5
HARVEST AND HOMAGE
The animals leaving the Ark, from the Bedford Hours
If there is one scene from the Hebrew scriptures that young children today are likely to recognize, it must surely be the story from Genesis of the animals, two by two, entering Noah’s Ark. It is an enchanting myth derived from a cataclysmic event: a single family rescuing the animals of the world from destruction in the great flood – humans and animals literally all in the same boat.
But when the flood subsided, and they all got out of the boat, the relationship between the shipmates became less cosy. We can see the moment in the miniature from the Bedford Hours, painted in Paris around 1420–30. The successive phases of the story are shown together. The bodies of the drowned still float on the surface of the receding waters, as submerged towns and buildings (among them a playfully anachronistic church) begin to reappear. Mrs Noah is helping the poultry onto the gangplank, sheep have begun to graze, the camel is heading for the desert, and the bear and the lion are preparing to prowl. While the last animals are still disembarking, Noah and his family have begun farming and planting vines – and Noah’s sons have not only trampled out the grapes, but already found their father shamefully drunk. What we see here is the new divinely ordained agricultural order of the world: livestock and wild animals, crops and vines, seedtime and harvest, all organized for the benefit of mankind. It was the world familiar to all Europeans in the fifteenth century, and indeed to most Europeans until the twentieth.
On the right-hand side, Noah makes his thanks-offering sacrifice to God, whose hand appears from the clouds. At this point, Genesis tells us, God speaks to Noah, setting out the future relationship between humans, animals and plants in the clearest terms. In the first chapter of Genesis, at the moment of creation, God had quite simply given humankind ‘dominion’ – over everything. What that means is now spelt out in much greater detail. ‘And the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every living thing shall be meat for you; even as the green herb, have I given you all things.’
This biblical idea of dominion, of a literally god-given right to do with every living thing as we please, to kill or harvest anything for our sustenance, has had great influence on how Western civilization uses and abuses the natural world. In many ways it appears merely to describe the experience of modern city-dwellers, now comprising more than half the population of the planet, living far from the plants or animals we eat, in an environment overwhelmingly composed of things made by us or existing only for our benefit.
Yet in this regard the Judaeo-Christian tradition is unusual. Most belief systems urge a more complex, reciprocal relationship between us and the living world, whereby we have obligations to the animals and plants which sustain us, and dominion is tempered by an awareness of dependence.
It might seem strange to consider that more complex relationship by first looking at an anorak. This loose-fitting parka, sewn from horizontal strips of transparent material, is the perfect garment to keep out rain and wind. It looks as though it could be a more effective, indigenous version of the plastic rain-capes that you see on summer tourists as they walk round wet European cities. Totally wind- and water-tight, it was made by a Yup’ik woman, Flora Nanuk of Hooper Bay in south-west Alaska, to wear when she went out picking berries during the brief Arctic summer.
Seal-gut parka made in south-west Alaska by Flora Nanuk, in the late nineteenth century
It is made from the animal on which, above all others, the Yup’ik people depend for their survival: the seal. The body of the parka is composed of bearded-seal intestine, scraped inside and out, blown up, dried, cut lengthwise into extended strips, then stitched together. The armpits are made out of parts of a seal’s colon for extra resilience. In autumn, the Yup’ik people have traditionally gone inland to hunt caribou for meat and skins.The most important season for food, however, is the long, frozen spring that follows winter, when seal can be stalked across temporary sea-ice. Their flesh, skin and intestine crucially provide both clothing and nutrition. Their fat is rendered into oil and served as a condiment with meals; historically it was also used as fuel for cooking, heating and lighting during the long Arctic winter. But seals also play another, less expected, role in the winter life of the community. Amber Lincoln is the curator of the North American collections at the British Museum:
The winter months were largely cold and dark, with oceans and rivers in great measure frozen over. While people in western Alaska travelled and camped widely during the summer and autumn, the darkest months compelled them to stay inside. Men would gather and repair tools, mend and make nets. Women would make and repair clothes. These winter months were also the season when the whole community could come together, with time to conduct ceremonies and celebrations.
To these ceremonies, people invited the spirits of the animals that had been harvested throughout the year, and celebrated them. In a way, they were thanking them for giving their lives for the nourishment of Yup’ik people. The animals who had been taken were honoured with dancing and storytelling and good food, so that other animals would decide to give themselves up to hunters in the coming year.
Alaskan women wearing seal-gut parkas, 1929
Among these animal spirit guests were of course the seals, especially at the Bladder Festival, one of the most important winter celebrations. The soul of a seal was thought to reside in its bladder: so when a seal was hunted, and the body cut up, the bladder was preserved. It was given a place of honour during the festival and then released back into the sea through a hole in the ice: the soul could thus return to the sea, and so, it was hoped, encourage other seals to visit the next season. It is a potent ritual, publicly honouring the animal that you needed to kill, on whose death indeed your life depends: harvest and homage going hand in hand. Amber Lincoln explains further:
The way you treat animals matters at every stage: you offer a seal you have killed a drink of water, so that its soul will not be thirsty. Those animals, it is believed, will then go off and tell others how well they were treated. This shows us that in the Yup’ik hunting relationship, agency ultimately lies not with the hunters, but with the animals. They would consent to let themselves be taken by hunters who were respectful, who paid attention to their needs.
