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Self Portrait With Masks (James Ensor, 1899) oil on canvas
Yesterday we sure had some…fun?…looking back at the evil clowns in the literature and music of yesteryore. Before we push through to the evil clowns of the twentieth & 21st centuries (and examine why they excite and disturb so may people), let’s take a break and check out some disturbing clown art from Belgium’s most famous artist! This is not Ferrebeekeeper’s first post about dark clown art–we already featured a controversial evil contemporary clown painting a few years back (it is funny–and maybe meaningful–to reflect that that post was from the last Halloween when I was a drinker!). But anyway, in today’s post, we are going to try to look at art which is not contemporary (since the art world these days sometimes seems like nothing but evil clowns), yet, moving back in time to look at James Ensor’s garish & phantasmagorical artwork raises a lot of disturbing questions.
Now whereas we know whether clowns of literature and opera are evil, things become less clear when we get to visual art–since all we have are visual cues. Clearly the wistful clowns of Picasso’ rose period, the clowns of Pigalle as seen through the eyes of Toulouse Lautrec, and the sad twilight clown of Watteau don’t belong here (gosh, artists really do like clowns!). Instead we are going to look at the decidedly mixed nihilistic clowns of James Ensor.
James Ensor (1860-1949) was a sort of outsider artist of the Symbolist era. He lived in his parents’ attic much of his life and rarely traveled. His mother owned a costume shop, so, one could argue that many of these “clowns” are really strange masks or ludicrous costumes. What is a clown though, but a masked costumed comic performer? Ensor’s art might be described as thriftshop existentialism: skeletal beggars and weird apparitions in fancy rags struggle through their days towards oblivion.
Two Skeletons fighting over a Dead Man (James Ensor 1891) oil on canvas
A more cutting argument might be that Ensor’s clowns are sad rather than evil. A lot of these clowns do look very sad indeed–like they are trapped with the three stooges in an Albert Camus novel. One of Ensor’s paintings (immediately above) features two bedraggled skeletons fighting each other for the corpse of a hanged person as a bizarre cast of ghostly outsiders look on. All of the figures are dressed weirdly and have peculiar makeup, but are any of them evil? Are any of them clowns? Are any of them living humans at all? Maybe??? It certainly doesn’t matter: the pitiable spectacle paints existence as a nihilistic and sordid tableau with such force that it doesn’t matter if I have betrayed the theme of today’s post by putting it up. It’s not like evil clowns are paying me for writing this anyway [evil clowns, if you want to pay me just drop a note in the comments and we can move the discussion to email]
King Pest (James Ensor, 1895) etching
Ensor was also a political artist. For some reason, he felt that the pompous masters of society were abusing and degrading the people below them in the social hierarchy. He was not however a romantic or an idealist: one gets the sense that the victims in these interactions would behave just as meanly if the roles were reversed. Ensor was also famously an atheist (although he sometimes painted Jesus as a sort of ultimate moral philosopher). The haunted queasy feeling of these works is thus a metaphor for ultimate oblivion.
Comical Repast: Banquet of the Starved( James Ensor, ca. 1917-18) oil on canvas
Ensor painted life as a meaningless clown show where social hierarchy was a rickety ladder of betrayal and corruption. In his world, everyone is a sad clown, but the aggressive, abusive, and domineering clowns are in command because of their mean tricks. It is not an uplifting view of existence, but he painted it with such bravura force and ghastly energy that his work has a sublime aspect.
Red and White Clowns Evolving (James Ensor, 1890)
There is a spirit of bitter mockery and unfulfilling vengeance which motivates these works about fin de siècle European society as it moves towards the Great Wars. Evil clowns in literature and art are all about vituperative nonbelief! James Ensor got that. His clowns are a cutting metaphor for cruel existential absurdity. And, to wrap up, here is Hop Frog again!
Hop-Frog’s Revenge (James Ensor,1896) Oil on Canvas
Though I had my doubts when I first started writing this, I now have to say, some of these clowns are not just sad, they are definitely super evil. Thanks James Ensor, you always come through!
