Kibbutz

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A Kibbutz , plural Kibbutzim , from the Hebrew word meaning “gathering” or “together,” is an Israeli collective community. The Kibbutzim movement combines socialism and Zionism in a form of practical Labor Zionism, founded at a time when independent farming was not practical. Forced by necessity into communal life, and inspired by their own socialist ideology, kibbutz members developed a pure communal mode of living that attracted interest from the entire world. Of particular interest was their collective mode of child-rearing, in which the children, like all their property, were considered as under collective ownership and responsibility. The Children’s Societies provided a place and adults who raised all the children together, meeting their parents only at scheduled visits.

While the kibbutzim lasted for several generations as utopian communities, most of today’s kibbutzim are scarcely different from the capitalist enterprises and regular towns to which they were originally supposed to be alternatives. Today, farming has been partially abandoned in many cases, with technology industries commonly replacing them. Nuclear families have replaced the Children’s Societies.

Though the kibbutz movement never accounted for more than seven percent of the Israeli population, it did more to shape the image Israelis have of their country, and the image that foreigners have of Israel, than any other Israeli institution.

Ideology of the Kibbutz movement

The spiritualism of the pioneers of the kibbutz movement consisted of mystical feelings about Jewish work, articulated by labor Zionists like Berl Katznelson, who said, “everywhere the Jewish laborer goes, the divine presence goes with him.”

In addition to redeeming the Jewish nation through work, there was also an element of redeeming Eretz Yisrael, or Palestine, in the kibbutz ideology.

Kibbutz members took pleasure in bringing the land back to life by planting trees, draining swamps, and countless other activities to make the land more fertile. In soliciting donations, kibbutzim and other Zionist settlement activities presented themselves as “making the desert bloom.”

The first kibbutzniks hoped to be more than plain farmers in Palestine. They wanted to create a new type of society where there would be no exploitation of anyone and where all would be equal. The early kibbutzniks wanted to be both free from working for others and free from the guilt of exploiting hired work. Thus was born the idea that Jews would band together, holding their property in common, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Kibbutz members were not orthodox Marxists. Marxists did not believe in nations, whereas those kibbutzniks who leaned toward nationalistic Zionism did. Traditional Marxists were hostile to Zionism, even its communist manifestations. Although kibbutzniks practiced communism themselves, they did not believe that communism would work for everyone. Kibbutz political parties never called for the abolition of private property; Kibbutzniks saw kibbutzim as collective enterprises within a free market system.

History

Origins

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, conditions were especially hard for the Jews of the Russian Empire. It was the underlying policy of the Russian government in its May Laws to “cause one-third of the Jews to emigrate, one-third to accept baptism, and one-third to starve.” Except for a wealthy few, Jews could not leave the Pale of Settlement; within it, Jews could neither live in large cities, such as Kiev, nor any village with fewer than 500 residents, even if a person needed rural medical recuperation. In case any Jews made their way into Moscow, in 1897, the Moscow Chief of Police offered a bounty for the capture of an illegal Jew equal to the capture of two burglars.

Jews responded to the pressures on them in different ways. Some saw their future in a reformed Russia and joined Socialist political parties. Others saw the future of Jews in Russia as being out of Russia, and thus emigrated to the West. Last, but not least, among the ideological choices that presented themselves to Jews in late nineteenth century Russia was Zionism, the movement for the creation of a Jewish homeland in the cradle of Judaism, Palestine, or, as Jews called it, Eretz Yisrael.

In the 1880s, approximately 15,000 Jews, mostly from southern Russia, moved to Palestine with the dual intentions of living there and farming there. This movement of Jews to Palestine in the 1880s is called the “First Aliyah.”

The First Kibbutzim.

The Jews of the First Aliyah generation believed that Diaspora Jews had sunk low due to their typical disdain for physical labor. Their ideology was that the Jewish people could be “redeemed physically as well as spiritually by toiling in the fields of Palestine.”

The Biluim came to Eretz Yisrael with high hopes of success as a peasant class, but their enthusiasm was perhaps greater than their agricultural ability. Within a year of living in Palestine, the Biluim had become dependent on charity, just as their scholarly brethren in Jerusalem were. Thanks to donations from extremely wealthy Jews, such as Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, the Biluim were able to eventually prosper. Their towns, Rishon LeZion, Rehovot, and Gedera developed into dynamic communities while their culture of labor evolved: Instead of cultivating the soil on their own land, the Biluim hired Arabs to work the land in their place.

Tensions flared up once again in Russia in the first years of the twentieth century, which inspired another wave of Russian Jews to emigrate. As in the 1880s, most emigrants went to the United States, but a minority went to Palestine. It was this generation that would include the founders of the kibbutzim.

Most members of the Second Aliyah wanted to farm the land, but becoming independent farmers was not a realistic option. In 1909, Joseph Baratz, nine other men, and two women established themselves at the southern end of the Sea of Galilee near an Arab village called “Umm Juni.” These teenagers had hitherto worked as day laborers draining swamps, as masons, or as hands at the older Jewish settlements. Their dream was now to work for themselves, building up the land.

Ottoman Palestine was a harsh environment, quite unlike the Russian plains the Jewish immigrants were familiar with. The Galilee was swampy, the Judean Hills rocky, and the South of the country, the Negev, was a desert. Living collectively was simply the most logical way to be secure in an unwelcoming land. On top of considerations of safety, there were also those of economic survival. Establishing a new farm in the area was a capital-intensive project; collectively the founders of the kibbutzim had the resources to establish something lasting, while independently they did not.

They called their community “Kvutzat Degania,” after the cereals where they grew up. Their community would grow into the first kibbutz. Baratz wrote about his experiences:

We were happy enough working on the land, but we knew more and more certainly that the ways of the old settlements were not for us. This was not the way we hoped to settle the country—this old way with Jews on top and Arabs working for them; anyway, we thought that there shouldn’t be employers and employed at all. There must be a better way.

Development

Despite facing significant difficulties, kibbutzim grew and proliferated. By 1914, Degania had fifty members. Other kibbutzim were founded around the Sea of Galilee and the nearby Jezreel Valley. The founders of Degania themselves soon left Degania to become apostles of agriculture and socialism for newer kibbutzim.

Kibbutzim and the whole Jewish community in Palestine grew as a result of the increase in Anti-Semitism in Europe. In contrast to the prediction anti-Zionist Jews had made prior to World War I, the spread of liberal ideas was not irreversible and the position of Jews in many Central and Eastern European societies actually deteriorated. To escape the pogroms, tens of thousands of Russian Jews immigrated to Palestine in the early 1920s, in a wave of immigration that was called the “Third Aliyah.” In contrast to those who came as part of the Second Aliyah, these youth group members had some agricultural training before embarking and had already held meetings and made preparations to begin kibbutz life.

Kibbutzim founded in the 1920s, tended to be larger than the kibbutzim founded prior to World War I. Degania had only twelve members at its founding. Ein Harod, founded only a decade later, began with 215 members. Altogether, kibbutzim grew and flourished in the 1920s. In 1922, there were scarcely 700 individuals living on kibbutzim in Palestine. By 1927, the kibbutz population was approaching 4,000. By the eve of World War II, the kibbutz population was 25,000, 5 percent of the total population of the whole Yishuv settlement.

Challenges

The establishment of Israel and the flood of Jewish refugees from Europe and the Muslim world presented challenges and opportunities for kibbutzim. The immigrant tide offered kibbutzim a chance to expand through new members and inexpensive labor, but it also meant that Ashkenazi kibbutzim would have to adapt to Jews whose background was far different from their own.

Many of the kibbutzim were secular, even staunchly atheistic, although they wanted their new communities to have Jewish characteristics nonetheless. Friday nights were still “Shabbat” with a white tablecloth and fine food, and work was not done on Saturday if it could be avoided. Kibbutzniks marked holidays like Shavuot, Sukkot, and Passover with dances, meals, and celebrations.

A major challenge that kibbutzim faced was the question of how to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews, or mizrahi. Many kibbutzim found themselves hiring Mizrahim to work their fields and expand infrastructure, but not actually admitting very many as members. Since few Mizrahim would ever join kibbutzim, the percentage of Israelis living on kibbutzim peaked around the time of statehood.

Kibbutzniks enjoyed a steady and gradual improvement in their standard of living in the first few decades after independence. In the 1960s, kibbutzim actually saw their standard of living improve faster than Israel’s general population. The prestige that kibbutzniks enjoyed in Israel in the 1960s was reflected in the Knesset. When only four percent of Israelis were kibbutzniks, kibbutzniks made up 15 percent of Israel’s parliament.

Life in the Kibbutzim

Until the 1970s, the principle of equality was taken extremely seriously by all kibbutzim. Kibbutzniks did not individually own animals, tools, or even clothing. All gifts and income received from outside were turned over to the common treasury.

Social lives

Social lives were held in common as well. At some kibbutzim husbands and wives were discouraged from sitting together at communal meals, as marriage was a kind of exclusivity.

Although major decisions about the future of the kibbutz were made by consensus or by voting, day-to-day decisions about where people would work were made by elected leaders. Typically, kibbutzniks would learn their assignments by reading an assignment sheet.

Kibbutzim attempted to rotate people into different jobs. One week a person might work in planting, the next with livestock, the week after in the kibbutz factory and the following week in the laundry. Even managers would have to work in menial jobs. Through rotation, people took part in every kind of work, but it interfered with any process of specialization.

From the beginning, Kibbutzim had a reputation as culture-friendly and nurturing of the arts. Many kibbutzniks were and are writers, actors, or artists. In 1953, Givat Brenner staged the play My Glorious Brothers, about the Maccabee revolt, building a real village on a hilltop as a set, planting real trees, and performing for 40,000 people. Like all kibbutz work products at the time, all the actors were members of the kibbutz, and all were ordered to perform as part of their work assignments.

Children

The arrival of children at a new kibbutz posed certain problems. If kibbutzniks owned everything in common, then who was in charge of the children? This question was answered by regarding the children as belonging to all, even to the point of kibbutz mothers breastfeeding babies which were not their own.

In the 1920s kibbutzim began a practice of raising children communally away from their parents in special communities called “Children’s Societies,” or Mossad Hinuchi. The theory was that trained nurses and teachers would be better care-providers than so-called amateur parents. Children and parents would have better relationships due to the Children’s Societies, since parents would not have to be disciplinarians, and there would exist no Oedipus complex. Also, it was hoped that raising children away from parents would liberate mothers from their “biological tragedy.” Instead of spending hours a day raising children, women could thus be free to work or enjoy leisure.

In the heyday of Children’s Societies, parents would only spend two hours a day, typically in the afternoon, with their children. As children got older, parents would sometimes go for days on end without seeing their offspring, except from chance encounters on the grounds of the kibbutz. Kibbutzim Children’s Societies were one of the features of kibbutz life that most interested outsiders.

Some children who went through Children’s Societies said they loved the experience, others remain ambivalent, while still others maintain that growing up without one’s parents was very difficult. Years later, a kibbutz member described her childhood in a Children’s Society:

“Allowed to suckle every four hours, left to cry and develop our lungs, we grew up without the basic security needed for survival. Sitting on the potty at regular intervals next to other children doing the same, we were educated to be the same; but we were, for all that, different … At night the grownups leave and turn off all the lights. You know you will wet the bed because it is too frightening to go to the lavatory.”

Gender roles

In the early days of the kibbutz movement the Kibbutzim tended to be male-dominated. The original female members had to perform many of the same tasks given to the male members, such as working in the fields. In many cases the women were still expected to perform traditional female roles, such as cooking, sewing, and cleaning in addition.

Eventually women in all the kibbutzim were allowed and even expected to do the same work as men, including armed guard duty. The desire to liberate women from traditional maternal duties was another ideological underpinning of the Children’s Society system. Interestingly, women born on kibbutzim were much less reluctant to perform traditional female roles. It was the generation of women born on kibbutzim that eventually ended the Societies of Children. Also, although there was a “masculinization of women,” there was no corresponding “feminization” of men. Women may have worked the fields, but men did not work in childcare.

Psychological aspects

In the era of independent Israel kibbutzim attracted interest from sociologists and psychologists who attempted to answer the question: What are the effects of life without private property? Or, what are the effects of life being brought up apart from one’s parents?

Two researchers who wrote about psychological life on kibbutzim were Melford E. Spiro (1958) and Bruno Bettelheim (1969). Both concluded that a kibbutz upbringing led to individuals’ having greater difficulty in making strong emotional commitments thereafter, such as falling in love or forming a lasting friendship. On the other hand, they appeared to find it easier to have a large number of less-involved friendships, and a more active social life.

Other researchers came to the conclusion that children growing up in these tightly knit communities tended to see the other children around them as ersatz siblings and preferred to seek mates outside the community when they reached maturity. Some theorized that living amongst one another on a daily basis virtually from birth on produced an extreme version of the Westermarck effect, which subconsciously diminished teenage kibbutzniks’ sexual attraction to one another. Partly as a result of not finding a mate from within the kibbutz, youth often abandoned kibbutz life as adults.

