Boria Sax's Blog: Told Me by a Butterfly, page 5

The Primordial Alliance of Sheep, Man and Dog: Thoughts on the Year of the Ram

For over a decade, I have regularly attended the annual Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, New York, a celebration of all things sheep. Scores of stalls sell hand-crafted woolen sweaters, photographs of sheep, spindles, spinning wheels, fleece, books about sheep and so on. The sheep, of many breeds, are present as well, and they are obviously raised with a great deal of care and affection. Visitors constantly admire them, touch samples of their wool, talk gently to them and ask questions about them. A few sheep appear to bask in the attention, and most appear indifferent to it, but all appear at least content.



Several stalls offer lamb and mutton; loving sheep and eating them have, for millennia, gone together with surprisingly little tension. It is hard to imagine a festival in which the love of pigs and the taste of pork are celebrated in such comfortable proximity. But relationships that we lump together under the heading of "domestication" do not follow any single pattern or prototype. The bond with humanity is profoundly different for dogs, pigs, bees, sheep and other animals. Each relation entails unique values, duties, uses, problems, symbols and mythologies. This celebration in Rhinebeck will seem less paradoxical if we consider the entire history of human relations with the ovine tribe.



Scholars believe the sheep was probably the second animal after the dog to be "domesticated," a bit before its relative the goat. The human bond with sheep rivals that with dogs in both historic importance and intimacy. Human, dog and sheep eventually formed a complex relationship, the foundation of what we now know as "civilization." People cleared the land for sheep and protected them, receiving in return their milk, fleece and meat. Dogs guarded the sheep, and obtained in return a share of their meat from human beings. Sheep of that era shed their fleece naturally and did not need to be sheered. They did eventually give their lives, but their life-expectancy was not necessarily reduced from what it had been in the wild. Until the end, sheep could count on plenty of pasture, safety from wild carnivores and shelter from the elements. All parties could enjoy one another's company, but, at least in pragmatic terms, the sheep certainly got the best deal of the three.



We traditionally have thought of these relationships anthropocentrically as two successive domestications, in which man first subjugated canids, which then aided him in dominating the sheep. But in many ways, this triad seems to center mostly on the ovine partner. Sheep demanded the most exertion from the two companion species, and also obtained the most obvious benefits from the arrangement. Furthermore, the triad involved profound changes in the relationship between canine and sheep, which human beings could not easily control. The dogs had to conquer their instinct to attack the sheep, and these hounds even turned against their relatives, the wolves. A ram can be fully a match for a dog or wolf, but rams also had to restrain any impulse to attack. At least initially, the triad was a complex symbiosis, involving three species and at least that many distinct bonds. Perhaps it anticipated the class-based structure of later human societies, with a division into priests (sheep), warriors (dogs) and tradesmen (human beings),



In historic terms, the pasturing of sheep has been a mixed blessing. On the positive side, it maintains the soil far better than agriculture, and supports a much greater diversity of plant life. Nevertheless, overgrazing eventually turned most of Greece into a semi-desert, led to the erosion of soil on mountainsides in Spain. In early modern times, communal fields in the British Isles were consolidated under private ownership, in order to provide pasture for sheep, forcing many families into poverty. I suspect that some of that may have been done neither for humankind nor for the environment, but rather for the sake of sheep, probably "man's best friend" after the dog. As Roger A. Caras has written in A Perfect Harmony, for shepherds, "... the well-being of the flock is all; everything else falls by the wayside."



Civilization may have begun with a three-way partnership of equals, but a lot has changed since then. Several other animals have been added to the club, including the bee, goat, pig, cat, chicken, carp, cow and silkworm. Every one of these has increased the complexity of the relationships, adding new duties, tasks, and customs. Humankind has become increasingly central, while other creatures have, at least from our perspective, been marginalized. Dogs, however, now share not only the homes of people, but almost every amenity or problem that comes with human status, everything from canine television shows to psychiatrists. Sheep continue to have special importance, and the Industrial Revolution may arguably have begun with new techniques for breeding them. In 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first animal to be successfully cloned. The bond between dog and sheep has largely been obscured, though it survives in a few rural areas. But, today, people as well often feel marginalized by their own technologies, and fear that computers may usurp our presumed supremacy.



