The Giddy Heights
Somewhere I Should Take You More Often
The Sights to See Beyond the Hero’s Journey
Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution - more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to.
- Lisa Cron, from ‘Wired for Story’
This is going to be a bit of an odd article. I’ve been focusing (or perhaps my focus has been ruined by) the tales I’ll share with you in this article a lot of late.
“Why?”, I’m sure you’re screaming, probably whilst waving your fist at the screen. (If so, please stop that).
In part, because they’re very cool, and also because I’d like to highlight how important research and story selection are to our art form.
Gilgamesh is great. So is Beowulf. So are many “goddess stories”. A lot of storytellers ‘do’ those.
Now, many of my colleagues do them justice. It does, however, leave a vast number of stories we should be telling stuck flat on the pages of various compilation books, further ceding ground to our (*places tongue in cheek*) most hated enemy - the written word.
So I’ve selected a few to share here, and will share more without particular care for theme more often!
“Are they related in any way, perhaps by cultural origin or, I don’t know, alphabetically?”, I’m sure you’re spitting in rage.
Nah.
They are, however, all stories that really make you think. Now, all stories should make you think (well, the good ones at any rate), but these few I’ve chosen here ensure that you cannot but break the bonds of how most narratives achieve this. Head-scratchers, all of ‘em! I really love these kinds of stories. They’re little gems, truly. The kind of treasure that can only be found in the world’s great oral traditions.
I hope you enjoy them as I do!
The Olympian Limit
Here is a story, one that is quite simple as compared with others in its general category, that has beguiled me since I first heard it. You could say that this is kind of my thing : stories that are clearly part of a tradition, but skirt the edges so closely that they nearly fall off into some uncharted area between categories.
The big, trad myths and legends? Great. Post-modern novels that leave you wondering what in the hell you just read? Also great. But these in-between, near-anomalous, sometimes fragmentary tales, well they just fascinate me like no other kind of stories.
One wouldn’t be foolish to conclude that no such tale should, or perhaps could, exist within what is perhaps the best attested, oft-repeated, likely most studied corpus of mythological stories on earth, an ancient tradition that is so supremely coherent in form (considering its age) that it beggars belief: the Ancient Greek mythos.
Wrong.
And here it is:
(from my notes)
Once upon a time, Cephalus, son of Deion, married the beautiful Procris, daughter of Erechtheus, at Thoricus in Attica. Being a suspicious man, Cephalus decided to test Procris to see if she was inclined to remain faithful to him. He pretended that he was going out hunting and sent in to Procris one of his servants who was not known to her. The servant was given a great deal of gold, instructed by Cephalus to say that he was a foreign gentleman, and that he had fallen in love with her. Cephalus told the servant to then offer her this gold if she would meet with his at night and have intercourse with him in an empty house nearby.
At first Procris refused the gold, but when the man offered double the quantity, she agreed and accepted the proposition. When Cephalus saw her approaching the house in order to lie with the foreigner, he brought out a flaming torch and discovered her. In her shame Procris forsook Cephalus and went off as a fugitive to Minos the king of Crete.
She found on arrival that the great King Minos was afflicted by childlessness and promised a cure, showing him how to beget children. Now Minos would ejaculate snakes, scorpions and millipedes (!), killing the various women with whom he had intercourse. But his wife Pasiphae, daughter of the Sun, was immortal. Procris accordingly devised the following to make Minos fertile: she inserted the bladder of a goat into a woman and Minos first emitted the snakes into the bladder; then he went over to Pasiphae and entered her.
And when children were born to them, Minos gave Procris a fine enchanted spear from his own armoury and, even more incredibly, his famed hunting dog, a gift from the gods themselves. No animal could escape these two and they always reached their target. Accepting them, Procris went to Thoricus in Attica, where Cephalus lived.
She had altered her clothes and had cut her hair as a man; no one who saw her recognized her. She befriended Cephalus, and became a hunter with him. When Cephalus saw that he never caught anything when hunting, while Procris caught all manner of quarry, he yearned to have that spear for himself. Procris promised this, and more, he have the wondrous dog as well, if he would agree to enjoy her youthful charms. Cephalus accepted the proposition and when they lay down together, Procris revealed who she was and reproached him for having committed something far more disgraceful than she had ever done. But Cephalus, caring not for her deception and her slander (?!?!?!), acquired the dog and the spear.
