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

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

The ring was found in Silchester, in Hampshire county in the South of England, which sits atop the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum. The item is a massive signet with a faceted band and a raised central square bearing the reversed letters VE and NUS to either side of a bust of the goddess named. The letters are backwards so when pressed into hot wax, the impression would come out right. Around the outside of the ring is inscribed:¹

SENICIANE
VIVAS I{I}N DE[o]

Senicianus, may you live in God

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

Then, 80 miles away at the site of a temple to the Celtic god Nodens at Lydney, a lead sheet was found. Nodens appears in H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. The placename Lydney seems to derive from a variant of the same god’s name, Ludd. Naturally, the tablet also bears an inscription:²

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

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

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

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

J.R.R. Tolkien, who was an Oxford professor and so living in this same region, was definitely aware of these items:³

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

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

As a reminder, the Tolkien ring’s inscription runs:⁴

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mentioned earlier the way defixiones are meant to work is via sympathetic magic. Third century Neoplatonist Plotinus discusses this concept in The Enneads (Ἐννεάδες):⁵

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

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

The mere act of using lead for curses, apart from the sending downward of its message I mentioned previously, is a metaphor for the intended action. One very common formulation, used from early Greek katadesmoi (κατάδεσμοι) their word for defixiones, runs:⁶

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

This has been taxonomized as a similia similibus (like for like) formula, described by prominent scholar in the field, Christopher Faraone, as:⁷

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve also mentioned nails were used to pierce some poppets within containers found in the Shrine of Anna Perenna. Gordon & Simón note this was often done to the defixiones as well:⁹

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

Another sympathetic magic tactic involves how the text is written — sometimes words or names are reversed, and sometimes entire inscriptions, according to Jürgen Blänsdorf:¹⁰

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

As such, the texts contain persuasive analogies such as this one from Cologne:¹¹

AVT SERCIS ACAREAV

COH ODOMOC SAGA ESEVREP

TSEVTPRCS ESREVREP

S[.]BONS[.]TPOXEDIVQDIVQ

MVVT TVPACNI

TAINEVE

Vaeraca, sic res tua: perverse agas, quomodo hoc perverse scriptum est. Quidquid exoptas nobis, in caput tuum eveniat.

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

Again, a few finals are missing from this inscription, and the spelling variant COMODO is used for quomodo. This one from Mainz seems to be of the same character:¹²

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Read subsequent articles in the Defixiones series

Part 4: Bargaining with the Gods

Part 5: Secundina’s Beef

Part 6: More Than Money Can Buy

Part 7: The Punic Curse Trail

Part 8: Hellenism Schmellenism

Part 9: The Celtic Undercurrents of Bath

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Read previous articles in the Defixiones series

Part 1: The Curses of Aquae Sulis

Part 2: Malefic Traditional

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Notes

1. Roman Inscriptions of Britain (RIB), RIB 2422.41.
2. RIB, RIB 306.
3. Maev Kennedy, “The Hobbit ring that may have inspired Tolkien put on show”, The Guardian, 2013.
4. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings, 1954.
5. Plotinus, Ἐννεάδες (The Enneads) VI.4.2, ca. 270 BCE.
6. For example, DTA 107A.1–5, fourth century BCE.
7. Christopher Faraone, Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, 1997.
8. DTM 11 (LCT 236, TheDeMa 754), end of the second or third century CE.
9. Richard Gordon & Francisco Marco Simón, “Introduction”, Magical Practice in the Latin West: Papers from the International Conference held at the University of Zaragoza 30 Sept.–1 Oct. 2005, 2010.
10. Jürgen Blänsdorf, “The Curse-tablets from the Sanctuary of Isis and Mater Magna in Mainz”, MHNH: International Journal of Research on Ancient Magic and Astrology, 2003.
11. Scholz 2010 (LCT 100, TheDeMa 258), mid-first century CE.
12. DTM 15.

Our continuing ties to ancient curses (Defixiones, Part 2)

In the Graeco-Roman world, if you had a problem, you might visit a shrine and use an iron stylus to write a note on a lead slip to a deity you thought might be sympathetic and effective for the type of help you needed. If you knew the name of the person responsible for your woes, you could put the finger on them and ask a variety of awful punishments be meted out. This might at first seem strange and foreign to you, but looking into it further, it actually connects to some quite familiar things.

First, I’d like to point out some linguistic connections: we still say spellbinding, breaking a spell. The root of the Latin word for a curse tablet, defixio, is fīgō, cognate with our word fix, in the sense of fasten, and likewise the nucleus of the Greek term for these objects, κατάδεσμος is δέω; “to tie”. The very word magic comes down to us from Old Iranian via Greek µάγος (magos), and Pliny’s transliteration of the adjectival noun µαγική (magike) seems to have been the original coinage, eventually pushing out Germanic words like dyr and galdr.¹ Other European languages from Russia to Portugal also contain terms closely related to magia, demonstrating the pervasive influence of this Graeco-Roman tradition across the region.

For physical evidence, I’ll turn to the research of Marina Piranomonte.² Together with other academicians, she has worked painstakingly on the finds relating to the fountain of Anna Perenna and her Nymphs.

This site is important for several reasons: First, it is a fairly recent discovery, having only been found in 1999 during work on an underground carpark at Piazza Euclide in the area of Parioli in northern Rome. Our techniques of archeological excavation are vastly superior to those the Victorians applied at Aquae Sulis (modern Bath), for example, including careful documentation and preservation of the artifacts together with their context.

Next, rather than dealing with the finds of an entire town, the fountain is a relatively discrete location well outside of ancient Rome proper, across the large open area of the former Campus Martius. The shrine was closed up when Rome turned away from paganism, likely under Theodosius I, who made Nicene Christianity the state religion of Rome in 380, additionally forbidding the worship of the old gods, and the site was left unmolested until it was stumbled upon during the building of the carpark.

Finally, after its abandonment, the cistern was filled with clay deposits, which rendered the environment nearly anaerobic and thus preserved the contents to a remarkable degree.

Some discussion of the deities enshrined at this location is necessary here. Anna Perenna is a little-known deity, who, though Ovid names her as Dido’s sister³—the Queen of Carthage of Aeneid fame—seems to have originated as a mother goddess of the Etruscans. Under the Romans, she became identified with the yearly cycle—the assignment of this role seems simply due to a linguistic coincidence with the Latin phrase, per annum. Her rites took place on the Ides of March and were described as Bacchic. Only three cultic shrines are known, this one, one in Sicily, and one in Cisalpine Gaul.

When I say nymphs, which Anna Perenna is also sometimes described as—as a mortal, she was drowned in a river, a typical nymph origin story—that’s likely to conjure images of beautiful young women. However, these nature spirits were really more closely aligned with Dionysus, the sileni, and Pan—deities of the untamed landscape. Nymphs, in particular, represented the seductive and dangerous qualities of such wild places. England’s Peg Powler, who lures victims to the water’s edge, then drags them under, occupies this same type of mythic space, with similar traditions appearing around the world. This, coupled with the fact these bodies of water were thought of as passages to the netherworld as I mentioned in the previous Part that, makes this fountain an obvious place from which to send malign messages.

Now to the artifacts. Piranomonte describes these as:

[…] 549 coins, 74 oil-lamps, 22 randomly-scattered curse-tablets, 18 cylindrical containers made of lead-sheet, some containing poppets, […] a large copper-alloy pot or bucket (caccabus) with traces of use on a fire, seven pine cones, egg-shells, twigs and a number of small plaques made of different kinds of wood.

Since the shrine was both a religious site and a source of freshwater (it was located at a natural spring), all these items have to be considered as votives specifically and deliberately brought into the place and deposited in the cistern.

Let’s begin with the pinecones. The pinecone remains a symbol of fertility, health, and good luck across Europe, with folk beliefs stating women wishing to become pregnant should place them beneath their pillows. It also features prominently in Near Eastern religions, in particular the apkallu (𒉣𒈨) figures tending trees in Mesopotamian reliefs and the snake-staff of Osiris. A pinecone-tipped staff called a thyrsus was also the emblem of Dionysus and his followers; satyrs and maenads, all of which I’ve already explained relate closely to nymphs. The pine’s seemingly magical ability to remain green through the winter is the source of these beliefs, and also why the tree and its cones remain a symbol of our Christmas. I’d suppose the other pieces of wood also relate to this type of idea.

And speaking of Christian symbols borrowed from pagan beliefs: eggs. Yep, eggs are another emblem of fertility used nearly worldwide. And of course, these continue to be a part of our tradition as “Easter” eggs.

The cooking pot is complete with an arc-shaped hanger from which to suspend it over a flame. It’s a pretty classic witch’s cauldron, though a small one, so add Halloween to the modern holidays we’ve found correspondences for.

Now for some trickier material: the containers. These seem to have been used in some form of malign magic, and their exteriors were inscribed in similar fashion to defixiones and made of the same material. They were generally a set of three containers of graduating size, each nested within the next in the fashion of matryoshki, and were hermetically sealed.

The number three, besides connecting to images of Graeco-Roman myth, particularly those of the underworld, especially with the three-headed figures of Cerberus and Trivia (Ἑκάτη, Hekate), but also to folk belief right down to today. You are likely to have said some version of “the third time’s a charm” without considering the tradition of magic behind the utterance. For those who would point to Christianity’s Holy Trinity as the origin for the phrase, I say perhaps, but the Holy Spirit was more or less an invention of the First Council of Constantinople in 381, and there was a variety of pagan trinities to draw the idea from well predating it. Hermes (Ἑρμῆς), another god of magic, is known as Τρικεφαλος (3-headed) in his role as the protector of intersecting roads, another related magical tradition.

Next, some containers held poppets made of wax and other organic materials, such as flour, sugar, herbs, and milk. All the figures were formed around slivers of animal bone, some of which had fallen out, revealing they also bore inscriptions. Some of these poppets were partially wrapped in lead sheet and/ or pierced with nails.

If this sounds like the stereotypical “voodoo doll”, it is. However, such effigies actually have no place in the vodun of West Africa, nor in their forms practiced on this side of the Atlantic. Rather, it is a tradition of Western witchcraft with its origins in Graeco-Roman ritual and ultimately from the ancient Near East, which was ascribed to Afro-Caribbean religions in order to cast them in a negative light.

And so we come to the lamps. The use of lamps as offerings shows continuity from Graeco-Roman practices as well. Just one notable example came in the Gymnasium area of Corinth (Κόρινθος) where a deposit of some 4000 lamps was found, and so dubbed Κρήνη του Γλαύκου (Fountain of the Lamps). The lamp flame, like the pool of water, is another metaphor for mediation between worlds—the wishes of the devotee are communicated as they ascend from the earthly plane to the celestial one. The Christian votive candle is symbolically identical, and candles and incense are used in the context of prayer worldwide. Furthermore, the lamp, as a magical object, obviously raises echoes from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights tale, Aladdin.

