Of pantos, dwarves, and “Snow White” (DeDisnification, Part 9A)

While in Bath, we attended the Theatre Royal’s production of Snow White. This show was what is known as a pantomime, or as the locals say, “panto”. It’s a brand of musical comedy particular to the UK that’s typically put on during the “festive season”. Panto contains songs, including sing-a-longs, jokes, often with references to contemporary culture, slapstick, dancing, and cross-dressing actors, with the audience periodically encouraged to participate by shouting responses at various performers (with “Oh, yes it is!” and “Oh, no it isn’t!” being a common exchange) or booing and hissing at the villains, all wrapped up in a well-known story. The tradition derives from the Italian commedia dell’arte and the Victorian music hall, and carries on—minus the family-friendly part—through The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

This production of Snow White contained all these elements and more. Even though it seemed a fairly straightforward retelling, the pacing of the show felt a bit off until Muddles, the court Jester, was introduced. While some other characters occasionally broke the fourth plane, for him, there was nothing there to break. Dame Dolly, Muddles’ mum—played by a man—and the Evil Queen rounded out the main comedic players, with some additional gags from the various dwarves.

A quick aside: plural dwarves has been preferred for the sense regarding the mythical creatures since J. R. R. Tolkien began using it in that fashion, while the spelling dwarfs refers to people of short stature. I’ll be using the former except in direct quotes and titles.

After a while I could catch on to the rhythm of the thing and even complete the performers’ jokes before they did; ones such as:

Dolly: The other day I told the Queen she’d drawn her eyebrows on too high.
Muddles: What did she say?
Dolly: Nothing; she just looked surprised.

And:

Muddles: I’ve been having an irresistible urge (aside to audience: not that kind!) to climb to the castle’s highest tower and yell obscenities out the window. I think I’ve got turrets syndrome.

Others were cultural references that were so totally lost on me that even Googling in real time wouldn’t have helped (as well as being poor theater-going etiquette). There were many off-color gags, mostly going over the heads of the kids in the audience and there for the parents accompanying them, but the essential story remained unaltered: jealous queen, magic mirror, handsome prince, mining dwarves, beautiful princess.

It was clear that the Disney version was the main point of reference: the costumes were similar and they even used several songs from the film. And yet the dwarves, played by little people, had entirely different names:

• Pop
• Kip
• Twitcher
• Smiler
• Sneezer
• Grouchy
• Soppy

It seems that Walt was able to copyright the names Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, and Dopey.¹ They apparently didn’t think Sneezy was worth bothering with. The Grimm brothers didn’t give individual names to the dwarves, but while Disney would like to say that was their idea, the Broadway play of 1912 had:

• Blick
• Flick
• Glick
• Plick
• Snick
• Whick
• Quee

Winthrop Ames adapted the 1916 silent film script from the hit play he had also written under the pseudonym Jessie Braham White and both also starred Marguerite Clark. The film was clearly the model for Walt’s, bearing the title the Disney work used as well—Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs—while the Grimms made no titular mention of dwarves.

Robert T. Sidwell attempts to establish that Disney drew his dwarf names from the tradition of Germanic lore embodied in the Eddas.² There are indeed dwarf names scattered throughout those works: the Vǫluspá, the Dverga heiti, and the Nafnaþulur each contain versified lists of dwarves, with the Gylfaginning essentially repeating that of the first. Sidwell presents the following list of correspondences between the names of dwarves found therein and the names of the filmic seven—I’ve restored the Old Norse spellings of the names here:

• Tóki “foolish one”: Dopey
• Skávaerr “goodnatured one” [sic]: Happy
• Varr “shy one”: Bashful
• Dúri “sleepy one”: Sleepy
• Orinn “quarrelsome one”: Grumpy
• Grerr “roaring one”: Sneezy
• Ráðsviðr “one who gives wise advice”: Doc

As attractive as this theory is, it is lacking a fairly important element: any sort of evidence at all. The Eddic traditions are at least easy to locate in these days of the internet, but would have been a pretty arcane territory for team Disney to have wandered into, much less to have comprehended fully enough to understand, select, and cleverly translate a set of dwarvish names from. The work Sidwell cites as the source for the film’s names is “Dwarf-Names: A Study in Old Icelandic Religion”.³ This is an obscure article in a highly academic journal that would likely have been hard to access—I’d imagine one could’ve done so only at the library of a university with a strong language department—let alone comprehend. The article is probably better known today among Old Norse enthusiasts than when it was published. In any case, literally the only things that work are the article’s timing (prior to the 1937 film) and the language it’s written in (English). Sidwell himself notes the epics name some 60 dwarves, giving a pretty large pool to go fishing in for these seven generous “matches”.

