The old gods

My M.A. is in historical linguistics, focusing particularly on northern European languages and how they interacted in (relatively) recent times.  (While "recent," to a linguist, isn't quite as out of line with common usage as compared to how it's used by geologists, it bears mentioning that my earliest point of research is around fifteen hundred years ago.)  One of the difficulties I ran into was that two of the languages I studied -- Old English and Old Norse -- descend from a common root a very long time ago, so they share some similarities that are "genetic."  A simple example is that the Old English word for home (hām) and the Old Norse word (heim) are both descended from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *haimaz.  So if a word in Modern English comes from an Old Norse borrow-word -- one that came into English following the Viking invasions in the ninth and tenth centuries -- how could you differentiate that from a word that had been there all along, descending from the common roots of the two languages?

The most effective method is that during the time following the split between the ancestors of Old English and Old Norse, each of the languages evolved in different directions.  To take just one of many examples I used, some time around the eighth century, a pronunciation shift occurred called palatalization.  This is when words with a stop (p, t, d, g, and so on) followed by a front vowel (i or e) eventually "palatalize" the consonant, usually to y, j, or ch.  (It's driven by ease of pronunciation, and it's still happening today -- it's why in fast speech most people pronounce "don't you" as something like /dontchu/.)

In any case, words with /gi/ and /ge/ combinations in Old English all got palatalized to /yi/ and /ye/.  It's why we have yield (Old English gieldan), yet (Old English gīet) and yellow (Old English geolu), to name three.  So how do we have any /gi/ and /ge/ words left?  Well, if they were borrowed -- mostly from the Norse-speaking invaders -- after the palatalization shift happened, they missed their chance.  So most of our words with that combination (gift, get, girth, gear, and so on) are Old Norse loan-words.

That's just one of the patterns I used, but it gives you the flavor of how this sort of work is done.  Differentiating genetic relationships between languages (inherited from common ancestry) and incidental relationships (through migration, cultural contact, and borrowing).  Anyhow, the point is, I've been steeped in this kind of research for a long time.  (Since "recently," in fact.)

But what I didn't know is that the same techniques have been brought to bear not on linguistics, but on religion, myth, and belief patterns.  The work I saw was done on Indo-European speaking cultures (encompassing languages from the British Isles all the way to India), but there's no reason the same techniques couldn't be used for other linguistic/cultural groups.

When I found out about it, my immediate thought was, "Brilliant!  That makes total sense."  Deities can be "inherited" (passed down within a culture) or "borrowed" (adopted because of cultural contact), just like words can.  The names are a big clue; so, of course, are the physical, personal, and spiritual attributes.  Some of the more obvious ones -- here called by their reconstructed Proto-Indo-European names -- include *Dyḗws Ph₂tḗr, the daylight-sky god; his consort *Dʰéǵʰōm, the earth mother; his daughter *H₂éwsōs, the dawn goddess; his sons the Divine Twins; *Seh₂ul, the sun god; and *Meh₁not, the moon goddess.

When you start seeing the patterns, they jump out at you.  *Dyḗws Ph₂tḗr directly led to Zeus, Jupiter, the Vedic sky god Dyáus, the Albanian sky god Zojz, and the Norse war god Týr.  To take only one other example -- *H₂éwsōs, the goddess of dawn, gave rise to the Greek Eos, the Vedia Ushas, the Lithuanian Aušrinė, and the Germanic Ēostre or Ostara -- from whose name we get our word Easter.  (The word Easter has nothing to do with the Babylonian god Ishtar, despite the rather hysterical post to that effect that seems to get passed around every spring.  The two sound a little similar but have no cultural or linguistic connection other than that.)

Aurora, Goddess of Dawn, by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1621) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What I find most fascinating about all this is how conservative cultures can be.  If the name of a dawn goddess in the three-thousand-year-old Indian Rig Veda is linguistically and thematically connected to the name of a similar goddess revered in eighth century C.E. Scandinavia, how far back do her roots go?  That there is any similarity considering the geographical separation and the long passage of time is somewhere beyond remarkable.

Our beliefs are remarkably resistant to change, and when a belief is hooked to something in a language, that bit of language becomes frozen, too.  Well, not frozen, exactly, but really sluggish.  The old gods, it seems, are still with us.  

Changed, perhaps, but still recognizable.  

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A leap into the dark

Beliefs in an afterlife of some sort are pretty ubiquitous.  It's understandable; death is scary, and seems final, and it's natural enough to want life in some fashion to continue.  My own view is that I simply don't know what comes after death.  I'm inclined to agree with the comedian who quipped, "Lots of things happen after you die.  They just don't involve you."  On the other hand, I suppose it's possible there might be some kind of survival of consciousness, even if my rational/scientific side finds it hard to imagine how that could possibly work.

In any case, I'll find out eventually one way or the other.  I hope not too soon.

So it's unsurprising that most cultures and religions have beliefs in an afterlife.  What I find strange, though, is how specific many of those beliefs are, and I'm not just talking about religion, here.  The reason this rather macabre topic comes up is a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a paper by folklorist and anthropologist Stuart Dunn of Grisham College entitled, "Corpse Roads: Digital Landscape Archaeology," which looks at the peculiar British tradition of designating certain pathways "corpse roads" because they were used to bring dead bodies from villages with no consecrated churchyard to one that had a burial ground.  (Many of these roads, it turns out, are still called "Such-and-Such Corpse Road," or less grimly, "Lych Road" -- líc was the Old English word for "body.")

