The Queen Must Live: Mythic Patterns of Royalty, Sexuality, and Mortality

By Neil D. Isaacs

"The Queen Must Live" is a study of the eternal struggle between male strengths and female powers. Stories from every corner of the globe and throughout millennia reconstruct the mythic and ritual scenarios of this struggle. The object, rather than unilateral dominance, is the achievement a workable equilibrium. There are thousands of paths to be followed, sets of variable conditions from hundreds of societies and cultures; but there are also many recurrent and shared motifs in the stories. These motifs are what structure the analysis, resulting in an argument that asserts the need for human beings, as a species that could be termed Homo narratans, to acknowledge and honor both sides of the perpetual, persistent conflict.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Neil D. Isaacs
• Release date: Feb 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311338945

Neil D. Isaacs

Neil D. Isaacs holds degrees from Dartmouth, UC Berkeley, Brown, and UMAB School of Social Work. He was a college professor for forty years, a psychotherapist for twenty years, and a writer throughout. His hundreds of credits include newspaper columns (Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York Times, Baltimore Sun), magazine and journal pieces, and three dozen books. He lives with his wife in Pompano Beach, Florida.

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Foreword

For the academic year 1969-1970 I was honored with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This, along with a generous supplementary grant from the Graduate School of The University of Tennessee through its Faculty Research Fund and gracious leave from the Department of English, allowed me to devote a sabbatical year to this project.

We had recently moved into a home on Smoky Trail, our first piece of owned real estate, a short drive from the Knoxville Racquet Club. The ranch-style house was strangely laid out but seemed just right for our family. The main oddity was a one-car garage on the basement level and a two-car garage approached by a path around the yard. The dining space opened out from the kitchen and that was the largest room. The master bedroom was small, across the hall from two smaller bedrooms for our baby Annie and our grammar-school son Daniel. The front door, never used, opened into a small living room that became our den/library.

What made the house right for us was that upstairs garage--unneeded by a one-car family with four children. We converted that space into a new largest room for our high-schoolers, Ian and Jonny. No more bunk beds for them; they had ample space more like a suite than a bedroom, with a picture window across the whole southern side above a built-in desk/working table and a pleasant view of our modestly wooded backyard. While they were at school or playing tennis, that was where I did much of the writing for this book. When it was theirs for homework, I'd be reading in the den.

For me, that year blissfully justified the concept of sabbatical as perhaps the greatest perk of academic life, an indulgence to read extensively and write consistently in a concentrated process of self-education otherwise beyond reach. The following pages will show how far that reach extended for me beyond the limiting boundaries of academic discipline.

The idea that literature was a conservatory that housed vestiges of rituals of rule had come to me by way of recognizing mythological backgrounds or underpinnings or at least analogues in much of the literature I was reading and teaching. The sabbatical studies did more than provide support for the idea; they provided a far more extensive confirmation of the global implications and applications of my thesis. In addition, a number of my graduate students in medieval studies at U-T had been intrigued by the hypothesis of the project and formed a responsive and intelligent sounding board, providing additional insights from their own reading and thinking. A few are acknowledged below, but I would express my gratitude here to Mary Kelly, Sally Kennedy, Alice Lasater, Paul Dowell, Tom Gasque, and Hugh Keenan.

To several other colleagues and friends, including Jack Reese, Mike McDonald, Steve Cox, Jim Gill, Dick Penner, and Rose Zimbardo, I am grateful for thoughtful, constructive readings and discussions. The cordial, cooperative staff of the U-T Library was of considerable help, especially through inter-library loans.

When the sabbatical was over, I thought I had a book to show for it, and I entered the tedious process of queries, submissions, and vetting that is one of the burdens of academic scholarship--or of any writing for that matter. My work presented some built-in handicaps. Asked to provide names of possible peer reviewers I could think of only two or three I knew who might look kindly on an atypical project such as mine. Despite the prodigious reading done for it, the manuscript was in some senses unscholarly.

There was no bibliography; a thorough one might have added twenty pages to the typescript and still have been incomplete. Footnotes were kept to a minimum, and I quoted freely from texts of Herodotus, Xenophon, Saxo Grammaticus, and Giraldus Cambrensis, among others, without documenting editions or page numbers. I refused to be confined within the boundaries of any narrow discipline, but crossed the line to wherever (geographically or chronologically) my reading took me. Sometimes the documentation was sketchy, sometimes the ambition almost grandiose, and sometimes the sources and translations and authorities questionable. My target audience was not an academician of a professionalistic bent, but an educated general reader open to new ideas and willing to engage in mental argument with my hypotheses.

