The Journey to the Other World 0874716136

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These papers, given at the Con­ ference at Exeter in 1971 under the auspices of the Exeter University History Department and the Folklore Society, deal with the theme of the 'journey to the other world', 'a con­ ception which has fascinated man from very early times, and Ihas inspired some of the great themes of epic and religious literature,' besides proving 'a perennial motif in folklore and popular literature.' The papers range from Muhammad's Journey to Heaven to The Phantom Coach in the West Country and Under­ world Themes In M o d e m Fiction.

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MISTLETOE BOOKS NO. 2

THE JOURNEY TO THE OTHER WORLD

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THE JOURNEY TO THE OTHER WORLD

Edited by H.R.Ellis Davidson

Published by D.S.Brewer Ltd and Rowman and Littlefield for The Folklore Society 1975

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Published by D.S.Brewer Ltd. 240 Hills Road Cambridge and P.0. Box 24 Ipswich IPl 1JJ ISBN

0 85991 Oil 3 (U.K.) 0 87471 613 6 (U.S.A.)

First published in the U.S.A. 1975 by Rowman and Littlefield Totowa N.J. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: The Journey to the Other World (Folklore Society publications; no.2) Papers, given at a conference at the University of Exeter in April 1971, and sponsored by the Dept, of History and the London Folklore Society. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Future life. I. Davidson, Hilda Roderick Ellis, ed. II. Exeter, Eng. University. Dept, of History. III. Folk-lore Society, London. IV. Series Folk-lore Society, London. Publications; no. 2 BL535.J68 1975 236’.2 74-22305

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Redwood Burn Limited Trowbridge & Esher

CONTENTS

Page Preface 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Muhammad's Journey to Heaven. J.R. Porter ....................

1

The Thirteenth-Century Mongols' Conception of the After-Life: the evidence of their funeral practices. John Andrew Boyle ... ... ...

27

Other World Journeys in Japan. Carmen Blacker ..............

42

The Ship of the Dead. H.R. Ellis Davidson

73

.........

West Country Entrances to the Underworld. Theo Brown ... ... ...

...

90

6.

The Phantom Coach in the West Country. 104 E . Waring ... ... ... ...

7.

The Hero's Descent to the Underworld. J.G. Bishop ... ... ... ...

109

Underworld Themes in Modern Fiction. H.W. S t u b b s ....... . ........

130

8.

CONTRIBUTORS

The Reverend John G. Bishop, B.A. (Bristol), B.D. (London), Ph.D. (London). Rector of Dartington, Totnes, Devon. Carmen Blacker, M.A. (Oxon.), Ph.D. (London). Lecturer in Japanese, University of Cambridge. Professor J.A. Boyle, B.A. (Birmingham), Ph.D. (London). Department of Persian Studies, University of Manchester. Theo Brown, Honorary Research Fellow in British Folklore, Department of History, University of Exeter. Hilda R. Ellis Davidson, M.A., Ph.D. (Cantab.), F.S.A. Lecturer at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. President of the Folklore Society. Professor the Reverend Canon J.R. Porter, M.A. (Oxon.), Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Head of the Department of Thteology, University of Exeter. H.W. Stubbs, M.A. (Oxon.). Senior Lecturer in Classics, University of Exeter. E. Waring, M.A., M.Litt. (Cantab.) Staff Tutor in Philosophy, Department of Extra-Mural Studies, University of Bristol.

THE

PAPERS

FROM

JOURNEY

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EXETER THE

1971

OTHER

WORLD

Preface The papers in this volume were given at a conference at the University of Exeter in April 1971, sponsored jointly by the Department of History and the London Folklore Society. It is hoped that this will be the first of a series of conferences at University centres to be pub­ lished by the Society. The Exeter conference was organised by Theo Brown, Research Fellow in British Folklore in the History Department; the Committee of the Folklore Society, of which she is a member, is most grateful to her and to all those in the University who gave help and en­ couragement and a warm welcome to those who attended. The subject chosen was the Journey to the Other World, a conception which has fascinated man from very early times, and has inspired some of the great themes of epic and religious lit­ erature. It has also proved a perennial motif in folklore and popular literature, and the papers by John Bishop and Hugh Stubbs give some indication of its extent and persistence from ancient times to our own day, and the various forms of treatment, solemn, dramatic, satiric or humorous, which it has received. Canon Porter's study of Muhammad's supernatural jour­ neys and Carmen Blacker's survey of Buddhist visionary literature from Japan both emphasise the importance of the shamanic element, the journey of the living shaman, prophet or seer to realms beyond this world and back to his own community, bringing help, inspiration and warn­ ing to those left behind. The theme of the

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journey of the dead and its relationship to fun­ eral ritual and burial rites are discussed by Professor Boyle in his paper on Mongol practices and traditions in the thirteenth century, and by Hilda Davidson in an account of ship funeral in pagan Scandinavia and parallels from other parts of the world. Finally two folklore stud­ ies are based on material collected in the West Country, Theo Brown's paper on local traditions of entrances to the Other World, and E. Waring's short study of local legends of phantom coaches, in which he raises a number of questions of im­ portance to folklorists. Constantly recurring symbols like the horse, the wagon, the ship and the ladder, the tree and the mountain at the earth's centre, the descent into the depths of earth and water, provide links between the papers. In Carmen Blacker's paper, modern Japanese folk traditions of children snatched away for a while to the Other World are set against a background of vis­ ionary journeys forming part of the teaching of great religious leaders. It is clear that the folklorist collecting oral material often needs to be aware of the existence of a rich back­ ground of literary and religious tradition, while those who work on literary sources muät benefit by realising the continuing significance of themes like that of the Other World Journey in the living folklore of the community. The reaction of ritual and legend upon each other, and the association of traditions with topo­ graphical features and notorious characters are further important questions for folklore studies raised in these papers. It is essential more­ over to realise that such motifs and traditions flourish within the community because they ful­ fil a definite need: at the conference this point was made in a talk by Dr. R.F. Hobson, a practising psychiatrist, and proved a stimulaing subject for discussion. Finally Miss Aline

Scott-Elliot1s film of the Padstow and Minehead Hobby-horse ceremonies reminded us of the part played by visitants from the Other World in folk ritual. With a theme of such depth and complexity, an approach from a number of standpoints seems to be a helpful one. Here folklore provides a link between the various disciplines, and also between the lofty realms of religion and liter­ ature on the one hand and the basic reactions and needs of a group or community on the other. It should therefore have a special contribution to offer.

H.R. Ellis Davidson.

MUHAMMAD'S JOURNEY TO HEAVEN By J.R. Porter The earliest connected account of the as­ cension of Muhammad is found in the famous bio­ graphy of Muhammad written by Ibn-Ishäq, who lived from A.D. 702 to 768: he was thus active about a century after the death of Muhammad which took place in A.D. 632. I begin from Ibn-Ishäq's work rather than from those brief passages in the Kur'än1 which have tradition­ ally been taken as referring to Muhammad's as­ cension because the meaning of those enigmatic verses is much disputed by scholars and the de­ tailed discussion, which would be necessary if one were to try and make use of than,would take us too far from the particular concerns of this paper. Ibn-Ishäq's narrative is a weaving to­ gether of a number of traditions stemming from various intimates of Muhammad, such as his wife 'Ä'isha. As a result, there sometimes occur different versions of the same episode which diverge more or less significantly from one an­ other. More importantly, Ibn-Ishäq's story is a combination of two quite distinct events, one, Muhammad's journey in a single night from Mecca to Jerusalem which, in the strict sense, is not an ascension at all, and the other, Muhammad's visit to the heavens. We shall have to con­ sider the relationship between these two events in due course. According to the story,2 Muhammad was sleepone night near the Ka'ba, the sacred building in the centre of the sanctuary at Mecca, when he was woken by the angel Gabriel, who led him to the gate of the sacred enclosure. There he found an animal, described as being "white, half mule, half donkey, with wings on its sides with which it propelled its feet, putting down each forefoot at the limit of its sight." This -1-

creature is also described as being the beast on which the prophets prior to Muhammad used to ride and has the name Burak. Muhammad mounted him and was carried on his back to the temple at Jerusalem, accompanied by Gabriel, "who went with him to see the wonders between heaven and earth." Arrived at the Jerusalem temple, Muh­ ammad found Abraham, Moses, Jesus and a company of prophets,whom he led in prayer. Then he was brought two, or in another tradition, three,ves­ sels, containing respectively wine and milk, or wine, milk and water. He drank the vessel con­ taining milk, upon which Gabriel said to him, "Muhammad, you have been rightly guided to the fitra", a somewhat obscure word, but which may be understood as meaning 'the true primaeval religion.13 Here the events in Jerusalem terminate, and Ibn-Ishäq simply states that Muhammad returned to Mecca before going on to describe his recept­ ion when he came back. But after this descrip­ tion, Ibn-Ishäq returns to the setting of Jeru­ salem and quotes Muhammad as saying, "after the completion of my business in Jerusalem a ladder was brought to me finer than any I have ever seen. It is to this the dying man looks when carried to the place."4 Muhammad climbed this ladder, accompanied by Gabriel, until he reached the gate of heaven. The gate-keeper was an angel called Ismä'll, who asked Gabriel who Muhammad was and then enquired, "has he received a mission?", receiving an affirmative answer from Gabriel. As Muhammad journeyed up through the various levels of heaven, until he reached the seventh and final one, the same dialogue took place on each occasion. To return to the first heaven, there Muhammad is quoted as saying that he saw Adam judging the spirits of the de­ parted and, in this same first heaven, he was also shown hell by the angel Malik, the keeper of hell - "he removed its covering and the flames -2-

blazed high into the air until I thought they would consume everything." In each of the hea­ venly spheres he visited, Muhammad saw another great figure from the past, just as he had seen Adam in the first - Jesus and John the Baptist in the second, Joseph in the third, Enoch in the fourth, Aaron in the fifth, Moses in the sixth, and Abraham, sitting on a throne at the entrance to paradise, in the seventh. Ibn-Ishäq reprod­ uces two traditions about what happened to Muh­ ammad after he had reached the seventh heaven. According to the first, Abraham took him into paradise and, in what are given as Muhammad's own words, "I saw a damsel with dark red lips and I asked her to whom she belonged, for she pleased me much when I saw her, and she told me 'Zayd, son of Häritha.'" The traditionist who reports this episode then adds, "Muhammad gave Zayd the good news about her." The Zayd men­ tioned here was one of Muhammad's closest as­ sociates, a former slave whom he adopted as his son. By Muhammad's desire, he married a lady twice his age, and according to Moslem tradit­ ion, Muhammad promised him paradise for marrying her: we see that this included a doubtless wel­ come substitute for his wife. According to the second tradition, Muhammad was admitted into the presence of God himself, from whom he received the command, henceforward tct,be a distinguishing mark of the pious Moslem, to recite fifty pray­ ers every day. After this,Muhammad returned to earth, although we are given no details of his return journey. Ibn-Ishäq's narrative is to some extent fragmentary and summary, and later Moslem auth­ orities, while not departing from the basic out­ line, provide us with a number of other details, some of which are of interest for our particular purpose.5 With reference to the night journey, Gabriel and Muhammad are said to meet several -3-

good and several wicked powers on their way to Jerusalem, while, according to another tradition, the place of punishment of the damned is located between heaven and earth and Muhammad sees it in the course of this same journey. With refer­ ence to the ascension proper, the following de­ tails may be noted. First, the great religious figures of the past in the heavens are not just seen by Muhammad, which is all that Ibn-Ishäq states, but he is introduced to each of them and each of them greets him, generally with the words, "Welcome, good brother and good prophet." Secondly,apparently at the border between the seventh heaven and paradise, Muhammad is shown a tree, with a specific name, Sidrat al-muntaha, commonly translated, perhaps somewhat despair­ ingly, as 'the lotus-tree at the boundary.' All we are told about it is its great size - "its fruits were like water-pots and its leaves like elephant's ears." Thirdly, in the same region, Muhammad is shown a building or, according to a variant tradition, recites the fifty prayers al­ ready mentioned in this building, which again has a specific name, al-bait al ma'mür. Liter­ ally, this means 'the inhabited house' or 'the frequented house', perhaps to be explained by what is said about it in a rather late narrative of Muhammad's ascension,^ "every day seventy thousand angels visit it and the next day they go away, and the occasion will never come back to them again." However this may be, this heavenly house has a particular importance from our point of view and we shall return to consi­ der it later. Such, then, in very broad outline, is the story of Muhammad's ascension. The impression it is likely to make on us at first sight is well expressed in some words of A.A. Bevan: "in gen­ eral it may be said of the traditions concerning the Prophet's Ascension that, while they contain -4-

much that is grotesque, they are wholly devoid of poetical feeling and of the impressiveness which we should expect to find in descriptions of the other world."7 The difficulty is that the significance of the episodes we have out­ lined is nowhere explained and thus it is easy to dismiss them as the product of pious fantasy, elaborating and distorting the brief and tanta­ lizing glimpses of his spiritual experiences which Muhammad has left us in the Kur'än. Such has been the general conclusion of Islamic scho­ lars, who have mainly devoted themselves to ana­ lyzing the development of the traditions about Muhammad's ascension, to pointing out their in­ consistencies and to isolating additions made in the course of time to the original kernel of the story. A good example of this is the statement by Fazlur Rahman in his book on 'Islam', pub­ lished in 1966, where he writes: "the Qur'an refers to an important transforming experience or perhaps a series of such experiences of Muhammad in several Süras ..... But the spiritual experiences of the Prophet were later woven by tradition, especially when an 'orthodoxy' began to take shape, into the doctrine of a single, physical, locomotive experience of the 'Ascension' of Muhammad to Heaven, and still later were sup­ plied all the graphic details about the animal which was ridden by the Prophet during his ascension, about his sojourn in each of the seven heavens, and his parleys with the Prophets of bygone ages from Adam to J e s u s ..... The doctrine of a locomotive 'Ascension' developed by orthodox (chiefly on the pattern

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of the Ascension of Jesus) and backed by Hadith is no more than a historical fiction whose materials come from various sources."® But even if this view were wholly correct, it does not at all explain the motives which led later Moslems to embark on the creation of all this fantasy, still less the particular kind of fantasy which they evolved. Nor are the sug­ gestions that they did all this as the result of Christian influence, or, alternatively, the in­ fluence of later Judaism, very convincing. No doubt, as has often been pointed out, various details in certain later accounts of Muhammad's ascension have very probably been borrowed from one or other of these sources.9 But they re­ main details: they are essentially additions to an already well established pattern and not the basic constituents of that pattern itself. When we compare the narratives of the ascension of Muhammad with the gospel accounts of the ascen­ sion of Jesus it is difficult to find a single point of identity, while the whole structure and significance of the two events are totally dif­ ferent: to give just one, but a vital, instance, the ascension of Jesus is the prelude to a per­ manent sojourn in heaven, while Muhammad's visit is only temporary, and when Muhammad died and 'Umar', one of his friends, claimed that he was not really dead but had gone to Allah and would return after forty days, he was silenced by an­ other of Muhammad's friends, Abu Bakr, who re­ cited the verses: "Muhammad is nothing but an apostle. Apostles have passed away before him. Can it be that if he were to die or be killed you would turn back on your heels?"19 What we need is a view of the story of Muh­ ammad's ascension which will explain what it is in fact all about, which can account for it as a -6-

whole and which can show how the various elements in it belong together. A few scholars, in the earliest part of this century, noted how certain features of the narrative have parallels in other religious systems, covering a wide area of space and time. Yet, illuminating as these observa­ tions are and, although, as I shall hope to show, they point in the right direction, they still only amount to little more than suggestive re­ marks about certain isolated features and the scholars in question have not grasped the full significance of what they observed, precisely because they did not go on to integrate these particular elements into the pattern of the story as a whole. The only thorough-going at­ tempt, as far as I am aware, that has been made to interpret the ascension of Muhammad from the standpoint of the history of religions has been made by the Swedish scholar, Geo. Widengren, in two studies published in 1950 and 1955.** It is impossible to discuss Widengren's extremely important investigations here but briefly he sees the whole scenario of Muhammad's ascension as determined by the ritual pattern of sover­ eignty in the Ancient Near East and by the idea of the king's ascension which was a central fea­ ture of his coronation. "This same pattern was maintained in the exemplary images and the myth­ ical biographies ..... of the Prophet."*2 While it is true that this pattern may have had a good deal of influence on later developments in the description of Muhammad's ascension and certain­ ly on the ideology of the later Shiite imams, who are very much royal figures, yet it does not seem very prominent in the earlier accounts. In fact, Widengren's studies say very little about the greater part of the narrative material dealing with Muhammad's ascension, and they con­ centrate almost exclusively on his interview in heaven with Allah, about which the earliest accounts by contrast say very little. In short, -7-

even Widengren1s very thorough investigation does not give us the real meaning of the account of Muhammad's ascension in its totality, which we have argued is the real desideratum. It appears necessary, then, to look else­ where in the field of comparative religion, eth­ nography and the history of religions for a clue to the real meaning of Muhammad's ascension and it seems possible that this may be provided by the religious phenomenon known as shamanism, which has recently been the object of a good deal of scholarly interest. Here I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not suggesting that there is any direct connection between Muhammed and his religious experiences and any of the shamans, pre-eminently a phenomenon of Siberia and Central Asia, who have been described by anthropologists and travellers. But as Eliade has demonstrated, shamanism is basically a tech­ nique of ecstasy and it has a particular and distinctive religious structure of its own and what may be suggested is that a very closely similar ecstatic technique and structure of rel­ igious experience are to be seen in Muhammad, and particularly in the account of his ascension. I would agree entirely with Eliade when he says that "despite all the typological similar­ ities, it is impossible to assimilate the ecstatic ascension of Mohammed to the ascension of an Altaic or Buryat shaman. The content, the meaning of the spiritual orientation of the pro­ phet's ecstatic experience presuppose certain mutations in religious values and make it irreducible to the general type of ascension."13 But I would also agree with him when he writes -8-

elsewhere that "one need only refer to the miräj of Mohammed to convince oneself that, in the history of religions, as every­ where else, to compare is to confuse. It would be absurd to minimise the differences of content that diversify examples of 'flight', 'ecstasy' and 'ascension.' But it would be just as absurd not to recognize the corres­ pondence of structure which emerges from such comparisons. And, in the history of religions, as in other mental disciplines, it is knowledge of structure which makes it possible to understand meanings. It is only after we have clarified, as a whole, the structure of the symbolism of the flight that we can arrive at its first meaning; the way is then open for us to understand each case separately."1^ All I want to do, then, is to try and demon­ strate the 'correspondence of structure' bet­ ween the ascension of Muhammad and similar phenomena among the shamans. Further, there is some evidence to suggest that this general structure of shamanic experi­ ence may have been mediated to Muhammad through the seers or soothsayers of the pagan Arabs, the kähins, for these "have their origin in the shamans, medicine men and fetish priests."16 In particular, there are a few passages in the Kur'an which suggest that the possibility of an ascent to heaven was known to Muhammad's contem­ poraries16 and it is recounted of the pre-Isla­ mic poet Zuhair that "he saw in a dream someone who came and lifted him so high in the sky that -9-

he could touch it with his hand, and then let him fall again to the earth".17 Again, there is an account of an experience of dismemberment, which, as will be seen in the next paragraph, is a regular prelude to ascension, suffered by a man living at the time of the emergence of Islam.18 Although Muhammad disclaimed being a kähin, "his earliest appearance as a prophet re­ minds us strongly of the manner of these sooth­ sayers"18 and he may well have originally been quite closely connected with them. The diffi­ culty is that our evidence provides very little detail about the religious experiences of the kahins28 and virtually nothing that helps us to elucidate the various elements in the accounts of Muhammad's ascension. In view of the con­ siderations just adduced, however, it may not be illegitimate to use the much fuller evidence we have of shamanism elsewhere to fill out Muh­ ammad's Arabic background and to help explain the details of his own ascension. Where we have to begin is from the fact that an experience of an ascent to the sky is an essential part of the initiation of a shaman.21 It is the way in which the neophyte himself be­ comes aware, and also demonstrates to others, that he has been called to this particular voca­ tion and the way in which he acquires the magi­ cal knowledge, the secrets of the shamanic craft> which he needs for his task. Ibn-Ishäq appears to suggest that Muhammad's ascension took place at a comparatively late stage of the prophet's life, but this is because he has linked it with the story of the night journey to Jerusalem which contains indications that it occurred when Muhammad had already had time to collect a con­ siderable group of disciples around him: and scholars are now generally agreed that the ac­ count of the ascension originally referred to the very beginnings of the prophet's mission.22 -10-

That this is so is made clear by at least two features of the story. First, there is the question which, as we saw, was asked about Muh­ ammad at his entrance to each of the seven hea­ vens, 'has he received a mission?' The deni­ zens of heaven do not yet know that Muhammad has been called to his prophetic vocation: it is only when they are sure of his calling that there can be revealed to him the secrets of the other world and this itself is an essential part of the whole initiatory process. Secondly, there is a curious episode, which Ibn-Ishäq does not report in this particular place, although he has it elsewhere, but which, in most other accounts, immediately precedes Muhammad's ascension. It begins from the same point, with Muhammad as­ leep in the Ka'ba. But then three angles - or in other versions Gabriel alone - came to him, and, as Muhammad was sleeping, "they laid him on his back, opened his body, brought water from the Zamzam well (that is, the sacred well at Mecca) and washed away all that they found within his body of doubt, idol­ atry, paganism and error. They then brought a golden vessel which was fil­ led with wisdom and belief and then his body was filled with wisdom and belief. Thereupon he was taken up to the lowest heaven!' Here clearly the language of the narrative has been influenced by the theological dogmas of the developed faith of Islam. As mentioned, IbnIshäq does not have the story at this particular point, but he reproduces it in his account of Muhammad's childhood in what seems to be a more original and less overtly theological form. According to this, Muhammad said:

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"While I was with a comrade of mine behind our tents shepherding the lambs, two men in white raiment came to me with a gold basin full of snow. Then they seized me and opened up my belly, extracted my heart and split it; then they extracted a black drop from it and threw it away; then they washed my heart and my belly with that snow until they had thoroughly cleaned them."23 This episode has generally perplexed Islamic scholars and they have attempted to account for it by some rational explanation: thus, in his Pelican volume on Islam, Professor A.Guillaume commented: "Exactly what lies behind this story of the opening and cleansing of Muh­ ammad's belly it is hard to see, unless it is an attempt to give a literal meaning to the metaphorical statement in the Quran, 'did we not open thy breast for thee?'"24 But this rather lame explanation is seen to be both unnecessary and erroneous when we realize that the dismemberment of the body, followed by a cleaning and renewal of the viscera and in­ ternal organs, is one of the commonest initia­ tory themes in the making of a shaman, attested among a very wide range of peoples.25 It is of course a symbol of the fact that the indivi­ dual, in becoming a shaman, becomes a new man, and in the shamanic rituals it accompanies the theme of the new shaman's ascension. Thus its identical relationship with Muhammad's ascension makes it clear that his heavenly journey was in fact his initiation into his prophetic calling. How does the journey to heaven effect init-12-

iation? In the shamanic rituals, when the sha­ man ascends to the sky, he has a dialogue with the gods or the spirits and he also holds con­ versations with the spirits and souls of dead shamans. From the former he receives religious revelation, from the latter more specifically shamanic revelations which constitute, so to speak, the secrets of the profession taught to him by those whose ranks he is now joining. Both these features are plain in the account of Muhammad's ascension. We have seen that its climax is a dialogue between the prophet and Allah - and this is much expanded in narratives of the ascension other than that of Ibn-Ishäq in which there is revealed to him the duty of reciting the fifty prayers, the distinctive mark of the followers of the Muslim faith and the means by which they will obtain blessedness in the hereafter. Similarly, Muhammad, the new prophet, converses with the former prophets, who welcome him as a prophet like themselves and as their brother: we may also note how, on the thematically closely linked night journey to Jerusalem, the animal on which Muhammad rode was the one on which the prophets prior to him had ridden and that at Jerusalem he joined in a com­ mon religious ceremony with these same prophets. It is easy, and of course correct, to point out that the predecessors Muhammad meets are all Biblical figures and that they originate in Muhammad's consciousness from his knowledge of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. But the matter is perhaps not quite so simple as that. One of the ideas behind the shaman's ascension is that he thereby restores the paradisal state, the condition of things at the very beginning of time when there was that unhindered communica­ tion between this world and the other world which has now, for one reason or another, been lost, and can only be achieved by such an exception­ ally privileged person as the shaman.26 Now in -13-

the accounts of Muhammad's ascension a very spe­ cial place is occupied by the figure of Abraham. He is in the highest of the heavens, he initia­ tes Muhammad into the ultimate mystery of para­ dise and, according to Ibn-Ishäq, Muhammad when he saw him said, "Never have I seen a man more like myself": he was the figure from the past with whom Muhammad felt himself most closely identified. How may we account for this very special position of Abraham? In the Kur'än, Abraham is described in a particular, almost technical,way, as one who was neither a Jew nor a Christian nor a polytheist, but was a hanif. The meaning of this term hanif, which has been much discussed, seems to be given by Süra xxx, 30 in the Kur'än, which runs as follows: "Turn thy face towards religion as hanif, (namely) to the original con­ cept according to which Allah has created man. There is no change in the work of Allah. This is the im­ mutable religion, but most men do not know it." It is clear here that the word hanif means "the original, innate, primitive religion in contrast to the particular religions which arose later, polytheism on the one hand and the at least partly corrupt religion of the possessors of the scriptures."27 Thus Abraham is the only per­ fect embodiment of man in his relationship to the divine as God intended man to be when he created him and it may be claimed that his cen­ tral role in Muhammad's ascension confirms our understanding of that ascension as a restoration of the primal human state. In this connection, we may refer back to the episode of the presen­ tation to Muhammad of the three vessels each containing a different liquid in the story of the night journey to Jerusalem: it should be -14-