These corpse roads were often considered liminal spaces, passageways not just of the obvious spatial sort.  So all kinds of traditions arose around them, including the rather terrifying idea that if you didn't conduct the body to its final resting place in exactly the right way, the dead person's spirit might travel back up the path and return to haunt the spot where (s)he died.  In order to obviate that possibility, you had to make sure to carry the corpse feet-first down the road, and never let it touch the soil until it reached the burial site.  Some of these pathways still have "coffin stones" alongside them -- places the pallbearers could set the coffin down and take a rest without it touching the dirt.

Another weird belief I learned about from Dunn's paper was the association between death and yew trees.  He speculates that it's because yew trees can be extremely long-lived, so they're associated with immortality.  He mentions a rather scary idea from Wales that is definitely one of the less comforting afterlife beliefs:

[I]n R. V. W. Elliott’s classic 1957 study, “Runes, Yews and Magic”... he describes the Brittonic belief that the root of a churchyard yew grows out of the mouth of each corpse buried therein, thus sustaining the former and ensuring its continued survival.

Then there's the idea of the totenpass -- German for "passport for the dead" -- the name given to a Greek and Egyptian tradition of burying an inscribed piece of metal with the deceased, either hung around their neck or put inside their mouth.  The inscription was a set of instructions for the dead person's spirit, so they wouldn't get lost in the next world.

Google Maps for the Afterlife, is the way I think of it.

These instructions were often amazingly detailed.  One totenpass from Crete had the following inscription:

You will find on the right in Hades's halls a spring, and by it stands a ghostly cypress-tree, where the dead souls descending wash away their lives.  Do not even draw nigh this spring.  Farther on you will find chill water flowing from the pool of Memory: over this stand guardians.  They will ask you with keen mind what is your quest in the gloom of deadly Hades.  They will ask you for what reason you have come.  Tell them the whole truth straight out. Say: 'I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven, but of Heaven is my birth: this you know yourselves.  I am parched with thirst and perishing: give me quickly chill water flowing from the pool of Memory.'  Assuredly the kings of the underworld take pity on you, and will themselves give you water from the spring divine; then you, when you have drunk, traverse the holy path which other initiates and bacchants tread in glory.  After that you will rule amongst the other heroes.

One has to wonder how the person who wrote the inscription, who was presumably still alive at the time, figured all this out.  But maybe it's best not to ask too many questions.

A fourth century B.C.E. totenpass from Thessaly [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Orphic Gold Tablet (Thessaly-The Getty Villa, Malibu), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then there's an Aztec belief -- also incredibly detailed -- about the use of a special type of paper called amatl or amate, made from the fibrous bark of fig trees, which was intended to give the dead person's spirit protection during the initial phases of the afterlife.  This process makes "going to your Eternal Rest" not sound so restful.  You needed six pieces of paper, each with the right designs drawn on it, or you were in some serious shit.  Here's how one source describes it:

The first piece of amatl paper was used to pass safely through two contending mountains.  The second piece helped the deceased to travel without any danger on the road guarded by the Great Serpent.  The third piece allowed a safe crossing over the Great Crocodile’s domain.  The fourth piece was a passport, which allowed the deceased to cross the Seven Deserts.  The fifth piece was used for a safe passage through the Eight Hills.  Finally and perhaps most importantly, the sixth piece was used for defense against the north wind.  In addition, for this latter challenge, the Aztecs burned the clothes and arms of the deceased so that the warmth coming from the burning body might protect the soul from the cold northern wind.

Seems like a lot of work to me.  One has to hope that after all that, there'd be something pleasant to look forward to.

The neighboring Mayans weren't much better.  Their concept of the underworld -- Xibalba, meaning "place of fright" -- makes the Judaeo-Christian hell sound like the French Riviera.   Just one of the special offers in Xibalba is a set of demons whose very names are enough to make going there a big old nope (not, I suppose, that you had any choice in the matter).  There's Xiquiripat ("Flying Scab"), Cuchumaquic ("Gathered Blood"), Ahalpuh ("Pus Demon"), Ahalgana ("Jaundice Demon"), Chamiabac ("Bone Staff"), Chamiaholom ("Skull Staff"), Ahaltocob ("Stabbing Demon"), and  Ahalmez ("Sweepings Demon"), just to name a few.  And if you think "Sweepings Demon" doesn't sound so bad, I should mention that Ahalmez teamed up with Ahaltocob to torture the souls of bad housekeepers.  Ahalmez hid in the dust of unswept parts of your house and lured your spirit over, then Ahaltocob jumped out and stabbed you.

This would be problematic for me and my wife, because our approach to housekeeping can be summed up as "there seems to have been a struggle."  It's likely that one of these days we'll both go missing, and when the police investigate, they'll find us both trapped inside giant dust bunnies.  So I guess it's a good thing we're not Mayan.

Anyhow, I find this all very curious, because it falls squarely into the "How exactly do you know any of this?" department.  But it's hardly the only devoutly-held belief I could say that about.

In any case, I'm okay with not knowing what'll happen after I die.  Death is the ultimate leap into the dark -- either into something new and different, or into nothing.  I'd just as soon if it is something new and different, that it not involve having to keep bunches of pieces of paper straight, because most days I have a hard enough time keeping track of simple paperwork like paying the electric bill.

But I guess the incentive for getting it right is pretty strong.  I for sure will remember not to draw nigh to any ghostly cypress-trees.  That sounds scary.

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The legend of the lost sister

The difficult thing about any sort of historical research is that sometimes, the evidence you're looking for doesn't even exist.

In my own field of historical linguistics, for example, we're trying to determine what languages are related to each other (creating, as it were, a family tree for languages), figuring out word roots, identifying words borrowed from other languages, and reconstructing the ancestral language -- based only on the languages we now have access to.  There are times when there simply isn't enough information available to solve the particular puzzle you're working on.

