The last of the adventure genre’s greats (Interactive Storytelling, Part 1)

When I wrote the previous article on so-called interactive storytelling, I was repeatedly reminded that while I had taken a year to finally look at Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, that work’s genre deconstruction had missed the boat by a quarter century. 1993 saw the release of two important entries into the adventure game genre: Sam & Max Hit the Road (S&MHtR) and Gadget: Invention, Travel, & Adventure (Gadget).

It’s worth mentioning Myst was also released in 1993. The game was a sales juggernaut, moving over 6.3M units worldwide. Despite this impressive market penetration, I am not alone in counting Myst a massive step backwards, not only for the genre, but for games as a whole. Next Generation magazine termed it “gaming’s bleakest hour”.¹ There’s some gatekeeping nonsense about how Myst’s fans aren’t real gamers, but the gist of the actual criticism runs:²

[B]ehind its slick graphics and enigmatic sense of mystery, Myst was hopelessly shallow. The entire game consisted of puzzles locked behind puzzles, and while those enigmatic riddles were devious, they were also limited.

The interaction consisted of things like going to one room, seeing a door that needs to be opened, backtracking to a different room, throwing a lever, returning to the first room and noting the result… over and over forever. And, as noted above, the payoff for solving a puzzle was yet another puzzle:³

The puzzles are based exclusively on trial and error: the epitome of poor game design. […] The designers were good at creating a facade of mystical nonsense: you weren’t stuck because the game was bad, but because you just didn’t “get it.”

So, from a gameplay standpoint, the game falls well short of elevating the genre. Even three years on, one critic said:⁴

Myst led many publishers to believe that pretty screens meant more than pace and logic. We’re still recovering.

Having lived through this era, I can confirm the wrong lessons were learned by management in the games biz. The success of Myst served to further amp up the usual focus on flashy trash.

Myst is even regarded as having negatively impacted the success of actually good games in the genre like S&MHtR.⁵

PC gamers who had cut their teeth on Myst found it difficult to switch mental gears from the funereal elegance of Cyan’s work to the cartoonish whimsy of Sam & Max Hit the Road.

S&MHtR continued the tradition of LucasArts’ SCUMM-engine games, of which The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) remains the best entry. I already mentioned some of the important gameplay improvements present in this series. Monkey Island even directly referenced lame genre tropes, for instance, having a literal Red Herring inventory item. To be clear, this refers to items that seem to be useful, but are not. Appropriately, in Monkey Island, the item goes to feed a troll.

I was a fan of Sam & Max from its first incarnation as a funny book during the indie comix explosion of the mid-’80s. It was a standout for originality, humor, and amazing art. These elements are carried through to the game, making it excellent as well.

The self-aware humor is amped up, with the protagonists taking every opportunity to reference being in an absurd video game. There are fourth wall-breaking moments aplenty, including one where repeatedly directing Sam to pick up an item results in him starting to cry, and Max addressing you directly:⁶

Max: Now you’ve done it! You’ve broken Sam’s spirit with your stupid attempts to pick up that silly object!

Still, I’ll admit the hijinx of Sam & Max aren’t for everyone. In fact, though they made it to the small screen in 1997, their animated adventures were canceled after a single season, retaining cult status.

But the best work deconstructing the interactive narrative form for my money is Gadget. Its gameplay is fairly standard to the genre, and if anything, is more linear as it doesn’t present the usual false choices.

Where the game really shines is in the atmosphere its discordant soundscape, deliberately uncanny-valley visuals, and rambling, sometimes incoherent dialogue creates:⁷

Each second of the game is filled with paranoia and dread. Every cryptic story about mind control, every abandoned and unexplorable railway station, and every allusion to an apocalyptic future builds on a suspenseful and overpowering darkness.

The reason for this is Shōno Haruhiko (庄野 晴彦) came at the whole project from a different direction:⁸

[T]he work’s emphasis was not on action or gameplay, but to give a strong sense of presence to the game world and its environment. With the oppressive atmosphere and the preservation of tension and mystique, I was aiming to derive a quiet catharsis, based heavily on an element of ambiguity.

I can make no claims as to Shōno’s awareness of Umberto Eco’s definition of the open work (opera aperta)—that’s not something we ever discussed—but he definitely hit on one of the important elements here.

Although Gadget failed to find a big audience outside Japan, its influence can still be felt. One of the game’s spinoffs was The Third Force: A Novel of Gadget, penned by Mark Laidlaw and eedited by yours truly. Laidlaw’s name might ring a bell if you’re familiar with the Half Life series which he went on to write for. I certainly detected some distinct Gadget flavor when I first played Half Life, and put two and two together when I read the credits.

Strangely, the game and its ancillary items, particularly the art book Inside Out With Gadget, found an eager audience in Hollywood, including directors Guillermo del Toro and David Lynch.⁹ Indeed, this is how I came to (briefly) work with the latter.

I’ll spoil Gadget’s ending—it’s a 21-year-old game, so get over it. It’s one of the best twists I’ve ever encountered in a game. In games, and particularly adventure games, as a player, you generally need to buy into their premise, no matter how far-fetched. When you follow all the clues and reach the final scene in Gadget, you learn you are the 13th patient, and the mind-control experiment performed on you is declared successful. Of course, this is only my reading, as it’s ambiguous.

Five years later came the absolute death knell of the adventure game in the form of Grim Fandango (GF). A critical darling bedecked with accolades, it bombed so hard commercially, not only LucasArts, but their main rival Sierra Online—of which Blizzard was a subsidiary when I worked there—canceled their planned offerings in the genre.¹⁰ Indeed, lacking the knowhow to retool for other game types, these giants would walk the earth no more.

GF’s reviewers praised the characters, setting, and story, but weren’t so accepting of the actual mechanics:¹¹

Charming as the characters are, I found “Grim Fandango’s” gameplay intermittently grating. Some of the puzzles in the game are so idiosyncratic that they seem predicated less on the deployment of practical reasoning than on the achievement of a mystical mind-meld with the game’s project lead, Tim Schafer […] I sometimes found myself mashing the interact button while Manny patrolled a tiny area searching for the appropriate pixels.

While Gadget’s linearity and limited interactivity compared to that of GF might seem to make for a worse game, it doesn’t. The level of gameplay in Gadget is consistent with the rest of the game, and the elements work together to create the type of experience Shōno was interested in. As for GF, players may have taken issue with the inconsistency between its gameplay and the sophistication of its other elements.

Read previous articles in the Interactive Storytelling series

Part 1: Lizzie’s Game

Part 2: Those Frumious Jaws

Notes

1. “Crib Sheet”, Next Generation, November 1996.
2. Jeremy Parrish, “When SCUMM Ruled the Earth”, 1UP.com, June 2011.
3. Next Generation, 1996
4. Ibid.
5. Parrish, 2011.
6. Sam & Max Hit the Road, 1993.
7. Phil Salvador, “GADGET: Invention, Travel, & Adventure”, The Obscuritory (website),
8. Dieubussy, “Haruhiko Shono: A Prophet of the Digital Age”, Sorrel Tilley, trans.,  CoreGamer, January 2009.
9. Salvador, 2014.
10. “Adventure Series: Part III Feature”, The Next Level. November 28, 2005.
11. Christopher Byrd, “Grim Fandango Remastered review: A witty but tedious classic”, Washington Post, February 2015.

Syncretized gods and borrowed celestial omens (The continuity of Magic from East to West, Part 6)

Herodotus was known for his tendency toward fanciful accounts and exaggerated language. The Greeks in general could be quite exoticist, as I noted in the previous Part. We can definitely see both at work in this line from Histories:¹

σχεδον δε και πάντων τα οὐνόματα τῶν θεῶν ἐξ Αἰγύπτου ἐλήλυθε ἐς την Ἑλλάδα. διότι μεν γαρ ἐκ τῶν βαρβάρων ἥκει, πυνθανόμενος οὕτω εὑρίσκω ἐόν: δοκέω δ᾽ ὦν μάλιστα ἀπ᾽ Αἰγύπτου ἀπῖχθαι. […] τῶν ἄλλων θεῶν Αἰγυπτίοισι αἰεί κοτε τα οὐνόματα ἐστι ἐν τῇ χώρῃ.

[T]he names of nearly all the gods came to Hellas [i.e. Greece] from Egypt. For I am convinced by inquiry that they have come from foreign parts, and I believe that they came chiefly from Egypt. [With a few exceptions] the names of all the gods have always existed in Egypt.

Herodotus seems to be under the impression Greeks and Egyptians had only recently met in his time, whereas these cultures had already mutually influenced each other centuries before, during the Bronze Age. The effect must’ve been similar to when, with increasing contact between Europe and India in the 16th century, scholars like Thomas Stephens began to detect similarities between the languages of the Subcontinent and Greek and Latin.

In fact, Herodotos establishes some of the earliest equivalences between the Egyptian and Greek deities, such as Jaˈmanuw (Amun) and Ζεύς (Zeus), Asar (Osiris) and Διόνυσος (Dionysos), and Pitah (Ptah) and Ἥφαιστος (Hephaistos). These were to be used through to Hellenistic times (323–31 BCE), continuing to be expanded by others, into what came to be known as the interpretatio graeca. This discourse was a roadmap for understanding not only of the Egyptian gods but the deities of various cultures as having traits in common with Greek ones.

However, as Herodotus does above, it also opens the door to a more literal conflation of the gods of different peoples. When this happens, native beliefs are erased, as with many of the Roman gods. For instance, very little is left of Iuppiter because it was decided he was the same as Zeus and all the myths and iconography surrounding the Greek god were transferred to him. 

And Fortuna, far from just being Τύχη (Tyche) under a different name, actually came to the Romans with the Etruscan rulers during the kingdom period (753–509 BCE). Some vestiges of the original deity remain, such as a depiction from her sanctuary at Praeneste (modern Palestrina) showing her as the mother of Iuppiter and Iuno. Obviously, because of the succession myth the Greeks got from the Hurro-Hittite Kumarbi Cycle, Zeus has to be the eldest of the current hierarchy, and Tyche, therefore, his daughter. Later Roman depictions made this “correction”.

So while it’s dangerous to say with Herodotus everything in Graeco-Roman myth and magic was borrowed from the ancient Near East (ANE), let’s take a look at what may be the final area I’ll discuss in which that influence can be clearly seen: astrology. Together with haruspicy, astrology was a major means of interpreting the will of the gods in the ANE.²

[Mesopotamian s]cholars’ references to the celestial phenomena as “heavenly writing” (šiṭir šamê) or “writing of the firmament” (šiṭir burūmê), […] are indicative of this perspective [i.e. the gods expressed cosmic truths and their will as to human affairs through the stars (among other things)].

Otto Neugebauer, scholar of the history of science, adds some color as to both the date and volume of the literature involved in this praxis:³

Important events in the life of the state were correlated with important celestial phenomena […]. Thus we find already in this early period the first signs of a development which would lead centuries later to judicial astrology and, finally, to the personal or horoscopic astrology of the Hellenistic age. It is difficult to say just when and how celestial omens developed. The existing texts are part of a large series of texts, the most important one called “Enūma Anu Enlil” […]. This series contained at least 70 numbered tablets with a total of about 7000 omens. The canonization of this enormous mass of omens must have extended over several centuries and reached its final form perhaps around 1000 B.C.

As I’ve noted of both cookbooks and wisdom literature, there does tend to be an oral tradition only later compiled in written form, just as Neugebauer suggests. The 12 zodiacal asterisms of horoscopic astrology were built over time, beginning with four from the Sumerians by ca. 3200 BCE. These represent the cardinal points on the ecliptic, also corresponding to the solstices and equinoxes.

Professor of astrology and astrophysics Bradley Schaefer theorizes a “database” of stars made by an Assyrian observer around 1100 BCE. The transfer of their asterisms to the Greeks took place much later, even after the Orientalizing period (ca. mid-eighth–mid-seventh centuries BCE):⁴

[I]t is reasonable to conclude that sometime after then and before the existence of Eudoxus’s book [i.e. Phaenomena] (366 B.C.), the Greeks received the Mesopotamian star groups. The lack of any evidence for the Greek constellations (other than the Bear and Orion mentioned in Homer) before 500 B.C. suggests that most of the transfer happened after that time. We know from textual evidence that the Babylonian system came to Greece around 400 B.C.

