Marie Brennan's Blog, page 81

New World: Wedding Customs

(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.)

A truly comprehensive survey of wedding customs around the world and throughout history would probably fill several volumes. I’m not going to attempt that; we’d get so far down into the weeds we’d never see the sun again. Instead I’m going to do a more top-level sweep of the steps involved in getting married, with some attention to the specifics of how those can manifest.

It starts with engagement, i.e. the promise to get married later on. This doesn’t have to last for a long time — it can be as short as the gap between “hey, want to get married?” and finding an Elvis impersonator at a drive-through Las Vegas chapel to hitch you two together — but the longer the gap is, the more preparation you can do. Today’s wedding-industrial complex pushes the ideal that you should do a lot of prep (and spend a lot of money on it), which echoes yesteryear’s necessity of assembling a wedding trousseau. (I’m reminded of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s line in The Lion in Winter, dismissing the likelihood that Richard and Alais will get married any time soon: “The needlework alone can last for years.”)

But even engagement can involve more than mere agreement. There may be a prenuptial contract to negotiate, or permission to secure: from parents, a master, a liege lord, or anyone else with the authority to gainsay a match. Posting the banns is or was required in a number of Christian countries, giving the general public a chance to raise objections — though usually only within set limits, e.g. “he’s got a wife in another town.” This also creates a mandatory waiting period, helping to stave off the buyer’s remorse that often afflicts the clients of those drive-through Vegas chapels.

Looping briefly back to that matter of permission . . . in patriarchal contexts, a daughter is usually considered the property of her family. If the marriage isn’t arranged by other people, then the expectation is that the man will be the one to propose — and he’ll ask her father’s permission to marry her either before he does so, or immediately after she accepts. Even today, when so many gendered divisions have been reduced and parental permission may not be required, the onus is usually on the man to do the asking, in dating and in marriage. But the expectation and the reality aren’t always the same thing. Queen Victoria proposed marriage to Prince Albert, because of their respective ranks, and I strongly suspect that any number of historical marriages began with the woman more or less instructing her future husband to propose, and doing her own work to bring her father around.

When it comes to the wedding itself, it’s rarely enough for the two people to say “okay, we’re married.” They have to perform the correct rituals, or more frequently, they need an authorized individual to perform those for them. When the wedded state brings some number of associated rights and obligations, it’s in society’s best interests to formalize the process, making sure people can’t just get hitched willy-nilly and then skip out on their responsibilities.

This often involves a religious figure, whose job is not merely to formalize but also to sanctify the match. That person’s job might begin well before the wedding ceremony, putting the future husband and wife through purification or instructing them in their future duties. But religious recognition and civil recognition of a bond aren’t necessarily the same thing: a clergyman can perform a wedding that isn’t legally permissible (e.g. between an underaged girl and an older man, or a polygamous marriage), and the government may grant marital status to a couple religiously barred from marrying (e.g. divorced Catholics or same-sex couples). Depending on your jurisdiction, it may be that clergy are legally licensed to marry people, or that any layperson can get a temporary solemnization permitting them to do the same, or that all couples have to go to a local office to fill out the forms — which is all that’s required in Japan — or any number of other setups.

Setups which people have a long history of circumventing. Long before we had Elvis impersonators pronouncing people husband and wife, there were Fleet marriages, taking advantage of legal loopholes to perform marriages of dubious validity. The British Marriage Act of 1753 attempted to put a stop to that — and thereby created a local industry in the border town of Gretna Green, because Scottish law differed and so you could escape the restrictions by running there and asking a blacksmith to wed you over his anvil.

But let’s presume you’re going through with a normal, formal ceremony. There are countless traditions here, but many of them fall into recognizable categories. Special clothing: white to show virginity in the modern West, red for good luck in China, as excessively splendid as one can afford in many parts of the world, or just the best clothing you’ve got if you can’t afford much. Witnesses: relatives and members of the community, not just to swear that yes, those two people really did get married, but also because marriage is a social institution and as such, often gets celebrated socially. Blessings, whether religious or secular. Confirmation and reiteration of consent. Some kind of joint act to bring the couple together: in a Hindu wedding, walking around the sacred fire; in a Shinto wedding, sharing three cups of sake three times; in a Christian wedding, the recitation of vows, or “you may now kiss the bride” — these days sometimes phrased instead as “you may now kiss each other,” for increased mutuality.

