That Cap in the Coat of Arms

Now and then I remember the delights of heraldry—and its wondrous language. Today I feature the coat of arms of Argentina, the birthplace of our new pope, Francis, taken from Wikipedia (link). The heraldic description of it, also from that source, is as follows:

A Sun of May or. An oval party per fess bleu celeste and argent; the two shaking hands in base come together to hold a pike with a Phrygian cap gules in chief. The whole surrounded by a wreath of laurel vert and tied with a banner.

That Sun of May is  “or” or golden. The phrase “party per fess” means an oval divided horizontally in the center. “Bleu celeste” is sky blue, “argent” is silver, in heraldry often rendered as white. The Phrygian cap, of which later, is “gules,” meaning red; “in chief” means high. “Vert” stands for green. Now as for that cap…

Phrygia was once what now is the western part of Turkey, with the Black Sea above, the Mediterranean Sea below. The cap symbolizes liberty—the reason why it found a place in Argentina’s heraldry. Among the Greeks it used to symbolize non-Greek and therefore barbarian regions, among the Romans liberty; it was a cap worn by freedmen. Later it became a symbol in the French Revolution. Turns out that the cap appeared, also held on a stick, held by an image of Liberty on a nineteenth century American dollar coin. It is also to be found on other coats of arms as well: that of Cuba, Nicaragua, and one of Brazil’s state, Santa Catarina.

Being a descendant of an ancient court jester, it occurs to me that the Phrygian cap is also a clown’s cap. Only people who treat the world with a sense of humor may be said to be truly free. Our own family’s coat of arms, alas, features a man with a cap that has four up-standing points rather than one leaning one—else I would add it to my Phrygian list.

The Dragon in Question

Yet another PBS TV show yesterday, combining cartoons and documentary footage, aimed at educating children about that awesome creature, the male lion, set me musing—about dragons. The lion, the dragon, and the eagle are probably the most-used images in heraldry; if we wink knowingly at double-headed eagles and lions, accepting them as products of artistic license, we have two animals still alive and well today, but what about that dragon? One can also extend the list. All manner of other actual animals also play a role; among the carnivorous the wolf and bear play respectable roles. Among the vegetarians, the horse leads, I think, but there are also bulls, oxen, donkeys, sheep, and goats as well. Among the more imaginative are fused animals, thus camel-body-donkey’s head. As we advance in time, sure enough we find both elephant and whale. Yes, yes. But what about the dragon? What are the roots of that creature in human memory? Or is it—and its fiery breath—entirely the product of imagination?

The current consensus appears to assert that—and for a reason. The reason is that the last reasonable physical prototype of a dragon, some gigantic carnivorous dinosaur, disappeared 65 million years ago roughly, while humans anatomically like ourselves appeared a mere 200,000 years ago. Conclusion: no human was actually threatened by a dinosaur, got eaten by one, or escaped being eaten after a close encounter with that fiery breath. It amuses me to read the following sentence in Wikipedia’s article on Dragon (link): “Some creationists believe that dragons of mythology were actually dinosaurs, and that they died out with other creatures around the end of the ice age.” Such a characterization, to be sure, is the ultimate dismissal of the possibility; creationists, so-called, appear to compress the past drastically. Based on Biblical studies, they think creation took place roughly 6,000 years ago.

But there are many ways to skin the cat. My own gut feel is that the great symbols of humanity are always rooted in real experience. I would bet that real humans did encounter Tyrannosaurus Rex or a close cousin; the wings so typical on dragons in the west, but not the Chinese variety, may have been poetic license too; I’d prove it, too, if only I had handy access to the Akashic Records. (Google has a ways to go yet.) Creationists shorten the age of the earth, but anthropology may be artificially shortening the history of homo sapiens. As I’ve noted in a post on “Catastrophism” last year (link) we don’t really know what prevailed in times about 10,000 years ago and going back; all we have is stone and debris, and carbon dating; the latter may not be a very high-resolution lens.

Now as for that fiery breath, we do know something about that. It doesn’t take a dragon to produce it. Why, in our extended family lives Katie the Beagle who, before some very expensive dental work corrected the phenomenon, used to have a breath so strong that it could derail a speeding train. One didn’t see the flames—but felt them. That breath might explain the reason why St. George stayed up on his horse and used a long lance.