The further back in time you go, the shakier the ground gets.  You'll see in etymological dictionaries claims like "the Proto-Indo-European word for 'settlement' or 'town' was *-weyk," but that's an inference; there aren't many Proto-Indo-Europeans around these days to verify if this is correct.  It's not just a guess, though.  It was reconstructed from the suffixes -wich and -wick you see in a lot of English place names (Norwich, Warwick), the Latin word vicus (meaning "a village in a rural area"), the Welsh gwig and Cornish guic (which mean approximately the same as the Latin does), the Greek word οἶκος (house), the Sanskrit viś and Old Church Slavonic vĭsĭ (both meaning "settlement"), and so on.  Using patterns of sound change, we can take current languages (or at least ones we have written records for) and backpedal to make an inference about what the speakers of PIE four thousand years ago might have said.

Still, it is only an inference, and the inherent unverifiability of it sometimes leaves practitioners of "hard science" scoffing and quoting Wolfgang Pauli, that such claims "aren't even wrong."  I think that's unduly harsh (but of course, given that this is basically what my master's thesis was about, it's no surprise I get a little defensive).  Even so, I think we have to be careful how hard to push a claim based on slim evidence.

That was my immediate thought when I read an article by Jay Norris, of Western Sydney University, in The Conversation.  It was about the mythology associated with my favorite naked-eye astronomical feature -- the Pleiades.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rawastrodata, The Pleiades (M45), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Norris and another astronomer, Barnaby Norris (not sure if they're related, or if it's a coincidence), have authored a paper that appeared in a book in 2022 called Advancing Cultural Astronomy which looks at a strange thing: in cultures all over the world, the Pleiades are associated with a collection of seven individuals.  They're the Seven Sisters in Greece, and also in many indigenous Australian cultures, for example.  And Norris and Norris realized two things that were very odd; first, that even on a clear night, you can only see six stars with the naked eye, not seven; and in both the Greek and Australian myth, the story involves a "lost sister" -- one of the seven who, for some reason or another, disappeared or is hidden.

So they started looking in other traditions, and found that all over the world, in cultures as unrelated as Indonesian, many Native American groups, many African cultures, the Scandinavians, and the Celts, there was the same tradition of associating the Pleiades with the number seven, and with one of the group who was lost.

They then went to the astronomical data.  They found that the stars in the Pleiades are moving relative to each other, and that a hundred thousand years ago there would have been seven stars visible to the naked eye in the cluster, but in the interim two of them moved so close together (from our perspective, at least) that they appear to be a single star unless you have a telescope.  That, they say, is the "lost sister," and is why cultures all over the world have a tradition that the group used to have seven members, but now only has six.

And this, they said, was evidence that the myth of the Pleiades is one of the oldest stories humans have told.  At least fifty thousand years old -- when the indigenous Australians migrated across a grassy valley that (when the sea level rose) became the Bay of Carpentaria -- and perhaps as much as a hundred thousand years old, when the common ancestors of all humans were still living in Africa and (presumably) shared a single cultural tradition.

It's a fascinating claim.  I have to admit that the commonalities of the myths surrounding the Pleiades in cultures all over the world are a little hard to explain otherwise.  Still, I can't say I'm a hundred percent sold.  I know from my work in reconstructive linguistics that chance similarities are weirdly common, and can lead to some seriously specious conclusions.  (Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall my rather brutal takedown a few years ago of a guy named L. M. Leteane, who used cherry-picked chance similarities between words to support his loony claim that the Pascuanese -- or Easter Islanders -- were originally from Egypt, as were the Olmecs of Central America, and both languages were descended from Bantu.)

So as far as the claim that the story of the Seven Sisters is over fifty thousand years old, count me as interested but unconvinced.  I think it's possible; it's certainly intriguing.  But to me, it's too hard to eliminate the simpler possibility, that the "loss" of one of the stars in the Pleiades was noted by many ancient cultures -- separately, and much more recently -- and became incorporated into their legends, rather than all the legends of the Pleiades and the lost sister coming from a single, very ancient ancestral story.

But it'll give you something to think about, when you see the Pleiades on the next clear night.  Whatever the origins of the myths surrounding it, it's awe-inspiring to think about our distant ancestors looking up at the same beautiful cluster of stars on a chilly, clear winter's night, and wondering what it really was -- same as we're doing today using the tools of science.

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Jenny's ancestry

I went into historical linguistics because of my fascination with origins.

It's manifested in other realms of study.  My primary interest in biology, a subject I taught for over three decades, is evolutionary genetics; I'm endlessly interested in the family tree of life, and its connections to species migration, adaptation, paleontology, and extinction.  More personally, I've been a devoted genealogist since I was a teenager, and although my hoped-for noble lineage never showed up (my ancestry is virtually all French, Scottish, and English peasants, rogues, ne'er-do-wells, and petty criminals), I still periodically add to my database of ancestors and cousins of varying degrees, which now contains over 150,000 names.

It's why when I find a curious origin story, it just makes my little nerdy heart happy.  Like when I discovered something strange about a rather terrifying legend from northern England -- the tale of Jenny Greenteeth.

Jenny Greenteeth is a story that seems to be most common in Lancashire, Cumbria, and the western parts of Yorkshire, and is about a "river hag" -- a female water spirit that specializes in grabbing people, especially children, who have strayed too close to the water, and drowning them.  She shares a lot in common with the Slavic Rusalka and French Melusine, which makes me wonder why people kept dreaming up stories about strange women lying in ponds.  (Certainly it's no basis for a system of government.)

