The Legendarium according to Smaug

A meteoric dumpster fire

I’ve watched the first two episodes of Rings of Power. Even though I promised I wouldn’t.

It’s bad. And I mean really, holistically bad.

Let’s get the trivial concerns out of the way first. Casting Black actors and actresses to play hobbits, dwarves, men and elves isn’t at all a problem for me. If anything, Tolkien’s dwarves are supposed to be swarthy-skinned and dark of complexion, which for some reason they weren’t in the Jackson movies; and the hobbits were envisioned as being just as diverse of physical appearance as humans. The question is whether the actors and actresses can act well. (Sir Lenny Henry and Sophia Nomvete can and do act well here. Ismael Cruz Córdova? Not so much.) Also if it isn’t done cynically, which is a bit more questionable. Race politics have nothing to do with why I think Rings of Power is a full-on betrayal of Tolkien’s work.

What does, then? One word: Galadriel.

In Tolkien’s Silmarillion, Galadriel was originally a stubborn, headstrong and adventurous girl—this much is true. She did have something of a growth arc. The reason she came to Middle Earth at the end of the First Age was because she was intrigued by the place. She was tempted, in part, by Fëanor’s promises of glory, and longed to see the shores of an unknown land and even to rule them as queen. But she refused to join Fëanor’s quest for revenge against Melkor for the death of his father (Galadriel’s grandfather) Finwë, and she (along with her father Finarfin and her eldest brother Finrod) refused to engage in the political quarrels of the Noldor which ended in the slaughter of the Kinslaying and the Burning of the Ships.

That is as much as to say: she was stubborn and adventurous, but neither brooding nor vengeful—she was of like mind with her father and brother, not having sworn Fëanor’s oath of revenge. Further, it is highly hinted by Jack himself that the reason she stayed in Middle Earth was because she loved it. She loved the people, she loved the living creatures, and she especially loved the forests. The reason she stayed in Middle Earth was because she found hope there.

Melian said: ‘There is some woe that lies upon you and your kin. That I can see in you, but all else is hidden from me; for by no vision or thought can I perceive anything that passed or passes in the West: a shadow lies over all the land of Aman, and reaches far out over the sea. Why will you not tell me more?’

‘For that woe is past,’ said Galadriel; ‘and I would take what joy is here left, untroubled by memory. And maybe there is woe enough yet to come, though still hope may seem bright.’

In Rings of Power, there is no love at all in the character upon whom they wrongly bestow the name of ‘Galadriel’. There is no joy. There is not even a trace of hope. Her reasons for staying in Middle Earth have nothing to do with any kind of attachment to Middle Earth, land or creatures or people—and everything to do with hunting down her brother’s killer, Sauron. The makers of Rings of Power have made this ‘Galadriel’ into precisely a bitter, brooding, violent woman who is dead-set on revenge: in short, they have made her into Fëanor Mark II.

These are not the same character. Not even at different ages.

This is partly ideological. There is a current in the corporate culture machine’s interpretation of feminism, that thinks that in order to pander to women viewers they should make all female characters ‘strong’ by putting weapons in their hands—by making them ‘action heroines and corporate girl-bosses’. But this isn’t good writing, and arguably it isn’t even good feminism. Let me be blunt: Éowyn wasn’t a badass just because she picked up a sword, delivered a one-liner and stabbed a wraith in the ‘face’. If it had been just that, she wouldn’t have gotten any of the cheers she did. Éowyn was a badass because of the context of that action: she cared about Merry and her father enough to protect them.

This ‘Galadriel’? She doesn’t care for anything or anyone except her dead brother—and not even Finrod himself, but his ‘task’. This ‘Galadriel’ would never have been found worthy of the option of returning to Valinor in the first place—the pardon that the Valar bestowed only upon Finarfin and his children, among all of the Noldor. The only reason Galadriel was allowed to return to the Elf-home was because she wasn’t as vengeance-obsessed as Fëanor, and hadn’t taken Fëanor’s oath! Rewriting ‘Galadriel’ as another Fëanor doesn’t strengthen her—it diminishes her in ways that are frankly blasphemous.

And what’s worse, Rings of Power tries to make her Fëanorish vindictiveness a sign of her sagacity. Like Cassandra she warns of Sauron’s known-to-the-audience return when everyone around her, High King Gil-Galad and ‘Elrond’ particularly, disbelieve her and tell her she’s overreacting (the mansplaining chauvinist bastards). Never mind that in the book, Galadriel was the one urging Gil-Galad to show caution, not the other way around—and she was right to do so!

I’ve got other grievances with Rings of Power that operate on a similar level. The portrayal of ‘Elrond’ as Gil-Galad’s political staffer and speechwriter is particularly offensive. As is the notion that Celebrimbor would be worried about the size of the elves’ ‘workforce’ in building his Super-Duper Mega-Forge—sending ‘Elrond’ off to literally hammer out (and I do mean with a literal hammer) a labour contract with Durin’s dwarves. Tolkien would be appalled at this! His elves and dwarves had their flaws, but they were not industrialists and capitalists. Their crafts, were crafts. Capitalism was personified in Lord of the Rings by Saruman, and assembly-line Fordist industrialism metonymised by Isengard. They were certainly not valorised the way they are here.

But this should not come as a surprise. Both my gripes against ‘Galadriel’ and the characterisation of the elves and dwarves generally stem from a much broader complaint. That is: Rings of Power is nothing more and nothing less than the Legendarium according to Smaug. It’s Tolkien’s universe as interpreted by Jeff Bezos—born on third base, mega-polluter, war hawk defence contractor, exploiter of the poor—someone who doesn’t even value Tolkien or his œuvre and has nothing to do with Tolkien’s own ecological-minded Christian Tory-anarchist mythopoesis. Of course any interpretation he sponsors in order to garner a greater market share for his streaming service, is going to run dead against the logic of Tolkien’s universe.

Tolkien often expressed his own view through the words of Faramir. And this was Faramir’s view: ‘I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.’ Rings of Power, so far, takes the opposite view: trying to dazzle with special effects, battle sequences, blood and fire—while holding the substance of their source material, the characters and the setting, in utter contempt.

Give this one a hard pass.

Your Name 《君の名は。》

I want to help build landscapes that leave heart-warming memories… I didn’t even know anybody in that town. Why does the scenery of a town that no longer exists wring my heart so?

Back when I did my review of Flavours of Youth I promised I’d get around to seeing this film: Your Name, directed by Shinkai Makoto 新海诚. In short, I’m incredibly glad I did. This film is a masterpiece, one which well deserves its reputation as a classic of Japanese animation.

Your Name is best described as a fantasy/sci-fi romance, which speaks directly to a Japanese but also a more broadly East Asian experience of being disconnected in time, of the tensions and antinomies that arise from being part of a landscape where ageless antiquity and glittering hyper-modernity exist side-by-side. But the two main characters, despite their frequent and sometimes heartbreaking alienation which sometimes takes the form of literal jumps in time, still seek a genuine connexion with each other. And the heart of the film rests in how they mature and grow.

Your Name is a story that defies easy categorisation. It’s a story about a (literal) disaster, when a comet strikes a remote, traditional Japanese town. It’s also a bildungsroman and a breathtakingly bittersweet teen romance. It freely borrows from SFnal tropes about time-travel (including multiple timelines and alternate futures), as well as fantasy tropes about body-swapping (think the Warehouse 13 episode ‘Merge with Caution’). It is steeped in traditional Chinese lore, Daoism and Shintô religious rites, but it also has the feel of a young-adult fantasy book by TA Barron. It would be easy for any feature film, but particularly a Japanese animated one, with this many moving parts to feel overstuffed, overwrought and pretentious. But Your Name avoids this in part because of the tender vulnerability and humanity of the two protagonists.

