From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  Without this heavenly corroboration, a Sibyl would be nothing more than a woman unlawfully possessed, exercising her powers of speech wantonly. By the sixteenth century and the era of the great witch hunts, the terror of old, prophetic women had contaminated the Sibyls, too; they were denounced as mouthpieces of the Devil, even if what they had said was true. Suspicion grew when the new humanist techniques of textual criticism at last showed that the Oracula sibillina were by no means as ancient as Augustine and others had believed.26 Sibylline imagery begins strikingly to resemble negative representations of women’s talk, of old women and their ramblings. These prophetesses remained the most ancient participants in the business of remembering and recording; but change the text, and women’s speech, especially crones’ chatter, becomes a very dangerous thing, a lure, a false seduction.

  The Sibyls offered the spectrum of human experience, varying in age from young to very old; the Hellespontine, was often one of the most gnarled and vatic, and her message usually singles out the crucifixion. (Oppenheim, c. 1514.)

  II

  John Milton, in his famous ‘Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, alludes to the legend that all infidel seers were silenced by the coming of Christ:

  The oracles are dumb,

  No voice or hideous hum

  Runs through the archèd roof in words deceiving …

  No nightly trance, or breathèd spell

  Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.27

  Walter Ralegh had also spoken of the silence that fell on Apollo’s priests in each of their sanctuaries, and a sixteenth-century commentator on Spenser had written that at the Nativity, All oracles surceased and enchaunted spirits that were wont to delude people, thenceforth held their peace.’28, 29 Milton, like Ralegh, refers in particular to the abandonment of Apollo’s shrine at Delphi, where the oracles were attributed more commonly to the Pythoness, or Pythia, a vates or female voice, but also to a Sibyl.

  The spectre of frenzied prophetesses, like Manto and Cassandra, has been invoked even in modern times as an argument for the exclusive male priesthood: fascination with the classical practice runs through the Catholic and Protestant attitudes to female inspiration – with varying results, from burning at the stake to sanctification. But the concern more surprisingly migrates from its native habitat of religious debate into the secular sphere, and this journey can be seen in the changing status of folklore. The history of fairy tales, as a form of literature, becomes entangled with changing attitudes to these female voices speaking with a claim to knowledge. The Cumaean Sibyl, surviving in the legend of the Apennines, hands us a magic key to enter the magic mountain of fairy tale in its social context. For among the oracles which were supposedly silenced at Christ’s birth, we find the perceived prototypes of the crones of the nursery hearth, as well as the inspiration for many of the types of tales they told in the period when fairy tales become established as literature fit for children.

  The Hellespontine Sibyl prophesies that the cross will be put to shame, as the instrument of Christ’s death. Artists sometimes resisted depicting the Sibyls as old: though the inscription says that she was fifty years of age, she wears her long hair loose like a young girl. (Paris, 1508.)

  In his essay ‘The Cessation of the Oracles’, the literary historian Constantinos Patrides develops, with some skilled bibliographical sleuthing, an account of the disputes about the pagan prophetesses’ survival, and he fingers the end of the seventeenth century as the moment when the sceptics begin to express their views, and belief in the miracle of the oracles’ silencing starts to decline. The French philosopher Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) published his essay ‘L’Histoire des oracles’ in 1687; it mocked with ironic grace the notion that the Devil spoke through the pagan oracles, and, in consequence, that the seers had all been silenced overnight when Christ was born. This is a significant date, for it falls during the time the first written fairy tales were being produced, in France, and Fontenelle was a friend of La Fontaine, one of Perrault’s chief inspirations, as well as of many writers in the circle which told stories as a pastime. Mme d’Aulnoy’s first fairy tale, ‘L’Ile de la félicité’ (The Isle of Happiness), appeared in a novel of 1690, Histoire d’Hypolyte, Comte de Duglas; Mlle L’Héritier’s pioneering collections in the decade following; Perrault’s Mother Goose tales were being written at the same time and published soon after. This does not mean that the profane was being reclaimed, but that it was no longer perceived in certain quarters as perilous. The Catholic view, that Sibyls were both privileged witnesses of salvation and beyond redemption as she-demons, enchantresses, began to lose ground, and the effect can be seen in particular among early liberal thinkers.

