The Spirits of Crossbones Graveyard: Time, Ritual, and Sexual Commerce in London (New Anthropologies of Europe) - Softcover

Hausner, Sondra L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253021367 ISBN 13: 9780253021366

Verlag: Indiana University Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Every month, a ragtag group of Londoners gather in the site known as Crossbones Graveyard to commemorate the souls of medieval prostitutes believed to be buried there-the "Winchester Geese," women who were under the protection of the Church but denied Christian burial. In the Borough of Southwark, not far from Shakespeare's Globe, is a pilgrimage site for self-identified misfits, nonconformists, and contemporary sex workers who leave memorials to the outcast dead. Ceremonies combining raucous humor and eclectic spirituality are led by a local playwright, John Constable, also known as John Crow. His interpretation of the history of the site has struck a chord with many who feel alienated in present-day London. Sondra L. Hausner offers a nuanced ethnography of Crossbones that tacks between past and present to look at the historical practices of sex work, the relation of the Church to these professions, and their representation in the present. She draws on anthropological approaches to ritual and time to understand the forms of spiritual healing conveyed by the Crossbones rites. She shows that ritual is a way of creating the present by mobilizing the stories of the past for contemporary purposes.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sondra L. Hausner is Associate Professor in the Study of Religion, St. Peter's College, at the University of Oxford.

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The Spirits of Crossbones Graveyard

Time, Ritual, and Sexual Commerce in London

By Sondra L. Hausner

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2016 Sondra L. Hausner
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-253-02136-6

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, XI, 
INTRODUCTÌON Set and Setting, 1, 
ONE The Myth of the Winchester Goose, 32, 
TWO Medieval Bankside, 60, 
THREE Shamanism and the Ritual Oscillation of Time, 90, 
FOUR The Virgin Queen and the English Nation, 112, 
FÌVE Southwark, Then and Now, 148, 
CONCLUSÌON Making the Present, 178, 
EPÌLOGUE Crossbones Garden, 198, 
PERMÌSSÌONS FOR TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS, 205, 
NOTES, 206, 
BÌBLÌOGRAPHY, 213, 
INDEX, 221, 

CHAPTER 1

The Myth of the Winchester Goose

Take away prostitutes, and what evils would ensue. St. Augustine, On Order (386 CE)

Mythic reality is a strange and ethereal one, one of those few places in the human social universe unconstrained by the limits of time. Whether we embrace the functionalism of the Polish British fieldworker Bronislaw Malinowski or the structuralism of the great French theorist Claude Lévi-Strauss, myth is eternal, as it is designed to be. Its source and its power are both attributable to that particular, enduring capacity of myth to transcend time: mythic narrative creates, sustains, and maneuvers the very origin of our existence. We use the stories of our beginnings to recount — to ourselves and our kin — how it is we see the passage of time, not least the way we understand what is happening to us now, at the time of our telling.

Anthropologists adore myths, for they constitute a body of readymade stories that give us an easy, inviting route into the way a group narrates itself. For Malinowski (1948 [1925]), myth was famously analogous to a tribe's "charter," or rulebook, or even constitution, of how a culture lived its morality. In this functionalist interpretation of myth, if one wants to know how people think they should behave, one need only consult a culture's myths: they inscribe a set of moral ideals by which a culture's inhabitants know they should live. For Lévi-Strauss (1963), myth bespoke the very structure of the human mind, constituting the formless but somehow architectural web upon which consciousness builds itself. For Mircea Eliade (1954), myth was an axis mundi, the pole around which a nation tells its tales, anchoring its fleet to cosmic truth.

For the tellers themselves, myths recount — or even create — the story of being, otherwise a perennial mystery. As such, they have an unchanging or constant quality, even as they speak to all the variations and exigencies of contemporary life. It is in this paradox — the eternality of myth alongside its changeability and seemingly endless variation — that mythical narratives have come to be seen as the cornerstone of religious cultures across the world and throughout history.

Even our tiny, unnamed tribe, gathering rain or shine by the gates of Crossbones Graveyard, repeats and reveres its origin myth: the tale of its brief history is an integral part of its ritual actions. Every time we participate in this ritual, we hear how a Goose appeared in the life of a contemporary London artist named John Constable (not the Romantic English painter of the same name), also known as John Crow, one night early in the twenty-first century. This particular Goose, in her interaction with our Crow, was an inspirational totem: she led John to the site, he recounts to us, that would subsequently be identified as a historic graveyard, where the bones of 148 skeletons would be excavated in the process of preparing the land for an extension of one of London's underground lines (the Jubilee Line, to be precise). The story of the Winchester Goose — the totemic spirit who came to visit the storytelling shaman — came streaming out of the present-day poet: overnight he wrote a play that would in due course be performed at the Southwark Cathedral, the locus of worship in his neighborhood, and an important site in the Church of England's diocese of the same name.

This artistic act was not an insignificant achievement (nor exactly an anti-establishment one) on the part of an iconoclastic rebel poet in South London. But the good graces of the Cathedral are not to be relied upon in an everyday sense: the whole point of the ritual is to remind us how powerful institutions (even if — or perhaps especially if — they are subordinate to still more commanding interests) have a way of asserting their dominance when it suits them. An index of the inevitably hierarchical structure of social orders, this ritual is most comfortable in the open air, in front of its self-created memorial altar, not inside the Cathedral itself.

And so, as we know, every month since it happened, John holds a ritual in honor of the shamanic vision that brought him to the Cross-bones Graveyard on Redcross Way. John's ritual points out — explicitly — how the Church of England distinguished between different kinds of dead: some people, those who had enough money or were connected to family members who could pay, were buried in the church graveyard; others were buried outside, down the road, in unmarked graves. This story, orated by Constable's shamanic alter ego, John Crow, is the origin myth of this particular social group, and we gather to hear it on each twenty-third.

It is not particularly effervescent — we are a small gaggle of fairly tame counterculturalists on a side street in central London — but it is our ritual. Often wearing a blue robe that could equally be a terry cloth bathrobe (or, in British parlance, a dressing gown) or a wizard's cloak, with a large amber rosary around his neck, John Crow performs on a ritual stage as he tells us of his vision — the dreamlike, shamanic awakening that brought him, and now us, to this location in the first place — and also of the activist vision into which he would translate that clarion call from the spirits of Southwark. His hope is that, through the telling of this story over time, we may gradually reveal the social hierarchies within our societies and thereby act to undo them: through their exposure in ritual, those structures that determine who's in and who's out — in every society, in every period, and even within ourselves — are weakened. This is a ritual about the past, but it is performed for the benefit of the future, and for the sake of the site, namely the memorial garden that he hopes we can create for the community of Bankside, as well as for "all humanity."

As we have seen, the ritual opens by invoking the spirits of the dead (and equating them with us, the "spirits of the living"), and closes with a release, or an incantation to the totem ("Goose! May your spirit fly free!"), and a literal circle of gin, poured around us, a group huddled by a graveyard, and down our gullets too. Human societies need solace, John Crow explains, and gin was an alcohol that was cheap enough to be the balm of many: "It was mother's comfort, and mother's ruin." This ritual, and the telling of this particular myth, is also a source of solace; it offers a gathering of like-minded people who care about memorialization, and who need a place to come every now and again for some open-hearted human contact.

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Indiana University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0253021367
• ISBN 13: 9780253021366
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 238
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande