Thomas badly injures Mary when he impales her hand with a fork (“the devil’s tines”), and she decides to sue for divorce. Her attempts at freedom, and at healing herself and others, lead only to her being tried for witchcraft. Bohjalian builds another claustrophobic world, and as in The Manningtree Witches, the ridiculousness of the charges creates a disquieting tone. Again, there’s a major split in the community, the “elect” versus the damned, and another between men and women—one of Mary’s crimes is that she speaks “with the surety of a man.”

Bohjalian is excellent at suspense (he also wrote The Flight Attendant) and at lovingly detailed scene setting. Hour of the Witch is more straightforwardly told than The Manningtree Witches, and although its characters are fictional, their quoted testimony is very convincing. But this novel’s true strength is in its portrayal of an abused person’s mind. Mary is not only cut off from others but self-divided too, always wondering if she is good or bad, trying to understand why her husband harms her. The exhaustion of her self-monitoring is painfully realistic. She’s confused over her ability to give herself private sexual pleasure and ashamed that she likes looking at handsome young men.

Hour of the Witch also raises perceptive questions about how fixed identity really is. Fretting over whether she reads too much, as Thomas believes, Mary wonders what it says “about her soul that a few bits of fashionable silk or cotton cloth and some interesting books could make her content.” Even more, the book asks whether we own our identities and whether we can know ourselves, the way many people have questioned who they are in the upheavals of the last two years. David L. V. Bauer, a London virologist who gave a TV news interview on research behind the Pfizer vaccine only to watch anti-vaxers edit, misquote, and circulate it widely online, says he “never imagined that my own work could actually be part of [an anti-vaccine] misinformation arsenal” or that he would be the involuntary star of conspiracy videos that make him out to be either “some sort of supervillain, or the unlikely hero of the anti-vax world.” Mary also speculates whether she might unwittingly be a supervillain herself: “Did a woman who was possessed not know it until it was too late?”

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen takes the question further. A spiky heroine, Katharina Kepler, mother of scientist Johannes Kepler, is another purported historical witch. As in the other books, there’s turmoil and division, here featuring war and crop failure and Lutherans versus Catholics. In early seventeenth-century Germany, Katharina, a widowed grandmother, irritates many neighbours with her straight talk, her “manly” behaviour, her herbal cures, and her love of her cow. One townsperson, Ursula Reinhold, sets off an avalanche of charges by accusing Katharina of poisoning her with a drink. Others pile on: she caused them bodily harm by looking at them or killed their livestock with a slap or “asked the gravedigger to dig up her father’s skull to make a drinking goblet of it cast in silver—a known witchy tool.”

Galchen’s insightful and dramatic novel is the most absurdist of the three, with the charges against Katharina clearly nonsensical (although based in fact). Its form is also purposely askew, with untitled chapters shifting between Katharina’s voice and her neighbour Simon’s interspersed with courtroom examinations of her neighbours’ accusations. As one witness argues, “We all know she’s a witch. We’ve always known. The matter of how we came to know is simple—we already knew.” How can anyone argue with what everyone knows?

Somewhat beaten down, Katharina sees a doctor to inquire what she really is. He tells her she’s likely not a witch. And witches are real, the doctor says: “Sure they are. But what can they do, really? Not much, is what I have observed.” Yet Katharina’s not off the hook. Like the other novels’ characters, she suffers physical examinations to check for what are often called “witch marks.” Her family’s fortunes are ruined in attempts to defend her, and she’s later informed that her real punishment will be “that the story of the evil she had done would live long, and survive as a tale to frighten children until the end of days.” However, one of the book’s most tragicomic twists comes when Simon tries to tell an English bookseller about Katharina and the man replies, “People don’t like an old lady story, you know? I wouldn’t lead with that.”

What do people want from a story? To make sense, to know what happens, to bridge gaps. Historians have shown that witch hunts weren’t panicked insanity. They were usually attempts to understand real problems—Why was life hard? Why didn’t the rain stop? Why did children die? How could a church pull in more followers? The witch as answer fit, the way witches do in the stories told about them for centuries. They make handy antagonists, powerful but satisfyingly defeated. “Hansel and Gretel” has its infamous witch tempting children into her candy house so she can cook them. She vanishes from the tale with surprising quickness, though, once Gretel shoves her into the oven and the children make their way home to the parents who forced them out in the first place. As Blakemore’s character shrugs, a witch’s job is to fill a slot, to “move the story along.”

