by A. S. Byatt
NEVERTHELESS, the scientist himself cherished unfounded beliefs, which we may call credulous, or mythical, or magical. These cross his scientific course in strange and beautiful ways, inspiring his curiosity, opening new roads, conducing also to new errors. Here was a man who not only adopted the prevailing scientific view of the time, that Man was an animal, but included the creature in his Systema naturae first under anthropomorphs, and later, when it was objected that anthropomorphs simply meant “man-like,” under a new category, primates, which included monkeys and apes, and also the sloth, and the bat. Primates were a subsection of Mammalia (hence his interest in the dugs of the dead horse and its fellows); Mammalia included whales, which his great friend and fellow-taxonomer, Artedi, had included in his Ichthyologia. CL was not inclined to the view that Man alone had a soul, and that other living things were simply machines, bruta, bestiae. He wrote in his Diaetia Naturalis, “One should not vent one’s wrath on animals. Theology decrees that man has a soul and that the animals are mere automata mechanica, but I believe they would better advise that animals have a soul, and the difference is in its nobility …” We feel, he said, greater compassion for a dog than an insect, and more still for an ape. Indeed, he applied the adjective sapiens, first of all, not to Homo sapiens but to a species of monkey, Simia sapiens, which was said to be able to learn to play backgammon excellently well, and to keep watchmen posted on the lookout for tigers, so that the rest of the group could sleep safely. He kept monkeys and mourned the death of his own tamed friend, the raccoon Sjupp, in 1747; he subsequently dissected Sjupp, paying particular attention to his sexual organs.
During his lifetime the boundaries between Homo sapiens and his fellow anthropomorphs were drawn and redrawn. At varying stages the Systema naturae contained creatures such as the tailed man, Homo caudatus, the pygmy, and the satyr, which is also the orang-outan and Homo sylvestris, which walks bolt upright in the forest, has hands for feet, has arboreal claws, and is full of lust, so that women of our species dare not walk alone in its vicinity. It also has good table manners, and sleeps at night on a pillow under a quilt “like a respectable old lady.” CL sometimes referred to Homo sapiens as Homo diurnus, and gives a detailed description of his strange double and opposite, Homo troglodytes or Homo nocturnus, “the child of darkness which turns day into night and night into day and appears to be our closest relative.”
The troglodytes are short (the height of a nine-year-old boy) and white as snow, since they are active only at night; they have white fuzzy hair, round eyes with orange pupils and irises and a transparent micturating membrane, like those of bears and owls. They live in caves and holes, and are quite blind by day, stumbling, if they are dug out, as though their eyes have been put out. They have a language, guttural and impenetrable, but never learn more than “yes” or “no” in the speech of Homo sapiens or diurnus. At night they see well, and make thieving raids; populations of men, where they see them, exterminate them as vermin and refer to them as blafards, cockroaches. CL as always, was interested for classificatory reasons in their genitalia (they were said to have a fold of skin which fell forwards over the sexual organs of the female, as in the Hottentot). He begged for details, particularly of the nymphae (labia) and clitoris of a ten-year-old female troglodyte on show in London in 1758, but could not be satisfied, for the sake of the child’s modesty.
He believed also, as did Artedi, in sirens and mermaids, and in the sea-cows, the cattle of the undines—he examined a calf found on the seashore, and concluded that it must have been born prematurely, since it had not developed suitable lungs for underwater breathing. He believed to the end of his life that swallows spent the winter on the bottom of lakes, beneath the ice.
He also believed in, and indeed, claimed emphatically that he had been attacked by, a pestilential creature called Furia infernalis, the Fury from Hell, or “the shot.” The Fury was wingless, and fell from the skies in Lapland, where one had once been observed when it landed in the plate of a vicar. CL, in the days of his fame, offered a gold medal for a preserved Fury, and despatched his students into the Lapp wastes in search of the creature. CL gave each of his students a farmyard beast to shadow, one a cow, one a pig, one a goose, one an ass, requiring each student to count and describe the hundreds of species of plants consumed as they vanished down their familiars’ throats (the students had nicknames derived from “their” beasts, the Oxman, Lord Swine, Rooster, Balaam [from the speaking Ass] and so on). Such a teacher was a true scientist; but the same teacher despatched the same students to hunt the Furies among the Sami witches, or as we would now say, shamans.
