داستان پینا و بره سریانی، برتولت لوفر

Thesis Updates

Botany and medieval travel writing, now with 20% more bizarre zoophytic hybrids.
Monday, November 8, 2010
The Story of Pinna and the Syrian Lamb (article)
The Story of Pinna and the Syrian Lamb
By Berthold Laufer, for The Journal of American Folklore (1915)

Every time I read an article by Berthold Laufer, I feel like I've been schooled.

Anyway:
Laufer's article begins with an assessment of the legends concerning pinna, named in some Chinese myths (in the Later Han Dynasty, for example, AD 25-220) as "water-sheep" (103). The pinna is a type of mollusc, rooted to a particular spot on the sea bed by threadlike filaments called byssi. The molluscs were a source of pearls and meat, and the byssi were spun into a fine golden cloth of surpassing beauty.

The pinna's importance is well-documented, and its function in the production of textiles has Hellenistic roots.

Aristotle mentions the pinna in a discourse on the hierarchy of the living world: though he places plants below animals in the spectrum of living things, within the realm of plants there is a hierarchy too. Some plants are closer than others to the rank of animals - particularly those living in the sea which exhibit animal characteristics (106). To show the occasional difficulty in discerning between plant and animal, Aristotle points to the pinna: "devoid of motion, [the pinna] is rooted like a plant to a fixed spot, and must perish when detached from its intrenchment." Tricky thing: it exhibits both plant and animal characteristics.

The pinna has a strong presence in early literature, mentioned by Aristotle, Theophrastus, Pliny, Aelian and others. It also has a strong presence in Chinese and Arabic legends. For Laufer, the transformation in legend to a terrestrial vegetable lamb simply "represents a metamorphosis of the biological condition of the" pinna" (117). His foundation for discussing the terrestrial vegetable lamb is sound, and bears repeating:

"I propose to examine this curious legend without any bias toward speculations which have previously been advanced" (116). And, "The student of folk-lore and the trained observer will be conscious of two points, - first that the germ of a fact or observation relative to natural history underlies the legend; and, second, that, as not all its constituents can satisfactorily be explained from natural events, it must have been construed with a certain end in view, which may have an allegorical purport or religious cause" (116).

Religious cause, hoo boy, just wait until he kicks off his discussion of some Talmudic texts and Syrian Christian symbolism. Anyway! Before we get there...

Now, Laufer first does a neat little pirouette and discusses the wide range of Chinese and other texts that discuss the vegetable lamb. Beyond the early legend of the water-sheep (pinna), and serving as a "continuation or further development of it" (115), we have a tradition in the Annals of the T'ang Dynasty (618-906). Here, "There are lambs engendered in the soil. The inhabitants wait till they are going to sprout, and then build enclosures around as a preventative measure for wild beasts that might rush in from outside to devour them" (115). These lambs are attached to the ground by an umbilical cord which, if forcibly severed, will kill the lamb. However, if the lambs separate themselves naturally from their "stalk", they become free animals. But it's key that the separation is instigated by the lamb itself.

Thus, when the men are ready for the lambs to be separated, in some versions of the legend they storm the pens on horseback bearing swords and shouting to frighten the lambs into severing their umbilical cords in order to flee. And interestingly, some Arabic stories around the marine sheep - the pinna - have a neat parallel. They claim that a crustacean predates the pinna, frightening the mollusk into "dropping" its byssi (threads). The crustacean consumes the mollusk, and the threads drift ashore, where they are collected by people and woven into textiles. In this Arabic tradition, the horsemen and the crustaceans, bearing their swords and pincers, serve much the same function.

Through this sort of metamorphoses of legends from sea-lamb to terrestrial zoophyte, Laufer also connects the pinna and the land-based vegetable lamb to a figure found in the Talmud that takes the form of a man that is connected to the ground by a stalk and stem. Where he takes it next breaks my brain:

The Talmudic text (the Mishna Kilaim, VIII, 5) refers to adne sadeh (translated by Laufer as "lords of the field"). In a commentary on this passage, Rabbi Simeon (d. 1235) claims this creature is "the man of the mountain", which "draws its food out of the soil by means of the umbilical cord: if its navel be cut, it cannot live" (120). Further, one Rabbi Meir claims there is an animal that "issues from the earth like the stem of a plant, just as a gourd. In all respects . . . [it] has a human form" (120), and "As far as the stem (or umbilical cord) stretches, it devours the herbage all around. Whoever is intent on capturing this animal must not approach it, but tear at the cord until it is ruptured, whereupon the animal soon dies" (120).

How do we interpret this? Says Laufer, speaking of symbolism in the Syrian Christian tradition, this Talmudic "man of the mountain" figure "unquestionably represents an illusion to the 'Divine Lamb standing on Mount Sion'" (121). However, "It is inconceivable that Christ should have been conceived as a lamb immovably rooting in the soil" (121).

Rather, ". . . it was the faithful who were thus depicted, either as the retinue of the Good Pastor, or enjoying the delights of Paradise after their Salvation. Essentially, the "lambs" are devotees, and the "umbilical cord" represents their attachment to earthly pleasures. The "lambs" are threatened by "beasts" (temptations) and can be protected by a "shepherd" (Christ) only to a point: they must ultimately save themselves by cutting the tether of their own umbilical cord (an act that cannot be performed on their behalf without killing them, as we see in the vegetable lamb/pinna legend). The "mounted horsemen" that frighten the "lambs" into freeing themselves actually represent the Last Judgment, and the severance of the "umbilical cord" frees them for redemption into Heaven.

Heavy shit.

However, as Laufer points out, the spiritual drift of the sacred Syrian allegory had long sunk into oblivion" (125) by the time Odoric and Mandeville were writing about the vegetable lamb. As both medieval travelers locate their vegetable lambs in Asia and offer a "worthy counterpart" (125) to the contemporaneous Chinese version, Laufer draws a connection between the two that has Odoric and Mandeville merely modifying an existing Oriental legend.

Interestingly, Laufer is quite vehement in his disgracing of Henry Lee (author of The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: a Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant). The main points of his attack are (1) the fact that cotton production was well-known in Asia and Europe and an unlikely thing for people to widely mistake, and (2) his assessment takes into account only European legends and not the wealth of Asian ones. Still, he credits Lee with undoing the fable that the source of the vegetable lamb legend is in the manipulated rhizomes of a fern tree.

All in all, a long, frighteningly rigorous article. To read Laufer with Lee is to get a more balanced idea of how the legend grew in Asia and Europe respectively, and how the legends were received, modified and embellished as cultural objects. I'll write about Lee's booklet soon.
Composed by Jess around 7:28 PM
Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz
May contain traces of: marvels (in general), odoric, vegetable lamb, warning: will induce headache