A Natural History of Monstrous Nonsense (part 3):

Landscapes of Banishment

Nick Jones

Bournemouth and Poole College Bournemouth

Dorset BH1 3JJ jonesn@bpc.ac.uk

www.thecollege.co.uk

Abstract:

The banishment dialectic that arises from inequalities of social power is written upon landscapes and changes according to the circumstances of authorship. Diverse evidence is examined from Greek heroes to monster- conjuring Rabbis and the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz to Aldous Huxley’s mescaline experiments. It is concluded that mythological narrative adapts to mediate social inequalities that serve the interests of those who control its modes of production and distribution – the systems and structures that regulate meme change and flow.

Keywords: Alexander, banishment, dialectic, social power, nonsense, landscape, mythology, meme.

1.0: Introduction

There have been 5 mass extinction events during the Earth’s natural history. These are as follows:

i) Ordovician-Silurian (445-400 million

years ago)

ii) Late Devonian (375-359 million years

ago)

iii) Permian (252 million years ago)

iv) Triassic-Jurassic (201 million years

ago)

v) Cretaceous-Tertiary (66 million years

ago)

It is generally accepted that in the last four mass extinction events between 80-90% of existing species became extinct. After each event the natural world gradually recovered with new environmental conditions favouring the emergence of new species. Without the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction event that corresponded with the decline of the dinosaurs and the ‘mammalian explosion’ that followed, it is

unlikely that humans would have emerged as a species.

Despite mass extinction events erasing much of the natural world, life reasserts itself on the smudged pages of the Earth’s environment. Paleontologists use those smudges to reconstruct the chronology of past events so that the human race can know or at least infer how it came to be and the jeopardy ahead that is inescapable.

A problem for humans is how best to comprehend and represent huge temporal and spatial horizons and the events that occur therein. Chronologies and maps are useful methods of representing what is otherwise incomprehensible but these come at a cost. The cost is authorship, as it is the author or/and the author’s patron who together promulgate mythologies and bias (intentionally or not) coalescing with that which is real.

Orwell famously penned in his novel 1984; ‘All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.’ [1]. It warns the reader that the past may be represented to serve the interests of an authority that holds dominant social power. Manufactured fictitious events can be planted in the past and used to satisfy the need for justifying further control measures, entitlements, prestige and to validate emergent ideology. The first stage in that process is the deletion of historical and cultural memory which equates to a mass extinction event.

The act of ‘scraping clean’ can be applied to any media, be it the paper page or the landscape and once the prior symbolism has been erased a new symbolism and new meaning can be authored, presented, legitimised and in the concluding stage, reproduced.

2.0: Investigating Banishment and Landscape (Methodology):

A prerequisite for the act of banishment requires that an inequality of social power exists: master and slave, patron and patronised, ruler and ruled. The physical heterogeneity of landscape and the semiotic meaning that its symbolism connotes may be successfully utilised to reinforce that division of social power.

This paper sets out to examine that banishment dialectic using a broad array of sources. The methodology deployed to provide such an examination will be heterodox as this approach has the advantage of enabling the author to switch between the Western mythological canon and de facto accounts of modern banishment. Moreover, the conflation in the writing of Greek, Roman and Renaissance natural historians between fantastic creatures, real creatures and moral purpose will further attend to the question of how it is that landscapes mirror patterns of social power.

3.0: Alexander’s Quest to the End of the World and the Caspian Gates:

The Hereford mappa mundi (13th century) shows a gate in the north

1 near Scythia. This gate is

referred to as the Caspian Gate or Alexander’s Gate and it exists upon the map because during the 13th century The Greek Alexander Romances were popular tales in which the Macedonian leader, who lived 1500 years earlier was reinvented and mythologised.

Figure 1: Hereford mappa mundi (1285): Alexander’s Gate is located as position 5. [2]

1 The Hereford mappa mundi follows the T-O cartographic tradition where the north is located to the left side of the map, therefore what the reader may think is the west using modern cartographic convention should be read as the north.