Actual accounts of the Disney dwarves’ creation relate a far different story; that they were always intended to be the comedic relief and that their names related to their personalities for that purpose rather than being cleverly rendered Nordic idionyms. The set that was eventually whittled down to the seven we know included others, such as:⁴

Jumpy, Deafy, Dizzey, Hickey, Wheezy, Baldy, Gabby, Nifty, Sniffy, Swift, Lazy, Puffy, Stuffy, Tubby, Shorty, and Burpy.

We should perhaps be grateful that these did not make the cut. Still, even the ones that did drew criticism from C. S. Lewis, who disliked the,⁵

[…] bloated, drunken, low comedy faces of the dwarfs. Neither the wisdom, the avarice, nor the earthiness of true dwarfs were there, but an imbecility of arbitrary invention.

Sidwell attempts to establish a parallel by presenting a list of Tolkien’s dwarves from The Hobbit, which are fairly well known to have been drawn from Eddic sources. The two works also came out in the same year. I’ve corrected and completed the list here:

• Bífurr “quivering one”: Bifur
• Bǫfurr ?: Bofur (a nonsense word simply pairing with Bífurr)
• Bǫmburr “swollen one”: Bombur
• Nóri “shrunken one”: Nori
• Óri “the raver”: Ori
• Óinn “shy one”: Oin
• Þorinn “bold one”: Thorin
• Fíli “the filer”: Fili
• Kíli “the wedge”: Kili
• Glóinn “glowing one”: Gloin
• Dóri “the borer”: Dori
• Dvalinn “the delayer”: Dwalin
• Bálin “fiery one”: Balin

Gandalf is also the name of an Eddic dwarf—the original being Gandálfr, meaning “magic staff elf”—making Bilbo, named for a sword of Spanish origin, even more of an outsider to the group.

Tolkien was an Oxford Professor of English Language and Literature and Professor of Anglo-Saxon, a philologist, author, and poet. Disney never finished high school. Sidwell is a Professor of Education while I’m an autodidact, so it may seem like we’re both veering wildly out of our respective lanes—he to attempt to place these two on a par in this arena, and me to decry that as ridiculous—but I think mine is the only realistic conclusion.

Taking a step back to the symbolism of dwarves in myth, Joseph Campbell describes them thus:⁶

The titans, dwarfs, and giants are represented as the powers of an earlier mythological age—crude and loutish, egotistic and lawless […].

Adolf Roeder concurs, adding some color on the differences between dwarves and giants:⁷

Evidently these giants are representations of the gigantic forces of nature and of spirit, while the dwarfs are equivalent representations of the minute forces of nature and of spirit. […] Sometimes the gods require the help of the minute forces of nature, and Loge and Wotan descend into the cave of Niflheim to find the ring and the Tarnhelm. And sometimes man’s spiritual side—that is to say, the gods, must struggle with the dwarfish powers of nature, but he must do so always by ingenuity and cunning, and not by force, as witness the story of Siegfried and Mime.

As to the specific role of the dwarves in this tale, PhD in the History of Religions, N. J. Girardot sums it up so well, there’s very little I can add:⁸

Being deep in the forest at the house of the dwarfs, Snow White has symbolically returned to the mythic beginnings of time, the liminal period of chaos when the mysterious gods and ancestral creatures of creation were active. In many tales the dwarfs, as chthonic creatures, are malevolent and destructive beings; but, as in this case, they can also be the creative agents of growth and rebirth. Indeed, in this story the dwarfs […] can be taken as the divine ancestors, teachers, refiners, guardians, or helpers necessary for a successful initiation. They help to mine gold from the black earth of Snow White’s soul as the smith and alchemist assist in the divine work of accelerating the processes of nature, or the shaman heals through the agency of various spirit-animals.

These are the reasons folklorists and mythologists, if they even condescend to give opinions of Disney’s works, are less than favorably disposed: depictions such as that of the dwarves as two-dimensionally comedic characters are completely at odds with how central the theme of the ambivalence of cruelty and innocence is to folktales.

