The Biographer's Tale (7 page)

The world of magic is double, natural and supernatural. Magic is impossible in a purely materialist world, a purely sceptical world, a world of pure reason. Magic depends on, it makes use of, the body, the body of desire, the libido or life-force which Sigmund Freud said stirred the primitive cells as the sun heated the stony surface of the earth-cells which, according to him, always had the lazy, deep desire to give up striving, to return to the quiescent state from which they were roused. Our savant might mock the divination of cow-stomachs and milking-sticks, but he was the author of
Nemesis Divina
, a collection of tales of divine retribution, including that of the Pastor of Kvikjokk, encountered on this journey—“The pastor's wife whores with the regimental quartermaster Kock. The pastor in despair takes to the bottle; his daughter becomes a strumpet and is tumbled by a Lapp.” There are several scatological and raucously erotic anecdotes in this work. There is also the tale of Yeoman Slickert,
who loved the widow von Bysen and gave her a manor house. This upset his son-in-law, who fired three bullets through the window one night; the shots entered the Yeoman's stomach, and killed him. The son-in-law in due course developed cancer of the stomach, with three gnawing tumours, that killed him. A gentleman who fell asleep in one of CL's lectures went home and died of an apoplexy. This is sympathetic magic, though its title invokes a grim Greek deity, and its dedication, to CL's son, invokes a god whose vengeance is a principle of order in a chaotic and dangerous world.

Innocue vivito, numen adest
. It was his own motto, carved over his bedroom door. “Live harmlessly. The spirit is close.”

H
E CAME
to a place called Lycksmyran—“lucky marsh”—after a long period of stamping through freezing marshland up to his knees in water; he remarked that if he had had to undergo this misery as a punishment for sin, it would have been severe, and asked
cur non
Olycksmyran, unlucky marsh. Here his Lapp guide, sent out for shelter, returned with

“a human being, but whether man or woman I could not tell. I think the poet could never have described a
furia
to compare with this one; she might indeed have issued from the infernal Styx. She was tiny, her face smoked black, the brown eyes shining, the brows black, the jet-black hair hanging round her head, on top of which was a flat red cap. The dress was grey, and from her chest, which resembled frogskin, hung long, limp brown dugs; she wore a number of brass bracelets, a belt and boots.

“At first sight of this being I was afeard. But the Fury took pity on me and cried out, ‘Wretched man! Poor creature, what has brought thee here, where none has ventured before! Hast thou not seen how mean are our dwellings?' ”

This Fury insisted that the only way to go was back through the swamps. CL begged for food—she offered him raw fish, putrid and breeding maggots. He asked for smoked reindeer tongue, which he had come to like, but there was none. He went back, that time losing his boat, his axe, his pike, a stuffed heron and a stuffed sea-eagle in the rapids of the river. Nevertheless, having recuperated at Umeå he undertook another up-country expedition, and met more Furies, more kindly old women, and magic. He records, in his published Travels, that in Norway he had heard of a curious ruse by which the Lapps could be deceived into surrendering their magic drums—you could sidle up to one, who had refused you his drum, and, without his remarking what you were at, push up his sleeve and open a vein. The wounded Lapp, faint from loss of blood (and apparently unaware of why—CL is vague on this point) can easily be persuaded to hand over the magic object. It is probable that CL's story is a garbled version of the cruel punishments
inflicted on the Sami by Christian priests, who tied them down, opened the veins and let the blood run until the unfortunate nomads recanted, were “converted,” and gave up their magic objects and practices. We come now to CL himself, and the strange portrait he had made of himself in his Lapp dress, complete with drum and magic drawings, on his return from the uncharted lands. What did the drum mean to him? What did he learn, out there in the wastes, in the skin huts of the Sami?

He was a noticing man, a collector of facts, and he describes their daily life with apparent amiable objectivity. He conducts an examination of the reasons for their strength and resilience—they are pure carnivores, they exercise their strong muscles by sitting cross-legged, they wear heelless boots, they eat frugally and do not fill their stomachs. (He goes into an excursus on teeth, and the carnivorous nature of man, “our species,” cf.
Babianos et Simia et Satyros sylvestres.)

He noted also their sleeping habits, huddled together, quite naked, sixteen at a time, under reindeer skins. Some of their habits disgusted him; they cleaned their bowls and spoons with fingers and spittle, drinking boiled reindeer milk, which was strong-smelling and thick. They did not wash clothes, living in skins, fur inside in the winter, outside in the summer, “rigid sarcophagi” says CL. He was interested also in the strongly scented mushrooms (probably
Boletus suavolens
) which the young Lapp males wore to entice the young females.

“When a Lapland youth finds this fungus he preserves it carefully in a little pouch hanging from his waist, so that its grateful scent may make him more acceptable to the girl he
is courting. O whimsical Venus! In other parts of the world you must be wooed with coffee and chocolate, preserves and sweets, wines and dainties, jewels and pearls, gold and silver, silks and cosmetics, balls and assemblies, concerts and plays; here you are satisfied with a little withered fungus!”

There is an analogous case to this borrowed Lapp aphrodisiac in the way in which the male euglossine bee impregnates himself with the musky pheromones of the bucket orchid in order to attract a mate. But certain of CL's jottings lead us to believe that he enjoyed other fungi with other properties. Out of Jukkasjärvi he stayed with a group where he records a conversation with another old woman, whose silver belt with its appendages he described accurately.

1. A spoon in a case.
   
2. A knife in a sheath.
   
3. A pipe in a case.
   
4. A leather thimble to put
   digito inditorio
   .
   
5. A needlecase with a brass cap to pull out.
   
6. Rings, some of them large, in brass.
   

The belt itself is decorated with tin or with silver beads.