Your Name uses a lot of traditional tropes from East Asian literature that might get lost on American audiences. The ‘red thread of fate’ is probably a familiar enough one, and it gets used liberally here between the two protagonists. The ‘butterfly dream’ of Zhuangzi is also alluded to. The tradition of fermenting rice wine with human saliva (kuchikamizake 口嚼酒) plays an important rôle in the story. And despite all the fractures and disconnects in time that occur between the two protagonists, there is a subtle but persistent theme of continuity, of history repeating itself, of déjà vu.

A comet, whose orbit comes within sight of Earth once every 1200 years, passes overhead. As it enters Earth’s gravity well, its nucleus fractures, producing a spectacular meteor shower. One of these fragments is large enough to fall on the village of Itomori. It destroys the town and kills 500 of its inhabitants. Two young teenagers look up at the night sky and watch the comet streak across. One of them, Tachibana Taki 立花泷 is a high-schooler and part-time waiter in a fancy restaurant in Shinjuku ward in Tôkyô. The other, Miyamizu Mitsuha 宫水三叶, is a high schooler in Itomori, and one of the two granddaughters of the keeper of the local Shintô shrine there.

Mitsuha is frustrated with her limited surroundings, being (embarrassingly) involved in the rites of the shrine, getting unwanted attention from being the village mayor’s daughter, and feeling like she’s trapped in a fishbowl. She screams from underneath the torii that she hates her life, she hates her town, and she wishes she could be reincarnated as a handsome boy in Tôkyô. Not long after this, Mitsuha and Taki begin to have strange dreams.

Formerly, I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt that I was a butterfly, a butterfly flying about, feeling that it was enjoying itself. I did not know that it was Zhou. Suddenly I awoke, and was myself again, the veritable Zhou. I did not know whether it had formerly been Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or it was now a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhou. But between Zhou and a butterfly there must be a difference.

昔者莊周夢為胡蝶，栩栩然胡蝶也，自喻適志與！不知周也。俄然覺，則蘧蘧然周也。不知周之夢為胡蝶與，胡蝶之夢為周與？周與胡蝶，則必有分矣。此之謂物化。

As though in answer to Mitsuha’s wish, Mitsuha and Taki begin swapping bodies, randomly, whenever they fall asleep. This part of the story might have been handled gratuitously or exploitatively, and sometimes it rides the line. (What’s the first thing Pete does when Robert Louis Stevenson’s bookends trap him in Myka’s body? Yup, Taki does the same thing. Typical teenage boy.) But Taki and Mitsuha are quickly intrigued by each other in deeper ways. Mitsuha finally gets to visit Tôkyô, go out to eat in stylish urban cafés, and hold down a job in a fancy restaurant. And Taki is enchanted by the charming architecture and wondrous vistas of Itomori – including the huge round lake which is very clearly and ominously a crater.

The two teenagers quickly begin setting ground rules for each other, what they are and aren’t allowed to do in each other’s bodies, leaving each other messages including by writing on each other’s hands and wrists with marker. Going through each other’s smartphones, they learn details about each other’s lives that they can appreciate. Taki begins asserting himself among Mitsuha’s classmates to get them to stop teasing her. And Mitsuha sets Taki up with an older girl at his workplace, Okudera, whom he has a crush on, and tells him in a message that he should be able to see the comet that night.

Taki’s date with Okudera goes poorly and no comet appears. He tries calling Mitsuha with the number she left him, and she doesn’t answer. The body-switching stops, but Taki can’t forget about the dreams he had from when he was Mitsuha. He then embarks, together with Okudera and his classmate Tsukasa, on a half-baked quest to find Mitsuha and her village. The only thing he has to go on, though, since he can’t remember her name or the name of the village, are the landscape drawings and sketches he did of the views from her house and the temple. An old man recognises his sketch as that of Itomori before the disaster, and Taki ultimately learns from him that Mitsuha was killed along with the rest of the village when the comet struck Itomori three years before.

Taki decides to leave Okudera and Tsukasa to try and find the holy place where Mitsuha’s grandmother took her to pay respects to the old Shintô god that had come 1200 years ago. It happens to be in the middle of a crater – and Mitsuha’s grandmother had told her that crossing over into the grounds of the shrine was like taking a step into the underworld. Taki finds the rice wine that Mitsuha made inside the shrine, and drinks it. This reconnects Mitsuha and Taki, and allows the two of them to rewrite the history of Itomori and save the townspeople from the impact of the comet fragment. But, as history changes, the dream ends, and the two of them lose each other again, even forgetting each other’s names…

I’m not going to spoil the ending here, but suffice it to say this: Shinkai Makoto has a brilliant and touching ‘ear’ for the voices of young adults. He makes real the connexion between these two people, so utterly different from one another and separated by time, space, class, sex, tradition and modernity. Although the director very cautiously refrains from overtly editorialising at any point in the film – with one partial exception – one gets the distinct impression that the same longing the characters feel for each other is connected intimately to a sense of loss of the traditions that Mitsuha embodies in her life even as she rebels against them.

One sees this same sort of traditionalism, actually, even in the gender-bending body-swap plot. Even though it’s a explicitly a comic point to see ‘Taki’ (inhabited by Mitsuha’s consciousness) act like a traditional-minded Japanese girl, and ‘Mitsuha’ (actually Taki) behave live a typical urban high-school boy – right down to their body language and pronouns (‘Taki’ almost gives the game away by calling himself by the feminine ‘watashi 私’ before landing on the more masculine ‘ore 俺’) – they each come to have a tender respect for each other’s physical embodiedness and an active interest in each other’s social lives. There is an almost Ruist sensibility here, in that Taki and Mitsuha come to understand and love each other by experiencing relationships with friends, family and surroundings through each other’s eyes.

The single most strained relationship in the film, actually, is that between Mitsuha and her father, who is a (presumably ruling-party) politician in the town, and who rather callously left his daughters behind with his shrine-keeping mother-in-law after their mother died. Throughout the film Mitsuha’s father refuses to listen to her or take her seriously. This is where I think the partial exception to Shinkai’s refusal to editorialise comes in. Mitsuha’s father represents a deliberate rupture with tradition even though he uses it to attain his personal goals.

As to be expected from a CoMix Wave production, the animation quality is amazing, even if – by Shinkai Makoto’s own admission – not quite reaching the Studio Ghibli gold standard. Both the urban and the rural backdrops are lovingly, painstakingly rendered – as though each frame is meant to be a landscape painting. The technical and stylistic use of proportion and perspective, also, enhance the thematic preoccupations with separation and reunion, rupture and continuity, alienation and connexion. I highly, highly recommend this film.

EDIT: Also, the title of the film called to mind this Tad Morose song, the lyrics to which seem almost appropriate at times:

How Joanna Cole informed my early Russophilia

An illustration from The Flying Ship

This past Sunday saw the passing of the outstanding, beloved children’s author Joanna Cole. For many – including for myself and my children – her Magic School Bus series of books were some of our first explorations into the world of the natural sciences, and for these contributions to children’s literature Joanna Cole is rightly remembered and honoured. But for me, ever since I was seven years old, Ms Cole’s name is also indelibly associated with a collection of folktales, the Best-Loved Folktales of the World, which (as the title suggests) she compiled from a vast variety of cultures and times from around the globe. This book, an old favourite, has followed me around everywhere and always occupied a place of honour on my bookshelf long into my adulthood.

Children are enchanted by folktales, and I was no exception – but folktales are by no means a childish thing. Indeed, Joanna Cole put together this collection as much for adults – not just parents – as for children. Because prior to the invention of the printing press, most written materials were in fact the self-narration of the élite classes, folklore and folktales are a pristine window into the lives, concerns, struggles and aspirations of the common people. This was one of the big draws of folklore for scholars like the Brothers Grimm, August von Haxthausen, Julius Krohn, Marianna Kambouroglou and Pyotr Kireevskii. As Joanna Cole herself put it:

Because they are the products of preliterate societies, the folktales, unlike our modern novels and short stories, were not invented by a single author and printed in a book to be read unchanged forever. Instead, they were passed by word of mouth from one teller to another, never told twice in exactly the same way. This oral tradition made for a unique intimacy between teller and listeners, and the give and take with the audience no doubt influenced the form of the tales. Thus the stories express the wishes, hopes and fears of many people, rather than the concerns of a particular writer, and they deal with universal human dilemmas that span differences of age, culture and geography.

When heard again and again throughout a lifetime, the tales served not only to entertain but to transmit the values and wisdom of the culture, imbue a strong sense of right and wrong, and provide a reservoir of vivid images that became part of the individual’s imagination and even of his everyday language.

Joanna Cole acknowledges both the universal themes in the body of folklore she herself selected to transmit to another generation, and the particularities of the cultures she sought to represent in translating and compiling them. Indeed, one of her methodologies in this book is to attempt to find a source for the story that is as close as possible to the oral tradition, and then to write in-character in an attempt to transmit the style and voice of the storyteller. Small wonder indeed, that a seven-year-old would, upon stumbling on this book, at once find himself mesmerised by the many voices in Cole’s storytelling!

It was natural that I should gravitate toward the folktales of certain cultures within the book. I was drawn to the trickster-spider Anansi stories of the Ashanti tribe of West Africa. I enjoyed the underdog tales of small, less-regarded children against giants and ogres in English folklore – or the parallel adventures of younger sons against enchanters and trolls in the folklore of Northern Europe. But the folktales that I kept coming back to, time and again, were the stories from Russia: ‘The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship’, ‘The Firebird, the Horse of Power and Princess Vasilissa’, ‘Prince Hedgehog’ and ‘Salt’. The heroes of these stories are remarkable not for their book-smarts or martial prowess, let alone for their wealth. The Fool of the World and the simple Ivan are, in fact, far less than clever to begin with, have no real special abilities and are even belittled by their parents. And even if the heroes in these tales are possessed of cleverness (like Prince Hedgehog) or martial prowess (like the archer in the story of the Horse of Power), they are never saved from danger by their natural gifts but instead by a mixture of faith, compassion and an innate sense of fair play – as well as a certain kind of natural cunning which the villains always seem to underestimate.

I quickly came to admire, and even internalise to a degree, these deeply humane aspects in the moral substratum, by which the folklore of Russia represented the values and wisdom of its common people. As such, the Western ‘meritocratic’ præoccupations, that we should judge people by how smart they are or by how strong they are, never really rubbed me the right way. By the way, you can see from some of the East Asian folktales in this collection – like ‘The Wife’s Portrait’, ‘The Magic Brocade’ and ‘Mister Lazybones’ – that the idea of ‘merit’ in cultures influenced by Ru ideology is very different from the modern Western idea. East Asian ‘merit’, at least in its folk conception rather than in its Legalist one, has a lot more to do with fulfilling filial duties and confining oneself to the appropriate social rôles, than with showing off book-smarts or military strategy. It seems interesting – though not surprising – that the dangers of the usual East Asian studies tack, of conflating Rujia with the disembodied and rationalised ethics of the Enlightenment (which indeed tore up in Europe many of the social substrata upon which Ru ethics in China were built), are brought to the fore and thrown into such sharp relief by the study of East Asian folklore.

The folklore of Russia – and in particular the Great-Russian folklore of Novgorod, in whose vicinity Arthur Ransome lived and collected the folktales that would go into Old Peter, and from there into Joanna Cole’s collection – has retained on the flipside much of the old kenotic radicalism of the Rus’ polity, long after it was abandoned by princes and chroniclers and even churchmen. In this folklore, the ordinary muzhik, even – nay, especially – if he is a simpleton, is often allowed to triumph over tyrannical tsars, mighty giants, violent generals and jealous older brothers. And this triumph occurs occasionally on account of the muzhik’s underhanded cunning, but more often on account of his natural good nature, his instinctive generosity, and most of all his simple faith in God.

On another note: it’s hard not to see the impress of heroes like Ivan and the Fool of the World on the protagonists in Russian cinema. The Kazakh youngster Mustafa in Shıza, Vanya in Kavkazskii plennik, Danila Bagrov in the Brat films, even (to a certain extent) Kris and later Anya in Ya ne vernus’, all embody in a certain sense this distinctively Great-Russian folkloric archetype. They all seem to have these same characteristics of faith, fair play and an instinctive underdog cunning that are hinted at in Ivan and in the Fool of the World – even though the archetype is occasionally played with or subverted in the transition to film.

May God grant unto Joanna Cole everlasting rest, and make her memory to be æternal! It’s interesting to me to discover that the authorial genius behind the Magic School Bus books, indeed did have a profound impact on me and particularly upon my respect and affinity for Russian culture – though this was one signpost I had nearly forgotten until now. Perhaps I’ll go back and read ‘Salt’ again tonight.

Baksy: pretty but flawed gangster flick

Aıdaı (Nesipkúl Omarbekova), Toha (Tolepbergen Baısakalov)
and Asan (Almat Ayanov) in Baksy

Gulshat Omarova’s second film after Shıza, and second collaboration with Sergei Bodrov, Sr, is the 2008 movie Baksy. In English, this title is somewhat ineptly translated as Native Dancer, which doesn’t do justice to the double entendre in the title. Baksy Баксы in Kazakh means ‘shaman’, but in Russian, it’s a slang term for money (coming from the English word ‘bucks’). Even from the title we can see that Omarova is still developing the themes that she began with Shıza here: the ambiguities and ironies that face a Kazakhstan which straddles Kazakh and Russian cultures, as well as ways of life that are traditional and semi-nomadic on the one hand, and capitalist and post-Soviet on the other. But, whereas in Shıza Omarova was playful in exploring the ambiguities of the relationship between Kazakh and Russian – both in the interior life of her protagonist Mustafa and in his romantic involvement with the Russian Zinka – in Baksy it seems like Omarova has definitively chosen a ‘side’.

In the broad strokes, Baksy tells the story of a traditional aul centred around two people: the shady, Mafia-connected biznismen Batyr (Farhat Amankulov) and the elderly shaman Aıdaı (Nesipkúl Omarbekova). Aıdaı lives on the land owned by Batyr, on account of its mystical healing properties, and a small community has grown up around her. When a local crime boss, Arman (Nurlan Álimjánov) decides to move in on the property, it touches off a power struggle between the forces of biznis and the forces of nature.

Warning: Spoilers below.

Aıdaı makes a living on her rented land, giving folk cures to those who come to her. These cures often involve a mixture of Islâmic prayers including the takbîr and repetitive chants, the entrance into the shamanic trance, the sacrifice of animals and the ritual use of their blood. Some who come to her include the wayward sixteen-year-old girl Gauhar (Asel Abutova), and Mustafa (Oljas Nýsýppaev) and Zina (Olga Landina – uncredited) who make a cameo reprise of their rôles in Shıza. There are some semi-permanent fixtures of Aıdaı’s aul that we see as well, including Toha (Tolepbergen Baısakalov), a lazy, cowardly, beer-swilling and pool-playing scoundrel whom we first see down a makeshift oubliette for an unspecified offence, but who normally does odd manual tasks for the shaman.

Aıdaı’s uneasy relationship with the wealthy Batyr comes to a head when Arman attempts to strong-arm her off the land so that he can build a full-serve filling station and nightclub where her aul is. Toha starts sleeping with Gauhar – and Aıdaı beats him for it. The police find out about it, which – having been bought off by Arman – is all the excuse they need to evict Aıdaı from her property. Aıdaı goes into a trance and falls down, seemingly dead. The only one who sees that she is not in fact dead, is Batyr’s young son Asan (Almat Ayanov). Arman moves in at once, has the aul all but demolished, and promptly builds the filling station and nightclub, a gaudy joint named ‘Las Vegas’.

The only people who stay on the ruined aul are Toha and Gauhar. Toha gets into a fight with Batyr over his having sold out the shaman, and Batyr himself begins to have second thoughts about the whole enterprise when Asan tells him that he’s seen Aıdaı alive. When Batyr refuses to congratulate Arman at the celebration of the opening of his nightclub, the two of them have a falling-out. The following night, Toha witnesses one of the fake, electric-lit palm trees suddenly and inexplicably come crashing down, starting a petrol fire which completely destroys both the filling station and the nightclub. Arman learns of the destruction and promptly blames Batyr – demanding that the landowner pay half a million dollars to recoup the losses. When Batyr refuses to pay, Arman sends two thugs to kidnap Batyr’s son Asan after his boxing lessons, and the film takes a sharp turn from the supernatural into bog-standard Russian crime thriller territory.

Batyr recruits Toha to track down the baksy if she’s still alive, and gets the boxing instructor and some of the older students at the dojo on board to help him. He delivers the money, only for Arman to renege on his promise to release his son and demand another half a million dollars. When Toha at last finds Aıdaı, the first thing she does is start beating him with a stick, but once she learns what has happened to Asan she goes into a trance and shows Toha where he’s being kept. Batyr, the boxing teacher and the older students hijack the SUV of one of Arman’s henchmen and have him lead them to his hideout, and he rescues his son after a shootout that leaves both Arman and Batyr dead – but Asan, who witnessed the bloodshed, becomes traumatised to the point where he cannot speak. Asan is taken back to the aul, where Toha and Gauhar help Aıdaı conduct rituals to help Asan work through his trauma and mourn his father.

End spoilers.

There’s a lot going on in this movie, with the central character of Batyr here representing the internal struggle for the Kazakhs between outward material wealth and Western notions of ‘progress’ as represented by Arman, and the spiritual connectedness of Kazakhstan’s præ-Islâmic shamanic past as represented by Aıdaı. Omarova makes no bones about which side she sympathises with; there is as much a moral contrast between Arman and Aıdaı as there is a contrast in the languages they use or the clothes they wear. She does little to glamourise or romanticise the shaman’s rôle in the community – or, for that matter, the shortcomings of that community itself. Toha and Gauhar, although they remain the most loyal to Aıdaı and Asan by the end of the film, are still remarkably flawed: it’s their indiscretion that gives the police a pretext to raid the aul in the first place.

On the other hand, there is no redeeming quality in the mobster life, despite its naked opulence. Omarova does her level best to portray the encroachment of biznis onto Kazakhstan’s native traditions as superficial, and marked by cupidity and decadence. Other reviewers have remarked on the discrepancy between the vast Kazakh landscapes and the Lexuses, Bimmers and Benzes that the characters use. This discrepancy is clearly deliberate. There is certainly a remove between Baksy and a film like Brat, but there are interesting parallels as well. Omarova wants to draw our eye to the contrast between the healthier, authentic vices of ordinary or even ‘bad’ Kazakhs like Toha – drinking vodka out of dusty glasses, playing pool, screwing around in a yurt – and the sterile shallowness of the nightclub glitz. Everything about the nightclub seems fake: it literally has a flat façade that makes it look like a stage prop; it’s decked out in electric lights and fake palm trees. It’s on account of these that it literally goes up in flames.

Progeny seems to play an important thematic rôle here, as it did for Scorsese in his 2006 remake of Infernal Affairs, The Departed. Batyr has a son from a previous marriage – but that son is under the care of Aıdaı for most of the film, and we never see Batyr have any genuine connexion with his heavily made-up, shades-rocking, high-heeled girlfriend. Likewise, even though Arman is surrounded by girls, he clearly has no one he can leave a legacy to. On the other hand, Toha, despite having a number of venial faults, gets Gauhar pregnant: and by the end of the film, Toha and Gauhar seem to be acting as Asan’s surrogate parents.

The film suffers somewhat in that it doesn’t really own up to being a gangster film until about halfway through, and the result is something that stands halfway between the introspective criminal drama of the previous year’s Réketır, and the beautifully-bleak magic realism of the following year’s Kelin, without really managing the depth of either. At the same time, the cinematography and lighting are excellent, and the camera lingers lovingly on the steppe, the dusty rural roadscapes, the edifice of the mosque, equally as it explores in palpable excitement the controlled chaos of the bazaar. The fight choreography isn’t as well-executed as in Shıza, sadly, and most of the acting seems fairly wooden – with the exception of the young Almat Ayanov’s precocious insight and Tolepbergen Baısakalov’s expert comic timing, which give the movie something of a heart. Is it worth a watch? Sure. But there are certainly better films in the same genre.

The Evenki hero Hailanqa

Statue of Hailanqa, Hailar, Inner Mongolia

As I was reading The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian 遲子建 several months ago, one name in particular popped out at me: Hailanqa. The narrator of the novel, as did many of her relatives in the urireng, treated the name of this hero with reverence and awe. Hailanqa, the greatest martial hero of the Evenki people of the 18th century, was described in the novel as an orphan who lost both of his parents while he was still a youth, and he ended up a servant for a horse-merchant in Hailar. He was something of a folkloric figure of tall-tale proportions, somewhat akin to a batyr in a Turkic dastan. One Evenki saying about Hailanqa is that he was able to scare wolves away from the herds of horses even in his sleep, because his snore was as loud as a tiger’s roar. He rose to prominence to become one of the Qing Dynasty’s bravest, most tenacious and most successful generals.

But like most heroes of legend, Dolar Hailanqa (Duola’er Hailancha 多拉爾海蘭察) was in fact a historical figure. He belonged to the Solon 索倫 tribe of the Evenkil, and was born sometime around the year 1740, around the same time that the Evenkil around Lake Baikal were being converted to Orthodoxy by Russian missionaries. The stories about him being an orphan and a servant to a Hailar horse-merchant might very well be true. But when he was probably about fifteen years old he entered military service as a cavalryman.

In 1755 the Qing Dynasty had begun its conquest and destruction of the Dzunghar Khanate. The Dzunghars had overextended themselves on account of their sustained campaign of subjugation against the Kazakhs, which the latter people were spiritedly resisting under leaders like Abylai Khan. Hailanqa was recruited from amongst the Solon Evenks to participate in this campaign against the Dzunghars. As many of the Evenkil still are, he was a practised marksman, and his favoured weapon was the short cavalry bow. He distinguished himself in battle by shooting and capturing the Dzunghar general Bayar; and he impressed Emperor Qianlong 乾隆帝 enough to be granted the courtesy name of Erke Batlu. He later accompanied the Emperor in Mulan Park, and shot two tigers that were about to attack the Emperor. The grateful Qianlong promoted him to a senior captain rank in the Imperial Bodyguard.

He rose quickly through the ranks from there. Hailanqa again distinguished himself in military service against Burma, where he fought with bravery and distinction in highly unfamiliar terrain as a vanguard of the light cavalry (though the Burmese campaign itself turned out to be a disaster), and was awarded with a position in the Bordered Blue Banner. Two years later he was promoted to the Bordered White Banner and sent to Jinchuan – modern Sichuan – to quell a rebellion by the Tibetan Chieftain of Tsanlha. The campaign was an incredibly costly one, and the siege lasted five years. Even so, his service there was enough to ensure his promotion to the Plain Red Banner and his generalship in the Imperial Guard.