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Illustration is the coat of arms of Kahlenbergerdorf, an independent community until 1892, now part of Vienna. The figure in the image is identified as St. George. The source is Wikipedia (link).

Trampling a Sword?

Some questions arose about the coat-of-arms of Finland I used to illustrate a recent post. One e-mail commentator thought that it represented the Christian Lion’s victory over the Saracen Sword. Another wondered what a sword was doing there; wouldn’t it cut the lion’s paw?

March having lived up to its name this year and brought us plenty of war, I thought I’d clear this up on the last day of the month. Wikipedia’s article on this subject (here) brings the following clarification:

The earliest known blazon from this period states that the arms of Finland represents A crowned lion of gold holding a sword in the right forepaw and trampling with both hindpaws on a Russian sabre (ryssesabel), surrounded by nine silver roses in a red field, over the shield a golden crown with a red cap.

As for me, I’d rather trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored than bothering with the weaponry. But symbols are symbols, and I got to thinking about the wondrous future coats-of-arms a glorious new age of heraldry would paint. One of them might feature an upside-down lion seemingly kicking the sky filled with sleekly-drawn black and silvery birds. And some future scholar, with many words, will in that future’s more civilized future explain that it represented the nation trampling on a no-fly zone.

The Eagle, Lion, and the Owl

The production of grand, lasting symbols is a process mirrored in the creation of great art. In practice it is grubby craftsmanship, messy, arduous, often obsessively mechanical. From this labor arises the new, but the labor itself is inspired by something lofty, already or always present, high above. Today I return to the Eagle—which irked me a while back in one of Dante’s cantos. The focus today is the American Bald Eagle in the Great Seal of the United States of America.

I must confess that heraldry had already gripped me as a child. Its mesmerizing quality merely strengthened later when I encountered phrases like “argent a lion azure with two bends gules athwart,” etc., and if the words “griffon sable” or “chevron between three swords erect” were present, so much the better. My last foray into this subject came in the context of the seal of Budapest, my place of birth. I researched the Roman eagle a few days ago frustrated by dearth of explanations and decent images. Then yesterday Peony, she who is the guarding spirit of the Tang Dynasty, wondered out loud: Was there a link between Minerva and the Eagle? This is the sort of challenge I cannot resist.

It turns out that the Great Seal, quite like the Seal of Budapest, was the work of a committee, a contentious labor extending over a long period. In our own case here three committees labored to generate the seal. The last finally yielded to the decisive action of a single person, that of Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress. He introduced the eagle; it had not appeared in earlier designs. He specified that the bald eagle be used—that oddly-named bird which isn’t bald at all. Curiously, the motivating force behind this selection was exerted by the image of thirteen arrows held by the bird. But that image was probably suggested by a book of emblems supplied by Benjamin Franklin. It had the eagle, the arrows, and the olive branch. At that time the seal of the Dutch Republic also featured a bunch of arrows—the only European state with a representative form government. The Dutch seal, however, depicted a lion holding seven arrows, one for each subdivisions of the state. Neither Rome nor Minerva seemed to play a visible or obvious role in this labor of creation (or, perhaps, appropriation), although—as in all matters of art and spirit—they were there up in the sky. The source (as usually) is Wikipedia. The synthesis, as always, mine.

The eagle or the lion predominate as symbols of sovereignty, and the two combined produce the griffon. The owl belongs, as it were, to a higher order of reality and also to a more ancient dispensation, the ages of the Goddess.

Minerva, in Etruscan and later in Roman times, was the preeminent image of the Goddess and, being All to All, presided over all important things. She was the goddess of war, poetry, medicine, wisdom, commerce, crafts, and magic. She also invented music. The owl was her bird and hence Owl and Wisdom remain forever united.