A closely related Italian version of the tale, La Bella Venezia,⁹ has banditti instead of dwarves, but their role is the same: initiatory figures who live outside the strictures of normal society. Their lair in the wilderness opens to a magic formula, “Open up, desert!” linking them to another set of robbers, those in the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. And these act out the malevolent side of the trope, repeatedly trying to do Ali Baba in. The magic opening formula is “Apriti, deserto!” in Italian, and the closing one,“Chiuditi, deserto!” In Italian, the Ali Baba versions simply use sesamo instead of deserto. That both groups of outlaws live essentially within the earth links them again to the chthonic dwarves.

After hiding nearby and hearing the password, the nameless daughter of Bella Venezia enters the home of the bandits and seeing food and being hungry, she eats a wing from each of their 12 chickens, a bite from each loaf of bread, and a sip of wine from every bottle. This too puts us in mind of another folktale, that of Goldilocks and the Three Bears and the Grimm Brothers’ version of Snow White (Schneewittchen) has an even closer version of the sampling performed by the yellow-haired waif. The title is partially standardized Low German: snee = “snow”, witt = “white”, + diminutive ending -ken, so “little Snow-white” (standard German Schneeweißchen).︎ The bears are yet another version of these semi-human guardian figures, and it’s also worth noting that three, seven, and 12 are common folkloric magic numbers. Tolkien (via Gandalf) had Bilbo join the 13 dwarves out of triskaidekaphobic concerns, in a related trope of avoiding an unlucky number.

I hope I’ve been able to show some of the intricacy, depth, and resonance of these supposed children’s stories, even though I’ve only discussed one element of this one so far. In the introduction to his Italian Folktales, Italo Calvino discusses how daunting approaching the field of study was:¹⁰

For the Brothers Grimm, the salvaging meant bringing to light the fragments of an ancient religion that had been preserved by the common people and had lain dormant until the glorious day of Napoleon’s defeat had finally awakened the German national consciousness. […] To the anthropologists it signified the somber and bloody initiation rites of tribal youths, rites that have been identical from time immemorial, from paleolithic hunters to today’s primitive peoples. The followers of the Finnish school, in setting up a method for tracing migrations among Buddhist countries, Ireland, and the Sahara, applied a system similar to that used for the classification of coleoptera, which, in their cataloging process, reduced findings to algebraic sigla of the Type-index and Motif-index. What the Freudians salvaged was a repertory of ambiguous dreams common to all men, plucked from the oblivion of awakenings and set down in canonical form to represent the most basic anxieties. And for the students of local traditions everywhere, it was a humble faith in an unknown god, rustic and familiar, who found a mouthpiece in the peasantry.

Calvino’s is a relatively pure work; he has scoured the countryside in search of variants of each tale, with straightforward criteria for selection among these versions:¹¹

Because of the various texts at my disposal, this particular one struck me as not only the most beautiful or the richest or the most skillfully narrated, but also as the one most rooted in its native heath, had drawn from it the most pith […].

Not to say that there is nothing of the author in this compilation; he freely admits to adding his own innovations, but the effort is to create rhythm, symmetry—to make better folkloric sense of the material.

Tolkien’s was an original work (based on Celtic and Germanic sources), created an entire world—peoples, religions, languages, conflicts—with his tales set against that backdrop: a folktale world reimagined. It wasn’t Tolkien’s plan to even publish his works, just something he was doing for its own sake.

By contrast, On the other hand, Disney’s work was a reductive one: taking the characters and setting of a folktale and forcing that round peg into the square hole of the then-popular screwball romcom. Even the menace presented in the film is there because of how well known the woman-in-peril motif was for manipulating audience emotions. And the ultimate purpose of the work was to sell a lot of popcorn in order to save the financially troubled company. Overall, he made it safe and outwardly attractive; features that led Tolkien to liken Disney’s works to “vulgar plastic toys”.¹² The comparison was ironically prescient, since these films have become, more or less, vehicles for the sale of such stuff. Disney strongly considers the “toyation” angle of any works they produce.

It is unsurprising then that the pantos would gravitate toward this version: not just because it is the most safe and familiar one—ostensibly for children, but with gags for the parents that perforce must watch with them, a feature that has long since become a hallmark of Disney’s works—but because it offers a nearly blank canvas upon which to splash their own over-the-top buffoonery.