To the medieval mind Alexander was not the son of Philip of Macedonia but of an Egyptian magician called Nectanebo who impregnated Alexander’s mother (Olympias) when disguised as the Libyan God Ammon. Later Alexander kills Nectanebo and defeats the Persian King Darius and others on his ascent to greatness but the following encounters described in Book II of The Greek Alexander Romances are of greatest interest in terms of mythology and quest:

“Then I took guides, intending to go deep into the desert, in the direction of the constellation of the Plough. They counselled against going that way because of the number of wild beasts that live in those regions. However, I took no notice of them and set-out. We soon came to a land full of ravines, where the way was narrow and precipitous……in this place we saw beasts of all kinds, all quite unfamiliar to us. After we had crossed it, we came to an even more desolate place. Here we found a great forest of trees called anaphanda, with a strange and unfamiliar fruit: they were like apples, but of the size of melons. There were also people in that wood, called Phytoi, who were 36 feet tall, their necks alone being 2 feet in length, and their feet an enormous size. I could not believe my eyes when I saw them, and gave orders to capture one; but when we charged them, shouting and blowing our trumpets, they ran away. We killed thirty-two of them, and they killed 100 of our soldiers. We spent some time there, eating fruit.” (Book II,

para. 32) [3].

Alexander continued upon his quest towards the edges of the civilised world and next encounters round wild men among other uncivilised creatures:

“Then we set out and came to a green country where there were wild men like giants, spherical in shape, with fiery expressions like lions. After them were another people, the Ochliate, who had no hair on their bodies, were six feet tall and as broad as a lance. When they saw us, they ran towards us. They were dressed in lions’ skins, very strong and ready to fight without weapons. We fought them, but they struck us with logs and killed a good many of us. I was afraid they might put our men to flight, and so I ordered fires to be lit in the forest. When these mighty men saw the fire, they ran away. But they had killed 180 soldiers.” (Book II, para. 33) [4].

Despite these perils the erstwhile Alexander continued and encountered beasts that resembled

lions with three eyes, fleas as big as frogs and a huge man covered in hair. Alexander attempted to pacify the creature with the gift of a naked woman but the creature eats the woman with gnashing teeth. The natives were disturbed by the noise of the devouring and barked like dogs but as they were afraid of fire could be easily encouraged to retreat.

Alexander’s army next encounter a river that contains trees that grow at sunrise but cease to grow on the sixth hour and shrink to miniature size on the seventh hour. The sap from the trees smell of Persian myrrh but when members of the army attempt to extract sap the men are whipped by invisible spirits. A voice emanates from the river commanding the soldiers to stop on penalty of being struck dumb.

The river contains black stones that cause anyone who touches one to turn black and the fish from the river cook in freezing cold water. Birds around the river are familiar to Alexander but when touched fire is discharged. It is at this point that Alexander’s army is accompanied by beasts with six feet and others with between 3 and 5 eyes and 15 feet in length. However, this is not a happy company and Alexander’s soldiers kill many of the beasts with bow and arrows.

Alexander further continued and encountered headless men who ate fish and mushrooms. While his advisors urged Alexander to return home, he refused because he is determined to reach the end of the world. After passing through desert, where the sky remains black, Alexander reaches the ocean and commands his army to construct boats and sail across to an island. As soldiers alight from the boats and swim to the island giant crabs appear and drag the unfortunates under the water to their death.

Alexander then descends into the ocean in a giant jar attached to a chain with a sealed hole in the bottom that once on the sea bed could be opened to allow the gathering of sediment. It is claimed that Alexander descends 464 feet and observed many splendid fish. After this episode, Alexander once more marched on to a land where the sun does not shine – the end of the world.

Two birds with human faces and conversant in Greek rebuke Alexander for his quest and tell him that the ‘Isles of the Blessed’ are not for him to trespass. He is instructed to return east to the former Kingdom of Porus. After a further 22 days of journeying Alexander returned into the light,

encamped and commissioned an arch to be erected over a ravine that stated: “If you want to get to the Land of the Blessed, keep to the right, or you will get lost.” (Book II, para. 41). [5].

An alternative account provides that the arch stated: “Alexander came here and erected an arch over which the whole army crossed; his intention was to reach the end of the Earth, if Providence approved his plan.” (‘γ’ recension,

Book II, para. 37) [6].

Alexander is then struck by a moment of empirical revelation and to verify that he had travelled near to the end of the world instructed his soldiers to capture two large white birds that fed on carrion such as dead horses. The two birds were starved for three days then a yoke tied to their necks and a bag made of ox-skin large enough for Alexander to climb into attached. Alexander then enters the bag holding two 10 foot spears with horse liver attached to the pointed end of each.

