An Opera for Beltane

I suppose I should have been spending this lovely Beltane Sunday out in the woods a-conjuring summer in, but WWUH (University of West Hartford) has a Sunday afternoon opera program with a sweet tooth for unusual works, and their choice today was the new Naxos 8669 recording (from a 1996 Seattle Symphony concert - what took 'em so long?) of a genuine May Day opera, Howard Hanson's 1934 Merry Mount, libretto taken from a Hawthorne short story (but Hawthorne unaccountably omitted the extensive witches' sabbath-devil's orgy sequence from his version).

I remember when Hanson, who ran the Eastman School in Rochester for forty years, grumbled at salutes to 80-year-old Aaron Copland as the "grand old man of American music," that Copland wasn't old enough for this distinction and Hanson was. In any case, both are dead now, and Hanson's music is far from well known, as he lacked the jazz inflections and winning populist emotions that kept Copland up top. On the other hand, Copland never composed an opera for the Met, and Hanson did. I first discovered this years ago when my grandmother gave me her collection of old librettos - her husband (who died in 1935) having had a sweet tooth for opera. The Met, in Gatti-Casazza's day, felt a certain commitment to American music, and every year or two there was another world premiere - although not one of the works so created (unless you count Puccini's California Gold Rush drama, La Fanciulla del West) endured more than a season or two, and none are remembered today: Peter Ibbetson, Mona, The King's Henchman, Shanewis, The Great God Brown. With all their faults, these stylish works were a damn sight better operas than such Met commissions as The Last Savage and The Great Gatsby and An American Tragedy and The Voyage. (But none of them is half as good as Fanciulla.) (This leaves Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra in some middling limbo. Anyway, rep standards they have never become.)

Merry Mount is an expert score, melodious in a late-romantic but pre-Schoenberg style. Its resemblance to movie scores (the field into which the more populist American and European composers were moving with a vengeance at the time of its premiere) is neither accidental nor displeasing. The vocal lines are not extreme enough to put it out of the range of revival, though the enormous cast may be. (At least we don't have excessive unsingable high notes, often fallen back on by post-tonal composers to express extreme emotion because they have given up all other musical methods of expressing it - melody used to accomplish this, remember?)

The centerpiece of the opera, for pagan music-lovers, is the great witches' sabbath that ends Act II, a wonderfully sensuous (not merely discordant) scene in which a Puritan minister, tempted by the flesh (in particular the flesh of a lovely Cavalier aristocrat, Lady Marigold Sandys, whom he identifies with the goddess Ashtoreth - Astarte, folks!), falls utterly and gives himself up to demonic allegiance. What with religious hypocrisy running rampant in the U.S. these days, such a scene might with profit (prophet?) be presented by regional opera companies fed up with the lack of controversy under which they are forced to labor. Anyway, it's great fun for a pagan, and I'd love to see it staged somewhere. True, American witches may have problems with the final scene, in which local Indians attack the Puritan village, burn it to the ground, and scalp a couple of folks before being driven off.

Heartily recommended. (Why doesn't Botstein put this on?)

Cross My Palm With Silver

I'd heard the phrase "cross my palm with silver" in fortune-telling settings, and assumed it meant "Give me some money for a reading." But I'm just reading Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear, and in the opening scene the hero goes to a fortune-teller. "Cross my palm with silver," she says, and he takes out a piece of silver money, makes the sign of a cross over her palm, and pays her the coin - a half-crown (two shillings six, one-eighth of a pound, to you metric types). In return (this being Graham Greene) she gives him a piece of information he is not supposed to have, setting off a spy chase plot.

So "cross" is not a euphemism for pay but actually means to make the sign of a cross, as in to "cross oneself" is to make a cross on one's abdomen ("when in Rome, do like a Roman" as Tom Lehrer put it) - I first encountered that usage at 11 or 12, reading Howard Pyle's medieval children's novel, Otto of the Silver Hand, and had no idea what it meant - I thought crossing oneself was like stepping on your own toe in utter confusion. People seemed to do it when confused, or driven to an unintended oath.