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Read Subsequent Articles in this Series

Part 9B: The Sum of its Versions

Part 9C: The “Snow White” Studio

Part 9D: Snowhaus

Part 10: The Little Less-Than

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Read Previous Articles in this Series

Part 1: Straightening out “Hunchback”

Part 2: Making over “Mulan”

Part 2 Addendum B: Your Western Wuxia Is Weak

Part 3A: “Hercules”: Myths and Mistakes

Part 3B: Doing Hera’s Work

Part 4: “Belle” Epoch

Part 5: Putting “Pocahontas” to Rest

Part 5 Addendum: Powhatan’s Mantle

Part 6: The Trouble with “Tarzan”

Part 7A: Down the Rabbit Hole

Part 7A Addendum A: Curious Curation

Part 7A Addendum B: “Alice” in Revolt

Part 7A Addendum C: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan

Part 7B: Alice’s Adventures in the Cousins War

Part 8: Guerrillas and the “Jungle”

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Notes

1. Matthew Moore, “Pantomime renames dwarfs to avoid breaching Disney copyright”, The Telegraph, 2008. Note that the article is not about the Bath panto but the topic seems to come up quite regularly.
2. Robert T. Sidwell , “Naming Disney’s Dwarfs”, Children’s Literature in Education, 1980.
3. Chester Nathan Gould, “Dwarf-Names: A Study in Old Icelandic Religion”, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1929.
4. Bob Thomas, Disney’s Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast, 1991.
5. A letter to Tolkien quoted in Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion & Guide: Reader’s Guide, A letter to Tolkien quoted in Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, 2006.
6. Joseph Campbell, The Masks Of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology, 1959.
7. Adolf Roeder, Symbol Psychology: A New Interpretation of Race Traditions, 1903. Clearly, what are acceptable personal names and names of works have changed since. Note also that he is using the Wagnerian Germanizations of names from Norse myth.
8. In “Initiation and Meaning in the Tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, The Journal of American Folklore, 1977.
9. Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales (Fiabe italiane), 1956.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. The Collected Letters of C.S.Lewis: Volume II, Books, Broadcasts and the War, 1931–1949, Walter Hooper, ed., 2004.

The analogies employed for action at a distance (Defixiones Part 3)

here’s a pop-culture connection between the ancient defixiones (curse tablets) of Roman Britain and our own times. It’s also an interesting because it involves two artifacts from separate locations, one an inscribed lead sheet, and the other a ring of gold.

The ring was found in Silchester, in Hampshire county in the South of England which sits atop the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum. The item is a massive signet with a faceted band and a raised central square bearing the reversed letters VE and NUS to either side of a bust of the goddess named. The letters are backwards so that when pressed into hot wax, the impression would come out right. Around the outside of the ring is inscribed:

VIVAS IIN DE[o]
SENICIANE

Live in God
Senicianus

Even this brief inscription contains two scribal errors, IIN has an extra i and DE should be deo. Also, while it may seem like my capslock is stuck, these inscriptions are typically in majuscule, and I’ve formatted them here to reflect that. This is a common Roman Christian motto, together with the personal name, Senicianus, so it seems an odd pairing with a signet of a pagan deity but remained just a curiosity for some 150 years.

Then, 80 miles away at the site of a temple to the Celtic god Nodens at Lydney, a lead sheet was found. Nodens makes an appearance in H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. The placename Lydney seems to derive from a variant of the same god’s name, Ludd. Naturally, the tablet also bears an inscription:

DEVO NODENTI SILVIANUS ANILUM PERDEDIT DEMEDIAM PARTEM
ONAVIT NODENTI INTER QUIBUS NOMEN SENICIANI NOLLIS PETMITTAS SANITATEM DONEC PERFERA[t] USQUE TEMPLUM [No-]DENTIS
REDIVIVA

To the god Nodens: Silvianus has lost his ring and given half (its value) to Nodens. Among those who are called Senicianus do not allow health until he brings it to the temple of Nodens. (This curse) comes into force again.

This inscription contains a number of spelling variants: DEVO for Deo, ANILUM is written instead of anulum, PERDEDIT is used rather than perdidit, DEMEDIAM is used for dimidiam, and PETMITTAS should be permittas—which I’d classify as an actual error. The first part of Nodens was simply on a damaged section of the piece.

These two objects seem to tell a story: Seniacus stole this ring from Silvianus and Silvianus donated money to the temple of Nodens, as well as cursing Seniacus with this defixio in order to try to get it back.

J.R.R. Tolkien, who was an Oxford professor and so living in this same region, was definitely aware of these items:¹

[A]rchaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler […] called in Tolkien in 1929 to advise on the odd name of the god—and also spotted the connection between the name on the curse and the […] peculiar ring.