Six lamps in the fountain of Anna Perenna contained rolled up defixiones placed into them as a wick would be. If throwing lamps into a body of water seems self-defeating, this puts it right: Just as a flame sends communication upwards, a heavy piece of metal sends it downwards to the chthonian deities—this is a nega-lamp.

Finally, we have the coins. I was honestly surprised to learn the sacred spring at Aquae Sulis contained 12,000 coins, as the idea of throwing coins into a fountain for luck seems so comparatively modern. Piranomonte reports of the ones at the Fons Annae Perrenae:

[C]oins were found, […] attesting to the practice of throwing money into water as a sign of devotion to the resident nymph(s) or deity.

I wondered if the practice simply came down to “cutting out the middleman”—offering the coin itself as a votive rather than paying a magical practitioner to perform a binding via a defixio. The introduction to Piranomonte’s article reports:

[T]he shift at the nymphaeum away from inscribed text as the effective cursing mode in favour of alternatives seems suggestive in the wider context of the long retreat both from public epigraphic culture (except at the level of the administration) and from personal literacy.

Which is to say the option for individuals to execute their own curse texts was slowly dying out, and even the ability to employ a professional to do so seems also to have dwindled toward the end of the site’s use. Still, there seemed to be other options, as there were lead sheets only containing images or charakteres—magical writing resembling letterforms.

However, two of the lamps each contained a coin, providing a smoking gun for my theory. Lamps are offered with defixio wicks, lamps are offered with coins, coins are substitute defixiones: QED. (Update: at least at Bath, there may have been an earlier Celtic practice of deposition of coins) So consider the old gods of the netherworld you are contacting the next time you pitch a penny into a wishing well.

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Read subsequent articles in the Defixiones series

Part 3: Sympathy for Sauron

Part 4: Bargaining with the Gods

Part 5: Secundina’s Beef

Part 6: More Than Money Can Buy

Part 7: The Punic Curse Trail

Part 8: Hellenism Schmellenism

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Read previous articles in the Defixiones series

Part 1: The Curses of Aquae Sulis

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Notes

1. “magic, n., Etymology”, Oxford English Dictionary, 2023.
2. Marina Piranomonte, “Religion and Magic at Rome: The Fountain of Anna Perenna”, Magical Practice in the Latin West, Papers from the International Conference Held at the University of Zaragoza, 30 Sept.–1 Oct. 2005, Gordon & Simón, eds., 2010. I’ve referenced the work throughout.
3. Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid) Fasti, 3 (March), 8 CE.

A reexamination of the defixio (Defixiones, Part 1)

While visiting Bath, we went to the Roman ruins there. To be frank, my expectations were not high; at street level, the town center is all gray Palladian orderliness built around an insect-in-amber Gothic abbey. Neither does the museum’s entrance offer much promise, feeling like the sleek modern update of a Victorian hotel lobby. But then you step into a secret garden.

You arrive abruptly on a balcony overlooking the Great Bath. Generally, the largest pool in a Roman bath is the natatio (“swimming pool”), which is typically neither as large as Bath’s nor heated, where this one is fed with water from the hot spring, so it is simply designated the Great Bath. Then, as I described of another in situ archaeological museum, you proceed downward through the strata of history, viewing the excavations of the site, together with displays of the artifacts found there.

There were some elements I had not seen before, showing the intermingling of Roman culture and that of the native Celtic Britons. Being familiar with some of the other materials in no way dimmed my enthusiasm. In fact, they told the story of just how much of their way of life the Romans brought with them even to this distant outpost of their empire, as well as how modern in many ways these people were.

As to this last point in particular, there was a lead ingot which had all the characteristics we associate with such an object; a bricklike shape with trapezoidal sides, a standard weight, a raised edge at the top of the casting to show it was whole. This is similar to what is done with coins—if material was scraped off, this raised area is visibly uneven, allowing such thefts to be detected. And it bears an inscription telling us under whose authority it was cast. Each ingot weighs 155 pounds and reads:¹

IMP[eratoris] HADRIANI AUG[usti]
[property of] Emperor Hadrian Augustus

And on the topic of this metal, and unexpectedly, I learned the collection of defixiones at Bath is actually one of the largest yet found, and definitely one of the largest and most important in the archaeology of Roman Britain.

Defixiones, sometimes called curse tablets, are sheets of lead varying in size, with the smallest around 1×1¾ inches and the largest 4¾×10¼ inches (roughly 2.5×4.4/ 12.1×26.1 cm). These sheets were typically inscribed and sometimes drawn on, then folded or crumpled, sometimes with a lock of hair or other component enclosed within, and sometimes pierced with nails.

The most common place to find them in this state is buried in graves or tombs, which is one reason I would not have expected to see them in the thermae and associated temple at Aquae Sulis—the name for the Roman walled town where modern Bath now stands—which did not contain a necropolis or any other such structure. But, as I learned, wells and pools were another place in which defixiones could be deposited—basically as places proximal to the chthonic powers such bodies of water were thought portals to.

As with many things relating to Mediterranean antiquity, I ran across the defixio researching Gods & Heroes. I implemented them as a consumable item from which a player could cast a variety of debuffs on their enemies.

Before deciding this, I read many books, both from the actual traditions and modern archaeological texts. The second category in particular continues to grow: some 1600 separate items identifiable as defixiones have been discovered so far, and there is a great deal of continuing scholarship on the topic.

Furthermore, the materials I read focused mainly on the corpus of defixiones from the Italian Peninsula during the Republic, while these artifacts appeared across the Greco-Roman World, from Africa to the Rhineland, for the entire millennium between the fifth centuries BCE and CE.

In short, it was a great opportunity to return to the topic.

Looking backwards a bit, the continuity from Greek κατάδεσμοι (katadesmoi) is clear. Plato describes them thus:²

ἐάν τέ τινα ἐχθρὸν πημῆναι ἐθέλῃ, μετὰ σμικρῶν δαπανῶν ὁμοίως δίκαιον ἀδίκῳ βλάψει ἐπαγωγαῖς τισιν καὶ καταδέσμοις, τοὺς θεούς, ὥς φασιν, πείθοντές σφισιν ὑπηρετεῖν.

[I]f a man wishes to harm an enemy, at slight cost he will be enabled to injure just and unjust alike, since they are masters of spells and enchantments that constrain the gods to serve their end.

Matthew Dickie examines the attitudes of Tacitus toward various forms of magic shown in his Annals, finding:³

Tacitus conspicuously does not like foreign cults. Yet his disdain for foreign religious practice significantly does not extend to the cults of the Greeks; they are treated with respect and are not dismissed as externae superstitiones as are Egyptian rites and the religious practices of the Celts, Germans, Jews and Christians.

In fact, many of the earliest Roman defixiones continued to be written in Greek, seemingly as part of the ritual until eventually Latin came to dominate.

Winding the clock back still further, there is a clear mutual influence between Egyptian and Greek magic rituals. Friedhelm Hoffmann notes,⁴

The late Egyptian magical papyri show also signs of contact with Greek magic, which in turn was influenced by Egyptian magic.

So much so papyri, written, as the name implies, on the expensive material imported from Egypt, became all but synonymous with magic spells in Greek culture.

The Egyptians also had a tradition bearing similarities to that of the curse tablet; the execration text. These texts also seem to have worked by analogy, being written on items of clay or stone, sometimes even figures of bound captives, which were destroyed and buried.⁵

Moreover, we find as soon as there is written language, it is used for magical formulae, some apotropaic, but just as often meant to harm others. In Sumerian, one particularly cold curse runs:⁶

Namt’il nikkikkani khena
May life be his illness!

In any case, the Greeks and then the Romans widely adopted these practices. Pliny discusses the magic arts, but devotes a full chapter to “The Origin of the Magic Art”, in which he decries its ubiquity, as well as the frauds its practitioners perform, concluding:⁷

natam primum e medicina nemo dubitabit ac specie salutari inrepsisse velut altiorem sanctioremque medicinam, ita blandissimis desideratissimisque promissis addidisse vires religionis, ad quas maxime etiam nunc caligat humanum genus, atque, ut hoc quoque successerit, miscuisse artes mathematicas, nullo non avido futura de sese sciendi atque ea e caelo verissime peti credente. ita possessis hominum sensibus triplici vinculo in tantum fastigii adolevit, ut hodieque etiam in magna parte gentium praevaleat et in oriente regum regibus imperet.

That it first originated in medicine, no one entertains a doubt; or that, under the plausible guise of promoting health, it insinuated itself among mankind, as a higher and more holy branch of the medical art. Then, in the next place, to promises the most seductive and the most flattering, it has added all the resources of religion, a subject upon which, at the present day, man is still entirely in the dark. Last of all, to complete its universal sway, it has incorporated with itself the astrological art; there being no man who is not desirous to know his future destiny, or who is not ready to believe that this knowledge may with the greatest certainty be obtained, by observing the face of the heavens. The senses of men being thus enthralled by a three-fold bond, the art of magic has attained an influence so mighty, that at the present day even, it holds sway throughout a great part of the world, and rules the kings of kings in the East.

That’s the background and tradition against which the defixio is set—the tradition is so pervasive the power to “bind and loose” given to Saint Peter according to Matthew can only be understood in this context.⁸

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Addendum

I had been looking for, but failing to find, a good citation showing Greek magical practices incorporated those of the Near East to a large extent, which I knew to be the case. I finally found one in Gordon and Simón’s Introduction to Magical Practice in the Latin West:

In the late Republic, individuals such as the Pythagorean Nigidius Figulus (pr. 58 BCE), who almost certainly studied abroad, had access to a range of Greek occultic sources, themselves mediating material from Babylonia and Egypt.

It seems to be a well enough known fact it is simply taken for granted.