Economics

Even prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, kibbutzim had begun to branch out from agriculture into manufacturing. Kibbutz Degania, for instance, set up a factory to fabricate diamond cutting tools; it now grosses several million dollars a year. Kibbutz Hatzerim has a factory for drip irrigation equipment. Hatzerim’s business, called Netafim, is a multinational corporation that grosses over $300 million a year. Maagan Michael branched out from making bullets to making plastics and medical tools. Maagan Michael’s enterprises earn over $100 million a year. A great wave of kibbutz industrialization came in the 1960s, and today only 15 percent of kibbutz members work in agriculture.

Future

Kibbutzim have gradually and steadily become less collectivist. Rather than the principle of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” kibbutzim have adopted “from each according to his preferences, to each according to his needs.”

The first changes to be made were in utilities and in the dining hall. When electricity was free, kibbutzniks had no incentive to save energy. In the 1980s, kibbutzim began to meter energy usage. Having kibbutzniks pay for energy usage required kibbutzniks to have personal money.

Eating arrangements also had to change. When food was free, people had no incentive to take the appropriate amount. Every kibbutz dining hall would end the night with enormous amounts of extra food; often this food would be fed to the animals. Now 75 percent of kibbutz dining halls are pay as you go a la carte cafeterias.

Though Kibbutzniks see their neighbors more than other Israelis, they have begun to live private lives. Most kibbutz dining halls are no longer even open for three meals a day. Group activities are much less well attended than they were in the past and are now infrequently scheduled.

In the 1970s, nearly all kibbutzim abandoned Children’s Societies in favor of the traditional nuclear family. The reasons were many. Some kibbutzim believed that communal life for children led to psychological problems; some said that giving up one’s children was too great a sacrifice for parents.

Kibbutzniks no longer expect to transform the rest of Israel, or the globe, into one large collectivist project, but they have not given up on changing the world in smaller ways. Kibbutzniks are prominent in Israel’s environmental movement. Some kibbutzim try to generate all their power through solar cells. Kibbutzniks are also prominent among Israel’s peace activists.

Legacy

Although there may be hundreds of entities in Israel calling themselves kibbutzim, the collectivist impulse is gone. Some kibbutzim have been criticized for “abandoning” socialist principles and turning to capitalist projects in order to make the kibbutz more self-sufficient economically. Numerous kibbutzim have moved away from farming and instead developed parts of their property for commercial and industrial purposes, building shopping malls and factories on kibbutz land that serve and employ non-kibbutz members while the kibbutz retains a profit from land rentals or sales. Conversely, kibbutzim which have not engaged in this sort of development have also been criticized for becoming dependent on state subsidies to survive.

Nonetheless, kibbutzniks played a role in Yishuv society and then Israeli society, far out of proportion to their population. From Moshe Dayan to Ehud Barak, kibbutzniks have served Israel in positions of leadership. Kibbutzim also contributed greatly to the growing Hebrew culture movement. Likewise, kibbutzim have disproportionately affected the views that the rest of the world has of Israel and the image Israelis have of their country.

George Elliott Clarke

George Elliott Clarke, OC ONS (born 12 February 1960) is a Canadian poet and playwright. His work largely explores and chronicles the experience and history of the Black Canadian communities of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, creating a cultural geography that Clarke refers to as “Africadia”.

Life

Born to William and Geraldine Clarke in Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia, Clarke has spent much of his career writing about the black communities of Nova Scotia. Clarke worked as a parliamentary assistant to Howard McCurdy, MP in Ottawa. He also taught for a time in the African-American Studies department at Duke University.

Clarke earned a B.A. honours degree in English from the University of Waterloo (1984), an M.A. degree in English from Dalhousie University (1989) and a Ph.D. degree in English from Queen’s University (1993). He has received honorary degrees from Dalhousie University (LL.D.), the University of New Brunswick (Litt.D.), the University of Alberta (Litt.D.), the University of Waterloo (Litt.D.), and most recently, Saint Mary’s University (Litt.D). He is currently an English professor at the University of Toronto.

Clarke is a sought-after conference speaker and is active in poetry circles. He is currently promoting his latest book, I & I (January 2009). It delves into layers of spiritual meanings involving a couple traveling from Halifax to Texas and encountering tragedies of racism and sexism.

He currently teaches at the University of Toronto.

Writing career

Clarke was recognized for collecting and promoting stories of African writers and poets. Clarke lives in Toronto and began teaching Canadian and African diasporic literature in 1999 at University of Toronto where he is currently completing a second volume of essays on African-Canadian literature.

He views “Africadian” literature as “literal and liberal—I canonize songs and sonnets, histories and homilies.”  Clarke has stated that he found further writing inspiration in the 1970s and his “individualist poetic scored with implicit social commentary” came from the ‘Gang of Seven’ intellectuals, “poet-politicos: jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, troubadour-bard Bob Dylan, libertine lyricist Irving Layton, guerrilla leader and poet Mao Zedong, reactionary modernist Ezra Pound, Black Power orator Malcolm X and the Right Honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau.”Though flawed, Clarke found “as a whole, the group’s blunt talk, suave styles, acerbic independence, raunchy macho, feisty lyricism, singing heroic and a scarf-and-beret chivalry quite, well, liberating.”

Clarke’s literary emphasis is on the perspectives of the African descendents in Canada and Nova Scotia, focusing on the African American slaves’ descendents who settled in the East coast of Nova Scotia, whom he calls “Africadian.” He writes that it is a word that he “minted from “Africa” and “Acadia” (the old name for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick), to denote the Black populations of the Maritimes and especially of Nova Scotia”.

Clarke maintains that Africadians originated in 1783 and 1815, when Black Loyalists and refugees arrived in Nova Scotia.

Clarke continues to address and challenge the historic encounters with racism, segregated areas, discrimination, hatred, forced relocation and a loss of a sense of identity and a sense of belonging experienced by the Black descendents though they had settled in Canada for hundreds of years. Black immigrations to and within Canada have been compared to a biblical journey beginning with Lamentations and ending with Exodus.

Similarly, Clarke explores specific beliefs, longings and experience of oppression and resistance, the desire for safety, freedom, equality and other basic human rights, shared among the immigrants, historically and contemporaneously. In his anthology Fire On The Water Clarke uses biblical timeline, Genesis, Psalms and Proverbs and Revelation to present Black writings and authors born within a specific period. These names reflect the Africadians’ and other Black peoples’ forebears and the first singers’ own preferences for singing “the Lord’s song in this strange land.”

Clarke is known for his lyrical style, and his other intellectual contributions involve both his ability to combine literary criticism and theatrical forte and his continuance of the themes of cultural inclusiveness and Canadian iconic symbolism. In his 2007 play Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path, Clarke features his Liberal hero Trudeau (1919–2000) describing him as “the Shakespearean character: … He’s a figure about whom it is almost impossible to say anything definitive, because he is encompassed by so many contradictions but that’s what makes him interesting.” In presenting a multicultural Trudeau on the international stage, Clarke seeks to capture the human dimensions, the personality of Trudeau rather than his politics so as to emphasize the dialogues among key characters to “show the people as people not just exponents of ideas”.

Family

Clarke is a great-nephew of the late Canadian opera singer Portia White, politician Bill White and labour union leader Jack White. Clarke is a seventh-generation African Canadian and is descended from African American refugees from the War of 1812 who escaped to the British and were relocated to Nova Scotia. Clarke is the great grandson of William Andrew White, an American born Baptist preacher and missionary, army chaplain, and radio pioneer, who was the only black officer in the British army worldwide during World War I.

Awards and Merits

Clarke has received several awards. The most recent (2009) was as co-recipient of the William P. Hubbard Award for Race Relations from the City of Toronto for his outstanding achievements and commitment in making a distinct difference in racial relations in Toronto. Clarke was cited for “his local and national leadership role in creating an understanding and awareness of African and black culture and excellence in his contribution to redefining culture.” He was a featured writer/instructor at the 2007 Maritime Writers’ Workshop & Literary Festival in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

On 16 January 2008 Clarke was made an honorary Fellow of the Haliburton Literary Society, the oldest literary society in North America, at the University of King’s College, Halifax. He was also inducted as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2008.

In 2001 Clarke won the Governor General’s Award for poetry for his book Execution Poems.

Clarke’s Whylah Falls was selected for the 2002 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by Nalo Hopkinson.

 

Puppets

While the general definition of a puppet is that of an object manipulated by someone, the history of puppets is in fact a long and varied one. While today they are widely considered to be entertainments for children, more and more people are discovering that puppets have always held a place in entertainment for all ages. By taking a look at the history of puppets, you’ll be able to see that the contribution of puppets and puppeteers to the arts has been inestimable.

While it is impossible to be certain, puppetry had its birthplace in India, almost a thousand years B.C. From this era, you can find stick puppets that were used to play out the Indian epics like the Maha-Bharata and the Bala-Ramayana.

While these puppet shows described very sacred and beloved texts, there was still a very real element of entertainment in them. The performances, far from being solemn affairs, were loud and boisterous. This aspect of puppetry would be continued by Indonesians, with their use of the walang puppets. The Indonesian puppet shows would be opened with a speech from a holy person and treated with a certain degree of seriousness.

There are many reasons why the use of puppets might develop. Centuries later, bunraku puppets, large, extremely expressive Japanese puppets were handily replacing human actors on the stage. Legend has it that a famous playwright grew tired of actors demanding that their parts be enlarged and that his plays could be much better acted by wood puppets.

To accommodate the historical dramas and deeply emotional love stories that were current in this era, the puppets themselves were highly sophisticated. There could be as many as three men designated to each puppet; each man would be clothed and hooded in black and though they were in plain sight of the audience, were simply not acknowledged.

In Europe, puppets were no less popular. In many places, puppets were used to act out morality plays, acting in ways that would never have been acceptable for humans to behave. It was during the 18th century that puppetry flourished in Italy, and many serious plays, like Dr. Faust, were performed in this method. By the 19th century, under the direction Pietro Radillo, the Venetian puppeteer, puppets were upgraded from two strings and a rod to controls that included as many as eight strings. This enhanced control gave the puppets a wider range of movement as well as a great degree of believability.

In the 19th century, puppets were divided from actor theaters forever and puppeteers took their places as buskers and wanderers, sharing the same social class as jugglers, gypsies and other foreigners.

At this point, puppetry would start to compete with vaudeville and music hall theater, both venues that were considered low-brow entertainment compared to the classical acting tradition. Like other performers in these venues, puppeteers grew very adaptable and versatile, coming up with new routines overnight and often finding their talents of use at places like seaside resorts, which had only recently opened up. There was an interest in leisure during the 19th century and puppetry played strongly to that.

Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were those who praised puppetry as being a finer art, and there were discussions of the advantages of puppets over real human actors. There was an essay written by one Heinrich von Kleist called “On the Marionette Theatre” where puppets were praised as being less self-conscious than humans, and therefore would always be the better choice. There was the argument made, one that is still recurrent in several forms of media today, that while the human actor imitates the emotion, the puppet, by virtue its unchanging nature, always expresses that key emotion.

Despite the history of puppets going back so far, it is interesting to note that puppetry is still a thriving medium in our world today. There has been a resurgence of interest in puppetry in the twentieth century, and it is possible to see puppets in many different places…

The Muppets, as created by the Jim Hensen company, are one immediately recognizable fixture of the puppetry scene and with even that one word, many people have a certain image called to mine.

The satirical movie Team America: World Police was produced entirely using puppets, for much the same reason that bunraku puppets were used in Japan; the producers simply did not want to deal with human actors.

While it is easy to see that puppets are holding their own when it comes to pure entertainment, it is also worth noting there have been some very important strides made in terms of fine art. Julie Taymor, for instance, who was responsible for the musical The Lion King and the move Titus Andronicus. Taymor was first inspired by a presentation of the Indonesian wayang kulit shadow puppets and went on to study pre-bunraku puppets in early Japan. Thanks to her studies, the puppets used in the Lion King and the musical Juan Darien have won countless awards as well as adding to the rich cultural history of puppetry

 

Adultery

Adultery is generally defined as consensual sexual intercourse by a married person with someone other than his or her lawful spouse. Thus, adultery is a special case of fornication, which refers to consensual sexual intercourse between two people not married to each other. The common synonym for adultery is infidelity as well as unfaithfulness or in colloquial speech, “cheating.”

Views on the gravity of adultery have varied across cultures and religions. Generally, since most have considered marriage an inviolable if not sacred commitment, adultery has been strictly censured and severely punished. For any society in which monogamy is the norm, adultery is a serious violation on all levels—the individuals involved, the spouse and family of the perpetrator, and the larger community for whom the family is the building block and the standard or “school” for interpersonal relationships. The Sexual Revolution of the mid-twentieth century loosened strictures on sexual behavior such that fornication was no longer considered outside the norms of behavior and certainly not criminal if both parties were of age. Nevertheless, adultery still has serious ramifications and is considered sufficient cause for divorce.