CL was an inhabitant of that borderland between magic and science, religion and philosophy, observation and belief, where most of our fellow men still wander, questing and amazed. It is true that he had his necessary armour of scepticism. The tone of his observations in the court building at Jönköping is robust. He saw there,
“a large collection of witches’ paraphernalia, such as treatises on black magic which we read and found to be full of deceit and vanities, antiquated and false receipts, idolatry, superstitious prayers and invocation of devils … We blew the sacred horn without conjuring up the devil, and milked the milking-sticks without drawing milk. Here were to be seen sorceries, made neither by witches nor by devils but from the triple stomach of a ruminant animal. Here were eagles’ feet with outstretched claws, with which wizards tore the stomachs of those who had colic; I should think that they no more deserved to be burned than do the Chinese who pierce a hole right in the belly … And here also we were able to see the genuine instruments of wizards; knives, hammers, cudgels and iron bullets by the use of which men have been killed by their enemies.”
But the same man saved his eight-year-old sister, Emerentia, from death by smallpox, by killing and flaying a sheep, and laying the child in the skin, to “draw her from death.” The inspiration, he claimed, was biblical, drawn from King David, who “when old took two young girls into his bed so that by their healthy transpiration they might revive him.” Later, in his medical notes, Lachesis Naturalis, CL endorsed David’s advice, prescribing a bed-rest between two young people as a quick cure for a cold.
IN 1935, workmen repairing the house in the Botanic Garden at Uppsala found under the floorboards, buried in a pile of rubbish, a little notebook which proved to be the notebook he had carried on that memorable journey, noting distances, phrases, descriptions of people. They found also a kind of writing-tablet on which jottings could be made in pencil and erased. CL records, in his public account, how he showed a Lapp some of his drawings. The man “was alarmed at the sight, took off his cap, bowed, and remained with his head down and his hand on his breast as if in veneration, muttering to himself and trembling as if he were just going to faint …” Scholars have generally supposed that the Lapp thought that the drawings were magical, like the drawings on the Lapp drums which are used in the sejdhr, or shamanic ritual. CL, a poor draughtsman, drew reindeer, anatomised, horned, pulling sledges. He drew also owls, naked women and female pudenda, intent on his classification. There are some pages, in a private collection, which I have been able to see, apparently detached from the notebook, which are written in an agitated hand, with fragmentary disjointed sentences, and hastily sketched drawings, which suggest that CL had experiences of Samic magic, of the sejdhr itself, which had affected him profoundly, although he was too cautious, or too shaken, to record them for the general public. He was, and remained, a respectable, God-fearing bourgeois, however great his international reputation. His ideas on the sexual life of plants aroused opprobrium amongst the respectable—a hostile spiritual atmosphere not so distant from one of the forms of northern magic, nídh, a series of magical acts designed to ruin a man’s life and reputation by destroying him with sexual taunts and humiliations. Magic is closely entwined with science; alchemy, the occult sciences, astrology, however strange or to modern men unacceptable their systems of belief or projects, resemble the true sciences in their
preoccupation with techniques of studying, and changing, the physical world. Magic, like science, is concerned with matter, with the world of things, of rocks, stones, trees, creatures, also clouds, rain, wind and water vapour.
The world of magic is double, natural and supernatural. Magic is impossible in a purely materialist world, a purely sceptical world, a world of pure reason. Magic depends on, it makes use of, the body, the body of desire, the libido or life-force which Sigmund Freud said stirred the primitive cells as the sun heated the stony surface of the earth-cells which, according to him, always had the lazy, deep desire to give up striving, to return to the quiescent state from which they were roused. Our savant might mock the divination of cow-stomachs and milking-sticks, but he was the author of Nemesis Divina, a collection of tales of divine retribution, including that of the Pastor of Kvikjokk, encountered on this journey—“The pastor’s wife whores with the regimental quartermaster Kock. The pastor in despair takes to the bottle; his daughter becomes a strumpet and is tumbled by a Lapp.” There are several scatological and raucously erotic anecdotes in this work. There is also the tale of Yeoman Slickert, who loved the widow von Bysen and gave her a manor house. This upset his son-in-law, who fired three bullets through the window one night; the shots entered the Yeoman’s stomach, and killed him. The son-in-law in due course developed cancer of the stomach, with three gnawing tumours, that killed him. A gentleman who fell asleep in one of CL’s lectures went home and died of an apoplexy. This is sympathetic magic, though its title invokes a grim Greek deity, and its dedication, to CL’s son, invokes a god whose vengeance is a principle of order in a chaotic and dangerous world.
You have come into a world you know not.
You see it not, but you marvel at its glory.
You see confusion everywhere, the like of which no-one has seen or heard.
You see the fairest lilies choked by weeds.
But here there dwells a just God who sets everything right.
Innocue vivito, numen adest.
Innocue vivito, numen adest. It was his own motto, carved over his bedroom door. “Live harmlessly. The spirit is close.”
HE CAME to a place called Lycksmyran—“lucky marsh”—after a long period of stamping through freezing marshland up to his knees in water; he remarked that if he had had to undergo this misery as a punishment for sin, it would have been severe, and asked cur non Olycksmyran, unlucky marsh. Here his Lapp guide, sent out for shelter, returned with
“a human being, but whether man or woman I could not tell. I think the poet could never have described a furia to compare with this one; she might indeed have issued from the infernal Styx. She was tiny, her face smoked black, the brown eyes shining, the brows black, the jet-black hair hanging round her head, on top of which was a flat red cap. The dress was grey, and from her chest, which resembled frogskin, hung long, limp brown dugs; she wore a number of brass bracelets, a belt and boots.
“At first sight of this being I was afeard. But the Fury took pity on me and cried out, ‘Wretched man! Poor creature, what has brought thee here, where none has ventured before! Hast thou not seen how mean are our dwellings?’ ”
This Fury insisted that the only way to go was back through the swamps. CL begged for food—she offered him raw fish, putrid and breeding maggots. He asked for smoked reindeer tongue, which he had come to like, but there was none. He went back, that time losing his boat, his axe, his pike, a stuffed heron and a stuffed sea-eagle in the rapids of the river. Nevertheless, having recuperated at Umeå he undertook another up-country expedition, and met more Furies, more kindly old women, and magic. He records, in his published Travels, that in Norway he had heard of a curious ruse by which the Lapps could be deceived into surrendering their magic drums—you could sidle up to one, who had refused you his drum, and, without his remarking what you were at, push up his sleeve and open a vein. The wounded Lapp, faint from loss of blood (and apparently unaware of why—CL is vague on this point) can easily be persuaded to hand over the magic object. It is probable that CL’s story is a garbled version of the cruel punishments inflicted on the Sami by Christian priests, who tied them down, opened the veins and let the blood run until the unfortunate nomads recanted, were “converted,” and gave up their magic objects and practices. We come now to CL himself, and the strange portrait he had made of himself in his Lapp dress, complete with drum and magic drawings, on his return from the uncharted lands. What did the drum mean to him? What did he learn, out there in the wastes, in the skin huts of the Sami?
He was a noticing man, a collector of facts, and he describes their daily life with apparent amiable objectivity. He conducts an examination of the reasons for their strength and resilience—they are pure carnivores, they exercise their strong muscles by sitting cross-legged, they wear heelless boots, they eat frugally and do not fill their stomachs. (He goes into an excursus on teeth, and the carnivorous nature of man, “our species,” cf. Babianos et Simia et Satyros sylvestres.)
He noted also their sleeping habits, huddled together, quite naked, sixteen at a time, under reindeer skins. Some of their habits disgusted him; they cleaned their bowls and spoons with fingers and spittle, drinking boiled reindeer milk, which was strong-smelling and thick. They did not wash clothes, living in skins, fur inside in the winter, outside in the summer, “rigid sarcophagi” says CL. He was interested also in the strongly scented mushrooms (probably Boletus suavolens) which the young Lapp males wore to entice the young females.