A man named Amphitryon heard tell of these events, and came to Cephalus and asked him if he would be willing to join him, with the hunting dog, in going after a monstrous Fox that plagued the people Cadmus. He promised to hand over to him a share of the reward offered by the Cadmeans. For at that time what had appeared in the land of the people of Cadmus, was a fox so monstrous that whenever it would issue out of Teumessus, it hesitated not in snatching up many Cadmeans. Every thirty days the desperate people would put out a child for it, and the Fox would take it and eat it up.
Amphitryon told him about the awful quandary faced by the Cadmeans, and urged him to go to Thebes with the dog. Cephalus accepted the proposal and set out to hunt the Fox. But it had been ordained by the gods themselves that the Fox could not be taken by any hunter. Cephalus began to hunt, reasoning that nothing could escape the dog when it went hunting.
Zeus saw them when they reached the Plain of Thebes, and turned both the dog and the fox into stone, setting both in the night’s sky as stars.
The End
Huh?!
God(s), I love this story, and this ending is the perfect exemplar of why I love this kind of tale:
Zeus, unmentioned until the very end, is watching the chess board of our world, with mankind as the pieces, from the lofty peak at Olympus, when he suddenly realises that somebody has gone and smuggled the top hat and the wheelbarrow from a Monopoly set onto the board! The ‘game’ can no longer be played; the fabric of reality itself cannot withstand the strain of such a monumental contradiction. So, off to the cosmos with the beasts! This is the ultimate act of “sweeping the mess under the bed”, lest Mommy (Rhea) ground you for a week because of the horrible state of your bedroom, eh Zeus?
Another cool detail in most versions of this tale, the dog and the fox, now up in the void of outer space, become the constellations Canis Major and Canis Minor respectively.
There is a longer version, with some more convoluted, wedged-in bits of historically dubious allusions to some wars, but this streamlined version is what I go with - the heart of the narrative.
The story shows what can be done with narrative: a wide range from a folk explanation for the origin of constellations, to a deep study on the limitations of man’s concept of the divine, and a brief musing on the brain-melting concept of contradictions. All in one short tale.
Beautiful.
The Silver Arrow
I haven’t covered any Scandinavian legends in my writings thus far. Let’s remedy that, shall we?
No, I’m not doing a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. No, it won’t be a Norse saga. I’m going to cover a fascinating urban legend from Stockholm. Many elements of this piece of modern folklore shares aspects with similar stories that have popped up all over the globe. So why cover it?
There is something that’s just so… Swedish about this particular archetypal urban legend:
(taken from this Atlas Obscura article)
“The story of Stockholm’s poltergeist locomotive begins in 1965, according to Christoffer Sandahl, the director of Spårvägsmuseet, the Swedish Tramway Museum. That year, Stockholm Metro purchased eight unpainted aluminum train cars to add to its fleet. This bare aluminium train, which could be made more cheaply than the standard green ones already running on the metro, was mainly used as a test to see how it performed, the idea being that such trains could be a cost-effective option for the expanding urban transit system.
The hundreds of trains in the metro system were painted a stock green in the 1960s, so when a silver train showed up on a line, it got people talking. Even before it became a ghost story, the train had earned the nickname Silverpilen (the Silver Arrow) from the locals. According to Sandahl, the train wasn’t very popular among Stockholmers, who took offense at its raw look. But it was not just the shiny silver exterior that set the train apart. The cars were of a slightly different design than the standard Stockholm Metro trains. The doors slid open on the outside of the train, allowing for a slightly expanded interior, and insides were free from the usual ads and decorations. Unlike the generally shining and clean metro trains most commuters were used to, the insides of the silver train were a bit dirtier, bearing the marks of removed graffiti, and generally looking a bit more dystopian. All of this contrast to the regular trains combined with Silverpilen’s unpredictable rarity—at least from the point of view of the commuters—created fertile ground for an urban legend to grow up around it.
As Sandahl tells it, the basic legend is that “if you got onboard the Silver Arrow, you didn’t get taken to any station. You just travelled and travelled and travelled and never got out.” Swedish ethnologist and urban legend scholar, Bengt af Klintberg, who wrote about Silverpilen in his 1986 book, Råttan i pizzan (The Rat in the Pizza), adds some of the legend’s variants:
“[I]t is only seen after midnight. It stops only once every year. The passengers in the train seem to be living dead, with expressionless, vacant looks. A very common detail is that a person who just wanted to travel to the next station remained seated for one week in the Silverpilen. Many girls dared not enter trains which they believed could be Silverpilen.”