And with that done, people celebrate! If you remember our discussion last year of rites of passage and their three stages, you’ll see those operating in many wedding ceremonies: separation, e.g. the father of the bride giving her away; liminality, when the people are transformed from individuals into a spousal unit; and incorporation, as their community welcomes them back in. The cultural specifics — things like Shinto brides wearing a white paper hat to hide the “demon horns” they supposedly grow — are as weird and varied as human imagination can make them, but it’s the underlying logic that makes us believe.

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New Worlds: Courtship

(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.)

The counterpart to arranged marriages are ones where the spouses choose each other, often referred to as a “love match.” When there’s no matchmaker involved (be it a family member or trained professional), it’s up to interested parties to find and woo their own future husband or wife . . . which can be a very fraught process.

Before we dive too far into that, I should say that there’s often courtship involved in arranged marriages, too. The Japanese matchmaking process is called miai and means “looking at one another;” nowadays it begins with looking at a photograph, but in the past it might instead be kagemi, a “hidden look,” arranging for the man to secretly glimpse the woman without her knowing. If that goes well, the families proceed to their children meeting face-to-face, usually in a series of three dates before a decision is made. European nobility sent portraits as advertisements for their kids, and the prospective pair might exchange letters to get to know one another if they couldn’t meet in person.

But with love matches/autonomous marriage, courtship plays a much larger role, because it’s the means by which people even find possible spouses, conduct their evaluations, and seal the deal. So let’s dig into that.

The trend over time has been for this process to become less formalized. When love matches were just starting to become widespread, roughly two hundred years ago, it was common — especially for the upper classes — to organize events where unattached men and women could meet each other under supervision and engage in socially acceptable interaction. You see this all over Regency novels, both contemporary and modern, and part of the reason we have entire genres of social dance is because of the role it’s played in Western courtship.

But not everyone approves of dancing, and not everyone is good at it. Religious activities have long been another venue where people can meet — and it’s worth noting that any number of arranged marriages have begun with two people getting to know each other at such an event and hitting it off well enough that their parents made the arrangements for them. The modern ideal where a husband and wife (or spouses of whatever gender) should be friends as well as domestic partners means that many teenagers and adults find prospects through their hobbies, whether that’s volunteer work, athletic competitions, book clubs, or online fandom. Alternatively, they can meet through processes specifically designed to facilitate relationships, such as speed-dating events in cafes or matchmaking apps.

As mores have relaxed, supervised interactions have given way to a more flexible notion of courtship. “Dating” is a concept with rather fuzzy boundaries, to the point where people can and do debate whether hanging out with a person of the suitable gender counts as a date or not. (Does it only count if it’s the two of you alone, or are group dates a possibility? Does it have to be a leisure activity? Is it only a date if you hold hands, or kiss?) It used to be permissible to date more than one person at a time, and exclusivity only came into play if you agreed you were “going steady.” Nowadays, relationship status is as likely to be defined by one’s Facebook profile as anything else.

The range of acceptable behaviors within courtship has broadened to the point where, for some people, the only difference between “married” and “not married” is a legal one. Not everyone, of course; there are many communities where physical contact is still tightly regulated, such that kissing is allowed but sex is not, or holding hands is allowed or kissing is not, or any touch at all is verboten. But it’s increasingly common for couples to cohabit, sleep together, or both before marriage. Which some people argue is good sense — thoroughly testing compatibility ahead of time — but there’s evidence that it does lead to higher rates of divorce, likely because more people just kind of let inertia slide them into wedlock, rather than evaluating their relationship before making that decision.

