"Chasing Hares": Buddha's Three Easter Bunnies?

Mad March Hares, chocolate bunnies, Astarte, lunacy, menstruation, fertility, Buddhism's three refuges, the Trinity, and the Virgin Mary. Along the Silk Road, through the Golden Horde, the same ancient symbol. Three circling and intertwined hares spread east to China and west through Germany to Devon. Coincidence? Chance? Kismet?

While the Chinese and the Christians who incorporated the motif into their places of worship both appear to have forgotten the original meaning, they displayed the three rabbits chasing each other upon roof bosses, treasure chests, wall paintings, and even Mongol coins. Sure, threes-- my lucky number-- is a given for many cultures. But, the specificity of the three hares does establish a singular pattern that did not originate independently. Its distinction marks its common birthplace, in Persia.

James Crowden wonderfully and eloquently follows the diverging, and then unifying path taken by three scholars. They pursued this image over thousands of miles. Listen to the November 16th 2004 BBC Radio 4 Programme "Chasing Hares." Crowden alludes to the connection: hares were by many ancients supposed to reproduce asexually, their fertility was tied of course to spring but also to the lunar cycle, and the half-lost ties to Astarte-Esther-Eostre-Easter, feminine wiles, and sexual potency jumbled together. Into "spring fever"!

The trio themselves of archeologist Dr. Tom Greeves, art historian Sue Andrew, and photographer Chris Chapman explored around 2004 the Three Hares icon's dispersion and origin. They have inspired an array of websites with pictorial links to the iconography and the provenance of this symbol. I don't think the hares made it to Ireland, but this triple intertwining, reminiscent of Celtic swirling interlace but somehow folklorically international and maddeningly common in many storytelling traditions, may have influenced the triskele of the Isle of Man and they have been traced to the North of England in formerly Celtic realms during the Middle Ages.

Many conventional scholars belittle the idea that Christian and Buddhist, Western and Eastern, Nestorian and Catholic, perhaps Celtic and Himalayan could have had much verifiable contact. (I admit caution here despite my romantic wish for fulfillment; I found out on my own, tangentially, that as late as 1291, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery survived in Persia, for example.)

What about the Italian friars contemporary with Marco Polo who travelled to Samarkand and Swat? The forgotten sailors who must have skippered from Cairo to Cornwall? The traders who lugged cauldrons and crafted torcs across the sands and steppes. If my Celtic ancestors may have exchanged goods with those prehistorically from Scythia or Danube, Galicia or Tunisia, why could such trade not glimmer later?

I'm now mapping out historical predecessors in pseudo-scholarship by antiquarians of Buddhist-Celtic ties. Professors scoff at this documented need by some of those on the fringe. Outliers persist in melding together what academicians sever. This energy produced, recently, determined constructions of hybrid spiritualities. While the Silk Road may be replaced by the Information Highway, the yearning to cross over from one culture, one faith, to another, still beckons a few bold pilgrims today.

The solution to the mysterious origin-- as far as we can surmise-- of the three hares suggests that our ancestors shared intriguing lore from faraway lands. No less than hipsters with Chinese tattooes, Lhasa residents better or worse working at Holiday Inn, or sushi bars the world over-- and pre-fab Guinness-tapped chain pubs. This venerable trail of interlocked beasties attests for us in a globalized age of a slow diffusion from a caravan-burdened, clipper-ferried, or tinker-peddled less hectic, more marvelling, past.

Here are two representative links: Chris Chapman's photos for the "Three Hares Project." Metapage to Crowden's talk, Chapman's pictures, Chinese parallels, and similar puzzles: "Three Hares Homepage." St. Andrew's Church, South Tawton, Devon image; photo by Chapman.

Learning Welsh: Resources

Iechydd da! "Good day!" Dia duit. As if Irish isn't daunting enough. Mutations "go leor," fearsome changes, dialectical brawls that make Corca Dhuibne vs. Gaoth Daobhair look like a playground spat. Literary and spoken versions diverging apace with the red shift of the galaxies according to the Hubble constant. But, after thinking about R.S. Thomas and getting Byron Rogers' recent bio (still meaning to read Justin Wintle's one from last decade on the same) on this fractious nationalist vicar who, learning his native tongue (yes, I understand the contradiction) too late, could not write in it the verse which, many claim, makes him the pre-eminent poet of the last part of the last century in English, I figured perhaps returning to find out more about Cymraeg and Cymru would be inspiring. Or, at least make me appreciate my lack of Irish fluency better.