From a spiritual perspective, however, the act of adultery causes more than just emotional or legal problems. The violation of trust involved in sexual activity with someone while married to another is deep, and sexual intimacy is not just a physical and emotional experience but a spiritual one. When one has a sexual relationship with another it is not just their “heart” that is given but their soul. While the heart cannot be taken back and mended without difficulty, it is all but impossible to take back the soul.

Definitions

Fornication is a term which refers to any sexual activity between unmarried partners. Adultery, on the other hand, refers specifically to extramarital sexual relations in which at least one of the parties is married (to someone else) when the act is committed.

Adultery was known in earlier times by the legalistic term “criminal conversation” (another term, alienation of affection, is used when one spouse deserts the other for a third person). The term originates not from adult, which is from Latin a-dolescere, to grow up, mature, a combination of a, “to,” dolere, “work,” and the processing combound sc), but from the Latin ad-ulterare (to commit adultery, adulterate/falsify, a combination of ad, “at,” and ulter, “above,” “beyond,” “opposite,” meaning “on the other side of the bond of marriage”).

Today, although the definition of “adultery” finds various expressions in different legal systems, the common theme is sexual activity between persons when one of both is married to someone else.

For example, New York State defines an adulterer as a person who “engages in sexual intercourse with another person at a time when he has a living spouse, or the other person has a living spouse.” Minnesota defines adultery: “when a married woman has sexual intercourse with a man other than her husband, whether married or not, both are guilty of adultery.”

A marriage in which both spouses agree that it is acceptable for the husband or wife to have sexual relationships with other people other than their spouse is a form of non-monogamy. The resulting sexual relationships the husband or wife may have with other people, although could be considered to be adultery in some legal jurisdictions, are not treated as such by the spouses.

Laws and penalties

Adultery

Historically, adultery has been subject to severe punishments including the death penalty and has been grounds for divorce under fault-based divorce laws. In some places the death penalty for adultery has been carried out by stoning.

For example, the influential Code of Hammurabi contains a section on adultery. It mirrors the customs of earlier societies in bringing harsh penalties upon those found guilty of adultery. The punishment prescribed in Hammurabi’s Code was death by drowning or burning for both the unfaithful spouse and the external seducer. The pair could be spared if the wronged spouse pardoned the adulterer, but even still the king had to intervene to spare the lovers’ lives.

In some cultures, adultery was defined as a crime only when a wife had sexual relations with a man who was not her husband; a husband could be unfaithful to his wife without it being considered adultery. For example, in the Graeco-Roman world we find stringent laws against adultery, yet almost throughout they discriminate against the wife. The ancient idea that the wife was the property of the husband is still operative. The lending of wives was, as Plutarch tells us, encouraged also by Lycurgus. There was, therefore, no such thing as the crime of adultery on the part of a husband towards his wife. The recognized license of the Greek husband may be seen in the following passage of the Oration against Neaera, the author of which is uncertain though it has been attributed to Demosthenes:

We keep mistresses for our pleasures, concubines for constant attendance, and wives to bear us legitimate children, and to be our faithful housekeepers. Yet, because of the wrong done to the husband only, the Athenian lawgiver Solon, allowed any man to kill an adulterer whom he had taken in the act.

Later on in Roman history, as William Lecky has shown, the idea that the husband owed a fidelity like that demanded of the wife must have gained ground at least in theory. This Lecky gathers from the legal maxim of Ulpian: “It seems most unfair for a man to require from a wife the chastity he does not himself practice.”

In the original Napoleonic Code, a man could ask to be divorced from his wife if she committed adultery, but the adultery of the husband was not a sufficient motive unless he had kept his concubine in the family home.

In contemporary times in the United States laws vary from state to state. For example, in Pennsylvania, adultery is technically punishable by two years of imprisonment or 18 months of treatment for insanity. That being said, such statutes are typically considered blue laws, and are rarely, if ever, enforced.

In the U.S. Military, adultery is a court-martialable offense only if it was “to the prejudice of good order and discipline” or “of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces.” This has been applied to cases where both partners were members of the military, particularly where one is in command of the other, or one partner and the other’s spouse. The enforceability of criminal sanctions for adultery is very questionable in light of Supreme Court decisions since 1965 relating to privacy and sexual intimacy, and particularly in light of Lawrence v. Texas, which apparently recognized a broad constitutional right of sexual intimacy for consenting adults.

Fornication

The laws on fornication have historically been tied with religion, however in many countries there have been attempts to secularize constitutions, and laws differ greatly from country to country. Rather than varying greatly along national lines, views on fornication are often determined by religion, which can cross borders.

Laws dealing with fornication are usually defined as intercourse between two unmarried persons of the opposite gender. These have been mostly repealed, not enforced, or struck down in various courts in the western world.

Fornication is a crime in many Muslim countries, and is often harshly punished. However, there are some exceptions. In certain countries where parts of Islamic law are enforced, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, fornication of unmarried persons is punishable by lashings. This is in contrast to adultery, where if one of the convicted were married, their punishment would be death by stoning.

Religious Views

Among the world religions, adultery and fornication are generally considered major sins:

No other sin has such a baneful effect on the spiritual life. Because it is committed in secret, by mutual consent, and often without fear of the law, adultery is especially a sin against God and against the goal of life. Modern secular societies can do little to inhibit adultery and sexual promiscuity. Only the norms of morality which are founded on religion can effectively curb this sin.

Judaism

In Judaism, adultery was forbidden in the seventh commandment of the Ten Commandments, but this did not apply to a married man having relations with an unmarried woman. Only a married woman engaging in sexual intercourse with another man counted as adultery, in which case both the woman and the man were considered guilty.

In the Mosaic Law, as in the old Roman Law, adultery meant only the carnal intercourse of a wife with a man who was not her lawful husband. The intercourse of a married man with a single woman was not accounted adultery, but fornication. The penal statute on the subject, in Leviticus, 20:10, makes this clear: “If any man commit adultery with the wife of another and defile his neighbor’s wife let them be put to death both the adulterer and the adulteress” (also Deuteronomy 22:22). This was quite in keeping with the prevailing practice of polygyny among the Israelites.

In halakha (Jewish Law) the penalty for adultery is stoning for both the man and the woman, but this is only enacted when there are two independent witnesses who warned the sinners prior to the crime being committed. Hence this is rarely carried out. However a man is not allowed to continue living with a wife who cheated on him, and is obliged to give her a “get” or bill of divorce written by a sofer or scribe.

The Hebrew word translated “fornication” in the Old Testament was also used in the context of idolatry, called “spiritual whoredom.” Israel’s idolatry is often described as a wanton woman who went “whoring after” other gods (Exodus 34:15-16; Leviticus 17:7; Ezekiel 6:9 KJV).

Christianity

Throughout the Old Testament, adultery is forbidden in the Ten Commandments, and punishable by death. In the New Testament, Jesus preached that adultery was a sin but did not enforce the punishment, reminding the people that they had all sinned. In John 8:1-11, some Pharisees brought Jesus a woman accused of committing adultery. After reminding Jesus that her punishment should be stoning, the Pharisees asked Jesus what should be done. Jesus responded, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” Jesus then forgave the woman and told her not to commit adultery.

Saint Paul put men and women on the same footing with regard to marital rights. This contradicted the traditional notion that relations of a married man with an unmarried woman were not adultery.

This parity between husband and wife was insisted on by early Christian writers such as Lactantius, who declared:

For he is equally an adulterer in the sight of God and impure, who, having thrown off the yoke, wantons in strange pleasure either with a free woman or a slave. But as a woman is bound by the bonds of chastity not to desire any other man, so let the husband be bound by the same law, since God has joined together the husband and the wife in the union of one body.

In the sixteenth century, the Catechism of the Council of Trent defined adultery as follows:

To begin with the prohibitory part (of the Commandment), adultery is the defilement of the marriage bed, whether it be one’s own or another’s. If a married man have intercourse with an unmarried woman, he violates the integrity of his marriage bed; and if an unmarried man have intercourse with a married woman, he defiles the sanctity of the marriage bed of another.

Islam

In the Qur’an, sexual activity before marriage is strictly prohibited. Islam stresses that sexual relations should be restricted to the institution of marriage in order for the creation of the family; and secondly, as a means to protect the family, certain relations should be considered prohibited outside of marriage.

Premarital and extramarital sex (adultery) are both included in the Arabic word Zina. Belonging primarily to the same category of crimes, entailing the same social implications, and having the same effects on the spiritual personality of a human being, both, in principle, have been given the same status by the Qur’an. Zina is considered a great sin in Islam, whether it is before marriage or after marriage. In addition to the punishments rendered before death, sinners can expect to be punished severely after death, unless purged of their sins by a punishment according to Shari’a law.

Hinduism

Hinduism, by the holy book, the Bhagavad Gita, forbids acts of fornication. It is considered offensive in Hindu society as well, and it is still forbidden by Hindu law.

Alternative Hindu schools of thought such as the Tantric branches of Hinduism, the Hindu practices native to India that predates centuries of conservative Islamic influence, is markedly less reserved, teaching that enlightenment can be approached through divine sex. Divine sex is one path whereby one can approach Moksha, a oneness with a higher spiritual level. As such, the Tantric practices seek not to repress sexuality, but to perfect it. By perfecting the act of divine sex, one clears the mind of earthly desires, leaving the soul on a higher level devoid of such worries, filled with bliss, and relaxed.

Buddhism

In the Buddhist tradition, under the Five Precepts and the Eightfold Path, one should neither be attached to nor crave sensual pleasure. The third of the Five Precepts is “To refrain from sexual misconduct.” For most Buddhist laypeople, sex outside of marriage is not “sexual misconduct,” especially when compared to, say, adultery or any sexual activity which can bring suffering to another human being. Each may need to consider whether, for them, sexual contact is a distraction or means of avoidance of their own spiritual practice or development. To provide a complete focus onto spiritual practice, fully ordained Buddhist monks may, depending on the tradition, be bound by hundreds of further detailed rules or vows that may include a ban on sexual relations. Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism, on the other hand, teaches that sexual intercourse can be actively used to approach higher spiritual development.

Adultery in Literature

The theme of adultery features in a wide range of literature through the ages. As marriage and family are often regarded as basis of society a story of adultery often shows the conflict between social pressure and individual struggle for happiness.

In the Bible, incidents of adultery are present almost from the start. The story of Abraham contains several incidents and serve as warnings or stories of sin and forgiveness. Abraham attempts to continue his blood line through his wife’s maidservant, with consequences that continue through history. Jacob’s family life is complicated with similar incidents.

Shakespeare wrote three plays in which the perception of adultery plays a significant part. In both Othello and The Winter’s Tale it is the (false) belief by the central character that his wife is unfaithful that brings about his downfall. In “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” an adulterous plot by Falstaff prompts elaborate and repeated revenge by the wronged wives; the comedy of the play hides a deeper anxiety about the infidelity of women.

In The Country Wife by William Wycherley, the morals of English Restoration society are satirized. The object of the hero is to seduce as many married ladies as possible, while blinding their husbands to what is going on by pretending to be impotent.

Other acclaimed authors who have featured adultery in their novels include F. Scott Fitzgerald in his work, The Great Gatsby, Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, and John Irving in The World According to Garp.

Flathead Nation

 

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation are the Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreilles (Kalispel) Native American tribes. They followed the lifestyle of the Plateau Indians, traveling to hunt buffalo and living in tipis like the Plains Indians, but also having access to reliable food sources in the form of fish, particularly salmon, in the many rivers and streams of their homelands; they also gathered berries and roots, particularly camas.

These tribes were peaceful, except for historical enmity with the Blackfeet, and welcomed white explorers and traders. They learned of the Catholic religion through the Iroquois and requested missionaries to come and minister to them. When missions were established they converted to Christianity. They signed the Treaty of Hellgate in 1855. There was misunderstanding on the part of the tribal leaders, as the treaty ceded most of their homelands to the United States government, leaving them a smaller portion, the Flathead Reservation, to which most tribal members were eventually relocated, some forcibly. Hard working and adaptable, the majority of these people were able to adjust to the reservation lifestyle and today have some successful business and educational ventures. They have made efforts to maintain and revitalize their cultural heritage in ways that are compatible with contemporary society.

History

Pre-contact

The Pend d’Oreilles, also known as the Kalispel, lived around Lake Pend Oreille, the Pend Oreille River, and Priest Lake in the northern Idaho Panhandle. They lived separately from the Bitterroot Salish and the Kootenai until after the signing of the Treaty of Hellgate in 1855.

The Bitterroot Salish and Kootenai tribes originally lived in the areas of Montana, parts of Idaho, British Columbia, and Wyoming. During the 1700s, these two tribes shared common hunting and gathering grounds.

The Bitterroot Salish (Flatheads) initially lived entirely east of the Continental Divide but established their headquarters near the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. Occasionally, hunting parties went west of the Continental Divide but never east of the Bitterroot Range. The easternmost edge of their ancestral hunting forays were the Gallatin, Crazy Mountain, and Little Belt Ranges. Their language is part of the Salishan languages group.