(CERI’S NOTE: It is also said by many that the train takes riders to the Underworld, riding around a loop there. A place where time runs slower. Much slower.)
Whatever version of the legend one might hear, Silverpilen spells doom.
By the 1970s the legend of Silverpilen was widespread, well-known, and growing. In the early part of the decade, the metro system was expanded, opening the new Blue Line in 1975. As part of this expansion, the Kymlinge station was built to service an area that was slated for an economic redevelopment. However this development never materialized. Without the expected demand for the station, the fully completed structure never opened to commuters. Soon this ghost station began accruing urban legends of its own, sparking a local saying: “Only the dead get off at Kymlinge.” Like Silverpilen, Kymlinge was blank and unadorned on the inside, without ads or signs, making it look pretty ghostly in contrast to the other bustling stations along the metro.
It was not long before the legends of Kymlinge and Silverpilen became intertwined, and the station came to be known as the home of Silverpilen, or the station where the ghost train picks up the dead. Just like Silverpilen, Kymlinge was very plainly real, but stories of the supernatural clinged to it like a fog.
Silverpilen continued to be used in the Stockholm Metro until 1995 or 1996, when it was finally decommissioned, and the cars were split up. But the legend continued. “I’ve been working at the transport museum for 10 years,” Sandahl says, “and there are a lot of people who know [the legend]. All the Stockholmers know what Silverpilen is.” As Klintberg puts it, “[The Silverpilen cars] have been taken out of service. However, the rumor of a ghost train has survived them, you still hear it, especially among young people.”
The ghost of Silverpilen lives on in the minds of metro riders, but the real train hasn’t completely disappeared either. According to Sandahl a couple of the cars survive around the country. Half of one of the trains was moved the Stockholm Police Academy, where it is used as a training setting to teach cadets how to police crime on the metro. (Assumedly not supernatural crime though, or else Silverpilen would likely be public enemy number one.) The only other car that is known to remain is located at the headquarters of Hägglunds, the Swedish company that built the train. Sandahl says it was preserved and at some point there was a cafeteria installed inside.
The stories of Silverpilen still haunt the tracks of the Stockholm Metro and Kymlinge still stands silent and mysterious. But there are still those who remember the truth behind the legends. “Have I seen Silverpilen? Sure.” Klintberg says, “I have been seated in the metallic trains innumerable times. But I am sorry to say, nothing strange ever happened.”
Have you spotted the thing that sticks out most in the outline of this piece of folklore (or, what sticks out to me, at least)?
Big shock, it’s the note I placed in the middle:
It’s really rare that the echo of ancient folklore and myth makes its way into modern urban legends. But there it is - the train takes riders to the underworld. The motif of a means to travel between the realm of the living and the dead goes back to some of our earliest narratives in the ancient traditions; Charon, the Hellenic ferryman on the river Styx, and Aqen, the pilot of Ra’s celestial barque in the Egyptian mythos being two prominent examples among many. Here, there’s a train that does the job.
The durability of these cultural concepts is truly amazing, when you think about it. How could such concepts survive the age of advanced technology without simply fading into an outmoded obscurity? Well, why shouldn’t psychopomps be operating mass transit vehicles? More people, more capacity, I suppose…
Beyond this cool little aspect, does this tale not strike you as quintessentially Nordic? No crazed killers or chain-jangling ghosts here: it’s almost as though Ingmar Bergman had been tasked with authoring this urban legend.
The dead remain motionless, sitting forlornly, waiting for another soul to join, as all will some day.
It’s an existentialist urban legend if ever I heard one.
See? Swedish AF, amirite?
Finally, somewhat spookily, and certainly poetically, the haunted station’s name, Kymlinge, is derived from the Swedish word kummel, meaning burial place.
Woah.
This tale, the image of the old chrome locomotive, the worn interior, the passengers’ vacant stares - I’ve found it pops into my head a lot, usually just before I nod off to sleep for some reason.
Now, that’s something to consider… briefly.
Tradition!