Well, like just about everything, the legend of Jenny Greenteeth didn't come out of nowhere; even folk tales have their origin stories.  (I've written here about the absolutely charming piece of research by anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani, wherein he developed a cladistic tree for the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood.")  And Jenny Greenteeth has a bit of a surprise in store, because her name isn't because her teeth, or anything else about her, are green.

The hint comes from the fact that in some areas of Cumbria, she's still called "Ginny Grendith" -- and the last bit has nothing to do with teeth, either.  That the story evolved that way is like a folkloric version of convergent evolution; once people noticed the chance similarity between her original name and "green teeth," her last name morphed in that direction, probably because it gave her alleged appearance an extra little frisson of nastiness.  

So where does "Greenteeth" come from?  It turns out the name -- and its alternative form, Grendith -- are cousins to that of another creature from the English bestiary, the grindylow.  Like Jenny, the grindylow was a water-dweller, a small humanoid with scaly skin, big nasty pointy teeth, and long arms ending in broad hands with grasping fingers.  They, too, were said to be fond of drowning children.

It's a wonder any surviving kids in northern England who lived near water didn't become permanently phobic.

What's fascinating, though, is that the story doesn't stop there, because grindylow itself has even deeper roots.  The name is thought to have evolved from yet another mythological monster, this one much more famous: Grendel.

Grendel by J. R. Skelton (1908) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Grendel, of course, was the Big Bad in the pre-Norman English epic Beowulf, who was eventually killed by the titular hero.  In a translation by none other than J. R. R. Tolkien, Grendel is described as follows:

... the other, miscreated thing,
in man's form trod the ways of exile,
albeit he was greater than any other human thing.
Him in days of old the dwellers on earth named Grendel.

Grendel was called a sceadugenga -- a "shadow walker," a creature who came out at night.  He was a denizen of boundaries, not quite human and not quite beast, and frequented places that also were on the edge; the spaces between inhabited areas and the wilds, between lowlands and highlands... and between land and water.  He was said to be a "swamp-dweller," living in fens, and that may have been how his later descendants, the grindylow and Jenny Greenteeth, became associated with ponds and marshes.

I've always felt sorry for Grendel.  He did some bad stuff, but he was kind of just built that way.  He didn't ask to be put together from spare parts.  It's why I named a dog I had a while back Grendel.  He was a bit funny-looking too, but he always meant well.

Maybe it's just that I always root for the underdog.

Where the name Grendel came from isn't certain.  Some linguists believe it comes from gren ("grin") + dæle ("divided"), i.e. baring his teeth.  Old English gryndal meant "fierce," but whether that came from the name Grendel or the other way 'round is unknown.  Same thing for the Old Norse grindill, meaning "storm wind."  The Beowulf story has its roots in old Germanic mythology, and there's no doubt it has ties to Scandinavia, but that one may be an accidental false cognate.  Grendel could also come from the Old English grenedæl, "green lowland" -- so there might be a connection to the color green, after all.

In any case, it's an interesting, if unsettling, legend, which a curious history.  I have a pond in my back yard in which I regularly swim, and thus far I haven't been grabbed by a creepy woman with green teeth.  I'll keep my eye out, though.  You can't be too careful about these sorts of things.

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The world of the trickster

Sometimes I run across a piece of research that is just so charming I have to tell you about it.

This particular one comes from the European University of St. Petersburg, where anthropologist and folklorist Yuri Berezkin has been working on tracking down the origins of trickster myths worldwide.  Every culture seems to have them -- characters from folk tales who are clever, wily, getting themselves into and then deftly out of trouble, often helping we humans out as they go (although we're the butt of the joke just as frequently; one of the persistent themes is that tricksters may be dashing and funny, but they can't be trusted).

I remember first coming across trickster myths when I was a kid, and had a positive obsession with mythology.  Loki, from Norse mythology, was a trickster of a more malevolent kind; the Greek god Hermes was the messenger of Olympus, but got his start as a small child stealing his brother Apollo's sacred cattle; and Coyote, a character in the stories of many Indigenous American cultures, one that was generally more benevolent to his human acquaintances.  When as a teenager, I read Richard Adams's amazing novel Watership Down -- in the characters' tales of the wise and daring El-Ahrairah (his name means "The Prince With a Thousand Enemies," translated from Lapine), I recognized the tropes right away.  El-Ahrairah is courageous, sometimes to the point of foolhardiness; out for his own gain and that of his friends, even if it means breaking the rules; not above taking every opportunity to make his foes look like idiots; fiercely loyal to the weak and powerless who call on him for help.

What Berezkin found is that trickster figures fall into three broad categories: fox/coyote/jackal, the most common, found throughout Europe, Siberia, East Asia, North Africa, much of central and eastern North America, and the Andes region down into Patagonia; hare/rabbit, found in the tales from southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (from which it jumped to North America via the slave trade; thus the Bre'r Rabbit tales, and ultimately, Bugs Bunny); and raven/crow, found in northwestern North America and across central Canada, far eastern Siberia, and a few spots in east Asia and Australia.

Coyote the Trickster (Edward Curtis, ca. 1915) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What's fascinating is that it appears that as people moved, they carried their stories with them, but upon settling in new areas, simply applied the same stories to a different set of anthropomorphized animals, based on whatever wildlife lived in the new region.  (For example, as Indigenous Americans moved from the Northwest into the Plains, their stories remained similar in theme, but they substituted Coyote for Raven.)

Berezkin writes:

The existence of two major zones of trickster tales in Eurasia and Africa, one with the fox/jackal and another with the hare/rabbit, seems to reject the differentiation of Homo sapiens populations after entering Eurasia from Africa.  During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) the Pacific borderlands of Asia and the northern/continental Eurasia were isolated from each other by sparsely populated mountainous and desert areas.  Each of the major zones populated by modern people during the LGM produced its own cultural forms.  When the LGM was over, the bearers of both cultural complexes took part in the peopling of the New World.