Unlike most other tribes in Montana, the Bitterroot Salish migrated from the west. The Salish occupied territory in Washington, Idaho, and western Montana but ventured as far east as the Bighorn Mountains. After acquiring horses in the early 1700s, they moved east, changing from a lifestyle based on salmon fishing to one more dependent on native plants and buffalo (Waldman 2006).

The Kootenai, however, are native to Montana. Archaeological evidence shows that Native Americans inhabited Montana more than 14,000 years ago, and artifacts indicate that the Kootenai have roots in the area’s prehistory. The Kootenai inhabited the mountainous terrain west of the Continental Divide, venturing only seasonally to the east for buffalo hunts. The Kootenai were divided into two main groups. One band lived to the northeast and had a lifestyle based on buffalo hunting. The other band lived in the mountainous west and their lifestyle centered around rivers and lakes.

Post-contact

The first written record of these tribes is from their meeting with the Lewis and Clark Expedition, where the “Flatheads” are described in detail and the Kalispel are mentioned under the name “Coospellar” (Lewis and Clark 2002). The “Flatheads” also appear in the records of the Catholic Church at St. Louis, Missouri to which they sent four delegations to request missionaries (or “Black Robes”) to minister to the tribe (Shea 1855). The Kootenai had also encountered traders through the Hudson’s Bay Company. David Thompson, the explorer, had crossed the Rocky Mountains and established trading posts in Northwestern Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Western Canada; including Kootenae House and later Saleesh House, the first trading post west of the Rockies in Montana, thereby successfully extending North West Company fur trading territories.

Treaty of Hellgate

The Treaty of Hellgate was signed on July 16, 1855, between Indian commissioner Isaac Stevens and the tribes located in western Montana. The treaty was ratified by Congress, signed by President James Buchanan, and proclaimed on April 18, 1859 (Prucha 1994).

The tribes involved in the signing of the treaty were the Bitterroot Salish, Pend d’Oreilles, and the Kootenai. Based on the terms of the accord, the Native Americans were to relinquish their territories to the United States government in exchange for payment installments that totaled 120,000 dollars. The original territory comprised about 22 million acres (89,000 km²) at the time of the treaty. The territories ceded were from the main ridge of the Rocky Mountains at the 49th parallel to the Kootenay River and Clark Fork to the divide between the St. Regis Borgia River and the Coeur d’Alene River. From there, the ceded territories also extend to the southwestern fork of the Bitter Root River and up to Salmon River and Snake River. This area totaled approximately 20 million acres; the remainder of their homeland became the Flathead Reservation.

From the start, the negotiations were plagued by serious translation problems. Father Adrian Hoecken, said that the translations were so poor that “not a tenth of what was said was understood by either side.” However, as in the meeting with Lewis and Clark, the pervasive miscommunication ran even deeper than problems of language and translation. Tribal people came to the meeting assuming they were going to formalize an already-recognized friendship. Non-Indians came with the goal of making official their claims to native lands and resources. Isaac Stevens, the new governor and superintendent of Indian affairs for Washington Territory, was intent on obtaining cession of the Bitterroot Valley from the Salish. Many non-Indians were already well aware of the valley’s potential value for agriculture and its relatively temperate climate in winter. Due to the resistance of Chief Victor (Many Horses), Stevens ended up inserting into the treaty complicated (and doubtless poorly translated) language that defined the Bitterroot Valley south of Lolo Creek as a “conditional reservation” for the Salish. Chief Victor put his X mark on the document, convinced that the agreement would not require his people to leave their homeland. No other word came from the government for the next fifteen years, so the Salish assumed that they would indeed stay in their Bitterroot Valley forever.

Over time, the real reason for the Hellgate treaty meetings became clear to the Salish and Pend d’Oreilles people. Under the terms spelled out in the written document, the tribes ceded to the United States more than twenty million acres (81,000 km²) of land and reserved from cession about 1.3 million acres (5300 km²), thus forming the Jocko or Flathead Indian Reservation. After the 1864 gold rush in newly established Montana Territory, pressure upon the Salish intensified from both illegal non-Indian squatters and government officials. In 1870, Chief Victor died, and he was succeeded as chief by his son, Chief Charlot (Claw of the Little Grizzly). Like his father, Chief Charlot adhered to a policy of nonviolent resistance. He insisted on the right of his people to remain in the Bitterroot Valley. However, territorial citizens and officials thought the new chief could be pressured into capitulating. In 1871, they successfully lobbied President Ulysses S. Grant to declare that the survey required by the treaty had been conducted and that it had found that the Jocko (Flathead) Reservation was better suited to the needs of the natives. On the basis of Grant’s executive order, Congress sent a delegation, led by future president James Garfield, to make arrangements with the tribe for their removal.

Conditions had become intolerable by the late 1880s, after the Missoula and Bitter Root Valley Railroad was constructed directly through their lands, with neither permission from the native owners nor payment to them. Chief Charlot finally signed an agreement to leave the Bitterroot Valley in November 1889. Inaction by Congress, however, delayed the removal for another two years, and according to some observers, the tribe’s desperation reached a level of outright starvation. In October 1891, a contingent of troops from Fort Missoula forced Chief Charlot and the remaining tribal members out of the Bitterroot and roughly marched the small band sixty miles to the Flathead Reservation.

Bitterroot Salish

Called the Flathead Indians by the first white men who came to the Columbia River, the Bitterroot Salish call themselves Salish (“the people”). The term “Flathead” derives from the flat skull produced by binding infant’s skulls with boards. However, this tribe never practiced head flattening, but rather were called “Flat head” because the tops of their heads were not pointed like those of neighboring tribes people who did practice vertical head-binding. The sign language used by neighboring tribes to distinguish the “Flatheads” consisted of “pressing each side of the head” with the hands.

Their lifestyle was typical of the Plateau Indians, gathering wild roots, particularly camas, and living in mat-covered lodges, and also hunting buffalo and living in tipis part of the year. They were reported to be peaceful, except for historical enmity with the Blackfeet (Mooney 1909).

Originally the Salish practiced an animistic religion with ceremonial dances, notably the Sun Dance. However, when they met the Iroquois through trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company they learned of the Catholic religion. In 1831, they sent a delegation to St. Louis requesting missionaries be sent to them. In 1840, Jesuit Father Pierre-Jean De Smet responded to this request. Welcomed by a gathering of some 1600 members, he established the mission of St. Mary on the Bitter Root river. Although this was later abandoned due to incursions by the Blackfeet, conversion to Catholicism was successful and a new mission of St. Ignatius was established in 1845, by Fathers De Smet and Adrian Hoecken; in 1854, that mission was moved to its present location in St. Ignatius, Montana, and has continued in operation to contemporary times (Krause).

In 1855, they signed the Treaty of Hellgate ceding the majority of their homeland to the Americans. Although there was misunderstanding, and the Salish expected to be able to continue to live in the Bitterroot area, they were eventually relocated to the portion of their lands that had become the Flathead Reservation in Montana.

By the early twentieth century it was reported that the Salish were increasing in population on the Flathead Reservation. They were considered “moral, devoted Catholics, and in every way a testimony to the zeal and ability of their religious teachers,” and had adjusted their lifestyle to become “prosperous and industrious farmers and stockmen” (Mooney 1909).

Pend d’Oreilles

The Pend d’Oreilles, also known as the Kalispel, lived around Lake Pend Oreille, as well as the Pend Oreille River, and Priest Lake although some of them live spread throughout Montana and eastern Washington. The primary tribal range from roughly Plains, Montana westward along the Clark Fork River, Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho, and the Pend Oreille River in Eastern Washington and into British Columbia was given the name Kaniksu by the Kalispel peoples. The name Pend d’Oreilles is of French origin, meaning “hangs from ears,” which refers to the large shell earrings that these people wore. Their language, Kalispel-Pend d’Oreille, belongs to the Salishan languages family.

The Pend d’Oreilles were generally peaceable. They made tools from flint, and many other things were shaped with rocks. For housing, the Pend d’Oreilles lived in tipis in the summer, as well as lodges in the winter time. These houses were all built out of large cattails, which were available in abundance. These cattails were woven into mats called “tule mats” which were attached to a tree branch frame to form a hut.

The traveled to gather their food on a seasonal basis, while also maintaining more permanent areas that they farmed. Camas was a staple, baked and dried to preserve it not only through the winter but for several years. They caught salmon, which they dried and thus preserved a year’s supply. Berries were also gathered and dried. In the winter they hunted and trapped, trading furs for supplies.

The horses they needed came from trading buffalo skins. They people wore robes as well as skins for clothing. They decorated themselves with dyes, paints, beads, and sometimes even animal quills.

In 1844, the Jesuit Father Adrian Hoecken began missionary work with the Pend d’Oreilles, establishing the St. Ignatius Mission with Father Pierre-Jean De Smet. Through this missionary work the Pend d’Oreilles were successfully converted to Christianity, as were the other tribes in the area.

In 1855, the “Upper band” who lived around the lake joined with the Salish and Kootenai in signing the Treaty of Hellgate, and were settled on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. Some of the “Lower band” who lived on the river joined them; others of this group settled on a reservation in Washington state.

Kootenai

The Kootenai (also spelled Kutenai) or Ktunaxa (pronounced in English as /k.tuˈnæ.hæ/) are one of three tribes of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation in Montana, and they form the Ktunaxa Nation in British Columbia. There are also populations in Idaho and Washington in the United States.

The tribes constitute a distinct stock (Kitunahan). They were known by the neighboring Salish as Skalzi (lake or water people), and to the French as Arez-à-plats (Flatbows). There is evidence that they formerly lived in the eastern plains, east of the Rockies, but were driven into the mountains by the Blackfeet (Mooney 1910b).

The Kootenai had a similar subsistence lifestyle to the Salish and Pend d’Oreilles—hunting, fishing, and gathering wild berries and camas roots, and living in tipis and lodges. They dressed in buckskin, painted their faces, and wore their hair long. Their social organization was simple, with each band having a chief and council. They had none of the secret societies that were found in other tribes (Mooney 1910b).

Prior to converting to Catholicism when Father De Smet established the mission among the Salish, they practiced shamanism and held animistic beliefs, particularly worshiping:

the sun, personified as a woman, as the highest and most beneficent deity, to whose home the spirits of the dead journeyed, to rejoin their friends later in this world at a place of sacred pilgrimage, on the shore of Lake Pend d’Oreille (Mooney 1910b).

The Kootenai were friendly toward whites, and David Thompson, the Canadian explorer who established trading relations for the North West Company with many tribes, established a trading post called Kootenai House in 1807. In his visits to the area, Thompson encountered Kaúxuma Núpika, a Kootenai woman. According to the entries Thompson made in his journal concerning her, she spent time as a sort of second wife to a man named Boisverd, who was one of Thompson’s men. Thompson eventually sent her away.

Kaúxuma then claimed to have been transformed by the whites into a man and now had spiritual powers. From this time Kaúxuma took several wives, served as a guide to traders, as well as fighting as a warrior with the Kootenai men and taking the role of shaman and prophet (Waldman 2008). Kaúxuma is thus an example of a female-bodied two-spirit person, a transgender type not uncommon among Native American tribes, many of whom foretold the future. When Thomson encountered Kaúxuma again in 1809, he wrote:

She had set herself up for a prophetess and gradually had gained, by her shrewdness, some influence among the natives as a dreamer, and expounder of dreams. She recollected me before I did her, and gave a haughty look of defiance, as much to say, I am now out of your power (Tyrrell 2008).

In 1811, Kaúxuma walked into Thomson’s camp seeking asylum. Thompson described this “Manlike Woman” as “apparently a young man, well dressed in leather, carrying a Bow and Quiver of Arrows, with his Wife, a young woman in good clothing” (Tyrrell 2008). Kaúxuma continued to act as a shaman and prophet, predicting large numbers of white people coming to the area and bringing diseases. In 1837, while acting as a mediator between the Blackfeet and the Salish, Kaúxuma was killed by the Blackfeet.

The majority of Kootenai within the United States moved to the Flathead Reservation in Montana following the Treaty of Hellgate in 1855. The Oblate Fathers established a mission in British Columbia and Kootenai in that region were educated there.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the Kootenai were considered “civilized” and dedicated Christians, who carried out farming, stock-raising, and working in the lumber camps. Despite epidemics of European introduced diseases, notable smallpox, which reduced their number, they had a stable population. They were described as “industrious, steady, and law-abiding,” “temperate and moral” (Mooney 1910b).

Contemporary life

Contemporary Salish, Kootenai, and Kalispels live on reservations that form a small part of their ancestral territory. Although their population is small, they have maintained their identity and have made great efforts to adapt to the contemporary situation while never forgetting their heritage, history, and culture. Visitors are invited to learn this history at their museums, which contain tribal artifacts and exhibits, and to attend pow-wows, held annually on the reservations, in order to learn more of their culture.

Flathead Indian Reservation

The Flathead Indian Reservation of around 1.3 million acres (5,300 km²), located in western Montana on the Flathead River, is home to the Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreilles Tribes, together known as the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation. The Reservation was created through 1855 Treaty of Hellgate and includes parts of four Montana counties: Lake, Sanders, Missoula, and Flathead. The Flathead Indian Reservation is an area of of forested mountains and valleys just west of the Continental Divide.

The total population of the Flathead Indian Reservation is 26,172 as of the 2000 census, which includes members of the Confederated Tribes as well as Native Americans from other tribes and non-Native Americans. The largest community on the reservation is the city of Polson, which is also the county seat of Lake County.

As the first to organize a tribal government under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1936, the tribes are governed by a tribal council of ten members. The tribal government offers a number of services to tribal members and is the chief employer on the reservation. The tribes operate a tribal college, the Salish Kootenai College, and a heritage museum called “The People’s Center” in Pablo, the seat of the tribal government.

Salish Kootenai College (SKC) is a Native American tribal college based in Pablo, Montana which serves the Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreilles tribes. There are approximately 1,100 students attending the college; enrollment is not limited to Native American students. Prior to 1978, it was a branch campus of Flathead Valley Community College (FVCC). In 1981, the college formally disassociated itself from FVCC and became completely self-governing. It is member of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium.

Flathead Lake is the largest lake in the western part of the coterminous United States, surpassing Nevada/California’s Lake Tahoe by .5 miles (0.80 km) in surface area, 5 miles (8.0 km) in length, and about 3.5 miles (5.6 km) in width, Flathead Lake is also the largest lake in the state of Montana. This lake is one of the cleanest in the world for its size and type. Once known as “Salish Lake,” this body of water takes its name from the tribes who live at the southern end of the lake on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Kerr Dam, near Polson, regulates the lake’s water level and provides hydroelectric power and water for irrigation. Flathead Lake is 30 miles (48 km) southwest of Glacier National Park and is flanked by two scenic highways, which wind along its curving shoreline. The lake is a popular tourist attraction, offering fishing and other water activities as well as scenic views and hiking in the mountains which border its shores. The KwaTaqNuk resort on Flathead Lake brings in revenue from tourism. The tribes also receive revenue from the valuable hydropower dam, Kerr Dam.

Kalispel Indian Reservation

The Kalispel Indian Reservation is northwest of Newport, Washington, in central Pend Oreille County. The total land area of the Kalispel Indian Reservation is 18.840 km² (7.274 sq mi). The main reservation is an 18.638 km² (7.196 sq mi) strip of land along the Pend Oreille River, west of the Washington-Idaho border. There is also a small parcel of land in the western part of the Spokane metropolitan area in the city of Airway Heights, with a land area of 0.202 km² (49.92 acres), the site of Northern Quest Casino which is operated by the tribe. The Northern Quest Casino provides nearly 1,000 jobs for members of the local community.

Kootenai Indian Reservation

The Kootenai Indian Reservation lies in central Boundary County, Idaho, about 40 kilometers (25 mi) south of the Canadian border, and about 3 kilometers (1.9 mi) west-northwest of the city of Bonners Ferry. It has a land area of only 0.076575 km² (18.922 acres) and a 2000 census resident population of 75 persons.

On September 21, 1975, the Kootenai Tribe headed by Chairwoman Amy Trice declared war on the United States government. Their first act was to post soldiers on each end of the highway that runs through the town and they forced people, at gunpoint, to pay a toll to drive through the area that had been the tribe’s aboriginal land. The money was to be used to house and care for elderly tribal members. The tribe also issued “Kootenai Nation War Bonds” that sold at $1.00 each. Most tribes in the United States are forbidden to declare war on the U.S. government because of treaties, but the Kootenai Tribe never signed a treaty. The dispute resulted in concession by the United States government and a land grant of 12.5 acres that became the Kootenai Reservation (Andrews).

Since that time, the Kootenai have worked to preserve their traditions, language, and culture while at the same time establishing economic independence. An important step in their economic growth was the opening of the Kootenai River Inn in 1986. A decade later this inn became the site of the Kootenai Casino and was fully renovated to become a luxury resort and spa. The success of this Best Western Plus Kootenai River Inn Casino & Spa has enabled Kootenai youth to pursue higher education and career goals.

Kootenay Reserves in British Columbia

Four bands of Kootenay (preferred spelling in Canada) live on various reserves in the southeastern corner of British Columbia, from the U.S. border north to the Invermere area, and as far west as Creston: The Lower Kootenay Band (Yaqan nu?kiy) have eight reserves established in 1906 on 2,553 hectares of land on the Kootenay River. The St. Mary’s Band (?Aq’am) live on five reserves established in 1884 on 7,850 hectares of land; their main community is on the west bank of the Kootenay River at the mouth of the St. Mary’s River. The Tobacco Plains Band has two reserves on 4,418 hectares of land adjacent to the U.S. border, established in 1884. The Columbia Lake Band (Akisq’nuk) has two reserves on 3,412 hectares of land at Windermere Lake, established in 1884.

These bands are affiliated with the Ktunaxa Nation Council, formerly known as the Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Tribal Council. At the beginning of the twenty-first century there were approximately 1,000 registered members of the Ktunaxa Nation in British Columbia.

The Kootenay are active in business initiatives such as golf courses, campgrounds, a guide outfitting territory, and housing developments, in addition to more traditional activities such as trapping, hay and livestock ranching, and arts and crafts. In October, 2010 the Province of British Columbia and the Ktunaxa Nation Council signed the Ktunaxa Strategic Engagement Agreement (SEA) providing for government-to-government discussions on natural resource decisions within Ktunaxa territory.

 

Santa Claus

 

Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, or simply “Santa,” is the mythical figure who, in most of Western cultures, brings gifts on Christmas Eve. The legend of Santa Claus is based in part on the historical figure of Saint Nicholas of Myra, as well as on Norse myths associated with the god Odin, and American commercial culture.

The modern depiction of Santa Claus as a plump, jolly man wearing a red coat and trousers with white fur cuffs and collar became popular in the United States in the nineteenth century due to the publication of the poem The Night Before Christmas and the influence of caricaturist Thomas Nast. This image has been maintained and reinforced through song, radio, television, films, and the commercial success of Christmas shopping.

The American version of Santa Claus lives at the North Pole, where he lives with Mrs. Claus. The European Father Christmas is said to reside in Lapland or other northern countries. Santa makes a list of children throughout the world, categorizing them according to their behavior: naughty or nice. He delivers presents, including toys, candy, and other gifts to all of the good boys and girls in the world, and sometimes coal or sticks to the naughty children. He accomplishes this feat with the aid of magical elves who make the toys, and eight to ten flying reindeer who pull his sleigh.

There has long been opposition to teaching children to believe in Santa Claus. Some Christians say the Santa tradition detracts from the religious meaning of Christmas, while other critics feel that the Santa Claus myth constitutes an elaborate lie unethically told to children by their parents. Defenders insist that believing in Santa is a harmless and joyous tradition which brings families together, and that he symbolizes a tradition of unselfish giving much in character with the spirit of Christmas.

Origins

Early Christian origins

Saint Nicholas of Myra is the primary inspiration for the Christian figure of Santa Claus. He was a fourth-century Greek Christian bishop of Myra in Lycia, a province of the Byzantine Anatolia, now in Turkey. Nicholas was famous for his generous gifts to the poor, in particular presenting the three impoverished daughters of a pious Christian with dowries to prevent them from falling into a life of prostitution. In Europe (more precisely the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Germany) he is still portrayed as a bearded bishop in canonical robes. Saint Nicholas became a patron saint of many diverse groups, from archers and children to pawnbrokers.

In many regions of Austria and northern Italy, children are given sweets and gifts on Saint Nicholas’ Day (San Niccolò in Italian), in accordance with the Catholic calendar, December 6.

Influence of European folklore

Numerous parallels have been drawn between Santa Claus and the figure of Odin, a major god among the Germanic peoples prior to their Christianization. Two thirteenth century books from Iceland, Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson and Poetic Edda compiled from earlier sources, describe Odin as riding an eight-legged horse named Sleipnir that could leap great distances, giving rise to comparisons to Santa Claus’s reindeer.

Children would place their boots, filled with carrots, straw, or sugar, near the chimney for Odin’s flying horse to eat. Odin would then reward those children for their kindness by replacing Sleipnir’s food with gifts or candy. This practice survived in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands after the adoption of Christianity and became associated with Saint Nicholas as a result of the process of Christianization. The modern practice of the hanging of stockings at the chimney in some homes may have derived from this tradition.

Numerous other influences from the pre-Christian Germanic winter celebrations have continued into modern Christmas celebrations such as the Christmas ham, Yule logs, and the Christmas tree.

Santa’s helpers

There are various explanations of the origins of Santa’s helpers, nowadays depicted as friendly elves. In the Netherlands and Belgium, Saint Nicolas is aided by a helper or helpers known as Zwarte Piet (“Black Peter”). Another theory is that the helpers symbolize the two ravens Hugin and Munin who acted as Odin’s spies. In later stories the helper represented the conquered Devil, who was defeated either by Odin or his assistant Nörwi, the black father of the night. Nörwi is usually depicted with the same birch staff as Zwarte Piet. A Christianized version of the story is that Saint Nicolas liberated an Ethiopian slave boy called “Piter” from a Myra market, and the boy was so grateful that he decided to stay with Nicolas as his servant.

The pre-Christian Alpine figure of the Krampus—a frightening, horned and clawed incubus—also evolved into a companion of Saint Nicholas. Traditionally, young men dress up as the Krampus in the first two weeks of December and roam the streets frightening children (and adults) with rusty chains and bells.

Modern developments

The character of Father Christmas dates back at least as far as the seventeenth century in Britain and is also found in other European countries. Pictures of him survive from that era, portraying him as a well-nourished bearded man dressed in a long, green, fur-lined robe.

He typified the spirit of good cheer at Christmas, and was reflected in the “Ghost of Christmas Present” in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

The figure of Saint Nicholas was also blended with local folklore. In Nordic countries the original bringer of gifts at Christmas time was the Yule Goat, a somewhat startling figure with horns. An elf from Nordic folklore called the “Tomte” became the person who delivers the Christmas presents in Denmark beginning in the 1840s. The Tomte was portrayed as a short, bearded man dressed in gray clothes and a red hat. This new version of the age-old folkloric creature was inspired by existing Santa Claus traditions that were then spreading to Scandinavia. By the end of the nineteenth century, this tradition of an elf bringing Christmas presents had also spread to Norway Finland, and Sweden, replacing the Yule Goat. In Finland, however, the more human figure retained the Yule Goat name. A straw goat is still a common Christmas decoration in all of Scandinavia.

American embellishments

In the British colonies of North America and later the United States, British and Dutch versions of the gift-giver merged further. For example, in Washington Irving’s History of New York, (1809), Sinterklaas was Americanized into “Santa Claus” but lost his bishop’s apparel. He was at first pictured as a thick-bellied Dutch sailor with a pipe in a green winter coat.

The modern ideas of Santa Claus emerged more clearly after the publication of the poem A Visit From St. Nicholas (better known today as The Night Before Christmas) in the Troy, New York, Sentinel on December 23, 1823. Originally published anonymously, the poem was later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore. In this poem Santa is established as a heavyset elf with eight reindeer, who are named here for the first time. One of the first artists to define Santa Claus’s modern image was Thomas Nast, an American cartoonist of the nineteenth century. In 1863, a picture of Santa illustrated by Nast appeared in Harper’s Weekly. In 1889, the poet Katherine Lee Bates created a wife for Santa, Mrs. Claus, in the poem “Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride.”

L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, a 1902 children’s book, further popularized Santa Claus. Baum gave his “Neclaus” a home in the Laughing Valley of Hohaho and ten reindeer which could not actually fly, but leaped in enormous, flight-like bounds. This work also established Claus’ motives: a happy childhood among immortals. When Ak, Master Woodsman of the World, exposed him to the misery and poverty of children in the outside world, Santa determined to find a way to bring joy into the lives of all children, and eventually invented toys as a principal means. In some images of the early twentieth century, Santa was depicted as personally making his toys by hand in a small workshop like a craftsman. Eventually, the idea emerged that he had numerous elves responsible for making the toys, but the toys were still handmade by each individual elf working in the traditional manner.

Santa living in the North Pole emerged after a group of Sami people moved from Finnmark in Norway to Alaska together with 500 reindeer in the late nineteenth century to teach the Inuit to herd reindeer. In 1926, Lomen and Company, which marketed reindeer meat, launched a commercial campaign in conjunction with the Macy’s Department Stores in which the reindeer pulled sleds with Santa. Thus was born the American commercial Santa Claus, coming from the North Pole with his reindeer.