In 1979, staying near a village near the Pennine moors, Upper Cumberworth ("homestead of the Cymri" as one of their last interior North-Central outposts near the vanished realm about which Ted Hughes wrote a Yorkshire-themed collection titled "Remains of Elmet")-- with my decidedly raven-curled and dark-eyed hostess Rachel, whose father was Liverpool Welsh and had studied at Aberystwyth-- I heard on a jaunt to Fishguard (Abergaun= "mouth of the river") a Celtic sentence or two spoken for the first time.

Rachel looked Welsh, and although we had to look puzzled and wait for the question to morph again into our imperial form of address, I was taken by this interaction. The assumption entered into a casual exchange between strangers: that Rachel was Welsh and that she could speak a language other than English-- one that had endured 4,500 years in this part of the island. The bond that was offered chafed against the sundered tie. Emigration from Wales had dissolved ancestral link that connected her family to its roots. Yet, her genetic inheritance still attracted the gesture made by the lads who stopped her. (Me, I don't know-- I guess I was either Irish or American or German for that matter to them-- if not a Brit. Another reason why when travelling I tend not to speak up much, preferring to blend in and observe.)

It was one of those happenstance moments that defines a path for a lifetime. Two Pembroke (we were in Dyfed, formerly Pembrokeshire) Corgis walked with their owner on the shore. Dog loving me took this as a good omen. Locals asked Rachel where she'd gotten the fish & chips she carried as we walked along waiting for the ferry to Rosslare and my first, albeit brief, glimpse of Ireland.

On the middle of the night's return, I also recall being catcalled by local louts as I entered the Kingdom again. I hesitated. I was unsure if I could stroll in as easily as a subject of the Queen, but nobody seemed to care that I was an American in this unlikely port of (re-)entry. Crown security was much more casual back then about such matters, although we were held up an awfully long time before departure. The boat had been boarded and police wandered about amidst squalling megaphones. There were mutterings of the IRA's threats as we waited for the ferry earlier that day. The tension of the Irish campaign churned with dormant memories of what being regarded as English in the principality where holidaymakers meant. I had already enjoyed the lyrical if somewhat sentimental novels of Richard Llewellyn, and not only "How Green Was My Valley." "Green, Green Was My Valley" written in his grumpy retirement in the 1970s lamented not only the closure of the mines but the arsonists who attacked the vacation homes. My sympathies were and remain with the Meibion Glyndwr. Rachel and her innocently uncomprehending sort earned resentment from our Celtic cousins who remained behind, under such invasion by us outlanders for centuries. We forgot our mother tongues, and, like R.S. Thomas or myself (can't speak for Rachel), we labor all the more to regain what to a child comes so much easier.

Irony also entered that resort town. Fishguard's the location of "the last attempted invasion" of Albion. In 1797 a few clueless Gauls were apprehended on the same strand where the Queen's chosen breed trotted. The next "year of the French" resulted in the failed Rising of 1798 with thirty thousand dead Irishmen: history certainly remained relevant.

I was staying with the Johnsons for six weeks on a summer exchange program after I won an essay contest sponsored by the State of California on the quadricentennial of Sir Francis Drake's landing in the Bay Area. Later, the Manx held their assembly-- I think it was on the Fourth of July whose spectacular sunset over Denby Dale lingers in my mind-- and on the BBC I listened to a bit of that revived language also. Ned Maddrell, (arguably) the last native speaker of Manx, had died less than five years before. (See my recent review here of Mark Abley's "Spoken Here" and its chapters on both Manx and Welsh.) And, in the sunny July garden "off Carr Hill Road" (as the postal address went-- "car" comes from a P-Celtic "car[r]"), I read the now famous Jon Savage review, "Death Disco," of a nearby band's debut LP (Sounds, Melody Maker, NME all being my constant companions then along with gammon crisps, lemon curd & Bakewell tarts), "Unknown Pleasures" by Joy Division. Bilberries (blueberries to me) from the fields. Also, my first pints of Guinness at the Toss o'Coin. What a way to bridge my high school- into- college summer; I turned 18 in England! Yes, Rachel had a boyfriend already, Simon in the RAF; he and I went to Mass together in Barnsley, and he was quite a genial gentleman.