The main body of wisdom literature about the stars in the ANE is known as the MUL.APIN (𒀯𒀳). It lists all the zodiacal houses we are familiar with today, most of them even retaining the same names in translation:

• Kukalanna/ Alû (𒀯𒄞𒀭𒈾) “The Bull of Heaven”, Taurus, the vernal equinox
• Mashtappa Kal/ Māšu (𒀯𒈦𒋰𒁀𒃲) “The Great Twins”, Gemini
• Allu/ Alluttu (𒀯𒀠𒇻) “The Crab”, Cancer
• Urkula/ Urgulû (𒀯𒌨) “The Lion”, Leo, the summer solstice
• Abpsin/ Absinnu (𒀯𒀳) “The Furrow”, (Virgo)
• Zibānītu (𒀯𒄑𒂟) “The Scales”, Libra
• Ngirta/ Zuqaqīpu (𒀯𒄈𒋰) “The Scorpion”, Scorpius, the autumnal equinox
• P’apilsang (𒀯𒉺𒉋𒊕) (Bow-Armed Warrior), Sagittarius
• Sukhurmash/ Suhurmāšu (𒀯𒋦𒈧𒄩) “The Goat-Fish”, Capricornus
• Kula/ Ṣinundu (𒀯𒄖𒆷) “The Great One” (Enk’i/ Ea), (Aquarius), the winter solstice
• Zibbātu (𒀯𒆲𒎌) “The Tail of the Swallow”, (Pisces)
• Agru (𒀯𒇽𒂠𒂷) “The Hired Man”, (Aries)

Again, it’s difficult to know for sure, but it seems there may have been some native Greek asterisms and others of unknown origin, possibly from Minoan sources. These won out over those in the MUL.APIN. There is but one more element needed to make Graeco-Roman horoscopy nearly completely recognizable as that used in modernity: the Egyptian concept of partitioning the zodiac into 36 decans, each spanning ten degrees, which was added in the late second or early first century BCE. Only a few minor refinements came from the Islamic Empire during medieval times.

Those who lived and died by ephemerides—books of astrological portents—were common enough in ancient Rome Juvenal saw fit to satirize them thus:

illius occursus etiam uitare memento,
in cuius manibus ceu pinguia sucina tritas
cernis ephemeridas, quae nullum consulit et iam
consulitur, quae castra uiro patriamque petente
non ibit pariter numeris reuocata Thrasylli
ad primum lapidem uectari cum placet, hora
sumitur ex libro; si prurit frictus ocelli
angulus, inspecta genesi collyria poscit;
aegra licet iaceat, capiendo nulla uidetur
aptior hora cibo nisi quam dederit Petosiris.
si mediocris erit, spatium lustrabit utrimque
metarum et sortes ducet frontemque manumque
praebebit uati crebrum poppysma roganti.

Remember always to avoid encountering the kind of woman
With a dog-eared almanac [ephemeris] in her hands, as if it were an amber
Worry-bead, who no longer seeks consultations but gives them,
Who won’t follow her husband to camp, or back home again,
If Thrasyllus the astrologer’s calculations advise against it.
When she wishes to take a ride to the first milestone, she’ll find
The best time to travel in her book; if her eye-corner itches
When rubbed, she checks her horoscope before seeking relief;
If she’s lying in bed ill, the hour appropriate for taking food,
It seems, must be one prescribed by that Egyptian, Petosiris.

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Read subsequent articles in the Continuity of Magic from East to West series

Part 8: No Ewoks, Only the Dead

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Read previous articles in the Continuity of Magic from East to West series

Part 1: The Griffin and the Phoenix

Part 2A: Hark, a Haruspex!

Part 2B: Go West, Young Mantis

Part 3A: Coda Etrusca

Part 3B: Devoted More Than All Others

Part 4A: Romancing the Hellenes

Part 4B: The Chthonian Connection

Part 5: Hellenism, Schmellenism

Part 6: Myth and Magic in the Cultural Koiné

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Notes

1. Ἡρόδοτος (Herodotus), Ἱστορίαι (Histories), 2.50.1–2, ca. 430 BCE. Translation by A. D. Godley, 1920.
2. Alan Lenzi, “Revisiting Biblical Prophecy, Revealed Knowledge Pertaining to Ritual, and Secrecy in Light of Ancient Mesopotamian Prophetic Texts”, Divination, Politics, and Ancient Near Eastern Empires, 2014.
3. Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, 1951.
4. Bradley E. Schaefer, “The Origin of the Greek Constellations”, Scientific American, November 2006.
5. Decimus Junius Juvenalis (Juvenal), Satirae (Satires), VI.569–584, ca. 100–127 CE; trans. A. S. Kline, 2001; emphasis mine.

The much-hyped inscription revealed! (Logic of Forgeries, Part 3 Addendum/ Late Bronze Age Collapse, Part 3 Addendum)

The Sea Peoples were various groups of Middle and Late Bronze Age cultures, with which western Asia Minor teemed. They were allied with the Trojans in their war against the Greeks and fought as mercenaries alongside the Hittites at the battle of Kadesh, only to be defeated by Agamemnon and Ramesses II, respectively. But they rose again, attacking many cities along the eastern Mediterranean coast, and helping to bring about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (LBAC).

Or maybe that’s a collection of magical thinking and leaps of logic propped up with just enough fact to seem plausible.

The Institute for Luwian Studies launched campaigns of sensationalism back in 2016 and 2017. At the end of the latter year, they delivered the inscription they claimed solved the LBAC. I was recently doing an editing pass on my post on the topic—since, as Jorge Luis Borges notes, “The concept of the ‘definitive text’ corresponds only to religion or exhaustion”¹—when I noticed it was past due for a follow-up.

Eberhard Zangger and Fred Woudhuizen revealed the inscription they had teased in their article, “Rediscovered Luwian Hieroglyphic Inscriptions from Western Asia Minor”. They term it “Beyköy 2” and give it the following significance: It was composed in western Asia Minor, an area that has produced little documentary evidence so far. Beyköy 2 dates to a time at the end of the Bronze Age (BA) after Hittite rule had collapsed, which is also not well documented. It was ordered by a great king named Kupantakurantas at the beginning of the 12th century BCE, revealing the existence of his kingdom in western Asia Minor. The inscription records his achievements at home and abroad.²

But there’s still the small matter of Beyköy 2’s provenance. As the paper itself notes:³

The announcement, earlier this year, of the publication of a monumental Luwian hieroglyphical inscription […] immediately triggered a lively debate among luwologists and many others. The debate soon mainly focused on the surmised falsification of the drawings […].

This “surmised falsification” is based on the reputation of the man in whose possession the inscription had supposedly been languishing for decades, James Mellaart. It’s worth noting while the original hype said the inscription was “newly deciphered,” Zangger and Woudhuizen’s article indicates Professor U. Bahadır Alkım actually did this in 1980. However:⁴

J. David Hawkins had known about the document since 1989, and Mark Weeden since 2012. Both scholars, we learnt, were convinced that Beyköy 2 was a forgery produced by Mellaart.

The former is a scholar of Hittite and Luwian language and history credited with much of our current understanding of these fields, and the latter is an expert in Anatolian hieroglyphs and cuneiform.

As for Mellaart, in a more recent article, Zangger describes his initial contact with the pseudoarchaeologist, and their common desire for more BA archaeology in western Asia Minor. They shared a belief in the region’s importance and a feeling it couldn’t have been populated only by “[…] uncivilized nomads roaming across the country in yurts [sic] and possessing no knowledge of writing”:⁵

[W]e shared a common conviction. Independently of each other, we had both arrived at the conclusion that western Turkey must contain numerous, still-hidden Middle and Late Bronze Age sites. We both also believed that a large part of the Sea Peoples had their home in this region. Their attacks on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean shortly after 1200 BC contributed to the downfall of the Bronze Age cultures of the heroic era. Some of the mercenaries who supported the Hittite king Muwatalli (c. 1295–1272 BC) in 1274 at the Battle of Kadesh came from western Anatolia. The same names then appear in the Sea People inscriptions known from Upper Egypt, and are also found again in Homer’s Iliad among the allies of the Trojans during the Trojan War. The western part of modern Turkey must therefore have been densely populated around 1200 BC.

We can see Zangger and Mellaart share the bad science of starting from a desired endpoint, then look for evidence to support it. Conveniently, Beyköy 2 speaks directly to much of what they believed. Giving Zangger the benefit of the doubt, his convictions led to his confirmation bias for the evidence Mellaart provided. It also led him to link Troy directly to Atlantis, declaring Plato’s description of the island nation, “a distorted recollection of the Trojan War”.⁶ One irony-impaired Atlantis conspiracy theorist defended Zangger’s book The Flood from Heaven, thus:⁷

The reactions of established academia on Zangger’s Atlantis hypothesis were characterised by a wholesale and dogmatic rejection. The counter arguments put forward were almost all superficial, outdated, or wrong. Above all, they were reckless and mocking, and aimed at undermining Eberhard Zangger’s reputation.

In Mellaart’s case, he perpetrated hoaxes to verify his version of history. In a more recent article, after a thorough look through Mellaart’s materials, Zangger brands him a packrat, forger, and possibly a prankster. He declares the original Beyköy Text (a different one from Beyköy 2) one such forgery, even putting it in scare quotes:⁸

[W]e came across an extensive collection of handwritten drafts of the “Beyköy Text.” Mellaart had placed the items he claimed to be the unpublished translations of Late Bronze Age tablets at the entrance to his study, clearly visible and appropriately labeled. The kits he had used to fabricate these documents, however, were kept well hidden. But not only that: I also found pieces of slate with pictorial carvings that were obviously sketches that Mellaart had published as reconstructed murals from Çatalhöyük. By this point there was no longer any doubt that Mellaart was a forger. The fact that he had carefully hidden the drafts hints at a sense of wrongdoing […].

Still, Zangger insists, despite clear evidence of Mellaart’s predilections and methods, somehow Beyköy 2 is real. Diether Schürr, scholar of Anatolian languages, is less sanguine, noting:⁹

[T]he drawings of the inscriptions, as well as the translations of the longest ones, are by James Mellaart, not only an important archaeologist but an unscrupulous inventor of artifacts like the Treasure of Dorak and kilim-like wall paintings at Çatal Hüyük, all of which exist only in his drawings. As early as 1954, he had published a drawing of a seal impression with the hieroglyphic Luwian name of a king’s son, the writing and reading of which evidently came from himself. He used a large amount of information in the inscription drawings he left behind. In form they imitate the inscription of Yalburt, in content he combined the names of kings and countries known from Hittite sources with names of Sea Peoples (Pulasati, Luka, Sakarasa), later documented city names and also the fables attributed to Xanthos, whereby he equated Mopsos alias Moxos with the name Muksus (written Mu-uk-šu-uš) recorded in a Bronze Age Hittite text or the name Mu-ka-sa- recorded in the Iron Age hieroglyphic Luwian double inscription from Karatepe in Cilicia, as others had done long before him.

The provenance of Beyköy 2 is presented by Zangger and Woudhuizen with no footnotes as to its historicity, so I assume it to be part and parcel of Mellaart’s fabrication. It’s quite a yarn:¹⁰

In 1878, news arrived at the Department of Antiquities in Constantinople that peasants in the hamlet of Beyköy, about 34 kilometers north of Afyonkarahisar in western Turkey, had found a large number of stone blocks with hieroglyphic inscriptions resembling those from Hama. The government commissioned the French archaeologist Georges Perrot, who had visited and carefully documented the ruins in Boğazköy in 1862 and was visiting Turkey at that time, to travel to Beyköy to produce drawings of the stone inscriptions and, if possible, to even photograph them. […] The archaeologist was successful—he proceeded from Beyköy directly to Edremit to record the inscription that had been found there and was stored in a public park. Perrot returned with copies whose quality satisfied the requirements he had been set. Realizing the potential significance of the finds, the Turkish government then ordered the stones from Beyköy to be secured. But nothing happened. So, the Director of the Department of Antiquities ultimately went to Beyköy himself, only to find that the stones had already been built into the foundations of a new mosque.

After all this, Mellaart came by copies of Perrot’s drawings and had a translator sent by the Turkish government. These layers of obfuscation are a great way for Mellaart to deny it’s even his work—he’s just presenting it. I’m inescapably reminded of a similar metafictional device, Miguel de Cervantes’ narrative of how he came upon the second part of Don Quixote. He relates he encountered a boy selling pamphlets in Arabic, which he couldn’t read. He found a Morisco who could, and:¹¹

When I heard Dulcinea del Toboso named, I was struck with surprise and amazement, for it occurred to me at once that these pamphlets contained the history of Don Quixote. With this idea I pressed him to read the beginning, and doing so, turning the Arabic offhand into Castilian, he told me it meant, “History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by Cid Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian.” It required great caution to hide the joy I felt when the title of the book reached my ears, and snatching it from the silk mercer, I bought all the papers and pamphlets from the boy for half a real; and if he had had his wits about him and had known how eager I was for them, he might have safely calculated on making more than six reals by the bargain. I withdrew at once with the Morisco into the cloister of the cathedral, and begged him to turn all these pamphlets that related to Don Quixote into the Castilian tongue, without omitting or adding anything to them, offering him whatever payment he pleased. He was satisfied with two arrobas of raisins and two bushels of wheat, and promised to translate them faithfully and with all despatch; but to make the matter easier, and not to let such a precious find out of my hands, I took him to my house, where in little more than a month and a half he translated the whole just as it is set down here.

Even if we squintingly accept the inscription’s origins, there are still issues. As noted by Schürr, one of the central elements of “proof” offered by Mellaart and Zangger is the connection of a prince called Mu-uk-šu-uš in the Hittite and Luwian inscriptions (Muksus, also seen as Mu-ku-susa and Mu-ka-sa) with the Ancient Greek (AG) Mόψος.¹²

Kupantakuruntas states that this maritime campaign to southeastern Anatolia and the Levant was conducted not by himself but by four great princes: Muksus, Kulanamuwas, Tuwatas, and Piyakuruntas. Of these, Muksus is the most prominent, as his name is singled out by the determinative of personal names and more sections are dedicated to him. Bearing a Phrygian type of name, he was seated in Apassawa or Apaisos on the Dardanelles. The memory of the conquest of Ashkelon by Muksus has been preserved in the legendary tales of Mopsos in Greek historical tradition.