Images of Santa Claus were further popularized through a depiction of him for The Coca-Cola Company’s Christmas advertising in the 1930s. The popularity of the image spawned urban legends that Santa Claus was in fact invented by Coca-Cola or that Santa wears red and white because they are the Coca-Cola colors. In reality, Coca-Cola was not the first soft drink company to utilize the modern image of Santa Claus in its advertising – White Rock Beverages used Santa to sell mineral water in 1915 and also in advertisements for its ginger ale in 1923.

 

The image of Santa Claus as a benevolent character became reinforced with its association with charity and philanthropy, particularly organizations such as the Salvation Army. Volunteers dressed as Santa Claus typically became part of fundraising drives to aid needy families at Christmas time.

The 1947 film, Miracle on 34th Street tells the story of what takes place in New York City following Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, as people are left wondering whether or not a department store Santa might be the real thing. There have been four remakes of the movie, as well as a Broadway musical. Among others, the film won an Academy Award for Edmund Gwenn for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Kris Kringle.

The concept of Santa Claus continues to inspire writers and artists, as in author Seabury Quinn’s 1948 novel Roads, which draws from historical legends to tell the story of Santa and the origins of Christmas. Other modern additions to the “mythology” of Santa include Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the ninth and lead reindeer immortalized in a Gene Autry song, written by a Montgomery Ward copywriter. The 1956 popular song by George Melachrino, “Mrs. Santa Claus,” helped standardize and establish the character and role in the popular imagination.

By the end of the twentieth century, Santa’s North Pole residence was often humorously portrayed as a fully mechanized production and distribution facility, equipped with the latest manufacturing technology, and overseen by the elves with Santa and Mrs. Claus as executives and/or managers. NORAD, the joint Canadian-American military organization responsible for air defense, regularly reports tracking Santa Claus every year.

Criticism

Christian opposition

Condemnation of Santa Claus originated among some Protestant groups of the sixteenth century. It was also prevalent among the Puritans of seventeenth-century England and America, who banned the holiday as either pagan or Roman Catholic. Following the English Civil War, under Oliver Cromwell’s government, the celebration of Christmas was banned. With the restoration of the monarchy and the Puritans out of power in England, the ban on Christmas was satirized in works such as Josiah King’s The Examination and Tryal of Old Father Christmas; Together with his Clearing by the Jury (1686) [Nissenbaum, chap. 1].

Reverend Paul Nedergaard, a clergyman in Copenhagen, Denmark, attracted controversy in 1958 when he declared Santa to be a “pagan goblin” after Santa’s image was used on fund-raising materials for a Danish welfare organization. One prominent religious group that refuses to recognize Santa Claus, or Christmas itself, for similar reasons is the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

‘Deception’

The belief in Santa Claus by children is widespread. In an AP-AOL News poll, 86 percent of American adults believed in Santa as children, with the age of eight being the average for stopping to believe he is real, although 15 percent still believed after the age of ten.

Parental and societal encouragement of this belief is not without controversy. Objections often center on the proposition that it is unethical for parents to lie to children without good cause, and also that children become seriously disillusioned when they discover that one of their most cherished beliefs was untrue. University of Texas at Austin psychology professor Jacqueline Woolley posits that the deception about Santa Claus constitutes a complicated series of very large lies. Writer Austin Cline posed the question: “Is it not possible that kids would find at least as much pleasure in knowing that parents are responsible for Christmas, not a supernatural stranger?”

 

Alan Mathison Turing

 

Alan Mathison Turing (June 23, 1912 – June 7, 1954) was an English mathematician, logician, cryptographer and one of the originators of modern computer science. In 1936, Turing developed the concept of “Turing machines,” theoretical devices that could mechanically perform mathematical computations by following a specific table of instructions. Turing machines formalized the concept of the algorithm and helped to determine the limits of computability in mathematical functions (Church–Turing thesis). The concept of a “universal Turing machine” which could incorporate the functions of numerous lesser Turing machines laid the groundwork for computer programming.

During World War II, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking center, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the “bombe,” an electromechanical machine that could detect the settings for the German “Enigma” code machine.

In 1950, Turing published an article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Mind, October 1950), proposing that it was possible for a computer to simulate all the processes of human intelligence, and suggesting the “Turing test” to determine the intelligence of a machine. He worked at the National Physical Laboratory in England, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, although it was never actually built. In 1947 he moved to the University of Manchester to work on software for the Manchester Mark I, one of the world’s earliest true computers.

Life

Childhood and Youth

Turing was conceived in 1911 in Chatrapur, India. His father, Julius Mathison Turing, was a member of the Indian civil service. Julius and his wife Sara (née Stoney) wanted Alan to be brought up in England, so they returned to Maida Vale, London, where Turing was born June 23, 1912, as recorded by a blue plaque on the outside of the building, now the Colonnade Hotel. His father’s civil service commission was still active, and during Turing’s childhood his parents traveled between Guildford, England and India, leaving their two sons to stay with friends in England, rather than risk their health in the British colony. Very early in life, Turing showed signs of the genius he was to display more prominently later. He is said to have taught himself to read in three weeks, and to have shown an early affinity for numbers and puzzles.

His parents enrolled him at St. Michael’s, a day school, at the age of six. The headmistress recognized his genius immediately, as did many of his subsequent educators. In 1926, at the age of 14, he went on to Sherborne School in Dorset. His first day of term coincided with a transportation strike in England; he was so determined to attend his first day at Sherborne that he rode his bike unaccompanied more than sixty miles from Southampton to the school, stopping overnight at an inn and making headlines in the local press.

Turing’s natural inclination toward mathematics and science did not earn him the respect of his teachers at Sherborne, a famous and expensive British public school, whose concept of education placed more emphasis on the classics than on science. His headmaster wrote to his parents: “I hope he will not fall between two schools. If he is to stay at public school, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a public school.”

Turing continued to show remarkable ability in the studies he loved, solving advanced problems in 1927 without having even studied elementary calculus. In 1928, at the age of sixteen, Turing encountered Albert Einstein’s work; not only did he grasp it, but he extrapolated Einstein’s questioning of Isaac Newton’s laws of motion from a text in which this was never made explicit.

Turing was encouraged at school by a friend, Christopher Morcom, who unfortunately died suddenly only a few weeks into their last term at Sherborne, from complications of bovine tuberculosis.

University and His Work on Computability

Turing failed to win a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, because he was unwilling to work as hard on his classical studies as on science and mathematics. Instead he became an undergraduate at the college of his second choice, King’s College, Cambridge from 1931 to 1934, graduating with a distinguished degree, and in 1935 was elected a fellow at King’s on the strength of a dissertation on the Gaussian error function.

In his momentous paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (submitted on May 28, 1936), Turing proposed what are now called “Turing machines,” formal and simple devices which could perform any conceivable mathematical function if it were representable as an algorithm (Turing machines are still the central object of study in theory of computation). He went on to prove that there was no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem by showing that it is not possible to decide algorithmically whether a given Turing machine will ever halt. While his proof was published subsequent to Alonzo Church’s equivalent proof in respect to his lambda calculus, Turing’s work was considerably more accessible and intuitive.

Turing spent most of 1937 and 1938 at Princeton University, studying under Alonzo Church. In 1938 he obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton; his dissertation introduced the notion of relative computing, in which Turing machines are augmented with so-called “oracles,” functions that perform operations outside of the machine, such as intuitive judgments made by a human mathematician, allowing a study of problems that cannot be solved by a Turing machine.

Back in Cambridge in 1939, Turing attended lectures by Ludwig Wittgenstein about the foundations of mathematics. The two argued and disagreed, with Turing defending formalism, and Wittgenstein arguing that mathematics is overvalued and does not discover any absolute truths.

Cryptanalysis

During World War II, Turing was an important participant in the British efforts at Bletchley Park to break German ciphers. Building on cryptanalysis work carried out in Poland before the war, he contributed several insights into breaking both the German Enigma machine and the Lorenz SZ 40/42 (a teletype cipher attachment codenamed “Tunny” by the British), and was, for a time, head of Hut 8, the section responsible for reading German naval signals.

Since September 1938, Turing had been working part-time for the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS), the British codebreaking organization. He worked on the problem of the German “Enigma” machine, and collaborated with Dilly Knox, a senior GCCS codebreaker. On September 4, 1939, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, Turing reported to Bletchley Park, the wartime station of GCCS.

The Turing-Welchman Bombe

Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park, Turing had devised an electromechanical machine which could help break Enigma: the bombe, named after the Polish-designed bomba. The bombe, with an enhancement suggested by mathematician Gordon Welchman, became the primary tool used to read Enigma traffic.

The bombe searched for the correct settings of the Enigma rotors, and required a suitable “crib,” a piece of matching plaintext and ciphertext. For each possible setting of the rotors, the bombe performed a chain of logical deductions based on the crib, implemented electrically. The bombe detected when a contradiction had occurred, and ruled out that setting, moving onto the next. Most of the possible settings would cause contradictions and be discarded, leaving only a few to be investigated in detail. Turing’s first bombe was installed on March 18, 1940. By the end of the war, over two hundred bombes were in operation.

Hut 8 and Naval Enigma

In December 1940, Turing solved the naval Enigma indicator system, which was more complex than the indicator systems used by the other services. Turing also invented a Bayesian statistical technique termed “Banburismus” to assist in breaking Naval Enigma. Banburismus could rule out certain orders of the Enigma rotors, reducing time needed to test settings on the bombes.

In the spring of 1941, Turing proposed marriage to a Hut 8 coworker, Joan Clarke, but the engagement was broken off by mutual agreement during the summer.

In July 1942, Turing devised a technique termed Turingismus or Turingery for use against the “Fish” Lorenz cipher. He also introduced the Fish team to Tommy Flowers, who went on to design the Colossus computer. It is a frequent misconception that Turing was a key figure in the design of Colossus; this was not the case.

In November 1942, Turing traveled to the United States and worked with U.S. Navy cryptanalysts on Naval Enigma and bombe construction in Washington, D.C., and assisted at Bell Labs with the development of secure speech devices. He returned to Bletchley Park in March 1943. During his absence, Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander had officially assumed the position of head of Hut 8. Alexander had been de facto head for some time, Turing having little interest in the day-to-day running of the section. Turing became a general consultant for cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park.

In the latter part of the war, teaching himself electronics at the same time, Turing undertook (assisted by engineer Donald Bayley) the design of a portable machine codenamed Delilah to allow secure voice communications. Intended for different applications, Delilah lacked capability for use with long-distance radio transmissions, and was completed too late to be used in the war. Though Turing demonstrated it to officials by encrypting/decrypting a recording of a speech by Winston Churchill, Delilah was not adopted for use by the military.

In 1945, Turing was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his wartime services, but his work remained secret for many years. A biography published by the Royal Society shortly after his death recorded:

Three remarkable papers written just before the war, on three diverse mathematical subjects, show the quality of the work that might have been produced if he had settled down to work on some big problem at that critical time. For his work at the Foreign Office he was awarded the OBE.

Early Computers and the Turing Test

Turing achieved world-class marathon standards of his era. His best time of 2 hours, 46 minutes, 3 seconds, was only 11 minutes slower than the winner in the 1948 Summer Olympics. From 1945 to 1947 Turing was at the National Physical Laboratory, where he worked on the design of the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). In a paper given on February 19, 1946, he presented the first complete design of a stored-program computer in Britain. Although he succeeded in designing the ACE, there were delays in starting the project and Turing became disillusioned. In late 1947, he returned to Cambridge for a sabbatical year. While he was at Cambridge, ACE was completed in his absence and executed its first program on May 10, 1950.

In 1949 Turing became deputy director of the computing laboratory at University of Manchester, and worked on software for one of the earliest true computers, the Manchester Mark I. During this time he continued to do more abstract work, and in “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Mind, October 1950), Turing addressed the problem of artificial intelligence, and proposed an experiment now known as the Turing test, an attempt to define a standard by which a machine could be called “sentient.”

In 1948, Turing, working with his former undergraduate colleague, D. G. Champernowne, began writing a chess program for a computer that did not yet exist. In 1952, lacking a computer powerful enough to execute the program, Turing played a game in which he simulated the computer, taking about half an hour per move. The game was recorded; the program lost to Turing’s colleague Alick Glennie, although it is said that it won a game against Champernowne’s wife.

Pattern Formation and Mathematical Biology

From 1952 until his death in 1954, Turing worked on mathematical biology, specifically morphogenesis. He published a paper on the subject called “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” in 1952, putting forth the Turing hypothesis of pattern formation.His central interest in the field was understanding Fibonacci phyllotaxis, the existence of Fibonacci numbers in plant structures. He used reaction-diffusion equations which are now central to the field of pattern formation. Later papers went unpublished until 1992 when Collected Works of A.M. Turing was published.

Prosecution for Homosexual Acts and Death

Turing was a homosexual during a period when homosexual acts were illegal in England and homosexuality was regarded as a mental illness. In 1952, Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old recent acquaintance of his helped an accomplice to break into Turing’s house, and Turing went to the police to report the crime. As a result of the police investigation, Turing acknowledged a relationship with Murray, and they were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Turing was unrepentant and was convicted. He was given a choice between imprisonment or undergoing hormonal treatment. In order to avoid going to jail, he accepted the estrogen hormone injections, which lasted for a year, with side effects including the development of breasts. His conviction led to a removal of his security clearance and prevented him from continuing consultancy for General Command Headquarters on cryptographic matters.