Since I studied Wicca, of course, I have "starred" myself - drawn a pentagram on my chest. (Or, in oil, on the brow of others.)

The cross makes me uncomfortable. I won't wear one. Too many people have been slain in its name. The Cathars regarded it with horror as an instrument of the torture of Christ, which it was. They are, of course, among the people the Christians murdered in the name of the cross. They're extinct now.

Long before Christ's day, the cross was a popular symbol of many meanings.
INDIAN: It's a cross - symbolizing the division of the universe into active and passive principles.
PADRE, disgusted: Lord have mercy on your heathen souls.
- Firesign Theater, c. 1968

It's a fairly obvious glyph - but its original meaning may be obscure, and its later meaning (the letter t?) unhelpful at discerning its antiquity. A gallows with which to play Hangman? A crossroads at which to bury a suicide? An X-Y graph on which to chart an equation? Any or none of these to the original hierophants who drew crosses upon rocks or inscribed them in tablets.

Its antiquity indicates (say unbelievers) that the cross, found among so many peoples, need not be assigned any fixed meaning, and may celebrate anything. Likewise the broken cross, or swastika - but you see, even the most ancient symbols may acquire a new meaning that soils the others and spoils all the aesthetic possibilities by ending our innocent objectivity. Wherefore Christian mystical types will assure you that the antiquity of the cross as a symbol indicates a certain sybilline strain among ancient peoples, who reveled in the cross because they knew instinctively that it would become the symbol of salvation. (You can't prove they're wrong.)

The Romans executed criminals by nailing them to crosses. You probably knew that, having seen it done in The Life of Brian. The fact is, the Romans did everything in a cruciform manner. Their roads were straight in all directions, but if a Roman chicken wanted to get to the other side, a cross was the natural result. The Roman castrum, or camp, was a square, cut in four parts by large straight paths, with a forum at the center. All their camps were like this, and some of them became towns, and some of the towns became cities, and many of the Roman cities (Paris, for instance - and New York) still have that crisscross grid pattern at the center.

This is especially evident at Split (in Croatia), which was originally not a city at all but the retirement cottage of the Emperor Diocletian. It is in the form of a rectangle, slightly longer on the E-W sides than the N-S, with barracks for two legions on the inland quarters of the square (why two? perhaps he had them play sports against each other) and an imperial residence in the other two quarters, with a three-story library and an enormous mausoleum, plus a balcony the equivalent of five city blocks long on the sea front, where he had music 24/7 - harder to arrange in 305 CE than it is today, but even in retirement the imperial purple has its privileges. At any hour of the day or night, the aged Diocletian could stroll by the sea and listen to lyres twang while the surf rolled in.

Diocletian certainly wasn't thinking of Christianity when he renounced the throne and went home to Illyria - he is the last man on record who ever attempted to stamp the religion out in its entirety - he thought Christians were unpatriotic, undermining the authority of Rome, which was certainly in decline. His successor, a few years later, Constantine, had the brilliant idea of using the Christians to give Rome a new backbone, proclaiming it the only legal religion. There were protests, but on the whole the scheme was a resounding success: The Roman Empire lasted another thousand years (till 1453), and preserved a great heap of classical learning until the Italians of the Renaissance were ready to receive it.

But meanwhile many a barbarian invaded the land. The city of Salonae was burned to the ground, and its people were homeless and afraid. Where could they take refuge? "What about the old palace?" someone said. It was half ruined, abandoned for 200 years, sheltering a textile mill. But the walls were still standing - and the balcony five blocks long - which is still standing today. The Illyrians hid out in the cross-shaped palace; the rich families took the big rooms, the poor families lived in the basement or the closets, chapels were stuffed everywhere, and the mausoleum of the emperor became the cathedral. It became the city of Split. The bust of the pagan emperor looks glumly down on the high altar where mass is celebrated, and a Venetian campanile stands across the way. In the forum, operas are staged.

You could say: A city at cross purposes.