It is now widely acknowledged that Tolkien conflated and fictionalized them into the One Ring. That’s right, this pair of artifacts inspired The Lord of the Rings. To memorialize the connection, the Tolkien Society set up the “Ring Room” at The Vyne, former home of the family that once owned the Ring of Silvianus, displaying it together with a first edition of The Hobbit and a copy of the curse.

As a reminder, the Tolkien ring’s inscription runs:

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

The Black Speech of Mordor is one of the more fragmentary and undeveloped ones in Tolkien’s world. He may have modeled it on Hurrian, which would’ve recently been deciphered when The Lord of the Rings was being penned but if so, he’s way off. I think he was mainly aiming at something that seemed to him very foreign and crude, with sounds he thought unpleasant. At any rate Saruman’s uber-Orcs, the Uruk-hai, share the first part of their name with an ancient Sumerian city (𒌷𒀕). In any case, Tolkien lifts significant details from Silvianus’ story just within the One Ring’s rhyme; he casts a binding spell against all named Seniacus in the darkness of a temple shrine to bring his ring back.

The central theme of the sympathetic magic Silvianus shows his firm faith in—the ability of one object to act on another from a distance—seems to have been what caught the author’s eye. The name Sauron seems quite close to Silvianus for a linguist well versed in applying sound changes and Tolkien’s watercolor image of his character seems to reflect the spiky crown Venus wears on the ring. For the name’s transformation, begin with Siluianus to give the proper value to Latin v, minus the masculine ending -us (Siluan), changing the l to r, swapping the u and r, as well as blending it with an earlier draft of the dark lord, Sûr (Siurian), and lowering the vowels from for a more sinister sound, (Sauron).

That Silvianus becomes an evil lord in the novels is likely down to the supposedly demonic quality of the curse, as well as the fact that Seniacus appears to have been a Christian (though it’s worth noting both that this might not have been the case, and even if so, the magic performed was not affected by the change), with whom the devout Roman Catholic Tolkien would tend to sympathize. I, however, find it hard not to side with the pagan in this case, as someone who has clearly been wronged and is seeking justice in a manner fully in accordance with the norms of his society—it should be clear by now that employing curses was far from a deviant activity in the Graeco-Roman world.

Also, it turns out that Seniacus was a pretty common name in Celtic-speaking areas like the banks of the Severn Estuary where Lydney sits, making it fairly unlikely that these two objects are actually related. I would have been hesitant to connect the items, not because Venus is Roman and Nodens Celtic, as gods are typically syncretized, and so would not present a problem, but because pagans tended to be monolatrous—that is, while they recognized many gods, they generally only worshipped one, so wearing a ring with an image of Venus, and then asking Nodens for justice would not make sense in this context. The ubiquity of the name cursed also implies that it could have messed with a lot of innocent people.

I mentioned earlier that the way defixiones are meant to work is via sympathetic magic. Third century Neoplatonist Plotinus discusses this concept in The Enneads (Ἐννεάδες):²

But how do magic spells work? By sympathy and by the fact that there is a natural concord of things that are alike and opposition of things that are different […]. [B]y the arts of physicians and magicians one thing is compelled to give something of its power to another.

Indeed, the idea is so central to magic in the ancient Graeco-Roman world that the name of the goddess of witchcraft, Ἑκάτη (Hekate), means “worker from afar”, and is thus semantically linked to the phrase “action at a distance” the very definition of sympathetic magic.

The mere act of using lead for curses, apart from the sending downward of its message that I mentioned previously, is a metaphor for the intended action. One very common formulation, used from early Greek katadesmoi (κατάδεσμοι) their word for defixiones, runs:

Just as this lead is useless, so too may the words and deeds of [person or persons] be useless.

This has been taxonomized as a similia similibus (like for like) formula, described by prominent scholar in the field, Christopher Faraone, as:³

[A] persuasive analogy […], in which the binding is accomplished by a wish that the victim become similar to something to which he or she is manifestly dissimilar.

Part of the ‘binding’ analogy also comes from the act of folding, rolling, or crumpling the lead sheet. The sympathetic magic metaphors around lead were extended depending on the way the curse was performed. If a defixio was cast into a body of water, as at Aquae Sulis or the Shrine of Anna Perenna, you might see ones like this:

Just as this lead is not visible but sinks down, so may the youth, limbs, life of [person or persons] sink down.