In Mistley, I don’t think anyone saw me as some sort of jogging Canadian witch. Most of the people there seemed kind, if always reserved, not “the usual monsters” of the town in Galchen’s novel or the Boston gossips in Bohjalian’s or the flat “Them” of Blakemore’s Manningtree. I wonder still if I made a stranger of myself. I remember realizing some days that my voice was whispery from not having talked to anyone until my partner got home at night. All the major characters of the three novels keep themselves apart to some degree, whether from a fear of others seeing them as too different or because they can’t tolerate others’ difference from them.

Political and social splits now feel as jagged as they often were during the historical period of these books. And witchcraft hovers on the edges of anti-vaccine thought. Misinformation whispers that the COVID-19 shots do all the things witches were accused of doing: they’re poisons, they can track your every move, they can make you infertile, they’ll pull you into Satan’s orbit. A recent online blow-up insisted the Moderna vaccine contains the chemical luciferin. It doesn’t, and at any rate, luciferin is just an organic light-creating molecule. It’s the mechanism behind a firefly’s glow. We all want some light shed on why the virus has hit, what is to blame, and when we’ll get to the end. Without clear answers, stories get stitched together out of old pieces.

ALIX HAWLEY
Alix Hawley is the author of The Old Familiar, All True Not a Lie In It, and My Name is a Knife. Her new novel is forthcoming. She lives in British Columbia.

CELESTE COLBORNE
Celeste Colborne is a multidisciplinary artist and illustrator from Alberta. Her art has been featured in Canadian Wildlife and Politico Europe.

4,400-year-old shaman's 'snake staff' discovered in Finland

Researchers said the carved, wooden lifelike snake matches “magical” staffs portrayed in ancient rock art from the region.

Archaeologists in Finland have unearthed a 4,000-year-old life-size wooden carving of a snake believed to be a ritual staff of a Neolithic shaman.

Satu Koivisto

June 29, 2021
By Tom Metcalfe

A 4,400-year-old life-size wooden snake unearthed in Finland may have been a staff used in “magical” rituals by a Stone Age shaman, according to a study released Monday.

The lifelike figurine, which was carved from a single piece of wood, is 21 inches long and about an inch thick at its widest, with what seems to be a very snake-like head with its mouth open.

It was found perfectly preserved in a buried layer of peat near the town of Järvensuo, about 75 miles northwest of Helsinki, at a prehistoric wetland site that archaeologists think was occupied by Neolithic (late Stone Age) peoples 4,000 to 6,000 years ago.

It’s unlike anything else ever found in Finland, although a few stylized snake figurines have been found at Neolithic archaeological sites elsewhere in the eastern Baltic region and Russia.

“They don’t resemble a real snake, like this one,” University of Turku archaeologist Satu Koivisto said in an email. “My colleague found it in one of our trenches last summer. … I thought she was joking, but when I saw the snake’s head it gave me the shivers.”

“Personally I do not like living snakes, but after this discovery I have started to like them,” she added.

The wooden carving of a snake is unlike anything else ever found in Finland.

Satu Koivisto

Koivisto and her colleague Antti Lahelma, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, are the co-authors of the study on the wooden snake published in the journal Antiquity.

They think it may have been a staff used in supposedly magical rituals by a shaman — someone who communicated with spirits in a similar way to the “medicine people” of traditional Native American lore.

It’s thought the ancient peoples of this region practiced such shamanic beliefs, in which the natural world is inhabited by multitudes of usually unseen supernatural spirits or ghosts — a traditional belief that persists today in some of the remote northern regions of Scandinavia, Europe and Asia.

Ancient rock art from Finland and northern Russia shows human figures with what look like snakes in their hands, which are thought to be portrayals of shamans wielding ritual staffs of wood carved to look like snakes. Lahelma said snakes were regarded as especially sacred in the region.

“There seems to be a certain connection between snakes and people,” Lahelma told Antiquity. “This brings to mind northern shamanism of the historical period, where snakes had a special role as spirit-helper animals of the shaman … Even though the time gap is immense, the possibility of some kind of continuity is tantalizing: Do we have a Stone Age shaman's staff?”

Archaeologists work at an excavation site in Finland.

Satu Koivisto

The figurine from Järvensuo certainly looks like a real snake. Its slender body is formed by two sinuously carved bends that continue to a tapered tail. The flat, angular head with its open mouth is especially realistic. Koivisto and Lahelma suggest it resembles a grass snake or European adder in the act of slithering or swimming away. The place where it was found was probably a lush water meadow at the time when it was “lost, discarded or intentionally deposited,” the researchers wrote.