The Assassination (James Ensor, 1888)
Ok! Well, evidently it’s evil clown week here at Ferrebeekeeper so I guess we better aim for the juggler and find some evil clowns to start with. As we will see later this week, clowns, jesters, mimes, buffoons, and comic/disturbing tricksters go wayyyyy back to the roots of civilization (and beyond?) in pretty much every civilization. Brother Jung really seems to have been on something…um, I mean onto something when he identified this as an enduring human archetype. However the definitive evil clown as a well-known literary trope is rather more recent. Our Western clown tradition descends from Ancient Greece and Rome. Comic buffoons were a mainstay in the bits of Roman comedy which have survived, yet, although the clowns of Terence and Plautus were lusty and sometimes violent, they are principally oafs who are not necessarily together enough or self-aware enough to be properly evil. The Roman clowns of antiquity were certainly grotesque and disturbing though (and we only have bits and pieces of Roman art, culture, and literature–it’s possible there were evil clowns we just don’t know about). This tradition of clowns as earthy, honest, and physical continued on through the dark ages. Medieval jesters, such as we find highlighted in the works of Shakespeare, were slanted characters: they are risible and rather sad, yet they can speak truth to the most powerful figures (and they seem to know some of the dark secrets of the grave as well). The Yorick scene from Hamlet does not involve an evil clown per-se, but it is a messed-up and gruesome scene.
To my (sadly incomplete) knowledge the first proper evil clown of our study is found in the works of Edgar Allen Poe. The grotesque cripple Hop Frog (from the 1849 story “Hop Frog”) is a small person and slave who is forced to serve as a jester and general punching bag for a cruel king (you can read the entire original story right here, and should do so now if you want to avoid spoilers). Hop Frog is a pitiable figure whose deformity pains him and who is unable to protect his one friend, the lovely small woman, Trippetta, as the grotesque narcissistic monarch and his seven wicked councilors torment them.
Poe’s brilliance is that he makes us sympathize fully with the dwarf (the literary antecedent to Oskar Matzerath and Tyrion Lannister) and despise the king. Indeed the evil king is practically an evil clown himself: he’s a showman who brutally insults and hurts people “as a joke” (this cruel, debauched, and loutish ruler seems weirdly familiar). We thus become complicit in Hop Frog’s scheme for revenge. And Hop Frog gets full vengeance! The trick he pulls on the king and the seven cruel ministers results in the death of all eight–in the most mortifying, painful, and public spectacle possible, while Hop Frog uses his upper arm-strength (and planning abilities) to escape with Trippetta. Hop Frog is quite sympathetic…at first but the reader’s sympathy is part of Poe’s own cruel jape. The way the little jester gets the king to conspire in his own demise (the murder seems like a staged prank–to such a degree that nobody helps the dying monarch and courtiers) is so hideous that, by the end of the story, the reader does not know what to think and has nobody to sympathize with. There is a room filled with charred bodies dangling on chains and the clown (and his paramour) are nowhere to be found.
The fame of Poe’s work (and the bourgeoning circuses of the rapidly industrializing 19th century) brought more evil clowns to prominence during that century! In Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera Pagliacci (which means “clowns”) the jealous and manipulative Tonio obtains revenge upon Nedda and her lover while dressed as a clown…inside a play…inside an opera.
With both Hop Frog and Pagliacci the murderous wrath of a costumed maniac is only part of the horror. Arguably the staged manipulation of different levels of verisimilitude is the truly disconcerting aspect of the works. Even in their earliest manifestations, the best trick of the evil clown was to stage manage the audience’s fear into something which crept through different layers of artifice into the real worlf. These tricks within tricks… inside plays within plays… become a dark hall of mirrors where the fears of social disorder metastasize into something darker… [to be continued]
OK! Today’s serpent monster is from Zambia from stories told by the Lozi people. This manufactured supernatural snake is called the llomba (in no way to be confused with a llama) and, according to lore, it can be constructed by a powerful witch doctor from his (or her?) own fingernails, skin and blood. When these disgusting ingredients are properly mixed with magical herbs a baby llomba is born. The witch doctor must feed the serpent with eggs and porridge until the monster’s fangs develop, whereupon the sorcerer can sic the creature upon their enemies. To disinterested third parties, the llomba merely looks like a giant terrifying snake, however it appears as a snake version of the witch doctor to the designated target (and to the witch doctor himself). When the llomba finds its prey, it consumes their soul in an orgy of primal serpentine terror! Woah!