New Moon rituals

Last night I arrived home in early evening to see, through the windshield of the cab, the thinnest possible visible sliver of the New Moon Cheshire-Catting at me (differs from tom-catting) down the end of Charlton Street. As soon as I'd got out of the cab, I bowed nine times (three-times-three-for-the-Goddess) to the crescent, then starred myself, saying "Lady of Silver Magic, Come into my life." This is, at the present writing, almost the only pagan thing I still regularly do (which is sad).

Bowing nine times to the first visible crescent after the New Moon is a trick I picked up from Robert Graves, inventor of the Triple Goddess cult, who made a habit of it when he lived on Majorca. The pentacle is ... itself. The invoking "Lady" prayer was taught by Leon Reed to all his students in Seattle, where I studied with him for a year and a day (Candlemas 1988 to Candlemas 1989). Alice Stewart told me once she had adopted the Leon prayer from me (when we were both in Proteus Coven), and once when I visited Christopher Hatton's coven, Mycota, for a Singing Darkness ritual (how I miss them! how we all miss them!), he spotted the crescent from his window, and suggested we all bow - pleasant to think I have conveyed these little rites further down some traditional line, and that others have taken a shine (a glamour?) to them, and carry them further still.

Suzanne often goes to mass when she finds herself free on a Sunday in a strange city. She no longer believes in the faith in which she was raised, but the ritual familiar from childhood centers and relaxes her, comforts her - and who among us (certainly not someone as sociable as Suzanne) does not long for some sort of no-questions-asked contact in a strange town on an empty day? Too, she often chats with the priest afterwards, about the music and the neighborhood and so on, and (being as lovely as she is charming) often finds herself invited to join him for brunch - a brunch with a strange man of somewhat esoteric and intellectual tastes and background and no social or sexual imponderables hanging about - what could be a classier dose of serendip? A little bit I envy her the option, having the ritual to recall her to pleasant childhood peace (my childhood was almost ritual-free, and religion-free except for my storytelling prettified obsessions with pagan gods).

When we were first getting to know one another (this is a new-ish friendship), Suzanne asked me, about my concept of the Gods of Olympus, "But you're an intelligent guy, John - do you believe in all that?" As individuals, as consciousnesses, as immortal personalities, as our human response-interpretation of natural forces? Her question, and herself, deserved a more careful answer than quick and glib response. (Which takes me a few days.) And then I could say: "Yes and No. Sometimes. Depending on circumstances." Who believes all the time, in everything? Who doesn't believe at any time, in any of it? Probably more of the latter than of the former.

Religion enriches life so many ways that have nothing to do with deity or the reality of deity, it is perfectly possible to avoid the question. Religion's mistakes have always lain in demanding everyone believe the same things all the time; this is inhuman, impossible, wicked. The best parts of religion are in its humanity. Religion is a human construct - the gods (if there are gods) have no need of it. Sacrifice never fed God - it fed those who made the sacrifice, sometimes only in the very real pleasures and uses of ritual. Prayer does not feed them either - it feeds us. Gods do not need worship - we need (or may sometimes need, or can make use of) acts of worship. (Bravo to those like my late, ethical father who didn't.)

Humans do not only believe or not believe - they believe to different degrees at different times in their lives. Totally opposite beliefs exist easily in the heart and the mind. It is inhuman to think this is difficult. "I don't know any sane adult who relies on magical thinking," some idiot wrote in the New York Review of Books a few months ago. I don't know any sane adult humans who do not think magically now and then - or any who do it all the time. I wonder who that writer knows. Certainly not (very well) himself.

A Hanukkah Posting

This time of year makes me think back to perhaps my first encounter with religious history. Of course, there had been the unspoken rituals handed down in my family for at least a decade or two from which I had imbibed unexplicated lessons, but the first time it all came out in the open, as I recall it (or as my internal Talmudic fabulist scribe chooses to arrange it for maximum moral value), I was, at the age of seven or eight, given a book: The Story of Hanukkah.