Like matchmaking, courtship of the informal type involves evaluating a prospective partner, but the criteria may be different. Family is often less of a consideration . . . though it doesn’t vanish entirely, as more than one person has realized they simply can’t stand the other person’s relatives. Financial status remains important, and personal attractiveness often plays a much more significant role. Especially in these days of airbrushed models and social media, we can be very prone to making snap judgments based on appearance — which leads many people on matchmaking sites and apps to use photos from ten years ago, or to lie about their height and weight. Then again, this is nothing new: Henry VIII, whom I mentioned before, claimed to be very disappointed in the appearance of Anne of Cleves, saying that descriptions and portraits had flattered her more than she deserved. (Considering his track record, Anne may well have been glad he annulled their marriage six months later.)

The notion that husbands and wives should be friends, though, has changed the “compatibility” field quite drastically. It isn’t enough simply for a couple to get along amiably, with the husband bringing home good money and the wife keeping a well-ordered household and a minimum of arguments — which was more or less the ideal of the eighteenth century. They should want to spend their leisure time together. Instead of having separate circles of friends, segregated by gender, they should share friends. So although it’s no longer the case in such marriages that family members have to give approval before two can wed, to some extent friends now fill that role: if a boyfriend or girlfriend doesn’t get along with a best friend, then the romance may be off.

This process can be fun, but it can also be significantly stressful, especially as people get older and their opportunities for socializing diminish. For many adults, work is their primary venue for meeting people . . . but there are significant problems with dating a co-worker, especially if one of you holds a position of authority over the other. So it’s not surprising that we’re coming to rely so heavily on technology to bridge the gap — or that miai is coming back into fashion in Japan. We may still have different standards now for what we want out of a spouse, but looking for help in finding one might just be good sense.

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Mains and sides

It’s the return of the Tin Chef!

As some of you know, I’ve finally started actually cooking, after thirty-some-odd-years of basically never doing it. I now have a nice array of recipes I like and can do, and enough confidence now that I’ll happily browse a magazine or cookbook and go “oooh, that sounds tasty, maybe I should try it,” as long as the recipe isn’t too daunting.

But almost everything I make is a single-dish meal, or if it isn’t, then we just throw some spinach on the plate as a salad. I’m still not much good at making a main dish and a side dish to go with it. Partly because that type of multitasking is still a little difficult for me — making sure things are ready around the same time, but don’t demand my attention at the same instant such that something winds up burning — but also just because . . . I have a hard time judging what things will go well together.

I know that to some extent the answers to this are a) it doesn’t matter that much and b) I can experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. But I’ve got a whole list of side dishes I’d like to try someday, and every time I look at them and go “I dunno, would that pair well with this main item?” I wind up going back to the single-dish things I’m comfortable with. So I put it to you, the cooks of my readership: how can I get better at this? I have two different “meat with balsamic + fruit sauce” main dishes I like — one chicken with balsamic vinegar and pomegranate juice, one pork chop with balsamic vinegar and dried cherries — and the fruitiness keeps making me second-guess whether a given side dish would make a good complement. And there are a lot of main dishes I haven’t even really taken a crack at yet. If I had some guiding principles for figuring out what combinations are good, I might experiment more.

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New Worlds: Matchmaking

(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.)

Last year I spent the month of February discussing marriage-related topics. This year, as Valentine’s Day approaches, I’d like to return to that subject — because as I noted at the time, there’s more to talk about than can fit into a mere four essays.

(Spoiler: it won’t fit into eight, either. Though the next time I loop around to this, we’ll be looking more at things on the periphery of marriage, rather than marriage itself.)

I said in those previous essays that historically speaking, marriage tended to be seen less as an alliance between two individuals, and more as an alliance between their families or nations or whatever. Because of this, it isn’t surprising that autonomous marriage — where individuals choose their own spouses, with nobody else getting a say in the matter — was far less common than arranged marriage. Even today, something like half of all marriages worldwide are arranged marriages.

This isn’t the same thing as forced marriage. Those do exist, of course, and unsurprisingly, women’s consent has usually been treated as more optional than men’s. Furthermore, that “consent” may be coerced, with parents threatening to lock up or disown their daughter if she doesn’t give in. But at least in theory, most societies operate on the principle that both spouses have to agree to the match.