noted that this episode more generally appears in the narratives of the ascension to heaven where it probably more properly belongs. It will be recalled that when Muhammad chose the milk, Gabriel told him that he had been rightly guided to the 'true primitive religion,' his action restored the proper state of man at the creation. Thus, though the particular form of it is determined by the Bible, the ideas which lie behind the account of Muhammad's converse with his predecessors of old may not be so dis­ similar to the shaman's meetings with his pre­ decessors as might appear at first sight. Once we have grasped the general character of the ascension of Muhammad, we can easily see how many of the apparently 'grotesque' - to use Bevan's word - details of the narrative fit into the initiatory pattern as we see it in shamanism and find their significance from this connection. Thus Muhammad climbs to the sky by means of a ladder, and indeed the Arabic word used to des­ cribe his ascension is m i 'rädj , literally 'lad­ der'. A real, or symbolic, climbing of a lad­ der is a very common means by which the shaman reaches heaven on the journey which initiates him into his calling.2® However, we also saw in Ibn-Ishäq's account of this ladder is the means of communication with the other world for the departed as well - "it is to this ladder that the dying man looks when carried to this place." In the shamanic initiation, the new shaman as well as visiting heaven also visits the underworld: there is nothing exactly cor­ responding to this in the stories about Muhammad and this at first may seem an important diver­ gence from the common shamanic structure. But the divergence is more apparent than real: what is different is the topography of the after-life in the two cases, not the purpose and signifi­ cance of the journey. In the religious scheme -15-

of shamanism, the sky is reserved for the gods and spirits, while the underworld is the realm of the departed. In the thought world of Muh­ ammad, the realm of the departed seems to be the lowest heaven, where they are judged by Adam, the wicked being then consigned to hell, which is located between the lowest heaven and earth, and the good, presumably, being rewarded with the paradise above the highest heaven. But the pur­ pose of the shaman's visit to the underworld is that he may know the secrets of the after-life, and that, as a result, he may be able to instruct men about it and so guide and help them when their time comes to go there. So Muhammad has revealed to him the whole state of the departed, he visits both heaven and hell, he can - as indeed he did - tell men what these are like and how they should conduct themselves so as to rea­ lise a happy fate in the next world. Thus, in the lowest heaven, he sees adulterers, usurers and oppressors of widows and orphans being cast into the flames of hell:253 on the other hand, he is able to reveal to his friend Zayd the sec­ rets of paradise and the delights that await him there. In the course of his ascension, Muhammad passes through seven heavens and the notion of heaven as divided into seven levels which the shaman visits on the course of his initiatory journey is again a very common one.3® In Muh­ ammad's journeys, whether to Jerusalem or to the sky, he is always accompanied and guided by the angel Gabriel, and this feature recalls the spirit guide who regularly, in many different cultures, leads the future shaman in his jour­ neys to the other world. Gabriel himself, of course, is a product of Muhammad's increasing familiarity with Jewish and Christian teaching about angels and there is some evidence to sug­ gest that, at the beginning of his career, to -16-

which, as we have argued, his ascension belongs, he may have had a much less precise idea and be­ lieved that revelation came to him through a spirit, rather like the spirit or djinn who in­ spired the Arabic soothsayers with whom, as we have also seen, he was probably well acquaint­ ed.31 The two remaining elements in the story of Muhammad's ascension which need to be con­ sidered are the tree and the house in the seventh heaven. With regard to the tree, we must surely see it as a form of the world-tree or the cosmic tree. This is one of the commonest cosmological conceptions in the religions of mankind, but the point of interest for us is that it plays a very prominent part precisely in the kind of initia­ tory experiences we are considering; the shaman finds it at the end of a very long journey and he is often said to climb it to reach the ulti­ mate heavens. Thus it is on the border, and forms a link, between one state of existence and another and this is how one should perhaps in­ terpret the mysterious phrase in the narratives of Muhammad, 'the lotus tree at the boundary.' The world tree is associated in a large number of archaic traditions with two other ideas both of which find their echoes in the texts we are considering. One is the idea of fertility and thus the world tree is commonly encircled by symbols which express this concept, such as fruits and water. We have already seen how the miraculous fruitfulness of the 'lotus tree at the boundary' is stressed in most of the accounts of Muhammad's ascension but the same accounts also speak of four great rivers which spring from its roots. No doubt the actual descript­ ion of these is determined in its present form by the picture of the Garden of Eden and its four rivers in the book of Genesis, but both rest on much older conceptions. The second idea associated with the world tree is that, in Eliade's phrase, it is "the very reservoir of -17-

life,"3^ and this is vividly symbolized by ref­ erences which speak of the shaman on his initia­ tory journey seeing either the souls of children waiting to be born or men of various nations perching like birds among the branches. There is nothing precisely corresponding to this in the narratives of Muhammad's ascension but there may be a reminiscence of the original concept in a late m i 1radj account which represents the pro­ phet as saying, "and I passed from that place and arrived at the lotus tree on the boundary and there like ants I saw angels without num­ ber."33 Turning now to the house which is in the same area as the tree, as we saw, it possibly owes its name, the bait al-ma'mur, to the fact that it was visited daily by a large number of angels, and we are told in some traditions that the purpose of this visit was for worship. So the angels are depicted as the ministrants in the heavenly sanctuary. Now according to Mus­ lim tradition, the bait al-ma'mur in the seventh heaven was situated immediately over the temple at Mecca.34 This, of course, is a version of the idea of the exact correspondence between the earthly and the heavenly sanctuary which is found in many religions. But we can go a lit­ tle further than this. Ibn-Ishäq, as we saw, makes Muhammad begin his ascension from Jerusa­ lem and this is the dominant Moslem tradition, but several other accounts make the ascension start from the sanctuary at Mecca. That is, there is a direct connection between the earthly house and the heavenly one and it is from the former that one can break through to the latter, and this is so because the earthly house or tem­ ple is thought of as the microcosm of the uni­ verse, so that one can project oneself from there on to the cosmic plane. These are pre­ cisely the ideas which provide the rationale -18-

for the shaman's initiatory ascension, which generally begins from a particular house, and for the initiative rituals which effect it. In Muslim thought, the sanctuary at Mecca was be­ lieved to form the place of communication with the upper and the under world and it seems clear that it is this idea which accounts for the pre­ sence of the corresponding heavenly sactuary, the 'frequented house', in the narrative of Muh­ ammad's ascension. Here there are a number of rich complexes of interlocking religious concepts which could and should be pursued a good deal further in the light of Moslem tradition and their links with the traditions of other religious systems. But this would go far beyond the limited scope of the present investigation. In conclusion, it is necessary to discuss a little further the dis­ tinct tradition, as we take it to be, of Muham­ mad's night journey to Jerusalem. Certainly this has become confused in the course of tradi­ tion with the ascension proper, and features be­ longing to one event have been transferred to the other and vice versa. Thus, the ascent to the sky, which properly belongs to Mecca, starts from Jerusalem, and the animal, which is properly the mount on which Muhammad rides to Jerusalem, becomes the means by which he is transported from Mecca to the sky. Nor is this surprizing or without good reason. The notion of the sanctu­ ary as the microcosm, and therefore the approp­ riate place for the journey to heaven to begin, is as characteristic of Jerusalem as it is of Mecca, while, as we shall see, the idea that the shaman rides up to the sky on the back of some animal is an extremely common one. But it would seem that the night journey to Jerusalem has its own distinctive character and can properly be considered by itself. It is essentially a flight through the air by which the participants are enabled to see the "wonders between heaven -19-

and earth" or the place of punishment of the damned in the same area. Now in shamanism, one of the most important powers the shaman acquires is the ability to fly, and that not merely ver­ tically to the sky, but also horizontally to dis­ tant parts of the earth.35 Though not identi­ cal, this kind of flight is thematically very similar to the ascent to heaven, because it ex­ emplifies the shaman's magical power over time and space which he acquires from his contact with the spirits who have the same power. In fact, in accounts of shamanic initiations, the shaman often makes several journeys to various parts of the universe, before finally ascending to the sky, as part of a single pattern, as in the re­ markable story of a Samoyed shaman recounted to Δ.Α. Popov:35 we can thus understand how the night journey and the ascension of Muhammad have come to be combined in the narrative of IbnIshäq. Very commonly the shaman is thought to use an animal as the means of locomotion in his flight, often a bird for obvious reasons, but various winged four-footed animals also appear. The beast on which Muhammad rose to Jerusalem or, as we have, in some traditions, to heaven is surely a product of the same world of thought, although Islamic scholars are still trying to explain it away as a mere product of ill-control­ led fantasy. Thus, in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, R. Paret, commenting on Ibn-Ishäq's statement that the animal had wings on its sides, says, "these words are in­ tended to mean, of course, only that the beast could move its legs extremely quickly, and not that it was capable of flying."37 Notice that 'of course'! Ibn-Ishäq's words seem simply to mean what they say and, once we realize the back­ ground of ideas to which the animal belongs, it is far more likely that it would have been ex­ pected to fly than that it would not. Further, it may be noted that the animal's name, Burak, -20-

is difficult to explain from Arabic, it is pro­ bably a word that goes back long before Muhammad and, "in general much reported about the steed will derive from pre-Islamic tradition."3® We may end this study with one or two sup­ porting considerations, not directly connected with Muhammad's ascension, which may suggest that the circumstances of his call to be a prophet were not entirely unprecedented and that they did have the sort of pattern and structure which are illustrated in shamanic initiatory processes. On the one hand, the fact has already been referred to that there are a number of passages in the Kur'an which indicate that Muhammad's contempor­ aries expected of a holy man the kind of mystical experiences with which this paper has been con­ cerned. For example, in Sura xvii, 90-93, Muham­ mad's opponents say to him: "We will certainly not believe in thee until there is for thee a garden with palm-trees and grapes and thou cause rivers to gush forth abundantly in its midst" - i.e. until you can re-create paradise - "or until thou mount up to heaven." Or again in Sura vi, 35, Allah tells Muhammad that he would be able to overcome the opposition of his op­ ponents , "if thou couldst find a way down into the earth or a ladder into the sky to bring them a portent." Of course, the scholars have been busy with this too: the great French Arabist, Regis Blachfere, in his translation of the Kur'an, interprets the words 'if thou couldst find a way down into the earth,' as "to procure a treasure for yourself." Surely a more obvious explanation is sug-21-

gested by our earlier discussion. On the other hand, there are a number of widely described . circumstances surrounding the call of Muhammad, all of which are closely parallel to those we know to form part of the initiatory experience of the shaman. Thus, he sometimes suffered great pain at the hands of his spirit visitants, as when, on the occasion that Moslem tradition views as that on which he actually received his call, Gabriel came to him, "seized him and squeezed him vehemently three times until exhau­ stion over-came him." At this time, to quote one tradition, "solitude became dear to him": to quote another, "he started going early to the tops of mountains to throw himself down from them": he became subject to visions and trances and was seized by nameless dread and terror.14® All these features can be closely paralleled in the experiences of shamans from a wide area, but the important thing is that they constitute one part of the regular, expected initiation of the shaman: in Eliade's words, "more or less patho­ logical sickness, dreams and ecstasies are so many means of reaching the condition of sha­ man."14·1 Again, one of the marks of the shaman is his possession of 'magical heat' within him­ self, ^ and this is more than once attributed to Muhammad, as in the testimony of his wife 'Ä'isha: "I have actually seen him, at the com­ ing down of the revelation upon him, on an ex­ tremely cold day, with his forehead running with perspiration."14^ One could go on much further, but it may be claimed that the material examined in this paper at least raises the possibility that Muhammad's journey to the other world is not just a late invention of pious fancy but is rather an essential part of his prophetic call, and that it and the otherwise strange details it contains can best be understood as a reflec­ tion of the general scheme of shamanic initia-

-22-

tion, however much that may have been trans­ formed by Muhammad's own unique religious ex­ perience and his own individual genius. (This essay has also appeared in NUMEN Vol. XX No. 3, 1973.)

-23-

References For some discussion of these passages, cf. the articles on isra1 and m i 'rädj in the Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1953. For a translation of this, cf. A.Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad, 1955, pp. 181-7. The quotations of Ibn-Ishaq in the text are from this translation, unless otherwise stated. The suggestion of Guillaume, op. cit. p. 182, n.2. The translation of the last five words is that of Geo. Widengren, Muhammad, the Apostle of God, and his Ascension, 1955, p . 102. These are largely to be found in al-Ghaiti1s 'Story of the Night Journey and the Ascen­ sion1 , translated in A. Jeffery, A Reader on Islam, 1962, pp.621-39. Although Ghaiti died only in A.D. 1574, his work rests on traditions which took shape as early as the beginning of the tenth century A.D., cf. R. Hartmann, "Die Himmelsreise Muhammeds', Bibliothek Warburg, Vorträge 1928-9, p.55. Translated in Widengren, op.cit., pp.220-6. The passage quoted is on p.224. Cf. his 'Mohammed's Ascension to Heaven', Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, vol. xxvii, 1914, p.60. Op. cit. p .14. Cf. e.g. B. Schrieke, 'Die Himmelsreise Muhammads,' Der Islam vol. vi, 1916, p.l6f; J. Horovitz, 'Muhammeds Himmelfahrt', Der Islam, vol. ix, 1919, p.l73f. Cf. Guillaume, op. cit., p. 683. The Ascension of the Apostle and the Heav­ enly Book, 1950; Muhammad the Apostle of God, and his Ascension, 1955. The comment of M. Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, E. tr. 1960, p.99.

13 l*f

15

16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33

Cf. M. Eliade, Shamanism, E. 1964 p.377. Cf. M. Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, pp.109-10. Cf. A. Fischer, Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, p.206. For the wide diffusion of shamanism, cf. N.K. Chadwick, Poetry and Prophecy, 1941, p.90f. Cf. Süra lii, 38 and Süra vi, 35. Quoted in T. Fahd, La Divination Arabe, 1966, p.256. Cf. Horovitz, op. cit. p.l71f. Fischer, op. cit., p.207. Cf., for a thorough account of the evidence, Fahd, op. cit., pp.92-104. Cf. M. Eliade, Shamanism, Index, s.v. 'ascension'. This was first clearly shown by A.A.Bevan, 'Mohammed's Ascension', p.58. Cf. Guillaume, op. cit., p.72. Cf. A. Guillaume, Islam, 1961, p.25. Cf. M. Eliade, Shamanism, Index, s.v. 'dismemberment'. Cf. M. Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, p.65f. Cf. F. Buhl in Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, p.132. Cf. also the similar con­ clusion of W. Montgomery Watt in Encyclo­ paedia of Islam, vol. Ill, new edition, 1971, p.165. Cf. M. Eliade, Shamanism, Index, s.v. 'ladder'. Cf. A. Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad, p.185f. Cf. M. Eliade, Shamanism, Index, s.v. 'heaven'. Cf. A. Fischer, op. cit. p.207. Cf. Shamanism, p. 271 Cf. Geo. Widengren, Muhammad, the Apostle of God, p.225.

-25-

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

Cf. A.J . Wensinck, Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, p.197. Cf. M. Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, pp.99-110. Reproduced in M. Eliade, Shamanism,p.38f. Cf. Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1, new edition, 1960, p.1310. Cf. Paret, op. cit. Cf. R. Blach^re, Le Coran, 1957, p.155 n. 35. These various traditions are translated, from the account of az-Zuhri, in W. Mont­ gomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, 1953, pp.40-1. Cf. also pp.49-50. Shamanism, p.33. Cf. M. Eliade, Shamanism, Index, s.v. 1 heat1. Cf. Watt, op. cit., p.55f.

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THE 13th CENTURY MONGOLS' CONCEPTION OF THE AFTER-LIFE; THE EVIDENCE OF THEIR FUNERAL PRACTICES By John Andrew Boyle The conquests of Genghis Khan and his suc­ cessors have ensured that the beliefs and prac­ tices of the 13th-century Mongols, still largely unaffected by the influences of Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, are referred to in the chron icles of almost every nation in Asia and Europe. By studying these references, not all of them equally accessible, it may be possible to form a clearer idea of religions and cultural tradi­ tions that go back through the pre-Islamic Turks the Huns and the Scythians to the Indo-European and non-Indo-European peoples who inhabited the steppes and forests of Northern Eurasia some 3,000 years ago, The Mongols - and no doubt those earlier peoples also1 - took an extremely materialistic view of the Otherworld. "They know nothing," says the Franciscan John de Plano Carpini, who visited Mongolia in 1246. "of everlasting life and eternal damn­ ation, but they believe that after death they will live in another world and increase their flocks, and eat and drink and do the other things which are done by men living in this world."2 They believed too that it was not only possible but necessary to take one's belongings with one into the next world. Referring to their fun­ eral customs in the case of the "less important men," Carpini describes how such a person "is buried with one of his dwellings -27-

(i.e. a yurt or ger), sitting in the middle of i t ..... And they bury him with a mare and her foal and a horse with bridle and saddle..... so that he may have a dwelling in which to make his abode and a mare to provide him with milk, and that he may be able to increase his horses and have horses on which to ride."® The provision of a horse, according to the Armenian Kirakos of Gandzak, writing c.1241,was rather because there would be "fierce fighting" in the Otherworld, and both he and the other authorities specify that the dead man's weapons are included amongst the grave goods.4 It is tempting to see in the "fierce fighting" a ref­ erence to something like the "everlasting bat­ tle" in the Norse Valhalla,® but perhaps the Mongols simply thought that conditions in this, as in other respects, would be the same in the next world as in the present one. As for the human victims, they were, in the main, as Kira­ kos says, the dead man's male and female ser­ vants or slaves interred with him for the ex­ press purpose of waiting upon him in the world to come.® Concubines too were provided - we are explicitly informed of the immolation of young women in the cases of Genghis Khan him­ self7 and of his grandson Htilegü, the first of the Mongol rulers of Persia® - but there was no ritual execution of a man's wife, or wives, like the Indian suttee,® it being believed that a woman, upon dying a natural death, would be re­ stored to her husband as a matter of course.1® It was apparently in connection with this belief that widows were expected and sometimes compel­ led to re-marry within their husband's family in accordance with a custom which is known to have existed amongst the Scythians, is amply attested amongst the Huns and pre-Islamic Turks and was -28-

still followed by the Kazakhs and Kalmucks down to modern times. * This custom, which seems to have no Turkish or Mongol name, is called by anthropologists the levirate because of a superficial resemblance to Mosaic law that required a man to marry his bro­ ther's widow when the brother had died without male issue. That law is referred to in a well known passage in the New Testament,^2 in which the Sadducees lay before Christ the hypothetical case of a woman who, in accordance with the terms of the levirate, had been married in suc­ cession to each of seven brothers: "In the resurrection therefore, when they shall rise, whose wife shall she be of them? for the seven had her to wife." The Sadducees' question would have presented no difficulties to the medieval Mongols: the woman was, and remained, the wife of her first husband. In fact the Turco-Mongol custom differed widely from the Jewish both in scope and in purpose. The Mosaic law related to the marriage in cer­ tain circumstances of brother-in-law (Latin levir) and sister-in-law. The Turk or Mongol, on the other hand, might marry without restric­ tion the widows not only of his brothers, but also of his father (apart from his own mother) and paternal uncles. The custom even survived conversion to Islam. Thus the Il-Khan Ghazan (1295-1304) went through the Muslim marriage ceremony with a woman who had been the wife of his father Arghun (1284-1291) and his uncle Geikhatu (1291-1295).13 The Mongols of Persia do not, however, seem to have imposed the prac­ tice on their non-Mongol subjects. It was otherwise in China, where in 1272 the Great Khan Qubilai (our Kubla Khan) issued a series of -29-

decrees enforcing the application of this law to the Chinese, who had previously been subject to their own customary law, which strongly condem­ ned such unions. Paul Ratchnevsky quotes from the Chinese official records several court cases in which a widow had been ordered against her inclination to marry her b r o t h e r - i n - l a w . T h a t the levirate was enforced in Russia we know from an incident reported by Carpini. Andrew, son of Mstislav, a prince of the House of Chernigov, had been executed on a charge of "taking Tartar horses out of the country and selling them else­ where." His younger brother came with his widow to petition Batu, the founder of the Gol­ den Horde, not to confiscate their territory. The young man was ordered to marry his sisterin-law, and despite their protests and the woman's tears and cries they were forced to con­ summate the marriage.15 It emerges from this and the cases cited by Ratchnevsky that one of the purposes of the levirate was to protect the economic interests of the family; the main pur­ pose was, however, to assure the restoration of the wife to her husband in the Otherworld, to which, in those ancient times when the custom of ritual execution was still observed, she would have actually accompanied him. Apart, however, from the measures adopted with the respect to his wife or wives, the means for enabling the dead man to continue his earth­ ly existence in the Hereafter were provided, as we have already seen, by the funerary objects and the human and animal victims that were actu­ ally buried with him. Here it would be help­ ful to adduce the archaeological evidence, but this is at present almost totally non-existent, certainly as regards what may be called the Royal Tombs. Only in one case do we know the precise location of such a burial place. Hülegü, the first of the Il-Khans of Persia, and his son -30-

and successor Abaqa were laid to rest in a cas­ tle upon the summit of a great rock rising 1,000 ft. above the shore on the Island of Shahi in Lake Urmiya in Azerbaijan.16 Of Hülegü's fun­ eral we are told by the Persian historian Vassaf that, in accordance with the Mongol custom, a sarcophagus (he uses the word dakhma, which is applied to the Zoroastrian tower of silence) was constructed, vast quantities of gold and jewels were poured into it and several beautiful young women, dressed in sumptuous costumes, were "made his bed-fellows."A' These tombs were rifled already in the Il-Khanid period; but the inac­ cessible site has never been scientifically ex­ amined. The Il-Khan's northern neighbours, the Khans of the Golden Horde, are believed to have been buried at Saraichik on the lower reaches of the Ural in what is now Western Kaz­ akhstan. The site of the town, which was razed to the ground by the Cossacks in 1580,18 was ex­ cavated by Soviet archaeologists in 1937 and 1950, but they do not seem to have found any traces of the tombs.*8 However, the most fam­ ous of these royal cemeteries was the yeke qoriq, the "Great Forbidden Sanctuary" of Geng­ his Khan. Already Carpini knew of its exis­ tence. "It is," he says, "where the Emperors, chiefs and all the nobles are interred, and whenever they die, they are brought thither if this can fittingly be done. A great deal of gold and silver is buried with them."20 Marco Polo too tells us "that all the great kings descended from the line of Chingis Kaan are taken to be buried to a great moun­ tain called Altai. (The cemetery, in fact, as we shall see, is to be -31-

sought much further east in the Kentei mountains.) And wheresoever the Great Lords of the Tartars may die, were it a hundred days' journey from that moun­ tain, they must be taken there to be buried. Another wonder I will also tell you: when the corpses of these great Kaans are taken to that mountain, be it for a distance of forty days' march, or more, or less, all the people met along the road followed by the corpse, are put to the sword by those who accompany the body, who say, 'Go and serve your Lord in the next world.' For they truly believe that all those whom they slay must serve their Lord in the next world..... And you must know that when Mongu Kaan died (in 1259), more than 20,000 men who met the corpse when it was being taken to its burial were killed."2* The most precise details are given by Rashid al-Din.22 The site had been chosen by Genghis Khan himself. One day, when out hunting, he saw a solitary tree. The sight of it pleased him and he sat for a while under its shade. Then turning to his attendants he said: "This place is suitable for my burial; remember it." When he died his words were recalled, and he was buried in that very spot. "It is said," Rashid goes on, "that in the very year of the burial, trees and grass grew beyond measure over that steppe, and now the wood is so thick that it leaves no passage and they do not know (which is) the original tree or the place of the burial, so much so that even the old keepers of the 'forbidden precinct'... -32-

do not find their way to it. Rashid adds that this was the burial ground, not only of Genghis Khan himself, but also of his youngest son Tolui and the latter's children including the Great Khan Möngke, whose burial is mentioned by Marco Polo, and Qubilai, who in fact seems to have been buried elsewhere - and their descendants down to Rashid's time. Rashid speaks also of the troops which still in his day kept guard over the "Great Forbidden Precinct," at the place called Burqan Qaldun, to which he also gave the name of Buda Öndür. The first of these names has been interpreted as meaning either "Willow God" or "Budda Cliff"; the sec­ ond can only mean "Budda Height". Burqan Qaldun has been pretty conclusively identified with the peak Kentei Qan in the Great Kentei in N.E. Mongolia, and the East German archaeologist, Johannes Schubert, has more or less pin-pointed the site of the "Great Forbidden Precinct."22 It is now perhaps only a matter of time before the royal cemetery yields up its secrets, and we may then hope to be infinitely better informed about the customs and beliefs, not only of the Mongols, but of all the early Northern Peoples. For the time being, however, we must fall back on the literary evidence. Carpini dis­ tinguishes between the methods employed in bury­ ing their "less important men" and their "chief man."24 In the case of the latter, after fill­ ing in the pit, "they put grass over it as it was before so that no one may be able to dis­ cover the spot afterwards." "In the night-time writes the Persian historian Juzjani (1193-1260), "the place is covered up, and horses are driven over it, in such a manner that not a trace of it remains."25 In the Yüan shih, the standard history of the Yüan or Mongol dynasty, it is stated: -33-

" (For Imperial funerals) when they reached the burial mound (ling), the earth removed to dig the pit was made into lumps which were disposed in (due) order. Once the coffin had been lowered (into the pit), (the pit) was filled and covered in the order (of the lumps). If there was earth in excess, it was carried to other places far away." Finally, a Chinese envoy who visited Mongolia ca. 1232, reports: "The tombs..... of (the Mongols) have no mound; they are trodden over by horses so as to appear as the even (ordinary) ground'.'26 The secrecy of the Royal Cemetery at Burqan Qaldun was, as we have seen, further en­ hanced by the growth of trees over the site. These trees were perhaps deliberately planted. Carpini tells us how Genhis Khan's son and first successor Ogedei, "left behind a grave to grow for his soul, and he ordered that no one was to cut there, and anyone who cuts a twig there, as we ourselves saw, is beaten, stripped and maltreated. And when we were in great need of something with which to whip our horse, we did not dare to cut a switch from there."27 I have suggested that this grove was somewhere on the southern slopes of the Saur mountains in Northern Sinkiang, where according to Rashid alDin the Great Khan lies buried and where his son Giiyiik may also have been laid to rest: it would appear to be the exact counterpart to the "great wood" which grew up around the burial place of Genghis Khan at Burqan Qaldun.28 The custom, reported only by Marco Polo, of -34-

putting to death all persons who met the funeral cortege along its route was presumably also de­ signed to preserve the secrecy of the burial site. So too was the better attested custom of closing the roads when a ruler died, and lay­ ing a ban on all movement from place to place?^ The motives underlying the secrecy are not clear it was hardly intended as a precaution against grave-robbers, but would seem to be connected in some way, as in fact Carpini indicates, with the rank of the dead man. Certainly in the case of "less important persons" the position of the tomb, far from being kept secret, was rendered more conspicuous by the erection of one or more horse skins over the site. I have discussed this practice at some length in two articles published in the Central Asiatic Journal3β but am far from satisfied with the tentative ex­ planations which I then offered. Since the dead man is provided in the grave itself with a mount or mounts for use in the other world or on the journey thither, the impaling of horses above the grave would appear to have some other significance. Nevertheless this is the explan­ ation offered, three centuries earlier, by the Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan with references to the same practice amongst the Oghuz Turks. After the dead man has been interred and his tomb roofed over with a "kind of clay dome" his com­ panions , "betaking themselves to his horses.... kill a hundred, two hundred or (only) one of them according to their quan­ tities. They eat the flesh of these except the head, legs, hide and tail which they suspend on wood. And they say: 'These are the horses on which he shall ride to Paradise'..... And sometimes they neglect to kill the horses for a day or two, and an old -35-

man, one of their elders, will exhort them saying: Ί saw so and so, (mean­ ing the dead man) in my sleep and he said to me: "As you see, my companions have got ahead of me and my feet are sore from following them. I cannot catch up with them and have been left all alone." Upon this they betake themselves to the horses, kill them and hang them up alongside his tomb. And after a day or two that old man goes to them and says: "I saw soand-so and he said: 'Tell my family and my companions that I have caught up with those that got ahead of me and have rested from my weariness'."01 According to Ibn Fadlan1s account then, the purpose of impaling horses over a tomb was,quite unequivocally, to provide the dead man with the means of transport into the next world. On the other hand, the suspension of horse hides as a sacrifice to the Sky-God is recorded amongst the Khazars of Northern Daghestan at the end of the 7th century, amongst the Finnic and Turkic peo­ ples - Cheremiss, Mordvins and Chuvash - along the Volga down to the 18th century, and amonst the Altaian Turks in what is now the Gorno-Altai Autonomous Region down almost to the present day. I had therefore suggested in the second of my articles that the horses impaled above medieval graves might likewise have been intended as of­ ferings to the Sky-God, the more so as the six­ teen horse skins suspended over a Kipchak(Coman) grave described by William of Rubruck were so disposed that four of them were facing "each quarter of the world," i.e. each of the four corners of the heavens.32 I am inclined now rather to compare this practice with the Scyth­ ian custom (described by Herodotus in a famous passage)33 of setting up a circle of 50 impaled -36-

horses and riders around the Royal Tombs. It may well be that the Mongols borrowed this form of burial from their Turkish subjects; it may be that the secret cemeteries in which their rulers and princes of the blood were laid to rest were a recent innovation; or it may be that these latter, which appear to have been situated high in the mountains,^ as near as possible to the Sky-God, represent a different but equally archaic tradition.