Using this mechanism, Alexander ascended until he encountered a human figure flying towards him. The figure entreated him to return to Earth, pointed down and advised that Alexander should descend towards the zone that looked like a threshing floor and not the snake as that is the ocean that surrounds the Earth, ergo, the threshing floor is land. Alexander then returned to Earth seven days journey away from his encampment. He was satisfied that he should travel on his quest to the end of the world no further.

Alexander’s journey illustrates the view that there is a locus of civilisation and the further away an individual moves the less civility that individual will encounter. Monsters, ungodly magical landscapes and perils await any hero who intends to explore distant uncivilised lands. Moreover, there is a Divine intolerance of Alexander’s determination to reach the end of the world. Even a hero must submit and be humble to the Christian Divine and foreigners from distant landscapes are effectively ungodly, unclean, dangerous and subordinate to the will of the civilised.

4.0: Alexander’s Account of the Unclean Nations:

The ‘γ’ recension of the The Greek Alexander Romances

2 describes in Book III that the leader of

2 This is a synthesis of two earlier versions (α and β) that dates to the 7th to 8th centuries AD.

the Belsyrians named Eurymithres plotted to attack Alexander but his army failed and fled. Eurymithres was caught but others were chased northwards for fifty days until two mountains were reached that separated the seen from the unseen world. The mountains were called the ‘Breasts of the North’.

Alexander prayed that the mountains should move towards each other and imprison the fleeing Belsyrians. The mountains came together having been originally 18 feet apart. A bronze gate was constructed between the narrows of the two mountains and these could not be dislodged by fire or iron and brambles were planted for a distance of 3000 miles in the open countryside providing a natural wall over and around the mountains.

The gates were named Caspian and additionally imprisoned 22 kings and their nations: Goth, Magoth, Anougeis, Aigeis, Exenach, Diphar, Photinaioi, Pharizaioi, Zarmatianoi, Chachonioi, Agrimardoi, Anouphagoi, Tharbioi, Alans, Physolonikaioi, Saltarioi and the rest

3. These

peoples ate snakes, flies, dogs, aborted foetuses, unformed human embryos and dead bodies. Alexander was concerned that they might return and pollute the world, so he shut them in and went on his way. This place is located on the Hereford mappa mundi (see Fig. 1).

5.0: Pollution - Matter out of Place:

Anthropologist Mary Douglas’ thesis titled: Purity and Danger – An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo provides a pivotal idea that is

encapsulated by the following quote:

“It may seem that in a culture which is richly organised by ideas of contagion and purification the individual is in the grip of iron-hard categories of thought which are heavily safeguarded by rules of avoidance and by punishments. It may seem impossible for such a person to shake his own thought free of the protected habit-grooves of his culture”. [7].

Gog and Magog (Goth and Magoth) connote the worst of pollutants and matter to be kept in a distant place. These unclean tribes are referenced in the Bible and Koran as well as The Greek Alexander Romances, Travels of Sir John Mandeville and the Travels of Marco Polo.

3 There is no further information naming the rest.

The geographical location of Gog and Magog was thought to be in the north; the tribes held behind Alexander’s Gate. The Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible does not designate a geographical location for Gog and Magog but prophesises:

“When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the Earth—Gog and Magog—and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore.”

[8].

In the Koran, Allah threatens to unleash the dam of Gog and Magog. Gog and Magog are peoples who are considered mischievous and have been imprisoned by an iron wall between two mountains by a king named Dhul-Qarnayn.

Gog and Magog are tribes that have a similar role in both Judeo-Christian and Islamic mythology – the unworthy, uncivilised, morally inferior archetype. These mythologies infer that in the next mass extinction event (the human extinction) it is these tribes that will be the instruments of destruction. This particular meme of nonsense no doubt served the social power interests of the pure and civilised priestly castes but influenced cartographers who were attempting to comprehend and represent huge spatial horizons based upon the best learning of their period.

It is argued that the mountains that imprisoned the unclean tribes described in The Greek Alexander Romances are most likely based upon Derbent in Russia which acts as a natural gate to the Caucasus. Derbent is an ancient city with archaeological structures over 5000 years old. The city developed between two walls which stretched from the mountains to the sea and were used as fortifications for over 1000 years.