Humans have been storytellers for a very long time.  If Berezkin is right, trickster stories go back at least to the Last Glacial Maximum, which is on the order of twenty thousand years ago.  How much older they are than that is anyone's guess, but given how widespread they are, and the commonalities between them worldwide, they might be twice that old or more.

So the next time you tell folk tales to your children, or read mythical accounts of the derring-do, cleverness, and craftiness of figures like Prometheus and Anansi and Kokopelli and Veles, you are participating in a tradition that far antedates written language, and has been passed down through the oral tradition back into a shadowy and unknown past.  You are helping to keep alive something that unites every culture on Earth.

I think Coyote would be proud.

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Lord of frenzy

I'm sure most of you have heard of the Norse god Odin, at least from his appearance in the Marvel universe.  My first exposure to this bit of mythology came from my near-obsession with the book D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths, which I checked out from my elementary school library approximately 538 times.  This, in fact, is why to this day when I think of the trickster god Loki, I picture this:

And not this:

Be that as it may, the Norse pantheon is a fascinating bunch, and unusual amongst the gods of myth and legend in being mortal.  In fact, one of the most famous parts of the mythos is the tale of Ragnarök -- literally, "the doom of the gods" -- in which Loki unleashes chaos and destruction by causing the death of Baldr, the beloved god of light and joy.  The whole thing is described in brilliant detail in the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda of the thirteenth-century Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson, to whom we owe much of what we know about the beliefs of pre-Christian Scandinavia.

Odin (or Wōden, as he was called in Saxon England; this form of his name is the origin of the word Wednesday), the "All-Father," was one of the principal figures in the Germanic pantheon.  His name comes from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *Wōðanaz, which means "lord of frenzy."  There are dozens of curious stories about him -- that he hanged himself from Yggdrasil, the "World Tree," in order to gain the knowledge of the runes and writing; that he created the first man and woman from an ash and a birch tree, respectively; that he gave one of his eyes in order to drink from the well of wisdom; and that he rode upon an eight-legged horse called Sleipnir, that was the offspring of the stallion Svaðilfari and Loki, who had taken the form of a mare.

Odin on Sleipnir (from Den ældre Eddas Gudesange by Lorenz Frølich, 1895) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What I didn't know, though, was that the earliest actual attestation of Odin from any written record is comparatively recent.  A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about a study of a gold disk from Denmark that contains the first certain reference to Odin, and I was surprised to see that it dates to only the fifth century C.E.  The disk is called the Vindelev bracteate -- it was found near the town of Vindelev, and a bracteate is a flat pendant.  It states, in runic lettering, "He is Odin's man," presumably referring to some unknown chieftain or leader.

Given the complexity of the legends surrounding Odin and the other Norse gods, presumably their worship goes a lot further back; but I honestly didn't realize how much less we have in the way of early attestations of the Norse pantheon as compared to (for example) the Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Indian, and Chinese assemblages of deities.  Just about everything we know comes from the eighth century and later, the point at which the Vikings kind of exploded out of Scandinavia and did their best to take over all of northern Europe.  They did a damn good job; not only was all of eastern England under Danish control for a time, so were the Hebrides and Orkneys, Normandy (the name itself means "northman-land"), and a good part of what is now western Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.  (Perhaps you know that the name Russia itself comes from the Rus, a group of Norse traders who ruled the entire region for a while, with their capital at Kyiv.)

So the dating of the Vindelev bracteate to the fifth century certainly doesn't mean that's when the worship of Odin began, only that this is the first certain example of anyone writing about it.  His influence on the beliefs of the pre-Christian Germanic world is immense.  As an Old English runic poem from the ninth century put it:

Wōden is the origin of all language
wisdom's foundation and wise man's comfort
and to every hero blessing and hope.

Perhaps the All-Father would not be upset that this is the way he's remembered, that his association with frenzy and battle was superseded by wisdom and hope, just as the people who once worshiped him settled down to become some of the most peaceful, progressive, and prosperous nations in the world. 

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Head hunters

Today's post combines archaeology, mythology, and an etymological mystery -- surely a recipe for something fascinating.

I first ran into the Blemmyes in Umberto Eco's tour-de-force medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose, where they are described as a race of people living in Africa who have no heads; their faces are in the middle of their torsos.  The topic comes up because of the habit of a manuscript illuminator, Brother Adelmo, who has a habit of adorning his manuscript with fanciful creatures -- not only familiar ones like centaurs and unicorns and dragons, but Cynocephali (dog-headed men), Sciapodes (people with one leg and a huge foot, the inspiration for the Monopods in C. S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and... the Blemmyes.

One of the Blemmyes (from a 1556 map by Guillaume de Testu) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So naturally I thought that the Blemmyes were a complete fiction.  (Actually, given the illustration, I hoped they were a complete fiction, because they're freakin' creepy-looking.)

That's why I was pretty surprised when I ran into a story on Science Daily yesterday, about some research out of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona that was published last week in the American Journal of Archaeology.  The paper was about the Blemmyes -- who were apparently a real nomadic people that lived in what is now southern and central Egypt during Roman times, and who had their faces on their heads as per the usual human specifications.

