The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  The black accents recur, adding a seriousness – even a fatality – to the extraordinary transformations that make up the Metamorphoses. Ovid’s black can be epic in its impact and its quantity. In a primal conflict near the beginning of time, the sun-god Phoebus fights the monster snake Python whose coils cover mountains. When the snake dies, venom floods from its black wounds (vulnera nigra) – as if its bloodstream as well as its fangs run with venom, such that, when wounded, its own poison rots it black at once. Then again, Ovid will use his dark tones lightly. When Iris is tasked to rouse the god of sleep, Ovid multiplies darknesses humorously. Near the land of the Cimmerians, at the lightless end of the world, surrounded by fogs, in ‘crepuscular’ light, Iris enters a cave-mouth thick with poppies. As she works to wake the god, he keeps closing his eyes while his chin lolls again on his chest. He lies stretched out on an ebony bed with a cover that is black or near-black (pullus), stuffed with black feathers (atricolor).24

  And in his most savage and cruel moments, the black emphasis reappears. When Philomela has just been raped and had her tongue cut out by Tereus, the brutal king of Thrace, Ovid imagines the cutoff tongue writhing like a wounded snake on the black earth (terraeque . . . atrae). Since the earth of Thrace is not, and has never been said to be, black, its blackness here is poetic. The earth is black for the visual contrast, and black as blood-soaked earth may be, and black again with the darkness of the powers beneath the earth.25

  Given the poetic use Ovid makes of blackness, there is an irony in the fact that this racy, daring, witty poet ended his days exiled among the Scythians by the Black Sea – a sea whose waters are far from black, but which even in antiquity may have derived its name ‘Pontos Axeinos’ (‘Inhospitable Sea’) from the Scythian aksaina, meaning lightless and dark.26

  18 The Black Madonna of Altötting, Bavaria, 14th century, wood.

  THREE

  The Black of God

  TO A ROMAN the colour black need not be harsh: it could be sweet, and luxurious, and erotic. But in temples it would be worn by mourners, not by priests; nor was the primary god – Jupiter – identified with darkness or with blackness. Priests and vestal virgins wore white or purple. A great change would need to come, in the universe of the spirit, before a god could be worshipped as lord of all – and as the light of the world – whose home would be in the deepest darkness that could be imagined by man.

  AMONG THE PEOPLES absorbed into the Roman Empire, some had native black traditions. When the geographer Strabo describes the people of Lusitania (Portugal) he sounds as though he has found a race of ancient Victorians: ‘All the men dress in black . . . but the women always go clad in long mantles and gay-coloured gowns.’1 Clearly the tradition of Iberian black goes further back than Philip II of Spain, since a prime local product was black. Strabo has particular praise for Iberian wool ‘of the raven-black sort. And it is surpassingly beautiful; at all events, the rams are bought for breeding purposes at a talent a piece.’ Not all black wool was so expensively fine, and the ‘rough black cloaks’ which many men wore may have been of black goats’ hair. Strabo is again referring to herdsmen when he says the people of the Cassiterides (possibly the Scilly Isles) wore long black garments that reached to their feet, and carried canes so that they looked like the goddesses of vengeance in tragedies – that is, the Furies. The canes were presumably an early form of shepherd’s crook.

  While Iberian women may have dressed gaily, further north there were other women, dressed in black, who resembled the Furies to more frightening effect. In 60 CE, when the Romans invaded Mona (Anglesey), a centre of druid opposition, they were met – Tacitus says – by armed warriors ‘while between the ranks dashed women in black attire like the Furies, with hair dishevelled, waving brands’.2 All around stood druids, lifting their hands to heaven, and ‘pouring forth dreadful imprecations’. Though they were the veterans of many campaigns, the legionaries ‘stood motionless . . . their limbs paralysed’, until their general urged them ‘not to quail before a troop of frenzied women’. Then they advanced, ‘smote down all resistance’ and laid waste the druid groves.