So far all of this sounds great (uh, insomuch as black magic homicide goes), yet there are drawbacks for the witch doctor as well. The llomba stays hungry and must constantly be fed. Once it has tasted human souls, eggs and porridge and Zambian breakfast foods no longer do the job. If the witch doctor lets it starve, he dies too. If the witch doctor gets weary of constantly feeding souls to a giant snake which looks like a snake version of himself, he can kill it through magic, but then he will be forever haunted by the llomba’s victims (not that this would necessarily bother someone killing people with evil power). Also, you may want to take this talk of magic snakes made of fingernails and dark wizardry with a grain of salt: my sources identified the llomba as a sea snake and Zambia is extremely landlocked.
Here is a very beautiful painting by Pre-Raphaelite luminary Evelyn de Morgan. This work is titled The Angel with the Serpent and it was completed between 1870 and 1875. Although the work is a religious allegory, its meaning is surprisingly elusive. In Judeo-Christian myth, the serpent represents sexuality, subversiveness, knowledge (and evil). These meanings certainly pertain to this work, yet the angel’s tenderness for the snake seems to suggest that God has wrought these aspects of existence too.
Admittedly this painting might depict a world before the fall (the sumptuous flowering bush and the bare lands beyond hint at this possibility). Is the handsome angel in the red robes Lucifer before he was cast down? Even if this painting does depict the time of Eden, it still suggests that the snake was always part of God’s plan and is dear to the Divinity and his agents (a forbidden idea which raises numerous troubling questions).
I am presenting the painting not just so you ponder the metaphorical meanings of Genesis (although I hope you are doing so), but also to introduce my Halloween week theme of supernatural snakes. Ferrebeekeeper is no stranger to snake deities and monsters at all levels, but snakes have always been part of every mythos except for those of the farthest north and so there are plenty more to get to. Enjoy Evelyn de Morgan’s lovely painting and get used to numinous snakes–we are going to see some amazing scales and forked tongues before next Tuesday!
Photo by Guido Mocafico
Today is world snake day: maybe you should run out and do something nice for our scaly limbless friends (though don’t hug them—they don’t like that)! Sadly though, many people do not appreciate snakes. Not only are serpents taboo in the Abrahamic faiths (since, according to the creation myth, a snake convinced the original people to disobey the creator deity for the first time), humankind also seems to have an instinctual inbred panic reaction to them. Perhaps this is an evolutionary leftover from when our just-out-of-the-trees ancestors shared East Africa with a bevy of aggressive venomous snakes like the formidable black mamba (or whatever the mamba’s just-out-of-the-trees ancestor was). This human antipathy towards the Ophidia is a shame. Not only are snakes inimical to the rodents and bugs which spell true problems for modern agricultural humans, they are critical to most non-pelagic, non-Arctic ecosystems in numerous ways. Additionally, snakes are very beautiful. They are more colorful than most other creatures and they have a hypnotic sculptural beauty all their own. Just look at the lovely art photo by Guido Mocafico at the top of the page.
Adam and Eve (Albrecht Durer, 1504, engraving)
Other ancient religions were not as opposed to snakes as the Canaanites and Israelites (who, were, after all, herding people who lived in a dust colored-desert filled with poisonous dust-colored reptiles). Hindus respect the powerful nagas and worship Vasuki, the cobra-king of all snakes. Buddha was sheltered by a hooded cobra. The Chinese creation myth centers on Nüwa, the serpent-goddess who first gave life to animals and humans. In ancient Greece, snakes represented the secrets of the underworld, the healing power of medicine, and the foresight of divine augury. The pre-Greek Cretan culture worshiped a sinuous bare-breasted snake goddess who held a serpent in each hand as she danced. Sadly we know little about this compelling deity other than what is revealed by sculpture.
Minoan Snake Goddess (Crete, ca. 1600BC)
Going back even farther, the oldest written story humankind currently possesses features a snake as a villain: after all of his trials, Gilgamesh loses the herb of immortality when it is stolen by a water snake. People from the Fertile Crescent really seem to dislike snakes…although that presumes that the Biblical serpent actually was the villain. Maybe the snake was the real hero of Genesis (after all, it is never demonstrated that the tree of knowledge does not perform as advertised). Don’t we long to become as Gods? Isn’t wisdom our greatest collective treasure? What is so great about obedience? After all, did we really want to live forever as naked childlike near-beasts? Perhaps the snake is a pivotal figure in imagining our transition from hunter-gatherers to agricultural folk–which is to say from nature to civilization.