The process of finding a suitable partner can be simple or complex. On the simple end — which is also the most common — family members take care of it. Parents hunt out prospective husbands or wives for their kids, discussing the matter with other parents, or sometimes with the potential husband himself, if he’s old enough or doesn’t have family. Or that task may fall to some other relative, especially if their social position gives them lots of opportunity to survey the field. This might be an aunt with a widespread gossip network, a grandfather with a lot of business partners with available sons, or anyone else well-connected.

In fact, if you’re really good at hooking people up, you might take that on as a regular job. In Japan matchmakers may be called nakōdo, and some of them are professionals; the same is true of shadchan in Jewish society. Many cultures have similar things, though I don’t know the proper names for them all.

These people do more than just provide a list of unattached people of the appropriate gender. A good matchmaker evaluates prospective spouses, talks up their merits or discloses their flaws, shepherds the candidates through their first meetings with each other, and handles negotiations between the two families. That last function is often cited as one of the greatest merits of using a matchmaker: as with any other kind of negotiation, having an intermediary can help smooth over difficulties and cushion people’s feelings in the event that things fall through.

And that evaluation can be thorough, a cross between a job interview and a background check. Personal compatibility figures into it — a matchmaker whose list of former clients are renowned for their dysfunctional relationships and public screaming matches isn’t likely to get much business — but that’s not the only factor. The matchmaker will also look into the families: their status and wealth, immediate relatives, hereditary ailments, whether there are any scandals not quite sufficiently buried. A family whose bloodline seems to be failing might want a young woman whose female relatives have a robust history of fertility and healthy children; a family oppressed by enemies might want a young man who’s proved his courage and skill in battle.

More esoteric concerns play a part, too. Not only might a pious family want to ensure their future son- or daughter-in-law is sufficiently orthodox and devout, but they might be concerned about the spiritual compatibility of the pair. In these cases, they can hire an astrologer to chart the relevant natal charts. If you’ve ever seen something telling you that Virgos and Leos make for bad marriage partners, or that people born in the Year of the Monkey match well to the Year of the Dragon, you’ve seen a simplified version of this in action. In East Asia, people also might read significance into the number of strokes used to write a person’s name, and declare numerological compatibility or incompatibility with the name of a prospective partner. Spiritual factors provide a polite out if one side doesn’t favor the match: it’s no fault on anybody’s part, but simply the will of the gods.

The scientific version of this might be genetic. Will your genome pair well with that of your spouse? If we ever enter a period of easy and widespread human genetic engineering, you’ll be able to pick and choose which genes to use, thus ensuring (for example) one copy of the sickle-cell gene and its accompanying malaria resistance, but not two and sickle-cell anemia. But if you’re rolling the gamete dice, you might choose to avoid a spouse who carries the potential for too many unpleasant diseases.

Being a matchmaker does carry hazards, especially when the match is between very high-status people, with all the associated stakes. Thomas Cromwell’s fall from power as chief minister to Henry VIII began when he arranged his sovereign’s marriage to Anne of Cleves — a marriage that ended six months later, having never been consummated. If something goes wrong, it’s easy for people to blame the one who helped make it happen, even if they’re not the one at fault.

What about the marriages themselves? There are statistics that suggest arranged marriages are more stable than autonomous ones — that letting cooler heads make the decision, rather than choosing based on romantic attachment, works out better in the long run. But societies that feature a lot of arranged marriages also tend to place more barriers in the way of divorce, or heap enough stigma on it that partners might be more inclined to stay in a bad situation. Disentangling those factors is difficult at best.

Regardless, it’s worth noting that while most marriages in the industrialized West nowadays are love matches, that doesn’t mean matchmaking has gone away entirely. We just outsource the job to technology: websites and apps that take the information you provide and run it through algorithms to guess at who might make a good partner for you. And of course friends and family may still try to help, dropping hints about available people and setting up social occasions for you two to meet.

But that gets into courtship, which will have to wait for next week . . .