  The women of Anglesey would again have worn black wool. Tacitus describes them as wearing funeral robes, and funeral wear was one destination for the black wool which so impressed Strabo. He found it at other extremities of the Empire. Of Laodicea in the Near East he says that the sheep there ‘are excellent, not only for the softness of their wool . . . but also for its raven-black colour, so that the Laodiceans derive splendid revenue from it’.3 Black wool was not worn only at funerals, for presumably it also provided some of those pullus garments which – Ovid said – suited women of light complexion. The palla, the Roman shawl, may also have been pulla.

  Black in another sense were the nation of the Huns with whom the Romans cooperated (before falling victim to them). They were known as the Black Huns through the Near East because they were the northernmost Hun tribal grouping: black being widely associated with compass-points north. But for the Romans they were dark both in their skin colour and in their ferocity. The author Jordanes said ‘they made their foes flee in horror because their swarthy aspect (pavenda nigridinis) was fearful, and they had, if I may call it so, a sort of shapeless lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes’.4 It was said that they slashed their faces, and smeared black earth into the scars, so as to be more frightening. Attila himself was described as short, flat-nosed and swarthy, though Priscus, the Roman who negotiated with him, was impressed by his frugal eating, by the civility of his wife and by the excellent carpentry in his wooden compound.

  Body art at this time might be black and might be blue. As shown on their coinage, many Celtic peoples had facial tattoos, for which a dark concentration of woad (wood indigo) was used. Julius Caesar said the Britons dyed their bodies blue before going into battle; probably their woad was mixed with beef dripping, which also gave protection from the cold. And Pliny said that British women and girls stained their bodies, not blue, but black all over. They used the herb ‘glastum’, which made them look ‘like Ethiopians’ as they performed sacred rites ‘in a state of nature’.5 The comparison would have been clear to his readers because, on the southern rim of the Empire, there were the Ethiopians, who had their own tradition of body art – of scarification and tattooing – using the black dye henna. Though never conquered by the Romans, the Ethiopians contributed archers to the multiracial force of the Roman legions; Ethiopia also provided the ebony that furnished many Roman villas.

  Beyond the material culture was the religious. When British girls went naked, and black, it was to perform fertility rites. The pestles and mortars where the ‘glastum’ was pounded might be decorated with phallic shapes, and semen might be used as a binding agent.6 For here too, as in ancient Egypt and elsewhere, blackness had a place in the cycle of Nature. The gods themselves might be black. The Celtic god Crom Dubh (his name means ‘Crooked and Black’) was black because he spent half the year underground, and bent from the weight of the sheaves that he carried. He sounds like Hades and Persephone in one, rising from the death of winter to preside over abundant harvests.

  Other black gods were less abundant. It is not surprising that Nott, the northern goddess of night, wore black clothes and was drawn by black horses. Nor that Morrigu, the Celtic goddess of battles, hovered over the carnage as a black crow or raven. Nor that the Nordic goddess of the dead, Hel, was half white as a corpse and half black as decomposition and night. Since the northern peoples did not then produce written texts, some of these gods are now obscure to us, like the Celtic god Leug (from the Indo-European root leug, black), who was associated again with ravens, or like the Slavic Czernobog (literally ‘Black God’).

  There is, on the other hand, nothing obscure in the description given of the Celtic god Ogmios as seen in a picture by the rhetorician Lucian of Samosata in the second century CE. The pantheisms of Greece and Rome were hospitable to other pantheisms, and classical writers were accustomed to finding their o
wn gods worshipped under other names in other religions. Even so, Lucian is astonished by the form the Celts have given to Hercules:

  The Celts call Heracles Ogmios in their native tongue, and they portray the god in a very peculiar way. To their notion, he is extremely old, bald-headed, except for a few lingering hairs which are quite grey, his skin is wrinkled, and he is burned as black as can be, like an old sea-dog. You would think him a Charon or a sub-Tartarean Iapetus – anything but Heracles! Yet, in spite of his looks, he has the equipment of Heracles: he is dressed in the lion’s skin, has the club in his right hand, carries the quiver at his side, displays the bent bow in his left, and is Heracles from head to heel as far as that goes.7

  Gazing at the picture, Lucian is still more astonished by the companions of Ogmios, for he draws behind him a crowd of men tethered by the ears, and the delicate chains that lead them – ‘fashioned of gold and amber, resembling the prettiest of necklaces’ – are fastened to Ogmios’ tongue. Happily Lucian has an educated Celt for a companion, who explains to him that Ogmios is the god of eloquence and can be identified with Hercules because of the power that eloquence has. He is elderly because eloquence only finds its full vigour when combined with the wisdom of age.