Here I cannot resist pointing out that Brigid, the Celtic Tripple Goddess, was the Nordic manifestation of the southern Minerva. Her inclusive governance of all things worthy is indicated in this quote from Lady Augusta Gregory, quoted in turn by Wikipedia here: The goddess was, Lady Gregory wrote, “A woman of poetry, and poets worshipped her, for her sway was very great and very noble. And she was a woman of healing along with that, and a woman of smith’s work, and it was she first made the whistle for calling one to another through the night. And the one side of her face was ugly, but the other side was very comely. And the meaning of her name was Breo-saighit, a fiery arrow.” And she honors me by being my Muse and blesses me by being my wife.

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In conclusion, in a whisper, as it were (thinking of a post here titled “Thirteen”), I would point out that the stars above the eagle, the arrows in its claw, the leaves of the olive branch, and the letters in E pluribus unum all number thirteen.
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Minerva photo credits: Marble Bas Relief of Minerva With Her Owl at the Library Of Congress John Adams Building (Washington, DC). Originally uploaded by takomabibelot

Budapest

Budapest formed on the eastern bank of the Danube around the slopes of what is now called Gellért hill, the highest point in the region. The hill takes its name from St. Gerard, Hungary’s first bishop, martyred by being thrown off the cliffs there. From Gellért it is easy to look across the river, which here flows North to South, in order to scan the East—whence came wave upon wave of nomadic peoples who, for the locals, were always a threat. Here rose one fortification after the other, not least the Castle of Buda, and as that name implies, this settlement was called Buda after the Magyars, who were one of those dangerous invaders, renamed the place after one of their leaders. In later times, as population grew, it eventually spilled across the water. The city across the way was Pest. And, again in due time (1872), the two settlements united to form Budapest, the capital of Hungary.

The city was originally built by the Celts. Yes. If you’re a Central European, you’re a bit of an Irishman, and not just on St. Patrick’s day. The Celts called the settlement Ak-Ink (abundant water). After the Roman expansion eastward eventually incorporated the region (Pannonia) into the Empire, the Romans transformed that name into Aquincum. The Magyars came in the ninth century of our era. Throughout its history, Budapest was, in a quite genuine sense, a border between West and East, the Danube itself a natural line on the map of successive cultures. But in the center of Budapest, which is the river, there is an island which, as it were, makes the center of the center. It is called St. Margaret’s Island. And it was on that island, poised between two worlds, betwixt the East and the West, Catholicism and Protestantism, the traditional and the modern, in the border zone, as it were, that my mother gave birth to her first child seventy-three years ago today. My father, a Catholic and a professional soldier, was stationed in Budapest at the time; the Army maintained a military hospital on St. Margaret’s Island which my mother, a Protestant, was therefore privileged to use. This explains the circumstances of my birth. Or was there something else afoot?—such as, for instance, that this island, in pagan times, had been known as The Island of the Rabbits? It’s true. And I just learned this important fact today, delighted—delighted because I’m a great fan of the rabbits and, on my walks, always count them and consider myself very lucky if I see thirteen or more…

Yes. Budapest is another cradle of Ghulf genes. The coat of arms that kicks things off today is that of Budapest, of course, incorporating in its image the crown of Hungary with its characteristic leaning cross, two castles, Buda’s and Pest’s, separated by the Danube’s azure. As one discovers in delving into heraldry and ancient artifacts, universes of controversy open. The cross was most likely tilted in an accident, but one finds dozens of conflicting stories. The lions, I assume, were presciently chosen because the heralds of the nineteenth century knew that I’d be born under the sign of Leo. Alternatively, the winged lion was part of the original seal of Buda; Pest’s own coat-of-arms bore a griffin, not a lion. In combining the two, the high council responsible for this matter, later, after long and heated debates, eventually replaced the griffin with another, if wing-less, lion for better balance.

The photographs show St. Margaret’s Island. In the first the island is the green mass touched by the bridge in the foreground (St. Margaret’s Bridge). The island’s lovely water tower—at its foot is a grand outdoor theater—is the only visible structure. The second bridge, in the distance, is Árpád Bridge, named after the Magyar chieftain who founded Hungary. The view is from Pest, thus from the East looking North. Behind us on the eastern shore is the Parliament. Across the way and roughly equidistant is Buda Castle. The second photo shows one of the fountains in one of the parks of this large island. The hospital where I was born has long since been transformed into a health resort.