Psychopomps

It seems that every culture shares a figure who "tricks" and transgresses rules even if at the same time he is a "Cultural Hero". Based on a classification of some basic characteristics common to all "tricksters", and despite the fact that contradiction and ambiguity are fundamental to their identity, this paper deals with the traces of the trickster in several Medieval Literature characters as Loki, Renart, Tristan, Merlin, Robin Hood and the anonymous mischievous deceivers of fabliaux and nouvelles.

Il semblerait que toutes les cultures ont en commun un personnage qui transgresse les lois sociales et abuse ses semblables, même s'il peut, à la fois, représenter un héros civilisateur. Malgré les contradictions et ambiguïtés qui déterminent la figure du trickster ou joueur des tours mythique, on partira d'une classification des composantes fondamentales de son identité pour examiner ses traces chez plusieurs personnages de la littérature médiévale tels que Loki, Renart, Tristan, Merlin et Robin Hood, ainsi que chez les mystificateurs anonymes des courts récits.

This began as a Supplementary Table to Harrod (2022), Portable Art Sculptures from the Anzick Clovis Cache, Wilsall, Montana. I did it to provide a Siberian/East Asian and North American comparative mythology context to identify Anzick Clovis cache (13,000 years ago) portable art, and identify possible depictions of Siberian/East Asian and North American Afterlife Beliefs, Mortuary Rituals and Psychopomp Motifs, especially involving Milky Way, Path of Souls of Deceased, Bird, Dog, Coyote or Wolf, and Reincarnation. Especially since this Version 2 is 177 pages long, I decided best to upload this separately from my Anzick article, to stand independently, pertaining to global comparative mythology on these beliefs and their symbolism.

Très tôt dans l’histoire humaine, les animaux, et singulièrement le chien, ont fait office de compagnon symbolique de l’homme dans sa mort. Malgré les recouvrements culturels, la fonction psychopompe des canidés semble s’être maintenue jusqu’en plein XXe siècle. Cet enracinement mythologique profond se retrouverait au cœur d’une célèbre affaire tranchée par le Conseil d’État en 1963, dans laquelle la juridiction suprême a interdit aux propriétaires d’un chien nommé Félix qu’il soit inhumé dans un cimetière communal. Pour autant, certains commentateurs ont très tôt douté de la portée véritable des textes invoqués par le juge administratif pour fonder sa décision de rejet. Il semble davantage qu’une motivation d’ordre moral, voire religieux, a orienté la décision du juge, dissimulé derrière un fragile voile juridique. Le problème de l’inhumation d’un chien dans un cimetière se serait donc heurté à un tabou religieux, en partie maintenu dans une société sécularisée. Il est possible de voir dans l’affaire Blois la question implicitement posée de l’angoisse de la mort et, avec elle, celle de l’artifice primitif permettant de l’outrepasser et qui attribue aux canidés la qualité d’animal psychopompe. Il est très remarquable que les Écritures et l’art chrétien rappellent sans cesse cette fonction psychopompe. Cela contrarierait dès lors le principe d’un interdit religieux d’origine et donc de l’empêchement d’inhumer dans le cimetière des hommes.

R. A. Lytvynenko. Ungulate’s Hide in the Bronze Age Kurgans: Sacrifice or Psychopomp.
Among the features of the burial rite of many Bronze Age kurgan cultures in Eastern Europe, there is one interesting common feature, when the deceased is accompanied by the ritual remains of hoofed animals, which are archaeologically recorded in the form of skulls and the lower parts of the limbs. Following M. P. Gryaznov (1977), the term “animal’s hide” or “stuffed animal” was assigned to these ritual objects, which were placed in burials to substitute the whole animals by the pars pro toto principle.
In the Early Bronze Age, the main area of the use of ritual animals in the funerary ritual was the Lower Kuban region, where from a quarter to a third of the burials of the Novotitorovskaya and East-Azov Catacomb Grave cultures were accompanied by hides of small cattle. During the Middle Bronze Age, this burial practice significantly expanded its range and is found in all catacomb cultures of the Don basin and the steppe Ciscaucasia, with its greatest manifestation in the Seversky Donets basin. In the post-Catacomb period, the tradition of using of animal hides and stuffed animals in the funerary rite was preserved only in the Dnieper-Don Babino Culture. In the Late Bronze Age, this practice was unevenly represented in the Srubnaya cultural region, most massively in the Dnieper-Don region.
Archaeological contexts, together with ethnographic, folklore and mythological analogies, allow us to interpret the ritual remains of ungulates as the animal–psychopomp that accompanied the soul of the deceased to the afterlife.
Keywords: South of Eastern Europe, Bronze Age, Yamnaya Cultural Area, Catacomb Cultural Area, Babino Cultural Circle, Srubnaya Cultural Area, funerary rite, animal hide, stuffed animal, psychopomp.