  Neither Lucian nor the Celt explain why the god of eloquence is black. We might wonder if he is dark from the ambiguity of eloquence, for to post-Christian eyes Ogmios could look like the Devil, by subtle words leading people astray. Lucian’s Celt has no such thoughts, however, nor is there any suggestion that Ogmios is a dark fertility god of the underworld, nor that his club is phallic. Perhaps, then, the blackness of Ogmios is a purely visual emphasis: it shows he is a different order of being from those he leads. He is the god of eloquence, not an allegory of it, nor a particular orator. His blackness is not natural, it is supernatural: he is a god. For there are many black gods in the myths of the world, and in the myths of many peoples living far from Africa. The blackness of some is associated with death and wrath and pestilence; of others with black silt and rainclouds and soil; of others with fire, ash and embers and again with light and the constellations.

  It may be that the dark gods should be viewed more broadly: that there is a connection between blackness and divinity. One could consider the mystery of any black surface. For a truly black surface differs from other coloured things because the eye reaches into it as into space, and finds only endlessness and no place to rest, as if sight could reach through black solidity. An all-black surface combines opacity with infinity. Such a character could suit the more-than-natural nature of the gods; their power is frightening though their purposes are opaque. If one thinks of the omniscience of the gods, and of their elusiveness and indifference to our needs, and of the way they outreach us though they reach deep within us, then it may not be surprising if in the pantheons of many cultures there are some gods who are black.

  19 Herakles fighting Amazons, black-figure vase, c. 530 BCE.

  To return to Ogmios, and his teasing connection with Hercules – the Roman name for Herakles. Hercules/Herakles is a figure to consider when one contemplates the relation of human beings with the gods. He survives in popular narrative now as the mythological version of the circus strongman, good for cudgeling many-headed monsters. But worship of him was widespread in the ancient world. For Herodotus he had been an Egyptian god before he became a hero for the Greeks, and for the Greeks he was in different places a man, a demigod and a god. On the island of Thasos he was first worshipped as a god, as the paramount god, before he was worshipped, in a separate temple, as a demigod. His story has mystery, and darkness too. Before starting his labours he had slaughtered his family, having been made mad by Hera. He was to die in horrific torment, his flesh devoured by the venom in the black blood of the black-haired centaur Charon. When Odysseus meets him in the Underworld in Homer, he resembles black night, glancing fiercely round, bow and arrows at the ready.8 On vases of the sixth century BCE a black Herakles may be seen fighting white Amazons (illus. 19).

  For the ancient world Herakles was a giant, sacred, tragic figure, the son of god and of man – of Zeus and Alcmene – the living union of the human with the divine. If we compare him with the other Son of Man – and of God – who was born into that world of gods in a small nation on the fringe of the Empire, we may see both the potency and the weakness of Graeco-Roman religion. For it is not just that Hercules did not walk on water, nor heal the sick; more importantly, for all his muscles, it seems that he had nothing to say. Actually, none of the gods of Greece or Rome are remembered much for what they said, and in their myths they often behave as though they had half the brain that the Greek philosophers had. Whereas Jesus – though he may have spoken from revelation – sounds as though he spoke from a searching observation of human motive (for instance, of the deep, bad work done in everyone by jealousy), and of human need in relation to life, death, love, right and wrong. And at all events, in spite of his humble origins and criminal death, Jesus came to conquer that inclusive, faltering Graeco-Roman world.