In order for this to be the case, they cite another Woudhuizen work in their footnotes, stating:¹³

Muksus is of origin a Phrygian type name, cf. Linear B mo-qo-so “Mopsos”

Mόψος is indeed attested in Linear B as mo-qo-so. However, although a confessed amateur, I’d differ with this reading. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Linear B is a defective script for Mycenaean Greek (MG), so ⟨q-⟩ does the work of a few different consonants: /ɡʷ/, /kʷ/, and /kʷʰ/. So how can we tell which is meant? By back-forming from AG. When we see ⟨ψ⟩, we can confidently say it developed from MG /ɡʷ/, so the name there was likely Mogwos, but definitely not Muksus as Woudhuizen and Zangger would have it. Furthermore, in MG Moξος would have been Modjos and rendered as *mo-zo-so in Linear B, so that alternation doesn’t work either. And not only have they made this consonantal leap, but they’ve also seen fit to alter the vowels as well, where Linear B’s vowel store contains a perfectly serviceable set in ⟨-u⟩.

Again, I’d say the articles I write, while sometimes exploring obscure realms, qualify only as popular history in that my object is to entertain rather than submit for peer review—although, I should note, I’m always happy to be set straight if I’ve gone astray. Even so, the Woozling involved in referring to your own work is something I instinctively steer away from. I’ve gone so far as to revisit an article of mine when I saw Wikipedia referenced it to find and cite my source. I have quoted my own articles, but only where I’ve said something whose accuracy is not debatable and well and concisely put.

Schürr agrees with my linguistic conclusion, further stating:¹⁴

[…] Muksus could be connected to the Graeco-Lydian Moξος and Mukasa- on Karatepe, especially a ca. 740 BCE Phrygian example of Muksos in Gordion has been known since 2009, which noticeably changes the picture of name distribution. Because this mediates between Lydia and Cilicia, the name may have wandered across Anatolia in the Iron Age—instead of a Greek seer or a Lydian king in the dim past. Above all, the other evidence of the name Muksos, which dates from about the same time, suggests the Karatepe [inscription] actually reads [Muksa-].

What Zangger, Woudhuizen, and Mellaart are trying to do here is to establish a large and influential Greek presence in western Asia Minor prior to the LBAC. They are led to do so by Ancient Greek accounts, including those of Homer and Plato, and indeed others motivated by their own political interests, as ancient historian Robin Lane Fox notes:¹⁵

Later Greek writers place actual Greek settlements [in the Cilician plain] and even claim that mythical Greek heroes in the legendary past once founded the important towns. False claims to a Greek origin became notorious in the plain in later centuries, arising when non-Greeks wished to compete for status in the later Greek-speaking age.

It shouldn’t have surprised me to learn Zangger has a history of Atlanteanism. Though he seems to have backed away from it, it’s problematic in the same way as his and Woudhuizen’s paper. Both argue a European culture is responsible for technological advances among non-European ones because they couldn’t possibly be capable of such advances on their own.

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Read subsequent articles in the Logic of Lies series

Part 4: Romancing the Hellenes

Part 5: Descent into the Absurd

Part 5 Addendum: The Ironclad Test Oath and Why It Doesn’t Work

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Read previous articles in the Logic of Lies series

Part 1: The Fakes that Launched a Thousand Ships

Part 2: It’s Fascinating What One Can Deduce about a Man Just by Knowing his Name

Part 3: The Luwian Menace

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Read previous articles in the Late Bronze Age Collapse series

Part 1: Apocalypse BCE

Part 2: Whither the Wanax?

Part 3: The Luwian Menace

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Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Homeric Versions” (“Las versiones homéricas”), 1932, collected in English in On Writing, Suzanne Jill Levine, ed., 2010.
2. Eberhard Zangger and Fred Woudhuizen, “Rediscovered Luwian Hieroglyphic Inscriptions from Western Asia Minor”, Talanta, December 2017.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Eberhard Zangger, “James Mellaart: Pioneer… and Forger”, Popular Archaeology, October 2019.
6. See Eberhard Zangger, The Flood from Heaven: Deciphering the Atlantis Legend, 1992, “Plato’s Atlantis Account—A Distorted Recollection of the Trojan War”, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 1993, Ein neuer Kampf um Troia: Archäologie in der Krise (A New Battle for Troy: Archeology in Crisis), 1994.
7. Thorwald C. Franke, “Eberhard Zangger: Atlantis = Troy: Atlantis brought down from heaven to earth”, Atlantis Scout, March 2017.
8. Zangger, 2019.
9. Diether Schürr, “Ein Königssohn, der Mops hieß (oder Mucks?): von Phantasie-Inschriften, antiken Fabeleien und Namenbelegen zwischen Pylos und Karatepe” (“A King’s Son Whose Name Was Mops (Or Mucks?): Of Fantasy Inscriptions, Ancient Fables and Names Between Pylos and Karatepe”), Gephyra, 2019. My mediocre translation.
10. Zangger and Woudhuizen, 2017.
11. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, John Ormsby, trans., 2004.
12. Zangger and Woudhuizen, 2017.
13. Woudhuizen, Documents in Minoan Luwian, Semitic, and Pelasgian, 2016, referenced in Zangger and Woudhuizen, 2017.
14. Schürr, 2019.
15. Robin Lane Fox, Travelling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer, 2009.

Hits and misses of “The Great Mouse Detective” (DeDisneyfication, Part 11)

Recently, my attention was drawn to The Great Mouse Detective (GMD). I didn’t see this film when it came out; in fact, I don’t even remember it coming out. Regardless, it was both critically acclaimed and financially successful, with the worldwide box office for its original 1986 release reaching over 50M USD, more than three-and-a-half times its budget.

Many point to the film as, if not the first film in the Disney renaissance, at least preparing the way for it. According to Disney itself, it laid the groundwork for the runaway blockbusters to come in three key ways:¹

[I]t had great music, utter commitment to its concept, and a willingness to innovate technologically.

Still, similar to Wordle, GMD is more or less a copy of a copy of a copy. The film was based on the Basil of Baker Street book series by Eve Titus. The movie was meant to use that same title until a fairly strange decision was handed down to change it. Story artist Ed Gombert lampooned the move with a memo suggesting renamings for Disney’s other animated classics:²

• Seven Little Men Help a Girl
• The Wooden Boy Who Became Real
• Color and Music
• The Wonderful Elephant Who Could Really Fly
• The Little Deer Who Grew Up
• The Girl With the See-Through Shoes
• The Girl In the Imaginary World
• The Amazing Flying Children
• Two Dogs Fall In Love
• The Girl Who Seemed To Die
• Puppies Taken Away
• The Boy Who Would Be King
• A Boy, a Bear and a Big Black Cat
• Aristocats
• Robin Hood with Animals
• Two Mice Save a Girl
• A Fox and a Hound Are Friends
• The Evil Bonehead

Apparently, the directive came from Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose takeaway from the box-office flopping of Amblin’s Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) was the fictional detective’s draw wasn’t so great.

This type of arbitrary-feeling decision making mirrors my own experience with the infamous marketing department at Sega. One of my games, The Ooze, featured innovative gameplay and a unique look and feel, but its sales were unquestionably hurt by the hideous cover art and terrible tagline—“Yuck, what a slob!”—they attached to it. Mark Cerny, who ran my studio, Sega Technical Institute (STI), prior to my arrival relates a similar tale of Sonic the Hedgehog:³

[N]o feedback had arrived from Sega of America’s marketing group, so I asked if they had any comments for the team. I heard, I kid you not, that the characters were “unsalvageable,” that this was a “disaster,” and that “procedures would be put in place to make sure that this sort of thing would never happen again.” These “procedures” included a proposed “top ten list of dos and don’ts” to follow when making products for the American market. Additionally, I was told that the marketing group would be contacting a known character designer (I won’t reveal the name, but it made me cringe at the time) to make a character that showed exactly what the American market needed. Needless to say, this character designer would have been totally inappropriate for the Japanese market. Not that great for the American market either, I suspect.

In the case of GMD, it’s hard to tell what effect the name change had. The source series had run to five books by the time of the film, with a further three by a different author, Cathy Hapka, in more recent years, the latest in 2020, so there certainly must be a fanbase. Objectively, the original name has more flavor, making Gombert’s genericized parody names well-aimed, also pissing Katzenberg off mightily. And while the box-office performance of the film was good, it pales in comparison with The Little Mermaid.

I’ve already spoiled the reveal, but of course the books themselves reference Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. The name Basil alludes both to an alias Holmes used in some of the original tales, as well as to Basil Rathbone, probably still the detective’s most famous portrayer in the West with a series running to 14 films.⁴

Backing up yet another step, even Doyle acknowledges his works were strongly influenced by Edgar Allen Poe’s stories of C. Auguste Dupin, beginning with The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Doyle remarked of Poe’s detective tales:⁵

[E]ach is a root from which a whole literature has developed…. Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?

To be clear, the answer is nowhere. Poe literally invented the genre. Dupin’s techniques of careful observation and analysis, termed ratiocination, strongly influence those of Holmes, and some of his personality quirks do as well. In addition, as one of Poe’s biographers noted:⁶

Poe’s detective stories use several devices that are now so familiar that they are taken for granted. […] The stories are told in the first person, not by Dupin, but by an unnamed narrator who lacks the brilliant detective’s ratiocinative abilities. […] Another of Poe’s devices comes at the end of the tales, when Dupin announces his surprising solution and then explains the reasoning leading to it.

Disney, predictably, does nothing with this legacy. GMD is, in fact, not a proper detective tale at all. In order to track Fidget (Candy Candido), Professor Ratigan’s (Vincent Price) henchman, they use Holmes’ dog Toby rather than following any clues. And it’s probably better that way, as in the subsequent sequence, Ratigan’s lair is pinpointed partly using chemical analysis as the only place in London there’s a bar where the sewer meets the saltwater Thames river. Anyone casual observer of the siting of pubs in London will attest there are dozens on the river. As to salinity, near the Thames Estuary, it’s brackish, but not very. Particular during the Victorian Era portrayed in GMD, raw sewage would probably be the most detectable element of the water.

The reason Ratigan kidnaps Mr. Flaversham (Alan Young), a toymaker, and gathers tools, gears, and toy soldier uniforms provides a tiny bit of mystery. But there isn’t ever a real crime to solve apart from the abduction and there’s only ever one suspect, Ratigan—an obvious analog of Professor Moriarty of the Holmes tales, who they even term “the Napoleon of Crime”. An actual detective story using the same elements would have started with the Queen’s (Eve Brenner) announcement of Ratigan as her royal consort, and then had Basil (Barrie Ingham) follow clues to figure out why. Instead, we see all the steps and the crime occurs an hour into the movie.

Disney, and its fluffy critics say GMD draws more from Bond film tropes. I agree, but in more of a classic Batman TV show realization thereof. We get an archvillain with a bevy of henchmen of whom he demands total loyalty, enforced with the threat of being fed to a cat. Basil and Dawson (Val Bettin) fall into Ratigan’s clutches and he leaves them immobilized in a Rube Goldberg contraption, from which they narrowly escape with their lives. His excessively complex master plan is foiled by Basil at the last minute. There follows a chase scene, which ultimately sees Basil triumphant and Ratigan dead.

In the area of technological innovation, I’d say Disney’s claim is a bit hyperbolic. True this is the first film to make extensive use of CGI and traditional animation together—The Black Cauldron only used it for some visual effects—but the way it’s used leaves a lot to be desired.

The whole sequence in GMD is only one minute, 20 seconds long. Obviously, CGI, especially in those very early days, was costly, so limiting it to one scene makes sense. Michael Eisner also cut the film’s budget from 24M to 10M USD, together with a compressed timeline.

The tech was pretty difficult to work with, with measurements carefully taken at Big Ben, then typed into computers, cameras and animations added using rotational data, then left to render, sometimes overnight.

I can relate having worked on Die Hard Arcade, STI’s first foray into 3D. 10 years on from GMD the technology was certainly better—we could use mice as input devices, for example—but as the game used run-time animation rather than pre-rendered, there were still a lot of limitations. Even though we built the characters using SoftImage on pretty fancy Silicon Graphics boxes, we had to check the vertex data by reading through big strings of numbers to ensure each polygon was a quadrilateral, as anything else would make the game’s renderer fail. We also relied on rotational data among the body parts of characters to animate them, which proved tricky for a robot character I built with an attack where its arm was designed to shoot straight out.

In any case, GMD’s use of 3D is also completely out of keeping with the film’s overall aesthetic. The other backgrounds in the film feature a dark and smoggy palette in keeping with the setting of Victorian London, and the surfaces are worn and pockmarked and fade into one another. By contrast, the clockwork elements of the CGI scene are cell shaded like the foreground characters: thick outlines and solid colors within. 

GMD is also a semi-musical as there are only three songs in the film. Two of them are quite odd, “Goodbye So Soon” plays on the phonograph that’s essentially the timer for Ratigan’s fiendishly overcomplicated death trap and “Let Me Be Good To You” is a song accompanying a burlesque performance by a character who appears only for the purpose. The villain song, however, is great. Not only is it the first of what was to become a whole genre, Price’s performance makes it.