As a proud xenophile (…read it again) and as a person who loves his own culture as he would a close relative, there’s nothing more exciting than seeing the marriage of two distinct traditions within an art form. When done well, it is unequivocal proof that mankind’s intrapersonal enmity is nothing as compared to our ability to cooperate.
Nobody weaves this magic as well as the Jews. It makes sense, when you think about it - if your people have spent a millennium (and more) moving around Eurasia, getting accepted, getting shunned, assimilating, resisting assimilation, being placed at the side of Kings and Emperors as trusted advisors, and being summarily banished from nations, you’re bound to accrue a pretty incredible body of folk tales. Alongside the already millennia-old stories from the Holy Land that form the basis of three of the world’s major religions (Islam, Christianity, and of course, Judaism itself), the Jewish diaspora have married their storytelling conventions to those found wherever they settled.
Still, there can be found tales which confound both the conventions of the ancient, religious traditions many great cultures hold, and the changing, mixing mass of folktales that accrue over the ages. The Jewish people are, quite wonderfully, given our last tale, not immune to such strangeness:
The Finger
(From my notes: orig. read in ‘Lilith’s Cave’, a collection of tales Collected and re-told by inimitable Howard Schwartz)
Many moons ago, in the city of Safed that lies between Mount Meron and the Sea of Galilee, there lived three young men. One night, they decided to take a moonlit walk. It was the night before one of their number, Reuven, was to be married. The men laughed and joked at his expense, testing his nerve before the big day. The moon shone bright above them. They decided to leave the path and wander the woods that surrounded Safed. The silvery light illuminated even the darkest corners of the forest, which now echoed with the hoots and chuckles of the men.
When the men reached the banks of the river, they decided to rest on some large boulders. They watched the moonlight dance on the rushing waters below them, taking in the heady aromas of the forest. One of the men noticed something strange nearby. Nearby the rocks, a strange root protruded from the soft ground. It was unlike the many verdant shoots and vines surrounding it, and didn’t much look like a tree root either. The men went up to it, curiously. They found that it was no root at all.
It was a finger.
Anyone else would scream and run away. Not these men. Perhaps it was their high spirits, perhaps the goading, macho tendency found in groups of male friends. Perhaps it was something else entirely, but one of them asked:
“Who will put a ring on this finger?”
Reuven joked that it should be him, obviously! “It will be good practice before tomorrow”, he joked. He placed a ring on the finger and repeated Harai at m’kudeshet li (“you are betrothed to me) three times. The young men laughed, nearly rolling on the forest floor at the ridiculousness of the situation until…
The finger twitched.
A hand dragged itself up from beneath the soil, grasping at the men. The earth shook beneath their feet, with each man frozen in utter terror. Suddenly, the rotting corpse of a woman, draped in a mouldering shroud, sprang up fro the earth. Her milky grey eyes stared at Reuven:
“Husband!”, she rasped, her arms outstretched at the man.
The men ran as fast as their legs would allow. Blindly they tore through the woods, as the moon had retreated behind a bank of dark clouds. The doleful wails of the dead woman followed them, imploring Reuven to embrace her, and for them all to celebrate the union.
“WHY DO YOU RUN, MY LOVE?”, she wailed.
The men cared not for the nicks and cuts they suffered from the branches and thorns, their clothes torn to rags by the time they emerged from the forest. They scattered, reaching their homes just as they neared exhaustion. Their doors were soon locked, their windows barred.
The friends met the next morning, vowing to never discuss the previous night’s events. Pale and drawn, Reuven made his way to the ritual bath to prepare for the wedding ceremony, leaving his friends to sit. Silently.
The time for the ceremony came, and it was beautiful. Both Reuven and his bride-to-be came from prominent families in Safed - she was the daughter of a very wealthy man, and Reuven’s family were amongst the oldest, and most respected in the city - and so a great many guests had come to celebrate, dressed in their finest, bringing gifts that only the great and the good could afford. Reuven stood next to the rabbi and his betrothed, ready to begin the ceremony, when a blood-curdling howl rang out.
It was the corpse.
She stood there, behind the seated guests, wearing her tattered shroud, her skin hanging in greyish-blue ribbons on his skeletal frame, the odour of the grave filling the air. The guests scattered, averting their eyes and screaming in fear. Only Reuven and the rabbi remained. The rabbi stood face-to-face with the revenant woman, whilst Reuven cowered and shook behind him.
