Category Archives: Magic and Occult

“Domine dirige nos:” The Dragon of London

Posted on by
Reply

The dragon guarding the Southwark landing of the London Bridge is the location of an important episode in Kate Griffin’s “Midnight Mayor.”

At the heart of London are two cities: the City of London and the City of Westminster. The City of London is the ancient part of London that was once known as the Roman city of Londinium. It comprises an area of one square mile and is located north of South Bank and London Bridge. Dragons stand guard at the ancient gates into the ancient city of London, at the bridges and main streets that now bring people into and out of old London. As guardians or gatekeepers of the City all the dragons face outwards, so if the dragon is looking at you, you’re outside the City, if he has his back to you, you’re inside the City. The dragons are poised to protect the City from those coming to attack.

The dragons lean on the shield of London, which show a red cross on a white background and a small red sword. red cross on a white background is the flag of St. George, patron saint of England (along with many other nations around the world). Inside the top left-hand quarter of the flag there is an upright red sword. This commemorates St. Paul, the patron saint of the City of London. Since the 7th century there has been a cathedral dedicated to St Paul on Ludgate Hill in the City. The sword commemorates Paul’s beheading by sword in Rome c. 66 AD during the persecution of Christians under Nero. The Latin motto of London, “Domine dirige nos” (“O Lord, direct/guide us”) is also seen below the dragon and shield.

Why dragons? The reason seems lost in the mists of time. Some suspect the London dragon–which is silver or white–is an old Saxon emblem set to attack the ancient Welsh emblem of another (red) dragon. Some think the London dragon is derived from the story of St. George. Others think that the London dragon is just another dragon commonly used in heraldry to display coats-of-arms and shields. But I like how Kate Griffin describes the dragon that simply IS London in her novel Midnight Mayor:

It was…

…dragon didn’t quite cover it.

Dragon implies something made out of scales, with a nod in the direction of reptilian ancestry: dinosaur meets flamethrower with wings….

To say it was made of shadows would be to imply that light or darkness even got a look-in. Sure, it had crawled out if them, in the way that the diplodocus had once crawled out of the ameba of the sea. And if a comet came from the heavens to smash it, it wouldn’t be squished, just spread so wide and thin across the earth that it would look like night had fallen down, dragging all the stars with it–before, with a good thorough shake to push the stardust off its skin, the creature slid back to its brilliant, angry, maddened shape.

Of course, the dragon might itself be said to have attacked the City in the Great Fire. The Great Fire of London was the conflagration that swept through the central parts of the City from Sunday, 2 September to Thursday, 6 September 1666. The fire gutted the medieval City of London inside the old Roman city wall.

A dragon on the Holborn Viaduct in London. (photo by S. Morris)

Flying Carpets

Posted on by
Reply

Riding a Flying Carpet, an 1880 painting by Viktor Vasnetsov

Flying carpets seem to be the single most famous object in the Abrian Nights stories. well, flying carpets and magic lamps. But everyone knows flying carpets fill the stories of the Arabian Nights.

Or do they? I just read a fascinating essay by Ruth B. Bottigheimer in the most recent issue of Gramarye, the journal of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales, and Fantasy. Bottigheimer points out that only a few of the Arabian Nights tales include flying carpets and those tales are all late additions to the collection. A flying carpet first appears in the tale Prince Ahmed and Pari Banou which was written by Hanna Dyab, a Syrian Christian who travelled to Paris and wrote his story after reading French fairy tales. His story follows a basic European fairy tale plotline which is different from the usual plots of the Arabian Nights tales.

The tale of Prince Ahmed and Pari Banou is based on a French story by Madame d’Aulnoy called White Cat. The French story has a beautiful carpet that does not fly and so a beautiful carpet appears in Pari Banou as well. But there is a wooden horse that can fly in the White Cat story and so the beautiful carpet in Pari Banou DOES fly. Before Hanna Dyab retold White Cat, the only Arabic mention of “magical carpets” were actually wooden platforms in the Koran which says that King Solomon was able to control the wind and travel great distances in a single day, with a large wooden platform travelling with him to carry all his servants, possessions, and soldiers.

Jewish stories from the Middle Ages also say that King Solomon was given the power to control the winds by God. In the Jewish stories, Solomon rides a green carpet with all his servants. But these Jewish stories were apparently unknown to Arabic storytellers. It seems that one of the most apparently Arabic magic objects–flying carpets–actually came from a Syrian Christian who retold a French fairy tale to the man collecting the Arabian Nights stories.

Executions

Posted on by
Reply

Ancient lithography representing the elements of devotional practices towards the holy souls of the executed in Sicily.

June 29, 1972 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled (5-4) that capital punishment was a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment.” The decision spared the lives of 600 individuals then sitting on death row. Four years later, in another ruling, the Court reversed itself and determined the death penalty was not cruel and unusual punishment. On October 4, 1976, the ban was lifted on the death penalty in cases involving murder.

Executions and the corpses of the executed have always fascinated people. Stories about the corpses fill books of folklore, legends and mythology. A hanged man’s hand was used to cure warts and skin tumors in England. All sorts of body parts were used in magic and medicine and these were taken from the corpses of the executed either by the executioner or by people who came to unearth and exhume the bodies of the executed in graveyards.

Prayers, folklore and customs from Southern Italy testify that even the souls of criminals had their part in the devotional practices of the population. Invoking the holy souls of the executed who dwelled for a long time in Purgatory, people established a compassionate connection between the actual and the heavenly world. The Catholic and political context of places like 19th-century Sicily, where the bandit might be seen as a popular hero who opposed the Bourbon oppressor, strongly connotes the concept of “holy soul”.