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!]

The reawakening of Merlin

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about a site in Hertfordshire, England called "Arthur's Seat" that has long been associated with the famous (but possibly mythical) sixth-century king, but which dates from Neolithic times -- over four millennia earlier.

The difficulty with teasing out fact from fiction, when there are scant contemporaneous written records of any reliability, is apparent.  A good many historians think that Arthur is based on a real person, who was a Celtic (or Celto-Roman) chieftain and fought against the first invasions of the Saxons, but the phrase "based upon" is being used in the loosest possible sense.  How many of the other figures in the Arthurian Legend cycle -- Guinevere, Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, the Knights Who Say "Ni" -- were even within hailing distance of reality is unknown, and probably unknowable.

Of course, there are always new discoveries being made, even in an extensively-researched place like England.  The most recent, and the reason the topic of Arthur comes up (again), is a manuscript found in an archive in Bristol, which I found out about because of my friend Gil Miller, who is a frequent contributor to Skeptophilia. 

The manuscript dates from the middle of the thirteenth century, and has a few interesting features.  The text is very similar to known copies of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, which formed the basis of Thomas Malory's famous Le Morte d'Arthur.  It has a few curious differences, though, particularly surrounding the relationship between Merlin and Viviane (also called Nimué) -- the Lady of the Lake.

A piece of the Bristol manuscript

In most copies of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, Viviane writes magic words on her groin, and this binds Merlin to her will, inducing him to have sex with her and teach her all of his knowledge.  Once she's had her way with him as much as she wants and has learned everything she can from him, she puts him into a charmed sleep -- this prevents him from assisting King Arthur in his fight at the Battle of Camlann against his villainous nephew Mordred (or Modred or Medraut), resulting in the deaths of both Arthur and Mordred.  Afterward, Merlin is fated to sleep "until Britain needs him again," at which he'll awaken and use his magic to save the day and make up for allowing Arthur to die.

Merlin, from Howard Pyle's illustrations for The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The new version takes out some of the more risqué bits.  Viviane inscribes the magic words on a ring instead of on her skin, and Merlin is simply bewitched rather than doing the deed with her.  The outcome is the same -- Merlin gets put into a charmed sleep -- but otherwise, the Bristol fragments have been cleaned up a bit by the prudish sorts.  Here's the passage from one of the standard sources:

And the girl [Viviane] made Merlin lie down in her lap, and she started to ask him questions.  She moved around him, and seduced him again and again until he was sick with love for her.  And then she asked him to teach her how to put a man to sleep.  And he knew very well what she was planning, but nevertheless, he could not prevent himself from teaching her this skill, and many others as well, because Our Lord God wanted it this way.  And he taught her three names, which she inscribed on a ring every time that she had to speak to him.  These words were so powerful that when they were imprinted on her, they prevented anyone from speaking to her.  She put all of this down in writing, and from then on, she manipulated Merlin every time that he came to talk to her, so that he had no power over her.  And that is why the proverbs say that women have one more trick than the devil.

What I find interesting about the new manuscripts is that from handwriting analysis, they were written in northern France -- but an annotation in the margin has been identified as an English script style used in the early fourteenth century, so the manuscript somehow made its way to England only a few decades after it was written.

Interesting as it is, it doesn't improve our knowledge from a historical perspective.  The Bristol manuscripts were still written a good seven centuries after Arthur's time, and don't add anything much to the legend, unless you count whether or not Merlin had sex with Viviane.  Back in the British "Dark Ages" -- between the exit of Rome in the fourth century and the consolidation of the Saxon kingdoms in southern and eastern England in the seventh century -- there were damn few records of any kind being kept, and whatever there was didn't survive.  We're relying on folk histories (which intermingle history with legend and mythology) and records that were written way after the fact.

So the sad truth is, we'll probably never know which bits of the story were true and which were not.

But it's still a cool discovery.  I had no idea how much handwriting analysis tells scholars; I didn't realize that it was distinct enough as to time and place that you could confidently say "this was written in northern France in around 1250."

But all I can say is, if Merlin is still in his magical sleep, it's probably time for him to wake up.  I know a few places other than Britain that could use some help from a powerful benevolent wizard.  So if Viviane reads this, allow me to say: Enough already.

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London in the nineteenth century was a seriously disgusting place to live, especially for the lower classes.  Sewage was dumped into gutters along the street; it then ran down into the ground -- the same ground from which residents pumped their drinking water.  The smell can only be imagined, but the prevalence of infectious water-borne diseases is a matter of record.

In 1854 there was a horrible epidemic of cholera hit central London, ultimately killing over six hundred people.  Because the most obvious unsanitary thing about the place was the smell, the leading thinkers of the time thought that cholera came from bad air -- the "miasmal model" of contagion.  But a doctor named John Snow thought it was water-borne, and through his tireless work, he was able to trace the entire epidemic to one hand-pumped well.  Finally, after weeks and months of argument, the city planners agreed to remove the handle of the well, and the epidemic ended only a few days afterward.