Hailanqa’s greatest military achievements were yet to come. He was sent to Taiwan to participate in the suppression of the rebellion of Lin Shuangwen 林爽文. Lin Shuangwen was a leader in the Hongmen 洪门 or Heaven and Earth Society 天地会, a quasi-Masonic organisation which by that time was engaging in piracy and racketeering. Lin Shuangwen organised an army of 300,000 people and proclaimed himself king. Hailanqa was sent to Taiwan in 1787 to advise the local police force of 3,000 led by Huang Shijian 黄仕简 on how to quell the rebellion. Once he landed, Hailanqa found his forces badly outnumbered and besieged. Despite being badly outnumbered, Hailanqa and Huang Shijian held out for months until Hailanqa’s friend and fellow bannerman Fukang’an 福康安 was sent with a relief force of 20,000 soldiers from the Chinese Southwest to take charge of the defence of the island. Lin Shuangwen was captured alive and sent to Beijing to face trial for his treason.

Hailanqa was also involved as one of the generals in the Sino-Nepalese Wars of 1788-1792. In 1791 the Evenki marksman was ordered to assist Fukang’an’s army of Manchu and Mongol bannermen in repelling an invasion of 10,000 Gurkhas from Tibetan territory, where they were under orders from Bahadur Šâh to exact tribute. The Manchus and Mongols under Fukang’an and Hailanqa marched through Tibet in the bitterest of winter conditions, and arrived to repulse the Nepalese force. The two bannermen won a number of engagements, but were soon overextended. They made a peace agreement with the Nepali šâh to the effect that instead of Tibet having to pay tribute to Nepal, Nepal would have to pay tribute to Tibet instead. Qing suzerainty was asserted over both countries.

By this time, Hailanqa was awarded a position in the Bordered Yellow Banner, the highest of the Manchu banner ranks. He died of illness in 1793 – possibly from his campaign in Tibet – and was awarded with the posthumous title of Wuzhuang 武状, or ‘Martial Champion’. In his life he had participated in at least five of the Ten Great Campaigns of Emperor Qianlong. His remains were interred in the Zhaozhong Temple 昭忠祠 – an honour reserved for the bravest of China’s veterans – and his name was inscribed in the Ziguang Pavilion 紫光阁 as a hero of the Qing Empire. Not a bad career at all for a horse-trader’s serving-lad from Hailar.

Righteous Custennin of Cornwall, King of Dumnonia

Ruin of St Constantine’s Chapel, St Meryn, Cornwall

Given the identical names, the feast-days which are only two days apart and their overlapping fields of activity, it is little wonder that the saint for today, the ninth of March, Saint Custennin of Cornwall, is often confused with the much-younger Saint Custennin of Strathclyde and Gowan, the son of Rhydderch Hael. Indeed, it seems that the hagiographies of the two Saint Custennins are muddled in a nearly-hopeless fashion, and that a great deal of careful effort and discernment has been needed by a number of people over the centuries to untangle the knot. Even now there are elements of these hagiographies which are confused! At any rate, these are two separate people, and therefore a separate treatment is needed for each.

Custennin was born to Cado, a British sub-king of Dumnonia whom tradition holds to have been one of the trusted retainers and close kin of the high king Arthur. Both Cado and his teenage son were said to have fought at the Gwaith Camlan in which Arthur was mortally wounded by his treacherous nephew Medrawd. Cado also perished in the fighting, and Arthur supposedly entrusted his crown to the young Custennin before he was carried off the field.

Custennin ruled at first, to all appearances, as a tyrant. He was criticised in particular by Saint Gildas the Historian, who called him ‘the unclean whelp of the lioness of Dumnonia’. The reason for Gildas’s rebuke was an incident in which Custennin disguised himself as a bishop to gain entrance to a church, where his two young nephews were kept in hiding. Having gained entrance to the church, Custennin slew the two infants to secure his claim to the high kingship. Later hagiographers slightly exculpate this blasphemous act of kinslaying murder in the sanctuary of the Church, by making these nephews out to be the children of Medrawd.

The following point may be a commonality between the two Saint Custennins, or it may be an instance of the confusion of their hagiographies. Custennin of Dumnonia’s wife passed away when he was an elderly man. This led the grieving elder Custennin to begin reflecting on his own mortality, and taking more seriously the consolations of Christ’s death and resurrection. It led him to a drastic change in character and a sincere repentance for his sins. One day while he was out hunting a deer, the animal took shelter in the cell of Saint Pedrog. This is a commonplace trope of many Celtic hagiographies, yet nonetheless it appears that Custennin did become acquainted with the hermit, and that Saint Pedrog left a profound impression on the king. It was on Pedrog’s account that Custennin converted to Christianity.

Legend has it that he co-founded with Saint Pedrog his monastery at Padstow. Custennin gave Pedrog his ivory hunting horn, left the kingdom in the hands of his son Bledrig, and took up the monastic life. While a monk at Padstow in discipline under Padrig (and possibly before, while he was lately still king), Custennin apparently took up with zeal the cause of founding new churches. There are churches dedicated to the memory of Saint Custennin in St Meryn (where his holy well also once was), in Constantine and in Illogan.

The repentant king, who had willingly abdicated and relinquished his crown, left Padstow and found his way to Mynyw where he sought out Dewi Sant, possibly with Saint Pedrog’s recommendation. He lived as a monk at Mynyw for many years, and founded churches at Cosheston and Cosmeston near Cardiff (now a reënactment village). Saint Custennin lived out the rest of his days in Dyfed, though it is possible that he preached in Galloway and was martyred by brigands in Kintyre. Here too is another point of confusion, as Kintyre was close indeed to where the Cumbrian saint, Custennin ap Rhydderch Hael, did much of his missionary work. The year of the Cornish Saint Custennin’s repose is given as 576, and his feast-day is kept on the ninth of March. Righteous Custennin, repentant king and humble monk, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Our mother among the saints Brigid, Abbess of Kildare

Saint Brigid of Kildare

One of the greatest – if not the greatest – of the holy mothers of the præ-Schismatic Western Church, is the late fifth- and early sixth-century Saint Brigid, Abbess of Kildare. In Ireland, devotion to Saint Brigid is matched only by that to Saint Padrig, who baptised and taught both her and her mother. The Life of Brigid amply demonstrates the spirited independence of Gælic holy women.

First, a note of caution. It is currently fashionable in some quarters to suggest that Saint Brigid is not a historical person, but instead the euhemerism of a heathen goddess, Brigantia. The evidence for this appears to consist of the fact that her feast-day, the first of February, coincides with the heathen winter festival of Imbolc (or Candlemas). It’s also true that the name Brigid [Scots Gælic Brìde, Welsh Ffraid, English Bridget] does indeed share the same root as the name (really an epithet) for the goddess, deriving from the unattested proto-Celtic name Brigantī, meaning ‘the High One’. However, apart from such circumstantial suggestions, ‘there is little evidence of a direct connection between the two figures’.

Saint Brigid was born around the year 451 in Faughart, now a ruin on the Northern Irish border six kilometres south of Forkhill and three kilometres north of Dundalk in County Louth. Her father was a chieftain named Dubhthach, and her mother was a Pictish slave named Brocca who had been baptised as a Christian by Saint Padrig. Dubhthach’s jealous wife forced him to put Brocca aside when she grew pregnant, and sell her to a druid nearby. Brocca gave birth in this druid’s household, and the druid attempted to feed her. However, she spat out all the food the heathen priest gave her, and was fed instead by the milk of a white cow with red ears, which was kept in the druid’s yard.

