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Chapter XI Charming The Moon: Moon Charms for Sick Children in Portuguese Ethnography Francisco Vaz Da Silva In this paper I draw attention to a set of moon charms performed for sick children, which I propose to interpret in the light of the fundamental link between water, soul cycles and lunar phases. Let me start with the longstanding notion of water/soul oscillations between this world and the otherworld in the longue durée of European cultures. Homer (Iliad 8.552) depicts Tartarus as “the pit of earth and sea”, and Socrates (Phaedo 112 a–b) affirms that into Tartarus “all the rivers flow together, and from it they flow forth again” in a back-and-forth movement. The same crucial notion appears in German mythology under the name of Hvergelmir, the great underground tunnel “from and to which ‘all waters find their way.’” Viktor Rydberg adds that Hvergelmir provided Germanic peoples with an explanation of the tides. Likewise, Socrates emphasises that since the chasm is bottomless (for it bores right through the earth), “the mass of liquid has no bottom or foundation; so it oscillates and surges to and fro, and the air or breath that belongs to it does the same.” Moreover, Socrates notes, “Just as when we breathe we exhale and inhale the breath in a continuous stream, so in this case too the breath, oscillating with the liquid, causes terrible and monstrous winds as it passes in and out.” Hence originate the tides and winds on earth (Homer 1998, 247; Rydberg 1907, 421; Plate 1963, 92–93). Socrates’ analogy between the circulation of breath and human breathing is significant in the light of the widespread identification of a person’s last breath with the exiting of the life principle. As Walter Burkert notes, psyche is both that something that exits the body at death 258 THE POWER OF WORDS and the “breath just as psychein is the verb to breathe.” In this perspective , the analogy between the body breathing and the rhythmic movement of “the air or breath” through Tartarus suggests an identity between this air and departed souls. In other words, breath carried by the waters between the upper and lower regions connotes the soul carried by the waters between this world and the otherworld (Burkert 1987, 195). Indeed, the to-and-fro circulation of water and breath through Tartarus accords with the folk notion of mutual inversion between the two realms. Socrates states that low tides in the upper region bring about high tides in the lower region, and vice versa (Phaedo 112 b–c). The underlying equation between the antipodes and the otherworld is plain in Virgil’s statement that whereas one pole is always high above us, the pole beneath our feet is in sight of the black Styx and the dead. And the poet goes on to link the lower region to ocean waters and lifeless silent night, then to propose equivalence between our sunrise and the sunset in the nether region (Georgics 1.242–51). One obvious implication is that each new cycle proceeds from the nether realm of waters. This brings us to the ancient link between waters and generation. For instance, the parallelism between Homer’s statement that Oceanus is the progenitor “of all [the gods]” (Iliad 14.246) and Plato’s assertion that “the soul came first” (Laws 892 c) is anything but casual. Richard Onians explains river worship in ancient Greek folklore by way of the hypothesis that “rivers were regarded as generative powers and givers of seed.” Moreover, Onians pinpoints the snake connotation of Oceanus, nine times wound around the earth, and he relates this connotation to the notion that “the procreative element in any body was the psyche, which appeared in the form of a serpent.” These remarks imply overall equivalence between the procreative life fluid of snake-like Oceanus, generating the soul, and spinal marrow, which was believed to take serpentine form.1 In short, Socrates’ depiction of the movement of waters and the pertaining psyche between the upper and the lower regions is actually 1 I am following the translation of Homer favored by Onians 1973, 247, and by Flacelière in Homère, Iliade. Odyssée, 1965, 334. I am using A. E. Taylor’s translation of Laws in Plato 1963, 1447. Onians 1973, 230 and 249, cf. 251. Concerning the snake essence of Oceanus and the snake form of marrow, see 206–7, 247–51 and 315–6. [3.145...

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