The Serpent Steals the Herb of Immortality from Gilgamesh (illustration by Ludmila Zeman)
If the snake does represent our coming of age it is ironic: the majority of city-dwelling modern humans probably never see wild snakes in our monstrous concrete cities. This strikes me as a shame. For good or for ill, there really is something sacred about the snake.
Honduran Milksnake
Etruscan sarcophagus from the Tarquinian tombs (Photo by Peggy Mekemson)
This blog has always been dedicated to the dark ones beneath the earth—the beautiful and horrible deities of the underworld! So today we will look at Etruscan gods of death and the afterlife. Sadly most of Etruscan literature and mythology has been lost, so in some cases all we have is obscure names. In the spirit of religion and mythology, I will try to make up for the lack of textual evidence with lurid pictures, extravagant adjectives, and outright supposition.
Charun (Death) with his hammer used to separate people from their lives
Much of Etruscan myth was strongly influenced by (or outright based on) Greek mythology. Aita was the equivalent of Hades who ruled over a similar underworld of spirits, monsters, and fallen gods. Aita’s wife “Phersipnai” was the unchanged analog of Greek Persephone. There were unique figures of the Etruscan cosmology who continued to have a hold on Roman practices and beliefs: like the “manes” which were the spirits of the dead which lingered near tombs and gravesites. There were also entities like Charun who were extremely unlike their Greco-Roman counterparts. Etruscan mythology as a whole has a bestial and naturalistic undertone of animal-human deities, human sacrifice, and violence.
To make this more straightforward (and to make this a coherent article—since data is scarce about some of these deities), here is an alphabetical list:
Aita Conjuring. A relief carved on a 2nd c BC ash urn from Perugia, in the Museo Etrusco Romano at Perugia. Drawing from Otto Volcano, Die Etrusker.
Aita: The Lord of the underworld: equivalent to the Greek Hades.
Calu: A mysterious savage underworld being who is a hybrid of wolf and man.
Charun: A blue skinned demon covered with snakes and carrying a hammer, Charun guided deceased spirits to their final home in the underworld. He is sometimes also depicted with boar’s tusks, a vulture’s beak, a huge black beard, and/or giant black wings. Charun was essentially the Etruscan spirit of death.
Culsu (AKA Cul): Pictured with scissors and a torch, Culsu was a female chthonic demon of gateways.
Letham (Lethns, Letha, Lethms, Leta) An Etruscan infernal goddess about whom little else is known. Worship her at your peril!
Mania: Reported to be the mother of the Lares and Manes, Mania was a dark goddess of the dead and the undead. According to ancient traditions and Roman legends about Etruria in the era of the pre-Roman kings, Mania was the central figure of the Laralia festival on May 1st when children were sacrificed to her. Mania was quietly worshipped in Roman times and had a position in medieval and modern Tuscan folklore as a goddess of nightmares and demons.
Phersipnai (Phersipnei, Proserpnai): The wife of Aita and queen of the underworld; a figure nearly identical to the Greek Persephone and Roman Proserpina.
Vanth: A winged goddess of the underworld who together with Charun acted as a psychopomp. She is usually portrayed with a kindly face and with bare breasts crossed by straps. She sometimes holds a key, a light, or a scroll and she tends to dress in a chiton. I wonder if her imagery didn’t skip over classical Rome, because (aside from her toplessness) she could easily be a Christian angel on the payroll of Saint Peter.
Charun and Vanth from the Tomb of the Anina Family. (ca. 300 BC)
I have done the best I could describing the underworld deities of Etruria. Of course, since everything about Etruscan society seems to involve ancient disputes, scholarly misunderstanding, and Roman fabrication, I have probably messed up substantially and I beg your understanding and forgiveness (particularly if you happen to be some terrifying fanged Etruscan death god). There is also a final mysterious category of Etruscan deities which should be mentioned—the Dii Involuti, “the hidden gods” who acted as a final arbiter of affairs both human and divine. These guys sound extremely scary and powerful and belong on any list of underworld deities. Unfortunately, in complete accordance with their name, I could not find out anything about them!