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References 1

2

3 4

5 6

7

"In heaven you will be as amongst the liv­ ing." So an 8th-century Turk addresses the Khan's brother in one of the Orkhon inscriptions. Quoted by Jean-Paul Roux, La Mort chez les peuples altaiques et medievaux d'apres les documents dscrits (Paris, 1963), p.100. Christopher Dawson (ed.), The Mongol Mis­ sion (London, 1955), p.12. Ibid, p.13. See J .A. Boyle, "Kirakos of Ganjak on the Mongols," Central Asiatic Journal, VIII/3 (September,1963), pp.199-214 (204). See H.R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (London, 1964),pp.152-153. See Boyle, "Kirakos of Ganjak..... ," loc.cit. On the occasion of a ceremony lasting three days following the enthronement in 1229, two years after Genghis Khan's death, of his son and successor, Ogedei (1229-1241). See Juvaini, The History of the WorldConqueror (Manchester, 1958), Vol.I, 189, Rashid al-Din's abridgement of this passage is worth quoting in full: "And when he (i.e. Ogedei) had done with feasting and making presents he ordered that in accord­ ance with the ancient yasaq and their usage and custom they should provide victuals for the soul of Chingiz-Khan, and should choose forty beautiful girls of the race and seed of the emirs that had been in attendance on him and having decked them out in precious garments embroidered with gold and jewels, dispatch them along with choice horses to join his spirit." See The Successors of Genghis Khan, transl. Boyle (New York, 1971), p.31. Where and how these human

-38-

and animal victims were put to death is not stated. The time interval between inter­ ment and immolation is interesting and re­ minds one of the fifty attendants and fifty horses that were sacrificed a year after the burial of a Scythian king. See below note 33. The preparation of victuals for Genghis Khan's soul presumably refers to the ceremony in which food was burnt by the Mongols in honour of their ancestors. The Yüan shih describes this ceremony as per­ formed at the court of the Great Khan in China "In the 9th lunar month of every year as also (on a day) after the 16th of the 12th lunar month there are used (for the sacrifice) in the courtyard where the food is burnt: one horse, three sheep, koumiss, spirits and wines as well as three rolls each of red fabric, gold-embroidered silk and coarse silk for underwear. At the Emperor's command a high Mongol court official accom­ panied by Mongol shamans and shamanesses, has to dig a hole in the ground to burn the (sacrificial) meat in. They also burn spirits and wines mixed (with the meat). The shamans and shamanesses call out the personal names of the dead rulers in the national language and make the sacrifice." See Paul Ratchnevsky, "Uber den mongolis­ chen Kult am Hofe der Grosskhane in China" in Mongolian Studies ed. Louis Ligeti (Amsterdam, 1970), pp.417-443 (429). See below note 16. There seems in fact to be no reliable evi­ dence for the execution of the widow at any period in the history of the peoples of Northern Asia. See Jean-Paul Roux, "La Veuve dans les societes turques et mongoles de l'Asie centrale," L 'Homme, IX/4 (1969), pp.51-78 (60-63).

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1 0

11

12

13

14

15 16

17 18

19 20 21

22

23

24

"..... as regards a widow they believe that she will always return to her first husband . after death." See The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253-55..... trnsl. and ed. W.W. Rockhill (London, 1900), p.78. See A. Zeki Validi Togan, Ibn Fadlan's Reisebericht (Leipzig, 1939), pp.129-131, Roux, La Mort..... . pp. 108-112, idem, "La Veuve..... ," pp.66 ff. Mark xii, 18-24. See Boyle, "Political and Dynastic History of the Il-Khans, in Cambridge History of Iran," Vol.V (1968), pp.303-421, (380). "The Levirate in the Legislation of the Uyan Dynasty" in Asiatic Studies in honour of Dr. Jitsuzo Tamura (Kyoto, 1968), pp.45­ 62. Dawson, op.cit. pp.10-11. See V. Minorsky, Iranica (Tehran, 1964), p.47 and note 2; also the article HULAGU in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.) Geschichte Wassaf's ed. and transl. HammerPurgstall (Vienna, 1856), p.97. See V .V . Bartol'd, "The Burial Rites of the Turks and the Mongols" transl. J.M. Rogers in Rashid al-Din Commemoration Volume (1318-1968) ed. J.A. Boyle and K. Jahn (Wiesbaden, 1970), pp.195-227 (221). See the Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya s.v. SARAICHIK. Dawson, p.13. The Travels of Marco Polo ed. L.T.Benedetto, transl. Aldo Ricci (London, 1931),pp.83-84. See Boyle "The Burial Place of the Great Khan Ogedei," Acta Orientalia (1970), pp.45-50 (45-47). In a paper read at the Second International Congress of Mongolists at Ulan Bator, September, 1970. Dawson, pp.12-13. -40-

25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33

34

The passage is quoted in full in Boyle, "Kirakos of Ganjak..... " pp.204-7, note 32; idem, "A Form of Horse Sacrifice amongst the 13th and 14th century Mongols," Central Asiatic Journal X/3-4 (December, 1965), pp.145-150 (145). See Paul Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo I (Paris, 1959), p.333. Dawson p.13. See Boyle, "The Burial Place....," p.50. See Rashid al-Din, The Successors of Genghis Khan, p.185 and note 29. "Kirakos of Gandjak.... " and "A Form of Horse Sacrifice..." See above, note 4 and 25. "A Form of Horse Sacrifice....," pp.149­ 150. Op.cit.148-149. It is tempting to seek some connection between the positioning of the horse-skins over the Kipchak grave and the belief amongst modern Altaic peoples that the stars are a great drove of horses, for which the cosmic pillar serves as a mighty tethering-post. See Uno HolmbergHarva, Finno-Ugric, Siberian, Vol.IV of the Mythology of All Races ed. J.A. MacCulloch (Boston, 1927), p.337, idem, Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker (Hel­ sinki, 1938), p.40. I am indebted to Mrs. A. Talbot for this suggestion. IV, 71-72. For a translation of the pas­ sage see E.D. Phillips, The Royal Hordes (London, 1965), pp.69-71. Bartol'd, "The Burial Rites...." p.204.

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OTHER WORLD JOURNEYS IN JAPAN By Carmen Blacker Mantic journeys to the other world are usually found in Japan associated with the figure of the ascetic priest. This man, who has often undergone Buddhist vows, has by dint of the austere disciplines of fasting and cold water accumulated in himself powers of a sacred and superhuman kind. Notable among these is his ability to exorcise malignant ghosts and witch animals, rescue them from their malevolence and bring them to a state of salvation and restitut­ ion. The ascetic priest may enter the religious life in one of two ways. First, the call may come from the other side. Through no will of his own he is wrenched from the ordinary human round, and compelled by a shattering experience, interior to his own mind but apparently extern­ ally caused, to alter his way of life. This experience carries the force of initiation. It takes him through a barrier into a different world, from which he returns with changed nature and equipped with special powers to accomplish his religious task. Alternatively, the impulse may come not from the other side but from the man's own vol­ ition. For one reason or another ordinary human life no longer proves supportable or meaningful. An altogether new mode of living, involving cont­ act with the sacred, seems the only way out of an impenetrable impasse. For a man in such a predicament the sacred life, with its attendant powers, may be cultivated by ascetic practices known as gyo. In both these modes of entry into the sacred

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life the journey to another world plays its part. It can come first as a forcible rapture. Through no will of his own the man finds his soul separated from his body and carried off by messengers to either heaven or hell. His body remaining behind in the state of cataleptic trance known as nyüjö, he is conducted along a road, across a barrier of water or mountain, to one or more realms of the other world. In the course of his journey he meets with adventures of an unmistakeably initiatory character before he is finally restored to his body. The man who from his own volition elects to enter the ascetic life may also experience the mantic journey. Here, however, the voyage is not the unwilled, forcible snatching that it is for the involuntary ascetic. It is accomp­ lished by symbolic mimesis. The soul does not leave the body to travel to the other world; rather, the other world is projected by powerful symbolism on to the landscape of our own world. If the man travels through that landscape in body as well as soul, 'fixes' the stages of the journey by the correct ascetic ritual, it will be a!3 i£ his soul had in vision travelled to a truly 'other' world. In both forms, therefore, the other-world journey acts as an initiation, a means whereby a man may effect the passage to a different life. The involuntary visionary journey is, however, antecedent and paradigmatic to the other. It is on the unwilled vision of the road to heaven and hell that the symbolic and mimetic journey is modelled. In this paper, therefore, we treat the visionary journey only. We consider the cases of forcible ecstasy, in which, with no preliminary warning, a man's soul is snatched from his body and carried off

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on a mantic voyage to the other world. Regrettably few first hand accounts have come down to us of people in Japan who, as a result of such a journey, have been impelled to enter the religious life. It is rather the opposite phenomenon, the forcible 'possession' of a human body by a god, of which we hear today as religious initiation. An interesting body of indirect evidence exists, however, which suggests that in past centuries the experience of spontaneous rapture to the other world was a good deal more common than it is today. This body of evidence we will examine, before adduc­ ing a notable example of initiation in recent times by mantic journey. A fertile source of indirect evidence is to be found in the popular Buddhist 'tale literature' of the middle ages. Here, in the collections of Buddhist tales which appeared in such profusion between the 10th and the 14th centuries, are to be found many stories of Buddhist priests who were forcibly carried off to various realms of the other world. Here it is relevant to note, perhaps, that the cosmos envisaged in these stories is not so vast or complex as the universe described in the Buddhist canon. The Buddhist cosmic traveller would certainly expect to see the vast axial mountain, Mt Meru, and, disposed about it, the six realms into which sentient beings may, according to their past karma, be reborn. Deep down near the roots of the moun­ tain the traveller would find the layers of hell$ hot and cold. Next, he should pass through the realm of hungry ghosts, the realm of beasts and the realm of ashuras or titans. Finally, high up the slopes of the mountain, well past our own human world, he should contemplate the multiple layers of heavens. The Buddhist shaman should, correctly, accomplish the rokudd-meguri, or Round -44-

of the Six Realms, on the pattern, perhaps of that notable Buddhist cosmic traveller Maudgalyayana. In the Mahävastu we read how this most exalted of the Buddha's disciples journeyed as a detached and unaccompanied spectator first to the various quarters of hell, next to the realms of ghosts, beasts and titans, and lastly to the successive layers of heavens. From each visit he returned to warn an appalled audience of the terrible fate to which the force of karma would condemn all those who failed to lead the holy life.1 In the medieval Japanese tales which here concern us, however, not a single example occurs of a traveller who journeys through all six of the transmigratory realms. True, in several stories the traveller is described as accomplish­ ing the rokud5-meguri, but in no case are all six countries systematically visited and described. Indeed, at no period of Japanese literature can we find a narrative in any way comparable with Dante's visits to Paradise and the Inferno, or even with the Chinese Hsi Yang Chi, in which Professor Duyvendak found so many motifs enigmatically similar to those found in Dante.2 The dramatic theme of the full cosmic journey has apparently been neglected in Japan. The tales which here concern us fall into two types only: descents to hell and ascents to heaven. Incomparably more numerous are the stories which describe visits to hell. These therefore we will examine first. In collections of Buddhist stories such as the Nihon Ryöiki and the Konjaku Monogatari, a remarkable number of tales can be found which describe a priest who falls sick and dies. For one reason or another his funeral is delayed, and after a period of usually three, seven or nine days he suddenly comes back to life. He

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has meanwhile been on a long and strange journey, he tells his astonished disciples and friends. Two grisly messengers came to fetch him and forced him to hurry along a dark and dreary road. They crossed a dismal river, usually by a ford, and eventually arrived at a glittering palace. "Here he is," the messengers shouted, and a voice from within replied, "Bring him inside." Within he saw Emma 0, the king and judge of the underworld, and round about him a multitude of the newly dead, crying piteously, being hurried away by frightful looking guards to the realms of hell or the hungry ghosts. What happens next to the terrified priest may be one of several possibilities. He may be subject to a series of ghastly ordeals, from which he is restored to life chastened and changed. Or, like Mu-lien in the celebrated Chinese story, he may find himself called upon to rescue his dead father or wife from terrible torment in one of the worse quarters of hell. Or again, he may himself be condemned to suffer such torments, only to be rescued at the last moment by a diminutive priest with a crozier in hand, who turns out to be the Bodhisattva Jizo. A few examples of these stories will show that embedded within each of these types there can be discerned a substructure of vision. Of the type in which the priest undergoes terrible ordeals, a good example may be found in the 11th century collection Nihon Ryoiki. A priest called Chiko, who had led an otherwise blameless life, was suddenly seized by unworthy feelings of jealousy for the saintly priest Gydgi, on whom the Emperor had recently lavished favours. Soon afterwards he fell sick, but warned his disciples that if by chance he were to die, they were to wait nine days before cremating his body. Sure enough he died, and the disciples accordingly

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locked up his body in a room.

At the end of

nine days they opened the door to find that ChikS had come to life again. Two messengers had come for him, he told his disciples, and they had walked along a road to the west. Ahead lay a golden palace, with two awful figures on either side of the door, clad in armour with red vines bound round their fore­ heads. "Here he is," said the messengers. "Go along that road then," replied the guards, point­ ing to the north. ChikS walked northwards with the messengers, and soon felt a scorching heat burn his face, though he could see neither any fire nor any light of the sun. Before him there appeared a red hot pillar of iron. "Clasp that pillar," the messengers ordered. Chik5 did so, and at once all his flesh was burnt away so that only his skeleton remained. After three days the messengers came back with brooms3 and brushed the pillar crying, "Come back to life, come back to life." Chikd revived, and again they journeyed northwards, until before them rose another pillar even hotter than the first and this time of brass. Terrible though it was, Chik5 felt a strong desire to clasp it. So when the messeng­ ers ordered him to throw his arms round it he did so, and again all his flesh was burnt away. After three days they came back again and brushed the pillar with their brooms crying "Come back to life." Once again he revived and they continued their journey northwards until they came to a fiery cloud, so hot that birds fell down dead when they touched it. "What is this place?" Chik5 asked. "The Avici Hell where you are to be burnt," the messengers replied, seizing him and hurling him into the fire. There he stayed

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for another three days until the messengers re­ turned and brought him back to life, and this time they turned back and retraced their steps. When they reached the golden palace the two fig­ ures at the gate said to Chikd, "The cause which brought you here was your jealousy of Gyogi Bosatsu. We summoned you here in order that you might wipe out that sin. Gyogi is soon to be reborn here and we are awaiting his coming. Do not eat of the food of the land of the dead, but return as quickly as you can." Chiko set out again eastwards with the messengers, until he arrived back in his temple to find that exactly nine days had passed. When he had recuperated from his ordeal, Chik5 visited Gydgi, confessed his former jealousy, was forgiven, and thereafter led an exemplary life.4 Another type of story which recurs many times describes how a man is summoned to hell and bidden to rescue his dead father, mother or wife from frightful torments there. Here we have a type which clearly has parallels in China. The celebrated tale of Mu-lien, who made many attempts to take food to his mother as she starved in the lowest realm of Hell eventually rescuing her by performing a ritual prescribed by the Buddha himself, is only one among several Chinese examples of this theme.5 In the Nihon RySiki again we find the tale of Fujiwara Hirotari, who died suddenly while recuperating in a mountain temple from a severe illness. His family were summoned and preparations were made for his funeral. But on the third day he came back to life and told them the following story. "Two men came for me wearing armour over their crimson garments and carrying swords and spears in their hands. They struck me on the

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back and hurried me away, saying that I was to appear at once before the king of hell. The road ended at a deep river, black as ink and dis­ mal to look upon, with a row of trees to mark the ford. The messenger in front warned me to follow close behind him as we waded across, and thus we reached the other side safely. Ahead stood a lofty tower, many stories high and dazzlingly bright. One of the messengers ran inside and said, "He is here." "Bring him inside then," came a voice from within. I went inside and a voice from behind a screen asked, "Do you recognise the person behind you?" I looked behind me and saw my wife, who had died. in childbirth some three years before. "Yes," I replied, "it is my wife". "It is at her request that we summoned you," they said. "Of the six years that she must suffer here, she had already endured three. Those three remaining years she wishes to pass with you, because it was with your child that she died." Hirotari went on to tell how he offered to rescue her from further torture by copying and reciting the Lotus Sutra. "If he will do as he says," his wife declared, "I will forgive him and let him go home." The pact sealed, Hirotari was just passing out of the gate of the tower, when he thought to ask the name of the being who had summoned him there. "My name is Emma δ", the personage replied, "but in your country they call me the Bodhisattva Jizö." With these words he touched Hirotari on the forehead and told him that the mark he had received would preserve him from disaster. Thereupon Hirotari came to life again, realising that the judge of hell and the saviour from its torments were one and the same person.6 Into this category of journeys to rescue or -49-

alleviate the sufferings of those in hell comes the voyage of one of the most prominent of the medieval mantic travellers, the priest Nichizö. Nichizö, otherwise known as Doken, is stated in several medieval works to have accomplished the full cosmic journey, visiting every one of the Six Realms, under the guidance of the Bodhisattva Kongo Zaö. Characteristically however, only his journey to hell and his ascent to heaven have been described. His visit to hell is stated in the Jikkinshö to have taken place during the eighth month of the year 934, during a period of ascetic seclusion in a cave on Mt Mitake. His body left behind in the cave, his soul travelled to a dreary waste where he saw a hut of reeds lying among mountains of iron. In this hut he found the Emperor Uda, with only a single garment to hide his nakedness, condemned for the sins he had committed during his life­ time to years of torment among caves of iron. Nearby were three of his ministers, stark naked upon red hot coals, ceaselessly wailing in their agony. The Emperor beckoned to Nichizö to approach. "Make no reverence to me," he said as Nichizö prostrated himself. "In hell there are no distinctions of rank." He then begged Nichizö to tell the Empress to recite sutras efficacious in the wiping out of bad karma, which the priest, weeping bitterly, promised to do.7 Here we see the traveller acting not as the immediate saviour from hell, but as the salvat­ ionary messenger. It is he who carries the tidings of what he has seen and heard to the relatives of the sufferer, whose responsibility it is to perform the correct nullifying obsequies. We come now to what is perhaps the most persistenly recurring theme in these stories of journeys to hell: the rescue of the traveller himself by the benign Bodhisattva Jizö. We

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have here a version of the theme of the harrowing of hell. The priest Ashd, the Konjaku Monogatari relates, had spent a blameless life devoted to the performance of ascetic exercises in mountains. One year a terrible pestilence ravaged the land, and on his way back to his temple one day Ashd was struck down by the sickness and died. His disciples, terrified of the infection, abandoned his body by the roadside. A couple of days later however Ashd came to life again and told the following story to a chance wayfarer. He had found himself walking along a wide road towards the northwest. Soon he came to a tall tower, like a court of judgment, with a great crowd of people standing outside whose sins were being weighed by rows of officials. Most of these people were eventually seized, tied up and sent off to hell, and the sound of their screams was as loud as thunder. Ashd was dumb­ founded at the sight, and his hair stood on end with horror. Then he caught sight of a small priest, attended by a single beautiful boy, hurrying to and fro with a staff in one hand and a scroll in the other. Ashö asked the boy who the small priest might be. "Don't you know?" said the boy. "That's Jizo Bosatsu." Over­ come with awe, Ash5 prostrated himself on the ground, whereupon Jizö came over to him and said reassuringly, "You will soon be out of this place." He took Ashd in front of the officials and said to them, "This priest has spent his life in performing austerities for the sake of the Law. He has been round all the mountains, Hakusan and Tateyama and many others, and written full des­ criptions in his ascetic diary. You must let him go at once."

