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.

A Queer Bogeyman

Hallowe’en is with us again, with its US-inspired misappropriation and distortion of traditional European customs and neo-pagan fakery.

The world is full of monsters and evil spirits who “live” all year round in every culture. There are no supernatural spirits that are specifically associated with Hallowe’en (unlike Christmas). Some of these spirits lurk in the shadows, ready to pounce on the unsuspecting. They are a wide range of bogeymen, a general name given to the many different types of spirits and monsters in all sizes and physical forms often used by parents to keep their children in order.

In South Africa there’s a bogeyman that has some gender-bending characteristics called Antjie Somers.

While most bogeymen originate in centuries-old folk belief, Antjie Somers can be traced back to more recent times. The first printed reference appears in a South African magazine called “The Friend of the Free State”, published in Bloemfontein on 10th August 1866. I haven’t been able to track down a copy of this edition but I have found snippets and references to it from other sources. From these it seems that Antjie Somers was a devilish character who stalked the streets at night, preying on lone travellers or looking for naughty children to carry away in his sack.

Several different urban legends and folk motifs merge in this Afrikaan bogeyman. First there is the Sackman, common throughout the world in many forms, including the original 19th century American Santa Claus who has a sack from which he distributes presents to good children and kidnaps naughty children (later downgraded to a “naughty list”).

Another common folk motif in Antjie Somers is the urban myth of a highwayman or robber disguising himself as a vulnerable character in need of protection or rescue. The urban myth of a hitch-hiker who appears innocent and turns into a bogeyman is still quite common. Although hitch-hiking bogeymen are scary they are also not very intelligent. Victims who see through the disguise can easily make an excuse to stop the car or horse and carriage by saying they accidentally dropped something onto the road, or there’s an obstruction ahead and ask the hitch-hiker to get out and pick up or remove the object. The potential victim can then just to drive off at speed, leaving the bogeyman behind.

A third common folk motif is one which concerns us today, that Antjie Somers is a male bogeyman disguised as a woman. This is a variation on the preceding hitch-hiker motif (commonly referred to as “the hairy-armed hitch-hiker”). There’s several indexes of world folk motifs. In the Thompson Folk Motif Index, for example, tales of a man disguising himself as a woman is category K.1836.

The 1866 “The Field” article states that there were two bogeymen called Antjie Somers and Antjie Winter, one operating in summer and the other in winter, hence their names. The article indicates that the characters were known from the time of Lord Charles Somerset who was the Governor of Cape Colony 1815-26.

Over the decades, these urban myths merged to produce the Antjie Somers known today. Such additional myths include his ability to become invisible and to fly around in the sky, other common motifs applied to evil spirits in European folk tales. The Dutch, the ancestors of the Afrikaans, certainly had legends about female-disguised robbers, as did other European colonists.

By the mid-20th century the stories of Antjie Somers had been reduced to those told to scare children. This was part of a general global turn from traditional folk stories and customs as humanity began to turn away from old days of superstition and into the modern scientific and technological world.

When Pieter W. Grobbelaar, a South African author and folk tale collector, published his 1968 book “The Most Beautiful Afrikaans Fairy Tales”, he wrote the “full story” of Antjie Somers. Briefly, it went like this: Andries Somers was a brave and strong Afrikaans fishermen. No-one could haul in the full nets as fast as he could. One day, the other fishermen became jealous and attacked him. Andries knocked them all to the ground, but one fisherman didn’t get up. He was dead. Andries, hoping to avoid being accused on murder, stole some women’s clothes to disguise himself and ran away. He managed to find work in another part of South Africa. His new work colleagues found the stolen clothes in his hut and began taunting him, calling him by the female name Antjie Somers. Andries could bear it no longer and fled once more and was never seen again. However, children began talking about an old woman in the mountains who was always angry and kept threatening them. People believed this was Antjie Somers and that children should keep away or he would carry them away in a sack. From this Antjie developed into a bogeyman. This was Grobbelaar’s version.

By the end of the century the origin myths of Antjie Somers had been further elaborated. Rather fancifully, modern social rights were applied to the bogeyman’s origin, including sexism and racism.