Derbent’s natural landscape and human modification of its environment acted as a palimpsest upon which mythological accounts could be written. The unknown author/s of The Greek Alexander Romances rewrote the life of Alexander the Great and rewrote the history of Derbent. This monstrous nonsense served a political purpose:

1. Extraordinary leadership flows in royal blood.

2. There are civilised and uncivilised inhabitants

on Earth which is determined by place.

3. The Judeo-Christian Divine places limits even

upon heroes and their quests.

4. The uncivilised will inevitably pollute and

corrupt civilised space and must be banished.

5. The banished will try to destroy their civilised

persecutors.

The apocalyptic crescendo of Gog and Magog provides an effective narrative to control attitudes towards heterodoxy. This Judeo-Christian and Islamic mythology asserts the case for a hero who will subjugate the banished and put them back in a distant dirty space whereas the pure will reclaim their unpolluted space and enjoy their higher caste status. Alexander’s Gate on the Hereford mappa mundi identifies for the traveller the locale in which the actors of the apocalypse are to be found.

For mythology the ‘end of days’ equates to mass extinction. Earth science attests that mass extinctions are inevitable and it is no surprise that on a qualitative level that human cultures sense impermanence on a collective level and this reality has been used to exploit. The Greek Alexander Romances were written to legitimise inequality of social power which in turn was written upon a landscape and its cartographic representation.

6.0: Space, Power, Myth and Banishment:

As 13th and 14th century cartographers attempted to represent the world as a fact, so it must follow that mythologies of The Greek Alexander Romances were represented as fact. Identified upon maps are zones of banishment, contagious danger, monsters, darkness, impurity and terror in waiting. When such zones exist there must be an antithesis, a space for heroes, purity and reason.

Islands have been used in fact and fiction as places of escape but more frequently as landscapes of banishment. The physical detachment of islands from a mainland has rendered these spaces uncivilised and dangerous. As a metaphor islands are the refuge of the shipwrecked and the escapee, a place to hide or be imprisoned.

7.0: Islands of Banishment:

Islands have been much used in the service of banishment. Geographical isolation limits the risk of escape and liberation from external

intervention. Odysseus was imprisoned twice on islands in the Homeric epic. The nymph Calypso keeps Odysseus on an island named Ogygia for seven years until the Goddess Athena intervenes and sends Hermes to deliver a message to Calypso to release him which she feels compelled to do.

Odysseus later finds himself under the gaze of Circe who had been banished by her father to the island of Aeaea for murdering her husband Prince Colchis. Circe turns Odysseus’s men into pigs but again Hermes intercedes and advises Odysseus to eat an herb named moly to protect him from Circe’s drug induced enchantment. After Odysseus overwhelms Circe and she reverses her magic, Odysseus remains on the island for one year before journeying further to Hades to meet the blind prophet Tiresias.

Odysseus’ difficulty in returning to Ithaca after the Trojan War is because he forgot to thank the gods for his victory and the god Poseidon took against him. Odysseus saw himself as more than a mere mortal in the universe and in forgetting his place in the cosmological order was banished to an island. His escape was only secured due to the intervention of Athena and her messenger Hermes.

In contrast to myth, Gyaros, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea was famed for being an island of exile during the early Roman Empire. The Emperor Tiberius took pity on an official named Silanus who had been accused of treason and decided not to send him to Gyaros because of its inhospitable environment. Instead, Silanus was banished to Amorgos another Greek island but Gyaros nearly 2000 years later made a return as a landscape of banishment.

During the 20th century many thousands of men were imprisoned on Gyaros for membership of the Greek Liberation Front (Ethniko Apeleftherotiko Metopo) during World War II. Further banishment and imprisonment took place against dissidents opposing the Greek military junta that ruled Greece (1967-74).

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn uses the metaphor of an archipelago to describe the spatial relationship between gulags

4, which were forced labour camps

4 Gulag - Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei (Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps)

situated across Russia under the rule of Joseph Stalin (who held office from 1922-52). The first concentration camps were created after the Russian revolution (1917) with the number flourishing during Stalin’s reign. [9].

The largest camps emerged in the most geographically and climatologically extreme locations within Russia (e.g. Arctic North and East Siberia). Some inmates had been sentenced to hard labour because of their political views. Mocking Communist party officials carried a sentence of 25 years and turning up to work late on three occasions carried a 3 year sentence. After Stalin the role of gulags diminished considerably but many still existed up until the Gorbachev era (1980s).