Nostalgia for the primordial bonds uniting man, dog and sheep has long pervaded human culture. Biblical metaphors for the relation of people to God or to their leaders are taken mostly from sheep and the pastoral vocation. Most of the Patriarchs including Abraham, Moses, Jacob, and David were shepherds. Psalm 23 begins, in the King James translation, "The Lord is my shepherd/I shall not want..." Bishops still carry a ceremonial shepherd's staff, a crosier, and a congregation is called a "flock." Jesus has often been depicted in the form of a lamb, adored by patriarchs, kings and saints.



Wenceslas Hollar, "Adoration of the Lamb," 1671



Idealization of the pastoral life runs through Greco-Roman, as well as Judeo-Christian, culture, a tradition beginning with Hesiod in Theogony, when the Muses appear to him as he tends sheep on the slopes of Mount Helicon. It's most definitive expression is in Virgil's Georgics, and it may also be found in the work of many poets from the Renaissance. At the end of Cervantes' Don Quixote, the hero, weary of violence, dreams of becoming a shepherd. In Asia as well, the herding of sheep or goats is traditionally a vocation for those who long for solitude, often taken up by sages who retire from public life.



That brings us to the occasion of this article -- the beginning of the Year of the Ram. The placement of the ram in the Chinese zodiac reflects not only the cooperative disposition of domestic sheep, but also the agility, balance and sagacity of wild ones. Older sheep are known for their ability to find mountain paths through the most forbidding terrain, rather like a wise elder who can mentor his juniors through difficult times. We need that sort of wisdom desperately today, and that is one reason why the ram will take its place alongside the exuberantly dancing dragons, unicorns and lions at the celebration of the Chinese New Year. The ram had to be pretty special to start a new phase of global history by domesticating both dog and man.





Scene from the Chinese New Year Celebration, New York, 2013



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Selected Bibliography:



Budiansky, Stephen. The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Print.



Carras, Roger A. A Perfect Harmony: The Intertwining Lives of Animals and Humans Throughout History. New York: Simon & Schuster 1996. Print.



Clutton-Brock, Juliet. Animals as Domesticates: A World View through History. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2012. Print.



Sax, Boria. The Mythical Zoo: Animals in Myth, Legend and Literature. 2 ed. New York and London: Duckworth/Overlook, 2013. Print.



Sun, Ruth Q. The Asian Animal Zodiac. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1974. Print.

The Primordial Alliance of Sheep, Man and Dog: Thoughts on the Year of the Ram

The occasion of this article -- the beginning of the Year of the Ram. The placement of the ram in the Chinese zodiac reflects not only the cooperative disposition of domestic sheep, but also the agility, balance and sagacity of wild ones.

The Image of Paranoia

Mainstream society, especially on the Internet, has taken an enormous amount from the culture of espionage. We now routinely use multiple passwords, aliases, and disguises. We also employ a vast arsenal of techniques for both identification and deception

The Image of Paranoia

Mainstream society, especially on the Internet, has taken an enormous amount from the culture of espionage. We now routinely use multiple passwords, aliases, and disguises. We also employ a vast arsenal of techniques for both identification and deception. Simply to survive, we must constantly be suspicious. Emails arrive in our inboxes every day with offers of love and money, but very few, if any, of them are sincere. Almost every photograph we see in slick publications has been edited with Photoshop or a similar program, making the apples more red and the human models more perfect.



So why aren't we all totally paranoid? Because the espionage and the deceptions are all very impersonal. There is little sense of trust, so we do not feel perpetually betrayed. The NSA, and perhaps even Facebook, collects information on a scale that even Stalin's secret police could never dream of, but the persons disappear into a mass of data. Old-fashioned spying and counter-espionage required empathy, since, in order to anticipate their moves, you had to understand the psychology of your adversaries. This created emotional conflicts, ethical dilemmas, and high drama, of the sort that fills the novels of John Le Carré. There are still spies and agents that operate more-or-less in the traditional way, but spycraft is now mostly a matter of looking for patterns in vast numbers of digitalized communications.



When I was growing up, the FBI was constantly following my father and mother, tapping their phone, looking though their garbage, and interviewing their acquaintances. As I child, I had no idea that this was going on, but that simply made the ubiquitous paranoia even more difficult to deal with. The FBI has by now released to me about 700 out of more than 3000 pages that it collected on my father's case from the mid-1940s through the late 1960s, and these are often so heavily redacted that only an odd phrase or two is readable. The files are written in bureaucratic prose, but there is nothing slick about them. They have a sort of quirky, arbitrary quality that at least shows the humanity of their creators. They were produced on manual typewriters, in which the spacing and the characters are slightly irregular. Several arrows, lines and occasional notes are written in pen. On the older files, the tape that covers censored passages is very irregular in shape and obviously cut by hand, but in the later ones it is standardized.