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"Well," said the officials, "if what you say is true, then certainly we will let him go." . The small priest dragged the weeping Ashö out of the tower and said, "Go back home and never come to this place again." With these words ringing in his ears, Ashö came to life again.8 The same theme is repeated again and again with sinners far greater than the innocent Ashö. Extortioners, hunters of fish and game, robbers and lecherers, are saved from the brink of hell and sent back to their former bodies, chastened and affrighted, by the intervention of Jizo. Always the relations and friends who listen to the terrible tale are guided thereby to lives of greater holiness and moral effort. On the face of it, therefore, these tales appear to be moral warnings to the ignorant of the terrible karmic penalties of sin, or of the salvationary power of various holy scriptures or bodhisattvas. Chikö's fearful experiences were undergone ostensibly to wipe out the karmic con­ sequence of one particular sin of slander. Those who die in childbirth, like Fujiwara Hirotari's wife, or with unexpiated sins of slaughter or lechery in their lives, may expect to pass years in hell unless steps are taken to save them. In nearly all the tales, however, beneath the accretions of Buddhist morality, there seems to lie a bottom or substructure of vision. The sinister messengers, the journey westwards or northwards, the barrier of dark water, the glittering palace, the ordeals of death and re­ suscitation from a skeleton, all these are reminiscent of the initiatory schema. The drama too of the rescue of the soul from hell is one which appears frequently in the initiatory vision of the shaman. There is rarely any superior

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Guide in these dark regions, it is interesting to note, nor is there any horse to carry the travel­ ler along the road, nor any boat or bridge to take him across the river. Nor yet is there any clear notion of descent; the dark road does not plunge downwards. But the baffling ambivalence which we have seen to be so characteristic of the other world persists. The king of hell is apt to shift from the inexorable prosecutor to the benign saviour; King Emma is at the same time the Bodhisattva Jizd. The palace too, which appears so constantly at the other side of the river, is at the same time hell and paradise. It is the court of judgment where sinners are condemned to hell, and at the same time the paradisal palace where Gyogi Bosatsu is to be reborn. We come now to the second principal type of other world journey to be found in these medieval tales, the ascent to heaven. These stories are fewer, shorter and less dramatiQ than those des­ cribing visits to hell. Some, moreover, must be ruled out of court as probable literary bor­ rowings from the Buddhist canon. The descrip­ tion of the paradise to which the priest is taken follows so closely the canonical account of the Land of Bliss in the two Sukhavatl Vyuha Sutras as to make any visionary basis of the story improbable. Other tales of ascensions to paradise can be found, however, in which the schema of the initiatory vision is unmistakeable. Take the account of the priest Nichizo's journey to heaven, for example, as related in the Fuso Ryakki under the title Döken Shönin Meidoki. This experience occurred thirteen years earlier than the visit to hell which we have just described, at a time when this priest still bore the name of Döken Shönin. After several years of ascetic seclusion on Mt Kimpu, the Fus5 Ryakki relates, culminating in thirtyseven days of complete fasting in a cave, Ddken -53-

Shonin suddenly felt his body suffuced with a parching interior heat. His throat and tongue grew burning and dry and the breath stopped with­ in him. His spirit then rose out of his body and left the cave. Soon he met a priest, hold­ ing in his hand a golden bowl full of water which he gave Döken to drink. Its taste was so miraculous that it seemed to penetrate his very bones and marrow. Twelve divine boys then appeared, who offered him food and drink on large lotus leaves. Another priestly figure then caught hold of Döken's hand and carried him far up the mountain into the snows. When they reached the top, Döken saw the whole world stret­ ched out before him bathed in dazzling golden light. To the north lay a golden mountain, and on its summit a throne made of seven jewels. On it sat another priestly figure who said, "I am Zao Bosatsu, a transformation of the Buddha. The land you see before you is Paradise. You have not much longer to live, so struggle with all your might to lead a holy life." A dazzling five-coloured light then shone upon them, and a deity by the name of Daijoitokuten appeared at the head of a huge retinue of followers. He offered to conduct Döken to his palace. Döken was thereupon given a white horse, on whose back he travelled hundreds of leagues with the deity until they arrived at a great lake. In the middle of the lake was an island, and on the island was a square altar. On the altar was a lotus flower, and on the lotus flower stood a jewelled tower, inside which was enshrined the Lotus Sutra. Döken looked to the north and saw a shining palace. This was the deity's dwelling place. The deity told him that in his hands lay the power to determine disaster and disease, and promised to allow Döken a longer spell of life provided that he practised his religious -54-

disciplines with all his might. He instructed him also to change his name to Nichizö. Thus armed with insight into the nature of disaster, Döken returned to Mt Kimpu and thence back to his body in the cave.9 The same schema of the ascent of a golden mountain appears in the tale of ötomo no Yasuko in the Nihon Ryöiki. He too died, but rose from the dead after three days and described how he had travelled upwards along the path of a rain­ bow until he came to a shining golden mountain. There he was welcomed by the superior figure of Shötoku Taishi, who conducted him to the summit. Here a Boy gave him a magical elixir in the form of a jewel which afforded protection from murder by the sword.1® Finally we must take account of the case of En-no-Gyöja. This mysterious figure, represent­ ed in iconography as wearing a pointed beard and a Mithras cap and carrying in his right hand a sistrum with large rings, is hailed as the archetypal and perfect ascetic. In the auster­ ities he practised and in the powers he thereby achieved, he is accounted the prototype of the ascetic man. For this reason he is said to be the 'founder' of the order of mountain ascetics known as Shugendo, some of whose rituals and disciplines we shall discuss in later chapters. Clearly he is to be understood as the founder not in the historical sense, but as a semi­ legendary figure who stands for the model or type of what the ascetic should aspire to b e , Several accounts of his life have come down to us, increasing in elaboration with the passage of time. The one which concerns us here is the En­ no -Gyöja-Hongi. The date appears uncertain. Some authorities place it as early as the 8th century, others as late as the Muromachi period. But we here find En no Gyoja described in -55-

unmistakeable terms as a cosmic traveller. When he was twenty-five, the account runs, he climbed to the top of Mt Minoo in Sesshu. There he dis­ ciplined himself to a deep concentration of mind. At once he rose up to the paradise of Nagarjuna, where a man asked him, "Who are you?" "I am Shökaku", he replied. Thereupon he was conduct­ ed inside a dazzling temple, vast and solemn, with tall towers and flowers of lapis lazuli, lakes of many coloured lotuses, rows of magical trees and a strange bird whose marvellous song chanted forth the Buddhist Law. Here, to the music of bells, gongs and drums which emitted sound of their own accord, he ate of the sweet dew of Heaven. Seated crosslegged on a jewelled lotus was the white figure of Nagarjuna, a crown on his head, a vajra in his right hand, a jewel­ led box in his left. Miraculous boys from the two mandalas, together with deities and kings, poured fragrant water over his head, Nagarjuna conferred upon him the deepest secret 'seal', a spell and a mudra of the hands. Thereupon he rose up through the nine worlds until he reached the realm of Myogaku. There, having received the innermost secret knowledge, he returned to his body on Mt Minoo.11 From this account we can infer that the ascent to heaven, and thence upwards through nine more paradisal levels, the meeting with superior godlike beings, the eating of paradisal food, the conferment of secret knowledge, is an ex­ perience which was considered proper and necess­ ary to the ascetic. En-no-Gy5ja as the pattern and mould of ascetic form must therefore have under gone an initiation of this kind. In all these stories, just as in the des^ cents to hell, we meet unmistakeably the drama of the initiatory vision. The ascent up a mountain, the golden light, the benevolent and

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superior Guide, the magical gifts, all seem to belong to an obverse, bright side of the initia­ tion myth complementary to the darkness and gloom which dogs the previous tales. We may surmise therefore, that in their kernel and origin these stories were not the contrived moral tale or the admonitory allegory that they now appear. Ben­ eath the moral accretions we can discern an account of a visionary journey to other worlds. We turn now to a second source of evidence which suggests that in the past the experience of involuntary rapture was more common than might be supposed from direct testimony today. It lies in the field of folk legend. Well into the present century there survived in many districts a persistent legend known as kamigakushi or abduction by a god. A boy or young man who unaccountably disappeared from his home was believed to have been kidnapped by a supernatural being and carried off to the creat­ ure's own realm. Appropriate spells were recited to compel the being to bring the boy back, and frequently the whole village would turn out at nightfall with lanterns, banging on drums and bells and shouting, "Bring him, bring him back." Quite often, it seems, these measures were fully justified by success. The boy would reappear, deathly pale, in some oddly inaccess­ ible spot such as the eaves of the local temple or the cramped space between the ceiling and the roof of his own house. For several days he lay in a dazed stupor, but eventually he recovered consciousness and told as best he could what had befallen him while he had been away. Sometimes, the stories run, the child was a halfwit when he recovered and was able to recount

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nothing of his adventures. But more often he told a tale along the following lines. A tall stranger with glittering eyes appeared while he was playing and carried him away. This figure is sometimes described as an old man, but more often as wearing the distinctive garb of the yamabushi or mountain ascetic. Sometimes indeed it is two yamabushi who, the boy relates, took him by the hands and flew up into the sky. They went on a long journey, sometimes down into under­ ground passages and caves, sometimes up into the sky as high as the sun and moon, sometimes far away over mountains and seas as far as the Great Wall of China or the great lake in the middle of Tartary. At first he had enjoyed the flight, but after a day or two he began to feel lonely and homesick and to beg his kidnapper to take him back. Whereupon in a trice he had found himself deposited in the odd spot where eventually he was discovered by his relatives.12 The oral versions of this legend are always told 'for true,' with circumstantial details of time and place. The boy was kidnapped, for example, "on the evening of September 30th 1907, from Mr Kasaijima's house in the village of Damine in Aichi prefecture," the teller frequent­ ly assuring us that he knew the whole family well· Stories on remarkably similar lines, however, may be found in a number of literary works from the medieval period onwards. The story is substan­ tially the same. The boy is carried away by yamabushi to a distant mountain where, after watching a number of strange sights, he is eventually restored to his home by a mysterious and benign figure, often absent from the oral versions, of an old man. A peculiar story in the 14th century collec­ tion Shasekishü, for example, tells how a boy disappeared from a monastery. Several days

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later he was found on the temple roof in a state of stupefaction. When he recovered his senses he told them that some yamabushi had kidnapped him and carried him off to a temple deep in the mountains. There he had watched a band of yamabushi dance. They danced for a long time, until suddenly a net descended from the sky and drew itself round the dancers. In great terror they tried desperately to escape, but in vain. From the meshes of the net there shot forth flames which grew gradually fiercer until they were all burnt to ashes. After a while they all came to life again and began to dance just as before. Then an ancient priest appeared and said to one of them, "Why did you bring this child here? Take him back to his temple at once." Whereupon the yamabushi, looking very frightened, took the boy home and left him on the temple roof.1^ In another story, related by a Mr. Kurahashi, a friend of the celebrated Shinto scholar Hirata Atsutane, and presumably taken from an oral source, the boy was carried far away across the sea, first to the Great Wall of China and event­ ually to a region very far to the north, where it was very cold and where the sun could be seen at all times. There they found a wondrous palace, where five lords were seated behind a screen. They told the boy that he would have to stay in that country for four or five days before they could arrange for him to be taken home, and during that time he sat in a large room where there were many other people who had also recently arrived in the place. They were all pressing red hot lumps of iron against their bodies, or climbing into cauldrons of boiling water, always emerging unscathed. Eventually the boy was taken back to Japan, again flying through the sky, and left on the roof of a temple near his own house.1**

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In another tale, also recorded by Hirata Atsutane, a young man engaged in repair work to one of the temple buildings on Mt Hiei, was forc­ ibly abducted by a small priest and a man with wild black hair and a red face. They flew through the air past many magic mountains, and several times when he was particularly frightened a tall priest appeared and comforted him with spells from the Lotus Sutra. When they arrived at their destination the young man begged to be sent home, to which his captors eventually agreed giving him as a memento of his journey a magic herbal medicine and a prescription for a discip­ line which would make it efficacious.15 The most lucid and detailed account of such a magical journey to other worlds is certainly that told by the boy Torakichi to Hirata Atsutane in the year 1820. Hirata in the course of his antiquarian researches into the golden age of the gods before the beginning of history, had become interested in the varioüs realms where supernatural beings were said to dwell. When he heard, therefore, that there was a boy in Edo who claimed to have been carried off to an otherworld mountain by an elderly tengu, and to have spent several years there as a pupil of this being, his curiosity was at once aroused. He invited the boy to his house, and with a group of friends, most of whom were also scholars of the Shinto Revival, they plied the boy with so many questions about his stay in the other world, that Hirata's record of his story runs to some two hundred pages.16 Torakichi1s account departs from the more laconic prototype of the kamigakushi story in a number of ways. His captor, though a tengu, turned out to be an erudite and benevolent figure, who instructed the boy in swordsmanship, medicine, magic and cooking, sent him on errands

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to the Island of Women and the Land of Dogs, and taught him how to fly as high as the moon, which he described as covered with great muddy seas, pierced by two or three gaping holes, through which you could see right through the other side. He also subjected the boy to a severe initiatory ordeal of a hundred days complete fast. Torakichi was tied up to a tree, and after sever­ al days starvation felt as though he were dead. When he came to himself again he found that the hundred days were up, and that his little finger nail, pulled out before as a pledge of sincerity, had been restored to him. Later cases of supernatural kidnapping have also been reported by persons of some education. During the Bakumatsu period a young priest called Koan was carried off by a white haired old man to Mt Akayama, where he met many Immortals, and later to China and Siberia. He wrote a long description of his journey. Seventeen years later a young medical student was carried off to the magic mountain Akibasan where he acquired supernatural powers. His story won him many disciples.17 Elsewhere the recorded instances seem to be largely of boys in mountain villages. In all the examples of this curious legend however certain elements tend to persist: the magical flight to strange places, the weird sights that the boy witnesses, the miraculous gifts of elixir, herb or protective jewel that are bestowed on him, the benign saviour, some­ times anonymous, sometimes taking the form of a Buddhist saint, through whose intervention the boy is restored to his home. Many of the elements, in short, are remini­ scent of the medieval stories we have just noticed of the journey to the realms of the dead or to the heavenly mountain. The two yamabushi

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captors are not unlike the two messengers from the underworld; the glittering palace appears again, the strange ordeals in which people are killed and brought to life, the magical gifts, the flight up a mountain, all these we have al­ ready seen in the earlier stories. May we not see in this oddly persistent legend another vestigial remnant of the rive initiatique? True, it has been deprived of its power-giving qualities. Some of the boys found on the temple roofs later became idiots, unable to endure the 'otherness' of the experience they had undergone. Far from returning enhanced, empowered persons, they were henceforth diminish­ ed, maimed ones. Others, such as Torakichi himself, apparently disappeared afterwards into obscurity, leaving scarcely a memory behind, let alone a line of disciples pledged to perpetuate their revelation. The vision remains, but it has lost its transforming power. No longer acknowledged to be religious experience, it sur­ vives, obscurely on the periphery of the reli­ gious world, as a folk legend. These legends and the medieval tales, we therefore conclude, can be viewed as evidence suggesting that the experience of forcible rap­ ture to the other world appeared more frequently in Japan than the few direct accounts which come down to us today lead us to suppose. These direct testimonies are indeed few. One spect­ acular example exists, however which in itself suffices to show that the mantic voyage can function in Japan as an entry into the religious life. This is the case of Deguchi Onisaburo, one of the founders of the flourishing religious movement known as ömoto.18 Deguchi appears to have been a sickly youth, haunted by visions of ghosts. He also affected

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the low company of gamblers and drunkards, who in the spring of 1898 beat him up so severely that he was nearly killed. After recovering from this ordeal he suddenly disappeared, and for a week nothing was heard of him. Then he reappear­ ed, and, like the kidnapped boys we have just noticed, sank for several days into a comatose sleep. When eventually he recovered conscious­ ness, he declared that he had been to a cave on Mt Takakuma in order to undergo a period of ascetic fasting. There his soul had been separ­ ated from his body and carried off, under the guidance of a variety of divine figures, to all the quarters of heaven and hell. In the course of his journey he had been granted supernatural powers, including clairvoyance and clairaudience. He had seen back into the past as far as the creation of the world, and into mysteries such as kotodama, the occult soul of words. His family called in exorcists, thinking him to be suffering from fox possession. But he soon made a good recovery, and proceeded to embark on the career which was later to bring him the fame and notoriety of a remarkable religious leader. The full account of his adventures was not published until 1921. By then he was already a celebrated figure. The religious group he founded, Ömoto, had already received its first blow of government persecution, whereby, on the charge of l£se majeste against the Emperor, its buildings were savagely razed to the ground and its leaders imprisoned. It was on emerging from prison on bail that Deguchi embarked on the nar­ rative of his adventures in the other world twenty-three years before. He is said to have dictated the story of his journey in a state of trance in which he relived vividly the whole cycle of his adventures. When he described travelling through icily cold regions, for exam­ ple, he himself shivered so violently that he had

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to be wrapped in coats even though it was a hot day. As he dictated he was apparently imper­ vious to fatigue; for many hours on end he con­ tinued to speak to a series of amanuenses who one after the other retired exhausted. The account of his journey to hell and his subsequent ascent to heaven is too long and com­ plex to relate in full. A few scenes only from each journey will have to suffice to exemplify this remarkable narrative.19 His account begins with a description of his austerities in a cave on the holy mountain Takakuma. For several days neither food nor water passed his lips. Day and night he sat cross legged on a painfully jagged rock, his body pierced by an icy wind, while bloodcurdingly uncanny sounds reverberated over the mountainside. There then appeared a messenger who summoned his soul from his body and carried it off hundreds of leagues through the air, his body meanwhile re­ maining behind cross legged in the cave. They descended at last to see before them a huge river, which the messenger told him was the barrier of the other world. They waded across, and as they did so Deguchi noticed that his blue garment had turned white. When they reached the opposite bank he looked back and behold, what he had thought to be no more than flowing water had become a writhing mass of thousands of snakes, their heads raised to spit forth fiery tongues. And following behind, apparently unaware of anything more than the water of the river, came a host of other travellers. Their clothes as they made their way across were all changed to different colours, black, yellow or brown. They were harassed and chivied by several fright­ ful looking guards, who called out their names and attached labels on their garments.

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Soon Deguchi and his guide came to a court­ house, where they were taken into the presence of the king of the underworld. A white haired old man with a beautiful gentle face, he talked to them amiably until it was time for him to go to the court room to preside over the tribunal of the multitudes who had waded across the river. Seated upon his throne of judgment, the king's aspect suddenly underwent a terrible change. Gone was the gentle and dignified old man. What Deguchi saw now was a bright red face, eyes huge and staring like mirrors, and a mouth, split open as wide as the ears, from which there spurted forth a long tongue like a flame. One by one the travellers were called by name, the judgment read out, were dragged off by the guards to the prescribed quarter of hell. When Deguchi's turn came, however, he received special treatment. Henceforth, the king told him, he was to become the messiah between the two worlds. He must therefore see for himself what the other world was like. He was given to aid him on his journey a magic spell, which, as we shall see, was to prove on many occasions indispensible. We see him first walking along a narrow road choked with dead weeds as sharp as icicles. On either side lay a deep ditch filled with loath­ some worms and insects. Above loomed a black cloud from which a terrible face glared down at him. Behind, a demon in a red jacket was trying to prod him with a sharp spear. Ahead of him he soon came to a deep river full of blood and pus, with no bridge, in which countless people, their bodies covered with leeches, were struggling and screaming. In this desperate position he murmured the words of the spell he had been given, and at once found himself on the other side of the river. Here he is again, sliding down an icy road,

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down and down into cold black depths, all round him a sickening stench of blood and the sound of indescribably agonised screams. Down and down he fell, until his face and body were cut to pieces on the sharp rocks. He managed to gasp out the words of the spell however, and at once it grew lighter, his wounds vanished, and he found himself in the midst of a great crowd of people on the edge of a lake. The lake was full of hairy caterpillars and horned snakes, and over it, as far as the oppo­ site shore, stretched a slender bridge of ice. Goaded by demons with sharp spears, the people were struggling to climb the bridge. Already several had slipped into the lake, to be bitten and squeezed by the snakes. Again Deguchi re­ cited his spell, and lo, the lake disappeared, the demons and snakes disappeared, and he found himself on a wide plain surrounded by thousands of dead people, their faces full of joy, calling him by name as their deliverer. Further on we see him again before a tall building as high as the clouds. At the gate stood two fierce guards, looking in all direct­ ions with eyes like mirrors. Then there ap­ peared a band of soldiers driving before them a throng of tormented dead people. The women and children rushed towards Deguchi, blood streaming from their mouths, snakes twined round their necks and spears sticking from their stomachs. Deguchi went to meet them murmuring his spell, and at once the tall building, the soldiers and the blood disappeared, a brilliant light filled the sky, and benevolent spirits like stars took charge of the dead people. For a moment the air was filled with joyous voices. Then they faded into the distance until at length all that Deguchi could hear was the sound of the wind.

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6 6

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There follow in his narrative many more such scenes, shifting, enigmatic and dreamlike. Time and again he is killed, split in half with a sharp blade like a pear, dashed to pieces on rocks, frozen, burnt, engulfed in avalanches of snow. Once he was turned into a goddess. Time and again he was able to rescue, by means of his spell, tormented dead people. At length, however, he was told that he had seen enough of the quarters of hell, and that it was time for him to pass on to his journey of heaven. After a short respite in his body in the cave, he was again snatched out of it, as though by an enormous hand, and set down at a double cross roads. From there he made many attempts to walk along the road to paradise. At each attempt, however, he found himself caught up in an enigmatic and dreamlike scene. He saw running before him along the road, for example, a strange woman with a pitted face, a long hanging tongue and sunken, glittering eyes. Soon she plunged into a thick wood, and Deguchi felt impelled to follow her. Eventually, after a long pursuit, he emerged on to a green plateau to see the woman, who now had a long thick tail, surrounded by goblins. With her tail the woman killed the goblins and, with an expression of rapture on her face, bagan to lap up their blood. As she drank, horns sprouted from her forehead, her body swelled, her mouth split open as wide as her ears and her teeth turned to tusks like swords. Paralysed with horror, Deguchi murmured his spell, and at once found himself back again at the crossroads. Realising out once more, snake with the with bloodshot

that he had gone astray, he set to see before him a large black face of a woman, writhing in agony eyes. She plunged into the sea

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and swam frantically away. Deguchi attempted to follow her, but at once the sea and the snakewoman vanished and he found himself once more back at the cross roads. Two more scenes and we must leave him. At length he found himself at the centre of the world, at the summit of the huge axial mountain Sumeru. Here he was vouchsafed a sight of the creation of the world. Below him stretched the entire universe, formless and shapeless like a muddy sea. But as he looked through his tele­ scope he descried in the distance a golden pillar which spun round to the left. Faster and faster it spun, until the mud churned and scattered into lumps which took their place in the sky as stars. Another pillar then arose, silver and spinning to the right. As it spun it scattered seeds in all directions which became mountains and plains and rivers. This vision ended, he found himself again walking along a road. At last he came to a great river, beyond which was paradise. Over it hung a great arched bridge made of gold. Many travellers were gathered at its foot, amazed at its steepness and dazzling beauty. There was no railing and the golden surface was very slippery, so that he had to take off his shoes and cast away everything he was carrying before venturing to step upon it. Many travellers slipped and fell into the river, but Deguchi, though dizzy and faint, reached the other side safely. There he saw before him, standing on a vast lotus, a marvellous palace made of gold and agate and the seven jewels. On to the lotus he climbed and saw all round him ranges of blue mountains, and a great lake rippling with golden waves. Among the waves rose innumerable islands, covered with pine trees with crane's nests among their branch­ es. Above the lake flew golden doves and crows, while on the surface of the water swam mandarin ducks and turtles with green fur. -68-

With this vision of the islands of paradise we must leave Deguchi's narrative of his journey to the other world. We have followed him through only a few scenes of his first volume. His adventures continue through eleven more. But already we have seen enough to recognise many of the motifs of the initiatory journey. Or­ deals which kill or transform, river barriers, perilous bridges, glittering palaces, the ambi­ valent ruler of the underworld, the obstacles on the road which ensnare and beglamour, all these are part of a familiar schema. But underlying the tale can be discerned unmistakeably the dis­ solving scenes of a genuine vision. This ex­ perience we know to have been a transforming one. Deguchi returned from his journey an altered person, gifted with powers and aspirations he had not possessed before. From the evidence here adduced we may infer that the experience of mantic flight to other worlds has been known in Japan for many centuries. In recent times, however, its incidence has dec­ lined, particularly in its power-giving form of a religious initiation. Examples of such as Deguchi, whose other-world adventures trans­ formed him from a sickly and neurotic youth to a powerful religious leader, are rare in modern Japan.

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References Mahävastu, Sacred Books of the East/ Vol.16, p.6. J.J. Duyvendak, "A Chinese Divina Commedia", T'oung Pao Vol.41, 1952. This work, Professor Duyvendak writes, gives "a general effect of almost uncanny similarity" with the Divina Commedia. The broom as a life-giving symbol occurs also in the Hsi Yang Chi, see note 2. When Wang Ming arrives at the eighth and last of the hells, he sees demons sawing the bodies of sinners into small pieces. They then brush'the pieces with a broom, and the sin­ ners come to life again. Duyvendak, op. cit. p.31. Nihon RyPiki, book 2, story 7. Mu-lien is the Chinese name for Maudgalyayana, whose cosmic journey in the Mahavastu we noted earlier. In China he became a well known figure in popular Buddhism, dramas featuring his journey to hell being frequently performed at funerals. His mother's life of sin began, according to one version of the story, when she tied up a goat next to a large vat of sauce. She then lit a fire round the poor beast so that it was grilled alive, in its agony falling into the vat of sauce, where she ate it with relish. She then killed and ate her own dog, and afterwards indulged in meat of all kinds. For these crimes she was thrown into the lowest hell. Mu-lien sought her in many sectors of hell, and after several attempts to save her, eventually with the Buddha's help succeeded in having her conveyed, purged of her karma, to the Trayatrimsa Heaven. See Arthur Waley's translation of the Tun-huang

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6 7 8 9

10 11

12

13 14

15 16 17

1 8

version of the story in Ballads and Stories of Tun-huang, p.216-235. Another version is given in Henri Dor&'s Recherches sur les Superstitions en Chine, Shanghai 1914, Vol. 6. p.159-161. For a discussion of the dissemination of the Mu-lien legend in Japan, see Iwamoto Yutaka, Mokuren densetsu to urabon. Nihon Ryöiki, book 3, story 9. Jikkinsho, book 5, story 17. Konjaku Monogatari, book 17, story 18. Fusö Ryakki, book 25, Kokushi Taikei XII, p.219-222. The story of Nichizö's journey's to heaven and hell can be found in several other books, notably the Genkö Shakusho and the Kitano Tenjin Engi scroll. Nihon Ryöiki, book 1, story 5. En-no-Gyöja-Hongi, Nihon Daizökyö, Vol.38, p.245-256. For oral examples of the legend, see Yanagita Kunio, "Yama no jinsei" in Teihon Yanagita Kunio Shü, Vol.4, p.77-8. Also Minzokugaku Vol.2, 9, 558. For a general discussion of the phenomenon, see my "Supernatural Abductions in Japanese Folk­ lore", Asian Folklore Studies, Vol.26, 2, 1967. Shasekishü, book 8, story 11. "Senkyö Ibun", Hirata Atsutane Zenshu. Vol.3, p.167-9. I have translated the story in greater detail in my op.cit. p.135-7. "Kokon Yömikö", Hirata Atsutane Zenshu Vol. 3, p.25-28. "Senkyö Ibun" passim. I have discussed Torakichi's story, op.cit. p.124-147. These stories have been collected into a book to which I have unfortunately not had access, Yumeikai kenkyu shiryo, published in 1921 and quoted by Yanagita, op.cit., p.84-5. A useful short biography of Deguchi, treated

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in a context of other founders of religious cults during the last hundred years, may be found in Kyoso, by Oguchi lichi, Saki Akio et al., p.69-96. The following perforce abbreviated account is taken from the first volume of the lat­ est edition of Reikai Monotatari, 1969, with which Mr. Kakehi of the Omoto headquarters at Kameoka kindly furnished me.