The druid sold Brigid and her mother back to Dubhthach when she was about ten years of age, and she entered her father’s house as a slave alongside her mother. Even at this age she had an incredible degree of generosity. When she was a youth, she was brought to the Liturgy by her mother, where she listened with great attention to the homilies of Saint Padrig, which inspired her to a degree of self-giving unusual for a child of ten. On one occasion she gave away her mother’s entire store of butter to the poor. Afraid of being punished by her angry mother, she prayed fervently to God, and it was later discovered that the stores of butter had been wondrously replenished. In the household of her father, she would ‘donate’ from her father’s clothes and other belongings to any needy person who asked.

This habit of hers infuriated Dubhthach, who at last resolved on selling her off to the king of Leinster. He brought her in his chariot to Leinster, and while he was negotiating with the king on her price, she saw a beggar by the side of the road. She took her father’s jewelled dagger, which had been wrought in Faughart as a gift for the king, from the chariot and gave it to the beggar for him to feed his family. The king of Leinster and her father both observed her as she did this – Dubhthach with outrage and mortification, and Leinster with approval. The king of Leinster would not buy her for himself, but he ultimately convinced her father to set her free, as it was obvious to him that she was a holy youth and well-disposed to a life consecrated to God.

Ultimately, the young Brigid was presented to Saint Mael of Ardagh – a nephew of Saint Padrig and one of his assiduous disciples in converting Ireland. Saint Mael consecrated Brigid as a nun along with seven other young women, and in some accounts even accorded her the honours due to a bishop! She was sent first to live a holy life at Kilbride (in County Offaly on the inlandmost side of Leinster) in 468, and here she spent several years. In 480 the King of Leinster invited Saint Brigid back and granted her a holding at Kildare (from Cill Dara – the ‘Church of the Oak’), on the plains of Curragh. Saint Brigid asked for only as much land as her cloak would cover. The king of Leinster agreed, seeing that her cloak was so small. But when she went to Curragh and spread out her cloak, by a wonder of God it seemed her cloak kept unrolling until it covered several acres. Beholding this wonder of God, the king did not go back on his word but allowed her to build there.

Here she founded an oratory and a monastic cell – the first such cloister for women in Ireland. In earlier times Cill Dara had been consecrated by the druids to the goddess Brigantia (another circumstance which has been drawn on by fans of the euhemerism theory), where virgins constantly tended an ‘æternal flame’ in her honour. However, under the saint who shared her name, tended instead were the flames of charity, hope and faith in Christ.

Not just young women, but even men had been drawn to Kildare by tales of Saint Brigid’s holiness, which when they saw it for themselves led them to desire a life consecrated to Christ. The monastery at Kildare was therefore consecrated as a double monastery – Brigid governed the one for women, while she selected a hermit named Conláed to lead the one for men. Saint Brigid travelled often from Kildare, preached the Gospel and founded other nunneries all around Ireland. She was of great assistance to Saint Padrig, and the two of them held each other in the highest affection and esteem. They were said to have been of one mind and one opinion.

Brigid and Conláed presided over one of the first Irish scriptoria as well. The illuminated Book of Kildare, described in glowing terms as a rival to the Book of Kells by the Welsh deacon Gerald in the twelfth century, was, to a large degree, the work of Saint Brigid herself. Saint Brigid was a sponsor and producer of many beautiful works of holy art including metalworking, and she quickly became a saintly patroness not only of scribes and illuminators but also musicians, poets and smiths.

Crosses made from rushes are associated with Saint Brigid as well. The hagiographies have it that Saint Brigid was called to attend a heathen man, a lord, who was sick and on his deathbed. Being feverish, the man wasn’t entirely in his right mind. Brigid picked up several rushes from the floor – flooring at that time often being made from such material – broke them and wove them together to form a distinctive cross. The sick man asked what she was doing, and patiently Brigid began to explain the Cross and its significance. Her conversation had the effect of soothing the man’s mind, and he came to believe in Christ before his death, through Brigid’s demonstrations and teaching. Since that time, it’s been customary in Ireland to weave crosses from rushes on Saint Brigid’s feast day.

Saint Brigid was a wonderworker, and wrought as many as forty-six wonders of God in her lifetime, with her request to the king of Leinster and the subsequent wonder of her cloak being spread over Kildare often being counted as the first. She cast out devils with the sign of the Cross, and she healed the blind. But many of her miracles involved food – as seen from the above anecdote about her prayer to God filling her mother’s store of butter after she gave it all away. Often these wonders would echo Christ’s feeding of the multitudes. When unexpected travellers came to visit Kildare and she didn’t have enough milk to feed them, Saint Brigid’s cows could be milked three times a day to sate their wants. At one time a large group of pilgrims visited Kildare and Saint Brigid had only a small pat of butter on hand, but this butter satisfied all their hunger. Honey would miraculously appear in Brigid’s refectory for her to give to beggars.

Not only do Brigid’s wonders involving milk and honey carry an obvious echo from the Hebrew Scriptures, but to mediæval Gælic ears they were also indicative of prestige. Milk in particular was associated with nourishment, healing and purity. Thus Saint Brigid’s wonders established her in the eyes of the early Gæls as a powerful patroness – but her choices of beneficiaries were always the poor, the indebted, the rootless, the kinless, the sick and the desperate. In a præ-feudal œconomy based on kinship and patronage, Brigid’s miracles also established her radicalism: she bestowed her wealth and purity on the people who had the least of both.

Saint Brigid reposed in the Lord, in peace among her nuns, in the year 525. She received the Gifts from a certain Ninnidh ‘of the Pure Hand’, but this is probably not the same person as Saint Ninnidh ‘the One-Eyed’ of Inishmacsaint. Her cultus is centred at Kildare, with her shrine having once been located at Kildare Cathedral. Her relics are now located at Down Cathedral alongside those of Saint Padrig and Saint Colum Cille. Saint Brigid is also venerated in Portugal; a skull said to be hers is enshrined at the Church of Saint John the Baptist in Lumiar, having been brought there in the thirteenth century by Irish crusaders. Her veneration is ubiquitous in Ireland and she is revered with Padrig and Colum Cille as one of Ireland’s three national patrons. She has a large number of holy wells throughout Ireland, with the most significant being the one at Kildare. Holy mother Brigid, wonderworker and open-handed friend to the poor, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

O holy Brigid, you became sublime through your humility,
And flew on the wings of your longing for God.
When you arrived in the eternal City and appeared before your Divine Spouse,
Wearing the crown of virginity,
You kept your promise
To remember those who have recourse to you.
You shower grace upon the world, and multiply miracles.
Intercede with Christ our God that He may save our souls.

Cathedral of Saint Brigid, Kildare, Ireland

Venerable Cwyllog, Anchoress of Anglesey

St Cwyllog’s Church, Llangwyllog, Anglesey

The seventh of January in the Orthodox Church is the feast-day of Saint Cwyllog, a northern Welsh saint of the sixth century who settled on Ynys Môn in her old age, at the church she founded and at which she is still remembered. She has something of a reputation in the Matter of Britain, but her holy life seemed to have left a good impression on the people of Gwynedd, who still venerate her. Saint Caffo, her brother, is venerated with her.

Saint Cwyllog was a daughter of Caw, king of Alt Clud, and thus a sister of Saint Gildas and of Saint Caffo. She sought sanctuary in Gwynedd when the Angles attacked the north country, and she and her family found refuge in the court of Maelgwn Gwynedd. The king of Gwynedd granted some land to the fleeing royals, Caw and his children, in Twrcelyn on the northeastern side of Ynys Môn. Later in her life she desired to become a holy anchoress, and founded a church in the southwestern part of her father’s sway, at Llangwyllog.