The first modern interpretation came from feminist activists who claimed Antjie Somers is proof of the patriarchal misogyny of the 19th century. As mentioned above, Antjie Somers is just one of many variations of combined folk motifs. The Thompson Folk Motif Index lists other disguises used my male bogeymen in folk tales, including animals, old men, and other people. There are also folk motifs of female bogeymen disguising themselves as men, even among the Afrikaans. Even today, most female fiction writers feature men as the main villain. Very few write about evil women.

Next we come to the most obvious fake addition to Antjie Somers, the idea that he was a slave and his myths are racist. I haven’t found any reference to Antjie Somers being either a slave or black before 2000. The version by given by Grobbelaar in 1968 clearly identifies him as Afrikaans, i.e. white, and every other reference I’ve found from that period implies the same.

The black slave link seems to originate in a musical called “Antjie Somers” which premiered in South Africa in 2000. The musical sets the origin of the Antjie Somers legend in 1834 which contradicts the 1866 “The Friend” article which dates if before 1826.

The character of Antjie Somers is portrayed as a black ex-slave. The musical’s creators haven’t said why they changed his race, or why the musical is set in the wrong period. The disturbing aspect, however, is that people who saw it probably went away thinking it was historical fact, like people have who have seen the musical “Hamilton” or the film “Braveheart”.

This is probably why a South African student wrote an MA thesis in 2011 about Antjie Somers which was solely based on the “fact” that the bogeyman was based on a real slave. The student even retold Grobbelaar’s 1968 version of the legend and wrote quite specifically that she changed Antjie’s race to a black purely to suit the purpose of her thesis, not because she had any new proof. Why her university didn’t throw out this student’s pathetic attempt at academic research is puzzling.

Be that as it may, the idea that Antjie was a black slave soon spread across the internet, and every time it appears it is usually repeated word-for-word as if it was fact, so that now it is virtually impossible to find any reference that restores the original version.

One earlier attempt to discover the origin of this bogeyman to find any basis in historical fact was made in the mid-20th century. One South African historian was told a story by a respected poet and folklorist C. Louis Liepoldt (1880-1947) who, in turn, heard the story from an elderly couple in around 1900. In their youth they were told of a real un-named robber who stalked Tuin Street, Cape Town, dressed as a woman. It was a rough area and most people avoided going there at night. When his activities became too well known he feared capture and ran away into the mountains.

This may just have been a story about a different robber, and there are other origins that have been suggested, including being the ghost of someone who committed suicide. Whatever Antjie Somers’ origin story actually is, he’ll be scaring children and travellers for generation to come.

I hope I haven’t put you off going out tonight, so why not stay indoors with a nice bottle of wine. A few years ago you could have enjoyed a nice sauvignon blanc from Folklore Wines in South Africa called Antjie Somers (pictured below). I don’t think it is available now, but you’re free to search around for a bottle.

For me, I’m celebrating Hallowe’en as it was intended, by remembering our ancestors, like the ancient Roman festival in late October which inspired the Roman Catholic Church to create Hallowe’en in the first place. The neo-pagan cultural appropriation of an alleged British Celtic festival unknown to the distant Italian Catholics, is not for me.

My Ancestor Was A Mermaid

That’s an extraordinary statement to make, but according to medieval legend I’m descended from a mermaid, and so are millions of Europeans and North Americans. More of that later. A couple of weeks ago I wrote “Queer Cryptids”, an article about legendary beasts. I mentioned mermaids briefly, and today we’ll look at some of the numerous lgbt connections of these citizens of the sea.

Mermaid is a term that encompasses many half-human, half-fish beings from just about every culture in the world. Whether it’s called a mermaid, naiad, merrow, siren or rusalka the common link is the traditional representation as seen in the Disney version of “The Little Mermaid”.

“The Little Mermaid” was a story written by Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) in 1837. Recent research has uncovered the circumstances behind the story. Hans was bisexual. For several years he had harboured a crush on Edvard Collin, and when he found out that Edvard was going to get married he incorporated his own loss into the ending of “The Little Mermaid”. In the original story the mermaid does not marry the prince but leaves him.

Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”, Ariel, has a desire to live in the human world. She sings a song entitled “Part of Your World”. In the lgbt community most of us have felt the same feeling, whether it is the right to marry or just the desire to be accepted and not persecuted for being different. The lyrics were written by Howard Ashman (1950-1991), whose first big success was “Little Shop of Horrors”. With song-writing partner Alan Menken he wrote songs for “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast”. Sadly Howard died from AIDS-related causes in 1991 before he could finish his songs for “Aladdin”. If you watch “Beauty and the Beast” you’ll see a dedication to him at the end of the film. The title song from that film won the 1992 Oscar for Best Original Song. His partner Bill Lauch accepted the Oscar at the ceremony.

Unlike the Andersen and Disney mermaids traditional mermaids didn’t trade their voice for legs. When they went onto dry land their tail turned into legs automatically, and changed back again when they came into contact with water. One legend which illustrates this comes in the folk legends of medieval France. There are many variations but all centre around the same mermaid called Melusine.

A French nobleman called Raymond was wandering alone in a forest when he came to a magic fountain. Standing beside it was the beautiful Melusine, the water spirit who guarded it. She promised Raymond if he married her they would become the founders of a royal dynasty. She gave one condition however. Under no circumstances was Raymond allowed to see her on Saturdays. Raymond agreed, they got married and went to live in Lusignan Castle. They had ten sons.

After many years Raymond’s suspicious brother persuaded him to look into Melusine’s chamber on a Saturday. The sight he saw horrified him. Melusine was in her bath in her natural form – each human leg had changed into water-serpent’s tail. Melusine shrieked in surprise when she saw Raymond and leapt out of the window, never to be seen again.

Even if that’s just romantic fiction the Lusignan family were very real. They were an influential French dynasty who rose to become Crusader Kings of Jerusalem. They have left many millions of descendants, including myself. My nearest ancestor is Countess Jeanne de Lusignan (d.1232).

You may have seen a picture of Melusine without realising it. In 1971 a company in Seattle, USA, was looking for a logo which symbolised the sea routes that early traders used when transporting their product around the globe. They chose a depiction of Melusine, with her two tails, as a representative of the sea trade, from a 15th-century printed version of the legend. They still use a modified version of that picture today. The company is called Starbucks.

The stories of Melusine and Ariel both show the importance of physical change to the characters. As such the mermaid became a symbol of some transgender groups. One of these is Mermaids UK, a transgender and gender-nonconforming youth network formed in 1995.

As well as on coffee cups pictures of mermaids appear in many places. One gay man who works for the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, Greater London, has built a career out of looking for them. Sacha Coward is the museum’s Community Participation Producer and is responsible for getting the public interested in maritime history. He’s been collecting images and depictions of mermaids, and mermen, from different cultures and has produced exhibitions at Greenwich in celebration of them.

To end with I’ll ask you a question. Do you remember the series “Man From Atlantis”? Would you class this character as a mermaid/merman? It made a star out of Patrick Duffy, but did you know that most of his underwater swimming scenes were done by a body double called Tom Reudy?

Tom Reudy went on to become a multi-medal-winning swimming champion at four Gay Games from 1986. In some of the relay races a team member was a man I’ll mention in my next “Around the World in Another 80 Gays” article, Michael Mealiffe. Today Tom Reudy is Head Coach at San Mateo Masters Swimming club.

So, from cryptids to coffee, and from Denmark to Atlantis, mermaids have a multitude of connections in the lgbt community.

Queer Achievement : International Children's Literature Day

[Achievement – the name given in heraldry to the full pictorial representation of a coat of arms.]

To celebrate today’s International Children’s Literature Day I’m looking at the coat of arms of the creator of one of the world’s most popular fictional characters, Peter Pan – J. M. Barrie.

First of all I’ll say a few words about why I think Barrie should be included in the lgbt community, something which has been debated in literary circles for quite some time. Some recent commentators have gone so far as to label Barrie a paedophile. While I think this is a wild accusation to make it is clear that Barrie did find the company of boys far more comfortable than that of girls or women. There’s no evidence he ever had sex with boys, or any overtly erotic desires for them, but his close friendship with the Llewellyn-Davies boys (the role models for the “lost boys” of the Peter Pan story) was more than paternalistic. Many decades later one of the boys admitted that “Uncle Jim”, as they called him, was in love with his brother Michael. Tragically, Michael died in what is believed to have been a suicide pact with his own boyfriend when he was 21.