I knew of no commercial press that would look at it nor any agent willing to take it on. Nevertheless, several academic presses expressed interest and put the ms. through their routine processes of consideration. It took years--multiple submissions were anathema in the culture of the time. And the results were consistently both dismissive and encouraging. The presses would send it out to two readers, and one would be impressed and positive but the other would vigorously reject it out of hand (with two recurring objections--either it violated the principles of a particular discipline like anthropology, ethnography, or literary study or it ran counter to the reader's knowledge and expertise in his own particular speciality).

One editor genuinely wanted to find a pair of readers to support publication (his press's requirement--like most) and tried more than once to achieve it. I would like to thank him, but I won't name him or his press because they kept the ms. out of circulation or from submission elsewhere for nearly two years (tha taboo against multiple submissions being vigorously enforced at the time) while I twisted slowly in the wind, to use a phrase then in common use. And by the time he gave up I was ready to give up too, wanting to devote my time and energy elsewhere. The few articles that came out of it were some consolation, the three doctoral dissertations it inspired much more gratifying.

But no book. Until the age of the e-book had arrived and I could reconsider getting it into print after all. After serious consideration I concluded that I really liked what I had done back then and, in keeping with one of the mythic themes prominent in the study, re-engaged in a symbolic process of death and rebirth.

I have made very few changes in the text, largely a matter of refining awkward phrasing. A few additional notes and parenthetical asides refer to obvious developments of the last four decades, along with books of particular interest as additional examples. But I have made no effort to review forty years' worth of scholarship and advances in a dozen areas of science, social science, technology, and the arts. My subject covers millennia; four decades, despite the ever-evolving explosion of knowledge, would have little bearing--barring a discovery of human culture on other planets.

Simply stated, my working hypothesis was that (1) narrative literature contained many vestiges of myths and rituals; (2) that such buried references revealed perceptions of humans in ancient times about the natural world, themselves, and their relationships; (3) that among the most important of these were bases of beliefs and systems of social structure, inheritance, and rule; and (4) that the divisions between the sexes consistently involved issues of conflict, therefore material for story-telling. I had already determined to zero in on the significance of sexual roles in myths and rituals that determined the choice of a system of rule, i.e., who held the power, of what kind, and how was it maintained and passed on.

Two other presumptions were foundations for my approach: first, that both sexes must be and always have been acknowledged in a functioning society--though that acknowledgment could just as well be ceremonial rather than practical. In other words, a story that presented a myth that women once held the secrets of life and held all the reins of power did not necessarily mean such a situation ever existed in practice. Second, it was and remains my conviction that linear development is impossible to trace because influence always moves both ways across points of contact. Chronological conclusions of chicken-and-egg questions are therefore invalid.

One of the main reasons I was able to conceive and execute a narrative argument of my own in such a relatively brief time was that all my reading led to identification of several distinct motifs that kept turning up in material from all over the world and from all periods of cultural development. Identifying and isolating the motifs, then, imposed a design on my reporting--a sequence of chapters that led naturally from one motif to another. In this sense, the book wrote itself.

A final word of caution about my approach, which I take from an essay published in 1969, the first public product of this study, roughly three decades before Bill Clinton's remarks about what the meaning of is is. I will often say that one thing 'is' another. I want this simple construction to be recognized as the semantic shorthand it is, neither an absurd (and tautological) assertion of literal identity nor an excursus beyond critical practice into poetical (i.e., purely metaphorical) play. When I say that one thing is another, I will mean that in some significant way its essence partakes of the essence of the other. Of course any such equation is metaphor-like both ion construction and operation, but it is a form of the more strictly controlled types of metaphor called metonymy and synecdoche. But when I say 'is', I am not saying 'is like' which is a way of saying 'is not'. Similarities which are singled out between things by a comparative 'is like' serve finally to demonstrate the unlikeness of the two things. Conversely, the unlikeness of things insures the striking recognition of points of similarity between them in egregious metaphors such as metaphysical conceits. Thus, I will try to avoid saying something like 'Agamemnon is Joseph', though I can show a metaphorical identity between them because the deadly robe of the one 'is' the many-colored coat of the other. (See Chapter XII below.)

With apologies for the abstruse nature of that paragraph (which I felt honor-bound to reproduce) and without further ado, I invite a reading of the following pages, filled with stories and celebrating the nature of the species as Homo narratans.

And finally, my thanks to Amy Richards, who designed the cover and helped with all technological matters that remain beyond my ken.

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind; civilization implies the grateful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought.

--Robert Graves

Nothing studied in depth can remain partitioned off as a subject in a curriculum.

--Marshall McLuhan

Il n'y a que détails qui comptent.

--French proverb

The medicine arrows are four: know each feather of bird.