  Fontenelle was putting a huge distance between himself and the witch hunters of the early part of the century. A cleric like Pierre de Lancre, for example, who in 1608 had been sent by royal command to cleanse the Labourd, in Basque country, reported the usual night-flyings, sabbath orgies, obscene rites of Christian belief in sorcery, and reported that women were much more prone to becoming possessed, owing to their weakness of character and their long tradition in the craft. He adduced as predecessors: ‘those whom the Italians called Fairies, Nymphs, Sibyls, White Ladies, Ladies, Goodwomen …’30 In 1680, Mme de Sévigné reported that the Duchesse de Bouillon had paid a celebrated poisoner, abortionist and witch to conjure Sibyls to tell her future and give her love charms.31

  But this was the other side of the picture to Fontenelle’s lucid vision. He found his inspiration in a diligent Latin work – in two volumes – by Antonius Van Dale, published in freethinking Amsterdam in 1683; but unlike the Dutch writer, Fontenelle had a succinct wit, and the observant court, thoroughly reformed under the pastoral care of Mme de Maintenon and the Jesuits, did not like what he said or how he said it. Like La Fontaine, Fontenelle’s trifling with Catholic pieties landed him in deep trouble, and he remained so, twenty years after the book’s appearance; he was denounced as an atheist to Louis XIV by the king’s confessor, and escaped being stripped of his pension and liberty only through the good offices of friends who still had some influence. It was dangerous to be tolerant. Fontenelle refused to reply to the Jesuit attacks, but wrote privately in a letter: ‘I dislike all quarrelling. I’d rather the Devil had been a prophet, since the Jesuit father wishes it and believes it to be more orthodox.’32

  The battle was joined: for the Catholic clerisy, the in-betweenness of a fairy land where phenomena took place that were not the result of maleficium, where supernatural beings who were not of the party of the Devil were believed to exist, could not be tolerated. But the sharpness of this disagreement denotes the weakening, too, of the orthodox position. The rise of fairy tale as a printed genre of literature coincides with permission to accept that between Heaven and Hell and Purgatory there lies another kingdom, a realm of human fantasy, in which the traditional categories of good and evil clash and find resolution in ways that may differ from the doctrine of orthodox faith and, even, ethics. The fairy tale, thronged with devilish figures like witches and goblins, refused to take them seriously; this could present an enlightened attitude from one point of view, blasphemy and consequent damnation from another.

  Fontenelle was not endorsing, in the manner of a last surviving just heathen, an alternative supernatural arrangement, but rather pointing to the human origin of the magic and miracles of the past. His scepticism embraced the scorn shown by his contemporaries at follies or credulity of all kinds, especially Catholic. Another learned Dutch scholar continued Van Dale’s labours, with Casaubon-like omnivorousness, principally in order to refute Sibylline claims altogether. He poured furious scorn on almost all prophetissae and on those who credit them, up to and including more recent manifestations, like Joan of Arc, to whom he devotes several incensed pages.33 His views on ‘these legends or fables’ correspond to those of the Académie Française, who were at the same time compiling their French dictionary, with its disparaging
definitions of the word conte. Their lexicography carried the contempt that the new scepticism felt about ancient lore. But this contempt also can be taken to imply the cessation of the fear which accompanies belief. Heterodox magic and prophecy no longer held any terrors for some French writers and thinkers of the time. Fairyland’s phantasmagoria had become nonsense, foolish nonsense. And foolish nonsense could lead on to certain kinds of entertainment, full circle back to the realm of fancy and pleasure, the very place where the fairy queen presided. The fairies in fairy tales could be malignant and dangerous, or they could work powerful magic, but they were no longer understood to be emissaries of the devils who had lured witches; let alone metamorphoses of the Devil himself. The imps who had brought some women – and men – to the stake were mischievous, not diabolical; the talking animals the friendly helpers of folklore, not familiars from the coven.

  Yet the whole story does not lie there, as levity can also act as a defensive measure against those same old creeds’ command of allegiance. Those goose or stork or one-eyed fairy tales represent a variant position for the supernatural to occupy, and a delighting mockery greets this enduring reflex of the unenlightened, superstitious mind; only children need believe in fairies. At the same time, the idea that the pagan oracles did not have to be silenced in order for Christianity to prevail, and that they might have survived a while until they dwindled and simply faded, does permit the new domestication and publication of their products – the fantasies of fairyland – as took place from the 1690s and through the eighteenth century.

