Savages

The notion of the 'savage in all of us' is an ancient one, finding a place in European thought all the way from Plato to Conrad and beyond. Consider Montaigne's essay on cannibals, in which he says that the civilized Frenchmen of his generation during the Wars of Religion are more savage and more cannibal than all the warrior tribes of Brazil:

I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine...than in roasting and eating him after he is dead.

As for the dangers and paradoxes in the mission of imperial civilization one could do no better than heed the words of the eponymous hero of "Gulliver's Travels";

A crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not wither; at length a boy discovers land from the top-mast; they go on shore to rob and plunder; they see a harmless people, they are entertained with kindness, they give the country a new name, they take formal possession of it for the king, they set up a rotten plank or a stone for a memorial, they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more by force for a sample, return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new Dominion acquired with a title of Divine Right. Ships are sent out at the first opportunity; the natives driven out and destroyed, their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free licence given to all acts of inhumanity and lust; the Earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: And this execrable crew of butchers employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people.

Who exactly, one has to ask, are the Yahoos and who are the Houyhnhnms? And is the savage no more than a response to savagery? Yes, the Yahoos are Swift's satire on a depraved humanity. But what of the Houyhnhmns who, in the midst of their wisdom and cultivation, discuss the possibility that the Yahoos should 'be exterminated from the face of the Earth’?

Yes, there are lots of questions and no easy answers.

Masked Balls

Masked balls? I simply love masked balls, both exciting and dangerous! They were certainly a great favourite in the eighteenth century, precisely because of the challenge they offered to the accepted conventions of the day. Their popularity was even the occasion for a minor 'moral panic', with The Spectator announcing in an issue of 1711 that "Fishes are caught with Hooks, Birds are ensnared with Nets, but Virgins with Masquerades." So, there you have it!

They only really began to catch on in England in the early 1700s, in imitation of the Italian fashion. The earliest were in fact advertised as 'in the Venetian manner.' The first large-scale public masquerade was that organised by James Heidegger in London's Haymarket in 1708. From that point forward they became the new fashion. In 1717 Alexander Pope wrote a letter to a female acquaintance, which serves to sum up just how central a part the season they had become, "For news in London, I'll sum up in short; we have masquerades at the theatre in the Haymarket, of Mr Heideeker's institution." These events allowed for otherwise unacceptable degrees of familiarity between the classes, from the highest to the lowest, as we know from the correspondence of Horace Walpole-"On Monday there was a subscription masquerade. The King was well disguised in an old fashioned English habit, and much pleased with somebody who desired him to hold their cup as they were drinking tea." Dear old Georgie was so fond of these events that he even appointed Heidegger Master of Revels in 1728.

As for the element of sexual release, well consider this from an issue of The Town and Country Magazine in 1770, describing an event at Carlisle House. A young woman was in attendance, "Wearing a double mask, one side a decrepit old woman, the other a young girl; the mask curtsied both ways, so that it was for some time difficult to discover which was the real front; on being asked by a Domino whether he should take her before or behind, the mask replied, which way you please sir, for it will come to the same thing in the end." In general, it was a moment of liberation for woman, allowing them not just to shed the conventions of the day, but also some of the accepted forms of clothing, corsets most notably. One maid of honour to the Queen attended an event dressed as Iphigenia, causing Walpole to observe that "Miss Chudleigh was Iphigenia but so naked she could have been taken for Andromeda."

Given all of this, it is hardly surprising that such events were so popular. The real question is surely why did they decline? :-)

Civilization and Death, exploring the Halls of Montezuma

I’m sure that the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City must count among the best museums in the world; it’s certainly one of the best I’ve ever been to, with an absolutely wonderful collection of Mesoamerican artefacts, many from the time of the Aztec Empire. It’s where I first saw the teocalli, a votive sculpture cared at the beginning of the sixteenth century to mark the end of the 52-year calendar cycle, and bearing the image of Montezuma II. Well, now it’s in London, the centrepiece of a new exhibition at the British Museum, focusing on Montezuma himself as well as some of the wider aspects of the culture of the Mexica-the term the Aztecs used for themselves-and the final clash of empires that followed from the arrival of Cortés.

The Aztecs, as most people known, certainly people who have seen Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, built a city that floated on water and a civilization that floated on blood. War and religion were closely united, in that campaigns were essentially pursued against their neighbours with the aim of taking captives who were then fed to the blood-thirsty gods, though this aspect is rather down-played in the exhibition itself. Though not generally understood this was the key to their downfall, not the fact that Cortés’s tiny force had firearms and horses. No, he had allies, Indian allies, enemies of the Aztecs.

So, given that the Aztec civilization was at heart a cult of death Boris Johnson, my favourite mayor in all the world, took to the pages of Monday’s Daily Telegraph to argue that their taste for killing presents a powerful case for colonialism and the intervention in the Americas of the oh-so benevolent Conquistadors (When one civilization deserves a bloody nose from another). Human sacrifice as practiced by the Aztecs was indeed horrible, a process by which the living heart was cut from the body by razor sharp obsidian blades; it certainly horrified the Spanish.

And yet, Boris, and yet. I wonder what an Aztec party coming to Spain would have made of the procedures of the Inquisition; what they would have made of the auto de fé, when living victims were cast to the flames in the name of another God, not a god of war, not a god who needed blood to rise in the morning, but a god of peace and love? Would they have been equally horrified? Yes, probably, because I imagine they would have been unable to work out why this was happening. There again, they may have sympathised with the ‘religious’ sacrifice of the Spanish in the way that the Spanish did not, could not, sympathise with theirs.

Boris, I know, is a Classical scholar and an admirer of the Roman Empire. So, let me take my imaginary Aztec travellers back in time to the days of the Caesars. What would they see? Why, yet another death cult, with ‘sacrifices’ across the Empire not for the benefit of the gods but for the passions of the mob. Now if our Aztecs were as technologically advanced in relative terms as the Spanish, if they came to Rome in the way that Cortés came to Tenochtitlan, if they had been as thoroughly destructive as the Spanish, we may never have heard of Virgil, of Livy, of Horace, of Cicero or of Seneca, as one imperial power built itself on the sands of another.

But I realise that this is all great fun, and that the dear mayor is writing partially tongue-in-cheek. What he and I can both agree on is that this is a super exhibition, worth going to see, and even worth the entirely voluntary sacrifice of a fiver. :-))