When is Spring? In Celebration of Imbolc - Celia Rees

St Brigid's Cross - Ancient Symbol of Imbolc

Today, I went out walking and marked the year's turning from darkness to light, from dormancy to life. 

8:05 15th February, 2019, Leamington Spa

We are not so far removed from our ancestors.  Until very recently we were all ruled by the eternal rhythms of sunset and sunrise.

Planet Earth at Night - wikipedia

Now, we have flooded the world with light. We love it so much that it is there 24 hours a day, you can even see it from Space. We are warned not to look at bright screens last thing at night because the brain simply won't know that it is time to sleep. Our love of light and dislike of darkness have changed the natural pattern of our lives, but still we feel it on our pulses, the turning of the year.

We still keep to the ancient calendar that is ruled by the sun. The winter solstice might have been christened Christmas but we are really celebrating the point when the sun begins its slow return. It's an act of faith more than anything. The mornings are still dark, night still comes early. The trees are bare and nothing is growing. Many of us feel 'down' at this time of year, depressed. The third Monday in January, has been designated Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year.  Electric lights are not enough, screens are not enough. We need the sun.

Then there is a day, often in late January or early February,  when the morning is lighter,  evening  comes later, the sun is brighter, stronger, there's a change in the air.  That's why I think we should re-instate the ancient Celtic Festival of Imbolc. It was traditionally celebrated on 1st of February, but the day was not exact, it could come a fortnight on either side of that date, depending on seasonal variations, the onset of lambing, the blooming of the blackthorn. It was adopted by the Christian church as St Brigid's Day, Brigid herself a christianised version of the Celtic goddess, Brigid. It is immediately followed by Candlemas on 2nd of February, a Christian festival associated with the Virgin Mary. Clues there as to its importance in the Pagan Wheel of the Year and its strong association with the Goddess. 

Imbolc and Candlemas have slipped from our calendar and our consciousness. The nearest date of note is Valentine's Day with its rampant commercialism, tawdry cards and heart shaped balloons. A time, supposedly, for lovers, but how many of us are? The traditional anonymity of the exchange of cards and tokens disappeared a long time ago and  for those of us who are not in a relationship for any number of reasons,Valentine's Day can eclipse Blue Monday as the most depressing day of the year. 

How much better to celebrate the coming of Spring. Not when it has already arrived on 21st March and the daffodils are everywhere, but when we can sense its approach in the lighter mornings and evenings and the drifts of snowdrops carpeting the bare ground. 

6:45 15th February, 2019 Leamington Spa

Snowdrops in Jephson Gardens

Love, Sex and Romance in Old Japan - Valentine’s Day Special by Lesley Downer

Until the late nineteenth century, there was no word for ‘love’ in Japanese, no equivalent to the western concept of pure, ennobling, platonic love, the courtly love of chivalry. Love was the forbidden fruit. 

Tayu courtesan in Shimabara, Kyoto.

The Japanese acknowledged the strength of love, its power to subvert the existing order, and did all they could to tamp it down. Falling in love was seen as a madness that swept you off your feet, made you go off with someone totally unsuitable. Such folly could only lead to tragedy. Far from expecting to fall in love, as we do, men and women had marriages arranged by their families.

One of Japan’s most emblematic love stories is that of Tokubei and Ohatsu. Tokubei was a clerk, Ohatsu a famous and beautiful courtesan. Tokubei was far too poor to be able to spend a night with Ohatsu, let alone buy her out of servitude. And, as a courtesan, it was Ohatsu’s job to make men fall in love with her but never, never to fall in love herself.

Nevertheless Ohatsu fell for this poor clerk.

Somehow Tokubei managed to beg, borrow or steal the money to pay her ransom. But then he was swindled out of his savings. Realising they could never be together the two decided to run away to Sonezaki Shrine in the wood of Tenjin and kill themselves so they could be together in death. There he stabbed first her, then himself, in the throat.

Cherry blossom time in the
Yoshiwara pleasure quarters.
Utagawa Hiroshige. Los Angeles County Fund

The event caused a sensation. Their story was immortalised by the great playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724). The play was first performed in the bunraku puppet theatre in 1703, the year of their deaths. The lines that the chorus sings as they walk into the forest are some of the most famous and moving in all of Japanese literature:

‘Farewell to this world and to the night farewell.
We who walk the road to death, to what should we be likened?
To the frost by the road that leads to the graveyard,
Vanishing with each step we take ahead:
How sad is this dream of a dream!’

