Helen of Troy

by Jack Lindsay

  At Blantyre, Central Africa, if an ordeal is to be carried out by proxy (god or fowl), the proxy is tied by string to the accused. In Kenya in an ordeal the accused purges himself by oath while sitting on a sheep stomach draped with sheep entrails. If he swears falsely, he expects instant death. (We may compare the oath of Helen’s suitors.) When a child is born among the Chuka of E. Africa, a mime is enacted to make it seem the child had really been produced by a goat. A goat is killed, the skin is spread on the mother’s legs; the baby is wrapped in it, then snatched out by old women, who give the trill-cry usual at a birth. At times the goat’s intestines are tied round the mother’s waist and cut at the moment when the child is lifted out of the goatskin.

  A Yoruba custom is to bury a sacrifice with chain attached. A piece of the chain’s end sticks out above ground. The person on whose behalf the sacrifice was offered sleeps on the spot, secure of the required protection. The chain gives direct contact with the underworld. Among the Hausa, to gain a sick person the maximum value from a sacrifice, a ‘common method was to tie a piece of cotton or string to the patient, the other end being made fast to the victim to be sacrified’. Among the Basoga of E. Africa, if a child is ‘proved’ illegitimate at its naming rite or the test of the sacred meal, the mother is tied to a post in the house till she confesses who the real father is. The man is brought. He and she are stripped naked and a wild gourd-vine is tied round the waist of each. The woman stands with her legs wide apart and the man crawls through. He rises and perhaps confesses. If he denies his guilt, he takes the woman’s breast and says, ‘Shall I suck?’ If he is innocent and she dares him to suck, she will die at once; if he is guilty and sucks, he will die of her milk. However, if she dares him, they are all so horrified that they generally kill him at once without waiting to see the result of the suck. In Uganda the navel-string is actually used as a medium of contact with the spirit world; when a king dies, a special temple is built to house his jawbone and navel-string, so that a prophet may keep up intercourse with his spirit. Among some tribes the medicine-man puts on his head a bundle of hay or grass; the inflowing spirit force pulls him about till it flings him at the guilty man.[421]

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  6. North America

  The Sia Indians of New Mexico say that the spider created all things; he lived underground, where he made fire by rubbing. In the end the coyote stole the fire despite the guards (snake, cougar, bear) at the three doors. The Tolowa of California say that after the Flood only a pair of human beings were left, without fire; the spider wove a gossamer balloon and a long rope; he let the balloon rise to the moon. The moonfolk were suspicious, but the spider persuaded them that he merely wanted to gamble. Then while they were all playing, his friend the snake climbed the rope and stole fire. The Cherokees tell how various animals tried to get fire, which the Thunderbird had sent down into a hollow sycamore on an island; after many failures the water-spider span a thread and wove it into a bowl which she fastened to her back and used for carrying a firecoal.

  An Iroquois tale tells of a hero who sets off in quest of the daughter of a neighbouring chief. His uncle, under whose tutelage he is, brings out ‘a curious thing made of coloured string and elk-hair of deep red, about a foot long. “I shall keep this by me,” he says, “and as long as you are doing well it will hang as it is; but if you are in danger, it will come down of itself almost to the ground; and if it does reach the ground, you will die.”’ Here the string becomes a sort of external soul; when it touches the earth the life in it will run out (back into the mother). The birth-rite is reversed.

  Among the Red Indians as among Melanesians, Malays, ancient and later Europeans, a common instrument of divination was a thread with an object (eg a ring) at the end. The movement transmitted to the thread seemed to make the latter a living attachment to the body. Sometimes the weight of the object was involved. Among the Chuckchi the diviner tied the thong to a corpse, asked his question, and lifted the thong. If the object grew light, the answer was yes.[422]