To me J. M. Barrie seems to have been asexual with a romantic interest in male youths. It is this queerness which makes me place him in this blog. Had he lived in our time, when accusations of child abuse are being made against anyone who so much as touches a child’s shoulder, he may well have been accused of paedophilia, even though there’s no evidence he had any sexual interest in them.

Now, the coat of arms. As with most of the previous arms I’ve covered there’s a pun on Barrie’s name in the design. The shield is divided into bars. In heraldry this is called barry (= Barrie). The book in the crest is an obvious reference to his writing career. The reeds, however, are less obvious.

This coat of arms was granted to Barrie by the College of Arms in 1919 and the “rationale”, the explanation behind the design, is not publicly available so I’ll make an educated guess. Reeds were used in ancient times to make pipes – the sort Pan would play. Are the reeds a reference to Peter Pan? I’m not sure about the reason for the lion either. I don’t think it has anything to do with England because Barrie was Scottish.

A couple of elements in the design signify J. M. Barrie received a knighthood. The first is the helmet. Knights show helmets with the visor open. If you look at some of my previous paintings you’ll see the visor closed. The helmet is shown facing front, it doesn’t have to be, it could face left. In the way I’ve shown here the open book can be displayed properly.

The second knightly element is the badge on the left below the shield. In 1913 Barrie was created a baronet, a hereditary knighthood, the second most senior knighthood in the UK (only one had been created since 1963 – Denis Thatcher). The badge is the official insignia of a baronet. Interestingly, Barrie turned down a knighthood, that of Knight Bachelor, in 1909 (Knight Bachelor is the lowest of the dozen ranks of British knighthood available at the time).

The badge on the right is that of the Order of Merit. This order confers no title on its holder though ranks in the middle of the top 5 knighthoods. The Order was created by King Edward VII in 1902 and is given to very few people who have made a significant contribution to society, mainly in the arts. Barrie became a member of the Order of Merit in 1922. One of the first members appointed by Edward VII in 1902 was Florence Nightingale, and one of the most recent is David Hockney.

The motto is in French and translates as “Love of Goodness”.

I didn’t think it was appropriate to put a rainbow backing to the motto scroll (one of the few areas where artistic license is allowed) considering what I said above about Barrie’s queerness. Instead I’ve chosen the colours of the asexual community and the Asexual Pride flag.

The 12 Gays of Christmas

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875)

At this time of year the air is filled with fantasy, magic and fairy tales. A lot of familiar fairy tales originate in old folk stories going back generations which were adapted into children’s stories. Some of them were written in recent centuries. Among the most popular are the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. The Little Mermaid, Thumbelina, the Ugly Duckling and The Emperor’s New Clothes have become staple stories of the festive season.

Andersen was already a successful writer before he published his first collection of fairy tales in 1835. “The Little Mermaid”, published in 1837, has been interpreted as Andersen’s own unrequited love for Edvard Collin, the son of his benefactor. In the words of Wilhelm von Rosen of the National Archives of Denmark Andersen’s sexuality can be reflected in “… the impossible and fatal love of a little mermaid for a prince who never really sees her, except for her art, her dancing on the small feet that hurt as if she were treading on knives.”

Discussion on Andersen’s sexuality has been going on since 1893. In recent decades more discussion has been published, and for Professor Dag Heede of the University of Southern Denmark the question of Andersen’s non-heterosexuality is beyond doubt.

In 1847 Andersen wrote his autobiography, calling it “The Fairy Tale of My Life”. He considered the real world to be like a fairy tale. In his own case this may be true. He was born into a poor family and rose to the heights of being Denmark’s leading man of letters.

Andersen travelled around Europe extensively, even becoming friends with Charles Dickens, spending 5 weeks with him in 1857 (Dickens found him a bit fussy). Andersen produced several books on travel, and by developing his own style of traditional travelogue mixed with comment, philosophy and story-telling, paved the way for modern tv travel documentaries.

Today, Hans Christian Andersen is seen as a shining beacon of children’s literature. His influence is found in literature and media everywhere, even giving the English language a few common phrases (e.g. “he’s a bit of an ugly duckling”). His birthday (2^nd April) was chosen as the annual date for International Children’s Book Day, and the statue of his most famous character, the Little Mermaid, attracts thousands to Copenhagen every year.