At the Temple of Isis at Mainz, Germany, however, the defixiones were thrown into sacrificial firepits within the sanctuary. Although initially an Egyptian goddess, the worship of Isis was widely adopted across the Roman world. Thus, one tablet found there reads:

SIC ILLORUM MEMBRA LIQUESCAN[t] QUAT[?]MODUM HOC PLUMBUM LIQUESCET, UT EORU[m] EXSITUM SIT

May their limbs melt just as this lead melts, in order that they may die.

This inscription is mostly standard Latin, except for the omissions of a -t and an -m, the second of which is a common feature of Vulgar Latin, and a semi-indecipherable word, that can only be some version of quemadmodum (meaning “just as”). And indeed, there are many examples in Mainz both of partially melted tablets as well as those that have been reduced to shapeless lumps of lead.

I’ve also mentioned that nails were used to pierce some of the poppets within containers found in the Shrine of Anna Perenna. Gordon & Simón note that this was often done to the defixiones as well:⁴

The binding ritual could also be performed on the lead plaque itself, as an analogue of the desire to harm the victim. Thus a large iron nail was driven straight through the lead […].

Another sympathetic magic tactic involves the way in which the text is written — sometimes words or names are reversed, and sometimes entire inscriptions, according to Jürgen Blänsdorf:⁵

[The] inversion of the normal direction of writing serves explicitly to model the intended fate of the target: such reversal was believed to have an unmediated effect on the target. The writing itself exerts magical power.

As such, the texts contain persuasive analogies such this one from Cologne:

VAERACA, SIC RES TUA[s]: PERVERSE AGAS, COMODO HOC PERVERSE SCRIPTU[m] EST

Vaeraca, in this way may you undertake your affairs backwards, just as this text is written backwards.

Again a few finals are missing from this inscription, and the spelling variant COMODO is used for quomodo. This one from Mainz seems to be of the same character:

PRIMA AEMILIA NARCISSI AGAT, QUIDQUID CONABITUR, QUIDQUID AGET, OMNIA ILLI INVERSUM SIT

Narcissus’ Prima Aemilia: (whatever) she may do, whatever she essays, whatever she may do, let all be reversed for her.

The use of genitive ending with the personal name Narcissus (i.e., Narcissi) indicates a relationship, but it’s unclear if Prima Aemilia is his daughter, wife, or lover. Also noteworthy is that the text begins along the edge of the sheet, turning at each corner, and so creating a box as yet another metaphor for restricting and binding the victim.

Again, you may feel that this was a long time ago in a different culture that’s impossibly alien and difficult to empathize with, but let me connect these ancient practices to our own supposedly modern behavior.

As this picture evidences we still will go out of our way to superstitiously avoid some situations—the one at work here is walking under a ladder is bad luck. You may protest that the ban on walking under ladders is a commonsense safety issue, but it’s not—also this isn’t even a ladder, but it doesn’t matter, as we’ll see. The superstition goes back way farther than that, to when the image of a ladder set in this way suggested a gallows, and walking beneath it meant an ignominious execution would be your fate. Before that, the right triangle made between the floor, the wall, and the ladder was imagined as representing the Holy Trinity, so walking through the middle was an act of blasphemy. Back further still, this same sacred triangle was thought of by ancient Egyptians as a place where both good and evil spirits rested and should not be disturbed, and so they avoided walking there.

What all of these superstitions have in common is the metaphor: the shape created by a ladder leaning against a wall was a symbolic image of something else, and the act of walking through that space became anathema because of what the analogy of doing so to the thing symbolized would mean. Rather than providing more examples, I’ll let you—I think you’ll find that many superstitions operate this same way.

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Read Subsequent Articles in this Series

Part 4: Bargaining with the Gods

Part 5: Secundina’s Beef

Part 6: More Than Money Can Buy

Part 7: The Punic Curse Trail

Part 8: Hellenism Schmellenism

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Read Previous Articles in this Series

Part 1: The Curses of Aquae Sulis

Part 2: Malefic Traditional

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Notes

1. “The Hobbit ring that may have inspired Tolkien put on show”, Maev Kennedy, The Guardian, 2013.
2. The quote is from VI.4.2.
3. In Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, 1997.
4. Magical Practice in the Latin West, “Introduction”, 2005.
5. “The Curse-tablets from the Sanctuary of Isis and Mater Magna in Mainz”, ibid.