Daniel Allen Zachary
University of South Wales
12 February 2013
This past month, a fragment of a medieval text making reference to the story of Narcissus and Echo was discovered among a forgotten box that had belonged to the collection of Catherine, Countess of Caithness at the Castle of Mey in Caithness, Scotland. Lady Caithness, a world traveler who spent much of her time in Paris, left only a smattering of documents and artifacts at her second husband’s ancestral home and this may be why this particular box has gone unnoticed until the present moment. The fact that she should have come to possess such a fragment aligns well with her documented persona. Lady Caithness was a sometime friend of Helena Blavatsky and wrote a spirited apologetic for the spiritualist movement in which she attempted to reconcile mediumship with both science and mainstream Christianity.
The text appears to be a segment of dialogue from a stage play. In the fragment, the mountain nymph Echo begs her would-be paramour Narcissus to see beyond his reflection in the surface of the water and gaze upon the dark waters beneath. Counter to Ovid’s version of the tale, Narcissus seems to heed to her call and drops into the pool. It’s unclear how such a stage effect would have been achieved or whether it was even attempted. It may be that this moment was achieved in some non-mimetic fashion or that the actor was able to perform a style of action unknown to us today. A further note, unheard of in extant versions of ancient Greek drama, indicates that at this point in the performance the audience should attune themselves to the voices of the shadows.
Given its classical subject matter, we can surmise that the text was likely of late medieval provenance. There is good reason to suspect that this fragment is a translation from an ancient source. While it is possible the original Greek or Latin text found its way into the hands of the medieval Scotch cleric, it is more likely that the scribe was translating a translation either in Arabic or perhaps German. I admit that the fact that there is no evidence of any of the other links in this chain—however many there may be—throws some doubt on the idea that this document is a translation of an earlier source; however, its correspondence with another late medieval writer’s work begs for further analysis.
The fragment appears to be further evidence of the mystery cult written about by a fourteenth-century writer I call pseudo Abertus Magnus (PAM) in my forthcoming dissertation. Drawing on documents no longer extant and writing in a series of short cryptograms, PAM posits the existence of an ancient Greek mystery cult circa 200 BCE. According to PAM, the cult would gather in the amphitheatre, likely the Theatre Dionysia in Athens. Lower-ranking members of the hierarchy would go up onto the stage and shout monologues (or perhaps as the Caithness document suggests dialogue) while the other members listened for echoes in the seats of the ampitheatre. The longest-serving members sat the furthest from the stage and are supposed to have had the most clear encounter with what PAM referred to as █████ ███████. PAM labeled the shadows “█████████ ██████,” interpreting them as independent entities somehow conjured into being by the cult’s exercises.
In 1877, a short pamphlet by Z. A. Duffy hinted at a revival or perhaps continuation of this practice in the form of what he called whispering séances. Paraphrasing a Mr. MacFarland, Duffy expressed the opinion that the whispers may be the product of a fractured consciousness. He attributed belief in something like PAM’s whispering demon to Slavic tradition. According to Duffy’s MacFarland, the Slavs used the term “█████” to describe these creatures. In my dissertation, I argue that “█████” is actually a mangled transliteration of the Swedish ███████ or ███████ ███████. Oddly, Duffy titles his pamphlet “█████ or ███████ ██████,” but, to my mind this is evidence of nothing more than a happy coincidence. Duffy appears to have no knowledge of the Swedish language or Swedish culture beyond what is passed to him by Mr. MacFarland—whose full name and biography I have yet to fully trace in any meaningful way.
Situated within the larger tradition of the ████, the ██████ are described as beautiful, blonde, and female. According to Slavic tradition, the ████ were supposed to have wandered the forests and streams and skies at night making terrible noises on pipes and drums. To call on the ████ is to court death, but the ████ will also arrive on their own accord, particularly to assist the warrior in battle. The ███████ tradition seems to have come out of these primary traits of the Slavic fairy.
On the principle that the fairies have a second aspect or perhaps exist in a second separate class of beings, the ███████ make a quiet, almost indiscernible sound in contrast to the standard ████’s loud trumpeting and banging. They cannot be called but they can be invited by the shaman using a special invocation that vacillates between a loud scream and a whisper. These seemingly intentional departures from the standard depiction of the Slavic fairy introduce an indeterminacy into the folklore surrounding the ██████. The echo fairy runs against the tradition, existing apart in its own space, rendering it inherently uncertain even for those who wish to invoke it. In other words, the ███████ bears the marks of a cultural invention in ways that the ████ and its various other iterations do not. And so, its interlocutors must either overcome or embrace the spirit’s constructedness as a factor of its being.
This resonates with PAM’s description of the ██████████ █████—a mysterious entity conjured by a mystery sect that even PAM cannot name. Mr. Duffy’s █████ also stands apart from the society in which it surfaces. As far as I have been able to gather, Duffy’s pamphlet is the only reference to any such creature in the English-speaking world apart from the Echo and Narcissus fragment. The rarity and obscurity of these references might lead the community of scholars to turn a blind eye to these phenomena on the grounds that there is simply not enough evidence to say one way or the other if such practices existed. But, as Charles Fort warns the would-be scientist, we ignore anomalies at our own peril. A paradigm is only as good as the phenomena it is capable of embracing and only as weak as the phenomena it chooses to exclude.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Caithness, Catherine (1876), Old Truths in a New Light, London: Chapman and Hall.
Duffy, Z. A. (1877), “█████ or ███████ Spirits,” Trenton: Z. A. Duffy.
Keys, David. “Ancient manuscript sheds new light on an enduring myth”, BBC History Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 5 (May 2004).
Magnus, Albertus (1967), Book of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wykoff, Oxford: Clarendon.
Norbert Reiter (1973), “Mythologie der alten Slaven”, in Hans Wilhelm Haussig (ed.), Wörterbuch der Mythologie.
The Veoka Archive 