The Yup’ik people celebrating with sealskin drums in the depths of the Alaskan winter, c.1914
The thinking behind this practice, asserting a respectful, entirely equal partnership between animals and humans, where the animals have real agency, is almost impossible for a highly urbanized society to grasp. Most foreign to us is perhaps its assumption of such close inter-connectedness and mutual obligation. The duties of humans, however, go far beyond merely respecting the living, or tending the dying, animal: as Amber Lincoln describes, how its body is used after death will also have long consequences:
You take good care of their hide. You properly dispose of their bones. You use all parts of the animal because they are aware, even after you hunt them. Other animals have awareness, too, so this relationship is really reciprocal.
This parka is therefore much more than just a means of keeping out the cold and the rain. It is an expression also of that obligation to use every part of the seal’s body, not just because they are all useful, but as a mark of respect to the dead animal. In the British Museum, as well as the parka, are harpoons made of seal bone, drums of seal stomach, seal fur clothing and decorations playfully made out of seal whiskers. Of course, these are evidence of a frugal, resourceful society, but they are also a community’s way of acknowledging and honouring the gift of a life.
The bond between humans and animals is so intimate that they must be treated as far as possible on the understanding that they and we are in a real sense members of the same community. This view, Amber Lincoln explains, is mirrored in patterns of everyday behaviour, even in the conventions of courteous conversation:
I’ve been at Game Meetings, which is where Alaskan state agencies come together with hunters, to talk about how many animals can be harvested. Yup’ik people always remind the officials that the animals under discussion are paying attention to us, may be able to hear us. ‘Please, talk nicely. Don’t necessarily use their name. You don’t need to say “bear” ten times. You can use a different word.’
Their world view was and largely continues to be that animals, and indeed landscape features and plants, are aware. That’s how Yup’ik people describe it – we might use the word sentient. And this awareness includes the ability to respond to human thought and human action. So Yup’ik people try to think good thoughts, respectful thoughts, to one another and towards the world.
Every part of the seal’s body is used, to make harpoons, drums and boots.
The notion that our relationship with the natural world is essentially reciprocal, that it constantly requires balancing gestures from the human side, Amber Lincoln elaborates, finds expression in every part of Yup’ik life:
Massive amounts of driftwood float down the rivers, and people in western Alaska traditionally benefited greatly from it. It was a huge resource. Even today they collect it. There are very specific, distinct kinds of driftwood that were used for house building, for boats, for mask making, for all the different parts of their material culture. There is a sense that this gift of wood should be used only for its proper purposes – the purpose for which it was given. So if, for example, instead of using the wooden masks that they make, Yup’ik decide to sell them, then they will burn an equivalent, balancing amount of wood.
There is of course no text that sets out the Yup’ik view of the place of humans in the cosmos. But their habits of belief and behaviour tell not of dominion but of a constant dialogue between living things that goes beyond any individual life.
In a world used to industrial farming and battery hens, we may struggle with the concept that sustaining a proper balance in our relationship with nature demands not just respect, but reciprocity too. Yet it is an idea that is central to agricultural as well as hunting societies, and it lies at the heart of many of the religious practices of ancient Egypt. The Alaskan rivers brought much-needed wood, but the Nile was the precondition of almost the entire food supply. And here too, as among the Yup’ik people, mutuality and ritual were necessary to keep the cosmic scheme in balance.
For the people of ancient Egypt, living in a region with some of the lowest rainfall in the world, the Nile was an essential source of life. Each year, monsoon rains falling to the far south, on to the highlands of what is now Ethiopia, raised the water levels of the river. A much-needed flood would follow, peaking between July and September. At this point – in the words of an ancient Egyptian text – ‘the fields laugh…the god’s offering descends, the visage of the people is bright’.
‘The fields laugh’: barley ripening on an Egyptian painted limestone relief, c.1340 BCE.
‘The gods’ offering descends’: harvest after the Nile flood. Egyptian tomb painting, c.1250 BCE
‘The god’s offering’ was the exceptionally fertile black silt left behind by the receding waters, in which farmers could plant their crops. The kingdom of Egypt was so reliant for survival on this seasonal flood that it emerged around 3000 BCE as an almost entirely linear state ranged along the great river and its banks. Yet things could easily go wrong. Settlements and precious land were sometimes destroyed when the waters ran too high. And when they did not run high enough, there was famine. In the Hebrew scriptures, Joseph proves his worth to Pharaoh by storing surpluses in the seven fat years so that Egypt can survive the seven lean years which follow them. Everything hinged on the proper balance of nature.