While I do not have nearly enough information to tell for sure, I suspect that reasons for the many deletions may be at least as personal as they are political. The passages may have simply reminded a bureaucrat of something that was unpleasant to her. In the margins of the files are codes, supposedly indicating why passages were redacted. The code "b1" indicates it is a matter of national security, while "b2" means a reason that pertains to the internal workings of the FBI. The code "7d" indicates that the passage was blocked out to protect confidential sources, while "7c" indicates that releasing the information would be an unwarranted invasion of someone's privacy. But these categories are usually too general to be very helpful without the full context and a great deal of interpretation.



The culture of the FBI must have been primarily an oral one, in which items were committed to print mostly as an aide to memory. The released files consist almost entirely of disconnected facts, which would, in any other context, appear trivial, except that they are dramatically highlighted by designations such as "secret" and "top secret." It is just about impossible to extract any narrative thread from them. They contain almost no analysis whatsoever. I estimate that the part of my father's FBI file that was released to me was about a tenth of the total, and it might have been even less. But if the rest contains simply more of the same thing, the entire file might not tell me a lot about my father's case, or at least not unless it was studied with a great deal of diligence and expertise.



Nevertheless, FBI files will probably be, in many ways, among the most important documents for future, and even present-day, historians, and obliterated passages, even should their content never be revealed, may ultimately be more illuminating than ones that were spared. They are not only full of the paraphernalia of everyday life, but also reflect many common fears. One could frame pages from them and hang these on the wall as semi-abstract graphics, giving them names like "Paranoia."

***



A page from the FBI file of Saville Sax, as reproduced in the book Stealing Fire: Memoir of a Boyhood in the Shadow of Atomic Espionage by Boria Sax (Decalogue Books, 2014):

Animals and Cultural Diplomacy

It was almost a decade after the Puritan government of England had executed King Charles I, and the country had begun to descend into chaos. Oliver Cromwell, who ruled as Lord Protector silenced criticism by banning newspapers, intercepting letters, and employing a network of secret police. In his History of Four-Footed Beasts, Serpents and Insects, Reverend Edward Topsell wrote, "Would it not make all men reverence a good king set over them by God, seeing the bees seek out their king if he lose himself, and by a most sagacious smelling sense, never cease till he be found out and then bear him upon their bodies if he be not able to fly. . . ." Topsell then tried to add a bit of balance by continuing, "And what king is not invited to clemency and deterred from tyranny, seeing the king of bees hath a sting but never uses the same." We have no reason to think Topsell was a political dissident, in fact he may really have believed that he was simply recording the ways of bees. Consciously intended or not, a subtext comes through, and the English Parliament apparently agreed with it, since, two years later in 1660, it invited Charles II, son of the beheaded king, back to rule, requiring, however, that he not use his office for revenge against the regicides. Simply by speaking of animals, one participates in an ongoing process of cultural, and often political, negotiation. J. J. Grandville, "Beehive," 1842



The world of animals here appears parallel to that of human beings, and differences of species may stand in for those of tribe, gender, class, profession and so on. This is a sort of vision that we associate with "totemism," which the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss explained in the mid-twentieth century as the application of structures initially found in the natural world, especially among animals, to human culture, as a means of representing social distinctions among indigenous peoples. Apart from the vastness of their scale and the complexity of their organization, nations are essentially tribes, and the relations between them follow many of the same dynamics. Animal symbolism is so deeply embedded in human culture that it is almost impossible to talk about animals without, simultaneously, speaking indirectly about human beings.



Levi-Strauss' notion of totemism has been qualified, challenged and refined by subsequent thinkers, but, without trying to tease out all possible implications, it still serves as a rough working model for understanding how animals and nature may contribute to cultural diplomacy. This is apparent in the beast fables from the tradition of Aesop, a half-legendary storyteller from the Greek isle of Samos in the seventh century BCE. Several of the stories commonly attributed to him such as "The Tortoise and the Hare" or "The Fox and the Grapes" are still familiar to contemporary people from childhood. Behind the moralistic tales of talking lions and foxes, we can discern a tribal religion, with its animal totems, deities, sages and tricksters, largely deprived of their numinous qualities yet, nevertheless, in ways not terribly different from those of many indigenous peoples of Africa or the Americas.