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  7. Polynesia

  Here we find the thread motif in a form equating girdle and rainbow, with the ritual actualization in the contests of kite-flying, in which are mingled religion, sport and meteorological lore. Thus, a myth from the Harvey Islands, with variant at Raratonga, tells one of the many tales of the hero Maui in the underworld. He notes that his father mysteriously departs every morning, and tucks the end of the latter’s girdle under his body, so that he wakes when it is pulled away. He hears his father address the main house-pillar: ‘O pillar, open up, so that Manushifare may enter and descend to the netherworld [Avaiki].’ During the day the children play at hide-and-seek, and Maui takes advantage of the game to say the charm to the pillar and slip off to the underworld. After meeting a blind old woman (his grandmother), whose sight he restores, he comes on his grandfather Tangaroa and sets about learning the fire secret from him, pestering him till he is shown the trick. A bird (the tern) takes part, holding the under-bit as they make fire by rubbing, till with the fire-stick Maui gives it the black marks that terns have by their eyes. The scared bird flies out through a hole into the upper-world, and Maui suggests to his grandfather that they fly. How? Maui says that flight is easy, and soars up. Tangaroa is charmed, and at Maui’s suggestion dons the Girdle (the Rainbow) which enabled Maui to rise aloft. He soars over the tallest coconut tree; but Maui has hold of the end of the thread, the Girdle, and tugs it. The old god comes crashing down to his doom, though later Maui resurrects him.

  The Girdle appears in a similar role in a tale about a girl and her brother who run away from a cruel mother and leap up into the sky. The girl is inseparable from her brother, hanging on to his girdle. The kite connection appears in the tale of the god Kane, who at times ascends in this form.

  In New Zealand, when a dead chief was laid out, wisps of long toitoi grass were put in his hands. His friends held these wisps and were thus in direct contact with the dead man as they lamented and wafted his spirit up in a sky-ascent with their chants. ‘Open, you gates of the heavens — enter the first heaven, then enter the second heaven, and when you shall travel the land of the spirits and they shall say to you, “What does this mean?” say you, the winds of this our world have been torn from it in the death of the brave one...’

  Among the Fijians bark-cloth is used to catch and secure gods and souls, and was often hung in temples as the path along which gods came down when they arrived to give oracles. The legend told how a god presented to a man of Matuku a snake which was the ancestor-god of the nobles of that island. The god tied on a piece of bark-cloth, saying: ‘Behold the cloth of sovereignty. If you take the snake and install a chief tie the cloth on his arm.’ The nobles followed the instructions; and ever since when installing a king of Yaroi they tie a piece of bark-cloth on his arm and leave it there four nights. Then the cloth is slipped off and the knot drawn tight. When the chief dies the cloth is buried with him. The god is thought to enter him along the cloth and is put inside him in the form of kava. The installation ritual, which takes the form of a death-rebirth (initiation), includes a drinking of ambrosia, a distribution of food and ritual bathing, for which a human victim is killed and after which comes noise and rejoicing; the chief drops his old name and is only called Lord and his title is used. People say, ‘Word has come from the Great House’: we may compare the title Pharaoh.

  We may add a tale from Mono-Alu, Western Solomon Islands. Two children climb a tree to eat its fruit; they throw some down to an old woman, who eats so much that she dies. They cut out her genitals and give them to an old man to cook and eat; then they climb a tree and sing at him that he has eaten the genitals of a loa (that is, broken a taboo about near relations). He cuts the tree down, they take to another, and so on till they are on a kengere tree, where they call out to the Man in the Moon, Murila, who lets down a rope on which they climb to the sky. The old man sends various birds after them; one at last succeeds and brings them back in a basket. In another tr
ee, the culture hero who makes canoes (he is the younger of two brothers) climbs a tree, gets up to the sky, and climbs back by a rope. FIe and his brother are stone-cooked; but the younger, by means of magic learned in the sky, does not die (survives the death-ordeal), unlike the elder brother.