“When a Lapland youth finds this fungus he preserves it carefully in a little pouch hanging from his waist, so that its grateful scent may make him more acceptable to the girl he is courting. O whimsical Venus! In other parts of the world you must be wooed with coffee and chocolate, preserves and sweets, wines and dainties, jewels and pearls, gold and silver, silks and cosmetics, balls and assemblies, concerts and plays; here you are satisfied with a little withered fungus!”
There is an analogous case to this borrowed Lapp aphrodisiac in the way in which the male euglossine bee impregnates himself with the musky pheromones of the bucket orchid in order to attract a mate. But certain of CL’s jottings lead us to believe that he enjoyed other fungi with other properties. Out of Jukkasjärvi he stayed with a group where he records a conversation with another old woman, whose silver belt with its appendages he described accurately.
A spoon in a case.
A knife in a sheath.
A pipe in a case.
A leather thimble to put digito inditorio.
A needlecase with a brass cap to pull out.
Rings, some of them large, in brass.
The belt itself is decorated with tin or with silver beads.
He also made careful notes on her vulva, labia, clitoris and buttocks.
He also described a ceremony in which this person appeared in another costume. This costume corresponds almost exactly to the costume of the prophetess, conjurer, or seer in the saga of Erik the Red. CL records some conversations with this person about “numen, sive hamr” in amongst his jottings on ceremonies pertaining to birth, and marriage. He was always interested in ceremonies surrounding birth, marriage and death. He records elsewhere that the pastor’s wife in Kemi told him that for a woman to drink a little blood from the severed funiculus umbilicus is a good way to avoid dolores post partum—ipso puerperie multis difficiliores. Hamr, he records—reconstructing his sketchy notes—was the membrane surrounding the foetus (specifically not the placenta, but the caul, the membrane) which bore, as it were, the shadowed impress, the double, of the human creature inside it. There were those whose hamr was loosed into the world at the moment of birth and who remained capable of contact with it, of changing shape, of travelling through time and space. I did not see how this could be, wrote the believer in mermaids and “shots” from clear skies. The old woman however told him that he was himself, as she clearly saw—“I have the sight”—hammramr.
He makes mention of a ceremonial dress with a hood of black lam
b’s-hide, lined with white catskin, reindeer-skin boots with long hairs, and catskin gloves, also furred. He writes of the gandr, or magic rod, with its knob and its brass and stone decorations. His accounts of the ceremonies, like all these private autobiographical fragments, are in the third person, distancing himself. Thus we read:
“They dance naked, beating their drums, which they say have magic powers, and the wisewomen sing long songs together, and separately, over and over. They drink hydromel and eau-de-vie at these times, and eat special foods. The drums are covered with drawings and signs.” The songs, he was told, are the songs of the creatures that make up the drum, the tree (silver birch, betula) and the young reindeer, chosen by Fate. They believe that their souls sing and conduct the practicants ad infernos acque ad supernos. The singing is strong and persistent; the room is hot and full of smoke and the drumming of naked feet.
The markings on the drums represent many things: the rainbow, skis and sledges, the eyes and wings of birds. They are divided into parts which they told him represent the three divisions of Mundus—Caelum, Terra et Regiae Infernae. They believe their spirits may travel to these places, whilst their bodies lie torpid.
Certe est, he saw one of them fall to earth, a dead man (pulsa non sentitur) who lay dead for some hours (duratio temporis incertissime est) whilst the others danced about him and sang.
HE SAW the huge hairpelt behind the smoke leave the place. They say they may travel for hundreds upon hundreds of leagues, in utrasque formas; during that time their names may not be mentioned, nor may the names of their alter egos, sive entes bestiae, or they may wander lost for ever. This may be what the priests refer to as raptus or alienato mentis. Those capable of these feats are known as mjök trollaukinn—those whose non-human powers, troll, are enhanced, aukinn.