Esoteric Coffeehouse

The other day, being hit with an annoying bout of cold, I was (re)reading a short treatise by the medieval Iranian philosopher Suhrawardi. Suggestively called “A Tale of the Western Exile”, the story follows the saga of a wisdom-seeker in the “Western” lands (1). In this story of esoteric initiation, the “West” stands as a negative symbol of materialism and bodily pleasure. Suhrawardi was heretic philosopher who was executed in 1191 by the Sultan. Yet, if you ask an average Middle Eastern man today, chances are that he will hold similar views regarding the West being decadently materialistic. The resilience of this perspective of the West coming from the East is remarkable. Yet the views of the West in Europe were often different. Let’s now briefly switch to another mythical tale, this time written on the other extremity of the medieval world, in Ireland. Here, the adventures of St Brendan tell us how the saint sailed to the fairy islands in the West. The voyage takes him to the borders of Christian paradise whence he must return (2). Here we have a dramatically different view of the West as a spiritual, if real, land of the blessed.

This over-simplistic analysis is not meant to say that the Westerners always looked to the West and Easterners to the East for salvation. Things are much more complicated than this, and they probably go to the core of what we feel about the cardinal points of East and West. They are obviously linked with the Sun’s path in the sky. In the East, the Sun is just rising, foretelling a new day. Hence the East is about renewal, hope, the promise of a new beginning. The West is the mysterious end – the unknown at the end of the road. The West is about death, afterlife, the latter times, and frequently about the hopes of earthly survival beyond natural death.

Indeed, the Greeks, Celts and other cultures viewed the West as the direction souls departed after death. Yet the good souls did not simply vanish, but would continue to dwell in the “Western” islands. Hence mythologies such as the Greek Islands of the Blessed and Avalon of the Britons focused on the existence of islands where dead souls continued on living. These islands were physical places in the people’s minds at the time: Christopher Columbus himself believed in the existence of St Brendan’s Island (3).

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Everyone remembers the witch hunts of the 1500 and 1600s as an ugly chapter of Western history. Thousands of so-called witches were burned, drowned, or tortured in an attempt to get rid of what the Inquisitors called ‘devil worship’. Today, we rarely believe that the witches were in league with the devil. In fact, during the early 20th century, scholars thought that witchcraft itself was a complete invention of the witch hunters (1). Even when some reality to the phenomenon was admitted, witch beliefs were dismissed as the matter of ‘female hysteria’ or peasant superstition (2).

Beginning with the 1960s and 70s, scholars began to consider witchcraft as more than a fiction of the Inquisition, and concentrated on analyzing its meaning for the peasant society (3), (4). Yet even this attempt was marred by a tendency of dismissing witchcraft as pure imagination.

If most scholarship believed witchcraft had no reality to it, there was one early dissenting voice: Margaret Murray, who maintained in 1926 that witchcraft was real, and that it actually represented a European-wide pagan religion dedicated to a horned god identifiable as Janus or Cernunnos (5). The medieval civilization was thus divided into the true Christians and the pagan “secret society” that adopted Christianity only as a facade. In an era of rationalism, numerous scholars rejected Murray’s work as pure fantasy (6).

Murray may have used her imagination to embellish the facts, but this does not necessarily mean that the whole phenomenon of witchcraft was imaginary. However, it was not until Carlo Ginzburg’s landmark studies that scholars began to really consider this possibility.

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We’re barely out of the Chinese New Year and the next celebration is almost here: Valentine’s Day. Since I can’t miss an opportunity to investigate a festival’s origins and mythology, I will proceed without much further ado.

A quick search on the internet will immediately inform you that the Valentine’s Day originates from the Roman festival of Lupercalia. But what was Lupercalia and how did it evolve into our modern Valentine’s Day?

In its classical manifestation, Lupercalia (“The Wolf Festival”) was a bizarre ritual where skimpily clad young men would run around whipping women with goat skin thongs. The women were also almost naked (1). The running men were called Luperci, the wolf people, and were divided into two “colleges” (2). The festival had enough importance to have Julius Caesar establish a third college, the Iuliani, which was first headed by his loyal general, Mark Anthony, of Cleopatra fame (3). The celebration perpetuated well into Christian Rome, before an archbishop of Rome forbade it.

Despite the fact that numerous Roman writers left testimonials about the Lupercalia, scholars are divided about the origins and meanings of this tradition. For instance, it is not clear what god was celebrated at the Lupercalia, if any at all. Some writers associated the celebration with the Luperca, the she-wolf who fed the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus (4). Other times it was associated with Evander, a legendary Greek hero who came to Rome from Arcadia (5). Most often, however, the celebration was associated with the god Pan, or Faunus as the Romans called it (6). In light of evidence, this is by far the most likely possibility.

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It is so bitterly cold outside, that it must be New Year’s Eve. Chinese New Year is here, heralding the year of the Ox. So I thought I’d switch gears a bit and analyze the image of the Ox to get an insight as to what this symbol means and what we can expect from an “ox year”.

Dictionary tells us that the ox is a castrated version of  bull (1). In other words, it is a bull whose wild, unpredictable energy has been converted to useful, manageable strength. Therefore, I will proceed by taking a look at the religious image of the Bull to decipher its general meaning.

Today, we associate bulls with energizing drinks, company logos, the astrological sign and rising financial markets. Chances are, unless you live on a farm, there will be very few instances in your life where you would actually meet a bull. Probably the only places that can still give you an idea of the force and stamina of the bull are rodeos and Spanish bullfighting. Therefore, we can only imagine the type of religious awe that this animal exercised in the early days of human history. The bull was an image of brute, untamable force that could destroy anything or anyone in its path. Thus, it was one of the first, and most pervasive religious symbols of mankind.

The Bull first appears on the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux in France, and most scholars accept that the images implied a cult of the bull (2). During the High Neolithic period, stylized bulls appear on pottery from the so-called Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey (3). In Sumerian-Assyrian culture, god Gugalana, the “Bull of Heaven”, is slain by hero Gilgamesh; the deity was no doubt associated with the Taurus constellation (4). The bulls are also prominent in Egyptian and Minoan Greek culture. The cult of the Apis bull was widespread in ancient Egypt, being associated with the slain god Osiris (5). The Bull also figured prominently in the religion of ancient Crete. The famous myth of the Cretan Labyrinth and the Minotaur must be a pale recollection of an earlier bull-cult. The Minotaur, the half-bull half-human creature destroyed by Greek hero Theseus, appears to have embodied the underworld god Minos, the archetypal king of Crete. Significantly, Minos was the offspring of the love between virgin Europa and Zeus in the shape of a bull god (6).

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