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THE SHIP OF THE DEAD by H.R, Ellis Davidson To those who live within reach of the sea or a great river, the ship as a symbol of man's last journey is instinctively right and fitting; I need only mention the effect of the boat bearing Winston Churchill's body moving up the Thames in 1965. We can look back also on the well-known legends of our childhood, Arthur's barge drifting away to Avalon, the Irish heroes departing to the Land of Promise, the old Viking borne away in his blazing ship to meet his end between water and fire. I doubt if this practice was ever really carried out in pagan Scandinavia, although it is obviously difficult to prove or disprove the existence of a rite of this kind. However the setting of a body adrift in a boat is something which has been known in recent times in certain parts of the world. There is an eye-witness account by Bishop McDougall, working in Borneo in the last century, of the effigy of a dead chief of the Malanaus being placed in a boat built for the occasion, together with fine cloth, ornaments and weapons, and launched out to sea. The body itself would have been in the boat, had it not been lost by drowning. The same bishop once saw a boat tos­ sing in heavy seas with what he took to be a man in the stern, but when he came nearer it proved to be a 'death-boat', manned by a corpse1. Cases have been recorded from Indonesia, Poly­ nesia, Melanesia and Australia of the dead being launched out to sea in a canoe, but more often the voyage was represented symbolically2 . A halfway stage is found in Sumatra, where small wooden boats were sent down the Wampu river to­ wards the Malacca Strait, holding the bones of several persons who had died some time before,

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accompanied by effigies of the dead and by the larger figures of the Ferryman and his mate. Again on the island of Sawu boats of leaves carrying images of the dead would be launched at the end of the funeral ceremony. Other examples of ship symbolism are the communal graves of the Batak in Sumatra in the form of stone ships, con­ taining hundreds of skulls, memorials with carved ships on the top, and boat-shaped coffins. It may be noted that in Indonesia and the adjoining regions there was a strong belief in a definite route taken by the dead to the land of the ancestors, either down a river, as in Borneo, or over the sea westwards, as in Polynesia. On some islands the exact route of the dead could be plotted on a map, to a point known as the 1leaping-place of souls', where they set out to sea, or passed from one island to a n o t h e r However in none of these regions is boat-burial universal; normal inhumation and cremation are wellestablished alternatives, and there appears to be a complex mass of beliefs about the journey to the Other World and the life lived there. It would be hard to decide which came first, the belief in a journey across the water to another world, or the practice of using boats, so much a part of everyday life, for the disposal of the dead. It seems probable that there was never a simple answer, and that the different motifs grew up side by side. Many however have argued that the custom originated in one definite way, and that the development was a logical one. I have been called to task for suggesting that the funeral ship in Egypt was a peculiarly fitting symbol, because of association with the ship of the sun and with the river Nile, on whose waters the land depended for its fertility.4 I have been told that there is no evidence for a symbolic link of

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this kind in the early period, and that in graves of the first dynasties the ship was merely part of the equipment of the dead, who were given liv­ ing quarters, food and the means to travel, because the idea of the after-life was still a very material one. I remain however not wholly convinced; it seems that Egyptian funeral sym­ bolism was from early times less material and more many-sided than the early Egyptologists bel­ ieved. The fact that boats buried by the early pyramids faced to various points of the compass8 by no means rules out identification with the ship of the sun or a voyage to the Other World. The pyramid itself represented the Primeval Hill, the centre of the world, and the land of the dead might be imagined in different directions, as Frankfort has pointed out6 according to the particular symbolic picture which was presented. Admittedly it is difficult to decide what the funeral ship meant to those who made use of it in any given period. In Egypt the Nile formed the main highway, used for ceremonial processions and journeys to temples and cult centres. The body of the dead king would nat­ urally go by boat to his last resting-place, and it is a widespread practice to bury the vehicle which carries the dead to the grave, perhaps because of an instinctive feeling that it is marked out as the property of the dead man. However the buried boats and boat-hollows care­ fully cut in the solid rock beside pyramids of the fourth dynasty at Gizeh and other sites must have had symbolic significance7 , and a fifth dynasty pyramid at Sakkara had a rock-hewn ship south of the causeway and texts on the interior walls referring to the king voyaging in the ship of the sun8. But as in Polynesia, the use of the ship symbol in Ancient Egypt is clearly a complex question.

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In the Bronze Age of Northern Europe, from about 1600 B.C., the ship was a frequent symbol in rock carvings in Scandinavia, in numerous scenes of ritual and ceremonial^. Sometimes a whole series of ships was carved over a rock face, possibly as a means of recording regular ceremonies over a long period. The ship was as­ sociated with the sun disk, with what is thought to be the sacred marriage, with the tree of life, and also with huge figures which may represent the Sky God. Sometimes the ship is identified with a horse, given a head at one end and a tail at the other. The most interesting theory to explain the importance of the ship is that of Sprockhoff1^ who claims that in the North the journey of the sun across the sky was represented by a wagon drawn by horses, and that through the underworld at night by a ship. Ships and wagons in the rock carvings may thus have been associat­ ed with religious ceremonies to preserve the round of the seasons and to bring back light and warmth after the winter dark. It seems also that the ship was a funeral symbol in the Bronze Age, since it is represent­ ed together with the horse on the slabs from the great tomb of Kivik in south Sweden11, and is also used as a resting-place for the dead. Dugout boats were sometimes used as coffins in the British Isles, and coffins made from large oak trunks have survived in Denmark, on account of the tannin in the wood, which are very similar to the boats, but provided with a lid.12 It was a laborious process to produce such a coffin, and it must therefore have been thought a matter of some importance that it should be used to hold the dead. We have also boats outlined in stone in cemeteries of the Late Bronze Age; there are about 300 of such 'ship-settings' on the island of Gotland, though as few have been carefully excavated we cannot assume that these were graves;

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they may have been put to some ceremonial use. After the close of the Bronze Age, about 500 B.C., the ship as a funeral symbol in Scand­ inavia is not found for about a thousand years. Then it reappears, in a series of impressive memorial stones on the same island of Gotland, vigorously and skilfully depicted, with rowers and steersman.1^ These stones are memorials raised to the dead, and theycontinued to be set up in Gotland until the end of the pagan period. On those of the Viking Age, the ship is provided with a huge billowing sail and elaborate tackle. From at least the sixth century the ship was also used to hold the bodies of the dead. It seems as if a sudden burst of ship-funer­ al began at about the same time in Sweden, Norway and East Anglia, which at this period was in close touch with Sweden.14 The famous royal grave at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk contained a large ship, and there was at least one other boat grave under a small mount in the same cemetery; it is possible that some of the graves still to be excavated there may yield further examples. Another large ship burial was at Snape Common, further down the coast, and there are indications of others never properly recorded. In the Anglo­ Saxon cemetery at Caister-on-Sea in Norfolk simpler folk were buried, not indeed in complete ships or boats but with curved planks from boats laid over them. Thus in pagan East Anglia the ship was used as a funeral symbol in the early seventh century, well before the Viking Age. In Uppland in Sweden, a number of local chiefs were buried in ships from the seventh century onwards; these vessels, like the one at Sutton Hoo, were dragged ashore and lowered like huge coffins into the graves prepared for them. At Vendel there were at least twelve ship-graves of

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this kind, extending over a period of about 300 years, during which the funeral rites seem to have differed very little. The dead man was usually placed amidships, on some kind of couch (although in two cases he was seated in the stern), and his ship was equipped as if for a voyage, while he retained weapons, armour and personal possessions. Animals were killed at the funeral, and there were usually two or more horses, as well as cattle, sheep, pigs, dogs and birds of various kinds. The same pattern is discernible in the cemetery at Valsgärde, where there were fifteen ship-burials of local chiefs; these too extended over a long period up to the tenth century. In Vestfold in Norway a similar ritual was followed for members of the royal dynasty, and here we have the famous ship-burials of Oseberg and Gokstad. The rich Oseberg burial was that of a woman, thought to be a princess because of the richness of the grave furniture; she was accompanied by an older woman who may have been her attendant. The ship was elabor­ ately decorated and was a vessel suitable for cruising round the coast, in contrast with the sea-going ship buried at Gokstad. Eight more examples of women buried in ships come from Tuna, Ostergotland, and it has been suggested that" this was an ancient cult centre with priestesses. There were women's graves along with those of men (including double and even triple burials) at Kaupang in Norway, where a number of boatgraves were crowded together on a headland, holding all kinds of craft from rowing-boats to larger vessels.^ It seems from the presence of ship's rivets in cremation graves that vessels formed part of the funeral pyre on occasion, including one impressive example from Brittany, where the ship had held a man and a youth with weapons, a dog and some birds.16 Outside Norway and Sweden we have only isolated examples of ship-burials: there was one about

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900 A.D. at Ladby in Denmark, on an impressive scale, and others on the Isle of Man, in the Hebrides, the Orkneys and other places visited by the Vikings, including the Baltic countries and Russia. The symbolism of these graves varies con­ siderably. Usually, but not invariably, the prow faces the sea. The anchor may be stowed in the bows, as if the ship were ready to sail, or, as at Oseberg, the vessel may be moored to the earth and weighted by heavy stones. One woman1s grave at Tuna had the oars laid ready for the voyage. Sometimes the boat was inverted over the dead, or placed upside down on the roof of the grave chamber. The dead might lie on the deck on cushions or skins under a canopy, or a heavy wooden burial chamber might be set up on board as if the ship symbol were being linked with that of the house of the dead. Sometimes only part of a boat was used, or ship's rivets scattered through the grave, or planks arranged roughly in boat form. Philip Grierson has made an interesting suggestion regarding the shipburial at Sutton Hoo,^namely that the forty gold pieces in the king's purse were meant as payment for the rowers, of which there would have been twenty on each side if the ship were fully manned. There were 37 Merovingian gold coins in the purser and three unstruck circular blanks, as though it was felt to be essential to make up the number to forty; there were also two gold ingots, which could have been intended for the steers­ man. As he pointed out, this does not neces­ sarily imply a simple material belief in the future life which was a copy of the present one: there were in fact no oarsmen in the ship, while gold coins were not used in East Anglia at this period. But they could have been prompted by another funeral custom, that of supplying Charon's obol, a single coin left with the dead -79-

in Roman graves: since a single ferryman receiv­ ed one coin, it might be argued that the ghostly . oarsmen who transported the king should also have one coin each, and this should be included along with equipment and provisions for the voyage. We have no circumstantial account of ship funeral from Norse literature. From Russia how­ ever we have what appears to be an eye-witness account of a tenth century cremation on a ship, written by Ibn Fadlan, an Arab diplomat who in 920-21 made a long and difficult journey from Baghdad up the river Volga, on a mission to the king of the Volga Bulgars. A full account of this was discovered by Zeki Validi and published in 1939 to supplement the fragmentary version already known, and scholars of various nation­ alities have worked exhaustively on this precious manuscript; it is their general verdict that Ibn Fadlan was a careful and reliable w i t n e s s . H e was most interested in the Rus, that is, Scand­ inavian merchant-warriors who had come to trade at Bulgar on the Volga, and who were allotted their own quarters there by the king. He had been told that when one of them died, a little boat was built to hold his body, but that if he were an important man, a great ceremony took place. Luckily this happened during his stay, and he was determined to find out all he could about it. He tells us how the dead man was temporarily buried in the earth while preparations were made for a great funeral cremation on his ship, and on the day of the burning one of his slave-girls, who had volunteered to die with her master, was killed to accompany him. She was strangled and stabbed at the same time, a sacrificial ritual associated with the cult of Odin. The ship was pulled up on to a wooden construction, the exact nature of which is unfortunately not altogether

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clear, and a rich pavilion of wood covered with cloth set up on board. Here the dead man was placed on a silk-covered couch, and here the killing of the girl took place, presided over by an old woman called the Angel of Death. Before she died however two horses, a dog, two cows, a rooster and a hen were cut to pieces and put into the ship, and the girl went through a strange ceremony, which seems to symbolise her entry into the Other World through the gate of the dead: Friday afternoon they led the slave girl to a thing that they had made which res­ embled a door frame. She placed her feet on the palms of the men and they raised her up to overlook this frame. She spoke some words and they lowered her again. A second time they raised her up and she did again what she had done; then they lowered her. They raised her a third time and she did as she had done the two times before. Then they brought her a hen; she cut off the head, which she threw away, and then they took the hen and put it in the ship. I asked the interpreter what she had done. He answered 'The first time they raised her she said "Behold I see my father and mother." The second time she said "I see all my dead relatives seated." The third time she said "I see my master seated in Paradise and Paradise is beautiful and green; with him are men and boy servents. He calls me. Take me to him."' These words indicate a journey to join the an­ cestors, to whom the dead man has already -81-

departed, and they appear to be words intended to be spoken not by a slave but a wife; a com­ parison may be made here with cases of suttee elsewhere, where a slave volunteers to die on the understanding that she will be honoured as a wife in the next world.19 The Scandinavians could hardly take their wives with them on the dangerous journey to the Volga, but they brought slaves to sell at the market there, and could take concubines according to Scandinavian law. After the girl had been killed, the ship was set alight, and words quoted by Ibn Fadlan again imply a departure to the Other World: I asked the interpreter what he said. He answered 'He said, you Arabs are fools.' 'Why?' I asked him. He said 'You take the people who are most dear to you and whom you honour most and you put them in the ground where insects and worms devour them. We burn him in a moment, so that he enters Paradise at once.' Then he began to laugh uproariously. When I asked why he laughed, he said 'His lord, for love of him, has sent the wind to bring him away in an hour.' And actually an hour had not passed before the ship, the wood, the girl and her master were nothing but cinders and ashes. The impressive thing about this account is that there are many small points of detail which are confirmed by evidence from Scandinavian lit­ erature and archaeology for the funeral rites of the Vikings. Like other descriptions of the Scandinavians in the East found in the works of Arab and Greek writers, it offers an inde­ pendent witness of the religious practices of the Viking Age in the last days of heathenism,

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and indicates something of the spirit behind them. Clearly ship funeral, wherever it is found, is not a universal custom; in Scandinavia, as in Borneo and Polynesia, the majority of funerals took place without the use of a ship. Ship burial was apparently limited to certain places, like the peninsula of Kaupang in Norway, to particular families, like the chiefs at Vendel, and to certain individuals. There may be links with the cult of Odin or with that of the Vanir, the fertility deities. The Rus would be warriors first and merchants second, living the heroic life of a small company pledged to follow their chief in dangerous and hostile territory. We have evidence that the cult of Odin was practised among these fighting bands in the tenth century, bound by ties of loyalty to an aristocratic leader.2^ The Gotland gravestones with their splendid ships also show scenes where the dead is entering Valhalla, and we have repre­ sentations of Odin's eight-legged horse and other symbols associated with him on a number of the stones. Weapons are found in many of the great ship burials, and various symbols suggest assoc­ iation with the god of battle.2* The sacrifice of a woman in a warrior1s grave would be in keeping with what we know of Odin's cult, and we have archaeological evidence strongly suggesting this in two ship-graves, one on Man and the other in Orkney.22 Two of Odin's legendary followers, Sigurd Hring of Sweden and Hakon of Norway were said to have been sent out to sea in blazing ships, while Balder, the favourite son of Odin, was burned on his ship according to one account in the literature. The Vanir gods however are also closely associated with ships. Freyr had one of his own; Njord's dwelling was 'the enclosure of

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vessels', Noatun, and he was worshipped, on the evidence of placenames, round the coast of Norway, by lakes and on islands. Nehalennia, a goddess of fertility whose shrine was on the island of Walcheren, protected sea-farers and had ships depicted in her shrine.23 There was a close link between the deities of fruitfulness and the produce of the waters, on which men in the North depended for food. The Oseberg ship may well have been associated with the Vanir cult, for its elaborate little carved wagon suggests ceremonial processions, and the corn, apples, hazel-nuts and seed among its cargo are all recognised fertility symbols. ^ Rich tap­ estries which were found in the ship show myth­ ological figures which could be linked with both Odin and the Vanir. We see that the ship of the dead was a longlived and potent symbol. It was established in two far separated regions. First, it was known in North-Western Europe in the Bronze Age and after a long gap again in Vendel and Viking times, when the practice of ship-burial was carried by the Vikings into various countries where their search for trade and adventure led them. Secondly it is found in Indonesia and the adjoining Pacific islands; here it may be traced back for several centuries, probably to the Bronze Age. We know that the symbol was found also in Ancient Egypt, in a civilisation where the River Nile played an essential part in men's lives. Other people familiar with the sea and with rivers however, the Ancient Greeks, the Japanese and the Celts, for instance, seem never to have developed ship-funeral as a custom, although ships may be depicted on cremation urns or memorial stones, for instance in the Creek cities round the Black Sea. The only detailed picture of a ship funeral -84-

in the early literature of North-Western Europe is that given in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. This was not taken very seriously as evidence for knowledge of the custom until the discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial caused scholars to regard it with new eyes. The poem opens with an account of Scyld Scefing, the first king of the Danes, brought by the bounty of the gods across the sea to reign over them. Here we see the ship taking part in a double journey, linking man with the Other World, for the ship first brings a child over the waves to Denmark, and then at the end of his reign as king it returns to the haven from which it came, carrying the dead ruler with it. On both journeys it was laden with treasures, for Scyld is said to have departed with great riches, even as did the unknown ruler commemorated at Sutton Hoo: Never have I heard of a ship more splendidly equipped with swords and mail-coats, the weapons of war and the raiment of battle. In her hold lay a wealth of treasures, which were to journey with him into the realm of ocean. Gifts were prepared for him and a nation's treasures, their value indeed as great as those which others had given him when they sent him forth at the beginning, alone over the waves, when he was but a child. High above him they set a golden standard, and then they let the sea bear him away, they committed him to the ocean. Their hearts were filled with grief and their thoughts were heavy. Men who bear rule in halls, heroes beneath the heavens, cannot say with truth who was to receive the cargo which that vessel bore. Beowulf 38-52

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Beowulf is a Christian poem, but contains much traditional symbolism which belongs to the pre-Christian period. This evocative picture of the last voyage of a king might be a myth to account for the custom of ship-funeral in Scand­ inavia and East Anglia, looking back to the time when kings were laid in ships because the founder of a dynasty had come over the sea and departed likewise, and the royal dead must follow his example. Similarly there was a link between the dead Pharaoh and his ancestors, and his departure in the sun-ship was part of the rich symbolism linking him with the divine kings who reigned before him. In Indonesia also there was a link with the ancestors, for various rites and cere­ monies were associated with their arrival in a canoe in the beginning. On the other hand the last voyage of Scyld Scefing might be an imagin­ ative reconstruction of the poet, who knew of the wonderful funeral ceremonies once held in pagan East Anglia, when the king departed in a ship from his sorrowing people. He would presumably have travelled by water from the palace at Rendlesham round the coast to the River Deben, where the royal burial place awaited him, and where the ship itself might sometimes be laid under the earth. The custom might arise out of the myth, or the myth be based on the custom; it seems probable that the process was a double one, each interacting on the other over a long period of time. It is not surprising that the ship symbol should be associated with the dead. The ship disappearing below the horizon is the emblem of finality. It is a sign of hope, bearing the dead to join the mighty ones of the past, and of new life, receiving him as in womb, to bring about his second birth in the land beyond the sunset, while the cycle begins anew with his successor. Finally it is the link between the

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8 6

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worlds, with the implication in Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature that a god comes into our world as a child over the sea. The two-way voyage is associated also with the progress of the seasons and the return of new life after a period of death. All this can be embodied in that most powerful symbol, the ship of the dead.

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References 1 2

3

4

5 6 7 8 9

10

11

12

13 14 15

H.Ling-Roth, Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo (London 1896) I,pp.l44ff. A.Steinmann, 'The Ship as represented in the Art of South East Africa1, CIBA Review V, 52 (1946) pp. 1879ff. R.W Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia (Cambridge 1933) II, pp.lff., 36ff. In my Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Harmondsworth 1968) p.137; the criticism was in a letter from Edmund S. Meitzer of the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. A. Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs (Oxford 1961) p.77. H. Frankort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago 1948) p.120. L.V. Grinsell, in notes in Antiquity 1943, pp.47-50. I owe this information to Mr. Grinsell. P. Gelling and H.R. Davidson, The Chariot of the Sun (London 1969) pp.43ff. E. Sprockhoff, 'Nordische Bronzezeit und frühes Griechentum', Jahrbuch des römisch­ germanischen Zentralmuseums, Mainz I (1954) pp.28-110, and 'Das bronzene Zierband von Kronshagen bei Kiel', Offa XIV (1955) pp.15ff. Gelling and Davidson, op.cit. 97ff.; L.V. Grinsell, 'The Kivik Cairn, Scania' Antiquity 1942, pp.160-75. L.V. Grinsell, 'The Boat of the Dead in the Bronze Age', Antiquity 1941, pp.360-70; H.R. Ellis Davidson, Pagan Scandinavia (London 1967) 44-5. ibid. lOOff. ibid. 113ff. and references in bibliography. C.Blindheim, 'The Market Place at Skiringsal' , Acta Archaeologica XXXI (1960)p p .91ff.

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8 8

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16

17 18

19

20

21

22

23 2h

P.du Chatellier and L.le Pontois, 'La sepulture Scandinave ä barque de l'Ile de Groix', Bulletin de la Societe Arch.du Finistfere XXXV (1908) pp.137-232. P. Grierson, 'The Purpose of the Sutton Hoo Coins', Antiquity 1970, pp.14-18. H.M. Smyser, 'Ibn Fadlan's Account of the Rus' and references there given, Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun Jr. (London 1965), pp.92-119. I have used his translation, e.g. R. Friederich, 'An account of the island of Bali', Journal Royal Asiatic Society N.S. IX (1877) pp.lOOff. H.R. Ellis Davidson, 'The Battle God of the Vikings', University of York Medieval Monographs I (1972) 23ff. K. Hauck, 'Herrschaftzeichen eines Wodanistischen Königtums', Jahrbuch für Fränkische Landesforschung XIV (1954) pp.9-59. G. Bersu and D.M. Wilson, 'Three Viking graves in the Isle of Man', Society of Medieval Archaeology Monographs I (1966) pp.90-91. The Orkney find, recorded in a BBC film, was made by a party of Norwegian archaeologists in 1969. A. Hondius-Crone, The Temple of Nehalennia at Domsberg (Amsterdam 1955) 22ff. 102-3. H. R. Ellis Davidson, Pagan Scandinavia (London 1967) 120ff.

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WESTCOUNTRY ENTRANCES TO THE UNDERWORLD By Theo Brown While we have in this region no entrances of such fame as those of Cumae or Delphi, it seems that many geographic features here have been deemed more or less numinous and so capable of fulfilling some necessary demand of human ex­ perience. Such chthonic aids include caves and fissures, conical hill-tops, the sea, rivers, and pools of water, and these are augmented by wells, holy or haunted, and by artificial breaches of the earth's surface created by ordinary burials, by points of fragility created by the coincidence of crossroads or gibbets, and sometimes by the temporary making of a magic circle.* We need to consider first the wider per­ spective of the west country in relation to Otherworld myths. These frequently look west­ wards, ultimately towards the Celtic Isles of the Blessed, far out in the Atlantic, but also, in some European traditions, to the north-west corner of the continent. For instance, the entrance to Hades in the Odyssey could, quite reasonably, be situated in the region of Finisterre, where the wild islands of Sein and Ouessant are still remembered as the isles of the dead, where bodies were once taken for burial, and, where it has been claimed there is a folkmemory of the death-waggon, the Ankou, nightly bearing souls of the dying across the Passage de l'Enfer.2 There is also the Germanic belief, held apparently until the last century, that the world of the dead was situated somewhere in our direct­ ion, probably in Britain itself.3 Procopius, who first mentioned this, referred to a passage across the sea from Gaul.4 Tylor cited a Breton

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legend concerning a certain Cure de Braspar whose dog leads the Ankou, laden with souls, over to Britain.5 it seems likely we too knew of the Ankou, as Scot in the sixteenth century referred to the hell waine^ and there might be some mem­ ory of this in the death-coach of Lady Howard at Tavistock, preceded by a black dog with one eye in the middle of its forehead.7 It is remotely possible that such a trad­ ition influenced the phenomenal explosion of Arthurian and Graal romances in France, immediate­ ly following the publication of Geoffrey of Mon­ mouth's Histories of the Kings of Britain, about 1130. It seems hardly credible that anyone could have made so much from Geoffrey's pseudo­ history unless Britain was already accepted as a mysterious region in which to locate a 'nevernever land' as a setting for such works as The High History of the Holy Graal or The Quest of the Holy Graal, both with a geography as indet­ erminate as that of The Pilgrim's Progress. In The Quest, the River Severn is the only recog­ nisable landmark. Thus, while we have no evidence for a def­ inite land of the dead in the west country, it is a theory worth bearing in mind. The Isle of Avalon, which in mediaeval times became identi­ fied with Glastonbury, may have been transferred from elsewhere, may vaguely have represented the whole peninsula, or, as is most likely, no earth­ ly locality at all. The evidence here put forward shows at least that in this region there were several centres of considerable antiquity, and others apparently adopted arbitrarily for local convenience, probably after the Reformation. It is perhaps worth mentioning that in the mid-seventeenth century, the astrologer, John Heydon, when writing about his Rosicrucian

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friends, stated categorically that the secret headquarters of the order in England was sit­ uated somewhere in the west country. It was an underground castle, larger than its counterpart in Germany and built of crystal. At the lowest part, a hundred and forty steps down, the light was as the noon-day sun pouring in at ten windows. Here the brethren feasted and carried on their work of healing and self-rejuvenation. He was not - as he continually reminds us - himself a Rosicrucian, so the whole description is presum­ ably fictitious and sounds more like a fairy castle. This impression is somewhat strength­ ened by a subsequent experience of Heydon's. Both he and his wife had connections with East Devon, and when he found it expedient to flee from London - having rather foolishly predicted Cromwell1s death by hanging - he lived at Sidmouth for a year, and when walking on Bulverton Hill met a lady dressed all in green who gave him a direct initiation into the Rosicrucian mysteries.® There seems to be a vague memory in this region that conical hill-tops were approaches to the upper world of the sky; this is strongly hinted in the predominance of such eminences surmounted by chapels dedicated to St Michael, presumably to defend us from thunder-storms and lightning, the 'fall-out' from the war of the angels overhead. In Somerset there are Brent Knoll (no chapel on top, but the hill lies within the parish of St Michael), Glastonbury Tor and Montacute. In Devor^ there are Brent Tor, South Brent and Torre Chapel (Torquay). In Cornwall there are St Michael's Mount, Rough Tor and Rame Head. The sea-side chapels remind us that St Michael also held back demons from the deep: 'the deep blue sea' was and is the archetype of chaos, spawning unimaginable mon­ sters .