In 1954, Turing died of cyanide poisoning at the age of 41, apparently from a cyanide-laced apple found half-eaten by his bedside. The apple itself was never tested for contamination with cyanide, and cyanide poisoning as a cause of death was established by a post-mortem. Most believe that his death was intentional, and the death was ruled a suicide, but his mother insisted that the ingestion an accident due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. The possibility of assassination has also been suggested; at that time Turing’s homosexuality would have been perceived as a security risk.

Posthumous Recognition

Since 1966, the Turing Award has been given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person for technical contributions to the computing community. Various tributes to Turing have been made in Manchester, the city where he worked towards the end of his life. In 1994 a stretch of the Manchester city inner ring road was named Alan Turing Way and a statue of Turing was unveiled in Manchester on June 23, 2001 in Sackville Park.

A celebration of Turing’s life and achievements arranged by the British Logic Colloquium and the British Society for the History of Mathematics was held on June 5, 2004, at the University of Manchester, and the Alan Turing Institute was initiated in the university that summer.

On June 23, 1998, on what would have been Turing’s 86th birthday, Andrew Hodges, his biographer, unveiled an official English Heritage Blue Plaque on his childhood home in Warrington Crescent, London, now the Colonnade Hotel. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death, a memorial plaque was unveiled on June 7, 2004, at his former residence, Hollymeade, in Wilmslow.

Various universities have honored Alan Turing for his achievements in computing. On October 28, 2004, a bronze statue of Alan Turing sculpted by John W. Mills was unveiled at the University of Surrey  The statue marking the fiftieth anniversary of Turing’s death, portrays Turing carrying his books across the campus. The Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico and Los Andes University of Bogotá, Colombia, both have computer laboratories named after Turing. The University of Texas at Austin has an honors computer science program named the Turing Scholars. Istanbul Bilgi University organizes an annual conference on the theory of computation called Turing Days. Carnegie Mellon University has a granite bench, situated in The Hornbostel Mall, with the name “Alan Turing” carved across the top, “Read” down the left leg, and “Write” down the other.

Thought and Works

Turing was a pioneer in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence. His initial work on mathematical logic developed ways in which the mathematical calculations made by the human mind using logic, could be carried out as self-generating mechanical processes independent of the human mind. His early work was concerned with cataloging infallible logical processes and recognizing the limitations of such computations.

During World War II, Turing became involved in working on encryption and decoding for the military, and many scholars consider this work to have been a distraction from his work in logic and mathematics. However, it was while working on the problems of decoding encrypted German messages that Turing built his first real computing “machines,” incorporating logical processes to sort through vast amounts of information and identify possible solutions for the human code breakers. He also realized the potential of using electrical circuits to store and mechanically process data according to written instructions.

After World War II, Turing became involved in writing some of the first computer software programs, even before computers were built. Beyond this, however, he conceived of the idea that all the thinking processes of the human brain could possibly be duplicated using some form of logical process. While considering whether a machine could be constructed to play chess, he came to included the possibility of making errors as part of his concept of intelligence; a truly intelligent being is not an infallible being, but one that makes errors, recognizes them and then “learns” from the experience.

Turing’s major contribution to science and philosophy was his treatment of symbolic logic as a new branch of applied mathematics, opening it up to physical and engineering applications. Turing’s preference for working independently and in isolation enabled him to see logic from a unique perspective and to synthesize mathematical logic and the philosophy of mind. He said that he took on the challenge of solving the difficult German U-Boat Enigma code because no one else wanted to attempt it, and he was able to work on it by himself. As a result of his isolation, however, many of his ideas were not promulgated until later—for example, in the textbooks of Davis (1958) and Minsky (1967). Certain concepts developed by Turing still remain central to the development of computer science and artificial intelligence.

Turing Machines

In his momentous paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (submitted on May 28, 1936), Turing reformulated Kurt Gödel’s 1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, substituting Gödel’s universal arithmetic-based formal language with what are now called “Turing machines,” formal and simple logical devices. Turing developed the concept of his “machines” in response to the lectures of the topologist M. H. A. (Max) Newman, which discussed Gödel’s 1931 proof of the formal incompleteness of logical systems rich enough to include arithmetic, and Hilbert’s “Entscheidungsproblem” (decision problem). The problem was whether there existed some universal method which could be used to determine that any given mathematical proposition was provable or not. The term “mechanical” had often been used to characterize the formal way in which Hilbert approached the problem, and Turing adapted the concept of a “machine” which could perform mathematical calculations.

Turing “machines” were theoretical devices which broke down mathematical calculations into simple atomic units. Though the machines did not exist in physical reality, they could be feasibly be constructed on the model of a teleprinter, with an infinite paper tape that could move through it backwards or forwards, and a ‘head’ that could read, erase and print new symbols. The tape was divided into squares, one next to the other, which could each contain one of a finite alphabet of symbols. The machine operated according to a finite table, or set, of instructions. The machine would scan one square of the tape at a time, and, according to the symbol in that square, perform one of the instructions in the table: print or erase a symbol on the scanned square or move forward or backward to scan the adjacent square. A “state register” would document the state of the Turing machine at each step. The number of different possible states was always finite, and there was one special start state by which the state register was initialized. Every part of the machine; its alphabet of symbols, its table of instructions, its number of possible states, and its actions of printing, erasing and moving forward or backward were finite, discrete and distinguishable. Only the potentially unlimited amount of paper tape gave the machine the possibility of carrying on its computation infinitely. No actual Turing machine would be likely to have practical applications, since using them was much slower than alternative methods of calculation.

Turing argued that any function which could be calculated by means of a mechanical, deterministic (algorithmic) procedure could be calculated by a Turing machine. Turing developed a thesis which stated that any function which could not be computed by a Turing machine was beyond the limitations of computing agents.

In developing his machines, Turing set out to embody the most general mechanical thinking processes as carried out by a human being. A primary concern in Turing’s thought was how to relate the logical Turing machines to the physical world. The number of Turing machines was infinite, each corresponding to a different method or mathematical procedure and operating according to a different ‘table of behavior,’ the equivalent of a modern computer program. Turing postulated a “universal machine,” which would have “tables of behavior” complex enough to read the tables of other, simpler, Turing machines and incorporate their functions into its own activities. There could be an infinite number of these universal machines. The universal Turing machines anticipated the way in which modern computer software programs incorporate and relate to hundreds of simpler programs.

Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experiences and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There will probably be a great deal of work to be done, for every known process has got to be translated into instruction table form at some stage.

The process of constructing instruction tables should be very fascinating. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself. (Alan Turing, 1946)

Artificial Intelligence

After his wartime experiences with the construction of actual computing machines which mechanized human procedures and judgment, Turing began to develop the idea that all processes of human intelligence could be computable. He researched how machines might be made to perform functions that were not purely mechanical in nature, and to speak of simulating “initiative” as well as “discipline.” Turing’s best known paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Mind, October 1950), his first publication in a philosophical journal, raised many of the questions which are still under discussion today in the field of artificial intelligence, such as whether computers could be made to simulate the physical operation of human neurons. Turing argued that the human brain must somehow be organized for intelligence, and that this organization must be able to be realized in some discrete mechanical form.

Turing proposed the “Turing test” for machine intelligence, based on the idea that human intelligence can only be measured and judged by external observation. He bypassed all discussion of the nature of human thought, mind or consciousness by devising a procedure in which a human being and a computer would both communicate by text messages to an impartial judge, who would try to discern which one was the computer and which one was the human being. If the computer could win this competition, it must be considered to be “intelligent.”

In 1950, Turing wrote on the first page of his “Manual for Users of the Manchester University Computer” (Turing 1950a):

Electronic computers are intended to carry out any definite rule of thumb process which could have been done by a human operator working in a disciplined but unintelligent manner.

His concept of intelligence involved the possibility of making mistakes in judgement, and also the ability to evaluate future risk and make judgments.

This … raises the question ‘Can a machine play chess?’ It could fairly easily be made to play a rather bad game. It would be bad because chess requires intelligence. We stated … that the machine should be treated as entirely without intelligence. There are indications however that it is possible to make the machine display intelligence at the risk of its making occasional serious mistakes. By following up this aspect the machine could probably be made to play very good chess.

…I would say that fair play must be given to the machine. Instead of it giving no answer we could arrange that it gives occasional wrong answers. But the human mathematician would likewise make blunders when trying out new techniques… In other words then, if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. There are several mathematical theorems which say almost exactly that. But these theorems say nothing about how much intelligence may be displayed if a machine makes no pretence at infallibility. (Turing, Technical Prospectus, 1946)

Turing suggested ideas for systems which could modify their own programs, such as nets of logical components (‘unorganized machines’) whose properties could be ‘trained’ into a desired function. He thus predicted neural networks, and anticipated modern “genetical search” algorithms, but was not able to develop these concepts further because electronic computers were then only in the early stages of operation.

At the time of his death, Turing was apparently researching the foundations of quantum mechanics, having earlier studied the theories of Arthur Eddington and John von Neumann, in an effort to further understand the physiological functions of the human brain.

Doukhobors

The Doukhobors or Doukhabors, earlier Dukhobortsy  are a Christian group of Russian origin. The Doukhobors were one of the sects—later defined as a religious philosophy, ethnic group, social movement, or simply a ‘way of life’—known generically as Spiritual Christianity. There were numerous Russian groups considered “spiritual Christians.” The only common denominator among them is that they rejected the trappings of traditional religion. Starting no later than the eighteenth century, they rejected secular government, the Russian Orthodox priests, icons, all church ritual, the Bible as the supreme source of divine revelation and the divinity of Jesus. They “believe that Jesus Christ is a spiritually advanced teacher and example to others. They also believe that people are capable of divine reason and can spiritually develop without the help of intermediaries…. The only symbols Doukhobors commonly recognize are those of bread, salt and water, the basic elements needed to sustain life. These are on a table at all Doukhobor meetings and important events.

Their Pacifist beliefs and desire to avoid government interference in their life led to an exodus of the majority of the group from the Russian Empire to Canada at the close of the nineteenth century. However, their interaction with the Canadian authorities was anything but peaceful.

Assimilated to a various extent into the Canadian mainstream, the modern descendants of the first Canadian Doukhobors continue to live in south-eastern British Columbia, southern Alberta and Saskatchewan. Today, the estimated population of Doukhobors in North America is over 20,000, with 15,000 in Canada and about 5,000 in the USA.

History

Early days – Ukraine and southern Russia

The origin of the Doukhobor movement dates to seventeenth and eighteenth century Russian Empire. Believing in God’s presence in every human being, they considered clergy and rituals unnecessary. Their rejection of secular government, the Russian Orthodox priests, icons, all church ritual, the Bible as the supreme source of divine revelation, and the divinity of Jesus elicited negative response from the government and the established church, as attested by the 1734 Russian Government edict issued against ikonobortsy (Iconoclasts).

The first known Doukhobor leader, in 1755-1775, was Siluan (Silvan) Kolesnikov (Russian: Силуан Колесников), originating from the village of Nikolskoye in Yekaterinoslav Governorate in what’s today south-central Ukraine. He was thought to be a well-read person, familiar with the works of Western mystics, such as Karl von Eckartshausen and Louis Claude de Saint-Martin.

The early Doukhobors called themselves “God’s People” or simply “Christians.” Their modern name, first in the form Doukhobortsy (Russian: Духоборцы, Dukhobortsy, ‘Spirit wrestlers’) is thought to have been first used in 1785 or 1786 by Ambrosius, the Archbishop of Yekaterinoslav or his predecessor, Nikifor (Nikephoros Theotokis) The archbishops intent was to mock them as heretics fighting against the Holy Ghost (Spirit; Russian: Святой Дух, Svyatoy Dukh); but later (around the beginning of the nineteenth century, according to S.A. Inikova) the dissenters picked the name, usually in a shorter form, Doukhobory (Russian: Духоборы, Dukhobory), implying that they are fighting not against, but along with the Spirit.

As pacifists, the Doukhobors also ardently rejected the institutions of militarism and wars. For these reasons, the Doukhobors were harshly repressed in Imperial Russia. Both the tsarist state and church authorities were involved in the persecution of these dissidents, as well as taking away their normal freedoms.

The first known use of the spelling Doukhobor is attested in a government edict of 1799, exiling 90 of them to Finland (presumably, Vyborg area, which was already part of Russian Empire at the time) for their anti-war propaganda.

In 1802, Tsar Alexander I encouraged resettlement of religious minorities to the so-called ‘Milky Waters’ (Molochnye Vody): the region of Molochnaya River (around Melitopol in contemporary southern Ukraine). This was motivated by the desire to quickly populate the rich steppelands on the north shore of the Black and Azov Seas, and to prevent the “heretics” from contaminating the population of the heartland with their ideas. Many Doukhobors, as well as Mennonites from Prussia, took up on the Tsar’s offer, coming to the Molochnaya from various provinces of the Empire over the next 20 years.