Gravestone of Ohatsu and Tokubei.

The play inspired a spate of copycat suicides and to this day ‘love suicide’ a la Romeo and Juliet is still considered the ultimate romantic act.  

But this was not courtly love. Tokubei was in love with a real woman, not some distant idealised figure, and Ohatsu was equally in love with him.

Geisha, Pontocho, Kyoto

As I said, at the time there was no word in Japanese for pure idealised ‘love’ which has nothing to do with sex. The word koshoku meant both love and lust and everything in between. There was no distinction between the two. Love was not something you felt for your wife. That would have been disrespectful. Respectable married women were taught not to make themselves attractive - not to ‘tart themselves up’, if you like.

Then in the late nineteenth century western literature entered Japan. Translators came across the word and the concept of ‘love’ and realised that it referred to something different from ‘lust’, some pure, noble emotion which didn’t require physical gratification. To begin with they used the English word ‘love’, phonetically transliterated as rabu, and eventually coined a new word - ren’ai.

The Kiss by Auguste Rodin
 at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Copenhagen, photographer 
Yair Haklai 2010.

There was also no word for ‘kiss’. When Oda Jun’ichiro translated Edward Bowler Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers into Japanese in 1878, he was stumped by the phrase, ‘I should sleep well if I could get one kiss from those coral lips.’ He finally came up with, ‘if I could get one lick of your red lips’, which Japanese of the time found extremely amusing.

A woman named Sugimoto Inagaki Etsu records in her 1926 memoir, A Daughter of the Samurai, that when she set off for America in 1898, her mother warned her, “I have heard, my daughter, that it is the custom of foreign people to lick each other as dogs do.”

But all this does not mean that love and kissing did not exist in old Japan. They did; but as we have seen they had a different place in the order of things.

Geisha provided an outlet for romantic feelings - though, while a man might have strong feelings for a geisha, he was well aware that she was being paid. Kissing was part of a geisha’s repertoire of exotic sexual techniques. It was not something that decent women did.

Eventually the word ‘kiss’ was transliterated as kissu, the only Japanese word for ‘kiss’ used to this day. When Rodin’s statue The Kiss was erected in Tokyo in the 1930s, it caused a sensation. The kissing heads had to be wrapped in a scarf. There was no problem with the naked bodies.

So, as we have seen, in old Japan love and marriage did not go together ‘like a horse and carriage’. They had very little to do with each other.

Love belonged on the wrong side of the tracks - which made it all the more alluring. The system which the Tokugawa shoguns established and which lasted for more than 250 years, from 1603 to 1868, put a premium on order above all. There was a place for everything and everything in its place. The place for love was the pleasure quarters, where it would not pollute the decent world of work, wife and children.

The most famous of these was the Yoshiwara, a good way outside Edo (now Tokyo), across the marshes. It was a city devoted to pleasure - the pleasure of men. There was every human emotion there - pain and tragedy, romance and love - and everything was heightened and intense. It was a place reserved for all the emotional side of life, so that outside it people could get on with the serious business like having a family and working. It was Las Vegas, it was Hollywood - a glamorous world of fun and fantasy, where whatever a man did had no consequences.

There, if he could afford it, a man might spend night after night with a beautiful courtesan. She no doubt told him she loved and desired him - as she told plenty of other men - and he might well be completely in love with her. It would suit her purposes if he was. In the morning as he left the pleasure quarters he would turn at the Looking Back Willow to take a long last look as she stood waving, wiping away a tear if she was a particularly consummate actress.

But it would be the pinnacle of folly for her to fall in love with him or anyone else - unless she too wanted to walk the road of death along with Tokubei and Ohatsu.

Lesley Downer's new novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is published by Bantam. Find more information on her website, http://www.lesleydowner.com/

http://bit.ly/TheShogunsQueen

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorLesleyDowner/

@LesleyDowner

Five Latin Love Poems by Caroline Lawrence

Cupids play music with Apollos instruments

As an excuse to do a bit of Latin translation I thought I’d post five Latin love poems in the run-up to Valentine’s Day. 