  Fontenelle had written in his preface that he wanted women in particular, who did not know Latin, to be able to read his ideas, hence his French version of Van Dale.34 He knew the issue was of interest to women, though he could not have predicted that, far from rejecting the connection of the female sex with such credulity and heterodox inspiration, it would be claimed and reasserted with unexpected vigour by his contemporaries and their posterity.

  In 1782, for instance, several of the fairy stories of Mme la Baronne d’Aulnoy were collected and published in English under the title ‘Queen Mab: containing a select collection of Only the Best, most Instructive and Entertaining Tales of the Fairies’. The title went on, ‘To which are added A Fairy Tale in the ancient (English) style … and Queen Mab’s Song’. This ‘Fairy Tale in the ancient style’ features Oberon and Robin Goodfellow and other figures of local faery lore; and tells a Scottish ballad tale about the magical cure of the despised protagonist, Edwin the hunchback – a typical fairy tale about the weak vindicated. The transmitter of this story, one Dr Parnell, ends by invoking a childhood memory – and this is where he makes a patent association of a most interesting kind. He writes:

  This Tale a Sibyl-Nurse a-read

  And softly stroak’d my youngling Head,

  And, when the Tale was done,

  Thus some are born, my Son (she cries)

  With base Impediments to rise, –

  And some are born with none.

  But virtue can itself advance

  To what the fav’rite Fools of Chance

  By Fortune seem’d design’d …35

  The immemorial storyteller, Mother Goose, or Mother Stork, or Mother Bunch, is a figure of fun, a foolish, ignorant old woman, a typical purveyor of old wives’ tales.36 But she is also established, by the early eighteenth century, as a Sibyl-Nurse – who instils morality and knowledge of the world, and foresees the future of her charges and prepares them for it. The appended moral, transmitted by the wisdom of old age to the young, was ascribed to this figure, the Sibyl-Nurse, in order to justify the frequent violence, bawdy, and extravagant fantasy of fairytale material. Perrault, for example, insisted on his edifying intentions in his prefaces and added sprightly and often rather dubious morals to his conclusions. The tendency towards sententiousness grew, as the genre became more and more identified with the moral education of children.

  The nexus which gathers together these different manifestations of the imaginary narrator does not exist merely at an associative, symbolic level – indeed, the symbolic cannot be sequestered at this distance anyway, but spreads through material culture. A figure like Mother Goose turns out to have a recorded, empirical history, to be compacted of many beliefs. Their shifts of shape over time have altered hers, as the earth changes under a delta to make new land masses.

  The ambiguous tradition of the Sibyl shaped reception of the fairy tale whose source was perceived as an old wise woman or witch; the classical prophetesses’ role in pagan lore positioned them to influence one of its popular survivals, in fairy tales. But they were not alone in helping to draw the sting of heterodoxy from the genre; the cult of Saint Anne, as it developed in France in the seventeenth century, combined with the Sibyls to give the crone narrator the kindly face of a favourite and familiar grandmother.

  The education of Mary to her high calling was a favourite theme of devotional art: in a domestic setting, Saint Anne, the legendary mother of the Virgin, is shown teaching her daughter her letters from the scriptures in which Mary’s destiny is written. (Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Virgin and Saint Anne, c 1655.)

  CHAPTER 6

  Saint Anne, Dear Nan: Sibyls II

  Dormi dulcis, dormi bella

  Caeli gaudium puella

  Dormi, dormi blandula.

  [Sleep my sweet, sleep my pretty,

  Little girl who is heaven’s joy

  Sleep, sleep, my little shining child.]

  Lullaby to the Infant Mary1

  ANNE OF AUSTRIA, Queen of France, attributed the late arrival of the future Louis XIV to the intercession of her patron Saint Anne. She had travelled to Apt to touch the relics of the mother of Mary, on one of many such pilgrimages she undertook in her long struggle to conceive an heir to the throne. And in 1638, after twenty-three years of a childless marriage to Louis XIII, she bore the Dauphin.