Richard Heighway, illustration to Aesop's "The Fox and the Grapes," 1910



From very early times, the fable has been primarily, though by no means exclusively, a form associated with slaves. Aesop, Phaedrus and Babrius - the three most celebrated fabulists of the ancient world, were all slaves, as was Uncle Remus, the mouthpiece for Afro-Indian tales in the Aesopian tradition, collected by Joel Chandler Harris in the deep south of the United States just after the Civil War. The fable enabled slaves, as well as people of other social orders, to indirectly express things which might otherwise be sensitive or forbidden.



Totemism became even more overt in the High Middle Ages, with the development of heraldry. This was initially a system of emblems painted on shields to identify knights in jousts, when their faces and bodies were completely covered by armor. In the most literal way, heraldic symbols were a substitute for the human face. Heraldry was gradually extended to feudal families, and then to states, businesses, clubs and almost all other institutions. These symbols were by no means confined to animals and vegetation, but creatures such as boars, wolves, bears, lions and eagles figured very prominently. Heraldry represented identity in terms of abstract relationships among symbolic objects, which are joined in fantastic patterns with no regard for common sense. They are deliberately esoteric, pointing to the mystery which is ultimately at the core of identity.

Crest of Britain with the Lion of England and the Unicorn of Scotland



In some contexts at least, modern societies have identified with animals with constancy comparable to that of tribal peoples. These creatures need not necessarily be indigenous, wild, contemporary, or even real. England is represented by the lion, which is not indigenous, or the bulldog, which is a domestic breed. The animal representing Mauritius is the extinct dodo, while Scotland is represented by the mythical unicorn. Those are simply animals that ─ whether for historical, folkloric, commercial or geographic reasons ─ seem to embody a nation's uniqueness. Underlying this totemic practice is an implicit analogy between the diversity of human cultures and that of all living things.



The animals in fables of the Renaissance, such as those of La Fontaine, and of political cartoons, are essentially those of heraldry. The totemic notion that animals constitute a world parallel to that of people was also responsible for the practice of physiognomy, which held that the character of a person could be read by the resemblance of his features to certain animals, so there would be wolf people, pig people, bat people and so on. That tradition, without the theoretical underpinnings, continues in caricatures and, most especially, political cartoons up through the present day, as well as in literary works such as Orwell's Animal Farm. Illustration by Wilhelm Kaulbach's to Goethe's "Reineke Fox," c. 1830



One might perhaps think that the stylized animals of literary fables, heraldry and editorial cartoons are too detached from their original models for their representation to have much impact on relationships between human beings and the natural world; experience suggests otherwise. White-tailed deer, turkeys and Canada geese, though on the brink of extinction in the early twentieth century, may now be more common in the United States and Canada than they were in preColumbian times. Bald eagles, moose, beaver, buffalo, and coyotes are making significant comebacks as well. These resurgent animals are precisely those that have great iconic importance in both Amerindian and immigrant cultures. The bald eagle is the national animal of the United States, and the beaver of Canada. The turkey is an old symbol of the New World, the buffalo of the Great Plains, and moose of the far North. All of the others as well are closely identified with certain regions, landscapes or peoples.



To be sure, iconic status in human culture can often endanger animals. In the United States immediately following the Civil War, the American buffalo were deliberately hunted almost to extinction, in order to dishearten the Plains Indians, in whose lives they had a central role. In Asia today, the South China tiger is being hunted to extinction in large part because of the central role that its body parts play in folk medicine. But such events simply show another aspect of the way cultural and natural concerns are inextricably bound together.



The United States Bureau of Fish and Wildlife currently lists about 500 species as "endangered" and about another 200 as "threatened." The many thousand additional species have been proposed for these lists. Having a local species listed can bring publicity and status as well as money for conservation, as well as less-tangible psychological satisfactions, but there is no clear criterion for either categorization. Inclusion is, therefore, a subject of continual lobbying, in which it is not always easy to tell cultural or economic motives from environmental ones.



The mediation performed by animals in human affairs is continuous, if seldom noticed, like the sound of crickets on an autumn day. In the past, this process has occasionally emerged from the background, as when Harun al Rashid gifted two leopards to Charlemagne or, in 1972, when the government of China presented a mated pair of pandas to the National Zoo in Washington, D. C. It is hard to say how much ecological awareness, if any, is reflected by either of these gifts. But the presents were at the least a reminder to the recipient that the distant land contained not only wealth and people but also natural wonders.