The film’s biggest failing is in meeting Disney’s goal of providing whole-family entertainment. The mystery and thriller elements are barely good enough for an audience of children, while several grisly deaths are implied and even take place on screen, and of course, the burlesque performance is definitely not for the kiddos.

Since GMD’s corollaries to Batman are obvious, they might’ve followed that model more closely as having successfully cracked this code. The show was charmingly campy to adults but with the action and panache to please younger viewers.

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Read subsequent articles in the DeDisneyfication series

Part 12: Mork & Scheherazade

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Read previous articles in the DeDisneyfication 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 on “Hercules”

Part 4: Tale As Old As Agriculture

Part 4 Addendum: The Enchanted and the Postmodern

Part 5: Putting “Pocahontas” to Rest

Part 5 Addendum: Powhatan’s Mantle

Part 6: Trouble with “Tarzan”

Part 7A: The Wrong 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 7B Addendum: Repainting the Roses

Part 8: Guerrillas and the “Jungle”

Part 9A: Through a Magic Mirror Marred

Part 9A Addendum: The Woods “Over the Wall”

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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Notes

1. “How ‘The Great Mouse Detective’ Kick-Started the Disney Renaissance”, Oh My Disney (website), September 2015.
2. Steve Hulett, “‘Mouse in Transition’: Basil or Mouse Detective?” (Chapter 19), Cartoon Brew, April 2015.
3. Ken Horowitz, “Interview: Mark Cerny”, Sega-16, 2006.
4. In the former Soviet Union, the 11 Приключения Шерлока Холмса и доктора Ватсона (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson) films 1979–1986 are their own cultural phenomenon.
5. “The Poe Centenary”, London Times, March 1909, quoted in Frederick S. Frank and Tony Magistrale, The Poe Encyclopedia, 1997.
6. Kay Cornelius, “Biography of Edgar Allan Poe”, Harold Bloom, ed., Bloom’s BioCritiques: Edgar Allan Poe, 2002.

Wordplay in the Quest for the Divine (Sator Square, Part 1 Addendum B)

The simple symmetry of letters laid out in a square is without doubt one cause for the fascination with the so-called Sator Square. This appeal means the figure has also found its way into many corporate logos. Generally, the results are poor, as in that of Supercell—or as I shall always refer to them, Sup Erc Ell. When I worked at Sega, they had a still worse layout for their tagline:

WELCO

METOT

HENEX

TLEVEL

This was dire indeed: it didn’t work out to an even 5×5, so they squeezed an extra letter into the final line hoping no one would notice, and, as literally none of the words landed evenly at the end of a row, they sometimes color-coded them as a nod to readability.

I even saw one new to me the other day but was too slow to get a pic, reading:

ADV

ENT

URE

All of these are pointless, not being sensibly readable in any direction but one—and poorly there. The Uniqlo logo does have a bit of ambiguity.

ユニクロ yunikuro

This simple set of four katakana characters fails in romaji, where it becomes a 2×3. The original design references hanko (判子), the signature seals commonly used in Japan and typically laid out in this same type of 2×2 pattern and which ‌use red ink. Although Japanese ‌has four valid reading directions, there are only two that work here; the one above and, as is typical of hanko, two columns from right to left:

ニロユク niroyuku

And in fact, even though it’s meaningless, niroyuku has become a funny way to refer to the company, reminding me of Zūja-Go. My own logo for this site is similar to Uniqlo’s in terms of layout, and so has the same potential for ambiguity. Thus far, I’ve neglected to ask any of my Japanese friends if there’s a tendency for it to be read as rugideku, or something else. 

There’s an intermediate step between this and the Sator Square level; one where a square can be read in two directions. Left to right and top to bottom. Known simply as a word square, this is actually a special type of acrostic. There are examples in English up to the ninth order (i.e., a 9×9 square) such as:

NECESSISM

EXISTENCE

CIRCUMFER

ESCARPING

STURNIDAE

SEMPITERN

INFIDELIC

SCENARIZE

MERGENCES

Of course, the result is nonsensical (and not in a good way); apart from “existence” the words run from rare to just this side of nullibiquitous. Rather than delivering meaning, the word square has become a problem for mathematicians and computers to solve—exactly as they’re attempting to do for the 10×10 square whose solution has remained elusive since 1897.

Just as with the Sator Square, ancient ones are known, like this one found twice in Smyrna (modern İzmir, Türkiye) from the second century CE:

μῆλον

ἡδονή

λόγος

ὄνομα

νῆσας

apple delight word name saying

Similar to the English word square above, this has no meaning, simply presenting a set of words that work together to create this form. As noted by its discoverers in 2016:¹

The more ambitious Christian interpretations of the [Sator] square […] gain no traction from this Greek square, which uses only nine letters of the Greek alphabet and will not allow the formation of any of the basic Christian vocabulary that comes to mind. Nor do the words have any isopsephistic [i.e., numerological] value.

Some still point to the central word being λόγος as a reference to the word of God, but there’s essentially an inverse relationship between the size of the square and its ability to convey meaning. There is a pair of 4×4s in Greek that don’t appear until the medieval period (specifically, sixth–seventh centuries); one is seemingly meaningless, and the other is:²

ἄλφα

λέων

φωνή

ἀνήρ

alpha lion voice man

A bit of a charitable reading—taking alpha as referring to the Hebrew letter א and so referring to the Western Semitic word for ox, and then voice as referring specifically to the cry of an eagle—gets you to the four living creatures that draw the chariot of God, the Christian Gospel writers, and the Tetramorph. Whether it was actually Christian in origin, it appears on a papyrus alongside the Sator Square, and seems to have likewise been used as a charm—possibly against snakebite—in Coptic magic.

The instinct to incorporate magic squares into medieval charms relates strongly to the very reasons they were created in ancient times. Because of the proscription of idolatry in Judaism, the divine had to be expressed in a different way. The complex and intertwining geometric patterns Islamic Art is famous for are motivated by the same Abrahamic tenet. In Judaism, this resulted in the exploration of magic squares, among many others, and so they have a long history:³

Magic squares have been recovered from [pre-Romance language] history that are edged with palindromes and from which the Hebrew name Elōhim [אֱלֹהִים] can be obtained, beginning with a central aleph.

Although iconoclasm was less of a factor in medieval European art, there was also some continuity of these traditions that continued to motivate the creation of,⁴

[…] abstract structures such as geometrical forms, symmetrical schemata, palindromes and monograms.

Coupled with art, European religion went looking for the microcosm. The phrase multum in parvo (much in little) characterized the notion of something small acting as a structural analogy for the entirety of the universe. This also led to the search for the perfect, “Adamic” language based on the Bible passage:⁵

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

This was seen as meaning there was one “correct” word for everything, lost to us because of the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. Among many others, Dante Alighieri was moved to study Hebrew, which, if not itself the Adamic language, was thought closest to it.

Failing to find this perfect language, Prophetic Cabalist Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia (אברהם בן שמואל אבולעפיה) tried to create his own, while Dante turned instead to the Florentine Italian of the common people. In any case, language, and particularly ways of interpreting it, such as the gematria, were front of mind among the medieval intelligentsia.

Palindromes, as noted, were a part of these explorations. Although the term is of Greek origin (παλίνδρομος—running back again), it’s actually a relatively modern coinage; in Ancient Greece, they were called καρκινικοί (karkinikoi), referring to the side-to-side movement of a crab (καρκίνος). One of the earliest attested comes from a school worksheet from Tebtunis, Egypt, in the first century BCE:⁶

ὦρτ ἐπἱ σῡν ἵvά κάπρον [ἀ]νόρπaκά νιν ὑσἱ πέτρον

From the place where (this stone once) attacked a (wild) swine, I carried it off to be a landmark for swine

Though this has as yet not been found to have been repeated, another, from the fourth century CE, known as the Nipson palindrome, became quite widespread. The phrase is attributed to Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and runs:

ΝΊΨΟΝ ἈΝΟΜΉΜΑΤΑ, ΜῊ ΜΌΝΑΝ ὌΨΙΝ

Wash [my] sins, not only [my] face.

Note, in addition to being a palindrome, when written in majuscules, as above, all its letters are vertically symmetrical apart from the ⟨N⟩s. Therefore, the phrase often appears with those letters reversed on the right side, so also becoming a mirror ambigram. Given its content, it came to be used frequently on holy water fonts, beginning, it seems, with one outside the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

Another from late antiquity, but from a mixed Judaic-pagan context appears on an amulet bearing on the other side the image of a mummy on a boat, likely representing Osiris, together with the god of luck, Harpocrates—as I’ve previously noted, also thought by some to be referenced by the word arepos in the Sator Square. This palindrome is found on amulets and magical papyri for a variety of magical purposes, and so seems to be formulaic:

ΙΑΕΩ
ΒΑΦΡΕΝΕΜ
ΟΥΝΟΘΙΛΑΡΙ
ΚΡΙΦΙΑΕΥΕ
ΑΙΦΙΡΚΙΡΑΛ
ΙΘΟΝΥΟΜΕ
ΝΕΡΦΑΒΩ
ΕΑΙ

Similar to some of the modern word squares I began with, the breakup of words here is somewhat random, reflecting the oval shape of the amulet, but the first word is clearly a Greek form of the tetragrammaton, YHWH (יהוה). The following words, βαφρενεμουν οθιλαρι κριφι, apparently translate an identifiable Egyptian phrase, and so the whole becomes:⁷

Iahweh is the bearer of the secret name, the lion of Re [lies] secure in his shrine

A different palindrome with which Dante was familiar, even referring to it in his Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia), appears on the floor of the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, reading:

EN GIRO TORTE SOL CICLOS ET ROTOR IGNE

[I], the sun, with fire, make the circles turn and I turn as well

The phrase is inscribed in a circle surrounding an image of the sun, the whole acting as the gnomon for an oculus in the building’s roof. This also makes the terms sol and ciclos self-referential. Additionally, the inclusion of rotor, itself a palindrome, strongly recalls the rotas of the Sator Square.

Just as quotes are sometimes difficult to properly attribute, so with these phrases, especially with the dates, which are often pushed back as with this one, spuriously linked to Virgil:

IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE, ECCE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI

We go around at night, and behold! we are consumed by fire

It’s much more likely this palindrome was created no earlier than the sixth century, and certainly we can see its strong resemblance to the previous one, which, depending on the direction of influence, would place it more into the medieval setting more expected for such works. Umberto Eco, an expert in the medieval, places it in that context in The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa). The phrase itself is thought to refer to moths, and so, allegorically to people, often drawn to powerful things that can end in their destruction, as Icarus to the sun.

Returning to the Sator Square, what gives it such majesty is it combines the elements of a palindrome and a magic square, and so is still more of an expression of divine perfection than either by itself. However, there is another also found in Pompeii:

ROMA

OLIM

MILO

AMOR

Rome once Milo love

This phrase lacks a verb, making it hard to parse, but like some word squares, it sacrifices meaning for form. The fact the word for “love” and the name of the great city of Rome are mirror images is easily noticed, and this square simply expands that with another pair of mirrored words. Although it also appeared in Rome’s port town, Ostia, it was perhaps too simple and obvious to proliferate, as its more famous cousin did.

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Read subsequent articles from the Sator Square series

Part 2: And the Rotas Go ’Round

Part 2, Addendum: Loosening “Tenet”’s Hold

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Read previous articles from the Sator Square series

Part 1: Sator Square Non-Starters

Part 1 Addendum A: Blessings Through Sator

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Notes

1. Roger S. Bagnall, Roberta Casagrande-Kim, Akin Ersoy, and Cumhur Tanriver, Graffiti from the Basilica in the Agora of Smyrna, 2016.
2. P.CtYBR inv. 1792 qua.
3. Dmitri A. Borgmann, “Palindromes: The Ascending Tradition”, Word Ways, May 1980.
4. Madeline H. Caviness, “Images of Divine Order and the Third Mode of Seeing”, Gesta, 1983.
5. Genesis 2:19, KJB, 1769.
6. Jerzy Danielewicz, “A Palindrome, an Acrostich and a Riddle: Three Solutions”, The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay In Greek and Latin Poetry, 2013.
7. Joachim Śliwa, “From the World of Gnostic Spells: The ιαεω‑ Palindrome”, Within the Circle of Ancient Ideas and Virtues, 2014.

A swirling miasma of ancient wisdom traditions (Continuity of Magic from East to West, Part 6)

On a recent trip, I found philosopher and thaumaturge Pythagoras’ (Πυθαγόρας) home island of Samos (Σάμος) is easily visible from the Turkish mainland near Kuşadası (known to the Greeks as Ἔφεσος Νεόπολις). Separating them is the Mycale Strait (Greek: Στενό της Μυκάλης, Turkish: Dilek Geçidi)—actually the narrowest such body between any Aegean island and Turkey at just under a mile (1.6 km). So the idea he somehow represented a purely Western wisdom is pretty unlikely.