Wood usually rots away when exposed to oxygen in the air or water, but sediments at the bottoms of swamps, rivers and lakes can cover some organic objects and preserve them for thousands of years.

The site near Järvensuo is thought to have been on the shores of a shallow lake when it was inhabited by groups of people in the late Stone Age. Recent excavations have yielded a trove of organic remains that have enabled archaeologists to create a more complete record of the site, Koivisto said. The finds have included a wooden tool with a handle shaped like a bear, wooden paddles and fishnet floats made of pine and birch bark.

“What a remarkable thing,” said Peter Rowley-Conwy, an archaeologist and professor emeritus of Durham University in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the research. “The ‘head’ appears definitely to have been carved to shape.”

But he was cautious about ascribing greater meaning to it: “A skeptic might wonder whether the sinuous shape was deliberate, or an accidental result of four millennia of waterlogging,” he said in an email. “I have worked on various bog sites with preserved wood, and wood fragments can be considerably distorted.”

Koivisto warns that artifacts like the “snake staff” may be lost as many wetland archaeological sites dry up.

“Wetlands are more important to us than ever before, because of their vulnerability and degradation of fragile organic data sources [from] drainage, land use and climate change,” she said “We have to hurry, before these valuable materials will be gone for good.”

Shamanism Endures In Both Koreas — But In The North, Shamans Risk Arrest Or Worse

ANTHONY KUHN

NPR

May 8, 20217:01 AM ET

Shaman Jeong Soon-deok (center) dances during the initiation ceremony for a new shaman (left) at a temple in Seoul.

Anthony Kuhn/NPR

SEOUL — The cold light of winter shines down on a hillside temple in Seoul. It gleams on the billowing red, yellow and blue robes of shaman Jeong Soon-deok, as she twirls in circles. It glints off the ceremonial knives, bells and fans she waves through the air.

The man standing before her in simple white robes is her newest initiate. Jeong's aim is to throw open the doors of the spirit world so the gods of sun, moon and mountains and the spirits of ancestors and children may enter him.

An estimated 50,000 shamanic ceremonies are held each year in greater Seoul, according to Kim Dong-kyu, a scholar of religion at Sogang University. Some South Koreans see shamanism — which predates Buddhism and Christianity — as a vibrant cultural treasure, while others consider it a primitive embarrassment to their modern, cosmopolitan society. But its appeal endures — in North Korea, too, where it is illegal.

Shamanic rituals are intended to bring good harvests, help villages or communities prosper and assist the souls of the dead in their journey into the afterlife. Shamans tell fortunes based on the Chinese calendar system and communication with the spirit world. They help clients choose names for children, serve as matchmakers and pick auspicious dates for weddings, moving house or opening businesses.

During a break in the ceremony, Jeong reports that this initiation is going smoothly.

"When we were welcoming the heavenly spirits of the sun and moon, they descended to him in the form of light," she explains.

Parts of the ritual, known in Korean as naerim-gut, are accompanied by singing or the playing of drums, gongs and wind instruments — sometimes fast and raucous, at other times slow and hypnotic. Jeong says the bells she uses have a special significance.

Shaman Jeong Soon-deok holds up a fan, bells and other ceremonial objects during an initiation ceremony at a temple in Seoul.

Anthony Kuhn/NPR

"The sound of the bells awakens the universe," she explains. "It also symbolizes the opening of the gate of words for the shaman."

That's the climax of the ceremony, when one spirit finally possesses and speaks through the shaman. This can take some time, and the initiation ceremonies are often all-day affairs with plenty of eating and socializing. Some temples have several ceremonies in progress at the same time.

Kim says shamanism, combining elements of animism, ancestor worship and folk religion, seeks to explain both natural and supernatural influences on human life.

"When someone suffers, there can be two explanations," he says. "One is that it's the ancestors or spirits that are intervening and inflicting pain. The other is that it's the person's destiny to suffer."

North Koreans rely on shamans for similar reasons, Kim says. But they must do so in secret.

"In South Korea, shamanistic rituals are visually flashy and involve a lot of sound," he says, "whereas in the North, from what I've heard, they are very small-scale and quieter."

In fact, shamanism in the North is completely underground and without formal organization, defectors and rights groups report. Practitioners can be jailed, sent to reeducation and labor camps or executed for taking part in what's considered an illegal superstition.

Shaman Jeong Soon-deok (rear) performs ritual purification of a new shaman during an initiation ceremony at a temple in Seoul.

Anthony Kuhn/NPR

A survey of religious persecution in North Korea released last October by the U.K.-based Korea Future Initiative found that 56 of 273 documented victims of persecution were believers in shamanism.