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Read subsequent articles in the Defixiones series

Part 2: Malefic Traditional

Part 3: Sympathy for Sauron

Part 4: Bargaining with the Gods

Part 5: Secundina’s Beef

Part 6: More Than Money Can Buy

Part 7: The Punic Curse Trail

Part 8: Hellenism, Schmellenism

Part 9: The Celtic Undercurrents of Bath

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Notes

1. Roman Inscriptions of Britain (RIB), RIB 2404.14, 117–38 CE.
2. Πλάτων (Plato), Πολιτεία (Republic), 2.364c, ca. 375 BCE, my emphasis. Paul Shorey’s 1969 translation. Κατάδεσμοι is translated as “enchantments”, while the other term translated here as “spells” is ἐπαγωγαῖς.
3. Matthew Dickie, “Magic in the Roman Historians”, in Magical Practice in the Latin West, Papers from the International Conference Held at the University of Zaragoza, 30 Sept.–1 Oct. 2005, Richard Gordon & Francisco Marco Simón, eds., 2010. The Publius Cornelius Tacitus work referred to is Ab Excessu divi Augusti Historiarum Libri (“Books of History from the Death of the Divine Augustus”), ?–116 CE, commonly referred to as Annales because of its year-by-year structure.
4. Friedhelm Hoffmann, “Part I, Antiquity”, The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present, David J. Collins, S. J., ed., 2015.
5. Ibid.
6. Neo-Sumerian Texts, Urnammu no. 28, ii 13–14., cited in Graham Cunningham, Deliver Me from Evil: Mesopotamian Incantations, 2500-1500 BC, 1997.
7. Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder), Naturalis Historia (Natural History), 30.1, 77–79 CE. John Bostock’s translation, 1855.
8. Seon Yong Kim, “Ancient Binding Spells, Amulets and Matt 16.18–19: Revisiting August Dell’s Proposal a Century Later”, New Testament Studies, 2016.
9. Gordon & Simón, “Introduction”, Gordon & Simón, eds., 2010.

Finding tradition in revolution

It is impossible to conceal my delight in describing the PDF coming originally from the pen of signore professore dottore Umberto Eco, and now available for download via JSTOR. Reconstructed from notes once thought lost and written during his stint as a guest lecturer at Colombia’s School of the Arts discussing postcolonial film theory, it is the first posthumous publication of what one hopes and imagines will become numerous from such a prolific and dearly missed writer. For those who, like me, fetishize actual books of paper, we can only pray some independent publisher such as McSweeney’s or Little, Brown will produce such an edition.

As Eco himself has said, “Now, everyone is a writer, but who will read them?” The phenomenon he describes is essentially an escalation of the postmodern dilemma via the multitude of texts emanating from around the globe via the internet. Under these conditions which democratize the ability to write and publish, and with the accompanying proliferation of texts, there is also a corresponding erosion of textual authority, as well as a reduction in the credibility readers can attach to any given text, even including an inability to determine a work’s authenticity.

Nonetheless, tanquam ex ungue leonem—after having thoroughly absorbed this book, it’s difficult to believe its provenance could ever have been in any serious doubt.

The work follows Foucault’s Pendulum (Il pendolo di Foucault)—and follows it not just in a chronological sense. Eco pursues the same major themes of his earlier book in this new work, The Da Vinci Code.

Much like Jorge Luis Borges, an author both admired and often emulated by Eco, he delivers the plot in an almost offhand manner within Pendulum:

Jesus was not crucified, and for that reason the Templars denied the Crucifix. The legend of Joseph of Arimathea covers a deeper truth: Jesus, not the Grail, landed in France, among the cabalists of Provence. Jesus is the metaphor of the King of the World, the true founder of the Rosicrucians. And who landed with Jesus? His wife. In the Gospels why aren’t we told who was married at Cana? It was the wedding of Jesus, and it was a wedding that could not be discussed, because the bride was a public sinner, Mary Magdalene.

Unlike Borges, however, and much to our edification and enjoyment, Eco returns in this second novel to do full justice to the themes only touched on previously.

Even the choice of titles for these two works bears some discussion. If Foucault’s Pendulum was ambivalent and vacillating, the disaster-prone experiment of an obscure academician, The Da Vinci Code has been collated and made manifest as a complete and coherent system—and quite as masterfully as the titular Renaissance polymath (and of course the author thus identifies himself with Leonardo, since, as a semiotician, he is a master of signs and hidden meanings—in short, codes). And though the unraveling of the code is the matter of the book, this is done in due course, revealing all its glory.

In the light of this concluding installment of the tale of the hidden elect, we see the sidereal day which is taken by a Foucault Pendulum to complete its full rotation at the Pole (thus demonstrating the very earth’s rotational movement) become the timeline within which Robert and Sofie must penetrate the mystery of the forces secretly governing the world.

Pendulum and Da Vinci begin in nearly the same place: each in a Parisian museum—the Musée des Arts et Métiers and the Musée du Louvre, respectively. In the first, it is evening, and Casaubon is looking for a place to conceal himself until after its closing, while in the second, the museum has already closed, and it is night with Saunière running for his life.

In both cases, the perspective is of one in mortal peril. And in fact, in both cases, they are killed—implicitly just beyond its close in the first novel, and explicitly followed through on at the beginning of the next. Though he manages to flee the museum, Casaubon can’t throw off the evil forces pursuing him, and Saunière, too, bows to the inevitable, turning his own death into the first of many clues.

The lush descriptions opening both books can also be seen as complementary as well; from the first:

The copper sphere gave off pale, shifting glints as it was struck by the last rays of the sun that came through the great stained-glass windows.

The imagery is continued in the second; the sinister chiaroscuro reflecting the coming descent into a world of dark conundra and omnipresent danger:

A telephone was ringing in the darkness—a tinny, unfamiliar ring. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on. Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed.

In particular, the transformation of ordinary things into threatening ones is echoed: In the case of the first, the pendulum: “bird’s head, spear’s tip, obverse helmet” And in the second, more subtly, the “unfamiliar” phone, the too-large bed, looming as if to fall upon and crush Robert. In general, there is a refining of the language; its descriptions are less overt, its symbolism more powerful and pure.

As Casaubon attempts to fight off his feelings of trepidation in Pendulum, we get his internal dialogue:

You know what museums are, no one’s ever been devoured by the Mona Lisa—an androgynous Medusa only for esthetes—and you are even less likely to be devoured by Watt’s engine, a bugbear only for Ossianic and Neo-Gothic gentlemen, a pathetic compromise, really, between function and Corinthian elegance, handle and capital, boiler and column, wheel and tympanum.

Which, in addition to setting up a series of images of the neutered objects on display, also prefigures the imagery of Da Vinci, in which it is revealed this same painting is actually the artist’s own self portrait, with its ambivalent gender reflecting the sacred union of male and female, its title an anagram pointing to the gods and goddesses of Ancient Egypt.

Once the museum has closed, Casaubon considers sleeping since he will have to wait several hours but discards the idea as too dangerous—or does he? What if he does sleep and then awakens as Langdon? It’s a trope Eco explores in The Cemetery of Prague (Il cimitero di Praga, also set in Paris), wherein there is an implication Simone Simonini’s memory gaps, taken together with entries in his diary by the mysterious Abbé Dalla Piccola, mean he sometimes wakes up in a different persona.

A similar motif of another self also appears in The Island of the Day Before (L’isola del giorno prima), wherein Roberto becomes obsessed with the notional existence of his evil doppelgänger, Ferrante.

The timeline of the two novels bears out this reading: Casaubon tells us, “The Masters would not come until close to midnight.” And in Da Vinci, Langdon awakens close by, shortly after midnight, when the last of the sénéchaux has been murdered.

Nonetheless, it is important to recall while it is natural to identify Robert Langdon as a resurrection (or more accurately, renaissance, as we shall see) of Pendulum’s narrator, especially since he even styles himself a “private eye of learning”, Belbo is the tale’s real hero, who, together with Diotallevi has already been destroyed by the keepers of the plan at the opening of the book, and whose clues Casaubon subsequently follows to his own doom. That torch clearly passes from Jacopo Belbo to Jacques Saunière in Da Vinci, in his role as the keeper and revealer of secrets.

Again, as with Borges, Eco borrows the trappings of genre fiction—in the case of this diptych, the thriller—in order to subvert it, as well as to raise deeper issues as a self-declared “public intellectual”. Here, two of the most inflammatory scholarly and social issues of our time: the feminist/ post-feminist challenge to patriarchal authority; and the textual construction of meaning and value.

His first novel, The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa), too, is parodical and indeed deconstructive of genre fiction, with William of Baskerville being a clear reference, if not recontextualization, of Sherlock Holmes as a 12th-century scholastic. Some have cited passages such as the following one as discrediting Eco’s authorship of Da Vinci because of their supposed literary ineptitude, but reread, it is deliberate:

Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow’s peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.

In addition to being a clearly absurd sendup of the tropes and stylistic foibles of the genre he’s playing in, it is also a clear echo of Belbo’s writing in his play-within-a-play novel in Pendulum. Indeed, Da Vinci might be intended to be construed as that novel, which contains similar imagery:

Rodin, speaking in this way, becomes fearsome. All the bloodthirsty ambition, all the execrable sacrilege that had smoldered in the breasts of the Renaissance popes, now appears on the brow of this son of Loyola. I see clearly: an insatiable thirst for power stirs his impure blood, a burning sweat soaks him, a nauseating vapor spreads around him.

Eco’s selection of an American protagonist, at first somewhat jarring, fits with the location the book was written in, as well as his fascination with the culture of the New World which he documented in his essay collection, Travels in Hyperreality (Il costume di casa).

Then of course we have the time Robert is awakened: given as 12:32 AM, the first three numbers imply a simple sequence—the first code of the book—the second 2 is clearly really 2 × 2: 4, thus completing the sequence 1, 2, 3, 4. Not only is this the Pythagorean Tetractys, well known to Eco, that symbol is also used to describe the pendulum at the beginning of the earlier book (emphasis mine):

[…] the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane’s dimensions, the triadic beginning of π, the secret quadratic nature of the root […].

But while I have thus far focused on the continuity between the two books, there is also a seismic shift worth noting: Casaubon’s is the point of view of a cynical academic who sees all religion as a turning away from the Enlightenment values in which he believes and toward irrationality. Da Vinci’s Langdon, while steeped in similar ivory-tower ideals and scepticisms, sees the defeat of Christianity and return to the primal religion of the Sacred Feminine as both just and desirable. The perspective of the first novel is made clear in this passage:

[…] in an enormous case in the rear, life-size and three-dimensional, a lion attacked by a serpent. The apparent reason for this piece was its medium, that it was made entirely of glass; but there had to be a deeper reason. Where had I seen this figure before? Then I remembered that the Demiurge, Yaldabaoth, the first Archon, odious creation of Sophia, who was responsible for the world and its fatal flaw, had the form of a serpent and of a lion, and that his eyes cast fire.

Striking in particular is the transformation from a dreadful and ancient Sophia, imperfect creator of an imperfect world, to her namesake in the second book, Sophie, who embodies the lineage of Christ as well as the Sacred Feminine.

Where the first novel selects some of the tropes of the Romantic embrace of the anti-patriarchal, such as the kabbalah and alchemy, in addition to searching farther afield into Afro-Cuban mysticism unsullied by Europeans, the second taps into a different vein, one explored by many writers—two in particular emulated by Eco: Shelley and Hugo—Gnosticism, a tradition that largely managed to avoid subsumption by Christianity.

Both novels are interrogations of Christianity via elements of Romantic literature, driven principally by the perceived complicity of the Church with the injustices and depredations of early industrial society. They succeed in isolating the fundamentally theological and symbolic nature of the contest, echoing recent Romantic theory in their restatements of the centrality of religious conflict to the literary mode’s rhetoric.