Death and what happens to the soul when our bodies fail has enthralled humanity across the ages. No less so for the Etruscans. Vanth, a female daimon who acts as a psychopomp, is one of the most commonly represented chthonic figures in Etruscan funerary art. However, despite this proliferation, she is only named by inscription seven times. Complicating things further is the wide variety of her iconography amongst these seven examples. A close iconographic analysis of the seven epigraphic Vanths proved little cohesion in Vanth's iconography if only this small sample is considered. It also revealed that relying solely on the epigraphic Vanths for frequency analysis leads to unusual attributes such a nude Vanths being weighed far more heavily than they should when compared to a larger sample. In this study, a corpus of 100 Vanth samples drawn from open access online collections were compiled into a database and examined using exploratory data analysis. The results showed distinct trends in Vanth's iconography over the 5th to 2nd centuries BCE. They also showed a lack of trends along a north-south axis of the geographical locations of the seven Etruscan cities studied, implying that the expansion of the Roman Republic during the same period had little effect on changes in Vanth's iconography. There are, however, localized phenomena that occur and have been documented in this study. Examining the trends by object type revealed minor variations in her iconography and peculiarities specific to certain object types. A secondary result of this thesis was the discovery of an element of Hellenic bias, with Vanth sometimes being misidentified in online museum collections as figures such as Lasa or the Greek Erinyes. She might also be given insipid descriptive labels or simply referred to as a 'winged demon'. This incorrect or obscure attribution creates a vicious circle whereby scholars searching for Vanth cannot find her because she is inaccurately labelled in the extant metadata of these collections. The Vanth database created to facilitate this study is open access and will serve as a resource by which scholars and museum curators can secure a more reliable identification of Vanth in the future.

The first task was to gather what can be called opera. Quite a few vocal works are not classified in that genre because they are considered as oratorios as if an oratorio was not an opera (a musical work entirely sung generally in two tones, prosodic and psalmodic). That goes back to the Old Testament which is divided in its accompanying music, written in the margins, in these two tones. It is of course present in any oratorio, starting in the 13th century in Beauvais Cathedral with Ludus Danielis.

The opera is only the transfer of this religious musical genre into the secular field. The opera is nothing but a secular oratorio. And can we see a musical difference between operas and oratorios in Handel and are Bach’s Passions oratorios or operas? Some purist will tell you the opera was invented in Italy, etc. Purity leads to closure. This geographic definition of the opera was introduced in a time when we did not know the musical accompaniment of the Old Testament probably codified by the music school set up by King David. At that time too Ludus Danielis was unknown and Italy was torn apart by two styles, one favored by the Roman Popes and remaining very narrowly religious and traditional, and another secular and bound to flourish in the Italian opera houses that were still to be invented and built in the 16th-17th centuries when that artistic quarrel between the Church and society was starting to rage with Monteverdi.

Anyway it does not apply to Benjamin Britten for the simple reason that he does not differentiate the recitative from the arias. The music is the same in tone and style from beginning to end. Then the difference between operas and oratorios, if there is one, is purely because of the religious dimension of oratorios. That is light and semantic.

You will hereafter find my notes on the 21 works I classify in this field, in chronological order, some small, some big, some famous, some less well-known, but all in a distinctive musical style that is unique and yet that is also very closely articulated on the music of the 20th century. Benjamin Britten knew his classics, even the modern classics of his time, and borrowing or imitating are fundamental: he is able to use the style of anyone and turns it into his own style that is first of all transformative.

« Au Japon, des coussins comme partenaires sexuels », The Conversation, June 22, 2017. https://theconversation.com/au-japon-des-coussins-comme-partenaires-sexuels-79367.
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“In Japan, pillows can be a sex partner”, The Conversation, July 4, 2017. Translation in English by Alice Heathwood. https://theconversation.com/in-japan-pillows-can-be-a-sex-partner-79985
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The Japanese market of sex toys for men is an impressive array of human substitutes, most of which either appear to be sleepy or sleeping. Fully 30% to 50% of online catalogues feature such offerings, and new products are being released at a dizzying rate. Browsing the sites, it's notable how many Japanese sex toys play on the notion of unconsciousness. Eyes closed, cut off from the real world by sleep, these dolls invite their human companions to follow them into a fantasy dreamworld.
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(This article was made out of a 20 mn lecture, at quai Branly museum, to celebrate the release of the “Terrain“ issue n°67 that I coordinated with Emmanuel Grimaud and Anne-Christine Taylor, in June 2017).

Archaeological region Xingó in the city of Canindé Sao Francisco, Sergipe, Brazil, is located one of the greatest exponents of data on existing preterit cultures in the Northeast. This work includes two skeletons, whose graves were shown to indicate a possible practice called psychopomp, a term used to denote a being as guide of souls. In the case of Xingó skeletons 119 and 166 animals were associated in their graves. The research exposes another point at which the storage area is used more broadly it is the application of a polymer used in the maintenance and repair materials for further research. The product cited received the name ParaloidB-72.

Il existe au Japon des jouets sexuels « déguisés » en matelas gonflables, en édredons et en appuis-tête, offrant aux utilisateurs la possibilité de « dormir avec » leur couchage. Ces objets font partie d’un vaste continuum regroupant les ersatz de corps humains – duplicatas d’organes et poupées – qui sont eux-mêmes souvent désignés à l’aide de mots comme « oreillers » ou « coussins ». Comment comprendre cette stratégie visant à confondre anatomie et literie ? Partant du principe que ces objets sont révélateurs du rapport que la société entretient avec la jouissance, cette étude se donne pour but d’analyser la façon dont les oreillers (« sexuels » ou pas) sont utilisés au Japon : comme instruments d’invocation et comme objets psychopompes.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    ........................................................................................................................................  USING PILLOW AS A PARTNER. IS IT PLEASURE OR JUST A DREAM?  In Japan, some sextoys are “disguised” as inflatable mattress, quilts or headrests, allowing their users to “sleep with” their bedding. These objects are part of a vast continuum including the human body substitutes – organs’ duplicates and dolls – which are themselves often referred to as “pillows” or “cushions”. How can we understand this strategy to blur the boundaries between human anatomy and bed linen? Assuming that such objects are indicative of society and its relationship with pleasure, this paper describes the way pillows (whether sexual or not) are used in Japan : as invocation tool and psychopomp apparatus.