I reviewed on the British Amazon site a while back Pamela Petro's "Travels in Another Language" about her experiences trying to speak Welsh while visiting foreign places where, she reasoned, the conversationalists would be less likely to lapse into Saesnag. She had studied, as so many do, at the Wlpan (the only word in Hebrew likely to have been commonly adapted into a Celtic language, I reckon) and at courses at the University campus in Lampeter (whose site no longer has a link to the on-line tutorials, however). Surfing the Web today after a search for Sain Records revealed disappointingly little about their activist past, I wandered into language links.

I credit the post-colonial Beeb for great sites for adult learners in both Irish and Welsh. Following links, I noticed a second Californian writer who learned Welsh at an Wlpan. I guess it's like Oideas Gael, but financially larger and so grandly scaled. There's one year-round in the formerly deserted village of Nant Gwrtheryn. Again, the contrasts between the relatively intimate facilities for Irish learners and the extensive support for adults learning Welsh continues to astonish me; certainly Sabhal Mór Ostaig on the Isle of Skye has developed too a strong Hebridean presence. (I've read "A Waxing Moon"-- a history of SMO-- by Roger Hutchinson and meant to review it but cannot find my notes taken from the ILL copy.) The state sponsorship of Irish, contrarily, as letters continue to castigate Conradh na Gaeilge and the like for their lackadaisical efforts, makes the resurgence of Scots Gaelic and Welsh all the more admirable, undertakings that relied more on community energy than hidebound bureaucracy.

Here's a link to a review of what Thomas published (for the great publisher Y Lolfa, the Celtic cousin to Cló Iar Chonnachta "as gaeilge") about her joys and pains: "You Don't Speak Welsh." http://www.clwbmaluhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/learnwelsh/cachu.co.uk/features/sandi_thomas_interview.htm

BBC's Learn Welsh: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/learnwelsh/
Mark Nodine's Welsh course on-line: http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/fun/welsh/
Harry Campbell's Welsh Informationary: http://www.gwybodiadur.co.uk

Shariah Program: Language-learning links from all over the world (including Ulpan/ Wlpan): http://www.shariahprogram.ca/Resources3.shtml

P.S. Image on right= "I'm learning Welsh." Tá mé ag foghlaim Breatnáis. Tá beagan Breatnáis agam. In Irish, the surname anglicized as "Walsh" is really "Breathnach," or stranger/ outsider/ foreigner. Compare "Wallace" in Scotland, as in Braveheart's William W. who, of course, fights the lisping Normans from England via France, Normandy via their marauding progenitors the Northmen or Vikings. Not to be confused with Wallachia near Transylvania or the Galizianers from Galatia on the border of present-day Poland and the Czech lands. (Not to be confused with the Galatians in Asia Minor who received a letter from Paul.) Gaul was conquered as were those Continental Celtic bastions by Rome, who at least named Cambria for the Welsh, Britannia for England, and Alba for Scotland. Confusingly, "Galles" is French for the Welsh. The Welsh speak a Celtic language but not a Gaelic one. Theirs is P-Celtic, or "Brythonic." Welsh, in English, derives from a term for stranger in post-Roman days as Britain was invaded by the Anglo-Saxons. Thus their term "wealasc" (cf. "commonweal"). Contrarily, "Cymraeg" denotes one of the people, a true native and not a sissified Saes in Welsh/ sinister Sasanach in Irish!

P.P.S. Britain derives from Prydain-- the same word used by the late Lloyd Alexander in his splendid tales that revive the Mabinogi. Brittany comes from the flight of the Celts from Britain into non-Frankish "Armorica," as the Romans called it. When the Irish call for "Brits out," they really mean "English," but this is complicated by the Union and the fact that many of the soldiers who were stationed in the North were Scots, or Welsh. (See "Soldiers & Innocents," Russell Celyn Jones' novel.) Many of those who first invaded Hibernia in 1169 were Normans who had taken over Wales a century earlier. And you all know that the Scotti were Gaelic migrants from Ireland, right?