  On the island of Thasos the columns from the temples of Hercules were reused – with Greek crosses cut in them – inside the new Early Christian churches, where a relief of Hercules himself was incorporated into the masonry. Both the columns and the relief can be seen on site, with no fence round them, at Alikes on the southern coast. Incidentally, in the succession from many gods to the One, the value of the colour black changed fundamentally.

  IN THE RELIGIONS with many gods, who may live in a big community somewhere between a family and polity, up on a high place like a mountaintop, above but not too far above our world, often there is among them a pre-eminent being who is more than their monarch or governor: in some sense this being contains them, or may have made or borne them. In proportion as such figures are separated above the others, and recognized as primary godheads, they are likely to be identified with light, or the Light, engaged in a fundamental contest with darkness. The contrast of light and dark, and day and night, is so fundamental to us that things could perhaps not be otherwise. In the Bible, in the beginning, darkness lies upon the face of the deep, until God says let there be light, and there is light – which God sees, and approves, and then He divides the light from the dark, which He calls night.

  The Jewish prophets were not alone in promoting the worship of an emergent single god. Their great enemy and captor, ancient Egypt, had an interlude – within the millennia of their worship of an animal-headed throng – when an eccentric pharaoh sought to impose the worship of a single god. During his reign of seventeen years, in around 1320 BCE, Akhenaten – the husband of Nefertiti – established temples to the great creating power, the Aten, which was also the disc and the god of the sun. In his hymn to Aten, Akhenaten sang:

  How manifold are the things that thou has made . . .

  O sole god, like whom there is no other.9

  The Aten is praised for creating the primal river, the Nile, which flows both in the underworld and in the blessed land of Egypt: for if life depends on water, still it is quickened by the light of the sun.

  Or in the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism the divinity Ohrmazd dwelt in endless light, and made of that light fire, then ether, then water, then earth, while the evil spirit Ahriman slept in endless darkness. When Ahriman woke, he turned the sky to dark night, inflicted the dark power Mihr on the world and set a ‘dark moon’ against the moon. In Zoroastrianism the Light that shone at the beginning of time gives the light of goodness in our world, and in each of us, while the evil of Ahriman is also the dark, bad part of us.10 The forces of the cosmos are the giant counterpart of the motives inside us; as again they are in the pantheistic religions, where Aphrodite and Diana may be the magnified equal of the sexual passion, and the ascetic impulse, within the individual.

  Zoroastrianism, and its offshoot Mithraism, appealed to the questing spirit of the failing Roman world. Temples to Mithras were built in pockets of the Empire, including Londinium (London). It was however a men-only f
aith, and though it naturally appealed to legionaries, it was evidently insufficient to meet the larger need; this came to be supplied by the Christian faith, which brought Light inside the lives of all men and women.

  A cosmic war between light and darkness is not, however, quite the same as a war between light and blackness. Christianity completed a change which was latent in all of the light–dark imagery when it equated the darkness with sin, and at the same time made sin black. This is an abstract way of putting things, I realize, and it may be helpful to look more closely at the actual colour of sin. Because sin, before the rise of Christianity, had not been primarily black. Sin had to have a colour, because in a recurring biblical metaphor, sin is conceived as a ‘stain’. It is a stain upon the soul because it does not come from the centre of the soul, and may, through penitent prayer, be removed. In the Bible, as also in Greek poetry, there is a running imagery of washing, and of the great difficulty of washing off sin, or guilt, or evil. The sin that cleaves to one may be black – as when the chorus in The Libation Bearers speak of the black blood of guilt which a rapist cannot cleanse. But more often, in the Old Testament especially, sin is red. And it is red because, like the rapist’s black crime, it is the colour of blood and bloodshed. The Lord speaks ‘of Saul and his blood-stained house’ (2 Samuel, 21:1) and Isaiah cries, ‘For your hands are stained with blood, your fingers with guilt’ (59:3). And as in Greek tragedy (and later in Shakespeare’s Macbeth), the actual difficulty of washing real blood from your hands is equated with the difficulty of cancelling guilt. ‘Although you wash yourself with soap and use an abundance of cleansing powder,’ Isaiah says, ‘the stain of your guilt is still before me’ (63:3).11