In Da Vinci, however, Eco raises a tripartite claim: primordial human religions featured a Goddess, their societies were matriarchal, and the Sacred Feminine remains instinctual among all people. Further, because of the presence of these underlying elements at odds with our supposed values, our culture has been, and remains, in continuous conflict and crisis, and may remain so until we fully understand these essential truths and work to properly reconcile the human and the divine.

How the megapolis got its modern shape (Taishō, Part 2B)

Among many other changes ushered in by the Taishō era (大正時代, 1912–26), increasing industrialization caused a huge shift of Japan’s population away from rural areas and into urban centers. None more so than Tokyō itself, which naturally needed to expand to accommodate the influx of people. The growth also shifted traditional centers within the city toward the west, continuing into the postwar growth of areas such as Shibuya (渋谷) and Shinjuku (新宿).

While Nihombashi (日本橋) had been the center of commerce in the Edo era and remained so through the Meiji period (江戸時代, 1603–1868 and 明治, 1868–1912), with the sudden and massive growth in Taishō, other areas naturally began to sprout as well.

While the centers for other activities moved into new areas, retail sales remained largely in Nihombashi, in particular at massive new department stores such as Mitsukoshi (三越) and Shirokiya (白木屋). The former store still has its main branch in Nihombashi, while the latter’s setbacks due to the Great Kantō Earthquake (関東大地震, Kantō dai-jishin, 1923) and war were less recoverable, though it still has a few stores, including its headquarters in Honolulu. But Marunouchi (丸の内) and Ginza (銀座) blossomed as districts for business and pleasure, respectively.

Marunouchi, a district I mentioned in Part 2A as the location for the first biru, was a small move—essentially from one side of Tokyō Station to the other. Nihombashi sits just to the east of the station, while Marunouchi grew just to its west. The area, a filled-in portion of Tokyō Bay, had been purchased from the Meiji government in 1890 by the Mitsubishi company (三菱), being known for a while as the Mitsubishi Meadow (三菱ヶ原, Mitsubishigahara). The name Marunouchi attests the area’s origin as part of the castle’s fortifications, as it means “within the circle” (i.e., of walls).

Things began to change in Taishō, and in addition to headquartering their own company there, Mitsubishi began to develop the area for other businesses as well. In particular, the major banks moved in. The Tokyō Station building I discussed previously was notably built on the Marunouchi side of the station. The Mitsubishi Group still owns much of the area today, and Japan’s top three banks remain headquartered there. Marunouchi also presents a stark contrast between old and new, with the moat separating a feudal stronghold from the skyscrapers of one of the world’s largest business districts.

Nearly due south of Marunouchi, what was to become Ginza was a neighborhood of tightly packed wooden buildings, much like the rest of the Edo-period city. What cleared the way for the area’s growth in the new era was not a grand plan, like the Haussmannization of Paris, but a fire.

Fires were all too common among the Edo buildings, because of their crowding as well as the building materials—mainly wood and paper. Smallish blazes were so common there was a saying: “Fires and fights are the flowers of Edo”.¹ But in 1872, a large one gutted most of Ginza. The Meiji government saw an upside to this and decided to rebuild the area as a Westernized model of modernization, which came to be known as the “Bricktown” (煉瓦街, Rengagai).

The main planner of the Ginza Bricktown was expatriate Irish architect Thomas Waters, who had somehow managed to build a career in Japan even before Japan’s opening to the West. By the time of his work in Ginza, he was employed as Surveyor-General and foreign advisor to the Meiji Government. Nonetheless, by 1878, he fell prey to souring attitudes toward foreign designers and left seeking better fortunes elsewhere.

Waters did see the Bricktown through to its completion in 1875, but it was hardly a smashing success. While the Georgian-style buildings were an impressive sight, they were ill-suited to the humid environment of Japan, tending to be quite damp and prone to mildew. This meant few people were willing to pay the high asking prices, and many of the buildings stood empty.

The area’s broad main thoroughfare, Ginza Dōri (銀座通り), initially mainly for pedestrians, was restructured to include streetcar and automobile traffic as well. This was essentially a road-building pilot for the country, and it was decided Nicolson pavement would be used. This consisted of wooden blocks with asphalt in the interstices and was commonly used in Europe from the mid-19th century. Such a road was obviously cheap to construct, as well as being hard wearing, softer on the feet of both pedestrians and horses, as well as reducing the noise of hooves and in city centers.

But the new road didn’t work out well either. The wooden surface was already obsolescent for reasons the Japanese were soon to discover: when it rained—as it frequently does in Japan—the blocks floated away, and when it was hot, the asphalt melted.² Also, while the areas for pedestrians and vehicles were clearly delineated by the willows the district came to be known for, cars and trolleys vied for right of way in a street without lanes marked out for each. In the end, the street caught fire, thus bookending Taishō Ginza between conflagrations.

The new brick buildings did provide a decent amount of fire resistance, and the blaze only affected the street, which was replaced with a more conventional one afterward. As for the willows, even though they remain strongly associated with the area—there is still an annual willow celebration in Ginza—a typhoon had severely damaged them even before the street fire, and they were replaced with hardier ginkgos.

The Tokyō subway, now so central to the city’s identity, also began, if not in Ginza proper, with the Ginza Line (Ginza-sen, 銀座線). It was the result of a 1914 visit to London by businessman Hayakawa Noritsugu (早川 徳次). He saw the need for a system like the Underground, which was to become the first subway in East Asia.

At its 1927 opening, the subway was only the portion of the modern Ginza line stretching from Ueno (上野) to Asakusa (浅草). It was too short to be useful, falling well short of its aim to run through Ginza and end at Shimbashi (新橋), already serviced by other trains, making it a sensible terminus.

Nonetheless, the novelty of the subway seems to have won out, as people would wait sometimes as long as two hours to travel along the five minutes of track. Just as the city itself, the line continued to extend westward, and its modern terminus is now Shibuya.

This tale of the difficulties in getting around in the rapidly swelling city is far from unique. Tanizaki Junichirō wrote of the poor state of the roads, and related the following of the overburdened streetcar system:³

For the general populace there was no means of transport but the streetcar. Car after car would come by full and leave people waiting at stops. At rush hour the press was murderous. Hungry and tired, the office worker and the laborer, in a hurry to get home, would push their way aboard a car already hopelessly full, each one for himself, paying no attention to the attempts of the conductor to keep order […]. The crowds, a black mountain outside a streetcar would push and shove and shout […]. They put up with it because they were Japanese, I heard it said, but if a European or American city were subjected to such things for even a day there would be rioting.

The crowding he refers to meshes with the modern image of the city, but seems to have been still worse; there is an orderliness and etiquette involved in ridership today even under extreme conditions. Obasan seem the sole exception—they routinely throw elbows and stamp on insteps to get to the coveted seats beside train doors. The phenomenon inspired the term obatarian (オバタリアン), a punning portmanteau of おば (oba, “middle-aged woman”) and the Japanese title, 『バタリアン』(Batarian, kanaized from battalion), of the 1985 film The Return of the Living Dead.

By the late Meiji period, Ginza began to come into its own with the advent of bazaars in the area. The forerunners of modern department stores, these large, multi-story buildings housed a large number of small shops selling goods such as toys, stationery, and books. By 1902, there were seven such bazaars in Ginza.

The other element cementing the status of Ginza in Taishō was the opening of Café Printemps in 1911. A painter named Matsuyama Shozo (松山 省三), returning from studying abroad in Paris, wanted to reproduce the atmosphere of the cafés of the French capital. He succeeded; people from the art world, such as painters and poets, as well as others who had been abroad, came there to socialize. The café was quickly followed by imitators like Café Paulista, Café Lion, Café Tiger, etc.

In short, Ginza became what is known as a sakariba. Made up of the words 盛り (sakari) “height” and 場 (ba) “place”, it might be directly translated as “amusement quarter”. Even this term was changing in Taishō, moving toward its modern meaning as a place with crowds, neon lights, and dozens of small drinking establishments.

The Edo-period origins of the sakariba were actually of three types: open outdoor spaces where people could gather in times of disaster along riverbanks, etc. and which in good times could be used by vendors and those offering attractions; areas outside of temples, where similar activities occurred, such as Asakusa; and red-light districts such as Yoshiwara (吉原). Ginza was the first of a new breed, according to Japanese studies professor Sepp Linhart:⁴

Ginza’s rise to preeminence […] mirrors the shift from entertainment catering to the old Tokugawa middle class of small businessmen and artisans to the new middle class of salaried white collar workers and professionals.

In Kurosawa Akira’s (黒澤明) 1949 film, Stray Dog (『野良犬』), the sakariba is the seedy underworld into which rookie homicide detective, Murakami (村上刑事; played by Mifune Toshiro, 三船敏郎), must blend if he is to find his stolen gun.

While it may seem strange, the crowdedness of these areas is part of the allure for the Japanese:⁵

What for many Europeans may be something quite unpleasant, seems to be for Japanese an enjoyable setting. Many Japanese […] simply cannot fall into a relaxed, leisurely mood if a sakariba is not full of people. They are disappointed if too few people are there […].

Japanese sociologist Ikei Nozomu even coined the term zattō no miryoku—“fascination of the crowd” (雑踏の魅力) to describe this element of the appeal of the sakariba.⁶

In any case, the emergence of the busy aspect of these districts seems to correspond to Ginza’s rise: Trendy shopfronts and innumerable cafes came to characterize the area, but, as previously noted, Ginza wasn’t really a retail center, it was one for window shopping and idling. Mobo and Moga flocked to the area, but mostly just to see and be seen—to be part of the crowd.

The activity was so specific to these people and this area, it was called gimbura (銀ブラ): “wasting time in Ginza”, derived from Ginza and ぶらぶら (burabura) “wandering aimlessly”. Fashionable attire was part of the gimbura scene, and single men could remove the awkwardness of strolling alone by hiring a “walking stick girl” (ステッキ ガール, sutekki gāru) to accompany them for two yen.

Even in the days of the 1918 Rice Riots (米騒動, kome sōdō), Nagai Kafū (永井 荷風, the pseudonym of Japanese writer Nagai Sōkichi, 永井 壮吉) detected a certain air of leisureliness among the dissidents in Ginza:⁷

I heard later that the rioting always occurred in the cool of evening. There was a good moon every evening during those days. Hearing that the rioters gathered menacingly before the houses of the wealthy when the evening had turned cool and the moon had come up, I could not put down a feeling that there was something easy and comfortable about it all. It went on for five or six days and then things returned to normal. On the night of the return to normal, it rained.