--Cheyenne proverb

I. Sex and Balances

The indelicate balance of power between the sexes is not a new issue for public confrontation. Far from it. Every human society we know anything about has recorded in some way its sexist awareness, its biases we should say. Cultural anthropology has developed a composite picture that shows the universal presence of sex discrimination. It appears in a seemingly limitless variety of kind and degree, and it is reflected in a bewildering variety of social structures.

To be absolutely elementary, sex discrimination means nothing more than the recognition of differences between male and female human beings. And at the most elementary level these differences are biological, physiological--merely a matter of equipment and mechanical operation. But as soon as this kind of discrimination leads to others--to matters of function and role-playing--awareness gives way to bias. It is the application of discriminatory perceptions that gives the word discrimination a bad name. Insidiously, more and more sophisticated applications will work backwards upon the more primitive modes of distinctions, and biases will actually substantiate themselves by altering phenomena. Thus, for example, a society that determines that one sex is physically stronger or weaker than another can be structured to influence, by a selective process, the relative physical strength of the sexes.

But it is important to remember that every society faces up to its sex discrimination, whatever applications it has projected. In some form, in some way, in its systems or patterns of action or operation or behavior. every society has taken account of both sexes, has made some accommodation for its perception of differences, But let us not naїvely suppose that a real balance of power between the sexes is always attained. It has probably never been attained to the satisfaction of sexist thinking on both sides of the gender aisle, not to mention the many shores of the modern multi-sex isle.

In the old joke about who has the power in a family a man says, I let my wife make all the little decisions, like where we'll spend our vacation, who we'll invite to a party, and how we'll slice our budget pie; but I decide the important issues, like whether we should give amnesty to war objectors, whether we should give priority to space exploration or to underwater research, and how far we can support the new regime in Chile. In little, or in Youngman, this is a cameo of the kind of balance I am talking about. One society may have a matrilineal inheritance of ceremonial queenship and yet have all other women treated as chattels with property rights vested solely in males. Another may have male primogeniture determine inheritance of property but have all political power reside with women. There may be divisions of temporal and spiritual powers between the sexes. But in every case, most of the power on one side will be real--affecting the practical living habits of all individuals, and on the other side will be sham, illusory, ephemeral powers--an unworldly tokenism.

At worst, there may be no more than an official fiction that takes account of one of the sexes. A tribal myth will report, say, that women once kept the tribal secrets and controlled the destiny of the people, that things were very bad, and that the men took over to save them all from destruction. This sort of thing should be understood not as tribal history, but as a rationalization for the gross mistreatment of women that obtains among that people. At best, perhaps all that humanity can hope for is a system that makes concrete acknowledgment of both sexes, even though some division of labor and distinctions of role-playing may obtain. Equity would seem to be a practical ideal where absolute equality is impossible--a delicate balance on a very high, very live wire.

This is a study about the way literature discusses or reflects the sex discriminations of various cultures. In it, literature is taken very broadly in two distinct dimensions. For one, it extends both to popular contemporary forms such as movies and song lyrics and also to myths and folk tales of the most primitive kind. For the other, literature is not regarded as an isolated compartment of knowledge, a discipline pigeon-holed comfortably away from other subjects for study. The strict division of academic disciplines seems to me an unfortunate byproduct of the great fragmentation of knowledge. I believe that all areas of knowledge must be allowed to contribute to mankind's cumulative perceptions about itself, its world, and their mutual dependence. All disciplines may be seen as parts of a single subject, an ecology of the whole. This is what I call higher relevance, the concept of unlimited interrelatedness.

In describing this dimension of my subject, I am running counter to most current practices of literary study, including Comparative Literature.¹ The influence of some myth-and-ritual critics on my work will be apparent, and my debts to Graves and Frazer are great; but it will also be obvious that I am using similar material in a much different way. The single most important debt is probably to Mircea Eliade, who has argued that knowledge of literature and art is positively vital to the history of religions and hermeneutics, which ranges itself among the living sources of a culture. For, in short, every culture is constituted by a series of interpretations and revalorizations of its 'myths' or its specific ideologies.² Eliade has also expressed surprise that so few historians of religion have ever tried to interpret a literary work from their own perspective, especially since the myth-and-ritual critics have not hesitated to use the findings of the history of religions.³

But very few writers have observed the necessity for crossing disciplinary boundaries to clarify our general and particular perceptions; and fewer still have done much about it, particularly in probing the relationships among the various perceptions of physical and life sciences, the complex of anthropology-ethnology-archaeology-paleontology, and studies of myth, artistic ritual, and literature. Owen Barfield has a character, a brilliant young physicist, who says to his colleagues at a professional meeting, But above all I ask myself if our predicament is not one which obliges us to look for help in any direction where it might conceivably be found. Would it not be wise, for instance, to pray in aid some of the results arrived at in other disciplines than our own?⁴

A rational, realistic answer would be, Yes, of course, but the advancement of knowledge is not always a reasonable process. Charles Fair, himself a scientist of some repute, observes that modern 'realism' encourages technological thinking and academic careerism, but discourages the breadth and disinterestedness of mind needed for really important work.⁵ In 1908, J.L. Myers, noting that foods and food-quest were of concern to Herodotus and Hippocrates, stated that the men of the early fifth century were already aware of the interdependence of environment, economy, and institutions.⁶ Myres probably intended no irony, but how little western civilization has advanced in two and a half millennia.