The Matter of Britain has it that Cwyllog was the wife of King Arthur’s nemesis Medrawd, and that she founded her church at Llangwyllog after the Battle of Camlann. Medrawd having fallen in battle and left her a widow, she undertook to become an anchoress. In despite of her husband’s treacherous reputation, she nonetheless had little trouble attracting a devoted local following. Holy anchoress Cwyllog, pray unto Christ our God for us!

Venerables Mael Rhys, Abbot of Bardsey, and Tyfrydog, Hermit of Llandyfrydog in Anglesey

Eglwys Maelrhys, Llanfaelrhys, Gwynedd

The first of the year in the sæcular calendar is the feast day of two holy men of Wales. One of them was a disciple and heir to Cadfan of Ynys Enlli, and one of the twenty thousand saints who are said to rest there. On the first of January we commemorate the feast of Mael Rhys of Bardsey. We also venerate on this day Tyfrydog, a hermit of Anglesey.

There are conflicting stories about the origins of Mael Rhys. One of them says that he was a Breton of high birth. The traditional genealogy names him the son of Gwyddno, who in turn was the son of ‘Emyr Llydaw’; that is to say, Budic II. the King of Brittany. If this were the case, then his presence among the disciples of Cadfan, who was himself a Breton of high birth (being probably the eldest son of Gwen ‘Teirbron’) and thus likely a cousin to Mael Rhys, would have been no wonder.

There is another story, however, that Mael Rhys was in fact a wealthy trader from the south of Wales, a dealer in grain, flour and basic foodstuffs. The tale tells of how he landed with a load of flour and grain near Aberdaron, which was then in the midst of a famine. He distributed his goods as there was need for them, but he observed that the poor folk thereabouts had no place to worship. He used the proceeds from his trade to convert his trading-house in the north, called Blawdty (‘Flour-House’) and located near Porth Ysgo, into a church, and settled nearby as an anchorite. The church is now called Llanfaelrhys

It happened on one occasion that two thieves broke into his church and plundered it of everything of value. The tale goes that as soon as they crossed the march of the parish, the two of them were turned to stone. These stones were called the Lladron Maelrhys (‘the Thieves of Mael Rhys’), and were once apparently landmarks of some importance. But today their location is unknown. As for Llanfaelrhys itself, a humble church merely thirty-five by thirteen feet on its base, it still stands in a secluded and picturesque part of the Lleyn Peninsula in Gwynedd. Holy father Mael Rhys, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

About Saint Tyfrydog, we know something of his origins but little about his life. He was a northern Welshman active in the fifth century. His father’s name was Arwystli Gloff, a Christian who appears to have been named under the patronage of Saint Aristobulus of the Seventy. He belonged to the same holy community as did Mael Rhys – the one founded on Ynys Enlli by Saint Cadfan mentioned above. Arwystli also had a daughter, Tyfrydog’s sister Saint Marchell, who also became an anchoress and founded a church in Powys.

At some point Saint Tyfrydog left Ynys Enlli and went into Ynys Môn, to found a church, St Tyfrydog’s in Llandyfrydog. There is nothing that remains of the original foundation; the current church dates to the fifteenth century. There is, however, a standing stone not far off from the church which is reputed to be the remains of a thief who stole a copy of the Gospels from Tyfrydog’s church. He was punished with being turned to stone, as had been the Lladron Maelrhys mentioned above. Sometimes the soul of the thief is said to be chased around the lea by devils, wielding red-hot pitchforks and prodding him mercilessly. Little else is known about Saint Tyfrydog’s life, though he is still venerated locally on Anglesey. Venerable Tyfrydog, pray unto Christ our God for us sinners!

St Tyfrydog’s Church, Llandyfrydog, Anglesey

Holy Hierarch Corentin, Bishop of Quimper

Saint Corentin of Quimper

The twelfth of December is the feast-day of another of Brittany’s great founders of abbeys, the fifth-century Saint Corentin, the first abbot and bishop of Quimper. He has become something of a larger-than-life figure in local Celtic folklore due to his dealings with Gralon, one of the local Breton princes, and his daughter Dahut. Regardless of these folkloric references, Saint Corentin nonetheless occupied a position, and a certain spiritual style very similar to, that of the later Saint Neot of Cornwall. He is closely associated with his contemporary Saint Gwenolau, with whom he was supposedly close friends.

Saint Corentin [also Kaourintin or possibly Cury] was almost assuredly a Welshman by origin, and likely accompanied some of the first settlers from Great Britain to Armorica when the Welsh were being besieged not only by Picts and Saxons but by illness, starvation and hæresy. He grew disillusioned with the world at a young age, and desired a life of solitary holiness in the forests of Ploudiern. He spent several years here in holy solitude, engaged in ascetic self-denial. The clergy and hierarchs of Brittany, during these early years of British resettlement in the northwest of Gaul, had little if any intercourse with those of the Franks, for the Franks held to different customs and had a different temperament. After the first generation of British clergy in exile from their island home died, the following generation were chosen from among themselves. This was how Saint Corentin was named bishop of Quimper, where he had his little hermitage. (This Breton name, which is actually kemper in that language or cymer in Welsh, comes from the Common Brythonic word for ‘confluence’.)

How he came by that hermitage is another tale. Corentin had lived a life of total selflessness for a long time before, giving all that passed into his possession to folk sick or suffering or otherwise in need, and leaving nothing for his own comfort. He became renowned for his generosity, far beyond Armorica into the Frankish-speaking parts of Gaul. He ate wild herbs and roots for his food. Beside his little cell in the Ploudiern there was a spring. Within this spring, the hagiography tells us, lived a fish, which whenever Corentin cut a fin from it to serve as his meat for the day, would wondrously regrow on the fish the following day. The prince of Cornouaille, Gralon Meur, came to visit Saint Corentin, who shared with him the cut of the wondrous fish. Shortly thereafter Gralon Meur granted to the holy man his own castle at Quimper to use as a monastery.

As mentioned before, Saint Corentin figures prominently in Breton folklore. In particular, he was the subject of a Brythonic romance of the city of Kêr-Ys. In that legend, Gralon King is presented, a ruler who takes a sorceress as his wife. Though his wife dies early, she leaves behind her their newborn daughter, Dahut, who grows up a bit spoiled by her fond father. Because Dahut was born at sea, she develops a great love for the sea, and demands of Gralon that he build for her a city on the sea – Kêr-Ys. Ys is protected by a series of interconnecting locks and dikes, controlled by a set of gold keys which Gralon keeps on his person. One night, Dahut stole the keys from her father, and used them – she thought – to unlock the banquet hall to admit a secret lover of hers. Instead, she opened the dikes and flooded Kêr-Ys, killing everyone there. However, Saint Corentin ran to the king’s side and urged him to flee before the deluge hit, and he did so, taking Dahut with him on horseback. As the water overtook them, Dahut was slowing the horse down. Saint Corentin called to Gralon to throw his daughter off into the waves, for it had been she who had caused the flood. Gralon did so, and as his daughter drowned it is said that she turned into a selkie. Other versions have it that it was Saint Corentin himself who struck Dahut off Gralon’s horse with his crozier. Still others hold that it was not Saint Corentin at all, but instead Saint Gwenolau.

Another legend has it that Saint Corentin was named and anointed as bishop by Saint Martin of Tours himself, though this seems unlikely from the chronology. It is more likely that he was appointed by a successor of Saint Martin in the same see. Saint Corentin attended the Council of Angers in 453, and affixed his name there as ‘Charaton’.