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The choice of conical hills may also have been inspired by their resemblance to Mediter­ ranean volcanoes, known to the ancients as 'chimneys of Tartarus'.9 There was a Welsh trad­ ition that on Glastonbury Tor, an invisible shaft led from the summit down into the underworld. Professor Mary Williams tells me of a waking dream experienced by a woman standing on top of the Tor: "She felt she was being taken right down through the middle of the Tor. At the bottom she saw a face, rather like the sun; then she was brought up again to the top, and came to herself".19 There is a curiously similar story from North Carolina in the latter half of the last century: a man asked a witch to initiate him. The rit­ ual involved standing inside a magic circle drawn on the road, but the neophant began to feel himself drawn down and down; so he leapt out of the circle.11 It looks as though St Michael may have been expected to hold back un­ desirable irruptions not only from above but also from below. In the hillsides we also find a horizontal entrance to another world of the dead, that of Sleeping Kings. There is Cadbury Castle near Ilchester where local traditions persistently maintained that the hill was hollow and that there was an entrance marked by iron gates: here King Arthur sleeps, but rides out with his knights when the moon is full. Here also is buried a vast treasure of gold, left not by King Arthur but the fairies when the bells placed in Churches drove them away.12 In various local legends, pixies and fairies emerge from and re-enter our world through the earth's surface, sometimes taking with them human

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visitors/ as at the Gump near St. Just19 and in Cornish tales of the Fairy Widower type14. . West country caves do not provide us with much Otherworld mythology, but two deserve to be mentioned. Of the Chudleigh caves Tristram Ridson wrote about 1630 'many marvellous things are spoken'19, but alas he did not trouble to specify these things. Later accounts give three items which would hardly be noticed sep­ arately but are significant when put together. First, there is a traditional association with pixies. Secondly, in the inmost chamber, the 'Pixies' Parlour', there is the 'Pope's Nose', an unpleasant excrescence of red stalactite which juts out from the wall. It was deemed lucky to insert pins into the crevices of this object in 1825, when the Roman Catholic antiquary Fr. John MacEnery saw it and called it the 'Pixies' Pincushion.'19 Thirdly there is a trivial tale about a dog being put into one of the narrow passages leading back from the Parlour and emerging, minus all its hair, three miles away in the parish of Hennock, at the Bottor Rocks which are also haunted by pixies.1· 7 The tradition is found in many other places, and in some passages round Britain the wretched dog is said to lose its skin as well. In Scotland, no dog must be left alone in a house where there is known to be a Brownie, or the latter will kill it , and any dog so foolish as to chase a fairy will return hairless or even skinless - and clawed all over as well19- a clear indication that it is wiser not to interfere with supernatural beings. In some stories the dog changes colour, and this is also reputed to have happened to a bull that accidentally lost its way and passed through a three-mile tunnel under the cliffs near Salcombe in Devon.20 Slight as these stories are they do suggest that the folk mind has a vague belief in some form of underworld in which

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intruders suffer transformation of some kind.

The other cave, that of Wookey Hole at the foot of the Mendips, has a more fully developed folklore. William of Worcester writing in 1478 referred to a stalactite in it which res­ embled "the figure of a woman clad and holding in her girdle a spinning distaff". This must surely be the figure now known to every tourist as 'the Witch of Wookey'. William also mention ed that there was at the entrance the figure of the 'porter' whose permission visitors had to ask before they entered the cave. To what this referred there is now no clue; it may have been an old statue. Camden compared the stories with those associated with the Sybil's Cave; a poem of 1807 described how ghosts could be laid there for a seven-year period, but this could have been a joke and not necessarily a genuine tradition. There are three distinct tales of "hairless dogs" connected with the Wookey Caves, their journeys leading off in various directions There are many mysteries surrounding Wookey and the other caves running under the Mendips. Wookey is remarkable for the strange sounds that are suddenly heard for no apparent reason; the cave appears to 'breathe' in and out, due either to wind or barometric variations. One anti­ quary has suggested that this may be the British cave mentioned by Clement of Alexandria (died c.AD 220) in his Stromata, where he said "a sound is heard as of clashing of numerous cym­ bals ." There does not appear to be any other cave in Britain that could fit this description2 The sea, pools on remote hill-tops, marsh.es, and pools in rivers have all in more recent times been regarded as penal settlements for evil spirits or unwanted ghosts, or even as actual entrances to the netherworld. It is im­ possible to determine the age of these beliefs.

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Luther referred to the idea, but in England clear statements are hard to find earlier than the beg­ inning of the eighteenth century. They lingered until modern times: the most recently recorded are associated with two deep pools in Somerset, both known as Popham's Pit, one of which, sit­ uated near the Wellington Monument, was mentioned in 1920, and the other below Wilscum Bottom in 196522. Primarily the Red Sea was the universal destination and this is mentioned satirically in Addison's play The Drummer (1716) and in An Exmoor Scolding (1727), but since only the most powerful conjurer could launch a spirit so far, entrances nearer home were usually preferred. Local pools of note were Dosmary on the Bodmin Moors, Cranmere on Dartmoor, and possibly Wookey Hole, with its eerie underground river, in Somerset. Classiwell on Dartmoor may have been one23; for this, like the Popham's Pits, Dosmary and Bradmere near Drewsteignton2** was believed to be bottomless. These last two pools and also World Pit, near Bradworthy25 were said to have passages leading off from the sides and extending for a ridiculous length. Dosmary was believed to be the habitation of "the ghosts of bad men", always engaged in trying to make bundles of sand by the shore, and, as early as 180325 the infamous Tregagle27 was associated with it, who was said to attempt to bale out the water with a perforated limpet shelL. Classiwell - which like Bradmere is merely an old mine-working - has a vaguer reputation. The height of the water was, in the last century, observed to rise and fall as much as twelve feet in a few days. No fish put into it were ever seen again2®; yet, though legend held that the bell-ropes of Walkhampton church, joined togeth­ er, could not plumb its depth, it is in fact seldom more than fifteen feet deep29, and in 1856 Rowe noted that when the water was used in

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time of drought it was almost emptied3 How­ e v e r it is an eerie spot, where voices as of a spirit in torment were supposed to be heard, and sometimes at midnight a loud voice called the name of the next person in the parish due to die31. Cranmere was the only Dartmoor place-name mentioned by William of Worcester in 1478, but unfortunately he gave no reason for this. The Rev. Mr. Atkins Bray of Tavistock was told when he visited it in 1802, "spirits are here con­ demned to suffer"32. How far this tradition stretches back it is impossible to say. By 1882 Benjie Geare, a former Mayor of Okehampton who died in 1701, was named as one of the res­ idents of the pool33; before that only anonymous ghosts are mentioned34. Therefore, if there was indeed a Continental belief that there was a subterranean or sub­ marine land of the dead situated under the west country, the likliest points of entrance (on the analogy of the Mediterranean examples such as Heraclea in Pontus, Cumae, and Naples) would be Glastonbury Tor, Wookey Hole and the pools of Cranmere or Dosmary. The other places mentioned are either relatively modern mine-workings, or the traditions are too slight to take seriously. Numerous 'entrances' of purely local inter­ est seem to have been improvised in post-Reform­ ation times for the purpose of disposing of superfluous ghosts, and can be found in sundry guide-books and topographical works. Although such references are made usually in a somewhat facetious spirit, there is no doubt that they are an important sociological phenomena that needs further investigation. For the moment it is enough to say that by the end of the seven­ teenth century, owing to the Church having

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officially 'forgotten' the problem of ghosts, local clergy, in remote parts, were driven by the plight of their desperate parishioners to devise a method of 'laying' spirits - a method which owed little or nothing to Church teaching. Al­ though it would be difficult to prove that such ceremonies were actually performed, the belief that they were is found in many parts of England, and may be simplified as follows: A ghost harasses his family, the vicar is appealed to, he comes with his Bible and 'reads the ghost down' either he gains sufficient control of it to dismiss it to a distant part of the parish to perform an endless task and then to return home at 'a cockstride a year'35, or he reduces it to such a small size it can walk into a bottle or snuff box, which is hastily closed and thrown into deep water. In other cases he may throw a handful of earth from a graveyard into its face, and this transforms it into an animal, such as a black horse or dog. In this guise the ghost is manageable, and can be led to a suitable point of entry to the underworld and thrown in. Often an assistant is needed. At Cranmere Pool, an innocent boy, duly blessed, rode the horse to the Pool, slipped off at the last moment, removing the bridle, and the horse plunged head first into the Pool. Near Lustleigh, the boy was ordered to ride the horse as hard as he could down the hill to the River Wrey. As the horse rose to jump it, it melted away, and the boy landed heavily the other side, still clutching the empty reins.35 At Otterton, the horse was simply driven -98-

into the sea.^ In Somerset a grey horse was backed into a pond.38 Only one instance of a black hound is known, that of Knowles, the weaver of Dean Combe (near Buckfastleigh). Here the ghost was not pushed into the Hound's Pool of the Dean Burn, but was given a perforated nutshell and ordered to bale out the pool.39 To this day, the locals say that the pool sometimes makes a strange grinding sound - and this is the Hound scraping the bottom! There are other minor examples too numerous to recount. The perplexing thing about the rituals described is that they follow a consistent pat­ tern, found, although more thinly scattered, over most of England, and that although the tradition cannot be based on fact, yet the per­ sons concerned, both the ghosts and the conjuring parsons, are frequently historical characters, usually from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. **8 Anatole le Braz was convinced that such a ritual occurred regularly in Brittany during the last century. At the foot of Mont St. Michel in the Montagnes d'Aree is a wide marsh, in the midst of which is a deep crevasse called the Youdik, popularly supposed to be the entrance to Orcus, the Breton Underworld. Unwanted spooks throughout a wide area were injected into a liv­ ing black dog, which was then led out to the Youdik and thrown in. The local clergy offic­ iated, and Le Braz's informants claimed to be related to the participants, to the ghosts, dogleaders and so on.1+1 This astonishing story, if true, might offer a significant key to our own fragmentary legends. Seeing that Brittany is a Catholic country, and has at its disposal a properly authorised ghost-laying technique, it

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seems surprising that a sub-Christian ritual of this nature should have survived, or indeed developed at all. Possibly in both areas of the Celtic West these local beliefs are examples of folk-memory from a much earlier period, per­ sisting in certain localities where the geograph­ ical features have kept the traditions alive.

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References 1 2

3 »f

5 6

7 8

9 10 11

12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

Theo Brown: 'The Triple Gateway', Folklore LXXVII (1966) pp.123-31. S. Baring-Gould: A Book of Brittany, 1901/ 32, pp.18-9 and 108. C . Hardwick: Traditions, Superstitions & Folklore, 1872, p.177. Procopius: Gothic War IV.20. E.B. Tylor: Primitive Culture, 1871. II, p.151. Reginald Scot: The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, ed. Montague Summers 1930.VII,xv. Transactions, Devonshire Association,XXII (1890) pp.66-110; LV (1930) p.117. A.E. Waite: The Real History of the Rosicrucians, 1887, Chapter XIII, pp.315-86. Gives a bibliography of Heydon's books; cites mainly from The Holy Guide, 1662, but the references are anything but precise. See also DNB. Raymond J. Clarke: The Katabasis. Ph.D. thesis, 1970. Exeter University. Letter dated 4th April 1971. North Carolina Folklore, Vol.I, 1951, pp. 648-9. The Rev. J.H. Bennett: 'Camelot': Somerset Arch. & N.H. Soc., XVI (1890) Pt. II pp. 2-4 R . Hunt: Popular Romances of the West of England, 3rd Ed. 1908, pp.98 fl. Ibid, pp.114 fl. The Chorographical Description of Devon, Ed. 1811, p.132. J. MacEnery: Cavern Researches, ed. Vivian, 1859, p.24. Richard Polwhele: History of Devonshire, I (1797), i, p.50, fn. J.G. Campbell: Superstitions of the High­ lands & Islands of Scotland, 1900, p.187. Ibid. pp. 144-6. Hawkins: Kingsbridge & Salcombe Illustrated,

2 1

22

23

2k

25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 3k

35 36 37

1819, p .102. Theo Brown: 'Bull Imagery', Devon & Cornwall Notes & Queries, XXX (1967) 208, pp.309-12. H.E. Balch: Wookey Hole: Its Caverns & Cave Dwellings, 1914. W.G. Willis: Calendar of Customs & Super­ stitions in Somerset, 1920,pp. 479-80. Ruth L. Tongue: Somerset Folklore, 1965, p.103. S. Baring-Gould: A Book of Dartmoor, 1900, p.231; William Crossing: Guide to Dartmoor, 1909, p.99; E.W.L. Davies: Dartmoor Days, 1863, p.148. S . Rowe: Perambulation of Dartmoor, 2nd Ed. 1856, p.128 fn; Ruth St Leger Gordon: Witchcraft & Folklore of Dartmoor, 1965, p. 84. Transactions, Devonshire Association, vol. 89 (1957), p.282. R. Polwhele: History of Cornwall, 1803, II, ii, pp.59-60; Notes & Queries 1st S, ii (1850-1), p.511. B.C. Spooner: Tregagle of Trevorder, 1935, p.48, etc. E.W.L. Davies, op.cit. William Crossing, op.cit. S. Rowe, op.cit. S. Baring Gould, op.cit. Mrs Bray; Traditions-- of Devon, 1838, I, p.261. Western Antiquary, III (1883-4), p.190. Notes & Queries, 1st S, iii (1851), p.404. See also Theo Brown: "The Dartmoor Entrance to the Underworld", Devon & Cornwall Notes & Queries XXIX (1962), 2, pp.6-9. Theo Brown: Spinners of Sand", op.cit. XXV (1953), 178, p.213. Cecil Torr: Small Talk at Wreyland, Abr.Ed. 1926, pp.25-6. Transactions, Devonshire Association, LIX (1927), pp.161-2.

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38

F.W. Mathews: Tales from the Blackdown Hills, 1923, pp.69-70. Notes & Queries 1st S., ii, p.515. Theo Brown: "Conjuring Parsons", op.cit. XXVII (1957), 79, pp.108-9. Anatole le Braz: The Night of Fires, Trans. 1912, pp.77 fl. and La Legende de la Morte, 3rd Ed. 1912, II Ch.xx, pp.231-85.

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The Phantom Coach in the West Country

by E . Waring. The theme of a journey between this world and the underworld seems to be to be exemplified in stories of the Phantom Coach, which are fre­ quently to be found in the West Country, as else­ where. In the discussion which follows, two assumptions will be made, firstly that these stories can be regarded properly as folklore, rather than as data for psychical research, and secondly that it is possible to take one element such as the coach and to study it in isolation. After all, stories of phantom coaches are not unlike stories of phantom hearses or phantom funerals. Spectral horsemen could be variants of the Phantom Coach though they could equally well belong with the Wild Hunt. The Black Dog occasionally runs with the Phantom Coach, but not often enough, I think, to establish a genuine connection. One object of my enquiry is to det­ ermine which elements of the story really belong to it and which are accretions. This can be done only by studying as many records as possible. Gazing at a single instance can be quite mis­ leading - its more exciting features may be borrowed from elsewhere. Given traditional material of this kind, I like to think that there must have been an original version, whose meaning was once understood, and that it might be poss­ ible to reconstruct it and to understand it. But perhaps this is a fantasy of mine. There are known to me 65 cases of phantom coach lore, in the counties of Dorset, Devon, Somerset, Hampshire and Wiltshire. Cornwall is not covered by my survey. One third of the cases are from Dorset, for no better reason than that that was where I did my folklore collecting.

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Outside Dorset, my information is mostly from publications. Of the 65 cases, many are very sparse in detail, nothing being recorded beyond the mere fact that a coach is supposed to haunt a certain locality. Therefore if a special element occurs in any 10 cases or more, I am inclined to regard that as significant. All the cases are local hauntings. There just is not a general phenomenon, the Phantom Coach, which can be seen anywhere. When it is said to appear, it is said to appear somewhere. It is tempting to draw a map, but my efforts in this direction have convinced me that much more collecting needs to be done first. At present any map merely reveals the distribution of folk­ lore collectors. With more research, perhaps more useful results would emerge. The usual scene of the hauntings is a Manor House. In 31 cases houses are mentioned, and all but three of these are Manor Houses. The coach is mentioned as driving uja to the house in 9 cases, and in 3 cases each we are told that it drives away again from the house, or around the house, or between two houses. Could it be that originally it drove up to the house, around it, and away again? Where the coach drives between houses these are houses owned by the same fam­ ily; e.g. Lady Howard's coach in Devon, Lord Ogle's in Hampshire and the Turberville family coach in Dorset. Passengers are referred to in 12 cases and 7 of them are named local gentry. Therefore we must think in terms of a private coach, not a stage coach. This is corroborated by the fact that main roads are not places where the coach is to be seen: it is far more a frequ­ enter of drives, fields and woods. My theory is that the coach represents a vehicle of return of the dead, of the illustrious but notorious dead, to the places where they lived.

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Were they the wicked gentry who because of their sins or untimely deaths, were not at peace in the other world? Certainly Lady Howard is accredited with the murder of four husbands, Dame Alice Lisle was beheaded for sheltering fugitives after Sedgemoor, and the wicked steward William Doggett committed suicide. Dates of death of persons named range from 1596-1780. This fits with our knowledge of the 17th and 18th centuries as the coaching era. We need not suppose that all persons named actually owned or even rode in coaches. They may have acquired them posthum­ ously! Whatever it may owe to earlier tradit­ ions at least one can say that the Phantom Coach story was alive enough in folklore, during the 17th and 18th centuries, to attach itself to real persons of note. Often (in 17 cases) the des­ cription given is of a "coach and four" and there are several mentions of the horses as black. Only in one case are the horses white. Headlessness is a baffling feature, too common to ignore. It occurs in 16 examples. The extreme case is one at Kingston Russell in Dorset where we have a coach with four headless horses, a headless coachman and footman, and four headless passengers. More commonly it is applied to the driver and the horses, or both, though this is probably because the passengers have been forgotten. Famous cases of beheading during the Tudor and Stuart periods may account for its popularity: Anne Boleyn has her coach in Norfolk, and could have been a prototype. Headlessness symbolically signified death. At Wolfeton in Dorset an apparition of Lady Trenchard, with her head under her arm, caused a judge to leave the house hastily, but before he reached Dorchester a messenger overtook him with news of her ladyship's suicide. I take it then that the headlessness is a way that the apparit­ ion has of manifesting that it is the dead, or

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comes from the regions of the dead. It is necessary to add here that there is a group of invisible coaches which are detected by sound only. I know of 9 of these: 6 in the North Dorset and South Somerset area. Among other rarer phenomena, there are 3 driverless coaches, 2 coaches lit from within and 2 that pass through walls. I should admit that in my total of coaches, I have allowed 5 cases of "waggons", since they can have passengers and resemble the coaches in other respects. Sometimes the time is given as "in the evening" or "at midnight" (8 cases): 3 accounts refer to New Year's Eve. More mention of New Year's Eve would have helped my argument, since I am suggesting that what we have here is a return of the dead, and the last day of the year is a traditional time for the dead to return. Eliade, in "The Myth of the Eternal Return", speaking of the relations between the New Year ceremonies and the cult of the dead, notes the "beliefs held almost everywhere, accord­ ing to which the dead return to their families ... at the New Year season". "In Japan, as among the Germans (and among other Indo-European peoples) the last night of the year is marked by the appearance of funerary animals and of the chthonico-funerary gods and goddesses: it is then that the masked procession of the secret societies takes place, that the dead visit the living". If the Phantom Coach is a visitor to this world from the underworld, something should be known about its points of ingress and egress, to and from this world. In fact I have only one

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reference to such an arrival. The Ibsley coach in Hampshire starts off in a churchyard. But on points of departure we are much better informed: 2 coaches vanish into churchyards, 3 into the ground, and 11 into a pond, well or stream. This coach-disappears-into-pond motif was an unexpected finding as far as I was concerned. I was sufficiently impressed by it to include in the Phantom Coach list three items of folklore in which coaches or wagons disappear mysteriously into ponds, even though there was no mention of subsequent haunting. Three of the ponds are said to be bottomless and one could say that we are dealing here with imaginary routes of return to the other world. There is however an alternative suggestion that I would like to make. The pond may not be a route, but rather a place of imprisonment. When rites of exorcism were performed, to rid haunted houses of their ghosts, the ghosts were sometimes sent to the Red Sea, sometimes into the nearest pond. No doubt the story of the Gadarene swine had something to do with this. I suggest a sequence of "events" as follows. The owner of the house, for his (or her) sins, unable * to find rest in the other world, returns and" haunts the house. A service of exorcism expels him to some nearby pool but is unable to hold him there completely. Once a year he is allowed to return, conveyed in a ghostly vehicle. If I am right, we have here the common belief in the existence of a few exceptionally earthbound spirits, superimposed upon an older idea of the regular annual return of the dead.

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THE HERO'S DESCENT TO THE UNDERWORLD by J.G. Bishop The Descent of the Hero to the Underworld is often regarded as one of his standard exploits. Maybe this derives from Heracles, best-known hero of the classical world, and a commanding figure in later ages. In fact not many heroes are underworld adventurers in the way Heracles was. Consider the heroes of the Iliad; these are specifically human; their powers outstrip those of normal men,* but they are mortal and vulner­ able. It is in this world that they shine; they do not descend to Hades and return. On the other hand several of the best known adventurers in Hades are not heroes in any ob­ vious sense. Some are women, such as Ishtar and Psyche. Others are concerned with religious quests or journeys of the dead rather than heroic ordeals. There are the Shamans, and Lucius in The Golden Ass, who 'approached near unto hell, even to the gates of Prosperpine threshold, and after that I was ravished throughout all the elements, I returned to my proper place1.2 Even the Underworld varies greatly in differ­ ent mythologies. At times it is a distant rath­ er than a subterranean place; often it is far in the West. The nature of the Underworld varies too according to the beliefs of different peoples. Descent journeys have much in common with ascents to Heaven, as tales of Siberian Shamans show. The hero's katabasis or descent embraces a number of distinguishable themes, which are not readily assimilable to one pattern. I shall -109-

consider a number of these in turn. Descents may be made merely to fill up time before return­ ing to this world, to close this life for ever, to rescue a dead person, to win personal immort­ ality, to acquire information, to obtain a boon, or to conduct the dead to their resting-place. We must also consider swallowing by a monster, the passive hero being rescued by his goddess lover, and descents to free the damned and to conquer the Underworld. More vividly we could describe these as the King Arthur, Patroclus, Orpheus, Gilgamish, Aeneas, Cupid, Hermes, Jonah, Tammuz and Christ motifs, using the names of well-known exemplars. We start with King Arthur: writes:

Christina Hole

The most persistent and widely distri­ buted of all the marvellous tales that gather round the memory of great men is that of the undying hero, the man whom death has not defeated and who is separated from his people only by a temp­ orary enchantment.3 It has been widely believed that heroes havQ not died. They sleep, and one day will return. Various resting-places have been assigned to different heroes; in early times they were held to be sleeping in the earth, and at times, in later stories, they are in Paradise. Charlemagne was such a hero, and even Hitler was supposed to be in hiding after the end of the 1939-45 war. King Arthur is the best ex­ ample. Probably a Romano-British chieftain who led resistence to the invading Saxons, he became the centre of all kinds of legends. Widespread, especially in the twelfth century, was the belief that he would return one day. This motif

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has some affinities with that of being caught away to Fairyland or Paradise for a season. With King Arthur the descent, if descent there be, is a subordinate theme, merely a means of accounting for the hero's absence. So the motif presents a limit situation with respect to the descending hero. Another limit situation is presented in the ordinary hero for whom there are no underworld adventures, but only the descent to Hades after death. This was no welcome prospect, as the dead Achilles assures Odysseus: I would choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as a hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished.4 The finality of this descent is shown by the dream of Achilles in which Patroclus comes to him. Patroclus is dead, but not yet buried. In the dream he asks Achilles to bury his body at once, so that he might pass the gates of Hades. Disembodied spirits of the dead are preventing him from crossing the river to join them, and he has to pace up and down alone. But once he has passed through the flames he will never come back from Hades: Never more in life shall we sit apart from our dear comrades and take counsel together.5 Similarly in the twelfth tablet of the Epic, Enkidu arrives in the Underworld of two mysterious objects. He is not return, though his spirit does go back ly to explain the various fates of men land of death.® - I l l -

