Morgan

Since I mentioned in my last blog the Arthurian link to fairies, and since the Arthurian legend is such an enormous part of English supernatural lore, I think it fitting to elaborate upon the key fae creature of those stories: that is, Morgan le Fay.

Morgan's name gives an interesting perspective on her character. "Morgan" is, in Celtic terms, a man's name, with "Morgaine" the female equivalent. Additionally, in Celtic mythology, the Morrigan was a triple goddess of death, who flew shrieking over battlefields to claim the heads of slaughtered soldiers. Her name, then, represents power to the point of masculinity. ("Morgan Le Fay" http://www.arthurian-legend.com/more-about/more-about-arthur-8.php)

"Le Fay," of course, refers to her fairy origins, though depending on which version of the story we use, the exact nature of this label changes. Some suggest that she was a fairy turned into a woman who became a sorceress in order to retain her powers. In early texts, Morgan was the chief of nine magical sisters who dwelt in Avalon, and had the abilities to shapeshift and fly with wings. At times she is portrayed as malignant towards Arthur, and she is the mother of Mordred who slays him, but she is never utterly wicked. She is beautiful, seductive, and a healer, and she is usually reconciled with Arthur in the end. In fact, she is traditionally one of three women who carry Arthur to Avalon to be healed.

Morgan is a good representative of the ambiguity of the pre-Shakespearean fairy. She is neither good nor evil. Her role alternates between friend and foe. It is not even clear at what point she ceases to be human and becomes fae, or vice versa. She embodies both us and them.

Speaking of "them," it is worth noting the feminine empowerment of fairy culture. Morgan is a powerful character in the Arthurian legend, in both name and legacy. She is usually unhappily married to a man Uriens, yet this does not stop her from taking lovers, orchestrating plots, and living her own life. (How many of us remember Uriens, after all? But everyone has heard of Morgan.) In the fairy realm, the female rules. If Avalon has rulers, they are women, just as the fairy queen is a far more popular folkloric figure than the fairy king.

Again we see fairies uniting separate parts. They are equalizers.

(Picture courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Morganlfay.jpg.)

Avalon Fading

One of the greatest struggles in this project so far has been trying to separate European fairy belief into its composite parts. In theory, I am discussing Early Modern British lore, but most legends overlap between countries, and most were becoming outdated by the Early Modern period. So far I have been struggling to pin down a strictly British theme, ignoring the obvious just in front of me: the Arthurian legend. I had forgotten, caught up in the complicated metaphor, that The Faerie Queene was structured around tales of King Arthur.

Although I spent a full semester last year studying Arthurian legends, the fairy connection did not come to me quickly for, I think, the same reasons I mentioned in my first frustrating attempts to find pre-Victorian pictures of fairies. Compared to our modern ideas, the fairies of Arthurian legend do not seem much like fairies at all. In Ashliman's Fairy Lore, however, the author lists Avalon as among the most popular depictions of fairyland, or faerie. While Arthurian fairies (i.e. Morgan le Fay) are vaguely sinister in their most favorable portrayals, the fairyland itself is more reminiscent of Eden than anything else. It is the Paradise in which Arthur will linger as he waits to rise again.

According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote The Life of Merlin in the late middle ages, Avalon, or the Island of Apples, produces all things of its own accord. None there labor for their livelihood, and those dwelling there live one hundred years or more (Ashliman 15-16). The location of Avalon changes from one source to the next. In the modern novel The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Avalon is akin to a parallel universe juxtaposed with our own and fading gradually into complete separation. I like this idea, as it captures the discomfort in and desperation for a closeness with supernatural realms. Since 1191, the physical site of Glastonbury Tor in Somerset, England, has also been associated with Avalon. In that year, Benedictine Monks from the nearby Abbey of St. Mary discovered what was said to be the grave of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. Many believed that the Tor, once almost entirely surrounded by water, could have been the enchanted island. It continues to be popularly linked with paranormal phenomena.


In fact, many traditional accounts place fairyland beneath the ground, including in grave mounds and natural hills (17). This emphasizes yet again the closeness of these particular supernatural creatures to common humanity. Some lore even plays upon the idea that we are competing with the fairies for space, a perhaps influential concept in the consensus that there are less fairies now than there once were. Fairies cannot coexist indefinitely with the Church, with reason, with the modern world. And so Avalon fades.

(Picture courtesy of http://photos.igougo.com/images/p361833-Glastonbury-Glastonbury_Tor.jpg.)

No Man's Woman

The portrayal of women through the stories we are reading continues to baffle me. Honestly, we may as well be discussing another mythical creature. I suppose the fact that most published writers of the Renaissance were male contributes to the mysticism surrounding the "other" sex, but the whole thing is most amusing. I have said before that the tone of the writing from this time often seems almost intimidated by women, and though this may be only wishful thinking or residual sexism on my part, I think it is worth looking into.