To be fair, the west coast of Asia Minor was inhabited by Greek-speaking peoples from the Bronze Age down to modern times, but, on the other hand, it’s a quick trip to more exotic locales. Moreover, it was the custom of such folks to visit “the East” to learn their trade, according to Carolina López-Ruiz:¹

[…] Pythagoras […] was later remembered as having sought out eastern wisdom in his travels. His learning in the Levant was later connected with Thales of Miletos, who, according to Herodotos, was himself of Phoenician stock:

“Surely aided by Thales…, he (Pythagoras) sailed to Sidon, having learned that it was his fatherland by nature and thinking well that from that place the trip to Egypt would be easier for him. There he joined the heirs of Mochos the physiologist-prophet and the other Phoenician hierophants, and was initiated in all the mysteries of Byblos and Tyre, and in select sacred rites performed throughout the greater part of Syria.”

Thales (Θαλῆς) is both a mysterious and celebrated figure. His works are largely lost to us, but various better-known people, such as Aristotle (Ἀριστοτέλης) tell us he’s an important mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher: one of the Seven Sages (Οι Επτα Σοφοι) of Greece and the Father of Science. His hometown, Miletus (Μῑ́λητος, now known in Turkish as Milet) was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia, in the Greek settlement called Ionia (Ἰωνία).

Crete (Κρήτη), too, though not strictly speaking “Eastern”, was another source of mystical wisdom for similar figures. Epimenedes (Ἐπιμενίδης), reputed author of the Oracles (Χρησμοί) and who was summoned to Athens (Ἀθήνη) to purify the Kylonian Pollution (Κυλώνειον ἄγος), was said to have been initiated for 57 years in a Cretan cave. Thaletas (Θαλήτας) was called from Gortyn (Γόρτυν) in Crete to rid Sparta (Σπάρτη) of a plague in 675 BCE—and did so by singing the Cretan paean (Κρητός Παιάν).²

When it comes to the gods, there are some commonalities that are down to the Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE). We think of the Near East as dominated by Semitic languages today—and it is, mainly by Modern Hebrew and various forms of Arabic—but we see outliers in Persian and Kurdish. In ancient times, many IE languages existed there, including the Anatolian languages: Hittite, Palaic, Luwian, Lycian, Lydian, and possibly Carian, Pisidian, and Sidetic, and the Indo-Iranian ones, including the ancestors of the modern languages of the region and Avestan. And just as the language family spread, so too can commonalities be seen across pantheons of the gods that also seem related to these common PIE origins: the head god is the sky father; his consort, the earth mother; his daughter, goddess of the dawn, etc.

Still, Zeus (Ζευς), who might at first seem a clear exemplar of the sky father, shares specific details with the Canaanite Baʿal (𐤁𐤏𐤋). This latter god has direct continuity from the Sumerian Ish’k’ur (𒀭𒅎). The morphing of the PIE sky father, usually associated with the brightness of the sun and nurturing rains, into a warlike storm god is generally agreed to be due to the influence of the ancient Near East (ANE), and specifically the Phoenicians. Similar to the Greek cosmogony, there is a battle of succession, where Baʿal—like Zeus—is the last to gain power. Thereupon, he builds a palace on a mountaintop to the north, in the center of the universe—Tsaphon (𐤑𐤐𐤍, located on the Turkish-Syrian border and known biblically as Zaphon/ Tsāfōn, צפון, and in modernity as Cebel-i Akra/ Jebel al-ʾAqraʿ, جبل الأقرع) being the corollary of Olympos (Ὄλυμπος) in the ancient Greek sphere—whence he sends his messages and thunderbolts. Indeed, Zeus is even associated with the same Levantine mountain under yet another name as Zeus Kasios (Ζευς Κασιος).

The storm god, variously named, was widespread throughout the ANE, even finding worshippers in Egypt, as stelai discovered there attest. The Akkadians even used the Sumerogram 𒀭𒅎 for their version of the god, Adad, and as to his messages:³

Adad was also associated with divination and justice […] he is addressed as ‘lord of prayers and divination’ [be-el ik-ri-bi ù bi-ri], and invoked to preside over haruspicies […].

This is, of course, another point of continuity with the Graeco-Roman world, specifically, the Etruscans, who continued to practice the divinatory arts even after their culture had been otherwise wiped out on the Italic Peninsula, and who dedicated their offerings to their own sky god, Tinia, again, also a god of justice, whom the Romans syncretized with Iuppiter.

The battle of succession, and the eventual victory of order over chaos is a theme we see repeated throughout the complex, but with various changes seeming to reflect specific threads of tradition, such as the castration of Ouranos (Οὐρανός), and his overthrower, Kronos’ (Κρόνος) swallowing of a stone, which are agreed to have been drawn from the Hurro-Hittite Kumarbi Cycle.

There are some points of difference as well, however, that do relate to the PIE version of the sky god. Zeus’ animal is generally the eagle, while the Ish’k’ur lineage is associated instead with the bull. But in the episode of the kidnapping of Europa (Εὐρώπη), notably a Phoenician princess, Zeus takes the form of a bull.

López-Ruiz references Walter Burkert’s The Orientalizing Revolution just as I did previously,⁴ but urges some caution. She points out the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East were in such close contact for such a long time, there is clearly opportunity for extensive mutual influences to have occurred, rather than there being an exclusively east-west one. She says, instead, there came to be a “cultural koiné”, drawing a parallel to the way in which the many dialects of the Greek language eventually fused into a common language.⁵ And of course, this is correct; I’ve already pointed out the interconnectedness of the cultures of the Late Bronze Age.

As to the succession myths, for example, López-Ruiz concludes:⁶

[T]his kind of narrative traveled easily across neighboring ethnic and linguistic frontiers and was adapted and transformed to fit prevailing trends and interpretations of coexisting myths, whether they were “old” or “new,” Greek or “foreign.” The narrative schema of a succession of gods provided a “grid” into which foreign and local elements could be easily adapted to specific theological and literary ends. Cosmogonies and theogonies, in turn, became popular partly because they systematized religious knowledge across a field of diverse local traditions, especially in Greece of this period when communities were expanding and coming increasingly into contact with each other. […] Possibly they also served to diffuse theological tensions by setting divine instability into an intelligible narrative framework. Hesiod’s [Ἡσίοδος] Theogony [Θεογονία] reflects a well-established divine order in which previous generations of gods are relatively marginal […] and […] a status quo had been achieved only through violence and unnatural processes […]. These more disturbing stories were partly neutralized by being set in the divine past.

Finally, regarding Pythagoras and his ilk, López-Ruiz notes the Greeks were a bit exoticist, as they saw foreigners, particularly from the East, and even more particularly from Egypt, as inherently mystical. Therefore, they tend to attribute foreignness to people in order to legitimize them as mystics, so we should take some of these tales cum grano salis.⁷

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Read subsequent articles in the Continuity of Magic from East to West series

Part 7: Lux Orientis

Part 8: No Ewoks, Only the Dead

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Read previous articles in the Continuity of Magic from East to West series

Part 1: The Griffin and the Phoenix

Part 2A: Hark, a Haruspex!

Part 2B: Go West, Young Mantis

Part 3A: Coda Etrusca

Part 3B: Devoted More Than All Others

Part 4A: Romancing the Hellenes

Part 4B: The Chthonian Connection

Part 5: Hellenism, Schmellenism

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Notes

1. Carolina López-Ruiz, When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East, 2010.
2. Ibid.
3. Kathryn Stevens, “Iškur/Adad (god)”, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, 2016.
4. Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, 1992.
5. López-Ruiz, 2010.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

From mysterious rebus to medieval charm (Sator Square, Part 1 Addendum A)

While I initially thought it might’ve had to do with the film Tenet, some of the traffic to my Sator Square articles seems to have had to do with its use in magic, which I mentioned in passing in Part 1. I’m not uninterested in that. That article and Part 2 focused on deciphering the original intent behind the creation of the square, concluding how it was used by members of the Jewish diaspora in the Roman world to recognize one another. In particular, I wanted to dispel the popular notion the rebus was of Christian origin.

Still, for the sake of completeness, I’ve researched when and how the Sator Square came to be used in Christian and magical contexts, which I’ll present here.

I’ll linger first on the rebus’ origins. The cross, while it seems an essential Christian symbol to us today, was not used as an esoteric sign of that religion before the second century. Thus, even apart from all the other anachronistic elements needed to interpret the Sator Square as containing the Lord’s Prayer, a cross layout is required, which would have carried no particular significance at the time of the rebus’ earliest appearance.

There were signs used in similar ways to the Sator Square by early Christians, most notably, the ἸΧΘΥΣ (ichthys) acrostic. This spells out the Greek word for “fish”:

• Ἰ: Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs), “Jesus”
• Χ: Χρῑστός (Khrīstós), “anointed”
• Θ: Θεοῦ (Theo), “of God”
• Y: Yἱός ((h)uiós), “son”
• Σ: Σωτήρ (sōtḗr), “savior”

All together forming the phrase: 

Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior

The first appearances of the ichthys in Christian art and literature date to the second century CE, far later than the first known record of the Sator Square in the mid-first century. Indeed, the acrostic only became popular late in the second century, and its use exploded in the two centuries after that.

The ichthys acrostic as a secret symbol and shibboleth obviously dates to the early Christian period (ca. 313–324) when the religion was outlawed, and signs of faith needed to be kept on the DL. There were two forms used to obfuscate the acrostic. The first resembled a wheel with eight spokes, formed of the superimposed letters. A similarly divided round loaf of bread, termed panis quadratus in Latin, has also been suggested for the image, which certainly has more resonances in Christian tradition. The one better known refers indirectly to the acrostic with a simple fish image drawn with a pair of arcs meeting at the left side and crossing at the right to form a tail. Fish figure prominently in the Bible, and particularly the Gospels. And of course it remains with us today, most commonly as a car adornment.

As for the Sator Square, we know it came into use in a Christian context from the early medieval period, as we see it in European churches from that time. The earliest such can be seen on a marble block in the facade of the Abbey of St. Peter ad Oratorium near Capestrano, Italy, built ca. 752. Rather than being a graffito like the inscriptions found at Pompeii or on the wall in the Roman villa making up the undercroft of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the one on the abbey seems much more elaborately carved, somewhat in keeping with the other inscriptions appearing nearby around its entrance.

However, the fact the rebus appears upside down inclines me to believe this block was from an earlier structure and reused in the church facade, as was often done. It brings to mind the massive gorgon heads in the cistern beneath Istanbul; one on its side and one inverted, so placed to dispel their pagan power. Indeed, it may be the original, rotas-first form of the square is the pre-Christian version of the square and the later, sator-first form, was suggested by this one’s upside-down placement in a Christian church. If so, it might be best to refer to the Rotas Square as a rebus, and the Sator Square, as we shall see, as a charm.

The first reference to the Sator Square in an unambiguously Christian setting comes from a marginal note in an Old English version of Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People from the 11th century. The benediction presented there invokes the Holy Trinity, but its central feature is the  words of the rebus:¹

Creator et s[an]ct[i]ficator pater et filius et sp[iri]t[u]s s[an]ct[u]s q[u]i es uera trinitas et unitas precam[u]r te d[o]mine clemat[i]ssime pat[er] ut elemosina ista fiat misericor[-]dia tua ut accepta sit tibi p[ro] anima famuli tui ut sit benedictio tua sup[er] omnia dona ista p[er] + Sator. arepo. tenet. opera. Rotas. D[eu]s qui ab initio fecisti hominem et dedisti ei in adiutu[-]rium similem sibi ut cresceretur et mutiplicaretur. da sup[er] terram huic famulam tuam .N. ut p[ro]spere et sine dolore parturit.

Creator and Sanctifier, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, who art true trinity and unity. We pray to thee, Lord most merciful Father, that this gift become your mercy, that it may be acceptable to thee for the soul of your servant, that your blessing be upon all these gifts through + Sator. arepo. tenet. opera. Rotas. Lord, who from the beginning created man, and gave him for assistance one like himself so that he should increase and multiply, grant to this your servant, [name] on earth let her give birth successfully and without pain.

Where the ⟨+⟩ appears in the text, as it does immediately prior to the words of the Sator Square, it indicates the sign of the cross is to be made as the words are spoken. The phrase “increase and multiply”, commanded of Noah after the flood;² often appears in charms promoting conception.

In contexts such as this, the actual meaning of the original Sator Square is of no importance; we can see in one example below, it even ceases being a palindrome. Instead, it has become a charm. This charm is sometimes spoken aloud, sometimes written and used as an amulet, and sometimes, it seems, both.

As an amulet, we increasingly see the square either presented as a magical figure, especially as a pentacle—with one unique case, showing it as five concentric circles, divided by five radiating lines—or the words that make up the rebus as normal text.

Use of the charm is more fully formed in a set of three late 12th-century treatises: Conditions of Women, Treatments for Women, and Women’s Cosmetics. Best known collectively as the Trotula, it’s one of the most important gynecological texts in medieval Europe, which compiled, among other things, remedies for difficult birth. Medicine and magic combine in the tome, as the character of writings of the former type are “scientific” in the sense they are records of patients who seem to have been helped by the methods described. Other remedies, such as girding the patient with a sloughed snakeskin—a well-known symbol of death and rebirth—are suggested, but crucially to this discussion:³

[…] scribantur hec nomina in caseo uel butyro: + sa. e. op. ab. z. po. c. zy. e. pe. pa. pu. c. ac. sator arepo tenet os pera rotas

[L]et these names be written on cheese and butter: + sa. e. op. ab. z. po. c. zy. e pe. pa. pu c. ac. sator arepo tenet os pera rotas and let them be given to eat.