My broader point is that environmental problems are also cultural, in fact one cannot address one apart from the other. In general, we can say that the representation of people in terms of animals and nature, an essentially totemic tradition, can place human concerns in a broader perspective, diffusing tensions and helping us to:

• Look beyond immediate personal or collective interests;

• Comment indirectly on subjects that might otherwise be too sensitive;

• Eliminate evasive political rhetoric;

• Unite people around shared concerns such as conservation and sustainability.

Like other forms of cultural diplomacy, this may remain primarily beneath the threshold of awareness, but can be made more effective through conscious appreciation.



The borders between nations are mapped out with great precision, but boundaries among cultures are fundamentally poetic. Literary, artistic and architectural accomplishments help to distinguish human cultures from one another. Interaction with the natural world, also embodied in customs from funerals to foodways, further differentiates them from domains that are still largely beyond human understanding or control. These frontiers, in turn, are constantly in flux, a bit like wetlands that shift with the weather, season and tide. Like the elements, cultures are engaged in a perpetual negotiation. Cultural diplomacy is essentially a natural process, which requires only a hospitable environment.



Topsell was not the only person who used bees to comment on human institutions. Socrates, in Plato's dialogue "Phaedo," suggested that people who lived as good citizens might be reincarnated as bees. Virgil upheld the bees to his fellow Romans as models of austere living and martial valor, especially because they would sting intruders at the cost of their own lives. In the Middle Ages, people thought of the hive as a sort of monastery, but, in the early modern period, Bernard de Mandeville satirized it as an imperiled feudal state that had failed to adapt to the ways of commerce, an idea that eerily anticipates the way honey bees are dying out today. Napoleon chose bees as his emblem, because of their association with industry but also with the early medieval rulers of France. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Maurice Maeterlink stated that bees were the most intelligent animals after man, and thought of them as socialists. On learning that the so-called "king" was actually a queen, some feminists have upheld the hive as a model of matriarchal society. These various philosophies and social systems might seem to have little in common, yet they are based on essentially the same imagery. Standard of Napoleon III





Suppose, then, that one were to hold a conference on the current dying out of bees ─ together with its agrarian, cultural, spiritual and economic implications ─ and invite representatives of groups with radically opposing social, religious and political views, from the tea party to the communists. I cannot predict what the various factions might say or what the final outcome would be, but that is precisely why such a meeting might be beneficial. You would likely to encounter some surprising coalitions and novel initiatives. All would be compelled to think beyond their accustomed rhetoric, and probably to articulate some of their core values, thus extending the mediation to other problems.



(A version of this essay was read by the author on June 27 at the Symposium on Cultural Diplomacy in the USA at the Czech Embassy in New York City.)

Animals and Cultural Diplomacy

Animal symbolism is so deeply embedded in human culture that it is almost impossible to talk about animals without, simultaneously, speaking indirectly about human beings.

Our Triumphant March towards Humility

As a historian of human-animal relations, I often find illustrations, which reveal assumptions beneath the threshold of consciousness, not only livelier but also more illuminating than texts. I search in flea markets for pictures taken from old natural history books. Our conceptualization of animals changes so profoundly that, after a century or so has passed that depictions of animals such as elephants or sloths generally look like creatures of fantasy. One of the best examples of this is the depictions of apes before Darwin.



It is odd how triumphalist rhetoric pervades campaigns against anthropocentrism. Every perceived strike against human exceptionalism, for example the Copernican universe or Darwin's Theory of Evolution, is presented as one more step in human progress. This is expected to lead to a vaguely delineated utopia, where human beings, inspired by their kinship with the cosmos, will benevolently manage and control the world.



Accordingly, Jane Goodall's "revolutionary" discovery that animals, specifically chimpanzees, use tools is considered a major blow to the prevailing idea of human uniqueness. Maybe it was one in the latter twentieth century when she made the discovery, but, if so, that is only because we had forgotten much that was entirely commonplace less than a century earlier. In most of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it would have almost been unusual to show an ape without a tool, usually a sort of walking stick. Far from trying to deny kinship between apes and people, illustrators (and writers) constantly emphasized and possibly exaggerated their similarity.



The idea of evolution was not a novelty in Darwin's time, but the author of Origin of Species described a mechanism, natural selection, that could account for it in considerable detail. Early theories of evolution such as those of Buffon and Lamarck did not, unlike Darwin's, seem especially threatening to contemporaries. Apes and monkeys were depicted in that era with very "human" expressions, cheerful but often with a slight undertone of melancholy, leaning on their staffs and looking straight out at the viewer.