Thursday's discussion of The Duchess of Malfi focused on astrology and Renaissance ideas of women. Normally I would not categorize those two together, but putting them side by side got me thinking about possible links. For instance, the zodiac is broken up according to cycles of the moon, a cycle to which many women maintain a physical connection. I have always found that fascinating, but is it possible that some may have found this tie to a virtually unknown outer world disturbing? There is a sort of power in it. Alternately, many animals have a greater sense than humans of the movement of the earth - seasons, direction, and such things - so perhaps it could be argued that there is something of the animal in a woman's bodily awareness.

Speaking of animals, I was also struck by the idea of the hyena as hermaphrodite, used to insult the Duchess. A hermaphrodite embodies both the male and female reproductive organs, which, depending on context, may make it an oversexed monster or a sexless divinity. In the case of the Duchess, of course, it is monstrous. But if man is superior to woman, as was the general consensus, wouldn't the best woman be the woman most like a man? This seems to be a contradiction.

In fact, the Duchess is not a hermaphrodite at all. She is no Elizabeth. She is a wife and a mother as well as a ruler. She lies, she contradicts herself in the space of a scene, and she goes through all the gritty reality of pregnancy and childbirth. She is not a saint, and she is not a man's woman. The curious thing about the Duchess is that she manages to fulfill many of the negative characteristics (besides passiveness) ascribed to women of the time, while still gaining our empathy and respect. A truly hermaphroditic woman is generally considered a strong character, but I feel that a woman who must make herself a man to be noticed only conforms to a man's world. The Duchess does no such thing. She is woman to the core, and proud of it.

Is this a fearful thing? I wonder if there is a little awe in Webster's writing. Even as he seems to deface women with graphic images of vomit and bloated stomachs, his honesty towards a real woman, and not an idealized image, lends its own sort of glory to the sex. Perhaps that is why the Duchess is never given a name. She is "other," she is "something else," but she is a little too real for comfort. She must not be made too personal.

I muse only, and perhaps we all read what we want to read. But I'm terribly fond of this woman. I really am.

Changelings and Maiming Babies

I think I can trace my love of changelings back to a book called The Moorchild, which I read sometime in elementary school. It caught me at the perfect time, on the cusp of dress-up games and Pre-Algebra, and it dealt, predictably, with an adolescent girl who could not fit in. To make it interesting, this particular girl was in fact a fairy, unknown to herself, deposited in a human cradle in exchange for its original occupant. I think I would have grown out of fairies if it were not for that book. Until that time they had been frillsome little things with wands and wings, a tad too flat to hold the interest of a graduate from the Disney movie phase, but this new (actually much older) breed of fairy struck in me something that has never quite left.

Maybe it is that basic human emotion that wells up every so often to convince us that we were dropped into this world unprepared and in completely unceremonious fashion, the idea that we are "other" ourselves, a justification for the incurable loneliness of space between the stars and us. Maybe it is that vague hope that there is a practical reason for the weirdness of ourselves relative to our surroundings (or vice versa). To me, there is an eerie comfort in the idea that I our world may mingle with another, and I am sympathetic to the changeling. But the original tellers of these tales would have taken a much different approach. The changeling was an upset in the routine, a thing to be feared and prevented, and the results of these beliefs were often tragic.

Accounts of stolen children were one of the most popular types of fairy stories across Europe. Traditionally, a fairy would snatch away a child while the mother was not looking and replace it with one of its own kind. It would then tote its human captive back to the fairy kingdom, where he or she would remain unless someone could convince the fairy to come reclaim its own child. Infants in their first six weeks were considered especially vulnerable. To avoid this misfortune, mothers were cautioned to keep young children under constant supervision. Impious mistakes, such as failure to baptize a child in due time, were also linked to fairy kidnappings (Ashliman 26).

Some speculate that the fear of changelings was put into mothers in order to ensure that they took good care of their children. While this idea has merit, the atrocities committed towards children that were suspected of being changelings seems to outweigh its value, to my mind. According to Ashliman, "Symptoms specifically described in the legends include a swollen head, strangely staring eyes, a flat nose, incessant crying, misbehavior, failure to learn to talk or walk, and a voracious appetite" (25). By this account, it is likely that many children suffering from autism, Down syndrome, and other mental disabilities or physical deformities would have been labeled changelings. The standard approach to getting rid of a changeling was torturing it until its fairy parents came to save it, though other methods involved coaxing it to laugh or to utter an exclamation of surprise that would reveal its true identity and force its parents to return its mortal counterpart (27-29).