Gilgamish in search allowed to temporari­ in the

It is this conception of the Underworld as a land of no return which gives poignancy to the Orpheus theme. In folklore this story is taken as the primary example of descents, and is so listed in Stith Thompson's Motif Index.^ After the premature death of his wife Eurydice, Orpheus determined to rescue her from Hades. He charmed all Hades with his song, so that for a while suffering ceased and even Ixion's wheel ceased to turn. He won back his wife on con­ dition that he should not look back at her whilst she was following him to the upper world. At the last moment he did look back, and so he lost her.8 This is the version universally accepted after Vergil. Some early versions however have it that Orpheus was successful.9 Parallels to the story of Orpheus occur in many cultures. In Polynesia Mataora brings his wife Nuvarahu back from the Underworld, whilst another hero, Tane, failed to regain his wife. In North America myths of descents to regain a spouse were widespread amongst the Indians and varied widely in form. In the Japanese cos­ mogonic myth, Izanagi descends to the Underworld to bring back his goddess wife and fails. In Norse mythology Hermod failed to rescue Balder. The stories of Heracles' descent to rescue Theseus and Alcestis are instances where the person to be rescued is not a relative.18 Another type of descent story relates to the search for immortality. We call it the Gilgamish motif, since this Sumerian version is the oldest known. True Gilgamish does not literally descend to the Underworld, but he is a hero, and he crosses the waters of death to meet Utnapishtim (a prototype of Noah) in the land of ever­ lasting life. Here Gilgamish learns of a plant which restores youth. He dives into the water and finds it on the seabed, but later a serpent -112-

snatches it away, so that Gilgamesh has to accept his mortality.11 Maui, the Polynesian culture hero, is similar. In the New Zealand version, Maui determined to secure immortality, and knew he could do this by passing through the body of his ancestress, Hine-nui-te-po. So he stripped ready to enter the mouth of the sleeping giantess But as he crept in some little birds laughed, and his ancestress awoke, closed her mouth and killed him.12 Descents are often made in search of inform­ ation. Here, beside Plato's myth of Er,1^ we have the famous tales of Odysseus and Aeneas. The former is not strictly a descent. Odysseus and his men beach their boat on the Cimmerians' coast at the frontiers of the world. They march into the kingdom of Hades and offer sacrifices as directed. Then the spirits of the dead come up from Erebus: These came thronging in crowds about the pit from every side, with a wond­ rous cry; and a pale fear seized me.11* The ghost of the sage Teiresias approaches and prophesies Odysseus' future, and the vicissitudes which he must endure before he reaches Ithaca, his home. Vergil's account of Aeneas' descent to meet Anchises owes much to Homer's 'Nekyia'. At Cumae Aeneas begs the Sibyl to be allowed to meet his dead father. The Sibyl warns: ... the way to Avernus is easy: Night and day lie open the gates of death's dark kingdom. But to retrace your steps, to find your way back to daylight, that is the task, the hard thing.15

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She advises him where to find the Golden Bough (evidently the mistletoe) which will ensure his . safety in the Underworld. Thus equipped, Aeneas enters the cave with the Sibyl. They descend and cross the land of Dis and the river Styx. In Limbo they meet many shades whom Aeneas had previously known in the world. They skirt the battlements of Tartarus, while the Sibyl des­ cribes its torments. Then they enter ... the Happy Place, the green and genial Glades where the fortunate live, 1 C the home of the blessed spirits. ° They come upon Anchises deep in a green valley. Three times in vain Aeneas tries to embrace his phantom father. Anchises explains how the dead are punished for their misdeeds, and then after an allotted span in Elysium are prepared to be reborn on earth. After these revelations Anchises speeds his son on his way back to the ships. Vergil's description, in spite of its incon­ sistencies, has been most influential. Dante had it in mind in writing his Inferno. Here, appropriately, Vergil is guide to the Underworld. The Divine Comedy is much more than a descent to acquire information, although it includes this theme. Dante combines his great cosmological vision with the Orpheus theme of the lover ad­ venturing through the Underworld to find his lost lady, in this case Beatrice. The result is a complex allegory of the soul's search for God. From the moment when Dante awakes in a dark wood, we are presented in the Inferno with an account of his descent down the huge funnel­ shaped pit of hell below the Northern Hemisphere. As he descends through the nine circles, he meets representatives of hardened sinners until at the

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centre of the earth he comes upon Dis, Satan himself.17 There are many comparable stories. A papyrus tells of the descent of the High Priest of Memphis, Setne Khaumas, in c.1250 B.C. to the Duat where he saw the judgement of souls.1® The Assyrian prince, Kummaya, was granted his wish to see the Underworld and was terrified by what he saw. J The Book of Enoch recounts Enoch's ex­ ploration of Sheol.zu When information is the goal, there is little stress upon the hero's prowess or dexterity. Instead he is often pro­ vided with a guide or talisman to ensure safe passage. This applies also to tales where the hero descends in search of a boon. In^the_story of Cupid and Psyche in the Golden Ass, Psyche has the apparently impossible task of fetching a box of beauty from Proserpine in Hades. She is advised as to the best route, and warned to carry coins to pay Charon and barley bread soaked in honey water to feed Cerberus, and told to pay no attention to calls for help. By this means Psyche reaches Prosperpine's dark palace. She is given the box of beauty, but contrary to instructions she opens the box on the way back and falls asleep. Her lover, Cupid, rescues her.21 There are many similar instances in folklore. Maui determined to find out where his mother went by day. He followed her under­ ground disguised as a bird, and later revealed himself. The fire was out in the Underworld, so Maui volunteered to bring some more. He went to the house of his ancestress Mapuike, the guardian of the fire. She gave him one of her fingers in which fire was concealed, and Maui quenched this in a stream. One by one she gave him all her fingers and toes until only one was left, and when Maui asked for this she set the world on fire. Maui called on rain, snow and hail, and they extinguished the flames. Maui then

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returned to the world; in some versions the last of the fire is said to have been put into certain trees.22 Other instances include the Mexican myth of the descent of Quetzacoatl to the 'region of the dead' to find the bones of human beings from other ages.2® There is also the descent of Eskimo shamans Jbo the bottom of the ocean to the Mother of the Seals when the supply of seals runs short. 21+ Psychopomps illustrate a quite different type of descent. In the Odyssey, Cyllenian Hermes is depicted as gathering souls. Armed with a golden wand he marshals the gibbering souls: Hermes, the Helper led them down the dank ways. Past the streams of Oceanus they went...past the gates of the sun and the lands of dreams, and quickly came to the mead of asphodel, where the spirits dwell, phantoms of men who have done with toils.2® A similar role is claimed by Shamans, the medi­ cine-men of certain Siberian tribes. Their lit­ erature recounts journeys to the realm of Erlik Khan, the god of the Underworld and of the dead. The shamans in certain tribes performed dramatic representations of the journey of the dead.2® Among the Goldi of Siberia, the Shaman sits down facing West on a board which represents a sledge. Beside him is the fanya, a sort of cushion con­ taining the dead person's soul, a basket of food and an imaginary servant.27 As Mircea Eliade puts it; The songs he intones and the words he exchanges with the 'servant' make it possible to follow his route. At first the road is easy, but the difficulties

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increase as the land of the dead is approached. A great river bars the way, and only a good shaman can get his team and sled across to the other bank. Some time later, he sees signs of human activity: footprints, ashes, bits of wood...The shaman and the dec­ eased have reached the underworld. At once the dead gather and ask the shaman to tell them his name and that of the newcomer. The shaman is careful not to give his real name; he searches through the crowd of spirits for the close relatives of the soul he is con­ ducting, so that he may entrust it to them. Having done so, he hastens to return to earth.28 Initiatory descents are far more widespread than tales of psychopomps. Jonah in the whale is an obvious example. The tendency of folk­ lorists to classify this story as a swallowing motif28 obscures its importance. Jonah, though he is not initiated in the simple anthropological sense, learns that he must obey the Lord and preach as directed at Nineveh. 8 Stories of heroes being swallowed by an animal whom they kill or from whom they are disgorged are world­ wide. So in Oceania the hero Nhanaoa had his boat swallowed by a kind of whale. The hero took the mast and thrust it into the whale's mouth to prop it open. Then he went down into the monster's stomach where he found both his parents still living. Nganaoa lit a fire, killed the monster and came out by its mouth.31 Lucian of Samo Sata in his fictitious True Stories tells a strikingly similar tale in which a whole ship is swallowed by a marine monster.32 In one version of the Kalevala, the sage Väinamöinen sets out for the land of the dead, Tuonela. On his way a giantess swallows him. He builds -117-

a boat in her stomach and rows up and down her intestine until the giantess vomits him into the

In some areas the memory still survives of initiatory rites including entry into the effigy of an aquatic monster. This is true of Papuans of New Guinea. Elsewhere, as in Sierra Leone, initiates to certain secret societies were under­ stood to have been swallowed by the monster Namu, from whom they were born again after four years.31* Initiations too often took place in caves. Mithraic initiations in the Roman world took place in underground temples.33 Eliade's inter­ pretation is: The initiatory meaning of this type of descent to the Underworld is clear he who has been successful in such an exploit no longer fears death; he has conquered a kind of bodily immortality, the goal of all heroic initiations from the time of Gilgamesh.3® In fact forms of puberty initiations vary greatly between different cultures, as Van Gennep showed in his Rites of Passage: descent and swallpwing imagery is by no means always used.37 But the Jonah motif illustrates one form of initiation scenario. The Tammuz motif presents a paradoxical form of the hero's descent. The motif of the Great Mother and her youthful lover appears in the Greek myth of Adonis. Both Aphrodite and Persephone fell in love with the young Adonis. They appealed to Zeus, who delegated the question to the Muse Calliope; she decreed that Adonis should spend one third of the year with each of the goddesses and the remainder as he pleased. In fact Adonis spent most of the year with

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Aphrodite. Whilst he was in the world he was killed by a wild boar owing to the machinations of Persephone. Some authorities hold that Aphrodite was able to renew the arrangement by which Adonis spent the summer in the world.33 In the Akkadian myth of the descent of Ishtar, the goddess goes down to the Underworld and is stripped of all her robes and ornaments. Naked in the presence of Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, she dies. Ereshkigal is induced to allow her to be sprinkled with the water of life, and so Ishtar returns. Ereshkigal commands: As for Tammuz (her) youthful husband, Wash (him) with pure water and anoint (him) with precious oil. Clothe him with a red garment (and) let him play upon the flute of lapis lazuli.11® It is generally held that this obscure ending to the Descent of Ishtar implies that Tammuz as­ cended from the Underworld as a result of Ishtar* s actions; yet it may be that all that is implied is the ascent of spirits, including Tammuz, to partake of the offerings made for the dead.41 Similar difficulties arise in interpreting the earlier and cognate myth of the Descent of Inanna.1+2 In recent years there has been a growing scholarly concensus that Dumuzi was not revived and did not return with Inanna from the Nether World. In 1966 the eminent Sumerian scholar, S.N. Kramer, announced new evidence for the return of Dumuzi.4+3 So Dumuzi may be a prototype of the gods who spend half the year in this world and half underground. In another ending to the myth, Dumuzi is dragged off weeping at the end by demons to the land of the dead. So it has been argued:

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...Inanna's imprudent visit to the nether world might be said to motivate Dumuzi's removal there.1+4 Whatever their precise endings, such myths, like that of Demeter and Kore, may well reflect the growth and decay of vegetation. More signific­ antly, they present the hero as a passive and dependent figure. __ The most important form of descent motif remains. This is the conquest of Hell. In some tales the accent is on the killing of a monster, in others it falls on the rescue of the damned. Theseus kills the Minotaur, half bull, half man, who lives in the heart of a mountain at the centre of a maze, the Labyrinth. With Ariadne's thread he finds his way to the centre and is able to return. So dies the monster who demanded a yearly tribute of seven youths and seven maid­ ens.1*^ Beowulf, the hero of the Anglo-Saxon epic, dives to the bottom of the lake to fight with Grendel's mother. She seizes him and takes him to her subterranean lair. There his mail­ shirt withstands her attack and an ancient sword which he discovers enables him to dispatch her.^^ For the freeing of the damned we can cite the Hindu legend of Ravana entering Hell, dis­ pelling darkness as he arrives. With Brahma's help he defeats Yama and so frees the damned. But this is of minor importance compared with the Christian belief in the Harrowing of Hell: From at least the second century there was no more well-known and popular belief, including the Descent to Hades, the overcoming of Death and Hades, the preaching to the Dead and the Release

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of Souls, and its popularity steadily increased.1+8 In the New Testament this motif scarcely appears at all. Christ's resting in Hades is hinted at in Romans X,7: Acts II, 31; Revelation I, 18; IX, 1; XX, 1: that is all. Other wellknown passages, as is now widely accepted, do not refer to this. Thus I Peter III, 18-20, relates to evil spirits imprisioned in the middle air and not to any conflict between the risen Christ and the rulers of the Underworld.1+9 St. Ignatius refers to the Christ as raising the prophets from the dead.58 Irenaeus has the Christ preaching in Hades.51 This is the prim­ itive theme; the Christ proclaiming deliverance to the saints of the Old Testament. The fully developed tradition appears in the Gospel of Nicodemus, an apocryphal work which seems to ex­ press third century beliefs52. Here we read of a great light appearing in Hades, which Isaiah recognises as heralding the promised Messiah. John the Baptist arrives, and Satan urges Hades to devour Jesus. Then the Christ is heard shouting 'Lift up your gates, 0 Rulers...' The barred gates are broken by the Christ's words, and the Christ seizes Satan and sends him over to Hades to be held until the second coming. The Christ raises Adam and summons the prophets and saints in Hades to come to Paradise. Christ's advent in Hades - or in medieval terms, Limbo - significantly duplicates the Gospel story.53 It became very popular. The Anglo-Saxon Harrowing of Hell in the Exeter Book consists largely of a prayer by John the Baptist for mercy and baptism. The full tradition occurs in the Golden Legend, while in the Mystery Plays the Harrowing of Hell makes a dramatic scene. Christ approaches, saying:

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Principes, portas tellite, Undo your gates, ye princes of pride, Et introibit Rex Glorie. The king of bliss comes in this tide.55 So the locks and bars burst, and Christ enters the gate. He orders Michael to bind Satan; and he summons the dead: Adam and From all Ye shall Where ye

you my friends so dear, your foes come forth with me, be set in solace sure, shall no more sorrows see.56

The Saddlers' Play in the streets of Medieval York shows how perennial is the motif of the des­ cent of*the hero. The same point could be illus­ trated from Piers Plowman. As regards Christianity, this legend fills in the gap between Christ's death and resurrec­ tion. It states dramatically the effects of the victory of the Cross; and it explains how the virtuous heroes of the Old Testament came to share the benefits of the Gospel. The Christian descent motif is distinctive. The deliverance of the inhabitants of Limbo into Paradise is widely different from the Orpheus motif where one person is brought back to this world. The de­ feat of Satan brings the Christian motif into line with other defeats of underworld monsters. It has been plausibly argued by Marcel Simon that the apocryphal tradition of Christ's con­ quest of Hell has been influenced by the Hercules Oetaeus, attributed to Seneca.57 There are also verbal reminiscences of Seneca in some of the Christian accounts, and Hercules is said to leave open an easy way from Hell to the higher world. So here we have one of the sources of the flour­ ishing Christian tradition.

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This survey of the main classes of descent motifs could no doubt be supplemented, particul­ arly with anthropological material. But it is more important to survey their main cultural embodiments. In the four thousand years since the Epic of Gilgamish and the Descent of Inanna were composed, the descent has taken many forms. Its vitality is indicated by its efflorescence within the Christian faith. It would be satisfying to discover some single source or impulse from which these descent motifs derive. Scholars have sought for such an impulse in the observed setting and rising of the sun, or in the death and revival of vegetation each year, or in initiation ceremonies. Such theories however seem at most to relate each to a fraction of the material we have discussed. More plausible is J.A. MacCulloch's view58 that at the root we have dream or trance visits to the Underworld which were elaborated under the in­ fluence of concern as to post-mortal existence. Plato's myth of Er,58 who was sent back from the dead to describe what he had seen to the living, illustrates well the application of this theory. Descents for boons, however, show that death is not always a preoccupation behind descent stories. Some of the descent legends provide striking evidence for a diffusionist theory. W.F. Jack­ son Knight in The Cumaean Gates argued that the Malekulans of the New Hebrides have myths of the journey of the dead with details similar to those of the Epic of Gilgamish and the Aeneid.88 He takes up S.H. Hooke's suggestion of common features between Melanesian and Sumerian cultures, and uses the Malekulan studies of John Layard. So Aeneas' Golden Bough is analogous to the sticks required by the Malekulan dead and the poles used by Gilgamesh in crossing water on their way to the land of the dead. Ferryman and

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boat occur in all three traditions, and Jackson Knight felt that all these three accounts go back to one o r i g i n a l . E v e n if this were the case however, only a minority of the descent material would be linked in this way. It is tempting to suggest that one of Jung's archetypes might be the cause of the occurrences of the descent motif. Certainly there is some­ thing potent and perennial about the imagery of ascent and descent, of height and depth. But the very varied forms we have surveyed, and the strangeness of descent to the Underworld for mod­ ern minds count against an archetypal explanation. Jung's own archetypes are image-forming propens­ ities similar to the instincts, hence potentially universal. It is unlikely that any one explan­ ation of descent motifs will suffice. Anthro­ pology has much help to give. From Malinowski and the functionalists we can learn the import­ ance of the purpose served by specific descent myths. This sends us back to the milieu where the myth was believed and used. From the structuralists of the school of Levi-Strauss we can learn to unravel the tensions which it att­ empts to mollify. Many descent myths are concerned with the problem of death; others with that of initiation to maturity. Different societies understand death in different ways, experience it and inter­ pret it differently. Descent myths open up a large field; and in this field sociological explanations are maybe more germane than spec­ ifically psychological ones. Dorothy Emmett writes of symbols; ...they can be interpreted as operative in such very different frames of ref­ erence as social function, psychological need, mystical and ascetic aspiration,

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and theological faith...62 The fact that such symbols can function in different ways at different levels, and sometimes perhaps even at the same time, may be one reason why their interpretation is so complicated.6^ If we turn to consider the long-term value of descent motifs: it seems that such mythical sym­ bols constitute an imaginative space in which individuals and societies can order, and con­ sciously relate to their hopes and fears. The effect of such an imaginative space can be seen by comparing the world views of a Vergil or a Dante with the embarassed taboo on the mention of death at the present day among many members of the modern English middle class society. The need for imaginative space can be gauged from the popularity of such works as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings; and also, more importantly, from the pervasive effects of the eschatological perspectives by which men understand their lives.

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References 1

2

3 k

5 6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

C.M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London 1964) p.91. Metamorphoses XI, 23 (trans. W. Adlington, Loeb Ed. 1915) p. 581. C. Hole, English Folk Heroes (London 1948) p. 19. Homer, Odyssey XI, 489-91 (trans. A.T. Murray, Loeb Ed. 1919, vol.I) p. 421. Homer, Iliad XXIII, 77-9 (trans. A.T. Murray, Loeb Ed. 1925, vol.II) p.50l. Lines 32-54 (See A. Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels Phoenix Ed. Chicago 1965, pp.96-101). At F.81.1 following F.81 in S. Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature (5 vols. Copenhagen 1955-57). Apollodorus, The Library I, iii, 2. M.P. Nilsson, 'Early Orphism and Kindred Religious Movements', Harvard Theological Review XXVIII (1935) p.189. R.B. Dixon, Oceanic Mythology (Mythology of All Races) IX (ed. L.H. Grey, New York 1964) pp.72-4 (Mataora and Tane); H.B. Alexander, North American Mythology (ibid. X, pp.50, 118-20, 236, 264, 302, n.53; Ed. Saunders, 'Japanese Mythology' in Mythologies of the Ancient World ed. S.N. Kramer (New York 1961) pp.419-20 (Izanagi); H.R.E. Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Harmondsworth 1964) pp.35-77 (Balder); Apollodorus, The Library I, ix,15 (Theseus); ibid. II, v, 12 (Alcestis). Epic of Gilgamesh X, iii, 48 - v,29, XI 258-97 (See Heidel, note 6 above, pp.77-9, 91-2). G. Grey, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealanders (Auckland, 1929) 38,41. Republic X, 613,20.

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1 »+ 15

16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40

Homer, Odyssey XI, 42-3 (trans. Murray, note 4 above) p.389. Vergil, Aeneid VI, 126-9 (trans. C. Day Lewis, The Eclogues, Georgies and Aeneid of Vergil, London 1966) p.287. Aeneid VI, 638-9 (op.cit. p.306). L 1Inferno, Canto XXXIV. J.A. MacCulloch, The Harrowing of Hell (Edinburgh 1930) p.9. A. Heidel (note 6 above) p.p.132-6. I Enoch xxii. L. Apuleius, Metamorphoses VI, 16-21. G. Grey (note 12 above) pp. 15-20. M. Leon-Portilla, 'Mythology of Ancient Mexico', Mythologies of the Ancient World (note lO above) pp.452-3. M. Eliade, 'Shamanism' Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago 1970) XX, pp.342-3. Homer, Odyssey XXIV, 10-14 (trans. Murray, note 4 above) II, p.403. M. Eliade, Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (London 1970) pp.200-4. ibid. 210-11. ibid. 211-12. E.G.S. Thompson (note 7 above) at F.910 ff. Jonah iii, 1-4. M. Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (London 1960) p.222. Lucian, True Stories I, 30-1. M. Eliade (note 31 above) p.221. ibid. pp.219-20. M.J. Vermaseren, Mithras, the Secret God (London 1963) pp.129-37. M. Eliade, Birth and Rebirth (London 1961) p.64. Van Gennep, Rites de Passage (London 1960) pp.74-88. R. Graves, The Greek Myths I (Harmondsworth 1960) p.70. A. Heidel (note 6 above) pp.119-28. ibid, p.127. -127-

41

42 43

44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

E.M. Yamauchi, 'Additional notes on Tammuz' Journal of Semitic Studies XI (1966) pp.10­ 15. Text in S.N. Kramer, Sumerian Mythology (New York 1961) pp.88-96. S.N. Kramer, 'Dumuzi's Annual Resurrection', Bulletin of American Schools of Oriental Research CLXXXIII (Baltimore 1966) p.31. G .S . Kirk, Myth, its Meaning and Functions (London 1970) p.112. R. Graves (note 38 above) pp.337-9. Beowulf lines 1442 ff. J .A . MacCulloch, 'Descent to Hades (Ethnic)' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (ed. J. Hastings, Edinburgh 1911) IV, p.653. MacCulloch (note 18 above) p.45. J. Dani^lou, The Theology of Jewish Christ­ ianity (London 1964) pp.233-5. MacCulloch (note 18 above) pp.83-4. ibid. p.93. See E. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocry­ pha (ed. R.McL.Wilson, London 1963) pp.470-6. MacCulloch (note 18 above) p.171. Some Gnostic texts place the Incarnation in Hades: see F. Wisse, 'The Redeemer Figure in the Paraphrase of Shem', Novum Testamentum XII (Leiden 1970) p.135. The Exeter Book (Part II) ed. W.S. Mackie (London 1934) pp.172-81. J.S. Purvis, The York Cycle of Mystery Plays (London 1953) p.174. ibid, p.176. M. Simon, Hercule et le Christianisme (Paris 1955) pp.112-14. MacCulloch (note 18 above) p.2. Republic X, 613-20. W.F.J. Knight, The Cumaean Gates (Oxford 1936) pp.24-5. ibid. p.42. D. Emmett, Function, Purpose and Powers (London 1958) p.189. -128-

63

ibid. p.197.