The State Department reported "an apparent continued increase in shamanistic practices, including in Pyongyang" in its 2018 report on religious freedom in North Korea, noting that "authorities continued to react by taking measures against the practice of shamanism... Defector reports cited an increase in party members consulting fortunetellers in order to gauge the best time to defect."

Because North Korean shamans who hold rituals risk being discovered and arrested, some "shamans there simply do fortune-telling," Kim says, "which can still be effective in explaining the reasons for clients' problems."

Lee Ye-joo told fortunes in North Korea before defecting to the South in 2006 at age 33. She now lives in Chungnam province, south of Seoul.

Participants clean up following a shamanic initiation ceremony at a temple in Seoul.

Anthony Kuhn/NPR

When she was 12, Lee began studying a book of divination called the Four Pillars of Destiny, based on the Chinese calendar system. She began telling fortunes eight years later.

"All people who came to me were officials," she recalls.

Because ordinary North Koreans "don't even have enough to eat, the only people who seek out fortune-tellers are those with money, like big-name officials," she explains. "They usually ask when they might lose their job or who their children should marry."

Lee built up her clientele surreptitiously, by word of mouth. She had to be careful not to get caught, she says — but then again, so did her clients.

"They were all linked to other officials who introduced me to them," she says. "So if one of them got me into trouble, I could tell on all the others."

Telling fortunes didn't pay well, so she turned to trading. She says she bought and smuggled goods out of a special trade zone to sell, often making a perilous trek through the mountains to evade authorities.

"What a relief it is not having to carry a knife," she exclaims. "In North Korea, when you carry a bundle of money, you always have to carry a knife, so you don't get robbed."

Her journey out of North Korea was harrowing. Human traffickers sold her into a marriage in China, which she later escaped. But she says her ordeal was worth it.

Lee Ye-joo, a defector from North Korea, speaks during an interview at her home in Chungnam Province, South Korea. She worked as a fortune teller in the North, where, she says, "the only people who seek out fortune-tellers are those with money, like big-name officials. They usually ask when they might lose their job or who their children should marry." She is training to be a shaman in the South.

Anthony Kuhn/NPR

"It's so good to live in this country," she says. "You can make money at 3 or 5 in the morning, if you just try. I'm in this great world now."

But since arriving in the South, she's had some health problems that have been hard to pinpoint.

"I'd been feeling unwell for about five years, and the hospitals couldn't diagnose the problem," she says. "So I visited a shaman and was told that the spirit has entered my body, the spirit of my grandmother."

The only cure for this shinbyeong, or spiritual ailment, was for her to formally become a shaman herself.

So now Lee is preparing for her own initiation. She believes this will help her tell fortunes more accurately. Her spiritual strength as a shaman will depend on her link with her grandmother, so workers are building a temple outside her house dedicated to her grandmother's spirit.

Just as North Korean defectors begin new lives in the South, becoming a shaman is also seen as a kind of spiritual rebirth. As both a defector and a shaman in training, that puts Lee in the unusual position of being born again — and again.

Se Eun Gong contributed to this report in Seoul.

Emperor moths in the rock art of the Namib Desert shed new light on shamanic ritual

Emperor moth cocoon rattles on the ankles of a ritual dancer, Kalahari, 1959. 

Jurgen Schadeberg, courtesy Claudia Schadeberg via Rock Art Research Institute, Wits University

December 15, 2021 9.33am EST

Not every archaeological discovery is made by opening the tomb of a long dead king. Indeed, some important finds seem inconsequential at first. Such as ostrich feathers stained with ochre, a leather bag containing emperor moth cocoons and a strange vessel made from the cranium of an African wild dog I unearthed from a sterile layer at Falls Rock Shelter. The site lies just below the summit of the remote Dâures (or Brandberg) massif in the desert region of western Namibia.

Perplexed, I consigned these finds, first buried 4,500 years ago, to a box beneath my desk. They lay there for another 40 years until, in a flash of realisation, I saw that the emperor moth cocoons were pierced to be strung as rattles worn around the ankles of a shaman in ritual dance.

As set out in my new book Namib – the archaeology of an African desert, these delicate, brittle things were to provide a new understanding of shamanic ritual performance as depicted in the rock art in Namibia and elsewhere in southern Africa.

The role of the shaman as a ritual specialist and healer among southern African hunter-gatherer societies is known mainly from rock art depictions. Until now, no archaeological evidence of shamanic ritual paraphernalia had been discovered in southern Africa.