The first Latin poem I ever fell in love with is one of the simplest and one of the most famous. It is by Gaius Valerius Catullus who lived in the first century BCE. He’s the one who famously asked Lesbia to give him a thousand kisses and then a thousand more in order to confound the old men. And he wrote about the sparrow. But the poem I fell in love with is this one. In twelve words he sums up a certain type of love affair that every one of us has probably experienced. 

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, nescio. Sed fieri sentior et excrucior. 

I love you and I hate you. 
Why I do this, I have no idea. 
But I feel it happening and I’m in agony. 
[Catullus 85]

Bust of Virgil from his so-called tomb in Naples

My favourite Latin author is Virgil. I especially love his use of colour, sound and movement. Publius Vergilius Maro lived in the late first century BCE but if he were alive today, he’d be making movies. Here’s a bit of love poetry from his masterpiece, the Aeneid. This is the famous scene where beautiful Queen Dido and the handsome Trojan refugee Aeneas are out hunting when a sudden hailstorm drives them to shelter in a cave. As they consummate their relationship the thunder crashes and the nymphs cry out in a tableau that makes me think of the famous scene in From Here to Eternity where Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kiss in the crashing surf. 

Like the others this is a fairly free translation:

Speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem
deveniunt. Prima et Tellus et pronuba Iuno
dant signum; fulsere ignes et conscious Aether
conubiis, summoque ulularunt vertice Nymphae. 

Dido and the Trojan leader come together
In the same cave. First Earth and then 
Juno the goddess of marriage
Give permission. Heaven watches the act of love
And illuminates the scene with lightning
And from the highest peak the Nymphs shriek. 
[Virgil Aeneid IV. 165-168]

Fresco from Lake Albano, Italy

Publius Ovidius Naso brings us into the first century CE. Born a year after the assassination of Julius Caesar, he lived during the reign of the first Emperor, Augustus. When he was about fifty, that emperor sent him into exile. Some people think a love poem was what got him in trouble. Or it may have been an adulterous love affair. Or perhaps both. All his surviving poetry is sublime but I chose these first lines of a poem addressed to his friend Atticus because of a wonderful fresco I once saw in a modern palazzo on the shores of Lake Albano near Rome. 

Militat omnis amans, et habet sua castra Cupido: 
Attice, crede mihi, militat omnis amans. 

Every lover does battle, Cupid has his own camp
Believe me, Atticus, every lover does battle.
[Ovid, Amores I.9]

My friend Matt dressed as a Roman

The Latin author I love to hate (and most enjoy reading) is Marcus Valerius Martialis. Martial was writing in the late first century CE, during the reign of Domitian. Many of his poems put me in mind of Sex in the City, Roman-style. He was a loathsome anti-Semitic misogynist, but he could also be funny, perceptive and sensitive. The thing I love most about him is his attention to detail. Nobody else describes the concrete world of ancient Rome as well as he does, certainly not that old sourpuss Juvenal. Many of Martial’s poems are X-rated, but this one is beautiful. It reminds us that at this period of Roman history it was normal for men to desire boys as well as women.

Quod spirat tenera malum mordente puella,
Quod de Corycio quae venit aura croco; 
Vinea quod primis floret cum cana racemis,
Gramina quod redolent quae modo carpsit ovis; 
Quod myrtis, quod messor Arabs, quod sucina trita, 
Pallidus Eoo ture quod ignis olet; 
Gleba quod aestivo leviter cum spargitur imbre,
Quod madidas nardo passa corona comas: 
Hoc tua, saeve puer Diadumene, basia fragrant.
Quid si tota dares illa sine invidia?

Like an apple when a tender girl bites into it, 
Like the perfume that wafts from saffron crocus, 
Or a bright vineyard flowering with new clusters,
Like grass newly nibbled by a lamb,
Like crushed myrtle 
Or the fingers of an Arabian spice collector, 
Like rubbed amber or flaming frankincense,
Like light summer rain on earth
Or a garland resting on hair dripping with nard…
Your kisses, cruel boy, smell of all these. 
Just imagine what they would be like 
If you gave them without holding back. 
[Martial III.65]

bedroom of the Hotel Europeo, Naples

Finally, I want to end with a couple of rare lines written by a female poet. We know of two Roman poetesses named Sulpicia. The later one lived during the reign of Domitian at the end of the first century CE. She was praised by her contemporary Martial as a model Roman wife: sensual but chaste. Two tentatively restored lines survive, here freely translated by me. 