What's weirdest about this is that the sources that mention the mythological headless Blemmyes and the ordinary human Blemmyes have almost no overlap; it's as if the authors of one didn't even talk to the authors of the other.  This might be understandable if it was some kind of linguistic coincidence, where two groups of people just happened to use similar-sounding words to describe two entirely different things; but I'm sorry, "Blemmyes" -- not only identical-sounding word, but identical spelling -- is just too weird for me to accept that they're unrelated homophones.  Add to that the fact that the alleged territory of the mythological Blemmyes and the home of the real Blemmyes both were what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan, and I can't swallow it as some bizarre coincidence.

But the medievalists don't seem to have a good idea of how it happened.  The real Blemmyes, according to third century B. C. E. historian and writer Eratosthenes, were named after one of their ancient kings, King Blemys, but he is unattested elsewhere.  Other linguists have traced the name of the actual people to the Coptic word Ⲃⲁⲗⲛⲉⲙⲙⲱⲟⲩⲓ, Balnemmōui, but tracking the word earlier than that has proven impossible.  What seems certain is that the real Blemmyes are the ancestors of the people who today call themselves the Beja, who live in southern Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea.

The mythological Blemmyes are even more of a mystery to linguists.  Seventeenth-century French antiquarian Samuel Bochart thought their name came from the Hebrew bly (בלי) "without" and moach (מוח) "brain;" linguist Louis Morié believed it was from the Greek blemma (βλέμμα) "look, glance" and muō (μύω) "close the eyes;" Egyptologist Hans Wolfgang Helck drew its descent from a Coptic word for "blind."

The truth is, no one knows for sure.

Oh, but if you want an even stranger coincidence, the paper in The American Journal of Archaeology about the real Blemmyes is about the discovery in the Egyptian town of Berenike of one of their shrines, within which was entombed fifteen mummified falcons...

... all of which were headless.

You can't make this shit up.

In any case, we're left with a mystery.  The fictional Blemmyes and the real Blemmyes -- and the descendants of the latter, the Beja -- seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with one another, except for a common name and living in approximately the same place.  But there has to be some connection, right?  I dunno, maybe we should be out there looking for real Cynocephali and Sciapodes.  

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Dog tales

People who know me are well aware that I consider our two dogs, Guinness and Cleo, to be family members, not just pets.

They're kind of an odd couple.  Guinness ("Dorkus Maximus") is a big, lumbering pit bull mix, whose thick coat and curly tail comes from some husky and chow ancestry turned up by DNA analysis; Cleo ("Dorkus Minimus") is a tiny, one-eyed pure-bred Shiba Inu rescue, whose personality supports the contention that Shibas are dogs for people who really wanted a cat instead.  Despite the fact that they seem to have nothing in common, they are best friends.  When they play tug-of-war, even though Guinness outweighs Cleo by a factor of four, he lets her win sometimes, as a good big brother should.

I've dealt here before with the fascinating questions surrounding how dogs were domesticated, and how since then they've coevolved to live with (i.e. manipulate) their owners.  So it was no surprise that a recent piece of research in the journal Anthropozoologica caught my eye.  The author, Julian d'Huy of the Collège de France, has been studying the mythology that has grown up around dogs in cultures across the world, and found some fascinating commonalities -- suggesting that our mythologizing dogs has as long a history as our domesticating them.

d'Huy found that there were three themes that seemed to be universal: (1) dogs as faithful companions to heros/heroines; (2) dogs as protector spirits and guides to the afterlife; and (3) an association between dogs and the star Sirius (the "Dog Star," the brightest star in the night sky, in the constellation Canis Major -- the "Big Dog").  

The first one is hardly surprising, given the fact that humans have had dogs as companion animals for thousands of years.  The second I find a little more puzzling.  Neither of our dogs is what you might call an effective guard dog, unless you count their mortal hatred of the Evil UPS Guy.  When the Evil UPS Guy shows up, both Guinness and Cleo go berserk, running around and barking, Guinness's booming "WOOF" punctuated by Cleo's comical and high-pitched "Ruff!", until finally the Guy gets scared and intimidated and leaves.  At least that's how they interpret it.  What seems to go through their heads is "we barked and he ran away, go us!"  Then they high-five and go back to sleep, so worn out that they wouldn't even twitch if an actual burglar were to show up.  In fact, if the burglar had some chunks of cheese in his pocket, Cleo would probably show him where the valuables are hidden.

I do think it's kind of fascinating, though, despite my own dogs' failings in the Guardian of House and Hearth department, that so many cultures associate dogs with being protector spirits, many of them shapeshifters who were thought to continue their loyal defense even in the afterlife.  Part of the elaborate tattoo on my back, shoulder, chest, and arm contains a design of two Celtic-style dogs, a tribute not only to my personal furry friends but to their role as spiritual guides and protectors.

But the oddest of all is the third of d'Huy's observations -- that apparently, Sirius was associated with dogs by more cultures than just the ancient Greeks.  Given the dubious resemblance of the constellations to the things they're supposed to represent, I always figured that most of them were completely arbitrary, and our current designations were probably the result of some ancient Greek guy looking up into the night sky at a random cluster of stars, probably after drinking way too much ouzo, and saying, "Hey, y'ever notice that bunch o' stars over there?  Looks just like a dude pouring water out of a pitcher."  And that's how "Aquarius" was born.

d'Huy's contention is that the association of Sirius with dogs isn't because there's anything especially doggy about it, but that the connection goes way back -- so much so that it's been passed down in many different cultures, and maintained even as populations traveled all over the world.  I don't know how you'd prove such an assertion, but in any case, it's kind of a strange coincidence otherwise. 

So dogs have worked their way not only into our hearts and homes, but into our stories, lore, and mythology.  I guess it only makes sense that these creatures who have become so close to us would show up in the tales we tell.  Dogs have made appearances in my own books, most notably the characters of Ahab (in Signal to Noise) and Baxter (in Kill Switch), the latter of which was the cause of one of the funniest interactions I've ever had with a reader.  I was walking down the street in my home village, and a guy I barely know came up to me and said he was reading Kill Switch, and so far, enjoying it.