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A new era

When I excavated the site, rock art studies had just entered an exciting new era. They left behind antiquarian musings for a theoretically rigorous approach. This was informed by modern anthropology and the great trove of late 1800s historical ethnographic material on the inhabitants of the region compiled by the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek.

Read more: South Africa's bandit slaves and the rock art of resistance

Scholars were able to offer detailed and convincing explanations of mysterious rituals in which shamans drew upon supernatural sources of potency to heal, guide and protect their people. Paintings which had seemed inexplicable – some were dismissed as irrational fantasies – yielded their meaning. The spiritual world of southern African hunter-gatherer opened to enquiry.

Many puzzles remained, of course, but some rock paintings offered such depths of insight that one even became known as the Rosetta Stone of rock art studies. The key to deciphering the rock art was the trance dance, a public ritual in which the shaman achieved a state of altered consciousness through rhythmic dancing, accompanied by clapping and singing.
Evidence from the Namib Desert

Southern African scholars argue that rock art and shamanic practice was not hidden: it was open for all to see. An egalitarian hunter-gatherer society had no place for specialist ritual practitioners. Other shamanic traditions are described by scholars of religion as essentially “polyphase”. This means having a phase of occultation, when the shaman is hidden or concealed, followed by his emergence or reappearance.

Shaman figure enveloped in an animal skin cloak, Snake Rock, Dâures massif. Joris Komen

Namib Desert rock art has many hidden sites, including paintings in dark crevices that cannot admit more than one person. These sites were part of a preparatory process which preceded a ritual performance. A striking feature of the rock art is its highly individualised figures, clearly shamans, overwhelmingly male and replete with specialised ritual equipment, including fly whisks, moth cocoon dancing rattles and long animal skin cloaks almost concealing the body. Significantly, these figures are not shown as participating in communal trance dance.

The evidence suggests that shamans in the Namib were individual specialists who travelled from place to place. They prepared themselves for ritual action in places of physical seclusion, rather than during the large communal trance dance events that rock art scholars have insisted were the fundamental social mechanism for trance experience throughout this region.

Enigmatically, no trace of ritual paraphernalia had been found elsewhere in southern Africa. This has led scholars to suggest that there probably were no such items and that the rock art represents concepts such as power and control rather than actual items of material culture.

So, what of the emperor moth dancing rattles? Are they no more than an unusual and accidental find, adding a little texture to our understanding of the rock art? On the contrary, they show that occultation, as an element of performance not previously considered by scholars of the region, is of fundamental importance to an understanding of the art and ritual practice of southern African hunter-gatherers. The rattles expose a critical weakness in conventional explanations.
The emperor moth dancing rattles

Moth cocoons with small pebbles placed inside and strung about the lower limbs, issue a characteristic rustling sound, a rhythmic accompaniment to the ritual dance. Their significance goes much further, for the cocoon represents the stage of occultation when the moth larva is hidden from view. The moth itself is the emergent stage represented by the dancing shaman: once hidden, now apparent.

Emergent emperor moths with extended wings, Naib ravine, Dâures massif. Rodney Lichtman

Paintings of emperor moths are rare but those in the Dâures massif are shown with the wings extended as in the emergent stage. The painted moth represents the shaman with his knee-length animal hide cloak which resembles the wings. The cocoon rattle, the moth and the cloaked shaman thus combine the two essential stages of ritual performance: concealment and reappearance.

Cloaked figures are, of course, not confined to the rock art of the Namib Desert. The fact that they occur over much of southern Africa shows that they refer to a basic trope in this ritual tradition, overlooked until now.

The occultation and emergence of the emperor moth has further ramifications, too. It explains the importance of physical seclusion, such as in the deep rock crevices found in the desert, as sites of ritual preparation from which the shaman emerges to perform his work. It also explains why the cocoons and other ritual items were buried at the site; these are objects imbued with supernatural potency and therefore kept hidden, in a state of latency, lest their powers be misused.

Now we see that these small items are more important than they might at first appear. Indeed, they provide the first integration of southern African rock art and hunter-gatherer ritual practice on the basis of firmly dated archaeological evidence. They alleviate a long-standing and counter-productive separation of rock art studies and the less glamorous field of “dirt” archaeology.

Perhaps the evidence from the Namib is not unique after all; there may well be cocoon rattles elsewhere, and dark crevices with hidden rock art still waiting to be found.

Namib – the archaeology of an African desert was originally published by the University of Namibia Press. It is available from Wits University Press and is also available internationally from Boydell & Brewer.

Author

John Kinahan
Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

University of the Witwatersrand provides support as a hosting partner of The Conversation AFRICA.