He also made careful notes on her vulva, labia, clitoris and buttocks.

He also described a ceremony in which this person appeared in another costume. This costume corresponds almost exactly to the costume of the prophetess, conjurer, or seer in the saga of Erik the Red. CL records some conversations with this person about
“numen, sive hamr”
in amongst his jottings on ceremonies pertaining to birth, and marriage. He
was always interested in ceremonies surrounding birth, marriage and death. He records elsewhere that the pastor's wife in Kemi told him that for a woman to drink a little blood from the severed
funiculus umbilicus
is a good way to avoid
dolores post partum—ipso puerperie multis difficiliores. Hamr
, he records—reconstructing his sketchy notes—was the membrane surrounding the foetus (specifically not the placenta, but the caul, the membrane) which bore, as it were, the shadowed impress, the
double
, of the human creature inside it. There were those whose
hamr
was loosed into the world at the moment of birth and who remained capable of contact with it, of changing shape, of travelling through time and space. I did not see how this could be, wrote the believer in mermaids and “shots” from clear skies. The old woman however told him that he was himself, as she clearly saw—“I have the sight”
—hammramr
.

He makes mention of a ceremonial dress with a hood of black lamb's-hide, lined with white catskin, reindeer-skin boots with long hairs, and catskin gloves, also furred. He writes of the
gandr
, or magic rod, with its knob and its brass and stone decorations. His accounts of the ceremonies, like all these private autobiographical fragments, are in the third person, distancing himself. Thus we read:

“They dance naked, beating their drums, which they say have magic powers, and the wisewomen sing long songs together, and separately, over and over. They drink hydromel and eau-de-vie at these times, and eat special foods. The drums are covered with drawings and signs.” The songs, he was told, are the songs of the creatures that make up the drum, the tree (silver birch,
betula
) and the young reindeer,
chosen by Fate. They believe that their souls sing and conduct the practicants
ad infernos acque ad supernos
. The singing is strong and persistent; the room is hot and full of smoke and the drumming of naked feet.

The markings on the drums represent many things: the rainbow, skis and sledges, the eyes and wings of birds. They are divided into parts which they told him represent the three divisions of
Mundus
—Caelum, Terra et Regiae Infernae. They believe their spirits may travel to these places, whilst their bodies lie torpid.

Certe est
, he saw one of them fall to earth, a dead man
(pulsa non sentitur)
who lay dead for some hours
(duratio temporis incertissime est)
whilst the others danced about him and sang.

H
E SAW
the huge hairpelt behind the smoke leave the place. They say they may travel for hundreds upon hundreds of leagues, in
utrasque formas;
during that time their names may not be mentioned, nor may the names of their
alter egos, sive entes bestiae
, or they may wander lost for ever. This may be what the priests refer to as
raptus
or
alienato mentis
. Those capable of these feats are known as
mjök trollaukinn
—those whose non-human powers,
troll
, are enhanced,
aukinn
.

He saw also, which gave him courage, but put great fear into him, that the dead man rose again after the
ganda
embraced and called him, striking him with her staff.

“I
T IS SAID ALSO
that these travellers, who are both still as stone and
velocitates in aeribus et super terras
, can tell accurately
what explorers may find in undiscovered countries, such as the location of hot springs, the shape of coastlines, harbours,
et caetera
, meadows and fjords.”

Quid dicitur? Scribo ut non?
He saw himself also, quite clearly, lying there upon a reindeer skin, a very corpse, white and cold, with staring eyes. And as he saw himself,
id quod vidit, ille qui vidit
, that which saw, he who saw, was able to leave himself there in the smoky place, and go out into the forest. There he was with others, who appeared to him, as in a dream, to be sometimes men wearing the skins of the great beasts, wolf and bear, or eagle feathers, and who sometimes had two pairs of eyes, and sometimes those two pairs melded. And these undertook a great journey, travelling over the high Torneå Fells, to Caituma, hundreds of miles. They travelled also towards Sørfold and from there—let us speak of it as in a dream, but it was no dream, a man may know if his body be dreaming or present, and to this traveller, all was present. For he saw them, in this swift
transitus, cerastium flore maximo
, and
Lycopodium echinat
which later he was to see in his more laborious journeyings.

From there he went even to Lofoten.

He had always greatly desired to see the renowned and terrible Maelstrøm, a wonder of the natural world. Now he found himself on the peak of the mountain, Helseggen, the Cloudy. From there he beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters were so inky a hue as to bring at once to mind the Nubian geographer's account of the
Mare Tenebrarum
. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose gloomy character was made more
striking by the surf which reared up its white and ghastly crest …

He saw as he watched, the character of the ocean surface change from a chopping character to a forceful current, which tamed into whirlpools, which in turn disappeared, leaving streaks of foam, which combined in a gyratory motion, taking on the motion of the subsided vortices to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly—very suddenly—this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than a mile in diameter. The funnel, whose interior was a smooth, shining and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, sending to the winds an appalling voice half shriek, half roar …

He saw himself lying on the skin as he stood in the doorway of the smoky house. He lay down on his cold body and his spirit entered his still flesh as the fingers of a hand enter a glove and spread and warm the skin. So it was, in truth.

W
HAT ARE WE MODERNS
to make of this? Some researchers have suggested that his published account of his travels was to some extent mendacious. He had not, they claim, the time to have made the long journey to Kaituma—he would have had to cover 840 miles in a fortnight—and far from undertaking the dangerous sea-voyage from Sørfold to Maelstrøm, he was prevented by storms and rowed about near the beach. He was prone to exaggerate, describing the “Alps” that divide Sweden from Norway as “more than a
Swedish mile high” (considerably higher than Everest). Far from journeying into
Terra Incognita
, he was only travelling where the Christian missionaries had already made trails.