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UNDERWORLD THEMES IN MODERN FICTION by H.W. Stubbs The story of the Hero who descends into the Underworld is as successful on BBC Television as it was in Sumerian cuneiform. If we are to analyse its modern treatments, we must first glance quickly at its earlier versions, Semitic, classical, medieval and Renaissance, to identify its essential ingredients and to see how it adapts itself to varying religious and cultural milieux. Since it belongs essentially to pop­ ular legend, I am treating it on the popular, rather than the learned, level, dealing with legends and novels rather than with professional literary criticism. Originally, the Underworld Descent, hence­ forward known for short as the CATABASIS, in­ volves a Hero, searching for parent, friend or consort, and usually fighting, or at least con­ fronting, underground monsters, or the Prince of Darkness himself.1 Usually, he cannot bring his loved one back, but he often brings treasure or spiritual enrichment; he has not overcome Death itself, except in a Pickwickian sense, but he returns a wiser, if a sadder, man, and is some­ times spiritually reborn. The story tends to amalgamate with two others: the tale of the Prince who sails away, fights a dragon in a far country, and returns with a bride and a treasure, perhaps also the title-deeds to a kingdom or a talisman to liberate his people (since these legends are sometimes highly political);2 and of the Thief who steals the food, or the drink, of immortality from the Gods, and gives it either to rival powers (as in Hindu and Norse versions) or to mankind (as in Greek and Semitic legends).3 In the latter case, something has to go wrong, since man is not immortal, and the recipient -130-

himself is no longer alive (in any normal sense). There is usually a woman who guards the sacred object, especially if, as often, it is a golden apple; she may be helped by a serpent or dragon, in which case the story easily amalgamates with the story of the Bride. If the hero, by force or fraud, overcomes the reptile, he and the woman may live happy ever after; more often, the reptile himself eats the apple, and becomes immor­ tal, sloughing his skin from time to time, while hero and bride have to perpetuate their existence by other, harder means. So it was with Adam and Eve, and Gilgamesh fared no better.1* Brides, treasure, golden apples and perilous descents are common in Greek legend, as in the Argonauts, where the Golden Apple, by an odd trick of lang­ uage, becomes a Golden Sheep,® symbolizing sov­ ereignty and, in a strange twist, eternal youth, and the Underworld has been transferred to the Black Sea; and in the Odyssey, where the Hero descends to the Underworld, receives valuable advice, and ascends to find a treasure, though the princess who should have been his Bride has to be left behind, as he is married already. Vergil's Hero descends to find (among others) a Father who tells him all about immortality and reincarnation, and gives him more immediately relevant advice about how to win bride and king­ dom, with a preview of the grandeur that will be Rome. Jewish legend moves bride, serpent and apple to the beginning of the story, but themes of death and resurrection can be seen, more or less disguised, in the tale of Jonah, and Ezekiel's Valley of Dry Bones, both connected, as so often, with the idea of national obliter­ ation and revival. Christianity, of course, centres upon the Catabasis par excellence, and on the Resurrection celebrated annually at Easter, and weekly on Sundays, ever since. Logically included in the last Catabasis,

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though unemphasized in the original documents, is that splendid theme, the Harrowing of Hell, which so fascinated the medieval mind. It is directly secularized in the grimly impressive story of Child Roland, who descends into a fairyruled Underworld and liberates his sister and two brothers, using a "red liquid" which has been identified with Communion wine (more probably blood; doctrinally, a distinction without a difference). The Arthurian legend comes to incorporate the Grail story, for which Dumezil has suggested an origin in a Celtic ambrosia-myth, while an odd linguistic coincidence equates the Saint Great with the Sang Real, the Holy Vessel with the True Blood;6 Arthur himself becomes one of many Sleeping Heroes, under a mountain from which he will later emerge to liberate his people, like Charlemagne, Holger Dansker and Barbarossa. (Harold Godwinsson and Alexander II of Russia have figured in rationalized variants in which the cavern becomes a monastery; other parallels will no doubt occur to the reader.) But the medieval underworld contains another, less praiseworthy, figure: the Queen of Elfland. Lineally descended from the Ishtar in the Baby­ lonian Underworld, she appears, Latinized as Queen Venus, in Tannhäuser's Venusberg; more robustly bucolic, as a kind of subterranean Catherine the Great, we find her in several tales recorded by Margaret Murray (herself the creator of a marvellous twentieth-century mythology), especially in the Tale of True Thomas, who gets the gift of wisdom, poetry and prophecy, but, luckier than Tannhäuser, manages by a subterfuge to avoid both death and damnation. A variant of this Catabasis brings us to the Renaissance. If Mahomet, of whose ascent into Heaven we have had an impressive account from Professor Porter, will not go to the mountain,

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then the mountain may, sometimes, come to Mahomet; if some medieval figures will not go to the Under­ world, the Underworld may, in some circumstances, come to them. It comes, for example, to Dr. Faustus. He gets wealth, and knowledge, and mystical sex, and perhaps, also, renewed youth; but, unlike True Thomas, he cannot escape his bargain, and in Marlowe, perhaps, his rewards are poor - a few practical jokes, an entree into the Emperor's court, and a few bits of preCopernical astronomy which, as he indignantly says, his college scout could have told him; but Mephistopheles obviously could not know more than Marlowe knew, or do what manifestly had not been done, though the topicality "I'll drive the Prince of Parma from our land" no doubt gratified Elizabethan audiences as much as an Oxford aud­ ience in 1939 was gratified by the words "The Emperor cannot live, but by my leave; nor any potentate in Germany", and there are certainly indications that Marlowe was thinking of the renaissance and reformation - infinite riches in a little room, a world of profit and delight. This same world of profit and delight is shown earlier by Rabelais, and simultaneously by Spenser. King Arthur's knights had wandered in distant and seemingly pointless errantries, which may have reflected the duties and hazards of Spanish knights on the borders of Moorish ter­ ritory, or Lancastrian knights moving through Yorkist-held countrysides; like them, Spenser's knight wanders in the service of his Queen, killing giants and monsters, such as Archimago and Duessa - as it might be, Cardinal Allen and Mary Queen of Scots - and freeing maidens from durance - that is, England from invasion and tyranny. In France, Rabelais' heroes are them­ selves giants - that is, emancipated princes, like the growing generation in Wells' Food of the Gods - and, while they explore distant islands

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like French mariners (often Huguenot mariners) in the West Indies, they go on a grail-like pilgrim­ age searching for a Magic Bottle which may, as Motteux thought, denote the recovery of the Chalice, removed from the laity in 1415, but surely also the more spacious, joyous horizons of the Renaissance.7 In the following century, Marvell's Puritans find an Earthly Paradise in the Bermudas, complete, like Jason's, with golden apples, and quite explicitly free from the tyran­ ny of Bishops; that is, spiritual health and freedom, as well as worldly riches, can be found there, together with as large a helping of immortality as the Christian religion, and the facts of verifiable experience, will allow. Spenser's Knight reappears, plebeianized, as Bunyan's Pilgrim, whose experiences start, sig­ nificantly, with a dream, in the Underworld of one of Charles II's jails. (Abroad, the Knights Errant had dwindled into figures of fun like Don Quixote, or picaresque adventurers who culminate in Gil Bias). Overseas exploration, a stimulus for Rabelais and Marvell, is used by Swift as a vehicle for social criticism; it is sometimes forgotten that in Swift's Laputa there is a spiritualist centre in which Gulliver learns from the resurrected spirits that most history is bunk, that most contemporary royalty is descended from seventeenth-century equivalents of Lady Chatterley's gamekeeper, but at the same time that Swift's own contemporaries on the plebeian level are nothing like the men their fathers were. (Swift, like Kingsley Amis, shows an equal detestation for contemporary progressives and for the over-glamourized past). Death and resurrection should not, perhaps, be left behind without a reference to Coleridge, whose Ancient Mariner abuses love and innocence, bringing a curse upon himself and all his ship­ mates; he alone rises, Jonah-like, from a world

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of death and decomposition, to bring a message of repentance. But with the beginning of the nine­ teenth century, the Underworld Theme splits in two. There is the Gothic theme, ranging from Beckford's Underworld, through Le Fanu's diablerie, to Sweeney Tod and Spring-heeled Jack,® laterin the century these have an impressive progeny, but they must be dismissed for the moment. In a rationalized form, the Catabasis and the Return appear as Suffering and Redemption; nor, indeed, is the form always as rationalized as all that. It may seem odd to see Dickens in this gal­ lery. But what a lot of him there is. Scrooge is reformed by a series of Underworldly visions Marley's Ghost comes somewhere between Enkidu in Sheol and Dives in Gehenna - and there is a sug­ gestion that Society itself may be revived by the Spirit of Christmas, just as Tennyson shows Christmas, Easter, and the New Year, combining with modern science and the memory of a dear dead friend, to "ring out the darkness of the land, ring in the Christ that is to be". Another re­ formed character is Martin Chuzzlewit, who has sailed, in effect, across the Waters of Death and suffered deeply in an American Underworld; there is a hero, strangely restored to life with temp­ orary loss of identity, in Our Mutual Friend, and he wins a Bride and a Treasure (which is, signif­ icantly, based on rubbish, dust, and decay), in Great Expectations, treasure comes up from the Underworld, but it is fairy gold, and it is only awkwardly, under protest and ambiguously, that the hero is even allowed to marry the Princess; and who knows who died, and who rose from the dead, in Edwin Drood? Across the Channel there is one masterpiece of redemptive suffering; it is, of course,

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always risky to interpret the products of a dif­ ferent culture-pattern (think how French critics have misunderstood English literature!) but what a wealth of underworld imagery we have in Les Miserables. Jean Valjean dies many deaths; his first life-sentence in 1795, his belated liber­ ation after Napoleon has come and gone (like another Sleeping Hero, Rip van Winkle, he has not stirred while armies have been thundering over his head); he passes through fire and loses his convict's ticket and his old identity, to be reborn as an industrious artisan who makes money and becomes a philanthropic Mayor; he goes back to prison again, escapes, is thought to have drowned, recovers his Treasure and rescues his Princess - Cosette, a kind of female Oliver Twist; born out of wedlock and maltreated by a pair of super-Bumble foster-parents; Jean and Cosette hide in a convent (dead to the world), and Jean, to be smuggled out, has to buried in a coffin, and very nearly does die until he is rescued by some more trickery with an identity-card (Victor Hugo's world is very modern in some ways); Cosette, originally a plain child to win our pity, becomes, by a gross piece of literary dishonesty, a beautiful teen-ager, and is courted by a hand­ some Prince; that is, by the author himself under the name Marius. Marius, brought up by a loving but fiercely royalist grandfather, becomes a Bonapartist when he learns about his true father, and an extreme Republican at the Univer­ sity (those of us who worry about rebel students may be grateful that we have never had to cope with Marius, Enjolras, Laigle and their friends); disowned by his grandfather, he retires to a slum, takes part in a rising that fails, like the student rising of 1968; for the love of Cosette, Jean rescues Marius, again descending into an Underworld - this time, the sewers of Paris, which the auther describes with poetic gusto; the persecutors, Javert and Thenardier, are -136-

disposed of, Marius marries Cosette and lives happy ever after on Jean's money while Jean him­ self dies happily, his duty done. Unluckily, France was not liberated yet, but we may suppose that Marius lived to see the Third Republic. English Gothic had by now emerged from its own Underworld into literary daylight. The nine­ teenth century's most famous Catabasis is Alice in Wonderland. It begins with a Guiding Animal: Cadmus was led to Thebes by a cow, Aeneas to Alba by a white sow, and the hero of George Macdonald's Phantaste was led into a magic wood by a white rabbit; Alice's rabbit leads her, more appro­ priately, into the underworld of a rabbit hole.9 Martin Gardner has explained Carroll's latent philosophical, linguistic, scientific, mathemat­ ical, and literary allusions; here, I need only say that Carroll, like Barrie some forty years later, developed a children's classic, with deep symbolic undertones, out of an imaginative em­ broidery on the events of a family picnic. Unusually, the leading character is female; apart from Bunyan's Christiana, women in symbolic literature had usually been lost Princesses con­ cerned with preserving their virginity and their social status. Alice faces no graver threats than adult rebuke and social embarrassment, which she overcomes by innocence and commonsense, sometimes helped by friendly adults (social criticism, a common ingredient of fantasy and science-fiction, here takes the form simply of parodying the general oddness of grown-ups) and emerges prepared for reality and maturity - such, I think, is the implication of the Epilogue, sometimes, unjustly in my opinion, denounced for its sentimentality. In the next volume we have a two-dimensional Otherworld Through the LookingGlass, where kindly adults help Alice win contests framed in the idiom of chess and ending, as Hocart and Raglan would have approved, with Queen

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Alice presiding over a ritual banquet.

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We may note that only during this last gen­ eration has Alice really effectively crossed the Channel. French logic is not a kindly soil for imaginative fantasy; nowhere is this more clear than in the works of Jules Verne, whose scientific imagination is confined to a rigidly limited ex­ trapolation of contemporary achievement, whose cardboard characters make epigrams instead of showing individual personality, and whose humour consists largely of florid exaggerations and comic statistics descending, remotely, from Rabelais. But even so, Phileas Fogg meets the adventures and the rewards appropriate to a knight-errant, and, helped by some trickery with international date-line, defeats time itself; the heroes in A Journey to the Centre of the Earth go, very properly, following instructions in a sphinx-like code, through volcanoes into an Underworld of fiery lakes and terrifying monsters, and rise again through a different volcano en­ riched with underworld jewels and qualified for successful love. Traditional fantasy and contemporary dis­ coveries are far more effectively amalgamated by Rider Haggard. Like the Argonauts, his heroes sail to, and slightly beyond, the limits of con­ temporary exploration; like them, they fight with monsters and discover the World's Desire. In King Solomon1s Mines, they destroy a sinister and age-old witch, find tremendous wealth in gold, and return to the upper world through a lake of fire; in She, the hero follows a family trad­ ition revealed in a mysterious document and passes through ordeals and dangers into an Under­ world where he finds a Queen, both Mother and Bride, who offers him the secret of immortality. This immortality is, unhappily, mere fairy gold; the Queen and her magic perish, as Gagool had -138-

perished in King Solomon's Mines, and as so many primeval pagan horrors were to perish under the old Empire - an Empire which, for all its faults, is well enough typified by Haggard's muscular young Christians. A very similar femme fatale appears, significantly, in Pierre Benoit's L 'Atlantice; but she is rationalized, many of the events and characters mentioned are histori­ cal, and at the end it seems that she is simply the daughter of a famous Second-Empire cocotte and an Arab chief. Later than Haggard, and influenced by the charismatic personality of Sir Richard Burton, comes Doyle's Lost World. Here, the World of the Dead is dominated by dragons and apemen, on an isolated plateau accessible, like the Islamic Paradise, by a narrow bridge over an abyss. But the escape is made through a tunnel, and the heroes come away with diamonds, and, like Hercules, with a demon-figure; no Cerberus, but a pterodactyl. Wisely, Conan Doyle, who dis­ liked conventional love-interests, has no Princ­ ess, though his first and last chapters, with their incredibly stupid anti-heroine, magnifi­ cently parody the conventional Victorian heroine who interferes with so many otherwise excellent plots. Contemporary with Doyle is Wells; so con­ temporary that The Poison Belt borrows unashamed­ ly from In the Days of the Comet. In some of his short stories, Wells pays brief homage to the Victorian exploration-theme - South America and the South Sea Islands particularly attract him but the Home Counties Cockney is seen at his best in the long novels, and there we find the real archetypes. In The First Men in the Moon, there is a voyage, and an underworld descent - there is an underground ruler of incredible wisdom, and there are also common people interred in a Long -139-

Sleep (though the real Long Sleep occurs in When the Sleeper Wakes, a tale of revolution); of his heroes, one gains wisdom in the underworld, but has to stay there, like Theseus when he tried to abduct Persephone, and the other returns with bars of gold, and hears from his friend by radio (a medium then newly invented). In The Food of the Gods, humanity fights with monsters and des­ cends into the Underworld (here, only a giant rat­ hole, but none the less sinister, and symbolic, for that) and then, as in Rabelais, assumes gig­ antic stature and intellectual emancipation. In The War of the Worlds, humanity itself goes under­ ground, to fight a ruthless and heartless enemy, which in the end is destroyed by the simplest of creatures - terrestrial microbes. In The Apple, Eden itself reappears, in a tale told by an Armenian refugee (like his compatriot Er,11 a victim of alien oppressors), who has stumbled into it and found the Golden Apple, which he gives to an English stranger who discards it, for a trivial reason - significantly, to please a woman; A Vision of Judgement and The Story of the Last Trump fit a slightly different moral to the myth of the general resurrection. (Like Outward Bound, a generation later, they both, in slightly different ways, suggest a liberation through truth, and the discarding of hypocritical disguises). In The Time Machine we have perhaps the earliest indication of a transition described by Walsh as From Utopia to Nightmare,·*·^ here, the hero passes through time, thinks he finds a para­ dise, and descends, temporarily, into an under­ ground Hell from which the Morlocks emerge on moonless nights, like Loki at Ragnarök, and exact a terrible vengeance. (The recent film, perhaps scared by the thought of cannibalism, made non­ sense of this theme, and indeed stood the whole social implication of the story on its head). For once, the hero does not organize a revolution, as Jack London's hero does in The Iron Heel, and -140-

as the young Gulliver does in the Russian film; he is more interested in rescuing a Bride from the subhuman creatures of the Underworld. Before the century was out, Gothic themes re-emerged even more crudely; the Devil was back, horns, hoofs and all. Ghosts and vampires had never really died out - Sheridan Le Fanu gave some magnificent examples - and they re-emerged with Dracula. Aleister Crowley brought the Devil back into intellectual fashion, and his activities were paralleled in France; Arthur Machen, from a High Anglican viewpoint, noted with horror the survival of sinister magic (mainly, it would appear from his horrified cir­ cumlocutions, a kind of fertility-ritual) which, a generation later, Margaret Murray saw in a kindlier light as a gentle, friendly paganism (inspired, of course, as so many of us have been, by Frazer).13 Murrayites are still numerous, and Crowleyites are not unknown; a leading Crowleyite, in a sense, is Dennis Wheatley - in a sense only, because, like Machen, he believes in Satanism, but, like Coolidge's preacher on Sin, "he is agin it". Wheatley's They Found Atlantis is shame­ lessly cribbed from Doyle's The Maracot Deep. In both we have Atlantis still existing. The novelist's Atlantis is, of course, a variant of two creation-legends, Noah's Flood and the Cities of the Plain. In both stories, there is an Underworld, in which the Devil is supremely powerful; in both, the heroes - a group of travellers, like the Argonauts - frustrate the demon rulers and escape. In another excellent Underworld story, The Secret People, John Beynon describes pygmies living on fungi in caves under Algeria, which he oddly supposed would still be under French control in 1964; these pygmies capture another group of travellers, who escape -141-

after feats of endurance. This is another instance of an underground people living menacingly on, like Well's Morlocks and Machen's serpent-people, in territory under foreign domination. In later years, John Beynon, under the name of John Wyndham, wrote other best-sellers which exploit ancient myths and archetypal fears, such as The Kraken Wakes, in which the Midgard-Serpent or the Beast from the Abyss rises from the sea and The Day of the Triffids, in which humanity, apart from a few lucky survivors, is literally blinded through its own hubristic ambitions, and another species comes near to taking over the earth. But we are approaching a time in which the Underworld really did open; when the Beasts came out of the Abyss; and when Hell really did need harrowing. In 1914, Sherlock Holmes made His Last Bow, foiled a German spy, and ended with some fairly shrewd prophecies. Later, Professor Challenger took up spiritualism and, like his creator, came into touch with a genuine post­ Christian underworld. By then, Wells had al­ most run dry of fantasy, though in 1923 he wrote Men Like Gods, which showed the hopes, and the frustrations, of the 1920s. In 1936, his film Things to Come showed what might soon happen; but the best Underworld writer was still Dennis Wheatley. The Crowleyite forces of evil, which had operated on a fairly small scale in The Devil Rides Out, reappear cosmically in Strange Conflict and They Used Dark Forces; in The Man who Missed the War, satanic Atlanteans reappear, living now in Antarctica, offering human sacri­ fices to the Principle of Evil, controlling the weather, and doing their best to frustrate the Allied liberation of France and Europe. But the most significantly prophetic catabatic apocalypse was published by Gollancz four years before the events it foreshadows; a great success at the time, now undeservedly forgotten, it was grimly -142-

and magnificently foreboding. It was called Land Under England, by Joseph O'Neill. The hero of this story is a descendant of an old family, the Julians, who have lived for centuries beside the Roman Wall. A solitary bachelor, he feels, like the hero of She, a strange compulsion; in this case, to go through a cave at the foot of the Wall. Beyond the cave he finds an entrance, guarded by monster spiders which he must overcome^ leading to an underground realm dimly illuminated, as in Beynon's novel, by phosphorescent fungi, which serve as food to the near-human inhabitants These inhabitants are descended from Roman legion­ aries, who were driven literally underground by the Saxons. Unlike Margaret Murray's friendly Neolithic pixies, these are grim, robot-like creatures, preparing, like Milton's Satan, to re­ emerge, re-Romanize Britain, and de-humanize it. Like Wells' Morlocks, they have sometimes cap­ tured living men; but instead of eating them, they have brainwashed them. One of their victims is Julian's own father, and Julian meets him. He has become a soulles automaton, like his cap­ tors, and he views his son with unrecognizing hatred. I may now quote; "If to the mass-hysteria of the race were added the modern technical and scientific knowledge which he, but not his father, possessed, then a new and ghastly era might open up for man­ kind... True, even with the extra­ ordinary powers that our knowledge combined with theirs would have given them, their State could not have stood any real chance of a successful invasion of England in normal circum­ stances. But normal circumstances are not always to be counted on, even in England. If she were at deathgrips with a very powerful enemy, if -143-

part of her population were in revolt, as the population of Russia revolted after the Great War, if a Fascist or Nazi section of her own citizens made common cause with the underneath invaders, because of the similarity of their doctrines, nobody could tell what might happen". This idea was not completely new - Wells had envisaged a collaborationist milice supporting the Martian invaders - but, at a time when Quisling was unknown, and Darnand and Joyce, if known at all, were only noted as loud-mouthed super-nationalists, O'Neill's words are singular­ ly prescient. In the end, of course, Julian saves his soul and his country's future, with­ stands brainwashing, and escapes, to re-emerge through a Roman mineshaft in Yorkshire. We have everything here - tunnel, monsters, dead souls, deceased parent, return by a differ­ ent tunnel; but the story has been stood on its head. (Not, perhaps, for the first time; sometimes a Sleeping Hero may have been re­ edited as a Chained Satan).11+ The Dead are all hostile; they pretend to be supporting age-old values (which, of course, they have grossly dis­ torted) , and appeal to traditional loyalties while planning to overthrow everything that those loyalties ever stood for. Worst of all, the Hero's father has joined them. It was just such dehumanized, pseudo-Roman anachronisms, supported by bewildered and misled accessories in the older generation, that were to emerge and overthrow the republic in Spain, and to collaborate with the invader in France; and our own elders were not invariably proof against brainwashing. Let us end on a lighter note - In Paris in 1949, I was recommended to read "a surrealist -144-

fairy story" called L 1Enfant du Metro. A boy of seven is stuck down the Paris Metro, like Alice down her rabbit-hole, and his imagination colours the names of the stations with bright imagery derived from memories of public and private fest­ ivals, Bastille Day and First Communion. The ticket-collector, controleur, a God-figure like Bridie's Sleeping Clergyman, tells him that he must liberate La_ Muette from a giant called Pelleport (all, of course, names of Metro sta­ tions; one school of French exegesis often ex­ plains myth and history in terms of aetiological myths invented to explain place-names). Helped by a father-figure at Pere Lachaise (significant­ ly, a cemetery) he looks, like Alice, through a keyhole at the Chambre des Deputes, where the Deputies are slumbering, like Arthur's knights. He meets various other creatures, friendly and hostile - an animal guide at Marbeuf, spouting dolphins at Porte Dauphine, monster ants at Campo-Formio, a lion and a boar fighting to death at Combat (like Tydeus and Polynices in the Thebaid?) a Bride who sends him to pick up a ribbon at Courcelles (where young people are dancing with the Arc de Triomphe in the back­ ground) and a golden key inscribed Je_ Delivre at the dead-silent Maison Blanche. This key admits him to a gackgarden where he is embraced by the elderly mother-figure La^ Muette; Giant Pelleport, rushing to attack him, collapses at the touch of the Golden Key and falls into the fiery hell of Denfert-Rochereau (formerly Enfer). The story ends with a party in the Place des Fetes, attended by the Ticket-Collector, by the awakened Deputies, by Pere Lachaise, and by all the friendly figures, now released from enchant­ ment. This is a French story, so it has to be rationalized; the boy has been dreaming (as, indeed, had Alice) and wakes up at home; his mother had found him asleep on a station bench and taken him back without awaking him. -145-

An amusing and picturesque story? Yes (especially if one can see the illustrations). Any more than that? Yes. This story was pub­ lished in Paris in 1943. La Muette is France; her people, including the Deputies, are under a spell, like the Sleeping Beauty; like Persephone, they are locked in a wintry Underworld. This is more than a rabbit-hole which the rising gener­ ation must explore; it is a Hell which the rising generation has to harrow.

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References Gilgamish, in the Assyrian version, makes two journeys, searching first for an ancest­ or (Ut-Napishtim), then for a friend (En­ kidu) ; Odysseus ostensibly goes to consult a dead prophet, like Saul at Endor, and in­ cidentally meets his mother and several friends; Aeneas goes to consult his father, and meets several friends on the way; Dionysius goes to resuscitate his mother. Orpheus, in an obscure and untypical legend, is the only ancient hero recorded explicitly as descending in search of his consort, but evocations of consorts are not uncommon, and we may compare the roles of Beatrice in the Divine Comedy and of Gretchen in Faust. See also W.F. Jackson Knight, Cumaean Gates (Oxford 1936), passim. On brides and treasures, see especially W.J. Woodhouse, The Composition of Homer 1s Odyssey (Oxford 1930). Of liberating her­ oes, the most obvious are Moses and Theseus, but usurpers and tyrants are also overthrown by Perseus, Jason, Odysseus and Romulus; for other legendary themes in Roman pseudo­ history, see G. Dum^zil, Jupiter-MarsQuirinus (Paris 1941-5) and A. Basanoff, Regifugium; la fuite du roi (Paris 1943). For variants, G. Dumezil, Le festin d'immortalite (Paris 1924). No recent works have covered this theme more satisfactorily than Sir J.G. Frazer, Folk­ lore in the Old Testament, (London 1918) vol. 1, chap. 2. R. Roux, Le probleme des Argonauts (Paris 1950) especially pp.35-6; cf. J.Lindsay, The Clashing Rocks (London 1965). d Td .R. Owen, The Vision of Hell (Edinburgh 1970), which came to my attention after this paper had been read, traces the direct -147-

connection between Lancelot's liberating ex­ pedition and the Harrowing of Hell in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus; elsewhere he points out (The Evolution of the Grail Legend) (Edinburgh 1968, especially pp.142­ 5) that the Grail is a twelfth century, addition to the Arthurian cycle, but does not discredit the pre-Christian associations of the sacred Vessel. One may compare the symbolism of wine, representing aspects of existence under an imagery officially disapproved of in the dominant culture, in Omar Khayyam and G.K. Chesterton. For Gothic themes popularized in early nineteenth-century mass literature, see E.S. Turner, Boys will be Boys (London 1948). Less grotesque than might be supposed; in addition to numerous popular beliefs about hares, not clearly distinguished from rab­ bits in Central and Eastern European usage, we might consider the function of rabbits as Easter symbols in Germany and the United States.cf. V. Newall, An Egg at Easter, (London 1971)pp. 324ff. For the developments of various social and cultural institutions, beliefs and tradi­ tions from kingship-rituals, see especially A.M. Hocart, Kingship (London 1927) and Lord Raglan, Death and Rebirth (London 1945) and The Hero (London 1936). Arthur Platt in the Classical Review 25 (1911) pp. 13-14 convincingly identified Plato's 'Er the Armenian' with an 'Ara, son of Aram' in a resurrection legend related by Moses of Chorene, which E.D. Phillips in a paper read to the Classical Association (summarized in the Proceedings 52 (1958) pp.28-9) has tentatively assigned to the invasion of Armenia by Sargon II in 714 B.C. Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare -148-

(London 1962). Several literary and biographical studies of Arthur Machen have appeared in recent years, but the best study of his peculiar fantasyworld, and of the similar, but wilder, romances of H.P. Lovecraft, was made by Peter Penzoldt in The Supernatural in Fiction (London 1952). On the temporary binding of Satan, see Revelation XX, 2-7; cf. the binding of Loki in Norse mythology and his release at the time of Ragnarök. Prometheus and Typhoeus, like Loki, are bound in underground dungeons, and like him are associated with earth­ quakes and volcanic eruptions, but Prometheus is released at the beginning rather than at the end of recognisable human history, while Typhoeus' punishment lasts, apparently, for ever.

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