This dependence was so profound that it went beyond being a matter of life or death. It became a matter of life and death: and the god represented in a small brown figure now in the British Museum played the key role in ensuring that the proper balance was maintained. But, unusually for a god, he did not ‘preside’ over that process: he was caught up in it himself. He too lived and died. John Taylor is the British Museum’s curator of Egyptian funerary artefacts:
Made between 700 and 300 BCE, this little statuette, is about thirty centimetres high. It represents a mummified human figure. The head, made of beeswax, has gilded lines accentuating the eyebrows above full, oval eyes; but the body is completely shrouded in linen wrappings, so you can’t see the limbs. You can, however, see that he has a prominent erect penis, bulging forwards at the front; and he is wearing a crown.
This is an image of Osiris, a king and a god, who died, was mummified and came back to life. The erect penis is to show that he is fertile, capable even after death of producing new life.
Corn mummy figure of Osiris, c.700–300 BCE
According to Egyptian mythology, Osiris was in the distant past a particularly beneficial king, who taught the Egyptians agriculture, gave them laws and civilized them. But his jealous brother killed him, and Osiris’s body was cut into pieces and scattered throughout Egypt.
His wife, Isis, collected the pieces together and had him reconstituted as a physical being and mummified. He was then brought back to life but continued as the ruler of the underworld, the kingdom of the dead. The core of the Osiris myth is the idea of a god who embodies the whole of Egypt, who dies and returns to life, and so gives to everybody the hope of new life.
That mystical idea is given powerful physical expression in our little statue. For if we could unwrap these dry, cracked bandages, we would find underneath not just more earth and beeswax. We would find something else entirely: corn, ready to germinate inside this body from seeds planted within it. This single small figure holds in it the image of death and the sprouting of new life. Figures like this one were at the centre of a great celebration held in Egypt every year during the fourth month of the flood, as the waters were falling back, exposing the fertile silt below which would soon be planted, as John Taylor goes on to describe:
The purpose of little figures like this one is to provide hope for the future, that the crops will grow and that life will continue. They are made for the festival of Khoiak, a name derived from the apt Egyptian term ka-her-ka, ‘sustenance upon sustenance’, just before the new season’s planting began. The priests gather grain seeds from the riverbank, mix them with earth, beeswax and other ingredients, and mould them into a mummy-shaped figure of Osiris like this one: which is why they are known as corn mummies.
These small figures then pass through a number of rituals and are carried in ceremonial processions, witnessed by large numbers of people. Eventually they are brought to a sacred place, where they are stored safely and kept throughout the year, until the next Khoiak festival. At that point the process is repeated. The old corn mummy is buried with fitting ceremony, a new figure is made to replace it, new seeds placed inside it, and the cycle continues.
The purpose of this festival is to ensure that this fertilization of the land and the production of food will continue in perpetuity. And part of that ritual involves making these special images of Osiris: within the body of the god you plant the kernel from which will spring new crops and new life.
An Osiris-shaped mould in which seeds were planted in an Egyptian tomb.
A wall painting showing Osiris, ruler of the Egyptian underworld, in splendour.
This was an all-encompassing celebration, then, of the seasonal cycle. Osiris lives, dies and lives again. The fertility of the land returns so that Egypt can eat, and Egypt itself is renewed.
It might be tempting to look at a figure like the corn mummy of Osiris, and the rituals that went with it, and imagine a people hoping to twist nature’s arm. But that would not be quite right. We would be getting trapped, I think, in our own modern Western conception of nature: that it is outside us, and that it should somehow be made to conform to our desires. Rather, it seems to many scholars that we are dealing here with a seasonal ritual that is not so much about humans exerting power over gods or nature, but working with them, playing their allotted part to help keep the system in balance and functioning as it ought: collaboration rather than manipulation. John Taylor describes this interaction:
In all aspects of ancient Egyptian life and religion, there was an awareness of a greater power, something beyond ordinary human agency. Egyptians clearly believed that they had to interact with this power so that the world as they knew it could continue and life could go on. Because his dismembered corpse had been distributed throughout the country, the body of Osiris is seen as a metaphor for the whole of Egypt. The cycle of his life is linked very closely to that of the Egyptian year, and is firmly integrated into the daily routines of the people. Only thus can the divine power of the gods bring new life.
These complex ideas and rituals, meticulously detailed in texts, are profoundly political. The link between them and the continued existence of the Egyptian state itself is apparent from the placing in royal tombs – Tutankhamun’s among them – of a wooden mould in the shape of Osiris. Within it was earth with barley seeds. In the darkness of the tomb lay the promise of new crops and new life for both king and people.
The parka and the corn mummy appear to come from thought-worlds far removed from each other, and even more remote from our own. Osiris is for most people today a god irrecoverably dead, his reconstitution and resurrection as alien an idea as the soul of a seal journeying in its bladder to speak to its fellows. But both Alaskan and Egyptian societies, in very different circumstances, evolved narratives to acknowledge with humility their dependence on the natural world. In consequence, both could devise actions to engage the whole community in husbanding it. Most of the modern world is now struggling to do either.