  The shaman of the Ona, one of the tribes of Tierra del Fuego, owns a magic rope, nearly three metres long, which he brings out of his mouth and makes vanish in a flash.[423]

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  8. Witches

  The witch or wizard, wherever they still have something of a place in a peasant community, can be described as the shaman at the last stage of vitality; the function has been largely broken down and the practitioner is a lost individual or at best an opponent in hopelessly archaic terms of existing religious and social systems. In the Shetlands ‘when a witch wanted to upset a boat or wreck a ship, she stood on her head and muttered, “Sweery, sweery, linkum-loo, do to them as I would do.” When she went to sea, she got into an eggshell and attached a lucky-line (a seaweed that grows like endless ropes) to a rock. The line she paid out as a spider does its thread. If the line was broken, she could not return to land.’ We see how it is that the spider fascinated folk concerned with the spirit journey; the fact that it somehow exuded the thread from its own body seemed to reflect the way in which the spirit-thread was thought to be produced. We understand more fully how Ariadne’s Thread was a part of herself. The spider, Arachne, in Greek legend was a Lydian weaver who boasted that she could outdo Athena; the latter appeared to her in the shape of an old woman and accepted her challenge to a contest; when Arachne started weaving pictures of the scandalous loves of the gods (while Athena wove pictures of persons punished for arousing the wrath of the gods), the goddess tore the offending web to shreds and beat Arachne with her batten. Arachne hanged herself and Athena turned her into a spider.

  The Eskimos of Greenland tell how the south part of their island was joined on by two women in a kayak, who fastened a child’s hair to the lump while it was still separated, chanted incantations and pulled, while an old woman tried to hold the lump back with a sealskin thong. In the Faeroes two isolated cliffs rise out of the sound between Eysturoy and Streymoy; they are said to be a giant and his wife who came from Iceland to pull the Faeroes over. The giant stood in the sea while his wife was tying the rope to the hilltop; at that moment the sun rose and the light petrified them. In Lewis we learn that the Wickings conquered a part of France and tried to drag it off to Norway with a cable of heather, hemp, wool, woman hair. A bit broke off and became Ireland; then another bit became the Hebrides; then in a storm the cable parted and the remnant became Lewis. The Lapps have a tale of how Aniov Island lies where it does. Three shamans went off on an expedition to carry away part of Norway with all the reindeer, etc., on it; but their mother dreamed of their return and ran out of her hut with loud cries of joy. She thus broke the taboo imposing silence during the spirit exploit; so she and her village were turned to stone and the ravished bit of Norway stopped in mid-sea. (Compare the Masai tale given above.)

  The witches of Europe had a string in some form or other as an essential part of their equipment. A witch burned at St Andrews in 1672, had a white cloth like a collar with many strings and many knots in the strings, and was quite assured that nothing could be done to her while she had the string on her person. The string, sometimes in garter form, was a kind of witch badge or token; and it seems that the ritual death for a witch was a strangling with string. (Compare the Hanged Heroines.)[424]

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  9. The string that binds or bars

  At Mantinea in ancient Arkadia there was a shrine of Poseidon, which it was taboo to enter. Aipytos, son of Hippothos, cut the thread which barred the way, entered, and was stricken blind by the blast of force from the shrine. Here the string holds the force in, instead of acting as a line of communication. The Bavili made a witch impotent by using a hippopotamus tooth; the prince chewed kola and spat on the tooth, which was then bound with the string-plant; after that the witch had no power to stop him from propagating his image. In China to stop rain (considered an act of the earthgod) the god was tied up with red cord passed ten times round him or his altar; an eclipse was stopped by a red cord round the earth-mother’s altar. The Paphlagonians thought the god was bound and tied up in winter. The customs in which knots are used in some apotropaic or binding way are vast in number. We may take as one example a Fijian custom of delaying the sun by tying a reedknot. We may compare the net said to have been hung in the Peruvian Andes from tower to tower to catch the sun. A widespread custom is to tie a string about the wrist or loins of a woman in childbirth to stop her soul from escaping. The breaking or removal of the thread may express a passage change, the movement into a new life. In the Abyssinian coronation ritual the Negus is held up near the church by a cord which girls hold across the way. They thrice ask who he is, and he answers. At the third interrogation he cuts the thread and the girls cry out that he is truly their king, the king of Sion. We may compare the tale of Alexander cutting the Gordian knot, thereby proving his imperial right.