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Books read, January 2019

Sekrit Projekt R&R My own work, read for editing purposes, does not count. Not even when it’s my second read-through in as many months.

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens. Re-read, if I can call it that when I don’t think I’ve read this since I was twelve. I was trying to remember Scrooge’s dismissive description of Marley’s ghost, and wound up deciding to read the whole thing — starting before Christmas, but I got interrupted and didn’t finish until early January. I’m struck, as a recent article which I have now lost pointed out, by how non-religious the book is: yes, Christmas, and there are some passing references, but this is very much the Victorian “social gospel” rather than anything overtly Christian.

Deep Wizardry, Diane Duane. Second book in the Young Wizards series, and it’s been fun to see people’s expressions when I tell them the protagonists spend most of the book as whales.

New Worlds: Incense

[Note: As Book View Cafe works on migrating to a better host, this week’s New Worlds Patreon essay is running here.]

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It only does so much good to make our bodies smell better if everything around us reeks. So from perfume we turn to incense — and also potpourri, pomanders, scented candles, and everything else you can use to cover up less-than-pleasant aromas in the world around you.

Many of the things one can say about perfume apply here, too. Incense was historically often expensive, because the components were rare or had to be traded across long distances; the kadō art form in Japan and its associated party games exemplify the way its creation and appreciation could be elite activities. You can divide the scents into the same categories as with perfumes and blend them in the same way — though there’s less of a tendency toward gendering in scents for a room than for the body.

But it isn’t always just a simple matter of making your surroundings more fragrant. During the many centuries when the “miasma theory” of disease held sway, people believed that foul airs literally carried sickness. If that was true, then sweetening the air was simple good sense. A pomander, a container for scented material often worn dangling from a neck chain or belt, was portable protection. Incense, scented candles, perfumed hand fans, herbs strewn in with the straw covering the floor, and other such things protected an area instead.

A special case of this is the famous and distinctive plague doctor costume. Its beaked mask might not make for a reassuring bedside manner, but stuffed with lavender, camphor, mint, or a variety of other strong-smelling materials, it was supposed to ward the doctor against infection. Which, in a way, it may have helped to do, though not through scent: the mere presence of the mask may have somewhat reduced the chance of airborne germs entering the body.

Scented materials can serve other practical functions as well. We use cedar and camphor today to repel moths, citronella to repel mosquitos. In historical East Asia they sometimes measured time with incense clocks. Some of these operated like candle clocks, burning down at a known rate and even releasing weights to clang and mark the time; others changed scent to announce the beginning of a new hour, which must have produced some interesting effects at the changeover. One particularly intriguing design involved laying powdered incense in the engraved lines of a seal and letting that burn, like a line of gunpowder. (Except less explosive.)

But not all the uses of incense were pragmatic. Last week I quoted Edward H. Schafer’s The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, which referenced the “unmistakable effluvia” of scented materials — their ability to emit their properties invisibly, to hang in the air even when there’s no other sign of their presence. Because of this quality, there’s a long and worldwide tradition of ascribing spiritual qualities to scents.

You see a hint of this in miasma theory, when you consider that evil spiritual forces were often thought to be the sources of disease. But it also shows up in positive form, sometimes to counteract those same spirits; in Schafer’s entry on gum guggul and benzoin (called “Arsacid aromatic” in Tang China), he memorably notes that they believed it “quells evil demons within the body, and that if the genitals of a woman haunted by an incubus are fumigated with it, it will quit her forever.” On a more dignified front, smudging is the general term covering a variety of Indigenous American traditions of burning sage, cedar, or various other herbs as a form of purification or blessing.

Incense might serve as a focus for someone meditating, much in the same way as a lamp’s flame or a mandala — with the added benefit, perhaps, that when the incense burns down, you know it’s time to stop meditating. And more generally, the tendency of smoke to rise means we naturally think of it as a vehicle for communicating with the gods, because we often think of the gods as residing in the heavens above us.

