Aucamville Project 14: Qu'es aquò?

Aucamville/Aucamvila, Tarn-et-Garonne.  Photo by Daurade

For the 0% of the French population that only speaks Occitan, the Tarn-et-Garonne has conveniently placed a new sign at the entrance to our village, just at the end of the Fondemenge cul-de-sac.  I see this sign at 1 o'clock (biplane tail gunner-wise) every time I leave the confines of our cozy little hamlet/a.k.a. nest of vipers.  This is a good thing for those non-existent Occitan monolinguals, it'd be hard to know you were in "Aucamvila" if you only had a sign for "Aucamville."  Una soleta lenga basta pas jamai!

Occitan is a Romance language spoken in southern France, some valleys in northeast Italy, Monaco, and the Val d'Aran in Spain.  In the Val d'Aran  it is an official language and the only place I have seen it used on street signs and stores in a widespread way.  The region where this language is spoken is unofficially called Occitania.

Many scholars don't see Occitan as one unified language, and others include Catalan in the same family; indeed, some dialects of Occitan are closer to Catalan than they are to other Occitan dialects.  In fact, until the end of the 19th century, Catalan was often considered an Occitan dialect.  Don't tell a Catalan that, though.  Anyway, this could have been a politically-driven interpretation pushed to dampen Catalonia's nationalist aspirations.

There is a kind of friendly rivalry among both peoples where Occitania meets Catalonia in the southwest of France, but there is more deeply a kind of solidarity between them as threatened minority languages, though Catalan has flourished in the last 50 years and seems here to stay.  Things get really interesting in the natural border between the two, the Pyrénées.  Every valley seems to have its own distinct dialect more or less influenced by Spanish, Catalan or French.  The people here will all have a smattering of French and Spanish and Catalan.  This is especially true of Andorra, where all three languages are spoken widely though Catalan remains the language with which Andorrans identify the most.  Andorrans, however, are a minority in their own land, and a proper tally of ts linguistic groups might reveal that Portuguese is also widely-spoken among the Principality's guest workers.  Occitan and Catalan quite naturally blend elements from both Spanish and French, and they blend with one another as well.  It wouldn't be surprising to see Portuguese enter the mix; thanks to the Troubadours, legends from northern Portugal also flourish in the southwest of France, especially in Gascony, and in Asturiano, a.k.a. "Bable" (Babel?), they pronounce "o's" like "u's" ("quesu" and "vasu" for "queso" and "vaso")  -- much like in Occitan.

Google Earth

The Catalans, who have fiercely protected their language since the depredations of Franco, have officially recognized a form of Occitan called Aranès in the Val d'Aran.  Here you'll see signs in Spanish and Catalan, as well as some French.  But you also see signs in Aranès.  In Toulouse, street signs are in French and Occitan, and neighboring municipalities often have a second sign at the edge of town with its name in Occitan:  Toulouse - Tolosa (pronounced Toulousa -- remember to "o" sound like a "u").  But these French examples are more a tip of the hat to history; it's not really a part of the quotidian linguistic reality:  the Town Hall is the "Mairie" not the "Ajuntament".  Even in the Val d'Aran, I'm not sure how widely it's spoken.  Dominic Smith concludes that Aranès probably has "the brightest future" for all the Occitan dialects, but that it seems to be losing ground to Castilian Spanish or other more "practical" languages.  Some schools in the southwest of France have offered Occitan as an elective beginning in middle school, and there are bilingual programs and even Occitan primary schools known as Calandretas (which though private, are free).  But elective and bilingual programs are being cut as belts tighten and parents increasingly favor focusing on languages such as English.  Toulouse has become less provincial and isolated, attracting foreigners such as myself and French people from other regions who are not as connected to the language as people with deep roots here.  Very few people speak it, especially outside the home, although a few phrases are commonly heard at the café.

From Wikipedia: "Occitania" with its major dialects

Occitan has at various times been known as Limousin, Languedocien, Gascon, and Provençal, but nowadays these appellations refer to dialects.  Other dialects include Auvernat, Gascon, which include Aranès and Béarnese; there is also an Alpine dialect.  The Toulousain dialect is called Moundi.  A clear-cut taxonomy of these dialects is difficult and there are differing classifications of them, just as there are disagreements over the wider question of their relationship to Catalan.

There are two principal written standards:  a classical norm and one created by Frédéric Mistral in the early 20th century.  The Mistral standard is based on Provençal and similar to French -- both of which have led to criticism from later Occitanists.  Mistral is largely unknown outside of -- and within -- France, but he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904, for his poems in Occitan. 

Attempts to standardise the spoken language have been a 20th century phenomenon and to me, doesn't reflect the historical and even current reality of the language.  Some speakers reject this process altogether because they take pride in their way of speaking it, which may differ from even a neighboring village (or may have differed -- it would be hard to hear this in action).  The French are very attached to and strongly identify with their "terroir" -- a connection often more profound than they have to the Revolutionary-era departments.

Proposed flag for an idependent Occitania.

Some Occitanists are cultural flag-bearers, but for others there is a political element to their "Occitanism".  This tends to be very regionalist and while some call themselves nationalists, they bear little in common with the far right the word usually describes.  On the contrary, they tend to celebrate multiculturalism within their own borders and feel like a distinct cultural element of France's melting pot (France doesn't seem to have taken to the "salad bowl" theory -- Occitanists usually self-identify as French as readily as Occitan; in fact very few see themselves Occitan at all, but Languedocien, Gascon, or Provençal, etc.)  They tend to be strongly in favor of decentralization; conscious of the fact that Paris has suppressed their language and their culture, they favor local autonomy.  Standardization of the language is philosophically incompatible with this viewpoint.

Proposed flag for an independent Catalonia; the Estelada or "Lone Star" (1918)

In Catalonia, the people have struggled to maintain their separate identity from Madrid, and language is a critical part of that effort; that is why they have allowed the Val d'Aran to make Aranès their official language and to recognize its autonomous government, called the Conselh Generau (General Council).  It's status is actually unique in Catalonia; it's basically a comarca, or county, but with a few additional powers.  This is both a nod to its unique cultural identity and also its isolation; until not so many years ago the valley was cut off from the rest of the world during the winter months.  A tunnel finally connected it to the rest of Spain year-round.  I have already mentioned there is a measure of Catalan / Occitan solidarity based on cultural similarities and their shared struggle as minority languages, but there are deep political roots dating back to the Middle Ages.  Toulouse had far more dealings and affinity with Barcelona than Paris for centuries; it's only been a relatively short time that Toulouse or even the south has been part of France.

Occitan was once the language of a culture which, compared to the north, was arguably more artistically refined; a culture in which Jews, heretics and soothsayers were generally more tolerated; and where women had the right to inherit and manage property.  It was once the language of poetry and songs the troubadours spread it throughout Iberia, traveling the St. James Way.  Because the southerners did not adhere to the custom of primogeniture, where the eldest son inherited all the domains of the father, but a system in which property was divided among all the children, the Midi was a patchwork of tiny fiefs, dwarfed by the vast holdings of the King of France and his vassals.  The abundance of little holdings meant an abundance of small armies; to go to war wasn't  matter of calling up a couple of powerful vassals but trying to wrangle up and hold together far more plentiful forces with varying allegiances, rivalries, petty squabbles and power games.  More refined or not, they proved no match for the French. 

The northern crusades against the south were essentially land grabs propagandized as fights against heresy (Catharism above all) and were bound up with the French version of manifest destiny, not to expand west beyond the horizon, but turn up all the corners of a map of Gaul so that they curled back and touched each other at the tips just above Paris.  This might help explain the modern-day Occitanist's sympathy for political devolution.  People have longer memories in Europe, but this centralizing tendency was an obsession during the Revolution.  Louis the XIV said "I am the state".  It was highly centralized, around his person.  This was true of the Medieval kings, but they were more itinerant, the court and thus the center of the Kingdom was wherever the king happened to be.  Louis XIV might have agreed, but by this time he had become almost synonymous with Versailles; the Revolution re-centered it on Paris, not a man, and they ran roughshod over regional variation to make this vision a reality:  the metric system replaced older and local systems, the new departments replaced traditional regions which had been named for the aristocrats who controlled them, or vice versa:  Armagnac, Foix, Corbières, etc.  The elderly and even some middle-aged folks will still tell tales of getting hit with a stick for speaking "patois".  There's a famous photo of a school, a roofed-over area, a wall painted with the words "Speak French, Be Clean" which is actually quite sad.  This is in Catalan France, but the same attitude was held in Occitan France as well.

Aiguatébia-Talaus school

The campaign has worked.  It is a dying language.  Native speakers are mostly elderly; three of my neighbors who spoke it are either dead or have succumbed to Alzheimer's.  There was an Occitanist wave of Basque or Breton-style nationalism in the 70's, and there are still some people of that generation who speak and teach Occitan -- many of them in the aforementioned threatened bilingual programs.  Some younger people, determined to preserve their heritage, are also learning Occitan and at least one bar in Toulouse encourages the use of Occitan within its walls.  Local radio and TV have programs in Occitan and local signage is often bilingual.  There is an Occitan community -- several Occitanist political parties and institutes of Occitan studies -- but they don't represent a living language of daily life.  It's not even the predominant language in the Val d'Aran and many French people -- its speakers among them -- don't consider it a "real" language at all.

Only 1.5 to 2 million people speak the language, but it can be found in some fairly far-flung places.  Forty Occitan-speaking, poverty-stricken families from Aveyron established Pigüé, Argentina in 1884.  Protestant Waldenses from Italy fleeing persecution established communities in the U.S., Uruguay, Argentina, and Germany.  One Occitan-speaking group left in 1893 and established what would be become Valdese, N.C.  Both groups brought their Occitan with them.  That means in the Americas, there are traces of both the Alpine and Languedocien dialects of Occitan.  The language is still spoken in Pigüé, but I'm not sure about Valdese.  Cathy Pons' thesis dissertation in 1990 might be an indication:  Language death among Waldensians of Valdese, North Carolina.   

It may well be that soon all we'll have of this language are some field recordings, street signs, and a few die-hards by which to remember what was once the leading cultural language in Europe.

Some phrases in Occitan (w/audio files) 

Coda:

Looking for more information on the leader of the Aveyron colonists, I came across something  interesting.  According to Les aveyronnais dans la Pampa: fondation, développement et vie de la colonies, Pigüé was a hotbed of occultism, Freemasonry and political radicalism starting in the 1890's -- just after the Aveyronaises arrived.  The book mentions the "virulent" protests of the Masonic Logia Emilio Zola against the installation of the Catholic Frères des Ecoles-Chrétiens  in 1905.  

This leads me to wonder what role, if any, Freemasonry has played in the Catalan and Occitan independence movements.  The Catalan independence flag is called the Estelada, or Lone Star, and was inspired by Cuba's flag.  We know that the Cuban flag was designed by a Freemason and incorporated Masonic symbolism, and that the Catalan movement looked carefully to the Cuban independence fight as a bellwether of their own chances if they chose to take on Madrid.  The Estelada has inspired other Spanish separatist movements to adopt the same lone star as a symbol, just as it was inspired by Cuba's flag, itself just one in a long-line of "lone star" flags used by independence movements led by Freemasons in the Caribbean, South and Central America, Florida, and above all, Texas. I know that all sounds rather wingnut, so please see Lone Star Republics for details.  I should also mention that there are a couple of "lone star" flags in Africa.  Need I say that in both theory and practice, Freemasons were all over these African movements as well?  Really, the number of flags is quite significant, so much so that it's increasingly hard for me to say that one flag was inspired by another, but it's more like one guiding ideology led the revolutionaries who waved them to put them on their flags.  So, piqued by that anecdote and that flag, I'm gonna dig around a bit and see if Freemasonry is involved, or not.

Look into my eyes

I saw a post from Juxtapoz on Facebook the other day about Spanish photographer Ángela Burón and the following photograph caught my breast, er, I mean eye:

Mírame a los ojos cuando te hablo, 2014

A striking bit of photoshoppery; take a fine female form in what would otherwise be sexy as hell and Blam!  You wanted to look at what is being revealed, taking a delicious pleasure in admiring such a form....but you find it's staring right back at you.  Busted, fella.

Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme? (What is Surrealism

Generally, a regular guy scoping out a woman is gonna try to steal a sideways glance or ogle from afar; unseen, you can get away with it.  But what happens when you're caught in the act?  Uncomfortable, to say the least.  A bit embarrassed, maybe even ashamed.  A sort of visual violation has been thwarted.  And what if rape is, as is said, a crime not of sex, but of power?

But why this talk of violation and rape?  Juxtapoz refers to Buron's work as "sneaky surrealism" and that's the trigger.  LoS has dealt with the conflation of the breast and the eye in a number of posts; the Gid's introduction to the subject featured Magritte's Le Viol from 1934, in which the replacement of the nipples with eyes is reversed.  Le Viol means "The Rape."

In the painting, a woman's face has become transformed into a nude female body.  Her mouth is a vagina, her eyes have become breasts.  The organs of sight and speech have been rendered into the principal objects of male lust.  Blind and mute, Magritte's feminine form is rendered powerless.  Thus, the rape.  His interest in the concept was such that he painted other versions in 1945 in 1948, both also entitled Le Viol.  He also drew it for André Breton's Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme? in 1934 and a second drawing from 1945 was discovered relatively recently.  Though the head is "facing" slightly left as opposed to right, the drawings most closely resemble the 1934 version.  This page includes a more thorough interpretation of the image.

Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme? (What is Surrealism

Le Viol, 1934

Contrast Magritte's painting with Burón's photo, which reverses the metamorphosis; Burón imbues the female form with power by turning the breasts into the watchful guardians of her image; interesting too that the lower part of the torso is revealed to such a point that her sex must lie but a millimeter south of where the frame ends.  The gateway is out of sight.  After all, it's self-evident:  the photographer controls what we see....and what we don't.

In at least two posts (The Eyes Have It and There and Back Again), we've looked at the iconography of two Sicilian saints:  Agatha carries her breasts on a plate and Lucia carries her eyes.  In this Medieval Catholic context, the women are victims, martyred for refusing the advances of an unwanted pagan suitor.  In a time when women were the pawns of men, who used marriage to create alliances and in all cases to consolidate their power, the breasts and eyes are inert, disembodied.  Sex between a royal couple might have little to do with love or desire but everything to do with providing an heir or to consummate a marriage -- a deal brokered by others.  In either case, for reasons of power.  Is it such that we can call this rape?

Gid's initial post also features an 18th-century engraving of a woman with an eye in glory representing Reason in the place where her breast should be.  Perhaps there's a pun involved, the areola being the circle of flesh around the nipple proper and the aureola a radiant cloud of light around a sacred personage.  Not so odd when you consider Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830), in which Marianne rallies the troops, leading with a prominent exposed breast.  Then there's Honoré Daumier's 1848 sketch entitled The Republic, in which Marianne nurses two children.  This is the state and it's values, foremost among them Reason, which nurtures and elevates the people.  The breast leads, the breast nurses, the breast is generous.  A controversial re-boot of Marianne in a local Mairie as recent as 2011 had to be replaced because her prominent set was causing a bit of a ruckus in the village.  "I made the breasts prominent to symbolize the generosity of the Republic" said the artist.  In this case, the breast symbolizes a form of power.

In our previous posts, we talk a little about why the eyes and breasts are conflated, but we suggest reading our source, N. Hilton's Before the Milk of the Word:  Nipple-Eyes, for a more thorough treatment of the topic.  He deals with Magritte and our Revolution-era engraving.  The association is not really as outlandish as it seems.  Imagine a kid's drawing with a circle and a dot in the middle; basically the same simple pictograph one would use to represent an eye or a breast.  But it is much more than a visual metaphor.  A nursing baby gets a windshield full of tit....before gazing up into its mother's eyes and letting out a satisfied belch, fed and secure.  Primordial images, an association all breast-fed kidlets make from day one.  Also makes me think of the time I was talking to a colleague and must have been staring chestward, because she said, "Hey, my eyes are up here!"  And lo and behold, during my second run through this text I discovered that Burón's photos is called Mírame a los ojos cuando te hablo:  "Look me in the eyes when I talk to you."  When I talk to you.  Not you talk to me.  When I (eye?) talk to you....

But I'm just being lazy; read the Hilton article; he or she gives a good overview of the subject.

Then there's Ken Russell's Gothic.  Required viewing for the budding bohemian/AP English film geek.  One of the more disturbing hallucinations brought to the screen include the following; Percy Shelley is licking lips lustily over Claire Claremont's breasts and Blam!  They're staring back, bub:

I seem to recall Claire is acting out Shelley's fantasy, "baring her breast and entreating him to look into her eyes", but when her nipples blink he turns away in terror.  Those haggard peepers would set anyone off a bit of nipple play for a while I'd wager, but it's worth stating the obvious:  the transformation of the nipples into eyes re-calibrates the balance of power.

Then there's this image I scanned from an article in a French magazine about sexual predators on the Internet.  I uploaded this before in an article about Little Red Riding Hood but didn't include it in the original article.  The eyes are rather wolf-like, which could indicate that women need to become like hunters themselves, in order to root out and destroy those who might otherwise prey on them.  That this is all represented by the eyes is perhaps tied to the natural fact that the hunter always tries to see everything while remaining unseen to its prey.  It's much more likely that the hunter will be successful if its prey isn't aware that it's being stalked.  In this image the usually oblivious mammary becomes something vigilant, determined, if not a tad menacing.
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Anyway, I don't have anything more to say on these images with regard to eye-nipple iconography than I've already said.  Burón's photo struck a chord with me and since she was gracious enough to let me use it, I wanted to share it in terms of this question of power, that hadn't really occurred to me before.

I'm not much of an art critic, but I find her work to be at turns playful, sultry and erotic.  She often reassembles the female form in a way that brings to mind the dolls of another Surrealist, Hans Bellmer, but without the undercurrent of violence and sadism his work emanates.  On the contrary, her work is serene and not self-exploitative, she always remains in control of her image.  She often looks the viewer right in the eye; in some, her camera is turned towards you.  This is especially effective in a shot where she lies naked, her back to the viewer.  But while she is out of focus, the camera in the foreground, trained upon the viewer, is not.  Her camera, her eye, thus serves, in a manner we've already evoked, as a kind of protection.  She is vulnerably naked, she can't even see you.  But her camera can.  You might ogle, but will probably turn your head when you realize you've been caught in the act.  The viewed voyeur vanishes.

You can check out more of Burón's photography on her flickr photostream at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/040710/

On a final note, a post script if you will, this makes me think of an organization based NYC called Hollaback!, whose goal is to end street harassment by, among other means, filming or photographing people who catcall, leer or make unwelcome advances, then putting it on the net.  (Full disclosure, I'm an old friend of their Deputy Director's partner).  In Burón's photos, she reminds us that she decides how and when she can be approached; she is in control of her image and thus, her physical body.  A scene often used in cinema is that of the underling squirming uncomfortably under the silent gaze of another character; it's a perfect representation of both character's perception of the power relationship between the two.  The women in Hollaback! want to be the ones doing the looking.  Looking someone in the eye can be discomfiting and that, in the end, is powerful.

There and back again: A week in Italy and Provence

I spent three years in Italy as a child, in the late-Seventies (the "years of lead", so-called because of all the political violence) and had studied there for a Summer back in 1990, so I was excited to be heading back for the first time as a family.  My wife went to Naples and Sicily, where she has roots, two years ago, but the kids and I stayed home for that one and felt jealous.

Our destination was Apricale, named one of Italy's most beautiful villages, which is saying something.  And it was indeed a beautiful old town, perched upon a small mountain, built for defense, a reminder of the time when "Italy" didn't exist, but a collection of small feuding states, some of them merely cities.  It's still a hard place to govern, which is partly by design; as a re-constituted republic (1946) recovering from Fascism, the constitution created a weak executive.  Governing Italy requires creating and then leading coalitions.  In a parliament with many small parties, this leads to political instability.  If one small party leaves a coalition, the government can fall and a new one needs to be put together.  Which has happened around 60 times since 1946.  But for the most part, the country "works".

Italy is an ancient place, rich in traditions which lend a continuity to daily life one might not expect if only the number of governments is considered.  And for all the differences between the north and south, as soon as you cross the border you know you're in Italy.  Nice was until relatively recently part of Italy.  I've never spent time there, but I can imagine that like Toulouse is France's "Spanish city", Nice's is France's "Italian city".  Which is to say that although you can feel the Spanish vibe in Toulouse, it is first and foremost French.  Likewise, I'm sure, with Nice.  Borders may be the result of history's vagaries, maybe somewhat arbitrary, but they do generally conform to natural boundaries more ancient than human:  the Pyrenées in the Southwest and the southernmost peaks of the Alps in the Southeast.  Despite very strong regional attachments, Italy does have a strong national identity and in Apricale, a few kilometers across the border, you feel its heart beating just as strongly as if you were in Florence, Naples or Rome.

Our route led us due east to Narbonne, then along the coast past Sète, Montpellier, Nîmes, Arles, Marseille, Cannes, Nice, Monaco and then in Italy, Ventimiglia.  A short jog north and you're in the canyon over which Apricale and a handful of other small towns are perched.  The older parts of these towns are small warrens of alleys that are not only formed by two buildings, but are often cut right through one of them.  It's as if you are both inside and outside at the same time.  You'd be hard-pressed to get an army far enough into the town to get to the top; possible, of course, but a hard slog.  I'm sure in some of these towns the streets ran with blood on at least one occasion.

It's kind of hard to imagine though, because these towns are very friendly places.  Each of them has a lower part built along the river and if you kept to the main road and didn't stop, park and venture across the necessary bridge, you'd see a town built choc-a-bloc upon the hillside, but unless you already knew the local architecture, you wouldn't expect such a labyrinthine series of alleys, some leading into pitch blackness, other upwards towards the light, others covered by white-washed groin vaults with doors leading into houses, shoppes and bars.  There are fountains and piazze, of course, usually before the church and city hall, which are, as in France, often on the same plaza and more often than not, include a café.  This area was rather touristy, not in a tacky way at all, so maybe that explains why there seem to be far more cafés in an Italian village than in a French village of approximately the same size.  Aucamville has about 1000 residents and there is only one café.   Isolabona, where our campground is to be found, has 716 residents and at least two cafés, in addition to a restaurant.  The people seemed much more sociable than in our village; on our last night we strolled through town and the cafés were bustling with old men playing cards, teenagers looking on, some small families.  On the stoops and benches sat groups of women, young and old, chatting, peaceful and animated, in the deepening dusk, a fountain echoing softly off the walls, a small electric candle glowing in an iron mesh-covered niche with flowers, ex-votos and a statue of the virgin.  But in these towns, it didn't seem likely that people had yards and who wants to stay inside all the time?

This is an interesting theory, come to think of it; the characteristics of the people, the everyday sociability, the nightly ritual of coming together to gossip and joke, to talk, etc. is in these towns determined by the urban design.  I'd hesitate to use the word planning, the towns feel more organic than planned, but no one's the worse off for it.  In Dolceacqua, a larger village but more or less the same urban pattern, I'd marveled that the buildings and balconies are connected and reinforced (recall that we're on a rather steep small mountain) with numerous small "bridges".  Perhaps they are flying buttresses in this case, I'm not sure if the term here is accurate, but the effect is the same, each building is connected at several point to the one above it, so that what would in a flat city be an alley, open to the sky, is here part alley, part tunnel.  The effect is a kind of perpetual dusk, gloomy but without the negative sense of the word; they're rather lively places, but not prone to echoes and an abrasive hurdy-gurdy of sound.  Thus, pleasant places to chat, where you can raise your voice and not pollute the atmosphere.  The women chatting were grouped around the piazza and the roads/alleys leading up to it, relatively open spaces, where you get out of the gloom and as the sun sets, see some stars.  Farther from the church, the stoops were empty and the only sounds we heard were tin-can sounds of someone's radio playing some kind of mellow soccer game, the sound of cutlery and dishes being shifted, a mewling cat.

In these parts of town, one can often catch a whiff of the old sewers.  Nothing overpowering or rancid, but not exactly pleasant either.  Centuries of humidity and cloaca leave their traces, impregnate the cut stones.  There’s no disguising it.  This is what leads a lot of Americans to call these old towns “dirty” but they’re actually pretty clean.  We’re talking about places whose origins lie in the Bronze Age, if not earlier.  Give Sacramento a few more years, especially after their water is in such short-supply they’ll have to flush it all away with grey water.  Then it’ll really merit the moniker “Excremento”.

I had the opportunity to see an old amphitheater, the top of which must have made for a structure of considerable height.  Not these days, as the top now sits a few meters below street level.  When one digs a new basement or parking garage in a city like Ventimiglia, the shovel isn’t removing gravel, but cut stones and brick.  One doesn’t dig into the earth, but through the stratified remains of millennia.  In Cortona, Tuscany, my last (three-month) home in Italy, the city walls were layered like a cake:  topped by Renaissance construction, built upon medieval brick, in turn Roman and finally, when the earth was low enough to permit it, Etruscan foundations.  I swear, one day I came across a stone so ancient it would destroy a medium’s mind like the Russian villainess in the Crystal Skull film and there, in faded Enochian letters were the words “Adam + Eve 4ever” scratched crudely within a rough-hewn heart.  (Full disclosure:  I’m lying).

I also made an impulsive stop in Dolceacqua to visit the municipal cemetery which was much like the French style, with a mix of small above-ground tombs and quite grand mausoleums.  Two or three especially caught my eye because they showed that in this small and rather obscure town the Egyptian revival had made an impact on local funerary architecture.  One had a pyramid, another featured obelisks and a third had ornaments on the corners of the roof inspired by Egyptian models, such as those previously discussed on LoS with regard to Toulouse’s Terre Cabade Cemetery and the parish church at Ondes.  You can see these on the pyramid-roofed mausoleum as well.  I still don't know what this element is called, so if anyone out there has an idea....Also, being a fool, I neglected to note the dates.   If we compare with the examples in Ondes, Terre Cabade and Lisbon, I'd wager they date to the first half of the 19th century, probably sometime between 1830 and 1850.  The Egyptian revival was especially strong in Italy, or at least early.  In France it was kicked off in earnest after Napoleon's colonialist adventures in Egypt, whereas the Italians had been erecting obelisks since the days of the Roman Empire.  An obelisk was transferred to Rome by Caligula in 37 CE and placed in its current location in 1586; Bernini later designed St. Peter's Square so that the obelisk stood at it's center.  Bernini also put an obelisk at the center of his design for the Piazza Navona; it sits atop the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (1651).  Both obelisks evoke the axis mundi; Eden was said to lie at the center of four great rivers, at the very center of the world, hence the quattro fiumi, or "four rivers".

I came across another LoSian topic in Isolabona inside a church dedicated to Nostra Signora delle Grazie, in the form of a statue of Santa Lucia, the Sicilian saint whose eyes were plucked out.  She is depicted gore-free with closed eyes, holding the orbs on a plate in front her.  Seeing her there, so serene, made me think of how I grimace and groan at the slightest of aches.  Of course, no one who's had their eyes plucked out could be so calm, but it was rather humbling nonetheless.  The Gid and I have discussed Lucia in connection with Saint Agatha, another Sicilian saint, a virgin martyr, who, having dedicated herself to Christ, was brutally murdered for refusing the advances of a pagan suitor.  Agatha, however, had her breasts shorn off.  Gid first started an investigation into the link between the imagery of breasts and eyes in this little post, coming across a section of a book entitled Before the Milk of the Word: Eye Nipples by N. Hilton.  This is a fascinating essay and instead of summarizing it here, I encourage you to read it.  I was also intrigued to see a boat hanging from the ceiling of the nave;  I can only imagine that the name of this sanctuary, "Our Lady of Thanks" refers (in part) to the answered prayers of those who had husbands, sons or fathers set out to sea; Isolabona, is, after all, only minutes from the Mediterranean.  I've seen this in Spain (Tossa del Mar) and in such land-locked places as Rocamadour (with several model boats suspended from the ceiling) and Montaigut, in the form of a votive painting.

Tossa, Rocamadour and Montaigut all have what can be called Black Virgins and I'd hoped to see two more exemplars on our return trip.  I missed the one at St. Paul because I'd been expecting to stay nearby in Tourettes-sur-Loup, making it possible to pop out during our stay and have a look.  but alas!  Our real destinations was Tourettes, an hour away.  We didn't turn back.  Another watches over the cemetery at the town of St. Jean-Cap- Ferrat (I Googled it and it's about four humans tall!) but somehow, concentrating on a map perhaps, we blew right past it.  This town is between Nice and Monaco, you could almost smell the money in the air.  The French Riviera may be fabled and storied but you know, it is damn beautiful.  The town of Menton, between Monaco and the Italian border is, coming at it from the east, particularly impressive.  The Virgin at St. Jean also has an association with Cocteau, who wrote "There is a mysterious youth in the oldest stones of St. Jean."  So, if you're ever out that way....

Dolceacqua also featured a shrine to Mary where she was placed in a grotto.  This may be a reference to Lourdes, or could be a native tradition.  Mary associated with a cave also appears in Spain, at Covadonga (from Cueva Doña, I believe), which is also, like Lourdes noted for its healing waters.

Our two nights in Provence were spent drinking and chatting and really......a lot of drinking.  In the daytime, it was hours by the pool.  No mysteries, history, culture or anything worth reporting from an LoS standpoint.  But have no fear.  I'm off to Morocco in a month and I can already feel something Burroughsian and Gysinian in the wind....

Coming soon:  Photo-essay of my collection of Argentine folks saints (all four of 'em!) and an interview with original Discordian Hope Springs.

Magique, Mystère, Tourisme....et de la bière. Beaucoup et beaucoup de bière....

Notre Dame de la Daurade

From Saturday until today The Gid and his brother Steven were in town to visit.  It was jam-packed with sightseeing and beer drinking and though tired, it's left me with a sense of contentment I haven't felt in a while.

One of the highlights of our trip was a modified version of the "Magical Mystery Tour" I took last year with my kids into Aude, Corbières, Languedoc-Rousillon, etc.

Steve has been writing about his visit and has some great photos.  I really enjoyed reading about places I've seen previously from the perspective of someone who's never been to France. It also gives you an idea of just how much there is to see in southwest France.

We touched a sliver of a fragment and even then didn't even begin to cover all the worth-a-visit sites the area has to offer, natural, historical and cultural.  We didn't do too bad though.

Please take a look a Steve's post.  It'll spark some great ideas if you ever consider coming to Toulouse and environs.

Europe Week One: Southern France and Northern Spain by S.J. Payne

Added 12/04.
And there was a black virgin, “Mare de Deu de Monserrat.” 
(For you, Steve Adkins.)   Europe Week Two:  Barcelona and Paris

Val d'Aure to the Val d'Aran: On the Trail of the Black Madonna

There have have been three successive waves of misfortune over the ages that have diminished the number of so-called “Vierges Noires” (Black Virgins or Black Madonnas) in France.  The most recent has also made surviving examples difficult to get a look at.

The first wave of destruction came at the hands of the Huguenots, who, in their iconoclastic fury, sent countless icons to the bonfires during the bloody years of the Wars of Religion (1562-1598).

In the French Revolution (1789-1799) we see the same fury and more icons were destroyed, chapels razed and sold off for their bricks and blocks, religious art "appropriated".  At least two chapels and one grand monastery within a few kilometers of my house suffered this fate.

The third wave has been theft. The two Black Virgins I could have seen during my stay in the Aure Valley were impossible to see for this last reason.  The example in Comminges was also locked away.

The route one travels from the mouth of the Aure valley over the Pyrenees into Spain dates back to a Roman road, and most likely even back to a prehistoric hunting/trading trail.  During the Middle Ages it was one of the important branches of the "Milky Way", a colorful name for the Road to Santiago de Compstela.  Aure is another word for or, or gold, recalling my own handle here on LoS:  Daurade, meaning "gilded/gilt" or "golden".  (It also means "gilt-head breem.")  How it got this name my be due to its historical importance as a trading corridor.

The Aure Valley is a zone dense with Black Virgins; to the North one finds Notre Dame de Polignan in Montrejeau.  By some accounts there's another at Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges. To the south, in Spain, Huesca is home to almost ten examples. To the west, a Black Madonna can be found in Héas; to the east, we find them in Oust, vic d'Oust, Belesta, Aspet and St Béat. One would think it would be easy to catch a glimpse of one, but I passed Bourisp, Aragnouet, Sopeira (Spain) and Montrejeau and only saw Nuestra Señora de la O in Sopeira.  And she's not even black.  Ean Begg's list of Black Madonnas often gets me chasing after these "White Black Virgins". 

Notre Dame de Sescas

ND de Sescas

The Black Virgin at Bourisp was stolen in the night of 21st November, 1982. She was quite tall, 150 cm, her black dress decorated with red flowers, seated on a gold throne.

Legend has it that the statue was found c. 1200 CE by a bull in a muddy area near a spring.  She was brought to the local church. But, according to Saillens, she "refused the hospitality of the church and ended up settling on a nearby high point, near another spring."  Usually this happens three times but in this case it took four times before the villagers decided to erect Her chapel where She wanted.

According to this excellent page, legend has it that an unknown architect appeared and made the plan, oversaw the work and then mysteriously disappeared once the work was completed.  This element figures in other legends; I first heard this kind of story at the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, about a miraculous staircase.  It obviously came from Spain and is probably as ubiquitous as tales about the "Devil's Bridge".

ND de Sescas is also known to have helped previously infertile couples have children.  One mother, whose previous nine children had died, prayed fervently before the icon and her tenth child outlived her.

Something related, as I see it, is that she was also known to bring an end to drought.

All of these are classic Black Virgin elements: found by a bull, the presence of a spring and subsequent role in fertility, the decision of where to be worshipped, a high place. Nothing unusual in the typology.  Like many of the Pyrenean Black Madonnas, there is also a link to the Saracen invasions.  The author of this brief text makes the excellent point that these legends are valuable historical records because they indicate the approximate dates that the Saracen invasions stopped; Madonnas that had been hidden for decades or perhaps even centuries were then (re)discovered.  This is an important feature of the legend of La Virgen de Montserrat, patroness of Catalonia.

Saillens also points out that nearby at Cadéac, there are thermal springs where Cybele was once worshipped. Cybele was the Phrygian mother of the gods worshipped by the Romans as the Magna Mater in the form of a black stone. Her holy day was the 25th of May, and this black stone was bathed in the river Almo. As I said earlier, today’s road dates back to antiquity, a Roman road linking Zaragosa to points north for both military and commercial purposes.  Ideal conditions for the transmission of her cult.

A pale reflection of the original

The original Virgin may be gone, but her memory is quite strong. A copy has been made; when I remarked that it is quite “white”, the women monitoring the church replied, almost indignantly, “No, look.” She waddled over to the copy and used her cane to pull back Her dress. Okay, the body was quite dark. On the floor, a second copy, black as pitch seemed to overlook the scene, somewhat Asiatic in features. A photograph of the stolen icon completed the scene.  So, secondary images retain the darkness which is, at least for the monitor, an important element of the Madonna of Sescas.

Vaguely Asiatic Black Madonna near the Sescas altar

Perhaps the most visible sign of the historical importance of her cult were the frescoes that decorated the church from floor up to and including the vault, from apse to nave to portico. Great stuff. Scenes from the life of Jesus, portraits of the patriarchs, the last judgement, the seven deadly sins, scenes of the early Christian martyrs. There were also two medallions with the Phoenix and the Pelican, so labelled, which are some of the symbols cherished by the Rosicrucians. The style of these were Renaissance, so it’s quite possible. In any event, a lovely place, well-preserved and obviously quite cherished, with old frescoes, early-20th century ex-votos and a thorough and tasteful contemporary renovation.

Your standard icon of Mary doesn’t evoke such devotion--there are broken and neglected statues of the Virgin all over France.  A Black Virgin, however, even a stolen one, is another story.

Frescos on the vault; hard to see, but these depict the Phoenix and the Pelican feeding its children with itw own blood, a Rosicrucian and masonic symbol of Christ's sacrifice

The Throne of Wisdom -- Aragnouet

The second Black Virgin I wanted to see was about 11k closer towards Spain in the small village of Aragnouet. All I know is that she is known as the Throne of Wisdom and was stolen 30+ years ago from a Templar Church to the southwest of the village. The church is perched aside a steep gorge as the river Neste roars below. Perfect setting for a mystical film à la Polanski’s 9th Gate. But this church is being renovated and when I peeped through the fence inside, all I saw were scaffolds.

Apparently this Virgen is related stylistically to Notre Dame de Belloc in the Catalan village of Dorres, which can be seen in this flickr set.   Notre Dame de Dorres seems to have a lively cult and is first mentioned c. 1260 CE, about the same time as ND de Sescas.  I also wonder if Dorres is etymologically related to "or" which is also Catalan for gold.  Golden in Catalan is "daurat" however, so it may just be a "false friend".

Back in the village, I passed the parish church church where I saw an older bloke with a killer mustache cutting the grass with a scythe. I called ou to him and he came over. I asked him if the church could be visited and he said no, it’s always closed and besides, it’s not very exceptional. I told him what I was after and he told me that the Vierge Noire wasn’t in this church, it was in a locked box. She’d been stolen about 20 years back and found in Paris at an auction house. The village actually had to buy her back!

Bastards, I thought, whoever’d steal a cult object is a real sonofabitch. I said as much and my informant agreed. They’d robbed Bourisp, Guchen, Aragnouet, etc. etc., all up and down the valley in the light of day. We’d be stupid to put it back on display he said. It would just get stolen again and we wouldn’t have much sympathy. Maybe when the Templar Church is finished they could put it back, with a guard? Well, volunteers are hard to come by these days! How many people live in this village? 250. Yeah, I can see how that could pose a problem!

So, this is Vierge Noire country, but if you can actually see one, good luck. Robbers have made them difficult to access, their guardians are understandably cagey and even a few kilometers can take a long time to travel! 

Nuestra Señora de la O, or de Alaón

On to Spain, we wound our way down to Barbastos and headed back to France via the Val d'Aran, the only place in the world where a form of Occitan, the Aranese dialect, is the official language (along with Castellano and Catalan).  On the road to the Val d'Aran, I had a chance to stop at Sopeira, a village of considerable charm in a truly majestic setting, the aquamarine mountain lake, the sheer mountains rising up in a multitude of brown and ochre hues, vultures sailing about.  One of those rare unforgettable places we stumble across from time to time.

The village is home to what began as a Cluniac Abbey, later to become a Benedictine property.  The Benedictines are often associated with Black Madonnas and this place is no exception.  The abbey dates to the late-11th/early-12 c. but there is a Visigothic crypt below the altar that dates to the 9th c.  Both the Benedictine and Visigoth history of the abbey are not inconsistent with other Black Madonna sites I've visited.

Thing is, despite Ean Begg's inclusion of "de la O" in his list of Black Virgins, the statue, though lovely, is white.  Begg has this to say about her:

The monastery of San Pedro contained various relics left there by the Goths....A document of 12 Feb. 845 of Charles the Bald, King of France, grants privileges to Na Sra de Alaón.  The 'O' is the cry of parturition [childbirth] celebrated in the Great O antiphons of longing sung at Vespers from 17-23 Dec.  The first line of the hymn at Lauds in the Office of Our Lady is 'O Gloriosa Domina'.

An alternate and probably more spurious reason for the "O" given by the guardian of the place was that people prayed to Nuestra Señora de Alaón o [or] de Sescas o La Morenita, etc.  This sound like straight-up folk etymology to me, but it would help explain, perhaps, why she is associated with Black Madonna....they're all one and the same as an intercessor.  The guardian didn't seem to think the suggestion that she was a Black Madonna was odd.  When I told her about Begg's designation she simply explained why.  Still, I didn't see any other indications in writing she is a Black Madonna.  

I can't find anything about her origins, but I would be unsurprised to find she was found by a bull or near a spring, any number of mythemes associated with the type.

Notre Dame de Polignan 

Upon our return to France and before jumping back on the autoroute, I took a short detour to Gourdan-Polignan, just next to Montrejeau, to see if I could get inside the chapel of ND de Polignan, having been denied the opportunity on a previous visit years ago.  Like so many chapels in the area, the chapel was locked tight, no doubt as a result if the robberies previously mentioned.  

Notre Dame de Polignan is a 14th c. statue said to have been found by a bull.  She also had the power to teleport, if you will, having at one point been stolen by the nearby village of Huos, who chained her up.  To no avail, she broke her own chains to return to the site of the present chapel.  For this, perhaps, one of her specialties is freeing prisoners, which is not a unique attribute.

Other than that, I can't find much about her other than that her primary day of pilgrimage is the 8th of September, the Nativity of the Virgin.  This also the day of a very old cheese festival; on that day her blessing is sought by pilgrims from all over the Comminges.  Not a trifling matter if your livelihood depends on this delectable dairy product.  Also, given the association of the Virgin with fertility and childbirth, an association with milk is pretty logical.

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So, all in all I visited four chapels and only managed to see one, cream-colored exemplar of a "Black" Virgin.  Still, the journey being the destination and all that, it was a rewarding experience.  I talked to some nice people eager to share their knowledge, which wasn't so vast, but it was agreeable nonetheless.  I also got to see some beautiful architecture and frescos.  I regret not getting more images, both due to my sucky camera and the locked doors, but I did get some useful data.  The similarities in these legends, especially the assocations with water and bulls, the miraculous indication of where the statue wanted to be worshipped, does indeed support the idea of a distinct genre of Marian cult, something I'm prone to vacillate about.

Anyway, this has turned out longer than expected, so I'm stopping.

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As with this and all of my posts about the Black Madonna, I consulted the following books.  For those who speak French, Cassagnes-Brouquet presents a solid, academic overview of the subject.  Saillens, also in French, has a lot of valuable anecdotes and a kind of region-by-region guide to where many Black Madonnas can be found.  His work is a bit more speculative; the version linked to below is cost-prohibitive for most of us.  Begg's book is a Jungian free-for-all, as he readily admits.  You have to be careful with his speculations, but the book is jam-packed with fascinating bits of folklore and insights.  The Gazetteer makes up half the book--it is an invaluable list; Begg accompanies me on every journey I make in Spain and France.

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