Legends of changelings end happily more often than not, offering hope to a period rife with birth defects and infant disease. As may be expected, true accounts were often far less positive. One woman who was tried in Ireland for drowning her four-year-old grandson, both mute and crippled, insisted that she had not meant to kill the child, but to "put the fairy out of it" (27). To give an idea of the punishments inflicted on these poor children, I must include one more quote from an Irish story, "The Brewery of Eggshells":

"Although its face was so withered, and its body wasted away to a mere skeleton, it had still a strong resemblance to her own boy. She therefore could not find it in her heart to roast it alive on the griddle, or to burn its nose off with red hot tongs, or to throw it out in the snow on the roadside, notwithstanding these, and several like proceedings, were strongly recommended to her for the recovery of the child" (27).

Legends of changelings were immensely popular and persisted in certain areas into the early 1900s (25). Such beliefs not only explained why some children were not "normal," but excused a family's unwillingness to support these children, who would have been deadweight in a society where all members of a family were expected to contribute their share of labor. Though it is not fair to hold these people at fault for their ignorance, it reveals the darker side of the pre-Victorian fairy story.

One facet of these tales that my sources have not explained, and that fascinates me, is the simple question of why fairies would steal children in the first place. What would a fairy want with a mortal? And yet that is a common theme in other branches of lore as well. Heartbreaking as it is to think of the abuse of handicapped children, I cannot help but return to my original curiosity at the idea of "other" among us. What do they want from us? With luck, more on this later.

Antithesis of a Ghost

I could not decide upon which character to focus this final entry for Hamlet. Initially, I meant to write a bit more on our old friend the ghost. Then I toyed with the idea of covering the eternally popular Ophelia. At last, however, I have concluded that the most fitting end to this discussion is the same as the end of most others: the grave-digger.

The grave-digger in Act five offers the first spoken possibility that Ophelia committed suicide. I find his opinion a particular curiosity because he is the first character we encounter who is entirely outside the influence of the court. The increasing mania in Denmark's royal circle denies us any certainty in the events that take place among them. In fact, the general tone is so strongly uncertain (and that comes very near to being an oxymoron) that we find our own sanity tremulous as it pertains to this story that sweeps us into itself. If Hamlet's murder of Polonius is the point at which he passes beyond all hope of redemption, Ophelia's madness is that same point for the story as a whole. When innocence becomes corrupt, the final net gives way. But at that point we are too bewildered by the ironies of despair to recognize the trap. The grave-digger, speaking as an unaffected observer, pulls us from this reverie into a world that will outlive our own minds.

As closely associated with death as he is, the grave-digger is scarcely affected by it. He chucks up skulls with good humor, no less alive for the reminder of his eventual fate. Hamlet may touch on a key point when he admits, "'Tis e'en so, the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense." He and his companions deal with little in the way of physical labors, so their minds are free to run themselves to distraction, while the grave-digger's more intimate connection to the natural world keeps him firmly grounded in its patterns. The grave-digger is the antithesis of the ghost. He does not muse; his riddles have answers. Death to him is not an unknown, but a physical absolute. That is all. He is real and solid and willing to let the world run as it will.

To call Ophelia's death an accident is to say that it was inevitable, but we know that was not the case. Hamlet, Laertes, Claudius - all are consumed by abstracted emotion, whether of their own accord or misleading by others, and because there is no certain protection against abstracts, they bind themselves to helplessness. The grave-digger is familiar with death, so it does not frighten him. Hamlet, on the other hand, has only his fantasies - his ghosts - to satisfy his morbid curiosity. The results of his brooding are, unfortunately, far more real than any of the quandaries themselves. It is easy in the world of the mind to create one's own lonely universe, but that does not stop the real one from following its usual course.

Someplace Between

They are not quite monsters, nor angels nor demons, yet they contain elements of all three. They are slightly freakish, sometimes glorious, and often deceptive. If the creatures that the human mind creates are offshoots of the human mind, and if fairies contain traces of all such creatures, it is no surprise that they should be the most human of the bunch. So just how human aren’t they? The very word “supernatural” implies some amount of freedom from physical limitations, and this is what separates fairies from us common folk. Still, if they can engage in physical activities (sex, eating, etc.), and even be enticed by them, it would seem that they must have some substance.