Mark Abley's "Spoken Here" Book Review

Subtitled "Travels Among Endangered Languages," the fact that this narrative roamed among two Celtic ones, Manx and Welsh, added to its attractions for me. While six thousand languages are currently spoken, one dies every two weeks, and by the end of this century, perhaps half will be lost. With each one, as this book chronicles, a world of insight and millennia of wisdom vanish. You cannot recreate one from software and tapes anymore than, the author warns, you can bring cheetahs back to life from a vial of sperm and a National Geographic video. Or, as one informant tells him, it's like dropping a bomb on the Louvre, with each destruction of a tongue. Languages differ since they not only limit what we can say but what we must say.

For those, as with the Mohawks who learn their enormously complex, and verb-based (rather than noun-based as English and many non-American languages appear to have evolved) way of thinking and speaking, the need to recover ancestral speech is akin to a phantom limb, one which yearns to be reattached, reanimated. But, as Abley finds in all of his travels, the prognosis for successful recovery is slim. Still, as with Manx, a few fight the odds. The trouble is, it takes an act of will to resist giving in to the dominant language. A visit to the Inuit effectively dramatizes how "melting at the edges," the tendency to slip into English tugs every day at speakers of other languages. If, as in Welsh, Abley tells, one day all its speakers turned to one another and substituted "good morning" instead of "bore da," the language would be spoken of-- but only in the past tense. It would have died.

Abley explores Native Americans among the Yuchi in Oklahoma, an "isolate" not related to any other language and Mohawk in Canada. The force of governments, armies, preachers, and traders has won the world for English, it appears, everywhere he goes. With it comes conformity to the majority, and erosion of tribal or ethnic identity. His look at aboriginal Australia reveals that a creole of a half-dozen languages, done under pressure to communicate among themselves when the peoples were herded by missionaries a century ago into encampments, is arguably thriving, but smaller languages are dying. Similar to the Americas, the relentless force of global English-- itself the reluctant do-gooder or haphazardly sinister villain behind every chapter here, undermines, of course, the Celtic tongues, as does French that of the vernacular-- known by many contending names (is it a dialect? language? separate dialects?) in Provencal. In Israel and enclaves in the diaspora, on the other hand, the mama-loshen of Yiddish appears to be strongest in the male bastion among Hasidic males, contrary to its once-disparaged role as "servant girl" stealing away favors of the Lady of the house, according to intriguing century-old Zionist propaganda cited.

Chapters alternate efficiently between Abley's encounters with each of these languages and more general, if equally thoughtful, shorter overviews of language debates. Chomsky's deep structure and his assumption that we all process the world through basically the same set of hardwired codes hoarded wins the academic bout. But my sympathies and those of many minority language speakers appear to be with Sapir-Whorf: the Mohawk section provides eloquent testimony. Abley paraphrases his argument that language indeed constructs our cultural p-o-v from a summary of Brian Maracle's "Back to the Rez" that I quote in full:

"John carefully paddled his canoe through the rapids yesterday," we'd say in English. A Mohawk equivalent could take several forms, but typically it would go like this: "yesterday/ through the rapids/ his canoe/ carefully/ he paddled/ John." Brian compares the English version to a movie scene in which the camera focuses first on John, then on his boat, and finally on the scene around him. In the Mohawk version, time and landscape take precedence, followed by the boat and then by a man in the boat; personal identity comes last of all. "These two movies," Brian writes, "represent two drastically different ways of looking at life. . . The way that the English-speaking world structures its sentences explains to me, in a small way, why western society is so self-centred and narcissistic, why it is so fixated on the cult of the individual and why it is so obsessed with celebrities." (186-7)

Certainly, such a comparison makes me ponder the reach of the language we use here. Wal-Mart, Abley wonders in Oklahoma, could be a fine comparison to global English; but, a native corrects him. Unlike the mom-and-pop stores, the chain fails to stock other products. Instead, once it takes over, it features the generic brand. Same with English; convenience, ease of use, and predictability follow its hegemony. While the book could have been, for me, more detailed on Hebrew vs. Yiddish and the countercultural politics and music that heightened the mid-20c campaign for Welsh, this book moves quickly and lightly over such material. There are notes pointing readers who wish more information on academic topics.

Abley encourages us, and shows in his last chapter how we can help practically such efforts that justifiably link endangered languages with ecological threats. Perhaps we can ease the impact of global English in this age of franchises and superstores and monolingual products.

(Reviewed on Amazon today in slightly modified form.)