In Celtic mythology, there is a mysterious group of supernatural beings, the aes sídhe, who belong to a realm which is beyond human understanding (yet which lies athwart the mortal world). The greatest among these aes sidhe were gods and goddesses—divine incarnations of nature, time, or other abstract concepts. Other members of the fairy host were thought of as elves, goblins, sprites, or imps (for example, the leprechauns–the disconcerting little tricksters of fairydom). However the supernatural world was also filled with the restless dead…beings who were once mortal but whose failures and miseries in life kept them connected to this plain of existence. A particularly ominous group of these dark spirits comprised the sluagh sidhe—the airborne horde of cursed, evil, or restless dead.
The sluagh sidhe (also known simply as the sluagh) were beings who were cursed to never know the afterlife. Neither heaven nor hell wanted them. Like Jack O’Lantern they were condemned to roam the gray world. Unlike Jack O’Lantern, however, the sluagh were reckoned to be a malicious and deadly force. They appeared en masse in the darkest nights and filled the air like terrible rushing starlings or living mist. One of the most horrible aspects of the sluagh was the extent to which their horde existence erased all individual personality (like eusocial insects—but evil and spooky).
Before the advent of Christianity in Ireland, Scotland, and the northlands, the sluagh were thought of as a dreadful, otherworldly aspect of the wild hunt. When the dark gods came forth to course the world with hell hounds, the sluagh were the evil demons and fallen fairies which flew along beside the grim host. After Christian missionaries began to arrive, the idea of losing one’s soul forever became worse than the idea of merely being torn apart by dark monsters—and the sluagh was reimagined as a force which hunted and devoured spirits.
Wodan’s Wilde Jagd (F. W. Heine, 1882, engraving)
The sluagh were thought to fly from the west. They were particularly dangerous to people alone in wastelands at night (which sounds dangerous anyway) and to people on the threshold of death [ed.–that sounds dangerous too]. Some of the Irish death taboos against western windows and western rooms are thought to be related to fear of this demonic horde. Although the sluagh could apparently be dangerous to healthy people in good spirits, they seem to have been most dangerous to the depressed, the anxious, and the sick. From my modern vantage in a warm well-lit (northerly-facing) room, the idea of the sluagh seems to be an apt metaphor for depression, despair, and fear. Hopefully they will stay far from all of us!
Resurrection (Christopher Ulrich, circa 2005 to 2011, oil on canvas)
As we drift towards the darkest night of the year, it is an ideal time to check out some dark and troubling artwork. This is a painting by the contemporary artist Christopher Ulrich, a painter who creates fractured fables out of traditional religious iconography. In this work “Resurrection”, the world is entering the final apocalypse. A heavenly paladin fights the great dragon in the background as vast mythical beasts fill up the sky. Lightning crackles from their eyes as the world is remade. Naturally, the end of times is when the devout are resurrected in the flesh, and the savior passes through the world granting bodies to the devout. In the midst of terrible chaos, he stands beneath a proud lighthouse and dispenses miraculous rebirth while a lambent mother goddess stands at his side and helps him in his task. Of course the end of the world offers some surprises for everyone, and the deity of resurrection does look a trifle different than one might imagine, but coming back to physical life after the body has disintegrated (as the world tumbles down, no less) has always been a chancy proposition anyway.
Baphomet, the Templars, and some sort of absurd Victorian Charlatan
In 1307, Philip IV of France was deeply in debt to the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (a military order more commonly known as the Knights Templar). The Templars had originated during the first crusade as a monastic order dedicated to helping pilgrims reach Jerusalem. They soon became a powerful military presence in Outremer (the Christian-held lands within the Middle East) and because of an extra-national network of knights, they amassed immense power and wealth around Europe. Since they had a financial infrastructure which stretched through many different countries, the Templars began acting as bankers (imagine if you deposited gold in England, and then withdrew it in Jerusalem without having to carry it through all the bandit-infested areas between). They took over and managed the estates of noblemen who took up the cross and went to fight in the crusades, and, as Philip could attest, they leant money. Some historians regard them as the first multinational corporation of Europe.
