An Easter Miracle

Happy Easter.

For practising Christians, the biggest miracle of all was the Resurrection of Christ. Miracles and miraculous events have become part of human culture and feature in every community, whether real or imagined. Here’s an Easter miracle you might like.

Christians have long celebrated Easter with a big feast, long before they celebrated Christmas. It was to mark the end of the period of fasting called Lent. For one medieval Irish abbot the Easter feast led to a truly life-changing miracle.

We only know about this abbot from one source, the “Book of Fermoy”, or “Leabhar Fhear Mai” in Irish Gaelic. This is a collection of poems, genealogies, histories and fables written in Ireland during the mid-15th century. The book gets its name from the home of the Roche family who feature many times throughout the book.

The story of the abbot appears about halfway through the book, sandwiched between an account of the Roman Emperors and a retelling of the Old Testament story of Enoch and Elias. It’s a short story, but will need a bit of explaining to comprehend its relevance.

The story goes like this (and I’ll keep referring to the character as abbot and not abbess, which I’ll explain later):

The protagonist of the tale is a young man who was the Abbot of Drimnagh near Dublin. One day, as preparations were being made for the Easter celebrations, he wanders out to a nearby hill to rest. He puts his sword down beside him and falls asleep. When he wakes the abbot is startled to find that she has become a beautiful woman. Even her sword has changed. It is now a distaff, a spindle for spinning, the occupation traditionally associated with unmarried women (hence an unmarried woman is often called a spinster).

Before she has fully come to terms with her change, and ugly old crone approaches her. The crone listens to the abbot’s story, and she says it is not safe for a young woman like her to be out on the hill as night approaches. Wild animals will attack her. The abbot decides she cannot return to her abbey and seeks shelter in the neighbouring monastery at Crumlin.

On entering the grounds she meets a handsome young man, the monastery’s chief administrator, who immediately falls in love with the abbot. The abbot offers no objection, and very soon the couple are married. Yes, abbots could get married in those days. In fact, this transgender abbot is already married, which will be revealed later.

This unusual couple are married for seven years and they have seven children. Then, as their eighth Easter together approaches, the young monastery administrator is invited to the celebrations in Drimnagh Abbey. The man gathers his entourage together and, with his wife, travels over the hill to Drimnagh.

On top of the hill the abbot feels very sleepy and persuades her husband and the entourage to continue, and she’ll follow them later. She then falls asleep.

A short while later the abbot awakes. Another shock awaits, as he realises he has turned back into a man. Instead of being relieved he is quite distressed. How can he explain himself to his husband and their children? How is he going to explain his seven year absence from his abbey?

Fortunately, the monks at the abbey accept his explanation and he steps back into his role as abbot without question. But what about his husband? Also, what about his own wife? When the abbot explains his long absence to her, his wife can’t understand what he means, because as far as she is concerned he’s only been away for one hour!

The abbot tries to explain to his husband what has happened. His husband seems to accept the situation. He remembers all of their seven years together, and that the abbot is the mother of their children. Again, fortunately, an amicable resolution is achieved, and they agree to let the abbot raise three of their children.

And that’s the end of the story. Firstly, the reason why I chose not to refer to the abbot as an abbess during her transition is to do with monastic governance. Some male monastic institutions could be headed by a woman, usually if there it also includes a separate community of nuns. This would be set out in the institution’s foundation charter. The fact that this character changed into a woman does not negate the terms of his abbey’s foundation charter. Only the head of the monastic order could stop her from being called an abbot, which didn’t happen in this story.

It is clear that this story was not historical but apocryphal. It’s what medieval literature termed a “fool story”. “Fool” in this context means “humble” and refers to what we would call a fable. Some historians think it may be based on real events. The abbot’s children may refer to seven pieces of land a real abbot owned, and that it deals with the division of that land into three and four parts between two monasteries. But, we’ll never know.