I have found a few old pictures that show apes as the original Adam and Eve, a notion that combines evolution with creation. The implicit idea is that the first couple were apes, who became human by eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge, an early form of what we now call "intelligent design." Take the following example from 1846:



Here Eve, the ape in the tree, as already eaten of the fruit, and Has a far more animated, intelligent expression than her partner. Show holds out the apple, and, though steadying herself by grasping the branch of a tree, moves more fluidly and requires less support than he. The ape below her, a simian Adam, has a benign but far less knowing expression, and supports himself with a staff. I do not have the original book from which this picture was taken, but my guess is that neither author nor illustrator thought about this symbolism in a conscious way. They simply appropriated a very familiar paradigm, the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, and applied it to the representation of human origins.



Last week at another flea market, I purchased the following picture, which I identified, using Google, as from Dictionnaire pittoresque d'histoire naturelle et des phénomènes de la nature (Pictorial dictionary of natural history and natural phenomena), published 1836 in Paris. It shows nine classes of mammals, and the first two are apes and human beings:



The figure on the right is labeled "Orang-Chimpanzee with White Buttocks." So far as I am able to tell, it is a blend of several species of ape and monkey, which scientists had not yet learned to distinguish clearly. In many ways, it appears more "human" than the man it is paired with. The ape has a higher forehead than the man, and a somewhat more expressive face. Hair, particularly on males, is traditionally a symbol of wildness; this creature has fur covering most of its body, but it is, like a clean-shaven man, free of facial hair. Like most simians in pictures from that period, it stands upright but with the support of a cane.



The man, by contrast, has no bodily hair, but does have a substantial beard. Like the ape, he is completely naked. Science of the era was pervaded by racism, and black Africans were often considered close to apes, but the man here is clearly white. That may be because the composite ape incorporates not only many simian species but also so-called "primitive" peoples. He represented, in other words, everything that the artist thought was almost, but probably not quite, human.



Interestingly, the contrast between the two figures also shows a sort of implicit theory of the co-evolution of civilization and biology. The walking stick of the ape has, in the hand of a man, thickened at the end, making it into a club. The man is casually balanced, a bit like a Greek statue, suggesting that he no longer needs external support, and it putting his tool to a different use. This perhaps anticipates the theory of "man the predator," developed by Robert Ardrey in the mid-twentieth century and popularized by works of science fiction such as the movie 2001. But why did the ape in the illustration want to stand upright so much that it procured a walking stick? A possible implication is that evolution was thought of a sort of act of will, and the ape was, rather successfully, striving to advance to the status of humankind.



Though these pictures may, in many ways, appear comically naïve to us now, they reveal a strong sense of continuity between people and animals. Darwin's theory of evolution did not upset people simply by linking human beings and the natural world, though it may have done so by presenting a competition among species as the driving force for change.



Similarly, the Copernican universe did not really remove man from the center of the cosmos. The Ptolemaic universe had, in the most literal way, centered not on man but on the core of the earth, Hell for people of the Middle Ages. Contemporaries of Copernicus actually complained that the new heliocentric cosmos actually accorded human beings too much importance. According to historian Frances Yates, the reason church authorities were upset by the heliocentric universe was actually that it encouraged worship of the sun as a pagan god.



So what happens to the triumphant march of humankind towards ever greater humility? Well, we human beings clearly want to be humble, but, just as obviously, don't know how.





Thanks to my wife, Linda Sax, for several ideas and suggestions that contributed to this blog.

Our Triumphant March towards Humility

It is odd how triumphalist rhetoric pervades campaigns against anthropocentrism. Every perceived strike against human exceptionalism, for example the Copernican universe or Darwin's Theory of Evolution, is presented as one more step in human progress.

Black Jack, Dickens' Raven at the Tower of London

The Tower of London may now, at least tentatively, count among its treasures an iconic raven that inspired Charles Dickens. It is stuffed and stands on a perch in a finely carved wooden case with glass walls and a silver base bearing the puzzling words: "Black Jack, whose death was occasioned by the fearful sound of cannon upon the funeral of H. G. (His Grace) the Duke of Wellington, late Constable of the Tower of London, anno 1852." There is a touch of irony in the inscription, since ravens are known for terrifying people, as in Poe's poem "The Raven," but here it is the other way around.



