Euhemerism

I said yesterday that I was going to talk about the writings of Ælfric of Eynsham, and I will, but I want to explain the term Euhemerism first. Euhemerism is an attempt to shed light on mythology by interpreting it as springing from actual historical events. Or, in the words of an American historian, it is "the taking of a cosmic god and placing him at a definite point in history as an actual person who was later deified." 

It assumes that real events became exaggerated and fictionalized in the oral transmission. The term comes from a late 4th-century BCE Greek, Euhemerus, who tried to rationalize mythology. Many early Greek philosophers were in agreement. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates offers an explanation of the story of an Athenian princess "taken away" by the north wind, Boreas. Socrates points out the place where there is a temple to Boreas where a wind might have knocked a young woman off her feet and onto rocks where she was killed.

Early Christian apologists used Euhemerism against paganism by declaring:

That those are no gods whom the common people worship, is known from this: they were formerly kings, who on account of their royal memory subsequently began to be adored by their people even in death. Thence temples were founded to them; thence images were sculptured to retain the countenances of the deceased by the likeness; and men sacrificed victims, and celebrated festal days, by way of giving them honour. Thence to posterity those rites became sacred, which at first had been adopted as a consolation.[from St. Cyprian]

The Middle Ages, and writers like Vincent of Beauvais and Roger Bacon, were willing to believe that supernatural beings were not imaginary, but were part of the natural order of things created by God. Men like Marsilius Ficino produced encyclopedic works to explain the hierarchy of demons, spirits, angels, archangels, etc., in God's creation.

Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (c.1220) paints the Norse gods as great leaders and kings, tracing back to that great foundation of so much medieval culture, the Trojan War.

The Modern Era also sometimes looks for historic origins of legendary characters, exaggerating them. Dracula, Paul Bunyan, Robin Hood—searching for the kernel of truth that grew into a legend.

But tomorrow we'll talk about Ælfric of Eynsham. Promise.

Whaling in the Middle Ages

Yesterday's post referred to Ohthere of Hålogaland supporting himself partially through whaling. Whaling centuries ago should not be a shocking idea: evidence for whaling in Alaska has been found dating to 1000BCE, and there are neolithic depictions in Korea that may be about whaling as far back as 6000BCE.

Rather than going out into the open sea to catch a large animal, a common method was to take several small boats away from a shore where it was known that whales and dolphins consort, then forming a barrier in an attempt to drive them to beach themselves on shore.

Another method that presents less danger to sailors is to use a drogue, a floating object that is attached to a harpoon by a rope. If the harpoon makes solid contact with a whale, the buoyancy of the drogue makes it difficult for the animal to descend and tires it out so that the sailors can catch up with it. Melville's Moby Dick refers to druggs for this purpose.

Petroglyphs in Korea show boats surrounding sperm whales and humpback whales, but most whaling tackled smaller prey (see relative sizes here). Large whales were looked on to the medieval mind as scary and dangerous, but the smaller ones were gladly hunted for food and materials. One inventory of whales from the Middle Ages mentions the pilot whale (between five and ten meters long) as a popular target for its relatively small size and the ability to drive it into shore. Minke whales were also valuable due to their smaller size.

Smaller whales, porpoises, and dolphins that were driven to beach themselves were then clubbed or knifed. The body parts were divided equally among the participants. Some animals wound up on shore on their own and a call would go out to gather and finish it off (if it were still alive) and share the spoils before they spoiled.

The Dominicans Vincent of Beauvais (c.1190 - 1264) and Bishop Albertus Magnus (c.1200 - 1280) wrote of observing whaling; they both described it as a group project. Bede (672 - 735) also mentions the capture of whales.

Iceland had some very strict laws about whaling, which we will talk about tomorrow.

Gravity

Climbing Lucifer in Dante's Inferno

A long time ago (it seems) I touched on gravity and said "there was no working theory of gravity yet; just a feeling that substances could be heavier or lighter." Theories of gravity did not need Newton to become useful to understanding the world.

Still, if the inhabitants of this globe knew it was a globe, they had to come to terms with how things stayed on it. John Mandeville wrote a book of travels in the 14th century in which he addresses this issue:

from what part of the earth that men dwell, either above or beneath, it seemeth always to them that dwell that they go more right than any other folk. And right as it seemeth to us that they be under us, right so it seemeth to them that we be under them. [Mandeville, Voyage and Travels, chapter xx]

The Middle Ages understood that objects inclined toward the earth itself, wherever they were upon its spherical surface. In fact, gravity was sometimes described as "kindly inclining."

Dante (1265-1321) in his Inferno has his traveler and guide (Virgil) descend through the levels of Hell—not a metaphorical journey, but descending deeper and deeper below the surface of the Earth—finally reaching the gigantic body of Lucifer embedded in the ice. They start climbing down his body when, at his groin region (the bottom-most part of the world), down becomes up, and they have to reverse their orientation. They are now climbing up to his feet.

Was Dante just speaking metaphorically? Did he understand gravity as it operates at the center of the Earth?

Maybe he did. Vincent of Beauvais (c.1190 - 1264) wrote an encyclopedia that was very popular in the Middle Ages. It is not unexpected that Dante would have been very familiar with it. Vincent was well aware of the spheroid nature of the Earth, and that objects fell directly to Earth no matter where they were on the surface. In his Speculum Naturale ["Mirror of Nature"], he explains as much of the world as he can in 3,718 chapters spread across 32 books. In Book vi, he tells the curious what would happen to a stone dropped into a hole that goes straight through the globe to the other side. He says that it would not fight gravity and rise to the other side, but would stay at the center.

The acceptance of a terrestrial globe forced scholars and philosophers to re-think the action of falling bodies and their relationship to the Earth. Common sense led them to arrive at the proper effects of gravity, even if they did not have the science or mathematics to understand the cause of gravity.