  Relics of the Saviour’s grandmother – her arm and the shroud in which her body had been buried – had been deposited there by Saint Auspicius, the town’s first bishop; he had saved them from desecration in their shrine at Marseilles, where no less a figure than the resurrected Lazarus had brought them, after he and Mary Magdalen arrived in the South of France from the Holy Land.2 The shrine at Apt was hallowed by a miracle, ascribed to Easter Day, AD 776, during a visit of the Emperor Charlemagne, when a young deaf-mute nobleman pointed to some flagstones in the floor of the church. When they were lifted, the relics of the saint, buried there for safe-keeping by Auspicius, were uncovered. The youth then recovered his powers of speech. The inventory of the relics was carried out in 1602, so the miracle would have been recorded at that time in full, marking the beginning of the huge rise in Saint Anne’s cult in France during the century. It is a significant cure, since it concerns a young boy – at a time when historians tell us children were of little consequence to society at large or their families; and, of course, it describes a coming-to-language, the ending of silence and the beginning of talk for that child. Anne was seen above all as a patroness of childless women and grandmothers, but she was also an educator, who in numerous cult images teaches her daughter Mary to read (here).

  The image of Saint Anne, flourishing in a place and at a time when terror of witches was rife, when the deviancy of wise women was a commonplace belief, mitigates these suspicions and fears. Anne offers an alternative, inspiring, contrastingly humane image of aged female expertise, and although a certain degree of clerical taming is implied as well (here was a proper old woman, keeping herself busy in edifying ways), the permitted benevolence is unexpected, and consolatory. The positive value the old wise-woman storyteller achieved in seventeenth-century secular culture represents a change in itself from earlier abuse against old women, witches and the old wives’ tale, and as this devotion emerged to full flower in France at the same time as the courtly and metropolitan appetite for fairy stories, it undoubtedly combined with it to loosen the hold of prejudice against female old age and its beliefs.
Her cult drew safe borders around risky territory: the skills of crones in medicine, sympathy, traditional knowledge, warnings, prophecy, language, consolation and talk were acknowledged and disarmed; and the grandmother of Jesus nourished the image of the old Gammer goodwives and grannies of nursery literature.

  Anne of Austria was enthusiastic at popularizing her miracle-working patron, as was her son later in her honour. After his birth, the queen endowed the Cathedral of St Anne in Apt in Provence with a reliquary chapel, and she acquired relics, including two of the saint’s fingers, from all over the Christian world.3 Almost concurrently in Brittany, a peasant called Yves Nicolasic had a vision of Saint Anne in which she asked that a chapel that had stood in his fields and been dedicated to her be restored; two years later, in 1623, ploughing there, he dug up an ancient statue of a goddess suckling two infants – possibly the Roman Bona Dea – which was identified as a miraculous Selbdritt, or trinity of Anne, Mary and Jesus. The memory of the last duchess of independent Brittany, Anne de Bretagne (here), who had died in 1514, fuelled veneration of the discovery: the statue was enshrined at Auray, Saint Anne was declared a patron saint of Brittany and became the focus of the great annual pardon pilgrimages which still take place in the province.4 The cult was also transported overseas, as part of French culture, to the new colonies of the French empire: Marie de l’Incarnation, a widow who had entered the Ursuline teaching order, founded a branch of it in Quebec in 1639; the French possession had been dedicated to Saint Anne, and yet more relics were despatched there in 1670 to stimulate devotion. Anne of Austria herself reputedly embroidered the chasuble which the votive statue of Sainte Anne de Beaupré still wears on special occasions.

  Anne of Austria may have encouraged and enriched the cult of her patron saint, but she did not initiate it.5 The mother of Mary had been the focus of one of the most lively devotions of the middle ages. Though Saint Anne does not appear in the Gospels by name, her story circulated widely in one of the most popular apo cryphal books, the Protoevangelium of St James, which was first written in the second century, and repeated with flourishes in the influential Golden Legend by the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine of the thirteenth century. His account of the embrace of Anne and Joachim, Mary’s mother and father, at the Golden Gate of Jerusalem became the emblematic moment of her conception: a sinless arrival, miraculously vouchsafed by God to a woman who had passed childbearing and had never had children before.