Poe is continually depicted with a raven as a companion, but perhaps he appropriated that image from Dickens. Unlike the English novelist, Poe did not keep ravens or show any particular fondness for them, and he had originally intended the bird in his poem to be a parrot. Dickens kept ravens for much of his life, and many visitors to his home including the writers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Hans Christian Andersen remarked on how a raven was constantly croaking in the background.



Ravenmaster Chris Skaife looks after the ravens at the Tower of London, which people say are the protectors of Britain. In January of 2014, he posted a picture of Black Jack on Twitter. I immediately had a hunch that Black Jack might have been a raven owned by Dickens, and became involved in a virtual conversation with the Ravenmaster and London historian Hannah Velten about his provenance.



Dickens' first raven, the inspiration for the raven Grip in his novel Barnaby Rudge, was also taken to a taxidermist after death, and is now the mascot of the Philadelphia Free Library. In a letter to Charles Maclise, dated March 12, 1841, Dickens writes movingly of Grip's last days and tells how he had the body autopsied prior to sending it for taxidermy, because he suspected his pet had been poisoned.



I contacted the library to ask about Grip's taxidermist, in the hope that this might provide a clue as to the identity of Black Jack. The librarian, Joseph Shemtov, graciously showed me a page from the logbook of taxidermist James Nutcher Bennett for part of the year 1852. Though it did not mention either Grip or Black Jack, the ledger contained a large order by Dickens for birds, confirming that Dickens was a good customer for taxidermy at the time.



I passed on the information to Ravenmaster Chris Skaife, who then took Black Jack to the Charles Dickens Museum in London. Though the personnel there were not able to specifically identify Black Jack, they did confirm that Dickens had at least four ravens in the course of his career, including one that died in 1852, the year of Wellington's Funeral at Saint Paul's Cathedral in London. In addition, Dickens had known Wellington personally and had attended his funeral as a prominent dignitary.



In a few short stories written over the previous two years and published in the magazine Household Words, Dickens had used a raven, presumably Black Jack, as a mouthpiece. The texts could well have been intended as a prelude to a longer work, which Dickens never got around to writing. In "Perfect Felicity" and "The Raven in the Happy Family I," the bird complains about being misrepresented by people, and plans to put together an anthology in which other animals such as the dog and horse will write down their impressions of human beings.



In "The Raven in the Happy Family II," the raven laughs at exploitive human funeral practices: "'Performing' funerals, indeed! I have heard of performing dogs and cats, performing goats and monkeys, performing ponies, white-mice, and canary-birds; but, performing drunkards at so much a day, guzzling over your dead, and throwing half of you into debt for a twelvemonth, beats all I ever heard of. Ha, ha!" Nevertheless, the raven defends the Undertaker, who the bird views as kindred spirit. The mortician is called the "Black Jobsman," a name that resembles "Black Jack."



Finally, in "The Raven in the Happy Family III," the narrator quotes at length from the first entry in his handbook on human beings, written by a horse who complains of human arrogance and dishonesty. The series might have continued with accounts by other animals such as a cat or cow, but they stop a bit before the time of Wellington's funeral.



To summarize so far, many features argue that the Tower's Black Jack was originally a raven in the Dickens household: The date of death, the carefully noted cause of death, the ironic tone of the inscription, and the use of taxidermy all point to that conclusion. Furthermore, if the effigy had not been associated with an illustrious name, it probably would not have wound up in the Tower of London at all. The inscription may be a sort of end to the truncated work of literature that Dickens had begun to center on Black Jack. A professional examination of Black Jack's taxidermy and case might be able to further confirm whether he was a companion to Dickens.



The first known references to ravens in the Tower of London date from 1883, considerably after Wellington's funeral . Just how the ravens were brought in to the Tower of London is not certain, but the Dickens' precedent for keeping ravens was probably a factor, especially if the Yeoman Warders of the late Victorian era were familiar with Black Jack and his history.



At least up until World War II, visitors usually viewed the ravens in the Tower of London one-dimensionally as figures of Gothic horror. Today, however, they have many roles including objects of scientific study, national pets and avatars of the natural world. Dickens wrote of ravens in several facets, and so his legacy is far more relevant than Poe's.