However, there are other elements which illustrate early medieval monastic practice. Medieval abbots didn’t have to be celibate. They could marry. There were hereditary abbots in Celtic Christianity who were usually lay members of the religious institution, quite often local aristocracy (perhaps descended from the original founder). One famous hereditary abbot is King Duncan I of the Scots (murdered by Macbeth in Shakespeare’s play) who was the hereditary Abbot of Dunkeld.

The story also contains several examples of medieval fairy lore. Hills have often been regarded as magical locations, particularly in Celtic mythology where they are often said to be the homes of fairies. The ugly old crone is the tale is also a common disguise for a fairy, as is indicated by her meeting the abbot on the fairy hill.

There have been a lot of commentaries of this story in recent years which centre on the transgender element and gender identity. Although these may have some validity in the mind of the commentator, modern transgender and identity attitudes shouldn’t be applied to ones that didn’t exist when the story was written. The medieval audience would no more understand the concept of transgender than they would about chocolate or digital technology. There are many stories of magical gender transformation in legends around the world. I’ve written about some of them on this blog. Unlike modern transgender issues, not one of them is the result of a personal choice to change gender (or species) without any supernatural means.

Another common folk motif is time distortion. Even though the abbot’s wife and the monks only think he’s been away for an hour, he and his husband remember seven years together. This time distortion is a common feature of tales involving people falling asleep on a fairy hill.

So, did you like this fable of a medieval Easter miracle? There’s still a lot in it which is difficult for historians to explain, but perhaps they shouldn’t try too hard. Like modern literature and media, the story meant something to the people who wrote it and the people who first heard it. There are clues in there which historians have yet to find, but in the end it’s simply a story. It doesn’t need to be fully explained to be enjoyed.

Homohoax: Pranking Penguins

There can be no better day than today – April Fools day – to present another Homohoax, one of the many hoaxes, pranks, fakes, imposters, conspiracy theories and confidence tricks perpetrated by or upon the lgbt community.

One of my favourite all-time April Fool jokes was the one the BBC pulled off in 2008. They made a short film promoting a non-existent documentary about flying penguins migrating from Antarctica to Australia. With this in mind I thought I’d write about a hoax involving both penguins and Australia.

The homohoax is known as the Ern Malley Hoax, and was carried out in Australia in 1944 by James McAuley (1917-1976) and Harold Stewart (1916-1995), the latter being regarded today, on the internet at least, as Australia’s first gay poet, although he was not out publicly in his lifetime

Let’s begin with the penguins.

There was an art movement in Australia in the 1940s called Angry Penguins, which took its name from the title a journal edited by a modernist surrealist poet called Max Harris (1921-1995). The name “Angry Penguins” came from a line in one of his poems, "as drunks, the angry penguins of the night". Other modernist poets and artists allied themselves to the movement and they became known collectively as the Angry Penguins.

The Angry Penguins were anything but conservative and traditional. Harold Stewart and James McAuley, however, were definitely conservative, and they hated modernism.

Harold Stewart was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. His father was a health inspector with a keen interest in Asia, an interest that he would pass on to his son. Harold showed early promise as a poet when he was a teenager at school. James McAuley was at the same school, and both received the school’s poetry prize, McAuley in1933 and Stewart in 1935

In school Stewart also became aware of his homosexuality, though the prevailing social conventions at the time were very homophobic and he remained in the closet for the rest of his life. It was only revealed in public in 1996, the year after he died. Stewart's school poetry had homoerotic subject matters, which subsequently helped to earn his the title of Australis’ first gay poet. Most of his friends were probably unaware of his sexuality.

After leaving school Stewart studied teaching at Sydney University but found it quite dull, and he abandoned his studies to become a poet. He spent hours in the public library, reading and copying poems, searching for his own poetic identity. He also met with friends around Sydney to recite and discuss their poems with each other.

During World War II, Stewart and McAuley worked in Army Intelligence (in the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs) in Melbourne. In 1943, while in the army barracks, in just one day, they created the Ern Malley Hoax, a fictitious poet and entire body of work. The poems were deliberately written to be bad, exaggerating the modernist symbolism to the point of ridicule. They actually just wrote down the first thing that came into their heads, whether it made sense or not. They also had a pile of reference books, dictionaries and phrase books from which they lifted words and phrases at random. At the end of the day Stewart and McAulay had written 17 poems and a complete fake biography of Ern Malley.