Here the game of telephone has broken the word opera, and therefore the palindrome. The curious string of syllables or abbreviations, sa. e. op. ab. z. po. c. zy. e pe. pa. pu c. ac. is unknown and nowhere else attested. The element of inscribing the charm on food and consuming it is interesting, but far from unique.

There is a case where the Sator Charm appears in a mid-12th century manuscript alongside another charm, known as the Crux Christi, to find a thief. The Sator Square is drawn, with these lines arranged around its edges:⁴

Veniat illi laq[ueu]s.
que ignorat et
captio q[uia] abscond[it]
app[re]hendat eu[m]
et laqueu[m] cadat ipsu[m]

Let there come to him a snare of which he is ignorant, and a trap that is hidden catch him, and let him fall into a snare.

And beside it:

Crux χρ[ιστ]ι ab oriente reducat te .N.
Crux [χριστι] a[b] meridiano reducat te .N.
Crux χ[ριστι] ab aq[ui]lone reducat te .N.
Crux χ[ριστι] ab occidente reducat te. N.
Crux χ[ριστι] abscondita fuit Helena
inventa e[st]. sic inveniat[ur] fugitiuus
iste p[er] uirtute[m] s[an]cte crucis.
Adiuro t[er]ra p[er] patre[m] et filiu[m] et sp[iritu]m s[an]c[tu]m et per sepulchru[m] d[omi]ni ut eu[m] n[on] retineas .N. s[ed] citissime redire facias ad me.

Cross of Christ, bring you back [name] from the east.
Cross of Christ, bring you back [name] from the south.
Cross of Christ, bring you back [name] from the north.
Cross of Christ, bring you back [name] from the west.
Cross of Christ, hidden Helen was found. So let this fugitive be found by the virtue of the Holy Cross. I charge by the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost and by the sepulcher of the Lord, that the earth not shelter [name] but return him to me as quickly as possible.

The Crux Christi Charm we see here would continue to be used for magic of this sort. On the other hand, we see a continuation of the tradition wherein the Sator Charm is associated with childbirth, as here:⁵

Ut partus facilitetur scribe istud & liga super ventrem illius. Maria peperit christum + anna mariam + elizabeth. Johannem + selina.remigium + sator + arepo + tenet + opera + rotas et bibat folium diptanni

To facilitate delivery, write this and tie it on her belly: Mary begot Christ + Anne begot Mary + Elizabeth begot John [the Baptist] + Cecilia begot Remigius [probably Saint Remigius of Reims] + sator + arepo + tenet + opera + rotas and drink [a decoction of] dittany leaf.

This example combines the Sator Charm with another widespread charm, known in the Anglo-Saxon tradition as the Peperit Charm. It presents the sequence of holy mothers. Some 66 versions have been found from all across Europe and in a variety of languages, though, as with most writings of the time, mostly in Latin. The documents it appears in are of various characters, including all the types compiled in the Trotula: magical, devotional, and medical.

A much more elaborate formula appears in a late 15th-century quarto manuscript from a private collection with the  introduction written in the Middle English vernacular:⁶

For Woman that travelyth of Chylde, bynd thys Wryt to her Thye: In nomine Patris + et Filii + et Spiritus Sancti + Amen + Per Virtutem Domini sint Medicina mei pia Crux et Passio Christi + Vulnera quinque Domini sint Medicina mei + Sancta Maria peperit Christum + Sancta Anna pep.[erit] Mariam + Sancta Elizabet peperit Johannem + Sancta Cecilia peperit Remigium + Arepo tenet opera rotas + Christus vincit + Christus regnat + Christus dixit Lazare veni foras. + Christus imperat. + Chr.[istus] te vocat. + Mundus te gaudet. + Lux te desiderat. + Deus ultionum Dominus. + Deus preliorum Dominus libera famulam tuam N. + Dextra Domini fecit virtutem + a. g. l. a. + Alpha + et Ω + Anna pep.[erit] Mariam, + Elizabet precursorem, + Maria Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, sine dolore et tristitia O infans sive vivus sive mortuus exi foras + Christus te vocat ad lucem. + Agyos + Agyos + Christus vincit. Christus imperat. + Christus regnat + Sanctus + Sanctus + Sanctus + Dominus Deus. + Christus qui es, qui eras + et qui venturus es + Amen, bhurnon + blictaono + Christus Nazarenus + Rex Judeorum fili Dei + miserere mei + Amen.

For woman that labors with child, bind this writing to her thigh: In the name of the Father + and the Son + and the Holy Spirit + Amen + By the power of the Lord let the cross and the passion of Christ be my medicine + Let the five wounds of the Lord be my pious medicines + Mary begot Christ + Anne begot Mary + Elizabeth begot John + Cecilia begot Remigius + Arepo tenet opera rotas + Christ conquers + Christ rules + Christ said “Lazarus, come forth!” + Christ commands + Christ calls you + the world rejoices in you + the light desires you + God of vengeance + God, Lord of hosts, deliver your servant [name] + The right hand of the Lord has been made strong + a. g. l. a. + Alpha + and Omega + Anna begot Mary + Elizabeth’s precursor + Maria (begot) our Lord Jesus Christ, without pain and sorrow. O infant, whether alive or dead, come forth! + Christ calls you to the light + holy + holy + Christ conquers Christ commands + Christ rules + holy + holy + holy + Lord God + Christ who art, who was + and who is to come + Amen, bhurnon + blictaono + Christ of Nazareth + King of the Jews, son of God + have mercy on me + Amen.

In what can only be called a shotgun approach, we see not only the Holy Trinity invoked, the Sator Charm, the Peperit Charm, not once, but twice, as well as a variety of other charms and prayers, including the Laudes Regiae—again twice, and the magic words bhurnon and blictaono, apparently hapax legomena.

The tale of Christ’s resurrection of Lazarus was popularly used by medieval magicians to summon forth anything from the body, as it is here for a baby, but also to remove pustules, bones being choked on, etc.

AGLA, meanwhile, is a magic word appearing in charms (including centrally in the image I’ve included above), commonly supposed to be a notarikon (νοταρικόν/ נוטריקון—a cabalistic acronym) for “Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever” (אַתָּה גִּבּוֹר לְעוֹלָם אֲדֹנָי‎ ʾAtā gībōr ləʿōlām ʾĂḏōnāy) This interpretation of the word may also have been applied after the fact, which may be a tale for another day.

It seems, ultimately, there may have only been a small window of time, if any, wherein the Sator rebus was accepted as Christian. Rather, if the Judaic hypothesis I presented previously is true, its use in that sphere, while not understood by outsiders, contained an intriguing and mystical-feeling palindromic symmetry, which prompted its adoption into magic as both amulet and incantation.

One can see in the character of medieval magic a deep sense of eclecticism and exoticism: charms are collected jackdawlike, mixed with mumbo jumbo, and assembled in a hodgepodge. Overall, I find it a bit messy compared to Graeco-Roman magic.

Read subsequent articles from the Sator Square series

Part 1 Addendum B: Acrostic as Microcosm

Part 2: And the Rotas Go ’Round

Part 2, Addendum: Loosening “Tenet”’s Hold

Read previous articles from the Sator Square series

Part 1: Sator Square Non-Starters

Notes

1. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 41, 329. Bedae Historia Saxonice (Old English Bede), ca. 1000–1099. My transcription and emphasis, translation from Lea Olsan, “The Marginality of Charms in Medieval England”, The Power of Words: Studies on Charms and Charming in Europe, James Kapaló, Éva Pócs and William Ryan, eds. 2013.
2. St. Jerome, Biblia Sacra Vulgata (VULGATE), Genesis 9:1, 405.
3. DigiVatLib (DVL), MS Pal.lat., Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum (Book on the Conditions of Women), 1304. Translation in Monica H. Green, The Trotula: an English translation of the medieval compendium of women’s medicine, 2002.
4. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm 536, Honorii Augustodunensis liber de imagine mundi (Honorius of Augustodunum’s Book of the Image of the World), 1143–1147, my transcription and translation.
5. Cambridge, King’s College, MS 16, fol. 93v, ca. 1300, my transcription and translation.
6. I pieced together the transcription and translation from William D. Paden and Frances Freeman Paden, “Swollen Woman, Shifting Canon: A Midwife’s Charm and the Birth of Secular Romance Lyric”, PMLA, March 2010 and K. Helm: “Mittelalterliche Geburtsbenediktionen” (“Middle-Ages Birth Benedictions”), Hessische Blätter für Volkskunde (Hessian Pamphlets for Folklore), 1910.

Lewis Carroll’s works as Taishō nansensu and beyond (DeDisneyfication, Part 7A Addendum C/ Taishō, Part 5)

Lewis Carroll’s Alice books hold a unique place in Japanese culture. The appearance of these works coincided with a key moment in the modernity of the island nation. They went on to become central, not only to the canon of children’s literature, but literature writ large, as well as other cultural forms such as film, comics, animation, electronic games, and fashion. Many of Japan’s cultural elite have produced translations and adaptations of Alice, including renowned authors such as Mishima Yukio (三島 由紀夫), and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (芥川 龍之介) and Kikuchi Kan (菊池 寛), and award-winning artists like Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生).¹

Translations into various languages appeared thick and fast following Lewis Carrol’s books’ English publication; today they include 175 languages. But there are far more in Japanese than any other. Including both Alice in Wonderland (AiW) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (TLG), there have been a whopping 425 translations. Furthermore, Japanese editions of these books are far more numerous than those in any other language, running to 1,271 of AiW alone.²

Sadly, the Victoria & Albert’s (V&A), “Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser”, virtually ignored the important place Carroll’s works reached within Japanese culture. The show featured only marginal mention of the impact of Lewis Carroll’s books in Japan. The show literally included a loli (ロリ, short for ロリータ, rorīta, the kanaization of Lolita) dress, a manga (漫画), and a poster for the Japanese release of the 1931 US film.

The two Alice books have had a strong presence in Japan since the turn of the last century, oddly beginning with Hasegawa Tenkei’s (長谷川 天渓) translation of TLG as Kagami Sekai (「鏡世界」, “Mirror World”), published in serial form throughout 1899. AiW was first translated nine years later, in 1908, by Shizu Nagayo (永代 静雄) as Arisu no Monogatari (『アリスの物語』, Alice’s Tale). There were also translations in 1910, -11, and -12, and apart from a wartime gap, when the government had a tight rein on printing in general, they have continued regularly until today.

The reasons the Alice books resonated with the Japanese beginning at the turn of the last century—and beyond, as we shall see—are many and varied. And, for the most part, quite different from those that made the works popular in their native tongue and in other places around the world.

One element comes from how these works were translated. As one might imagine, translating Carroll’s works with all their historical and contemporary Victorian cultural references, puns, parodies, and nonsense into any language presents a high degree of difficulty. Even in relatively closely related languages and cultures, such as those of Europe, the first translations—into French and German—didn’t appear for four years. 

Difficulties were compounded in Japan, lacking such cultural and linguistic relatedness. Particularly given the books were—at least ostensibly—intended for children, accessibility had to be a concern. Indeed, the very notion of children’s literature was new to Japan in the Meiji era (明治時代, 1868–1912), so these works were necessarily pioneers of this new genre. These issues together meant the early translations were really‌ adaptations, with material either omitted or significantly altered. The level of challenge in translating Carroll’s works can be seen in the fact in more recent years it was taken on by Naoki Yanase (柳瀬 尚紀) who has also executed Japanese versions of works by James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges.

A variety of strategies were used to make the Alices more acceptable to a Japanese audience, including altering the main character’s name. Hasegawa changed it completely, to Mii-chan (みいちゃん, where -chan is a title affix for children), as did Maruyama Hakuya (丸山 薄夜), to Ai-chan (愛 being a standard Japanese name meaning “love”) in 1910’s Ai-chan no yumemonogatari, (『愛ちゃんの夢物語』, Ai-chan’s Dream Story).

There were still others, including Ayako-san (綾子さん) in a translation by Niwa Goro (丹羽 五郎), Kodomo no yume (『子供の夢』, Children’s Dreams), in 1884, and Aya-chan (あやちゃん) in Saijo Yaso’s (西條 八十) 1921 “Kagamikuni Meguri” (「鏡國めぐり」, “Mirror Country Tour”), and in the same year, Sukko-chan (すゞ子ちゃん) was used by Suzuki Miekichi (鈴木 三重吉) in his “Chichū no sekai” (「地中の世界」, “Underground World”). Despite all this, eventually, Arisu (アリス) won out as the protagonist’s name, even becoming a commonly used Japanese girl’s name from 1920 on.