As Tanizaki noted with some bitterness of the era, “Old Japan had been left behind and new Japan had not yet come.”⁸ Many of the forms we associate with Tokyō as well as Japan emerged during Taishō, but as we have seen, many were only rough prototypes. The earthquake, economic depression, and WWII would ruin the chances for some of them to reach maturity, but others would eventually come to define modern Japan.

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Read subsequent articles in the Taishō series

Part 3A: Asakusa Movies

Part 3B: Asakusa Opera

Part 4: The Mysteries of Zūja-Go

Part 5: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan

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Read previous articles in the Taishō series

Part 1: Japan’s Turbulent Taishō

Part 2A: Epochal Architecture

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Notes

1. In Japanese, the saying runs: 火事と喧嘩は江戸の華 (kaji to kenka wa Edo no hana).
2. There were other issues with Nicolson pavement as well: it could be quite slippery when wet or icy, the blocks tended to rot, and when moisture seeped in, the blocks would swell, causing the surface to buckle. Susceptibility to fire could be dealt with by treating the blocks with creosote, but it’s a toxic chemical with a significant unpleasant smell.
3. 谷崎 潤一郎 (Tanizaki Junichirō), 『摂陽 随筆』(“Setsuyō Essay”), 1935, quoted in Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the Shogun’s Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867–1923, 1983, which I have consulted throughout.
4. Sepp Linhart, “Sakariba: zone of ‘evaporation’ between work and home?”, Interpreting Japanese Society: Anthropological Approaches, Joy Hendry, ed., 1998.
5. Ibid.
6. 池井 望 (Ikei Nozomu), 「盛 り場行 動. 論-空 間 と娯楽」 (“Behavioral Theory of the Sakariba: Theory Space and Entertainment”), 1973.
7. 永井 荷風 (Nagai Kafū), 「花火」 (Hanabi, “Fireworks”), 1919, quoted in Seidensticker, 1983.
8. Tanizaki, 1935.

Rapidly changing attitudes toward Western design (Taishō, Part 2A)

The Taishō period (大正時代, 1912–26) was a time of unprecedented urban expansion in Japan. By the middle of the era, Tokyo (東京) would take on the shape recognizable in the modern city, one completely different from the feudal city some older denizens would have recalled. Called Edo (江戸) during the Tokugawa Shogunate (徳川幕府, Tokugawa Bakufu, 1600–1868), the city was renamed and made Japan’s capital after the Meiji Restoration (明治維新, Meiji Ishin, 1868).

Already by the time of the Great Kantō Earthquake (関東大地震, Kantō dai-jishin, 1923), the population of the city alone was well over two million, and if we consider the suburban areas of the prefecture, the number rises to nearly four million. Underscoring the shift from rural to urban, as of the 1920 census, more than half the city’s residents had not been not born there.¹

Along with these changes in population, an architectural Westernization also occurred, initially in a strictly literal way during Meiji, but soon coming to take on a distinctly Japanese flavor.

Japanese culture’s ability to take outside influences, adapt them, and integrate them has come to be emblematic. This reputation reached its peak together with the nation’s economic dominance in the ’80s, particularly regarding their manufacturing sector.

The phenomenon was by no means new; their more regional borrowings such as the adoption of Chinese Hanzi as kanji (both 漢字), and from which their other scripts, hiragana (平仮名) and katakana (片仮名) also ultimately derive is an early example. Kanji and Hanzi are closely related systems of ideographic writing, while hiragana is the main syllabary for Japanese and katakana is a syllabary generally reserved for words of foreign (other than Chinese) origin. While this certainly enriched the Japanese language, it also created one of the most Byzantine writing systems ever.

For a more era-appropriate example, there is a whole category of food known as yoshoku (洋食), translating as “Western food”. According to an article in the Japan Times:²

But what it really means is European dishes as interpreted and assimilated by Japanese chefs over a century ago, at the time when foreign foods—and chief among them meat dishes—were being discovered for the first time.

A corollary term, yōkan (洋館), came into being at this same time, meaning “Western-style buildings”, but just as with the culinary term, it referred to the Japanese version of European architecture, focused particularly on the Meiji and Taishō eras. After Taishō, it’s simply referred to as kindai kenchiku (近代建築), “modern architecture”.

The move from wholesale borrowing to adaptation can be seen in changing attitudes toward Western architecture between Meiji and Taishō. In Meiji, Japan didn’t wait passively for Western ideas to arrive on its shores, it sought them voraciously, sending hundreds of scholars, diplomats, businessmen, etc. abroad to be schooled in the most modern thinking available. The Iwakura Mission (岩倉使節団, Iwakura Shisetsudan) was one particularly large and well-known venture, with over 100 individuals participating in a three-year (1871–1873) tour of the United States and Europe. The main objectives of the mission were to begin renegotiation of treaties with these powers, as well as making a thorough study of the modern industrial, political, military, and educational systems in the countries visited. Foreign experts were also invited to Japan to share their knowledge, and these factors together spurred Japan’s industrial revolution.

Architecture was far from an exception, and many Western-style constructions sprang up across the country. A still-extant red-brick neoclassical example is Tokyo’s Ministry of Justice Building (Hōmushōhonkan 法務省本館, now with 旧, “old” appended, Hōmushōkyūhonkan, as it is no longer in primary use). Already an architect of note for some 20 years in his native Germany, Wilhelm Böckmann was invited in 1886 by the Meiji government to rebuild Tokyo into a modern capital. A year later, he had his partner, Hermann Ende, join him, and together they designed the Ministry of Justice.

But the expatriate pair’s plans for a Japanese branch office together with a grand Hausmannesque redesign of Tokyo fell through, partly because of the massive budgetary requirements, but still more so because of a growing backlash against Western architects. Even design icon Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Imperial Hotel (teikoku hoteru, 帝国ホテル) was to be a fixture of Tokyo from Taishō until its demolition in the ’60s, returned home rather than remaining to see it completed.

Although the building and its architect are much more fondly thought of by the Japanese today, Western-style buildings as interpreted and designed by Japanese architects were already taking over. An excellent example is Tokyo’s Central Station (中央停車場, Chūō teishaba, now known simply as Tokyo Station, 東京駅, Tōkyō-Eki), a building still in use today. Another neoclassical edifice, it was designed by Tatsuno Kingo and Kasai Manji (辰野 金吾, 葛西 萬司), the former had studied in Europe and designed the Bank of Japan headquarters building in Tokyo (Nippon Ginkō, 日本銀行, also still in use) in 1890.

After some delays caused by the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, the station was finally opened in 1914. Though it shares several features with the Böckmann-Ende design both in terms of style and materials, the two stand in stark contrast: The Ministry of Justice Building would look at home in any European capital of the day, while Tatsuno’s design is unmistakably Japanese, intended as, and remaining to some extent, a national symbol.

Also in the Marunouchi (丸の内) area where Tokyo Station sits, the Marine Insurance Building, completed in 1917, was the first building to be designated a biru (ビル). Short for the kanaized English word “building” (birudingu, ビルディング), the word has come to describe most office buildings in Japan. Although much more restrained in terms of ornamentation, the Marine Insurance Building facade shows the progression of the Japanese-Western style toward an Art-Deco sleekness and consolidation of details into geometrical shapes.

The use of the term biru is an interesting linguistic point as well: Foreign words, and in particular English ones, were borrowed into Japanese at an unprecedented rate at this time. Some of these words, apart from mobo and moga, which I’ve already remarked on, include mama and papa, which came to nearly supplant the native terms. But again, words derived from foreign ones but so altered by Japanese usage as to be nearly unrecognizable, include rumpen and saboru. In Japanese, ルンペン, meaning “loafer”, comes from German Lumpenproletariat and サボる, “to skip” (work or class), comes from French sabotage, respectively. The latter is interestingly written in mixed kana with -ru appended in hiragana to turn the borrowed, abbreviated word into a Japanese verb.

The Ginza Wako building (銀座和光) provides an excellent example of the epochal sweep from Edo village to Taishō modernity: watchmaker Hattori Kintarō (服部 金太郎) identified the location of the wooden Asano Newspaper building (朝野新聞社屋, Chōyashinbunshaoku) as ideal for his new shop, commanding a central crossing of Ginza for his new shop. Incidentally, Hattori’s business was to evolve into an internationally well-known one: Seiko. He purchased and razed the old structure, replacing it with a Europeanized one, incorporating a clock tower in 1894.

The Hattori Watch Shop (服部時計店, Hattoritokeiten) was in turn destroyed to make way for the current building, which houses the evolution of another of Hattori’s ventures, a department store now known as Wako (株式). This building is iconic of modern Tokyo; a Taishō Deco-neoclassical structure made of concrete and steel designed by Watanabe Jin (渡辺 仁), also incorporating a clock tower.

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Read subsequent articles in the Taishō series

Part 2B: When Tokyo Moved West

Part 3A: Asakusa Movies

Part 3B: Asakusa Opera

Part 4: The Mysteries of Zūja-Go

Part 5: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan

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Read previous articles in the Taishō series

Part 1: Japan’s Turbulent Taishō

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Notes

1. Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the Shogun’s Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867–1923, 1983, which I’ve drawn from throughout.
2. Robbie Swinnerton, “Toyoken: Narisawa’s take on ‘yoshoku’ cuisine”, Japan Times, 2014, emphasis mine.

The sudden sensationalism of the second millennium BCE (Logic of Lies, Part 3/ Late Bronze Age Collapse, Part 3)

Who knew the Late Bronze Age Collapse (LBAC) would suddenly blow up on social media? A few weeks ago, articles began appearing in my Facebook feed from a variety of sources. The first was from Atlas Obscura, a site whose stories I have enjoyed in the past:¹

A Centuries-Old Frieze, Newly Deciphered, Tells the Story of the End of the Bronze Age

This immediately struck me as wrong on several levels. First it should be millennia-, (roughly 3200 years) not “centuries-old”, and why is it “newly deciphered” rather than discovered, and then there is not a story of “the End of the Bronze Age” but many of them across a large geographical area, and finally there’s an implication the inscribers of the frieze somehow knew they had been living in the Bronze Age—this is it, guys; tomorrow we switch to iron.

The article itself is more circumspect, noting there is controversy about some claims made by Institute for Luwian Studies president, Eberhard Zangger, including the possibility of forgery.

As many of these articles note, villagers in Beyköy, Turkey, dug up the original frieze upon which this text was inscribed in 1878. It seems to have already been broken into chunks. Georges Perrot carefully transcribed everything, even though he did not know the language, before the villagers used the original pieces in the foundation of a mosque. Perrot’s notes were lost, but a supposed copy of a copy was found.