This extends to more than just naturally fragrant items. In pre-colonial Mesoamerica, high-ranking individuals would shed their own blood onto bark paper, then burn the paper along with incense and other offerings. Such actions leverage the power of sacrifice, which was seen as feeding the gods, but there’s more going on than just that. Mesoamerican art has an artistic motif called the Vision Serpent, often seen arising from the bloodletting bowl with the smoke. The intangible, ephemeral presence of smoke and scent was seen as forging a connection between the mortal world and that of the divine.

To some extent the practice of using perfume and incense as offerings, or anointing sacred objects with them, probably arises from the sheer fact of their value: using them was automatically an expensive proposition, and therefore pleasing to the gods. (Sacrifice again, in less obvious form.) There’s a reason why the tale of the Three Wise Men says they offered the infant Jesus gold, frankincense, and myrrh, instead of lead, pine needles, and slate.

But there’s more to it than sheer monetary worth. Judaism had a long-standing tradition of using frankincense and myrrh in the First and Second Temple, so offering those to Jesus carries symbolic implications that would have been crystal-clear to the Jews of the time. Other materials hold a similar importance in religions around the world: spikenard, camphor, copal, galbanum, onycha (whose precise identity has been lost), and more. They’re used in rituals, to the point where they develop specialized equipment like the thurible for spreading the scent. You might not even be able to properly conduct your ceremony without the appropriate incense, any more than you can hold Communion without something to represent the body and blood of Christ.

That means the loss of a trade route, or the banning of a particular incense by an invading power, can have devastating effects on a religious community. Which smells a lot like plot potential to me . . . or alternatively, a writer could run with the spiritual powers of scented materials, for the banishment of evil spirits, communication with the divine, or some other effect. I believe incense clocks tended to be just simple spirals or other linear forms, so that the powder would burn at a predictable and steady rate — but you can easily imagine carving one in a mystically significant shape, with the powder flaring into branches like dominoes to imbue the figure with its power.

And maybe that power even banishes the miasmas that cause disease! But discussion of how to take discredited historical concepts and treat them as literally real in the world of your story will have to wait for a future essay.

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Canvas wraps on sale!

The place I order photo prints from has a sale on their canvas wraps, 25% off. If you’d like to order one of my pictures, now’s a great time to do it! Just skim through the galleries until you find something you like, then contact me to discuss specifics. Prices start at about $50 (with the discount) up to . . . I can’t promise any of my photos are crisp enough to still look good when blown up to five feet across, but if you want to spend five hundred dollars finding out, we can do that.

New Worlds: Perfume

This week’s essay for the New Worlds Patreon should really be titled “Ways to Make Yourself Smell Good,” because it’s also about scented lotions, oils, soaps, shampoos, bathwater, and everything else we use to counteract our natural tendency toward whiffiness. But “Perfume” was shorter and catchier, so I went with that instead.

Comment over there!

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Point and Click Adventure Games

I’ve always liked the “point and click adventure” style of video game. You know, the kind of thing Sierra was known for, back in the heyday of this genre: games where you wandered around talking to people and clicking on everything that was clickable to add it to your inventory, and then when you got to a challenge sticking your inventory items on it (or on each other, to make a new inventory item) until you figured out how to solve the problem. Many of these games were low-stakes, in that you could only die at a few specific points, and their overall focus was on story.

Does anybody have recmmendations for more games of that type? Either classics that are available on Steam or GOG, or newer games made in that mold. I’m a huge fan of the Gabriel Knight series, and I’ve also played various King’s Quest and Monkey Island games; I recently finished the more recent Blackwell series, and have also played Gray Matter, by the creator of the GK games. I like ’em because they don’t take too long to play and they don’t make me worry my character is going to die, and it would be nice to have some more to entertain myself with in my spare time. Fantasy genre preferred, but feel free to recommend whatever.

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New Worlds: Jewelry

For the time being, Book View Cafe seems to be holding steady, so the New Worlds Patreon has gone back to its usual home there, with a post on jewelry, and the human tendency to hang something shiny off pretty much any body part that can hold it. (And if it can’t hold it, that’s what piercing is for.) Comment over there!

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