"I just wanted to let you know one thing, though," he said.  "I know it's a thriller.  I know people are gonna die.  But..." -- and here, he grabbed me by the arm and looked me straight in the eye with a grim expression -- "... if you kill Baxter, I will never speak to you again."

We care deeply about our pets, even fictional ones, I guess.

But now I need to wind this up, and go see why Guinness and Cleo are barking.  My guess is it's the Evil UPS Guy again.  He just never gives up, that Guy.

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The legend of the lost sister

The difficult thing about any sort of historical research is that sometimes, the evidence you're looking for doesn't even exist.

In my own field of historical linguistics, for example, we're trying to determine what languages are related to each other (creating, as it were, a family tree for languages), figuring out word roots, identifying words borrowed from other languages, and reconstructing the ancestral language -- based only on the languages we now have access to.  There are times when there simply isn't enough information available to solve the particular puzzle you're working on.

The further back in time you go, the shakier the ground gets.  You'll see in etymological dictionaries claims like "the Proto-Indo-European word for 'settlement' or 'town' was *-weyk," but that's an inference; there aren't many Proto-Indo-Europeans around these days to verify if this is correct.  It's not just a guess, though,  It was reconstructed from the suffixes -wich and -wick you see in a lot of English place names (Norwich, Warwick), the Latin word vicus (meaning "a village in a rural area"), the Welsh gwig and Cornish guic (which mean approximately the same as the Latin does), the Greek word οἶκος (house), the Sanskrit viś and Old Church Slavonic vĭsĭ (both meaning "settlement"), and so on.  Using patterns of sound change, we can take current languages (or at least ones we have written records for) and backpedal to make an inference about what the speakers of PIE four thousand years ago might have said.

Still, it is only an inference, and the inherent unverifiability of it sometimes leaves practitioners of "hard science" scoffing and quoting Wolfgang Pauli, that such claims "aren't even wrong."  I think that's unduly harsh (but of course, given that this is basically what my master's thesis was about, it's no surprise I get a little defensive).  Even so, I think we have to be careful how hard to push a claim based on slim evidence.

That was my immediate thought when I read an article by Jay Norris, of Western Sydney University, in The Conversation.  It was about the mythology associated with my favorite naked-eye astronomical feature -- the Pleiades.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rawastrodata, The Pleiades (M45), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Norris and another astronomer, Barnaby Norris (not sure if they're related, or if it's a coincidence), have authored a paper that will appear in a book next year called Advancing Cultural Astronomy which looks at a strange thing: in cultures all over the world, the Pleaides are associated with a collection of seven individuals.  They're the Seven Sisters in Greece, and also in many indigenous Australian cultures, for example.  And Norris and Norris realized two things that were very odd; first, that even on a clear night, you can only see six stars with the naked eye, not seven; and in both the Greek and Australian myth, the story involves a "lost sister" -- one of the seven who, for some reason or another, disappeared or is hidden.

So they started looking in other traditions, and found that all over the world, in cultures as unrelated as Indonesian, many Native American groups, many African cultures, the Scandinavians, and the Celts, there was the same tradition of associating the Pleiades with the number seven, and with one of the group who was lost.  

They then went to the astronomical data.  They found that the stars in the Pleiades are moving relative to each other, and that a hundred thousand years ago there would have been seven stars visible to the naked eye in the cluster, but in the interim two of them moved so close together (from our perspective, at least) that they appear to be a single star unless you have a telescope.  That, they say, is the "lost sister," and is why cultures all over the world have a tradition that the group used to have seven members, but now only has six.

And this, they said, was evidence that the myth of the Pleiades is one of the oldest stories humans have told.  At least fifty thousand years old -- when the indigenous Australians migrated across a grassy valley that (when the sea level rose) became the Bay of Carpentaria -- and perhaps as much as a hundred thousand years old, when the common ancestors of all humans were still living in Africa and (presumably) shared a single cultural tradition.

It's a fascinating claim.  I have to admit that the commonalities of the myths surrounding the Pleiades in cultures all over the world are a little hard to explain otherwise.  Still, I can't say I'm a hundred percent sold.  I know from my work in reconstructive linguistics that chance similarities are weirdly common, and can lead to some seriously specious conclusions.  (Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall my rather brutal takedown two years ago of a guy named L. M. Leteane, who used cherry-picked chance similarities between words to support his loony claim that the Pascuanese -- or Easter Islanders -- were originally from Egypt, as were the Olmecs of Central America, and both languages were descended from Bantu.)

So as far as the claim that the story of the Seven Sisters is over fifty thousand years old, count me as unconvinced.  I think it's possible; it's certainly intriguing.  But to me, it's too hard to eliminate the simpler possibility, that the "loss" of one of the stars in the Pleaides was noted by many ancient cultures -- separately, and much more recently -- and became incorporated into their legends, rather than all the legends of the Pleiades and the lost sister coming from a single, very ancient ancestral story.

But it'll give you something to think about, when you see the Pleiades on the next clear night.  Whatever the origins of the myths surrounding it, it's awe-inspiring to think about our distant ancestors looking up at the same beautiful cluster of stars on a chilly, clear winter's night, and wondering what it really was -- same as we're doing today using the tools of science.

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I've always loved a good parody, and one of the best I've ever seen was given to me decades ago as a Christmas present from a friend.  The book, Science Made Stupid, is a send-up of middle-school science texts, and is one of the most fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious things I've ever read.  I'll never forget opening the present on Christmas morning and sitting there on the floor in front of the tree, laughing until my stomach hurt.