  An African tale, of the Hausa, combines the binding and the loosening motifs, plus the link with weaving. Two lovers married but could not consummate the marriage. After fifteen days’ failure, the girl’s aunt (the mother being dead) recalled that the girl had been ‘tied’ by a weaver when young. So the girl was taken to the house of another weaver, where she walked round the loom. After that all went well.[425]

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  10. Hair

  We have noticed how at times the thread is seen as a hair. For instance, an African hero made the spirit-ascent by climbing the highgod’s beard. The woman’s hair or thread, by which the hero climbs from a pit or up a tower in a large number of widespread folktales, belongs to our series. In the more primitive versions the link with the otherworld journey is plain. The pit leads directly into the underworld or the hair-climb shows traces of a sky-ascent. Thus in a poem of the Kysyl Tatars, Sudäi Märgän, the hero, is trapped in a deep pit. His wife, finding him, sends his horse to fetch the sister of a being who lives on heaven’s bounds. This woman has very long hair, and by means of it the hero is drawn up out of the pit. The rope on which the hero in the great Bear’s-Son cycle descends into the underworld derives from our thread series.

  Sometimes the hair is guide or key to the otherworld. A tale of Zante describes how a giant’s hair on touching the mountain opens the rocks and lets the giant into his underworld home. Another Zante tale tells how the hero finds two hairs from the three-headed snake he is fated to subdue; at the right moment he binds them on his hands; they draw him straight to the seashore over against the island where the monster has his lair; he crosses the water and kills the monster. In a Serbian tale, which makes fun of the motif, a character manages to descend from the sky-world by cutting off his hair and tying one hair to another as he goes down.

  The binding aspect appears in the large series of tales in which a witch gains power over her victims (generally the hero and his faithful animals) by laying a hair on each of them. At the spelling moment the hair turns into a mighty cable and acts as a transmitting line for sending a petrifying force into man or animal. It is not the victim’s hair, but the witch’s, which is used, so we are not dealing with a matter of sympathetic magic in which any part of the former’s body could be used against him. For the rites lying behind the tales we may take the thumie of the Australians, a charmed hair-rope, which caused deep helpless sleep. The Musquatie women in their customs reveal a mixture of sympathetic magic and idea of the hair or its band as a special medium of spirit flow; the band as navel-string has a strong lover-power and becomes an external soul. The women use a narrow braided band to tie their hair up. ‘This, though a talisman when first worn, becomes something infinitely more sacred and precious, being transfused with the essence of her soul; anyone gaining possession of it has her for an abject slave if he keeps it, and kills her if he destroys it’. A woman will go from a man she
loves to a man she hates if he has contrived to possess himself of her hairstring; and a man will forsake wife and children for a witch who has touched his lips with her hair-string. The hair-string is made for a girl by her mother or grandmother, and decorated with a luck pattern, and it is also prayed over by its maker and a shaman. The braiding or patterning of the band links this custom with the magical effects of weaving. The hair-string becomes a woman’s fate.

  The beliefs and customs of Hungarian gypsies show a connection between spider-thread, hair, and fertility magic. The gypsies gather the floating spider-threads in the autumn fields and make their husbands eat them as sources of fertilizing potence, while they murmur incantations to the Keshalyi or Fate whose sorrow at this season for her lost mate (the dying son-lover of the earth) has made her tear out her hair. The threads are her hair; the incantation attributes powers of impregnation to them, and invites the goddess to the baptism (where she would appear as the birth-fate, the birth-fairy). Among the Transylvanian gypsies the Leila tribe ascribe their origin to a king’s daughter who was driven forth by her brother and his envious wife. In her wanderings she was pitied by the Three Keshalyi (we thus find the triad of the Moirai). One of the Keshalyi dropped some of her hairs, which the girl ate, becoming pregnant with a son, the tribal ancestor. Among the gypsies of South Hungary the Keshalyi and her hair are associated with the spirit journey. The hero gets some of the goddess’s hair, winning her favour by combing her locks. He is thus enabled to gain the rings from the horns of the black cattle of the Moon-King, the white cattle of the Sun-King, the yellow cattle of the Cloud-King.

  The equation of navel-string and spider-thread is shown in the customs of the Kamchatka women, who first eat a spider to get pregnant, then eat the child’s navel-string to become pregnant a second time.[426]

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