The commonly accepted idea is that fairies’ bodies are “astral.” That is, they are comprised of spiritual matter that cannot be grasped and that passes through other solid substances, but they are capable of eating, drinking, sleeping, talking, and other physical activities at will. Paracelsus, a Swiss occultist, developed some leading ideas on this matter, separating all fairies into four categories based on the four elements of the earth. Gnomes inhabited the earth and soil, sylphs air, salamanders fire, and undines water. Their bodies were more transient than human flesh, but more solid than pure spirit. Though a certain fairy would not be comprised of its given element itself, it was closely tied to it and therefore to a physical world. With the Christianization of fairy lore, some theorized that fairies were actually fallen angels, stopped by the earth halfway between heaven and hell and turned into given types of creature depending on their area of landing. This follows with the idea that fairies were neither good nor evil, but merely different, stuck between with the rest of us. Paracelsus, however, did not believe that fairies were immortal. Because of their innate link to the earth, they merely returned to it, ceasing to exist when they died.

I find this particularly interesting insofar as it relates to salvation. There are numerous accounts of fairies seeking to be saved only to learn that they are barred from that gift, though a few stories tell otherwise. I cannot help but wonder if this would have seemed as much a part of the freedom of the fae folk as the ability to walk through walls. If they could not be saved, neither could they be damned. Surely there must have been something tantalizing in the idea of abandoning the impositions of the church without consequence (remembering that the doctrine of the time focused on the punishment of disobedience rather than the reward of loyalty). Perhaps fairies were, in this way, a form of wish fulfillment as are so many fantasies, the embodiment of a what-if that one could never achieve for oneself.

Love Like a House of Cards

Really, it's the Polonius bit that bothered me. When Hamlet ceases to ruminate and follows reckless impulse, he does not lose my sympathy, but he loses my respect. Hamlet is neither villain nor hero, just a typically human mixture of the two, and I can pity him both for his circumstances and their effects on his temperament. However, with his reaction to Polonius' death, it is clear that he has allowed himself to become his vengeance. I can accept the murder itself as a mistake; it is his coldness at the sight of the dead body that marks a turning point. That Hamlet, normally so tossed by the throes of emotion, should not blanch at the sight of his beloved's father slaughtered by his own hand proves that he no longer has a thought for any pain but his own. Perhaps any of us would react the same way under extreme duress, but though his actions can be explained, they cannot be justified.

That said, we must remember that it was not only Hamlet's father that was murdered, but his image of goodness. Murder is almost universally recognized as an injustice, and if Claudius had taken Gertrude against her will, his foulness would have been undiluted. Hamlet's heart may have been broken, but his delineations between good and evil would have remained intact. However, the fact that Claudius' greed combined with Gertrude's insincerity skewed Hamlet's entire conception of love. I think many of us believe true love to be the one unconquerable force in a world of uncertainty, if we believe in it at all. So when we think we have seen love and it is proven fallible, it is as though the fibers of the world begin to unravel.

Several years ago, my family became enamored with a certain minister. What he preached was biblically correct, and he was passionate about it. He looked like a genuine disciple of God, so we aspired to follow his lead. Then we began to see warning signs, discrepancies between words and actions, warped interpretations of scripture. We pulled away from him while remaining close to the rest of his family, trapped and learnedly helpless against a man who turned out to be a manic-depressive narcissist and clinically psychopathic. I suffered minimal personal hurts in the matter, yet I felt for months like I was losing my mind. My faith is my life. It was a man and not God who let me down (and this brought me through it in time), but the experience destroyed my trust in any authority, even my own mind, for quite a while. In fact, a great deal of unwilling resentment fell on my parents. If they, always seeking truth above popular appeal, could be so gullible, who could be trusted to know better? And if they could be wrong in following this man, could they not be as wrong in pulling away? That thought terrified me, for if God was truly on his side, I feared I wanted nothing to do with Him. If I thought my beliefs to be a fortress, I found them then to be a house of cards on a gusty day. I was forced to re-examine them by inches, rebuilding from the ground up.

I am guilty again of a tangent, but I mean to prove a point. To have a fundamental trust disproven is catastrophic to anyone, at least temporarily. Evil that has always been evil is not nearly so terrifying as evil taken once for good. When core beliefs are ripped to shreds, what can remain but madness? And from that madness we must seek something truer or surrender. If indeed a hero, Hamlet would have, perhaps, proven a truer love with Ophelia than his parents had together. Still, that would be much to ask of anyone so quickly. It is unfortunately at the peak of instability that the ghost goads Hamlet to action, for when good is shaken, evil, too, becomes difficult to differentiate. It may not be strange that Hamlet cannot feel remorse for Polonius. At the point that one cannot rationally label a single action as "good" or "bad", numbness becomes a predictable defense.

I do not condone Hamlet's actions, but I become increasingly convinced that he is played upon, that the ghost is not who he says he is (or that Hamlet's is a miserable father). If he had held off his visit a year or two, he may have been avenged without a single unnecessary death added to the tally. It is the timing that makes the story of Hamlet, and that makes it so tragic.