If you want a good laugh -- and let's face it, lately most of us could use one -- get this book.  In it, you'll learn the proper spelling of Archaeopteryx, the physics of the disinclined plane, little-known constellations like O'Brien and Camelopackus, and the difference between she trues, shoe trees, and tree shrews. (And as I mentioned, it would make the perfect holiday gift for any science-nerd types in your family and friends.)

Science education may never be the same again.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Antique ghosts

I've long been curious how far back beliefs in the supernatural go.

From what we know about ancient religions and mythologies, belief in something that transcends ordinary human experience seems nearly ubiquitous.  I suppose that without adequate scientific model to explain natural phenomena, nor even the tools to study them, deciding that it must be supernatural forces at work is natural enough.  What puzzles me, though, is how detailed some of those beliefs are.  The ancient Norse didn't just say that there was some powerful guy up there causing thunder somehow; they said it was Thor throwing a giant hammer called "Mjölnir" that was forged by the dwarves Brokk and Sindri, but while they were forging it a fly bit Sindri on the forehead and made him stop pumping the bellows (the fly was Loki in disguise, trying to fuck things up as usual), so the hammer came out with a handle that was too short.

So I guess our belief in the supernatural is not the only thing that goes back a long way.  So does our penchant for telling elaborate stories.

A recent analysis of a 3,500 year old Babylonian artifact that had been gathering dust in the British Museum has shown that our belief not only in gods but in ghosts has a long history.  The tablet came to the attention of Irving Finkel, one of the world's authorities on cuneiform and ancient languages of the Mesopotamian region.  And when Finkel took a look at the tablet, he realized the previous translation had been incomplete and at least partly incorrect.  The text is about how to get rid of a ghost -- and the front of it has the faint outlines of a male ghost being led at the end of a rope by a woman.

The gist of the text is that the way to deal with a haunting is to give the ghost what (s)he wants.  In this case, the ghost is horny and wants some female companionship.  How exactly the owners of the haunted house would talk a (living) woman into being the ghost's lover is an open question.

"It’s obviously a male ghost and he’s miserable," Finkel explained.  "You can imagine a tall, thin, bearded ghost hanging about the house did get on people’s nerves.  The final analysis was that what this ghost needed was a lover...  You can’t help but imagine what happened before.  'Oh God, Uncle Henry’s back.'  Maybe Uncle Henry’s lost three wives.  Something that everybody knew was the way to get rid of the old bugger was to marry him off...  It’s a kind of explicit message.  There’s very high-quality writing there and immaculate draughtsmanship.  That somebody thinks they can get rid of a ghost by giving them a bedfellow is quite comic."

The exact details of the ritual are as complex as the story of the forging of Thor's hammer.  You're to make figurines of a man and a woman, then, "... dress the man in an everyday shift and equip him with travel provisions.  You wrap the woman in four red garments and clothe her in a purple cloth.  You give her a golden brooch.  You equip her fully with bed, chair, mat and towel; you give her a comb and a flask.  At sunrise towards the sun you make the ritual arrangements and set up two carnelian vessels of beer.  You set in place a special vessel and set up a juniper censer with juniper.  You draw the curtain like that of the diviner.  You [put] the figurines together with their equipment and place them in position… and say as follows, Shamash [god of the sun and judge of the underworld by night]."

It ends by cautioning, "Don't look behind you."

Once again, you have to wonder how they figured all this out.  Were there other ghosts they tried to get rid of, but they only clothed the female figurine in three red garments, and it didn't work?  Did they serve the beer in alabaster vessels instead of carnelian, and the ghost said, "Well, fuck that, I'm not leaving."  What happens if you use cedar wood instead of juniper?  Most importantly, what happens if you look behind you?

Whatever the source of those details, it certainly demonstrates the antiquity of myth-making.  "All the fears and weaknesses and characteristics that make the human race so fascinating, assuredly were there in spades 3,500 years ago," Finkel said.

Here in our modern world, we tend to blithely dismiss such beliefs as "primitive" or "unsophisticated," but it bears keeping in mind that they were trying to explain what they experienced, just like we do.  Our scientific advancements have allowed us to peer deeper, and (more importantly) to make tests of our explanations to see if they fit the data -- but what the beliefs of the ancients lacked in rigor they made up for in a strange and intricate beauty.  And this little tablet gives us a window into a long-gone civilization -- making me wonder what other artifacts are still out there to be discovered, and what else we might be able to learn about the myths and folklore of our distant ancestors.

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Some of the most enduring mysteries of linguistics (and archaeology) are written languages for which we have no dictionary -- no knowledge of the symbol-to-phoneme (or symbol-to-syllable, or symbol-to-concept) correspondences.

One of the most famous cases where that seemingly intractable problem was solved was the near-miraculous decipherment of the Linear B script of Crete by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris, but it bears keeping in mind that this wasn't the first time this kind of thing was accomplished.  In the early years of the nineteenth century, this was the situation with the Egyptian hieroglyphics -- until the code was cracked using the famous Rosetta Stone, by the dual efforts of Thomas Young of England and Jean-François Champollion of France.

This herculean, but ultimately successful, task is the subject of the fascinating book The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone, by Edward Dolnick.  Dolnick doesn't just focus on the linguistic details, but tells the engrossing story of the rivalry between Young and Champollion, ending with Champollion beating Young to the solution -- and then dying of a stroke at the age of 41.  It's a story not only of a puzzle, but of two powerful and passionate personalities.  If you're an aficionado of languages, history, or Egypt, you definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]