So, what did Stewart and McAuley come up with for their biography of Ern Malley?

Ernest “Ern” Lalor Malley was born in England on 14th March 1918. His father died when Ern was 2, and his mother migrated to Sydney, Australia, with her two children Ern and Ethel. At the age of 17 Ern moved to Melbourne and had several jobs. In the early 1940s he was diagnosed with Graves' disease. Although not necessarily fatal, this is a serious autoimmune disease that particularly affects the thyroid gland which enlarges and produces hormones causing skin, heart, and muscle problems and, in the most well-known effect, the bulging of eyes. Malley refused treatment and he returned to Sydney to live with his sister in March 1943. He died a few months later on 23 July.

After Ern’s death, Ethel found some poems he had written. She wrote to Max Harris and asked for his opinion of them. Ethel was, of course, actually Stewart and McAuley. Harris was excited. He showed them to his Angry Penguin friends, and they fell for the hoax hook, line and sinker, just as Stewart and McAulay had hoped. They all agreed that Malley was a genius. Harris decided to rush out a special edition of the “Angry Penguins” journal and commissioned noted Australian artist Sidney Nolan to paint the cover illustration based on one of Malley's poems.

While the modernist poets praised Malley and his poems, the University of Adelaide’s student newspaper ridiculed the poems, suggesting that Harris had written them as a hoax. Then the Adelaide Daily Mail expressed the same opinion. The next week the “Sunday Sun” ran a front page story correctly alleging that the Malley poems had been written by McAuley and Stewart.

Then things turned serious. The police impounded the special “Angry Penguins” issue and prosecuted Harris for publishing obscene material. Several distinguished expert witnesses were called to defend Harris, but he was found guilty. His fine by today’s standard was pretty light - £5.

Understandably, the whole Malley hoax effected the course of the modernist and surrealist movement in Australia. Support of the Australian modernist and surrealist movement took a blow, and the “Angry Penguins” journal lost readership and soon went out of business. However, Max Harris later took advantage of the affair, and in the mid-1950s he published another literary magazine called “Ern Malley's Journal”. He was always adamant that Malley’s poems, even though he knew they were fake, still had merit and he republished them in 1961. He wrote, "Sometimes the myth is greater than its creators." His opinion was influential. Even today, over 70 years later, the Malley poems are regarded as legitimate surrealist poems. They have inspired many other poems and artists. In fact, the artist Sidney Nolan said the Malley poems inspired him to create his “Ned Kelly” series of paintings.

In 1974 there was an exhibition of Sidney Nolan’s art called "Ern Malley and Paradise Garden" at the Art Gallery of South Australia's Adelaide Festival Exhibitions. More recently an exhibition called "Ern Malley: The Hoax and Beyond" was mounted at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2009. The “Washington Post” has gone so far as to call the Ern Malley Hoax as the greatest literary hoax in the 20th century (I would challenge this – the Hitler Diaries had a more global effect).

After the hoax, Stewart worked in a Melbourne bookshop and collected many Eastern books, as his late father’s interest in Asia began to become a bigger part his own life. He began to study and pursue Japanese Buddhism and haiku poetry.

He first visited Japan in 1961. He was almost ordained as a Jōdo Shinshū priest in 1963 but changed his mind at the last minute. From 1966 Stewart became a permanent resident in Japan, becoming an expert on the history, culture and art of Kyoto. He wrote a series of poems with prose commentaries on Kyoto’s history in 1981. Earlier, in the 1960s, he published two translations of haiku poetry which proved popular.

Harold Stewart died in Kyoto on 7th August 1995 after a short illness. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Higashiyama mountains.

One of the ironic twists is that the Ern Malley poems have become the most well-known poems by Harold Stewart, more so than the poems he wrote under his own name. I wonder if that qualifies as a hoax that backfired.