Probably a publication of the Golden Books division of Simon & Schuster, source of much of my childhood entertainment (some of their executives were patients of my father's, I believe), it was a very large book with big illustrations and it told the story you all know: the Jews were conquered by nasty Greeks who ordered them to bow down to Greek idols; they resisted; they were oppressed; five brothers named Maccabee led a revolt; took the Temple; couldn't find enough consecrated oil for the proper ritual; a miracle occurred. This was followed by the menorah, the dreidel and other customs later spoofed on South Park. The Hanukkah Bush was not mentioned – just as well, since my parents had a Christmas Tree and called it that, and its colors and lights thrilled me from the first. I never questioned why my grandparents did not have such trees – they lived in Manhattan, in apartments; we lived in New Rochelle, in a house. People who lived in apartments did not have trees; people who lived in houses had children and trees. The logic was clear.

The book told a subtler story, or many stories. Who were these thriftless people with their Temple that didn't have storage space for more than one tiny bottle of oil? Who were the Greeks and what were they doing out of Greece? Who were those annoying kids willing to be put to death rather than pray to an idol, and why was it even an issue? Who were these rather ruthless Maccabees? (The later history of the dynasty was, mercifully, omitted: a bloody bunch.) Does the establishment of a holiday that is all about light, light returning ceremoniously, night by night, at precisely the Winter Solstice, not seem awfully pagan, awfully typical of earth-based rituals throughout the northern hemisphere? (It was ten years or more before I got around to asking that question.) Was the whole Hanukkah business, complete with bush and presents and carols (dear heavens! yes – even in high school choir – no doubt inevitable in so Jewish a suburb as New Rochelle), not a pasty me-too imitation of the great American consumerist Christmas?

My mother said this, early and often – she still does. When she was a child, Hanukkah was almost unheard of, and she had watched its growth and emulation of Currier & Ives custom with disquiet and contempt – but then, when she was a child, there had not been any recent attempt to wipe Judaism off the earth, and that event certainly had something to do with the revived and modernized, Second Coming as it were, of Hanukkah after the war.

So I got the book, and though puzzled, devoured it, especially noting the illustrations (which ancient Jewry so wisely forbade in their books): a bunch of muscular but slovenly men attacking a bunch of rather stiff centurion types, breaking into the Temple precincts, throwing down and demolishing statues of a rather pretty lady with a helmet on her head.

My response was instantaneous: Who was the pretty lady, and why would anyone break her statue? (Only much later did I discover that statues of her can be found all over New York – her family and friends too. I guess the Maccabees didn't get them all.)

Kiddie though I was, I had already been taken by my grandmothers, with great solemnity, in familial rite, to enormous, pervasively silent temple-type buildings filled with wonders and with echoes and with a great sense of awe and tradition. The Met Museum, for instance, was a palace and a temple, and there are lots of helmeted ladies there. (Also naughty pictures of ladies with nothing on at all, but I don't remember visiting those galleries. I wasn't much of one for painting till I was about 20, actually.) (There were also statues of men wearing nothing at all, and I knew I shouldn't look at certain parts of their bodies, but no doubt because of my childish lack of height, I did tend to stare. Being uncut, they didn't look at all like mine.)

Somehow I knew that it was wicked – wicked for those brutal men to knock down statues of that lovely lady. Somehow the book made me curious about her, and her rites, and the Greeks who loved her if not wisely perhaps too well. From my parents and grandparents, I had already imbibed the family religion: beautiful objects should be preserved and gazed at, appreciated and understood, shared with the world. Privately, of course, I wanted to keep them to myself – not the Met, which is a bit unwieldy, but I wanted the whole Cloisters all to myself, and maybe the Frick as well. But I didn't get them, either one, and regular access seemed the next best thing.

My family faith was in the works of human art – or so it seemed to me. The manifestations of all men and women, the arts that inspire and never inflict harm, the statues and buildings and paintings and (later) books and songs and dramas, that we all of us share, that cannot replace themselves and depend on us for their creation and preservation and glory: worshipful as evidence of the glory of human mind and skill, ranking us with the creation of nature itself (if it was created). Nature tends to have better taste, less subject to fashion. That is how one knows it is above art. But by my personal faith, it is possible to worship both. Both are worshipful, and worthy.

Worship is not required by deities; they don't need it. It's good for us, and it's good for nature and for works of art, because the worship inspires us to preserve them. But the deities can get along without it. They did before (if they're real); they will when we're gone.