A few exceptions are worthy of note: Leonard Palmer, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.⁷ Most prominent--in the attempt to bring together in a single encompassing theory the many disciplines in which man seeks out and classifies his perceptions--is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. His system defies economical summary; in effect his own works are themselves brief summaries or tight outlines of the system. But I will be able to make some references to him in the concluding chapter.

To make the point about interdependence and interrelatedness, I would like to offer an extreme case by forcing an association between an eminent twelfth-century man of letters and an eminent twentieth-century man of science. In The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin through Wales, a compendium of history, natural history, folklore, and legend, or rather the observations and reflections of an alert twelfth-century man, Giraldus Cambrensis reports a number of zoological anomalies, like the mixed breeding of a cow and a stag and of a monkey and a dog. Two cases in particular stand out: a wild sow whose faculty for hunting wild animals by scent was acquired because it had been suckled by a bitch famous for her nose; and a dog who had lost his own tail and whose progeny were then all born without tails. Giraldus comments on the first: an argument that man (as well as every other animal) contracts the nature of the female who nurses him. And on the second: It is wonderful, that nature should, as it were, conform itself in this particular to the accident of the father.⁸ The first perception may not seem so medieval when we think of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes or, for that matter, of much behavioral psychology. And beside the second, let us set a quotation from Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression: phylogenetic ritualization: a new instinctive motor pattern arises whose form copies that of a behavior pattern which is variable and which is cause by several different motivations.⁹

The point is not how fast or much we have learned (or how slow and little) about evolution, heredity, and behavior. The point is that both Giraldus and Lorenz are recording perceptions that belong to the same cumulative body of knowledge about life. Students of mythology and literature can learn from the new biology, even from popularizers like Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative) and Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape), but especially from those who, like Lorenz, go on to make connections themselves. Lorenz, in fact, finds striking analogues to the evolution of instinctive rituals in the process of cultural ritualization.¹⁰ One cannot, then, adequately study rituals in literature without giving some thought to what zoology can teach one about ritual.

Human perception, from extremes of provincial medieval folklore to the most sophisticated contemporary zoology, biochemistry, and astrophysics, involves a unity of material.¹¹ In order to study the literature and mythology of the world as a whole there is no need to postulate a theory about transmission or unified origin or contact or migration or expansion or universal necessity. And in order to study man there is no need to decide between parallel or single lines of evolution, Exact relationships are always welcome discoveries, but lacking them we may still find useful ways of pulling things together so long as we consider all myths and literature as a cumulative record of man's perceptions.

This study explores literature, in both classical and popular forms, to identify vestiges of myth and ritual. By these I mean the records and celebrations of significant perceptions, both ancient and contemporary. Our own mythology necessarily includes the constructs of science, technology, and mass media.¹² But I do not propose to follow a consistent methodology in the sense of either (1) analyzing literature by tracing motifs back to origins or (2) illuminating primitive structures by finding their vestiges in literature. Instead, I employ a comprehensive, open-ended, suggestive approach, moving back and forth between the two. One point of the whole study is the possibility, even the necessity, for such back-and-forth movement.

The relationship between ritual and myth is a complex issue, and I have no desire to get bogged down in either a semantic swamp or a chicken-and-egg quagmire. In common critical usage the terms appear to be virtually interchangeable. Some basic distinctions, however, must be made. We may begin by removing from consideration the kinds of fable and legend that seek to explain existing practices or phenomena (including rituals). Ivan Engnell puts the case most succinctly: a real, basic myth--i.e. a ritual, not an aetiological myth.¹³ In this oversimplified dichotomy, the real myth is the ritual. Most critics employing a myth-ritual approach to literature assume that myth is somehow a product of or development from ritual, but there are important exceptions. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, for example, states that it is inconceivable that the Ritual, in which the Myth is enacted, should have been the source of the Myth itself.¹⁴ Theodor H. Gaster makes a careful distinction between rituals, or direct experiences, and dramas, or representations, by seeing myth as the connecting link. He speciaifcally disputes Robertson Smith's idea of myth as literary interpretations imposed on sacral acts and Jane Harrison's conception of myth as the spoken correlative of things done. Myth, rather, translates