Illustrations of the Carroll books show the common pattern where foreign forms were borrowed during the Meiji era but discarded in the Taishō era (大正時代, 1912–1926) in favor of Japanese ones, whether newly created or traditional. For example, in Ai-chan no yumemonogatari, an Art Nouveau style reminiscent of Alfons Mucha is apparent, though Ai-chan has dark eyes and hair. A later one appearing in a 1911 collection called Kodomo no yume: Chōhen otogibanashi falls back on more traditional imagery; even though Alice wears a bob, she’s dressed in a kimono, and amenbo (飴棒, water striders) populate the pool of tears.³

This type of strategy continued to be employed. For example, a 1952 Disney picture book presenting an episode from AiW made even more connections to Japanese culture. These included the Kojiki (古事記, “Records of Ancient Matters”, ca. 711) a collection of myths, legends, and semi-historical accounts, specifically conflating the White Rabbit with the Hare of Inaba (因幡の白兎 Inaba no Shirousagi), giving him a river to cross to match the folktale, where none exists in AiW. Also, describing one of her size-changing episodes, it includes the passage:⁴

Suddenly, her height, she thought, grew tall like an obake [お化け] […].

Obake, meaning roughly “shapeshifter”, is a type of yōkai (妖怪), a class of spirits and monsters in Japanese folklore. Although these creatures were written about since antiquity, from the Edo era (江戸時代, 1603–1868) on, they became increasingly popular. Including this type of material made the work much more acceptable to a Japanese audience.

The first true translation wasn’t published until Kusuyama Masao’s Fushigi no kuni of 1920, which included both of the Alice books. By this point, Japanese audiences were much more familiar with Western culture, using katakana to render terms such as “Anglo-Saxon” and “ham sandwich” (アングロ・サクソン, Anguro Sakuson and ハム・サンドウィッチ, hamu sandōitchi), and even providing footnotes for words Carroll invented.⁵ Yet even this work:⁶

[E]mphasizes a hybridized Arisu, a figure who retains Western properties augmented with elements that suggest Japaneseness.

The Meiji era, in which Carroll’s works were first introduced to Japan, was not only an opening in physical terms—where people and goods moved freely between the formerly isolated country and other nations—but also in terms of education, where new ideas and ways of learning were also coming in from the West. Nor was this a passive exchange: Japan’s pursuit of Western knowledge and culture was nearly a mania.

With respect to education, the dominant paradigm in Japan prior to the Meiji era was Confucianism, and more particularly, Edo era Neo-Confucianism (known as 朱子學, shushigaku). Whereas this philosophy saw humor as useless folly, early contact with Western learning challenged that view. One textbook nearly any Japanese university student of English in the Meiji era would have used stated:⁷

[The] degradation of any dignified object, whether animate or inanimate, which has hitherto inspired us with feelings of admiration and awe, tends to awaken the ludicrous emotion […].

Therefore, they would have been presented with this legitimization of humor as a literary strategy, as historian Junji Yoshida notes, thus:⁸

Meiji learners of English rhetoric were […] impelled to reflect on, if not to renounce, their former denigration of laughter as mere frivolity.

Once the Confucian stigma had been so removed, intellectuals were free to explore humor in all its forms.

But even in the midst of the freewheeling Meiji era, there was a growing backlash to the expanding freedoms of the individual. One of the forms this appeared in was a crackdown on political speech thought dangerous to the ruling class. Already in 1869, there was a Publication Ordinance (出版条例, Shuppan Jōrei) providing for review and censorship ahead of publication.

This was still not enough to satisfy conservative elements of the government, so the Libel Law (讒謗律, Zanbōritsu) and the Press Ordinance (新聞紙条例, Shimbunshi Jōrei) were implemented in 1875. The latter was so severe, it forced the shutdown of radical presses such as the Hyoron Shinbun (評論新聞, literally, “Critical Newspaper”, but styled The Review in English). Restrictions in the subsequent Taishō were still more strict:⁹

The draconian Public Security Preservation Law of 1925 (治安維持法), put in place only two months after universal manhood suffrage, marked the biggest reversal of the Taishō Democracy. It was intended to suppress political dissent, specifically targeting socialism and communism. Under the law, an Orwellian thought police was formed, the Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu (特別高等警察: “Special Higher Police”, often shortened to Tokkō), whose mandate was the criminal investigation of political groups and ideologies representing a threat to public order. They arrested over 70,000 people during the time the law was on the books, 1925–1945.

One such venue was satirical magazines in the mode of Punch, which made their way to Japan. This was literally the case for the Japan Punch (ジャパン・パンチ) which was founded in 1862 by Charles Wirgman after working for the original British publication and immigrating to Japan. Kitazawa Rakuten (北澤 楽天) also founded Tōkyō Puck (東京パック) in 1905. And just as Punch originated the modern sense of the term “cartoon”, Rakuten was also the first to use “manga” with its current meaning. Yet another word, ponchi-e (ポンチ絵), was derived from the magazine’s name to describe a subgenre of ukiyo-e (浮世絵) featuring humorous or satirical themes.

Nonetheless, there was also a veritable explosion of publishing in Japan of the time for sensors to deal with. From 1923 to 36, there was nearly a tripling in the number of books. The government necessarily had to focus on large-circulation items, such as newspapers, while smaller ones could often escape censorship.

Many political radicals also became kōdanshi (講談師 “storytellers”), who were far less easily regulated. Through this medium, they could use humor to communicate subversive political ideas in talks termed jiyū kōdan, (自由講談, “freedom lectures”). Other media too proved less prone to governmental interference, and so the use of humor-masked radicalism spread to these, which included folk- and pop songs, the latter of which became a national craze, Asakusa Opera, as well as such unlikely means as folk dance.

To summarize the effect of Japan’s modernity on its relationship with the works of Carroll: The country was actively seeking engagement with the cultural products of the West, and Great Britain in particular. The Alice books could only be thought of as legitimate literature, as they were often cited in the British papers, as Dodgson’s nephew noted:¹⁰

With the exception of Shakespeare’s plays, very few, if any, books are so frequently quoted in the daily Press as the two “Alices.”

So, the books could not be dismissed as frivolous topsy-turvy, but instead their rhetorical use of humor had to be considered. In particular, the use of satire as a covert and subversive medium for political commentary was increasingly explored. Carroll’s books, with their connections to Punch via John Tenniel, as well as the use of satire and absurdity in the text, became notable for this rhetorical mode, especially as exemplars of how seemingly harmless children’s books could be so thoroughly subversive.

Another important avenue of the impact of Carroll’s works in Japan was through women and girls. From its earliest translations, Alice was directed toward girls. Arisu no Monogatari, which I mentioned earlier as the first translation of AiW, was published in newly created girl’s magazine Shōjo no Tomo (『少女の友』, Girls’ Friend), and even the translator’s pseudonym, Sumako (須磨子), is a woman’s name. Six years later, in 1918–19, the first actual female translator, Kako Yuko, produced a version of Carroll’s work which ran in a magazine aimed at adult women.¹¹ Translations by women became a trend, with at least six in the first decade of the postwar period and eight in the subsequent decade. In the decade spanning 2004 to 2013, there were 30 translations by women.¹²

In addition to appearing at a pivotal point in the modernity of the Japanese cultural milieu, Alice also coincided with the creation of a media image of idealized girlhood, termed shōjo (少女), in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the many reforms of the Meiji era was the Girls’ High School Order (高等女学校令, Kōtōjogakkōrei) of 1899. The improvements thus provided in education for women worked together with the other key elements of the time—Westernization, modernization, and industrialization—to create the concept of the shōjo. In earlier times, women were children, then brides. But now there came to be an intermediate period when girls from the middle- and upper classes were at school instead.

To serve new readership thus created, several magazines sprang up featuring the term shōjo in their titles, including Shōjo-kai (『少女界』, Girls’ World) in 1903, and in 1906, Shōjo Sekai (『少女世界』, also Girls’ World), and Shōjo no Tomo, which I’ve already mentioned as—uncoincidentally—where the earliest AiW translation was published. As many magazines of the time did, these presented serialized novels, but featuring female protagonists. Single-page manga began to appear within these magazines, eventually increasing in length and sophistication until they simply became shōjo manga. As a side note, this is the same audience Kobayashi Ichizo (小林 一三) was aiming for with his Takarazuka Revue (宝塚歌劇団, Takarazuka Kagekidan).

The images and manga in shōjo magazines were foundational to the kawaii (可愛い, “cute”) aesthetic, which has not only become a well-known aspect of Japanese culture but a worldwide phenomenon. While it may seem innocent, there’s a strong current of revolt in kawaii, as Sharon Kinsella, a lecturer in Japanese visual culture, notes:¹³

[Y]oung women […] desire to remain free, unmarried and young. Whilst a woman was still a shōjo outside the labour market, outside of the family she could enjoy the vacuous freedom of an outsider in society with no distinct obligations or role to play […]. [A]s young women get older and particularly in the period immediately prior to marriage, their fascination with and immersion in cute culture becomes still more acute.

And further:¹⁴

Women [criticized] as infantile and irresponsible began to fetishize and flaunt their shōjo personality still more, almost as a means of taunting and ridiculing male condemnation and making clear their stubborn refusal to stop playing, go home, and accept less from life.

Fashion, as one of the more important purveyors of the cute aesthetic, also shows the impact of Alice. Women’s views of sexuality, their own bodies, and their culture—including acceptance or rejection of it—all intersect in this field. As Japanese cultural studies scholar Masafumi Monden notes.¹⁵

Arguably, in Japan, Alice has been more influential because of her fashions, which reflect her age and spirited personality, than because of her literary adventures […].

There are a variety of images of Alice that have influenced fashion. This can easily be seen in loli attire, which refers to Carroll’s works both directly, through the use of calf-length dresses and pinafores, as well as through a general aesthetic of Victorian frills and lace together with accessories like gloves and parasols. A few recent examples of this influence are Emily Temple Cute, a Japanese fashion brand, whose 2009–10 winter collection, was called “Wonderland” and SO-EN (装苑), one of the oldest fashion magazines in Japan, which ran a 22-page Alice-themed fashion spread in 2007.¹⁶

Alice, a cute, female protagonist on the brink of womanhood and rebelling against the arbitrary structures of the society she is meant to fit herself into, was appealing and relatable first introduced to this audience, and continues to be. Indeed, she has become more important to the culture—an icon thereof.

And this is the broad and deep context behind the items from Japan in the exhibit the V&A provided none of. There’s not AN Alice manga—rather, there’s a spectrum of them. There’s not AN Alice loli dress—rather, Alice is a major touchstone of the Japanese fashion industry. As I’ve already described, there are a plethora of books and manga translating or adapting Alice, and as we’ve also seen, the image pervades fashion in Japan.

But it’s still more far-reaching. Alice appears in television, such as 2020’s Squid Game (《오징어 게임》, Ojing-eo Geim) -esque Imawa no Kuni no Arisu (『今際の国のアリス』, Alice in Borderland). In pop music, the works remain a repeated point of reference, as in Iwasaki Yoshimi’s (岩崎 良美), “Watashi no na wa Arisu”, (「私の名はアリス」, “My name is Alice”) of 1980, Matsuda Seiko’s (松田 聖子), “Jikan no Kuni no Arisu” (「時間の国のアリス」, “Alice in Time-Land”) and Kobayashi Asami’s (小林 麻美), 「Lolita Go Home」, both in 1984, and Nakagawa Shoko’s (中川 翔子), 「Through the Looking Glass」, in 2009.¹⁷

Games have appeared regularly as well, spanning diverse genres, including, 1991’s『Alice』, 2005’s, 『Are you Alice?』, based on a manga of the same name, 2007’s Haato no Kuni no Arisu〜Wonderful Wonder World〜 (『ハートの国のアリス』, Alice in the Country of Hearts). And above and beyond the possibilities offered at Tokyo Disneyland, there are dozens of Alice-themed shops, particularly bars, restaurants, and cafes scattered throughout Japan, often including Carroll-inspired menus and costumed servers.

Finally, Miyazaki Hayao’s (宮崎 駿) 2001 film, Spirited Away (『千と千尋の神隠し』, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) contains so many similarities to the Carroll books many point to it as an adaptation thereof. Beyond the obvious, the movie strongly incorporates several distinct Alice tropes—some specific to the local context: food causing metamorphoses, a world parallel to reality with obtuse logic, references to the Meiji period—specifically in the architecture—figures from Japanese myth and folklore, and social commentary. Not only was it a massive success in Japan, the film was well received internationally, even collecting the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2003.

It should be clear from all this an exhibition only covering Alice in Japan could easily be assembled. While this was not the specific remit of the V&A show, it was intended to speak to the influence of Carroll’s works, so it seems a pretty significant miss. And I definitely begrudge them the space taken up by their VR experience, which my correspondents assure me was just as terrible as I imagined.