The story was rapidly echoed around the internet on sites running the gamut from tabloids to “legitimate” mainstream press to scientific journals:

• Mysterious civilization of “Sea Peoples” were wiped out by “world war zero” 3,000 years ago (Daily Mail)
• Archaeologists decipher 3,200-year-old stone telling of invasion of mysterious sea people (The Independent)
• Entire Civilization of “Sea Peoples” May Have Been Wiped Out in “World War Zero,” Archaeologists Say (Inquisitr)
• Devastating “World War ZERO” destroyed ancient Mediterranean civilisations and plunged Europe into a dark age (The Mirror)
• World War Zero brought down mystery civilization of “sea people” (New Scientist)
• Luwian hieroglyphic inscription explains the end of the Bronze Age (Phys.org)
• Scientists proclaim a new civilization in the Aegean Bronze Age (Popular Archaeology)
• 3200 Jahre alte Hieroglyphen könnten das Rätsel um den Untergang der Imperien im östlichen Mittelmeer lösen (Der Spiegel, “3200-year-old hieroglyphs could solve the puzzle of the downfall of the empires of the eastern Mediterranean”)

Despite the lurid headlines, all the articles I’ve seen contain the necessary disclaimers if you actually read them, though buried in the late paragraphs.

To quickly clear the air, World War Zero is an absurd claim. People in Shang Dynasty China (商朝, ca. 1600 BCE–ca. 1045 BCE), for example, not only were completely uninvolved in any warfare in the region, they were entirely unlikely to have been aware of the calamities of the LBAC, or for that matter, even the existence of these civilizations. At most, the area involved in the LBAC stretched from modern Italy to Afghanistan, and the large nations needed for such a conflict were also not warring against each other, but fending off the raiding Sea Peoples, who, as the name suggests, did not constitute a nation at all, but several ragtag migrating groups.²

As to the Luwians, just looking into the name, we see it in Mycenaean Greek in the toponym ru-wa-ni-jo (Λυϝανίος/ Luwanios), which shows a genitive ending, so it is “land of the Luwians”. However, it is generally accepted Luwian is a language, and never spoken of either in that language, or those used nearby as a people, and so this name is effectively “land where Luwian is spoken”. Luwian was widely spoken in Anatolia, and indeed within the Hittite kingdom, particularly in the capital, Ḫattuša. The language was closely related to Hittite as a fellow member of the Anatolian branch of Indo-European, and the hieroglyphic script was commonly used on Hittite political monuments. And far from being known by only a few, the language is well documented. It’s also worth noting no serious scholars of the language are on board with Zangger.

Fred Woudhuizen, the Luwian language specialist of the group, also tried to connect it to Etruscan, even though most agree the latter language to not even be Indo-European. The Institute also claimed to have deciphered the Phaistos Disc, which serious scholars have found indecipherable without additional data from other sources. The many and varied proposed solutions have been labeled as classic examples of pseudoarchaeology.

That’s the main items debunked, but James Mellaart, in whose notes the copy of the transcription that was eventually translated was found, is definitely worth a bit of discussion as well. In what is now known as the Dorak Affair, Mellaart, through a highly suspicious set of events, presented extensive sketches and notes of what he claimed to be a group of antiquities from the Yortan culture, the so-called “Dorak Treasure”, to the British Institute of Archaeology.

None of the details, however, could be verified—the address in Izmir where he supposedly viewed the items did not correspond to the residence he said he visited. Subsequently, Turkish authorities came to believe he was party to smuggling the treasure he had described, permanently banning Mellaart from the country.

The treasure likely never existed and was simply a hoax perpetrated by Mellaart and his wife, though others insist the CIA was involved. In any case, Mellaart had to issue a public apology, and his reputation as a serious archaeologist was forever marred.

Although incorrect as to Metal and the Fonz, Chuck Klosterman was prescient about the news media. He describes how,³

It’s not that the truth is being ignored; it’s just that the truth is inevitably combined with a bunch of crap that’s supposed to make news stories unbiased and credible, but really just makes them longer and less clear.

And since then, there has been a natural escalation of the trend, such that articles can make exaggerated and sensationalist claims, then include far past the TL; DR limit the information this “news” is widely disputed. They have thus tricked you into clicking, told you a bunch of useless nonsense, and then, as an afterthought, let you know they have wasted your time.

The other interesting thing about the rapid spread of misinformation is the growing field of churnalism. Most of these articles don’t even bother to appear original—they simply repeat the story, and the outlets the stories appear in don’t create content—they simply aggregate it. The New Scientist article appears to have been the original.⁴

None of these articles says anything different from one another—they all contain some version of the same information in a longer or shorter format. Even the Zangger quotes they use seem to come from a press release, or at most a quick perusal of the Institute’s website, rather than real interviews or research.

Maybe the worst part about this sensationalist rumormongering is it’s the second time around for the Institute’s far-fetched claims. All the same information, barring the suspicious inscription, is old news—there was already a flurry of shallow reportage back in May 2016. And it was thoroughly debunked by serious scholars back then, but no one let that stop them.

My version of the article would have gone something like this:

Fringe Scientists Advance Dubious Smoking Gun for LBAC

Legitimate community gives emphatic thumbs down

Eberhard Zangger has a story for you. It’s an epic one, with invasions, counterinvasions, and civil wars. Egyptians, Babylonians, Hittites, Minoans, Trojans, Greeks, and more are caught up in its immense sweep.

But no matter how grand and appealing this tale is, very little is given in the way of actual evidence, and indeed, it flies in the face of what is generally accepted in the field.

And while the very nature of science is that conventional wisdom must yield to new evidence, what the Institute for Luwian Studies offers is quite slim: an inscription of dubious provenance, rather than hard archaeological data.

Homer’s tales of the Trojan War, which also figure into Zangger’s theory, do not constitute fact (and similarly, the accepted view is they contain only a kernel of truth—the Mycenaean Greeks seemingly did engage in conflicts with Trojans in western Anatolia), and until corresponding evidence comes to light (as the ruins of Troy did), they remain merely stories.

Furthermore, the inscription comprising the linchpin of the theory is yet to be revealed. In a move more Barnumesque than befitting the scientific community’s gravitas, the Institute for Luwian Studies is actually only teasing a December unveiling.

The Institute for Luwian Studies’ first salvo came in May 2016: Zangger went wide with a sensationalist “World War Zero” angle together with zero evidence, but said he expected to find it using boots-on-the-ground archaeological digs in the region. Even if this effort had gone forward, despite the shoddy science of trying to make evidence fit a theory, that’s not what transpired.

Instead, an unnamed person sifting through the notes of a discredited archaeologist came forward with a possible forgery purporting to be a copy of a copy of a transcribed no-longer extant Luwian inscription, which just happened to be the puzzle piece Zangger needed to prove what he has been arguing.

Although it seems reasonable to wait and see what information is put forward in December, it is also worth noting this PR campaign also involves a Zangger book launch, so I’d recommend taking all this as just one step removed from a claim of ancient aliens.

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Read subsequent articles in the Logic of Lies series

Part 3 Addendum: Fruit from a Poisonous Pseudoarchaeological Tree

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 subsequent articles in the Late Bronze Age Collapse series

Part 3 Addendum: Fruit from a Poisonous Pseudoarchaeological Tree

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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

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Read previous articles in the Late Bronze Age Collapse series

Part 1: Apocalypse BC

Part 2: Whither the Wanax

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Notes

1. Natasha Frost, “A Centuries-Old Frieze, Newly Deciphered, Tells the Story of the End of the Bronze Age”, Atlas Obscura, October 2017.
2. I’m paraphrasing Eric Cline, “World War Zero or Zero World War?”, Rogue Classicism, May 2016.
3. Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, 2003.
4. Colin Barras, “World War Zero brought down mystery civilisation of ‘sea people’”, New Scientist, May 2016.

The “accidental” action star (Mythmaking in the Martial Arts, Part 3)

Linda Lee Cadwell: When Bruce did the demonstration in 1964, before he had even come back to Oakland, where we lived at the time, I had received a phone call from William Dozier’s office.

Shannon Lee: Jay Sebring, the famous hairstylist, happened to see my father at the Long Beach Internationals, and he cut the hair of William Dozier, and he said, “Oh my God! You’ve got to see this guy—he’s amazing!”

Cadwell: When Bruce came home, I said to him, “You need to call this guy back: William Dozier. He’s a producer in Hollywood and he wants to see you.” That was the first inkling that, “Wow, I might be able to do something in Hollywood!” He never had any intention of going into show business. His passion was his martial arts, so he had a school in Seattle and a second school in Oakland. His plan was to open many, many schools all over the country.

I Am Bruce Lee is the most recent filmic hagiography of the deceased actor.¹ It’s conveniently available for free viewing on YouTube if you can stomach what’s essentially an hour-and-a-half infomercial for the Lee brand. His daughter and current mogul of his brand, Shannon Lee, was the executive producer, as well as appearing in front of the camera as an ostensible interviewee, along with her mother and co-beneficiary of the Bruce Lee estate, Cadwell. Their lines are scripted and well-rehearsed, and as can be seen above, Lee even attests events she was not only not present for, they took place some five years prior to her birth.

They want you to believe Bruce Lee becoming an action star was an accident.

To do this, first forget he grew up around show folk, including his father. Set aside his appearance in 21 films by 1964, as well as an unknown amount of Chinese opera, the main arena of his father’s fame. Ignore his having starred in The Orphan (《人海孤鴻》) pretty recently to the above events at 18. Pretend he wasn’t a child star whose body of work some have equated to Mickey Rooney’s.

To be clear, Lee was already a successful actor, and if he hadn’t had to leave Hong Kong under threat of arrest, he’d very likely have continued his career there.

I’ll relate yet another version of that story: gang challenge fights often took place on rooftops, and someone fell off, which may or may not have been Lee’s fault.² But if Lee could really have been connected to an actual death, it’s hard to believe he could ever have returned to Hong Kong.

Although its standing has no doubt been buoyed by his later fame, The Orphan, Lee’s last non-action film, is ranked among Hong Kong cinema’s top 100 films of all time.³

In the US, however, he was not well connected—film had yet to become as transnational as it is today. He knew he would need a gimmick to get noticed. Surveying the pop culture landscape as an astute player, he may have considered using his ability as a dancer, but kung fu (武術) was a much richer vein.

In the US Lee found himself in direct exposure to Asian martial arts had long since ceased being novel—in fact, it was both mainstream and commonplace. Already in 1945’s Blood on the Sun, James Cagney had played an American reporter working in Japan who, despite uncovering his host country’s sinister plot to conquer the world, has gone native, enjoying the pleasures of the baths (お風呂), as well as being a skilled judoka (柔道家). The Tanaka Memorial (田中上奏文 Tanaka Jōsōbun) around which the film’s plot revolves, is actually a thoroughly debunked forgery which nonetheless acted as a casus belli in the vein of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The film climaxes with a three-minute fight scene between Cagney’s Nick Condon and the villainous Captain Oshima (John Halloran) complete with judo throws, karate chops and kicks, and even some holds we would eventually see Lee use on screen. Far from a footnote, the film’s box office was $3.4M—a tidy sum for the day—and it also took home an Oscar.⁴ ⁵ More recently, the film has fallen out of favor because of its propagandistically anti-Japanese themes and use of yellowface.