Philip IV really liked money and he hated repaying debts. In 1306 he had exiled France’s Jews so that he could take over the loans which had been made by them. When rumors started cropping up about the profane nature of the Templar’s initiation rituals, the French king made sure the rumors spread widely and gained credence. He used his influence over Pope Clement V (a weak pope who was almost entirely under Philip’s control) to squelch the order. On October 13th 1307, hundreds of French Templars were rounded up and arrested. They were then subjected to intense torture in order to find out the truth of their heresies. Unsurprisingly, under torture, the imprisoned Templars confessed to all sorts of heresies (and other sins). One of the things which Templars confessed to was worshipping the dark god Baphomet. Baphomet had originated as a mispronunciation of Mohammed among untutored French soldiers during the First Crusade, however he was about to transcend his roots and become a deity in his own right.
Philip IV contemplates a group of Templars who have been tied to stakes and surrounded with flammable materials for some reason
With inspiration supplied by torturers the Templars came up with all sorts of examples of how they worshipped Baphomet idols and committed enormities in his name. Philip’s purpose was to destroy the Templars not to find out truth and the Baphomet story worked very well. Other imprisoned Templars were questioned about the entity, and when the rack and iron and pinchers were applied, they suddenly confirmed their fellow prisoners’ stories about the dark demon-god.
Baphomet, a hitherto nonexistent deity was literally born from the pain and fear and misinformation of the torture chamber. During the 19th century, there was a burst of historical interest in the destruction of the Templars (I have left the ghastly details out of this post, but Philip IV was entirely effective in crushing the order for personal gain: the grandmaster of the Templars was burned at the stake in the middle of Paris in 1314). Various authorities of the occult (which is to say fabulists) became interested in Baphomet and started providing further information about him. Baphomet came to be pictured as a “Sabbatic Goat” a winged androgynous being with a pair of breasts, a goat’s head, and various evil supernatural accessories and emblems.
Baphomet as imagined by Victorian Occultists
This image of Baphomet was seized on by Aleister Crowley, the influential English occultist, whose works had such an influence on modern neopaganism. As a result, Baphomet has become popular. You can buy devotional books and resin statues of him more easily than you can for almost any deity from my “deities of the underworld” category. The fact that this deity has always been entirely a fraud, a bowdlerization of the medieval devil, and a complete invention (created under torture) seemingly has little bearing on the deitiy’s popularity. Indeed it is a good origin story for a dark god and possibly has helped Baphomet to prominence.
Today’s a post concerns Kahausibware, a dark ambiguous serpent-deity whose story is part of the mythology of Makira (which was known as San Cristóbal during the colonial era) an island in Solomon chain. Kahausibware was a Hi’ona—a powerful supernatural being who created the world. Like the Chinese serpent goddess Nüwa, Kahausibware was a demiurge—a primeval creator deity who gave life to humanity, however, Kahausibware was not as benevolent & understanding as gentle Nüwa.
According to myth, Kahausibware created pigs, cocoa-nut trees, and fruit trees. Having created food, she then created animals and humans to use it. Since the world was new, death was unknown. Unfortunately Kahausibware was not patient with her creations and she had no tolerance for annoyances or distractions. One day, a woman (who was an offspring of Kahausibware) requested that the serpent-deity babysit while she (the woman) went to harvest fruit. The human child would not stop screaming and wailing, so Kahausibware wrapped around the infant and suffocated him—thus bringing death into the world. At this fateful moment the woman returned with her fruit. Seeing her child dead, she flew into a rage and began to hack Kahausibware into pieces with an axe.
Ornamented War Axe, Solomon Islands–19th century (photo by Hughes Dubois)
The snake-being was divine, so her dismembered pieces kept fusing back together, but the pain of the assault was overwhelming. The serpent escaped into the ocean and swam away forever from the island of Makira, but, as she left she withdrew her blessings of abundance and ease. Since that time, life in the Solomon Islands has become difficult. Famines and crop failures became facts of life and death spread everywhere. The islanders still venerate snakes, the mortal embodiment of Kahausibware—but where the amoral creator has gone is a mystery.
Custom Dancing on Makira (Photo by Bruce Hops)
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