“I’m sure that, if you have been invited to this happy occasion, that it is not so opulent that even the dead should attend!”, said the rabbi. “What brings you here from your resting place?”
“I shall not be slighted! Why should my husband be permitted to do me so wrong? Can the people of Safed not see that he is married to me?”, rasped the corpse. She held her rotten finger aloft, showing Reuven’s ring. The rabbi looked, noting the man’s initials inscribed upon it.
“Is what this… woman says true, boy?”, asked the rabbi. Reuven told him of what had occurred the night before, all whilst refusing to remove his trembling hands from his face. “You repeated the vow three times?”. A weak nod. “And two witnesses were present”. Another nod from Reuven. “Then we must convene a Beth Din (rabbinical court) to pass judgment on this matter. It would seem that, in accordance with the law, you are bound to this dead woman in matrimony, young Reuven and…”
But Reuven had fainted.
The city was abuzz with this strange tale. Reuven’s parents begged the rabbi to find a way to release their son from this curse. The rabbi isolated himself in a deep meditation and in study of responsa, hoping to find some favourable precedent.
There was none, however. A precedent would have to be set. When the court was convened, the rabbi summoned the corpse. She arrived, her skin crawling with insects, her lank, thin hair tucked beneath her shroud. She recounted the events under oath, before Reuven’s friends did the same. Finally, Reuven himself told truthfully exactly what happened - yes, the vow was made, but he cried as he swore that he had not intended to make it. It had been a joke, just a silly joke whilst they’d been in high spirits. Reuven pleaded for an annulment: how could this vow be binding if he had not known this woman was alive. Indeed, he had thought it was merely a severed finger.
The court asked the woman if she’d accept an annulment. She refused to relinquish her claim.
“In life, I never married”, she hissed. “I was denied my hour of joy. Now, I can have what should have been. I demand what is right. I demand the law be upheld! This union must be consummated", she cackled, drawing her green tongue over the few yellowed teeth still in her mouth.
Reuven’s parents were called upon next. They testified that their son’s betrothal to the daughter of the wealthy man had been made before they’d been born. The bride’s parents stood to confirm this. The three men of the court considered this. Their beards, it was said afterwards, were the most stroked in the land.
Poor Reuven waited, shaking, as the court deliberated. He avoided looking at the corpse bride, despite feeling her icy gaze upon him.
Finally, a decision was made. The rabbi stood among all who’d assembled and declared, “It is clear that Reuven made a vow in accordance with the law, and in the presence of two witnesses, that appears to be valid”. The rabbi paused. “In extraordinary cases, however, there are other factors we must consider. Firstly, this wedding vow must negate a previous betrothal, and it has been known for eons that one vow cannot negate an earlier one. Second, the vow made by the bridegroom was not made with sincere intention. Finally, and heed this people of Safed, there is no precedent for any claim on the living made by the dead. This union, and the vow made to bind it, cannot therefore be considered valid. The bride is not of the living, and has no standing here!"
The End
I have told this tale to an audience once. You could here a pin drop. A common event then occurred (one I, for good or bad, actively encourage): a question was posed, one I don’t often get from adults.
“What happened next?”
Now, whenever I usually hear this question from anyone above the age of 8, I feel very sad for that person; stories end where they end, and people who have grown up hearing tales (or reading novels) know how narrative structures work. It’s intuitive. But in this instance, the person was right to ask the question.
This is the answer I provided:
Consider the nature of the tale. It is, in fact, really just a story about rabbinical law, and the challenges of interpreting thousands of years of accrued wisdom. The amazing circumstances of the narrative are set to illustrate exactly this! You could say, I suppose, that the rabbi is the ‘hero’ here. Reuven and the corpse are bit part players, and the horrible vow is the antagonist that must be vanquished. Stories come in all shapes and sizes.
A follow-up question was posed: “But why go so over-the-top with the whole ‘corpse coming back to life’ storyline?”
Sometimes, I told the rather weirded-out audience, even a religious legal procedure deserves elevating beyond the humdrum, beyond the ‘everyday’. That’s what great tales do - they remind us that the sum total of human endeavour, our millions of years getting to where we are, the sheer amount of culture, traditions, and wisdom we’ve generated, despite sometimes appearing dry and dull, are things even more amazing than an annoyingly-entitled, talking corpse.