Other prominent stars used Asian martial arts on screen throughout the ’40s and ’50s, including Edmund O’Brien and Spencer Tracy. Judo and karate dojos (道場) had sprung up across the US. Finally, Hong Kong’s long-standing wuxia and emerging kung fu genres of film were slowly finding audiences beyond America’s Chinatowns. Wuxia (武俠), meaning “martial heroes”, being a more fantasy-oriented genre of action film, often employing wire work and visual effects, in contrast to the more “realistic” aesthetic of the kung fu genre.

The Wong Fei-hung (黃飛鴻) serials, in particular, were standbys. Established in the late ’40s, they had already run to at least 59 films by the time of Lee’s arrival in the US. There would eventually be 119 films about this Cantonese folk hero, featuring huge stars like Jet Li (李连杰), Jackie Chan (房仕龍), and Sammo Hung (洪金寶) in the role.

And so, when Lee moved to Seattle and worked as a busboy, the revisionists will tell you he taught his coworkers kung fu in the alley behind the restaurant. However, a firsthand account from one of those people reflects something different:⁶

“I knew [Bruce Lee],” my mother tells me. “I worked with him in a restaurant when I was in high school.”

“Really?” This is now officially the only cool thing about her. “What was he like?”

“I don’t remember. No one liked him though. All that kung fu stuff; it looked ridiculous. Like a parody.”

Those who worked with Lee were a captive audience to his bid to parlay his showmanship and scant knowledge of martial arts into a career as an action star, but it seems they were not fans.

At Jun Fan Gung Fu (振藩武術; lit. “Bruce Lee Kung Fu”), he emphasized exhibitions and demos, in which he and his students often performed. His purpose was to get noticed—not necessarily to get more students for his kwoon (館—Cantonese for a kung fu school; 馆, guan in Mandarin), but more to gain notoriety—press mentions, photographs, whatever could help him with his real goal. It was during one such demonstration at a local high school he met his future wife.

That his sights were set on forging a new acting career is evidenced by his concurrently majoring in drama at the University of Washington. His majoring in philosophy is yet another myth.

It’s no accident Lee was discovered at Ed Parker’s tournament; first, Lee and a few of his kwoon buddies had been running up and down the Coast like a kung-fu garage band. Second, Lee and Parker—though the latter initially disliked Lee as a showoff—turned out to be kindred spirits. Never intending to compete, Lee was instead Parker’s special guest. Though Lee’s heirs have tried since to change the narrative, in a 1971 interview, he’s pretty clear about his level of dedication to the martial arts:⁷

Just about the time I discovered that I didn’t really want to teach self-defence for the rest of my life, I went to the Long Beach International Karate Tournament and got myself discovered by Hollywood.

One of Lee’s original students, Leroy Garcia, also confirms this:⁸

[O]nce he found, “God, I can make money doing this”, all the original people [in Lee’s school] just dropped out. Looking back on it, Bruce always had an agenda—he was a product now, not a friend and a teacher.

Let’s discuss Parker, cut from much the same cloth as Lee: information about his martial arts training is vague, but he somehow goes from being a brown belt to an instructor at his own school. By the early ’60s, he bills himself as a “grandmaster” taking advantage of the American public’s lack of knowledge about martial arts in order to inflate his image.

Though he started teaching kenpo (拳法) in Provo, Utah, he opened a branch in Pasadena and moved there to be close to Hollywood opportunities: high-profile clientele, action choreography, and, ideally, onscreen appearances.

He cashed in his dubious claims to martial arts expertise for a moderately successful Hollywood career, mainly as a stuntman, with notable appearances in Kill the Golden Goose, and a few of Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther films. He was still better known as Elvis Presley’s karate teacher and bodyguard.

That his claims were overblown can easily be seen in his appearance on The Lucy Show a year prior to his eponymous tournament: he is repeatedly off balance, his arms flailing and generally lacking coordination. Although the show is a comedy, he is meant to be an impressive, skillful karate instructor, not a buffoon.⁹

Even in later performances, similar features can be seen; in an appearance on Chilean TV in the ’80s, he even falls over during a finishing move.¹⁰

Furthermore, it is an open secret his 1975 book, Secrets of Chinese Karate, actually comprised the technical knowledge of James Wing Woo, with Parker handling the writing, but which he then seized all credit for. Woo gave up trying to remedy the situation, instead building up a successful school with a dedicated following.¹¹

Parker’s First International World Karate Tournament, like much in the shady, nascent martial arts world of the time, was mainly a way of legitimizing and promoting himself. It also took place in Long Beach, a venue conveniently close to Hollywood.

Parker had wide coattails, helping along many martial artists in establishing their own schools, and though Lee’s case was slightly different, he still seemed a willing accomplice. He even lent Lee one of his own students for his demonstrations: Dan Inosanto, who was to become a major player in the creation and perpetuation of the Lee myth.

Many Lee bios conflate his appearance at the 1964 tournament with that at the 1967 one, including I Am Bruce Lee. When Gene LeBell reports in the film, “they treated [Lee] like a god”.¹² He is clearly referring to his appearance at the latter event, wherein he was something of a conquering hero, already having appeared as Kato on The Green Hornet.

In ’64, it would have been more, to quote Chris Rock, “Nobody knows my name; nobody’s glad I came.” The footage is easy to disentangle: the first tournament is the one shot in black and white, while the color footage is from ’67.

Again quoting LeBell in the same film:¹³

He did these things so realistically that people didn’t know if it was show business or the real McCoy.

It’s clear which one LeBell thinks it was—I’m honestly surprised his whole interview didn’t end up on the cutting room floor. Another martial artist-stuntman-actor, LeBell knew Lee (and Parker) well, working with him extensively on The Green Hornet.

At the tournament, Lee “sparred” with a well-rehearsed Inosanto and performed some spectacular parlor tricks; the one-inch and six-inch punch, again with an accomplice to sell their power by staggering backwards no matter how lightly they were struck (Taky Kimura and James Lee both attended with Lee, but it’s unclear which took part in this demonstration).

Another thing that appears again and again in these films is Lee’s “unstoppable punch”. Even though it’s from the 1967 tournament, let’s look into it: Lee, LLC says there were eight attempts, and the hapless karateka (空手家) on the receiving end failed to block even one.¹⁴

That karateka was Vic Moore, an authentic martial artist who had already won a world championship in 1966 and would rack up three more in 1968, 1969, and 1970, even defeating legendary Bill “Superfoot” Wallace in the last one, and he tells the story entirely differently.

According to Moore, there were supposed to be only two attempted punches by Lee, directed at his chest. Moore says he easily blocked both, and the footage the films use is from when he is smiling into the crowd after these blocks. Then, Lee surprises him, going for the head rather than the chest, as well as punching from out of range.

Looking at the footage, it’s easy to verify Moore’s claims: in the first frame, above, Lee’s punch is already at full extension, about a foot and a half shy of Moore’s face. You can also see Moore is looking up and to the left of Lee into the crowd—no one with any experience faces a punch with their chin up like that, and Moore was clearly experienced.

In the second frame, Lee has landed on his front foot with his arm already retracted. You can see Moore’s block in motion (and his chin come down) despite being caught off guard as well.

In short, Lee’s punch was never blockable because it was never in range.

Those responsible for polishing Lee’s legacy show this same footage over and over with different levels of zoom and tinting as if it were a series of punches, rather than a single cheap shot that never could have landed. Moore also claims he challenged Lee to attempt to block his punches, and the actor missed on both attempts.¹⁵

In any case, despite Cadwell’s claims, the effect of Lee’s appearance at the 1964 International World Karate Tournament had exactly the effect he had calculated—getting a call from Hollywood. Cadwell contradicts her own statement:¹⁶

Bruce insisted it was no real surprise to him. He’d anticipated something like this since appearing at the Long Beach Tournament.

Even without a solid deal, the Lees shuttered the kwoons in Seattle and Oakland—the schools that were supposedly his passion, that he had supposedly fought for and won the right to teach at—and moved to LA. But Bruce Lee the action star was born.

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Read subsequent articles in the Mythmaking in the Martial Arts series

Part 4: Urban Lee

Part 5: The Littlest Dragon

Part 5 Addendum A: Kato’s Comeuppance

Part 5 Addendum B: The Row over “Hollywood” Continues

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Read previous articles in the Mythmaking in the Martial Arts series

Part 1: The Bruce Lie

Part 2: Enter the Tycoon

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Notes

1. Pete McCormack (dir.), I Am Bruce Lee, 2012.
2. Norman Borine, King Dragon: The World of Bruce Lee, 2008.
3. The Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures, Hong Kong Film Awards, 2009. 
4. Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars, 2009.
5. Best Production Design, Black and White, 18th Academy Awards, 1945.
6. Paisley Rekdal, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, 2000.
7. Daniel Moss, “Bruce Lee: the big boss and the $3 million man”, South China Morning Post, 1971.
8. Bao Nguyen (dir.), Be Water, 2020.
9. Jack Donohue (dir.), “Lucy and Viv Learn Judo”, The Lucy Show, Feb 1963.
10. Mauricio Beltrán, SGM Ed Parker en Chile, February 2011.
11. Dejan Djurdjevic, “What did Ed Parker study?”, The Way of Least Resistance, 2014.
12. I Am Bruce Lee, 2012.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. GrandMaster Vic Moore: The Man That Fought ’Em ALL!!!, 2013.
16. Borine, 2008.

Building the brand of Bruce (Mythmaking in the Martial Arts, Part 2)

Back in 1995, in the early days of the internet, a guy named Martin Eng created a website with the domain name brucelee.com. The site displayed,¹

[P]hotos of Bruce Lee, a chronology of his life, images of various martial arts paraphernalia used by him, a list of movies that feature him, and text from a book authored by him.

Eng claimed fair use, saying it was a non-commercial site, which included the following disclaimer:²

With due respect to Bruce and his family, and fellow fans. This is a non-profit web site. The fans’ products aren’t for sale if there are any, and I receive no financial benefits before, now and whatsoever.

Eng was a minor local celebrity himself for a time, the owner of the Russian Hill home where MTV’s The Real World was set in 1994, he also was a candidate in San Francisco’s 1999 mayoral race as part of the “hyena pack” attempting to unseat Willie Brown, the lion in the scenario. A tech-savvy entrepreneur, Eng once owned as many as 1,400 domain names, including asians.com.