The work of John Snow led to a complete change in attitude toward sanitation, sewers, and safe drinking water, and in only a few years completely changed the face of the city of London.  Snow, and the epidemic he halted, are the subject of the fantastic book The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Cities, Science, and the Modern World, by science historian Steven Johnson.  The detective work Snow undertook, and his tireless efforts to save the London poor from a horrible disease, make for fascinating reading, and shine a vivid light on what cities were like back when life for all but the wealthy was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (to swipe Edmund Burke's trenchant turn of phrase).

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Sanitizing history

An online acquaintance of mine made an interesting statement a couple of days ago.

"The Europeans didn't just bring exploitation and disease to North America, they brought war.  The Native Americans didn't even fight wars until after the Europeans arrived."

I asked him how he knew this, and he said he'd read it in a book, and then posted a link from (of all things) a Reddit page.   I gave a verbal shrug, and sort of said, "Okay, then," and didn't push the topic any further.  But I've been thinking about it ever since.

Why do we need to have certain ethnic groups be characterized by a nearly mythical goodness?

How often have we heard that before the Europeans arrived, the Natives were "in touch with the land," that they respected the Great Spirit, asked animals' permission before hunting, never took more than their fair share of what nature had to offer?  And now, this gentleman claims that they also never made war on each other until the Europeans arrived and taught them to do so.  I've heard similar claims made for other groups -- most commonly the Celts, who have also been mythologized to a fare-thee-well, to the point that since the mid-1800s there have been quasi-religious groups of "druids" who have tried to emulate what they think the Celts were doing back then.  More recently, the Afrocentrist movement has claimed that all good things came from Africa, and the extreme wing of that school of thought calls dark-skinned people "Sun People" and light-skinned people "Ice People" -- with all of the value judgments that those terms imply.

There are a couple of problems with all of this -- one of them academic, one of them common-sense.

The academic problem is that because all three of those groups left next to no tangible records, we really don't have all that clear a picture of what they were doing before they were contacted by societies who did write things down.  And when that contact occurred, the records left weren't exactly unbiased -- it's hard to know how much to believe of (for example) what the Romans wrote about the Celts.  Trying to piece together what was going on in the years prior to such contact is decidedly non-trivial, and has to be inferred from archaeological evidence and such indirect evidence as patterns of linguistic distribution.

Queen Boudicca of the Celts by Joseph Martin Kronheim (1855) [Image is in the Public Domain]

In preparation for writing this, I tried to find out what was actually known to anthropologists about the nature of society in pre-Columbian North America, and the answer is: surprisingly little.  I'm no anthropologist myself, so am unqualified to make a firm judgment, but what did strike me about the papers I read is that they don't even necessarily agree with each other.  The tangible artifacts left behind by some groups (e.g. the Pueblo cultures of the US Southwest) seem to suggest a peaceful agricultural existence, but that, too, is a guess.  It seems fairly certain that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tribes of the Northeastern US did a good bit of fighting with the Algonquian tribes of Eastern Canada; those groups were "traditional enemies" and apparently were happily beating each other up long before the French and English arrived and made things worse.  Certainly the Aztecs, Maya, and Incas of Central and South America were not exactly what you might call peaceful by nature -- stone carvings show Aztec priests ripping the hearts from living sacrificial victims, and at least some of those victims appear from the carvings to have been prisoners of war.

My second objection is purely common sense; while some cultural values seem to me to be better than others, I just don't believe that whole groups of people were somehow "nicer" overall.  Consider what a future anthropologist might make of our current "warlike" American culture -- in the last hundred years we have certainly fought a great many times in places around the globe, for a variety of purposes, and during that time have diverted a large percentage of our resources into weaponry and the military.  What does that mean about us as a people?  My general feeling is "not much."  If you look around you, you'll find mean people, nice people, aggressive people, gentle people, and pretty much the gamut of whatever set of traits you choose.  Sure, our militarism is connected to our citizenry -- the military decisions are made by our leaders, who are elected by us -- but a future mythologizer who came up with a concept of American People As Evil Bloodthirsty Imperialists would be missing the truth by a mile.  (As would a concept of Americans As Courageous, World-Saving Warriors.)

Please note that I am in no way trying to excuse what our, or any other culture's, militarism actually accomplished.  What the Europeans did to the Native Americans and the Africans, what the British did to the Australian Natives and the people of India and Pakistan, what the Romans (and later the English) did to the Celts, are inexcusable tragedies.  My point is that the cultures who were the victims of these atrocities were not themselves perfect, and we do no favors either to them nor to the study of history in general by pretending that's true. 

 It is easy, out of our pity for the losers, to make them into creatures of myth, as having lived in an Eden until the nasty aggressors came in and fucked it up.  As always, reality is complex and messy, and doesn't fit neatly into pigeonholes.  It might be appealing to believe that the Celts were the Mystical, Nature-Worshiping People of the Sacred Forest prior to their being beaten to a pulp by a whole succession of cultures.  But this is a myth, just like the Native American as Noble Protector of the Environment and the African cultures as warm-hearted, creative Sun People.  No culture is perfect, no ethnic group without flaws, and it is only our desire to have an ideal to espouse that makes us ascribe such characteristics to the inhabitants of the past.

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One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

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