Alcatraz Island located in San Francisco Bay was used as a prison (1850-1963) by the United States (US). No inmate successfully escaped this banishment despite many attempts to do so. It was eventually closed due to financial reasons but controversy continued. Indigenous Indian tribes from the California region claimed from oral history that tribal members who had broken a taboo would have been banished to the island. Therefore, in 1895 when the US imprisoned 19 Moqui Hopi Indians on Alcatraz this had an additional layer of significance for the local indigenous tribes.

A Mohawk Indian (Richard Oakes) and Indian supporters chartered a boat called the Monte Cristo and occupied Alcatraz Island on 20th November 1969. This occupation lasted until the 11th June 1971, which was almost two years, under the banner “Indians of All Tribes”. There had been earlier occupations, such as in 1964 when five Sioux Indians occupied the island for four hours and demanded that the island host an Indian cultural centre and an Indian university.

During the “Indians of All Tribes” occupation the US Government at first placed a barricade around the island but then submitted to formal negotiations. The Indians wanted the deed to the island but the US Government would not consent and took the stance of non-interference and waited for the occupation to ‘burn-out’.

Electricity and clean water supplies were shut off by the US Government and as food and money became short copper wire from the historic buildings was stripped by the occupiers and sold as scrap metal. Some occupiers were later arrested for this and this act reversed the attitude

of the press who had previously been sympathetic to the occupation.

The conflict reached a crescendo on the 10th June 1971 when the FBI and US Special Forces removed the remaining protesters (6 unarmed men, 5 women and 4 children).

Islands have been used throughout history as a place of banishment where the ‘other’ can reside but in the case of Alcatraz the ‘other’ wanted ownership and to imbue the island with the status of a cultural homeland. This wish was not granted and this must be in part due to the non-surrender of power which is tied to claims on space. It seems acceptable for an authority to exercise banishment upon an individual or minority group but it is unacceptable for that minority to claim that banishment space as its own territory.

Figure 2: Indigenous Indians demanding the deed for the Island of Alcatraz. [10].

8.0: The Antipodes:

Medieval Macrobian5 maps identified the

Antipodes south of the Equator and it was a common belief that as the Equator was so hot, the closer people lived to it, the more charcoal their skin would be. It followed that nothing existed beyond the Equator and in the unlikely circumstance that something did then it would be truly alien.

5 Macrobian maps are zonal and show north at the top as do modern maps. Five zones can be identified with the Antipodes positioned below the Equator and above the Antarctic zone.

There is some dispute as to the first European sighting of Australia which may have been as early as the 16th century but after James Cook’s explorations of the 1770s it was to be a place owned by the British. Although now an independent nation it still has the British monarch as Head of State. Indigenous populations were brutally treated by the British resulting in subjugation, exposure to European diseases (e.g. measles) and loss of land.

British prisoners were sent to penal colonies in Australia during the 18th and 19th centurries

6.

Estimates of the number of prisoners banished during this time are in the region of 165 000. There were domestic reasons in Britain for this industrial-scale banishment due to the shortfall in the number of jails to accommodate prisoners. It should be noted that the authoritarian will to banish ‘others’ to the southern hemisphere accords with the recurring themes of ‘pollution’, ‘contagion’, ‘matter out of place’ and ‘Gog and Magog’.

Aldous Huxley in the Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell saw himself as a natural scientist exploring terra incognita. [11]. Huxley journeys to the “antipodes of the mind” which he equates to the New World full of exotica to be discovered, catalogued and understood. The “antipodes of the mind” is for Huxley an experiential place that an individual can only reach through such methods as meditation, self-flagellation, vitamin deficiencies, LSD or mescaline. Huxley argues that vitamin deficiencies (particularly B and C) during the medieval period may help to explain why so many visions of Heaven and Hell were reported by the mystically inclined.

Furthermore, in Doors of Perception, Huxley describes his own experience under the influence of mescaline which takes him experientially to a realm of the mind which had been hitherto inaccessible to him. Like the indigenous Indians demanding the deeds to Alcatraz, here Huxley is attempting to claim ‘inner space’ that others have voyaged towards or have been banished to depending upon the circumstances.

Huxley’s use of the phrase “antipodes of the mind” beautifully reveals the many incarnations of a binary dialectic: order and disorder, safety and

6 Accounts recorded by members of the Tolpuddle Martyrs illustrate the horrendousness of this banishment.

danger, access and non-access, authority and anarchy, humanity and monster.

There seems an insatiable need for dichotomy and for that to be culturally manifested through the production of mythology. The shape and detail of the mythology adapts to meet new circumstances, therefore, the agencies whom control the production of mythology wield enormous power and influence.

Words and images are the vehicles that express myths placed upon a medium. A wall, page, canvas, map, mind or landscape acts as a palimpsest

Huxley’s work is too often viewed in a New Age context and this testifies to the habit of decontextualision. Once this occurs reinterpretation follows to suit the needs of a contemporary discourse at a cost to the meaning of the original work. Huxley is too often trotted out as intellectual bunting by New Age advocates and that does him great disservice.

9.0: Discussion:

Gods, kings, heroes, priests and leaders are a common archetype that mythological process has imbued with superior rights of existence over others. The question arises: whose interests does mythology serve? The answer is simply those whom control its production and distribution.

A difference of interest becomes discernible when contrasting Alexander with Odysseus in terms of obedience to Divine Will. Alexander intends to reach the end of the world but Divine intervention commands him not to do so and he submits to that instruction. At the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus does not offer thanks to Poseidon

7 and

his punishment is to not return to Ithaca and so the odyssey begins.

Both Alexander and Odysseus are archetypal Greek heroes but to the reader of the Middle Ages, it is Alexander who most befits the Christian paradigm and this is because The Greek Alexander Romances have evolved over approximately 1700yrs to a new climate, one of Christianity, and to climax into a quasi-Christian mythological corpus with didactic moral purpose.

7 Odysseus further displeases Poseidon by blinding his son the Cyclops Polyphemos.

Odysseus displeases Poseidon and suffers his odyssey but Athena supports his wish to return to Ithaca. Despite tempests, monsters, sorcery and island banishment, Odysseus returns home. Poseidon presents an archetype of the ‘Envious other’ that attempts to stop the hero but the hero wins out. The will of a god is not fulfilled and a human triumphs in the end, albeit with help from other gods.

The act of banishment did not stop Odysseus enacting his will, so why did Alexander not follow the path of Odysseus? In a Christianised context, had Alexander defied the Divine then this would be a sin because he would be acting out of vanity.

Banishment and vanity make good bedfellows in the Christian world. Consider the following song attributed to Friar Girolamo Savonrola (1454-98) preaching the end of days in Florence:

Ciascun purghi l’intelletto,

La memoria e volontate

Del terrestre e vano affetto;

Arda tutto in caritate,

Contemplando la bontate

Di Gesu Re di Fiorenza;

Con digiuni e penitenza

Si reformi dentro e fore.

Translated: Purge the intellect, the memory and the will, of every earthly and futile passion, burn everything for the love of Jesus King of Florence; with fasting and penitence one reforms within and without. [12].

Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” (1471) burned in front of the Basilica at Santa Croce in Florence. A statue of Alighieri Dante (1265-1321) stands to the left of the Basilica’s front door where the statue’s gaze is fixed upon the Piazza Santa Croce. It is there that the burning of cultural artefacts took place. Objects included: paintings, secular books (e.g. Boccaccio’s Decameron), musical instruments, manuscripts of secular songs, cosmetics, mirrors and sculptures were ignited.

Children were recruited by Savonarola to collect the vanities from house to house for the bonfire while singing hymns. Children make good soldiers because they are open to fresh mythology that affords them purpose. The allure of the flames would have had ritual resonance.

Savonarola’s end of days preaching fits with our current notion of mass extinction events, with, however, a much different source of causation. This particular mass extinction was to be brought about because of the Divine’s displeasure apropos sin. The bonfire banishes the articles of sin in an attempt at purgation and atonement. It is a peculiar human trait to banish art because it is held to be vanity but as the contemporary reader finds themselves in the austerity phase of the current economic myth cycle the impulse to banish art as an act of moral fortitude and fiscal totemic offering chimes much with modernity.

The Piazza Santa Croce is a small but significant landscape of banishment. The architecture that surrounds it conveys the best of Renaissance beauty that despite bonfires much remains and Dante’s statue watches over this space. His dictum; “Luce intellettual, piena d’amore” (We come to heaven which is a pure light – intellectual love full of light) [Paradiso, Canto XXX] seems to describe the cultural stance of that landscape now. [13]. Here the act of banishment has ceased and conceded to the growth of the mind.