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Read subsequent articles in the DeDisneyfication series

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

Part 7B Addendum: Repainting the Roses

Part 8: Guerrillas and the “Jungle”

Part 9A: Through a Magic Mirror Marred

Part 9A Addendum: The Woods “Over the Wall”

Part 9B: The Sum of its Versions

Part 9C: The “Snow White” Studio

Part 9D: Snowhaus

Part 10: The Little Less-Than

Part 11: Batmouse 3D

Part 12: Mork & Scheherazade

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Read previous articles in the DeDisneyfication 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 4 Addendum: The Enchanted and the Postmodern

Part 5: Putting “Pocahontas” to Rest

Part 5 Addendum: Powhatan’s Mantle

Part 6: Trouble with “Tarzan”

Part 7A: The Wrong Rabbit Hole

Part 7A Addendum A: Curious Curation

Part 7A Addendum B: “Alice” in Revolt

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Read subsequent articles in the Taishō series

Part 6: Jazz: Agent of Cultural Transformation

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Read previous articles in the Taishō series

Part 1: Japan’s Turbulent Taishō

Part 2A: Epochal Architecture

Part 2B: When Tokyo Moved West

Part 3A: Asakusa Movies

Part 3B: Asakusa Opera

Part 4: The Mysteries of Zūja-Go

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Notes

1. I cannot responsibly omit Yayoi is apparently deeply problematic—google her yourself.
2. Jon Lindseth and Alan Tannenbaum, Alice in a World of Wonderlands, 2015.
3. 『子供の夢長編おとぎ話』 (Children’s Dreams: Feature-Length Fairy Tales), 1911, cited by Samantha Johnson, “Chasing the White Rabbit in Tokyo: 100 Years of Alice in Japan”, 2017.
4. 『ふしぎの国のアリス』 (Fushigi no kuni no Arisu, Alice in Wonderland), 1952. Though it uses the by then standard name for Carroll’s book, it actually presents a translation of a book called Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland Meets the White Rabbit (A Little Golden Book), retold by Jane Werner, adapted by Al Dempster, original story by Lewis Carroll, 1951. Quoted in ibid.
5. Kusuyama Masao (楠山 正雄), 『不思議の国』 (Fushigi no kuni, Wonderland), 1920, details from Amanda Kennell, “Alice In Evasion: Adapting Lewis Carroll In Japan”, 2017.
6. Sean Somers, “Arisu in Harajuku: Yagawa Sumiko’s Wonderland as Translation, Theory, and Performance”, Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-first Century, 2009.
7. W. D. Cox, The Principle of Rhetoric and English Composition for Japanese Students, 1882, quoted in Junji Yoshida, “Shifting Meanings of Humor at the Dawn of Literary Modernism in Meiji Japan”.
8. Ibid.
9. Stieg Hedlund, “Japan’s Turbulent Taishō”, Deru Kugi (blog), June 2017.
10. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (Rev. C. L. Dodgson), 1898.
11. Kennell, 2017. The translator’s name is not given in kanji, nor is the name of the work or the publication in which it appeared cited, and I was unable to locate these details. In fact, the translator’s identity is the subject of some debate, as is their gender.
12. Ibid.
13. Sharon Kinsella, Cuties in Japan, Women, Media and Consumption in Japan, 1995.
14. Ibid.
15. Masafumi Monden, “Being Alice in Japan: performing a cute, ‘girlish’ revolt”, Japan Forum, 2014.
16. Details from Ibid.
17. Ibid.

Lewis Carroll’s Victorian grotesquery (DeDisneyfication, Part 7A Addendum B)

There is a rumor Queen Victoria loved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (AiW) so much she asked the author to dedicate his next work to her. That author was Lewis Carroll, which was actually the nom de plume of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford lecturer on mathematics. His next book was 1867’s An Elementary Treatise on Determinants: with their application to simultaneous linear equations and algebraical geometry. This dainty dish was therefore set before the queen, who, one imagines, was unamused. While this tale is entertaining, it’s also easily debunked—Dodgson himself wrote:¹

I take this opportunity of giving what publicity I can to my contradiction of a silly story, which has been going the round of the papers, about my having presented certain books to Her Majesty the Queen. It is so constantly repeated, and is such absolute fiction, that I think it worth while to state, once for all, that it is utterly false in every particular: nothing even resembling it has ever occurred.

One of the biggest failings of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) show, “Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser”, was in conflating Carroll with his alter ego, Dodgson. They effectively drew a straight line from the staid Victorian Oxford don to the production of the Alice books. While this may seem a slight oversight, it actually erases some crucial information about both the author and his work.

First, Dodgson was very much a man of his times. Besides being a mathematics lecturer, he was also an ordained deacon in the Church of England, and was conservative personally and politically as well. As the quote above notes, he maintained a clear separation between his normal life and his fanciful writings about the world of Alice. One Carroll biographer describes him in his day job as:²

An inveterate publisher of trifles [who] was forever putting out pamphlets, papers, broadsheets, and books on mathematical topics [that] earned him no reputation beyond that of a crotchety, if sometimes amusing, controversialist, a compiler of puzzles and curiosities, and a busy yet ineffective reformer on elementary points of computation and instructional method. In the higher reaches of the subject, he made no mark at all, and has left none since.

And indeed, where Carroll is almost entirely known for his two Alice books, Dodgson published no fewer than 15 works on mathematics, logic, and other serious subjects. None of these received any accolades to speak of, let alone becoming the kind of massive international cultural phenomenon the Carroll books did.

There’s another Carroll myth the V&A show happily perpetuates: that the first Alice book is largely the same as the tale he told Alice Liddell, whose name the protagonist took, and her sisters on the Isis (the local name for the Thames) in Oxfordshire. Carroll himself made no such claim, describing the process thus:³

The germ of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was an extempore story, told in a boat to the 3 children of Dean Liddell: it was afterwards, at the request of Miss Alice Liddell, written out for her, in MS print, with pen-and-ink pictures (such pictures!) of my own devising: without the least idea, at the time, that it would ever be published. But friends urged me to print it, so it was re-written, and enlarged, and published.

In fact, the initial telling and the book’s publication were separated by over three years, with multiple successive versions and expansions. It’s obvious the final work’s depth and complexity, running to 27,500 words, was nothing like the extemporaneous tale of an afternoon.

And despite scientific and technological advancements, the general character of the Victorian era (1837–1901)—and even more so the mid-Victorian heyday of 1851–79—was just as drab as Dodgson outside the Alice books. Culturally, it was a repressive and moralizing time. These societal values came about as industrialization drove the rise of the middle class. As one literary critic noted of the status of art in Victorian England:⁴

[B]ourgeois capitalism restructures social and political life in such a manner that art and society appear related and yet somehow unrelated. 

A different pair of literary critics put a still finer point on it:⁵

When the bourgeois consolidated itself as a respectable and conventional body by withdrawing itself from the popular, it constructed the popular as grotesque otherness. But by this act of withdrawal and consolidation it produced another grotesque, an identity-in-difference which was nothing other than its fantasy relation, its negative symbiosis, with that which it had rejected in its social practice. 

It should already be clear on which side of the equation of acceptable literature versus grotesque the Alice books fall on, but for comparison, we can look at some of the other children’s literature of the age. Moralism, above all else, was the matter of such works. The fairy tale, introduced into literature in the 18th century, was pressed into new service by the Victorians. The model provided by Hans Christian Andersen earlier in the century, using the form to present protagonists showing virtue and determination in the face of troubles, was an especially favored one. Even this was criticized by some as being too focused on amusement above education. Stories for Victorian children focused still more on teaching boys how to become diligent and loyal workers and girls, wise and dutiful wives and mothers.

When urged by his publisher to make some pretense toward respectability in his first book’s title, Carroll ultimately refused, writing:⁶

Of all these I at present prefer “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. In spite of all your “morality”, I want something sensational.

This book, first published in 1865, would come to be more commonly known simply as Alice in Wonderland. It’s also worth noting while newspaper critics of the time did review Carroll’s later works—and none measured up to AiW in their eyes—that original work was all but unheralded; a simple announcement of its publication was all that appeared. Regardless of title, however, there could be no disguising the book’s content, as James Adams, a scholar of Victorian literature, noted:⁷

Alice in Wonderland engages in a […] thoroughgoing frustration of moralism; few works have ever been more subversive of the pieties of childhood.

With this information, we’re able to place the Alices solidly in the realm of the grotesque. And, as they mock the Victorian-bourgeois status quo, they are all the more marginal to that milieu. None of Carroll’s classical, historical, and mathematical references, his puns and witticisms directed at the highly educated, can save them from this categorization. Two elements in particular cement the works as grotesque: nonsense and satire.

Nonsense literature was clearly an offshoot of literary otherness. However, it’s not without precedents, even from ancient times. Horace, for example, in the first century BCE recommends it thus:⁸

Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem:
Dulce est desipere in loco.

Mingle a little foolishness with your prudence;
It’s pleasant sometimes to be unwise.

But the form truly blossomed in Victorian England with the nonsense poetry of Edward Lear, and later, the works of Carroll. This, again, can only be seen as a reaction to the repressive culture of the times:⁹

Nonsense literature charts the fear of meaninglessness which bubbles below the surface of Victorian culture, with its terror of godlessness and anarchy, and it does so by distorting and exaggerating precisely those new ideas and images which most shocked and disturbed the contemporary world view.

In part, the nonsense in Carroll’s work is a spillover from Dodgson’s professional realm:¹⁰

This is the […] insight of a logician who appreciates the limits of his own speciality. When the characters at the mad tea party demand that Alice speak in logically rigorous language, they absurdly fail to appreciate that the conventions governing everyday social life are fundamentally arbitrary. When logic is applied outside its proper sphere, it can seem mere bullying—which is what Alice encounters in most of her attempts at conversation.

This misapplication of logic joins puns, parodies, strange anthropomorphic creatures, and objects imbued with life, so that:¹¹

The effect is “nonsense” not as sheer gibberish, but as a concerted comic disruption of ordinary sense. In Wonderland, Alice experiences the power of rules in everyday life—the rules of language, social conduct, legal institutions—precisely through their subversion, which makes her experience akin to playing a game whose rules have been withheld, or are constantly changing in unpredictable ways.

Some of this, of course, plays into the satirical element of Carroll’s works. A parody can simply use the form of another work, but more typically, it’s meant as a commentary on that work. Especially in AiW, other contemporary literature for children, particularly of a moralizing kind, is targeted. For example, Carroll turns Isaac Watts’ tedious and preachy “Against Idleness and Mischief”, now remembered via AiW if at all—essentially a verse praising the industry of bees and informing us idle hands are the very workshop of the devil, and apparently required knowledge for British children of the time—into this sublime piece of topsy-turvy:¹²

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!

Nor does Carroll shy away from lampooning the most sacred Victorian institutions, including politics, the legal system, and the monarchy, among others. Indeed, Alice’s many size changes are a metaphor for one of AiW’s central concerns: how a girl can fit into this society whose rules are both strict and arbitrary.

Just as with nonsense literature, satire reached new levels in the Victorian era, driven in part by the growth of education and the middle class, which led to an explosion of literacy—90% for both men and women by 1870—and with it, engagement with politics. This was embodied in particular by Punch magazine, launched in 1841. And the fact Carroll chose John Tenniel, the satirical magazine’s chief cartoonist, to illustrate AiW is by no means coincidental.

Carroll even somehow manages to satirize satire itself, as Adams points out thus:¹³

Of course the very phrase “make fun of” reminds us that aggression is an integral part of humor. It was Carroll’s genius to discover this impulse in the heart of Victorian domesticity.

One can see why Dodgson let only a few close personal friends and relations know he was behind the Alice books, and would even deny it if asked directly. Even his refutation of the stories about Queen Victoria omits any specific reference to Carroll or his works, even though the press had clearly already made the connection. The Alice books were an act of rebellion in an age of conformity, which reflected rather poorly on a serious and respectable member of the Victorian bourgeoisie, an educator and ecclesiastic.

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Read subsequent articles in the DeDisneyfication series

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

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

Part 7B Addendum: Repainting the Roses

Part 8: Guerrillas and the “Jungle”

Part 9A: Through a Magic Mirror Marred

Part 9A Addendum: The Woods “Over the Wall”

Part 9B: The Sum of its Versions

Part 9C: The “Snow White” Studio

Part 9D: Snowhaus

Part 10: The Little Less-Than

Part 11: Batmouse 3D

Part 12: Mork & Scheherazade

---

Read previous articles in the DeDisneyfication 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 on “Hercules”

Part 4: Tale As Old As Agriculture

Part 4 Addendum: The Enchanted and the Postmodern

Part 5: Putting “Pocahontas” to Rest

Part 5 Addendum: Powhatan’s Mantle

Part 6: Trouble with “Tarzan”

Part 7A: The Wrong Rabbit Hole

Part 7A Addendum A: Curious Curation

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Notes

1. Charles Dodgson, “Postscript”, Symbolic Logic, second edition, 1896.
2. Peter Heath, The Philosopher’s Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass, 1974.
3. Lewis Carroll, The Letters of Lewis Carroll, Volume Two: ca. 1886–1898, Morton N. Cohen, ed., 1979.
4. Kathy Alexis Psomiades, “‘The Lady of Shalott’ and the Critical Fortunes of Victorian Poetry”, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, 2000.
5. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 1986.
6. Lewis Carroll to Tom Taylor, 10 June 1864, quoted in Annemarie Bilclough, “Creating Alice”, Alice, Curiouser and Curiouser, 2020.
7. James Adams. “Literature for Children”, A History of Victorian Literature, 2009.
8. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Carmina (Odes), VI.12, 13 BCE; my translation.
9. Jackie Wullschläger, “Victorian Images of Childhood”, Inventing Wonderland: The Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and A. A. Milne, 1995.
10. Adams, 2009.
11. Ibid.
12. Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 1865.
13. Adams, 2009.