Setting his notoriety aside, Eng might seem like a basic domain troll, but his interest in Lee seems to have been genuine; he is listed in the credits as a photo scanner for a series of unauthorized biographies of the film star, written by Sid Campbell and Greglon Lee.³

In 2005, Eng was sued by a company called Concord Moon LP. This entity was described in legal documents thus:⁴

Linda Lee Cadwell, the widow of Bruce Lee, and Shannon Lee Keasler, the daughter of Bruce Lee, are the legitimate heirs of Bruce Lee and the principals of Complainant Concord Moon LP.

The case was a slam dunk as so many others from those days were—it was clear mass registrations such as Eng had performed were specifically intended to usurp the trademarks others had legitimate claims to during the Wild West of the nascent internet, either hoping to be paid off to release them or to profit directly from their use. Eng’s claim his site was “non-commercial” didn’t hold water, since even though he didn’t sell anything on his site, it linked via ads to ones that did.⁵

Eng seems not to have been particularly harmed by the loss, nor by the destruction by fire of the massive house on Lombard Street Puck’s roommates booted him out of. His internet domains and real estate holdings rendered him permanently far more than well off. The house has since been rebuilt, as I’m sure you’ll be pleased and relieved to learn. Oh, and Puck ended up doing jail time, much to absolutely no one’s surprise.

Lee’s heirs have engaged in legal disputes with many others. Another of the entities they control, Bruce Lee Enterprises, won a well-publicized suit in 2010 against A.V.E.L.A., Inc. (the Art and Vintage Entertainment Licensing Agency), that “licensed” images of Bruce without actual authorization for T-shirts also involving Marc Ecko Enterprises—a “global fashion and lifestyle company”, according to their company profile on Bloomberg, behind such clothing brands as Eckō Unltd., Avirex, and Zoo York—who produced the shirts, and Target and Urban Outfitters, who sold them. The legal wrangling did determine A.V.E.L.A.’s claim the images they were licensing out were of the personas Lee portrayed in films, rather than images of him, per se, held no water.

Bruce Lee began the first of the businesses intended to control his brand in 1971 in partnership with Raymond Chow’s (鄒文懐): Concord Production Inc. (協和電影公司). Although Linda sold Bruce’s share of the company to Chow in 1976, she and her children, Brandon Lee and Shannon Lee (later Keasler) retained all rights to the deceased icon under California code Section 3344.1, as well as continuing to use the “Concord” name. The law confers on the immediate family the rights of a person,

[W]hose name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness has commercial value at the time of his or her death.

Over the years, there has been a hard-to-trace web of entities run by Cadwell, and later by Keasler. Here are those I was able to identify:

• Concord Moon, LP
• Concord Moon Management, LLC
• Bruce Lee Holdings, LLC
• Bruce Lee Educational Foundation
• The Bruce Lee Family Company
• Bruce Lee, LLC
• LeeWay Media Group
• Bruce Lee Entertainment
• Bruce Lee Beverage (Bruce Tea)
• Bruce Lee Foundation

Let me put in here I support the rights of Lee’s heirs to profit from his stardom, no matter how ghoulish or crass their efforts—seriously, Bruce Tea? But if you were shocked about my revelations in Part 1, you should know the effort to build up and proliferate the legend of Bruce Lee massive—one going far beyond his legitimate heirs, with many people seeing his status as a cultural icon as an opportunity to cash in, including the creation of a new sub-genre of film: Bruceploitation. A portmanteau of Bruce and exploitation, these generally low-budget films starred “Lee-alikes” and were in their heyday 1974–1981.

There have been several biopics over the years, and it’s important to understand these are not thoughtful documentaries executed by disinterested parties, but ways of establishing as fact a great many things reflecting well on Lee but simply untrue and denying the reverse. Even a quick perusal will turn up many inconsistencies, contradictions, whole-cloth manufacturing of material, and a persistent conflation of Lee’s onscreen personae with reality. This last element is particularly interesting given its similarity to the gambit the Lees sued A.V.E.L.A. over.

Although Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993) is the clearest example of these, being based on Cadwell’s book Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew, there is a direct involvement by Lee’s heirs in other efforts, which escalated to the level of media carpet bombing in the early ’90s and shows no signs of letting up.

In the list below, in addition to pointing out work by Cadwell, Keasler, and deceased family member, Brandon Lee, I’ve also noted the involvement of John Little, who seems to have been the group’s go-to writer, Taky Kimura, student, longtime friend, and still board member of the Bruce Lee Foundation, and Dan Inosanto, another longtime student and friend, but who seems to have recently fallen from favor:

• Little Dragon (upcoming): Keasler—producer, writer
• The Bruce Lee Project (upcoming): Keasler—executive producer
• Conspiracy (2015): Little—interviewee as Bruce Lee’s biographer
• Bruce Lee: Die Faust Hollywoods (Bruce Lee: the Faust of Hollywood, German documentary, 2015): Inosanto—interviewee
• I Am Bruce Lee (2012): Cadwell—interviewee; Keasler—executive producer, interviewee; Lee—archival footage; Inosanto—interviewee
• How Bruce Lee Changed the World (2009): Keasler—executive producer, interviewee; Kimura—interviewee
• Bruce Lee: In Pursuit of the Dragon (2009): Little—director, producer, interviewee
• The Legend of Bruce Lee (2008): Keasler—executive producer
• Blood and Steel: Making ‘Enter the Dragon’ (2004): Cadwell—archival footage
• The Unbeatable Bruce Lee (2001): Lee—archival footage
• Reflections on ‘The Little Dragon’ (2001): Inosanto—archival footage
• Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey (2000): Cadwell—interviewee; Little—director, producer, writer, voice; Kimura—interviewee; Inosanto—archival footage
• The Story (documentary about Game of Death, 2000): Little—director, producer, narrator; Inosanto—archival footage
• The Lees: Action Speaks Louder (1999): Cadwell—interviewee; Keasler—interviewee; Lee —archival footage; Kimura—interviewee; Little—interviewee; Inosanto—interviewee
• Bruce Lee: The Legend Lives On (1999): Cadwell—archival footage; Lee—interviewee; Kimura—interviewee
• Bruce Lee: In His Own Words (1998): Cadwell—archival footage, special thanks; Keasler—archival footage; Lee—archival footage; Little—director, producer, musical arrangement
• Bruce Lee: The Path of the Dragon (1998): Keasler—interviewee; Lee—archival footage; Kimura—interviewee; Inosanto—interviewee
• Masters of the Martial Arts Presented by Wesley Snipes (1998): Keasler—interviewee; Little—interviewee
• Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do (1995): Cadwell—special thanks; Lee—narrator, interviewee; Kimura—interviewee, thanks; Inosanto—narrator, interviewee, special thanks
• Bruce Lee—Martial Arts Master (1994): Lee—interviewee; Kimura—interviewee
• Bruce Lee: The Immortal Dragon (1994): Cadwell—interviewee, special thanks; Keasler—interviewee, special thanks; Lee—archival footage; Little—interviewee; Kimura—interviewee; Inosanto—interviewee
• Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993): Keasler—actress, performer: “California Dreamin’”
• The Curse of the Dragon (1993): Cadwell—interviewee; Keasler—interviewee; Lee—interviewee; Inosanto—interviewee
• Death by Misadventure: The Mysterious Life of Bruce Lee (1993): Lee—interviewee
• Bruce Lee, the Legend (1984): Cadwell—interviewee, Keasler—archival footage; Lee—archival footage; Kimura—interviewee; Inosanto—archival footage
• Bruce Lee: The Man and the Legend (1973): Cadwell—interviewee; Keasler—interviewee; Lee—interviewee; Kimura—interviewee; Inosanto—archival footage

Another person who frequently appears in these docupics is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but he seems to do so quite genuinely as a close friend and former student, and only in the role of an interviewee on those topics—after all, he has his own tremendous successes to manage.

On top of all the films, there have been many books penned by the various members of this group, Little was also the longtime Associate Publisher of Bruce Lee Magazine, and Keasler a writer on the recent comic book series Bruce Lee: the Dragon Rises. The most important of the books, apart from Cadwell’s bio, which I’ve already mentioned, are Tao of Jeet Kune Do (1975), which Cadwell and Inosanto also helped to edit, and another Cadwell-backed effort, Bruce Lee’s Fighting Method (1978). Additionally, there is the so-called Bruce Lee Library, all of which Little wrote using a variety of materials from the Lees:

• Vol. 1—Words of the Dragon—Interviews, 1958–1973 (1997)
• Vol. 2—The Tao of Gung Fu—A Study in the Way of Chinese Martial Arts (1997)
• Vol. 3—Jeet Kune Do—Bruce Lee’s Commentaries on the Martial Way (1997)
• Vol. 4—The Art of Expressing the Human Body (1997)
• Vol. 5—Letters of the Dragon—Correspondence, 1958–1973 (1997)
• Bruce Lee Artist of Life (1999)
• Bruce Lee Words From A Master (1999)
• Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts (1999)
• Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey (1999)

In short, there is an almost absurd amount of media about Bruce Lee—the number of authorized works alone is staggering, and there are still more unauthorized ones, especially if Bruceploitation is considered. Compared to this, Lee’s actual body of work was a single, fairly basic and largely plagiarized book (Chinese Gung-Fu: The Philosophical Art of Self Defense, 1963), four and a half films, one season of The Green Hornet, and a few bit parts on other US films and TV shows.

The image of Bruce Lee you have in your mind is a product, a brand. One carefully honed and refined to continue to be relevant and maintain its financial value, so media placements are worth paying for and merchandise continues to be sold. And they’ve done quite well: the Lee brand continues to pull down $5–10M yearly—impressive considering their golden goose has been gone for 45 years.

All this is why what you know about Bruce Lee is what Bruce Lee, LLC wants you to know about Bruce Lee.

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Read subsequent articles in the Mythmaking in the Martial Arts series

Part 3: Fists of Flim-Flam

Part 4: Urban Lee

Part 5: The Littlest Dragon

Part 5 Addendum A: Kato’s Comeuppance

Part 5 Addendum B: The Row over “Hollywood” Continues

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Read previous articles in the Mythmaking in the Martial Arts series

Part 1: The Bruce Lie

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Notes

1. National Arbitration Forum, The Heirs of Bruce Lee and Concord Moon LP v. Martin Eng, August 2005.
2. Ibid.
3. The series consists of Greglon Lee and Sid Campbell, The Dragon and the Tiger, Volume 1: The Birth of Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do, 2003; Lee and Campbell, The Dragon and the Tiger, Volume 2: The Untold Story of Jun Fan Gung-fu and James Yimm Lee, 2005; and Lee and Campbell, Remembering the Master: Bruce Lee, James Yimm Lee, and the Creation of Jeet Kune Do, 2006.
4. The Heirs of Bruce Lee and Concord Moon LP v. Martin Eng, 2005. 
5. Ibid.