Black Jack

Post-Apocalyptic Literature, Politics and Science

When I was growing up in Chicago during the late 1950s to mid-1960s, we were told that the city might be destroyed by nuclear war at any moment, and the only advance warning would be a siren. It would not help to flee, since the streets would be clogged with hysterical motorists. Your only chance would be to head toward the nearest basement, place your head against the wall and wait. We practiced that in "air-raid drills" at school. Quite a few people were building air-raid shelters, and post-apocalyptic dramas on television often added to the terror. Not infrequently, I would be walking along the street, and hear a noise that I thought was the "siren," at which I would be too frightened to even run.



The possibility of a nuclear war no longer inspires such terror, though it is still with us. Is that because the danger has receded? Is it more because we have simply gotten used to, or resigned to, living with the prospect of annihilation? Have we ceased to feel the dread, or have we grown more skilled at pushing it from our minds? To an extent it has been replaced by, or merged with, other apocalyptic fears such as a Fascist takeover, descent in chaos, economic collapse or, most especially, environmental destruction.



Apocalyptic fears may be found in any historical era, but they wax and wane. In Western culture, they reached a high point in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, and were often expressed in graphic depictions of the end of the world and of sinners in Hell. Demons were shown, as in Dante's Inferno, inflicting all manner of tortures on the damned, but most of the emphasis is usually on bodily consumption. They are, in other words, herding, cooking, devouring and excreting men and women. Nevertheless, invocations of Hell were not unequivocally terrifying, and possibly as much a matter of style as religion.



The demons in Hell are often depicted with a touch of humor, and it may at times be that the grotesque exaggeration in paintings of them even involve an element of satire. When they open their huge mouths, you cannot always tell a snarl from a grin. Often, the monsters seem less evil than simply bestial, like creatures in the wild following their instincts. For most viewers, the terror, genuine though it might be, was mixed with fascination. The depictions of Hell, in other words, were entertainment, not entirely unlike horror movies today. The late medieval preoccupation with demons resembles our contemporary obsession with Nazis, which are often caricatured to a point where they no longer seem to be human beings.



The apocalyptic imagery of that era faded very gradually. Part of the reason may be the greater security of Europeans and Americans on a day-to-day basis. Life expectancy in the Western world nearly doubled in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then almost doubled once more in the 20th. Even in the poorest countries today, human life expectancy is now far longer than it was anywhere in pre-modern times. But, as the two World Wars so forcefully reminded us, the chances of a cataclysmic disaster have greatly increased, so we have merely traded in one type of insecurity for another. Perhaps the representations of end times simply lost their effectiveness through excessive use.



Apocalyptic imagery has again lost its attraction through repetition over the past several decades. The use of a post-apocalyptic setting has now become fairly well-established in fiction. It is usually detached from any very immediate political or social context. The devastation that precedes the main narrative in Cormac McCarthy's The Road or Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games is not a warning, merely the background of a story.



This was apparent to me in reading Elizabeth Kolbert's recent book The Sixth Extinction . The crisis she describes is certainly one of apocalyptic dimensions. By around the middle of this century, scientists estimate that about a third of amphibians, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles and a sixth of all birds will be extinct. This, in turn, will have profound, but unpredictable ecological consequences, which could ultimately jeopardize human survival. Kolbert reports on the crisis though a combination of history, science and personal experience, yet the book is notable for its lack of preaching.



While she often mentions the ability of humankind to save a few selected species, she speaks of the sixth great extinction almost as though it had already taken place. This is quite a contrast with, for example, Jonathan Schell's book The Fate of the Earth , published back in 1982, which horrified the public by describing in very specific detail what would happen if a nuclear bomb were detonated in Manhattan.



However severe the crisis, apocalyptic imagery remains only one way to speak of it, and it is by no means necessarily the most productive. Its advantage is that it can at times shock people into action. The disadvantage is that it may instead lead to panic, despair or denial. In addition, people at times start to enjoy apocalyptic imagery a little too much.



Post-apocalyptic writing, by contrast, risks not doing full justice to the reality of the dangers that we face. But perhaps it confronts them with greater humility, by acknowledging the limits to our understanding, responsibility and control.







André Jacques Victor Orsel, "The Devil Tempting a Young Woman," 1832. The trumpet of the demon may signal the end of time, but the young woman does not appear overly concerned.







Limbourg Brothers, "Tundal's Hell," from Trés Riches Heures, c. 1416. These demons may be tormenting sinners, but they appear almost more playful than diabolic.







From How to Survive an Atomic Bomb by Richard Gerstell, 1950. This book was avowedly written to reassure people, but it further terrified them instead.