Si me cadurci restitutis fasciis
nudam Caleno concubantem proferat

If you were to untangle the sheets of my marriage bed
You would find me lying nude with my husband Calenus…

And on that sensual but chaste note of conjugal love I wish you all a Happy Valentine’s Day!

Caroline writes historical mysteries for kids set in Ancient Rome and the Wild West but has recently retold two stories from Virgil's Aeneid for reluctant or dyslexic teen readers. Try Queen of the Silver Arrow for a tragic love story.

Meon Hill - A Valentine's Day Death - Celia Rees

For me, Valentine's Day is not just a time for cards and flowers. I grew up in the West Midlands and every Valentine's Day, the local T.V. (ATV Today, we had it on before Crossroads) had a feature about the gruesome murder of of Charles Walton up on Meon Hill, just outside Stratford-on-Avon. Walton was killed in 1945 but the case was unsolved and had overtones of witchcraft. Enough to fascinate my brother and me (we were both fans of Dennis Wheatley) and to stick in my head.

The details of the murder were, indeed, bizarre. Walton was murdered on 14th February, a significant date in itself, but associated by the old calendar with the Celtic Festival of Imbolc. He was an old man, in his seventies, and out on the hill hedging and ditching. He was a farm labourer, living in a little cottage in the small village of Lower Quinton. When he didn't come back for his dinner, his niece went to look for him. She found him with his throat slashed with his own bill hook which was still embedded in his neck. He was pinned to the bank by a two pronged pitch fork and a large cross had been carved into his chest. It looked very like a ritual murder and Walton had a reputation for witch craft. The only thing that was missing from his body was an old tin watch. He was rumoured to carry a scrying mirror, a piece of mica, in the back of it which he used to overlook people and ill wish them.

Whatever the motives, the locals shut up like clams and eventually the famed Fabian of the Yard was brought in to try and crack the case. He never did, It was his only unsolved murder. It was said that he came back every year to walk the hill, re-visit the site, go for a pint in the pub and remind the villagers that he had not forgotten. He always believed that they knew the perpetrator but held to a code of silence. The village of Lower Quinton, which lies beneath the hill, is a small place, a few farms and a collection of cottages clustered round a green and a pub, the College Arms. It must have been quite isolated back in 1945 and, even now, it often seems eerily deserted. It's rare to see anyone about and it is still impossible to find anyone willing to talk about the case.

On one of Fabian's visits, he encountered a black dog. When he asked a boy if he had seen the beast, the child ran away. Later that day, a black dog was found hanging in a tree. This might just have been an incident of macabre cruelty, perhaps to warn him, but there were long associations with black dogs in the area. Walton himself was known to have encountered a black dog nine times in his youth. After the last occasion, he learnt that his sister had died. These black dogs were not regarded as ordinary hounds, but manifestations of the Barghest and the other black dogs of British Folklore. Meon Hill was said to be hunted over by the Cwn Annwn, the spectral hounds of the Mabinogion; another legend says it was the Yell Hounds, the Devil's Dandy Dogs, following Herne the Hunter, harrying the souls of the unshriven down to hell. Meon Hill itself is rumoured to be the haunt of fairies - and of witches who still gather there. It is a place regarded with superstition, even dread, by some living thereabouts. There are those will not walk on the hill in the daytime, let alone at night.

The stories are many and odd and exert a fascination. I've revisited the place several times in fiction. The first time was with Colour Her Dead, now long out of print. I changed the name of the hill, the village beneath it, the details of the case, but kept the unsolved nature of the crime. What interested me was the missing watch. With so much time elapsing, I began thinking: what if it turned up in a junk shop somewhere - in nearby Stratford, say? Put there by someone clearing somebody's effects with no idea that this is vital clue to an unsolved murder. What could happen then? So are books born. I changed the victim to a child and the watch to a handful of beads found in a junk shop by 17 year old Jude who likes to make her own jewellery. It has been out of print for ages, but I was pretty proud of Colour Her Dead. Very Ruth Rendell, even though I say it myself.

The next time Meon got a mention was in The Fool's Girl. Shakespeare coming home on May Day, after Beltane. I took a bit of poetic licence, but the hill is visible for miles around and he might just have been able to see it from the old road between Stratford and Oxford. He would certainly have known it and its reputation. The hill even appears in my new book, This Is Not Forgiveness, under the guise of Beldon Hill, casting its spell, exerting its powerful natural magic in a whole new way.