Being an active missionary, abbot and bishop was a great deal of effort, and yet Saint Corentin undertook it all without complaint. He wore himself out in these exertions, however, and passed to the abode of blessedness toward the end of the fifth century. Saint Corentin has been remembered by the Breton people of northwestern France, but he was also commemorated in a seventh-century Old English litany. Saint Corentin may or may not be the same person as the Saint Cury who preached in Devon and Cornwall and who lived as a hermit in a cell on one slope of Mount Menehout. Holy father Corentin, pray with us unto Christ our God for the deliverance and healing of our souls!

Iconoclasm versus syncretism in Bolivia

A Bolivian indigenous man holding a wiphala flag

The political upheaval in Bolivia has been all over the news recently, and as it happens I do want to comment about it rather badly. What we are seeing happening in Bolivia right now is, in fact, a coup. And it is an unfolding crackdown specifically against indigenous interests, and it’s taking a turn for the sanguinary.

From a purely political perspective, the perpetrators of the coup against Evo Morales are utterly illegitimate, and their comportment is reprehensible. On account of Orthodox Christianity’s unique position within Christendom vis-à-vis indigenous rights, neither our hierarchs nor our laity should be silent about condemning this coup. Indeed, many of our Orthodox brothers and sisters in Guatemala already are.

Needless to say, I agree with Tulsi on this. Sorry, Liz, you’re not very credible on this issue. Sorry, The Economist, you’re not either, nor on many others. And of course, the same goes for Foreign Policy magazine (see also here), the New York Times, the Washington Post and the rest of the usual gang of bloodthirsty cheerleaders for American imperium.

But there is a deeper problem than that, which can be seen in the new junta’s quasi-religious, clerical-fascist rhetoric. Most of that government are Protestant fundamentalists, and their antipathy to the country’s indigenous majority is couched in chiliastic terms. What’s more, Bolivian cultural symbols like the wiphala, the tawa chakana and Pachamama have become battlegrounds. They are being attacked even as the people are being attacked, by Bolivia’s new junta. The flags are being burned, and Pachamama is being denounced.

And thus the political problems, including the one of the coup d’état mentioned above, become infused with theological ones. This almost always presents problems, particularly (but not always) when it happens in the Western Hemisphere, where right-wing Protestantism and right-wing Catholicism tend to ally in an œcumenism of fear. This is also the case here. The fundamentalists – and certain Catholic traditionalists as well – would have us believe that the distinctions are clear-cut and the battle-lines have been drawn. But even if the problems have been drawn up falsely, they are not problems to run away from. Sadly, Orthodox commentators in English-speaking countries have a tendency either to dismiss these as ‘Catholic problems’, or else ally themselves with the most retrograde elements within Catholicism and Protestantism as part of this same œcumenism of fear. Both of these positions are reactive and do not draw upon the corpus of the relevant Orthodox social witness among non-Christians, particularly in Russia and Alaska.

First of all, it’s necessary to take at least a cursory account of the history of Bolivian popular worship. Pachamama was not invented at the Amazonian Synod, and not adopted overnight by Pope Francis. Pachamama has been, in fact, a long-standing element of syncretic Catholicism in South America, and has been identified with the Virgin Mary at least since the 1500’s. It is not an immaterial historical point that this kind of syncretism is endemic to the regions in the New World conquered by the Catholic colonial powers: Santería, Voudun, the modern Puebloan religion. This particular form of religious syncretism almost always appears as a form of indigenous resistance to being conquered. That is not an excuse for, let alone an endorsement of, such syncretism. It is merely a statement of historical correlation.

Secondly, Pachamama originally referred to the Andean goddess of nature; however, it is a title and not a name. It means, literally, ‘World-Mother’, and it has been used to refer to the Virgin Mary since the introduction of Catholicism to South America. Whether it’s appropriate to assign the title of Kósmotokos (the Greek equivalent of Pachamama) to the Theotokos is a purely theological problem, and as such it is way out of my league. I wouldn’t dare to comment on it for myself, let alone for the Church. But acknowledgement of this fact places the problem of the Pachamama at the Amazon Synod in the same realm, with the same theological stakes, as the Nestorian controversy. Again, I do not dare to take a side on this question, not without the guidance of the Fathers or the received Tradition – except to say that titles are important, and can make the difference between a genuine case of idolatrous hæresy or a relatively-harmless theologoumenon.

An Orthodox Christian – or, for that matter, a cogently Catholic – answer to the current problem of syncretism must therefore be informed by both the historical and theological stakes, and by our own tradition of iconography. Politics is limited, and merely taking refuge in political reaction renders us powerless and subject to the whims of the prevailing political winds. Mere blind opposition runs the risk of turning us into iconoclasts, or idolaters of a different sort.

Above all, we must not pretend that Orthodox cultures are somehow pristine, pure and unblemished by these problems. Orthodox history also has instances in which conquest and imposition have resulted in religious syncretism. The occurrence of, or at least the scholarly interest in, dvoeverie in Russia is probably the best example of this. Contrary to romantic-nationalist mythmaking and Soviet anti-Christian polemics, dvoeverie (Russian ‘double belief’, or paganism) was probably not a continuous and unbroken presence in Russia from the times of Kievan Rus’ up to the present. Instead, it’s much more likely that ‘double beliefs’ arose as a reaction against the bureaucratic reforms of Peter the Great, and became the object of interest only in the nineteenth century and the advent of romantic nationalism. The current prevalence of dvoeverie in the North Caucasus and among Russian Cossacks in particular would seem to support the recent nature of the phenomenon.

Even so, the patient, humble model of evangelisation embodied in our holy fathers Saint Tryphon of Pechenga, Saint Innocent of Irkutsk, Saint Innocent of Alaska, Saint Herman of Alaska, Saint Jacob Netsvetov and others is probably our best response. These saints did not journey among foreign peoples in arrogance, immediately smashing their places of worship, declaring them to be filthy and cowing them into the church. Instead, they lived among them in a discipline of ascesis and an attitude of humble service and love; and when the people in need of evangelisation were ready, they would come or their own accord to hear the Word of Truth. When these non-Christian people were exploited or abused by Christians, these saints would rally to their non-Christian neighbours’ defence. This model is not the sole patrimony of the Christian East, either: this gentle model of evangelism was heavily promoted by Saint Gregory the Dialogist, Pope of Rome.

This model of evangelism, instead of retrenching the failures of earlier generations, offers forth the possibility and necessity of repentance on the part of Christians who must own a historical legacy of violence and exploitation. Indigenous syncretism is, after all, a rebuke against Christian failure to preach the Gospel without violence. More importantly, it offers indigenous people the possibility of becoming iconographers for themselves. The life and witness of Matushka Olga of Alaska is a great example of this. I do not know if Matushka Olga ever made an icon out of wood and clay and paint with her own hands, but I do know that she tended to the indigenous young women in her parish who came to her, and that she treated each one as an icon of the living God. This is equally an important work of iconography, to pay reverence to the icon of Christ in the human person.

Pachamama may or may not be a retrievable form of such iconography. Like I said before, that involves assigning titles to the Holy Theotokos, and that is a labour of the intellect way above my pay grade as a lay Orthodox blogger. All the same, it is this model of evangelism, both historical and current (witness Archimandrite Andres Girón de Leon of blessed memory) that we must uphold. This is not only to rebuke the perpetrators of the current political violence against the indigenous people in Bolivia, which is shamefully being committed in the name of our Lord. This is not only to rebuke the hidden civilisational idolatry of the œcumenists of fear. It is also to retain the promise of Christ that all cultures are capable of receiving Him and being transfigured in Him – without necessary reference to any other.