Arguably it is this impulse to journey and discover new thoughts, ideas and ways of seeing that Huxley attempts to capture through his mescaline experiments. The “mind’s antipodes” and “terra incognita” are alluded to in The Greek Alexander Romances when Alexander reaches the river where fish cook in freezing water. Moreover, these concepts are represented spatially upon mappa mundi with Jerusalem at the centre and Heaven and Hell directly above and below. It can be seen that the further a traveller moves to the edges of the map the greater the number of banished monsters there are to be found. Alexander’s Gate holds the impure forces at bay and questions arise as to what exists beyond it as well as what are the consequences of that knowledge? Perhaps Dante’s remarks confer advice.

The banished and their descendants may wish to claim the landscape as a homeland or a space of cultural identity. The occupation of Alcatraz by Mohawk and Sioux Indians in 1969 with the wish to claim it as Indian space after ancestors had been banished there a century before attests to identity being bound up with landscape. The irony is that the descendants of the banished tribes when wanting to claim territory of the landscape of banishment (Alcatraz) were banished once more in 1971.

10.0: Conclusion:

It has been shown that mountains and islands can be used for the purposes of banishment. Yet the process of banishment can be enacted upon small urban landscapes too as was the case in Florence. Large cities such as London are marked by buildings representing wealth, state, religion, commerce, monarchy, knowledge and poverty. These spatially connected narrative-laden buildings arise due to historical patterns of social power and current action. The will to claim territory physically, and as Huxley showed within the mind to the exclusion of others is why the banishment dialectic persists.

There can be found parallels between the instrumental use of money to mediate social power relations and the role of magic to mediate social power. To control money or magic provides the means to banish and if both can be controlled then the more social power to be had and the more pressing the need to banish threats and maintain mythological narrative structures.

Ghettos are landscapes of banishment for the poor. Shanty towns are to be found in the cities of India, Kenya, Brazil and many other countries. The Banlieue

8 that surrounds Paris houses poor

Algerians and is a space of concern for the French Government. The Paris Banlieue is held to be home to a ‘French intifada’ which produced the men who murdered in Toulouse a 30 year old Jewish man and three children outside a Jewish school on 19th March 2012. One eight year old was pulled back by her hair before the gunman shot her in the side of her head. A week earlier two French soldiers of North African descent were killed by the same murderers.

The Paris Banlieue housed an Algerian extremist cell in the 1990s which planned to fly an aeroplane into the Eiffel Tower in the style that would be realised in New York, 2001. Before the leader (Khaled Kelkal) of this cell was shot by the French authorities he gave an interview to a doctoral student investigating the youth of the Banlieue. Khaled Kelkal asserted in 1992; “There is no place for me here….In the Banlieue we are separated from France by a wall. That’s why I want to blow it up.” [14].

This wall is both cultural and economic. It is no more physically real than Alexander’s Gate but it is a metaphysical line of demarcation that

8 Banlieue - the outskirts of a city.

separates the pure from the polluted. However, rotate the mythological structure through 180

o and

the role of the pure and polluted has been reversed. The imperative to build and destroy walls that segregate recalls the myth of Gog and Magog, where the monsters escape that which confines them and seek to take revenge on the powers that banished them. In Gaza the wall is more than metaphysical but Gog and Magog mythology still applies.

Jewish communities were ghettoised throughout medieval Europe and deemed to be monstrous. In response to the increasing anti-Semitic threat the Jewish community generated the myth of the Golem. The Golem’s creation is attributed to the 16th century Rabbi Loew who using cabbalistic magic made the Golem out of clay and placing the inscription ‘emet’ (truth) inside the Golem’s head. This mythological monster provided protection for the community from anti-Semitic attacks for if would be anti-Semites believed in the Golem then they would not attack.

Figure 3: Rabbi Loew and the Golem. [15].

Both Islamic and Jewish communities have imposed walls upon each other and have had walls imposed upon them by Christian communities but who assumes the role of ‘hero’

or ‘monster’ depends on authorship. Magic and religion are metaphysical systems that are founded on faith without recourse to doubt. Savonarola knew these methods well. He attempted to eradicate competing memes and induce his followers to please the Divine through banishing art to flames.

When Alexander ended his search for the end of the world, he did so at the request of the Divine whereas Odysseus may have kept going. The global economic recession has real effects but as money is a metaphysical concept reified in coins, paper and numbers on screens, it is a beautiful method of king-making and banishment not dissimilar to the properties of magic and Divinity.

The poor and psychologically vulnerable are asked to serve these invisible forces through purgation of unnecessary vanities, partake of jovial hunger (tighten your belt) and to appease those invisible forces through righteousness (it’s the right thing to do), devotion (hard work is prayer) and submit to the hive (keep calm and carry on).

As the king’s glance was claimed to cure scrofula, so contemporary affluent experts claim their business acumen will improve the lot of the bewildered poor. Business entrepreneur, Peter Jones, has established an academy to that end and provides to each franchise a full life sized cut-out of ‘Peter Jones’ to act as an object for student inspiration. The icon of Christ in a church works to the same end – through me you will be saved. The corollary is that those who do not follow will be banished to the hell of impoverishment.

On the cosmic scale the Earth sits in a solar system near the end of a spiral galaxy residing in an infinite and expanding universe which in turn may be one component of a multiverse. At that infinite level of space perhaps our whole planet seems irrelevant. The heliocentric view changed the way humans looked at themselves and caused outrage in theological quarters. No longer being the centre of the universe was a ‘bonfire of the vanities’ inasmuch as human importance no longer seemed so significant on a cosmic scale.

In the coming decade there may well emerge evidence of microbial life on other planets. This is highly speculative but there is great confidence in astrobiology faculties of universities that telescopes travelling on spacecrafts using spectral analysis of the atmospheres of

‘goldilocks’ planets will identify evidence of life elsewhere in the universe.

If this occurs how will mythology and constituent memes adapt? Mythology makes humankind relevant and generates heroes, monsters, heaven and hell. It is the author’s view that mythology will endure with memes adapting to new cultural environments as has been the case since cultural artefacts were produced 30 000 years ago. The maps will get bigger with new monsters to be found at the edges to be held behind Alexander’s Gate less the forces of impurity are unleashed upon the civilised. “The end of days” business will thrive under these new circumstances.

During the 16th century the heterodox Dominican Friar Giordano Bruno proposed that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited worlds. Bruno’s approach to thinking about the possibilities for the universe without constraint accorded with Dante’s dictum “Luce intellettual, piena d’amore”. Bruno was banished by Papal

fire in January 1600 and then to Hell for eternity.

What then will be the natural future of monstrous nonsense and how will that be reified spatially? As with history, the future too “….is a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as is necessary” [1] to serve the interests of those

who hold social power in the moment.

Interests who control the production and distribution of mythological narrative to mediate social inequalities must maintain control of its modes of production and distribution – the systems and structures that regulate the rate of meme adaptation and flow. Landscapes of banishment will remain to serve that purpose but the mythologies that hang upon them will continuously evolve to meet emerging circumstances.

11.0: References:

[1] Orwell, G., (1949), Nineteen Eighty-Four,

Secker & Warburg, p35.

[2] Hereford Mappa mundi, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mappa_mundi_Hereford_1300_explained.png, [Accesses 24th April 2013].

[3] Stoneman, R, (1991), The Greek Alexander Romances (Translation), Penguin, p115.

[4] ibid. p115-116.

[5] ibid. p122-125.

[6] ibid. p180.

[7] Douglas, M, (1966), Purity and Danger – An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo, Routledge, p5.

[8] The Bible: Book of Revelation 20:8.

[9] Solzhenitsyn, A., (1974), Gulag Archipelago,

Harper Collins.

[10] United States National Park Service, We Hold the Rock, http://www.nps.gov/alca/historyculture/we-hold-the-rock.htm. [Accessed 25th April 2013].

[11] Huxley, A., (2004), The Doors of

Perception/Heaven and Hell, Vintage.

[12] Borsook, E.,(1979), The Companion Guide to Florence, Collins, p263.

[13] Dante, A., (2008), The Divine Comedy,

Oxford World Classics.

[14] Hussey, A., (2012), Hatred in the Banlieue, New Statesman, p23-27.

[15] Rabbi Loew and Golem, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Golem_and_Loew.jpg. [Accessed 25th April 2013].