Transcaucasian exile

As Nicholas I replaced Alexander, he issued a decree (February 6, 1826), intending to force assimilation of the Doukhobors by means of military conscription, prohibiting their meetings, and encouraging conversions to the established church. On October 20, 1830, another decree followed, specifying that all able-bodied members of dissenting religious groups engaged in propaganda against the established church should be conscripted and sent to the Russian army in the Caucasus, while those not capable of military service, as well as their women and children, should be resettled in Russia’s recently acquired Transcaucasian provinces. It is reported that, among other dissenters, some 5000 Doukhobors were resettled to Georgia between 1841 and 1845. The Akhalkalaki uyezd (district) of the Tiflis (Tbilisi) Governorate (in Georgia’s region of Samtskhe-Javakheti) was chosen as the main place of their settlement. Doukhobor villages with Russian names appeared there: Gorelovka, Rodionovka, Yefremovka, Orlovka, Spasskoye (Dubovka), Troitskoye, and Bogdanovka (now renamed Ninotsminda). Later on, other groups of Doukhobors—resettled by the government, or migrating to Transcaucasia by their own accord—settled in other neighboring areas, including the Borchaly uyezd of Tiflis Governorate (in today’s Georgia) and the Kedabek uyezd of Elisabethpol (Ganja) Governorate (in the north-west of today’s Republic of Azerbaijan).

After Russia’s conquest of Kars and the Treaty of San Stefano of 1878, some Dukhobors from Tiflis and Elisabethpol Governorates moved to the Zarushat and Shuragel uyezds of the newly created Kars Oblast (north-east of Kars in today’s Republic of Turkey).

The leader of the main group of Doukhobors that arrived to Transcaucasia from the Ukraine in 1841 was Illarion Kalmykov (Russian: Илларион Калмыков). He died in the same year, and was succeeded as the community leader by his son, Peter Kalmykov (? – 1864). After Peter Kalmykov’s death in 1864, his widow Lukerya Vasilyevna Gubanova (? – December 15, 1886; (Russian: Лукерья Васильевна Губанова); also known as Kalmykova, by her husband’s surname) took his leadership position.

The Kalmykov dynasty resided in the village of Gorelovka, one of Doukhobor communities in Georgia. (Shown on one of J. Kalmakoff’s maps.. Lukerya (Lukeria) was respected by the provincial authorities, who had to cooperate with the Doukhobors on various matters. The number of Doukhbors in the Transcaucasia reached 20,000 by the time of her death in 1886. By that time, the Doukhobors of the region had become vegetarian, and become aware of Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy, which they found quite similar with their traditional teachings.

The religious revival and the crises

The death of “Queen Lukerya,” who had no children, was followed by a leadership crisis. Lukerya’s own plan was for leadership to pass after her death to her assistant, Peter Vasilevich Verigin. However, only part of the community (“the Large Party”; Russian: Большая сторона Bolshaya Storona) accepted him as the leader; others, known as “the Small Party” (Малая сторона Malaya Storona), sided with Lukerya’s brother Michael Gubanov and the village elder, Aleksei Zubkov.

While the Large Party was a majority, the Small Party had the support of the older members of the community and the local authorities. So on January 26, 1887, at the community service where the new leader was to be acclaimed, the police walked in and arrested Verigin. He was to spend the next 16 years in exile in Russia’s Far North; some of his associates were sent to exile as well. The Large Party Doukhobors continued to consider him their spiritual leader and to communicate with him, by mail and via delegates who traveled to see him in Obdorsk, Siberia.

At the same time, the government applied greater pressure to enforce Doukhobors’ compliance with the laws and regulations that they found vexatious, such as registering marriages and births, contributing grain to state emergency funds, or swearing oaths of allegiance. Even worse, the universal military conscription that had been introduced in most of Russian Empire, was now (in 1887) imposed in its Transcaucasian provinces as well. While the Small Party people would cooperate with the state, the Large Party, wounded by the arrest of Verigin and other leaders, and inspired by his letters from exile, only felt strengthened in their desire to abide in the righteousness of their faith. They stopped using tobacco and alcohol, divided their property equally between the members of the community, and resolved to adhere to the principles of non-violence. They would not want to swear the oath of allegiance required by the new Czar Nicholas II in 1894.

To avoid the temptation to use the weapons they possessed, even in an emergency (say, to resist a robber), the Doukhobors of the three Governorates of Transcaucasia made the decision to destroy them. As the Doukhobors assembled to burn their weapons in the night of on June 28/29 (July 10/11, Gregorian Calendar) 1895, with the singing of psalms and spiritual songs, arrests and beatings by government’s Cossacks followed. Soon, Cossacks were billeted in many of the Large Party Doukhobors’ villages, and over 4000 of their original residents were dispersed through villages in other parts of Georgia. Many of those died of starvation and exposure.

Migration to Canada

Persecution was unsuccessful in coercing the Doukhobors comply with the conscription laws. The entire affair proved an embarrassment in front of international public opinion, so the Russian government agreed in 1897 to let the Doukhobors leave the country, subject to a number of conditions. The emigrants were required to:

• never return;
• migrate at their own expense;
• community leaders currently held in prison or in exile in Siberia had to serve the balance of their sentences before they could leave the country.

Some of the emigrants went first to Cyprus, but the climate there did not suit them. Meanwhile, the rest of the community chose Canada for its isolation, peacefulness, and the fact that the Canadian government welcomed them. Around 6000 migrated there in the first half of 1899, settling on the land granted to them by the government in what is today Manitoba and Saskatchewan. More people, including the Cyprus colony, joined later that year, bringing the total count to 7,400–about one-third of the total Doukhobor population in Transcaucasia. Several smaller groups, directly from Transcaucasia or from various places of exile, joined the main body of the migrants in later years. Among these late-comers were some 110 leaders of the community that were in prisons or in exile in Siberia as of 1899; they had to serve their term of punishment before they could join their people in Canada.

The Doukhobors’ passage across the Atlantic Ocean was largely paid for by Quakers and Tolstoyans, who sympathized with their plight. Leo Tolstoy arranged for the royalties from his novel, Resurrection, (1899) his short story Father Sergius (written between 1890-1898), (Father Sergei,) and some other works, to go to the migration fund. He also raised money from wealthy friends. In the end, his efforts provided half of the immigration fund, about 30,000 rubles.

The anarchist Peter Kropotkin and James Mavor, a professor of the political economy at the University of Toronto, also helped the migrants.

On the Prairies of Canada

In accordance with the Dominion Lands Act of 1872, Canadian government would grant 160 acres (0.65 km²) of land, for a nominal fee of $10, to any male homesteader able to establish a working farm on that land within three years. Living on single-family homesteads would not fit Doukhobors’ communitarian tradition. Fortunately, the Act contained the so-called Hamlet Clause, adopted some 15 years earlier to accommodate other communitarian groups such as Mennonites, which would allow the beneficiaries of the Act to live not on the actual land grant, but in a village (“hamlet”) within 3 miles (4.8 km) from their land. This would allow the Doukhobors to establish a communal life style, similar to the Hutterites.

Even more importantly, in late 1898 the Canadian Government passed Section 21 of the Dominion Military Act, exempting the Doukhobors from military service.

The land for the Doukhobor immigrants, in the total amount of 773,400 acres (3,130 km²), was granted in three “block settlement” areas (“reserves”), plus an “annex,” within what was to soon become the Province of Saskatchewan:

• The North Colony, also known as the “Thunder Hill Colony” or “Swan River Colony,” in the Pelly and Arran districts of Saskatchewan. It became home to 2,400 Doukhobors from Tiflis Governorate, who established 20 villages on 69,000 acres (280 km²) of the land grant.
• The South Colony, also known as the “Whitesand Colony” of “Yorkton Colony,” in the Canora, Veregin and Kamsack districts of Saskatchewan. Some 3,500 Doukhobors from Tiflis Governorate, Elisabethpol Governorate, and Kars Oblast, settled there in 30 villages on 215,010 acres (870.1 km²) of land grant.
• The Good Spirit Lake Annex, in the Buchanan district of Saskatchewan, received 1,000 Doukhobors from Elisabethpol Governorate and Kars Oblast, Russia, who settled there in eight villages on 168,930 acres (683.6 km²) of land grant. The annex was along the Good Spirit River, flowing into Good Spirit Lake (previously known as Devil’s Lake).
• The Saskatchewan Colony, also known as the “Rosthern colony”, “Prince Albert Colony” or “Duck Lake Colony,” was located along the North Saskatchewan River in the Langham and Blaine Lake districts of Saskatchewan, north-west of Saskatoon. 1500 Doukhobors from Kars Oblast settled there in 13 villages on 324,800 acres (1,314 km²) of land grant.

Geographically, North and South Colonies, as well as Good Spirit Lake Annex (Devil’s Lake Annex, to non-believers) were around Yorkton, not far from the border with today’s Manitoba; the Saskatchewan (Rosthern) Colony, was located north-west of Saskatoon, quite a distance from the other three “reserves.”

At the time of settlement (1899), all four “reserves” were located in the Northwest Territories: Saskathewan (Rosthern) Colony in the territories’ provisional District of Saskatchewan, North Reserve, straddling the border of Saskatchewan and Assiniboia districts, and the other two entirely in Assiniboia. After creation of the Province of Saskatchewan in 1905, all reserves were located within that province.

Early struggles

On the lands granted to them in the prairies, the settlers established villages along the same lines as back in the old country. Some of the new villages were given the same Russian names as the settlers home villages in Transcaucasia (Spasovka, Large and Small Gorelovka, Slavianka etc); others were given more abstract, “spiritual” names, not common in Russia: “Uspeniye” (‘Dormition’), “Terpeniye” (‘Patience’), “Bogomdannoye” (‘Given by God’), “Osvobozhdeniye” (‘Liberation’).

The settlers found Saskatchewan winters much harsher than those in Transcaucasia, and were particularly disappointed that the climate was not as suitable for growing fruits and vegetables. Many of the men found it necessary to take non-farm jobs, especially in railway construction, while the women stayed behind to till the land.

Due to Doukhobors’ aversion to private ownership in land, Petr Verigin (who had served his sentence and was able to come to Canada in 1902) managed to have land registered in the name of the community. But by 1906, the Dominion Government, in the person of Frank Oliver, the Minister of Interior, started requiring registration of the land in the name of individuals owners. Many Doukhobors’ refused, resulting the Crown reclaiming more than a third (258,880 acres) of Doukhobor lands.

Oliver also posed another vexing issue when he required them to become naturalized citizens. The previous minister’s had given assurances before the Doukhbors arrival to Canada that they would not be required to swear an Oath of Allegiance to the Crown, which was against their principles. These problems led to a new crisis just a decade after the conscription crisis in Russia.

The crisis resulted in a three-way split of the Doukhobor community in Canada:

• The edinolichniki (‘Independents’), who constituted by 1907 some ten percent of the Canadian Doukhobors. They maintained their religion, but abandoned communal ownership of land, rejecting hereditary leadership and communal living as non-essential to their religion.
• The largest group—the Community Doukhobors—continued to be loyal to their spiritual leader, Peter V. Verigin. They formed an organization known as Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood (CCUB).
• The more radical Sons of Freedom group (also called the “Svobodniki” or “Freedomites”), which emerged in 1903, embraced Verigin’s writings in a more zealous manner than did even the CCUB.

The Independents were a group most easily integrating into the Canadian capitalist society. They had no problem with registering their land groups, and largely remained in Saskatchewan. It was they who, much later on (in 1939) finally rejected the authority of Peter Verigin’s great-grandson, John J. Verigin.

In British Columbia

To take his followers away from the corrupting influence of non-Doukhobors and Edinolichniki (‘individual owners’) Doukhobors, and to find better conditions for agriculture, Verigin, starting in 1908, bought large tracts of land in south-eastern British Columbia. His first purchase were near the US border around Grand Forks. Later, he acquired large tracts of land further east, in the Slocan Valley around Castlegar. Between 1908 and 1912, some 8,000 people moved to these British Columbia lands from Saskatchewan, to continue their communal way of living. In the milder climate of British Columbia, the settlers were able to plant fruit trees, and within a few years became renowned as orchardists and producers of fruit preserves.

As the Community Doukhobors left Saskatchewan, the “reserves” there were closed by 1918.

The Sons of Freedom, meanwhile, responded to the Doukhobors conflict with the Canadian policy by mass nudity and arson as a means of protesting against a host of complaints against the Canadian government and society, including materialism, the land seizure by the government, compulsory education in government schools and, later on, Verigin’s supposed assassination. This led to many confrontations with the Canadian government and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (continuing into the 1970s).

Peter V. Verigin was killed in a still-unsolved Canadian Pacific Railway train explosion on October 29, 1924 near Farron, between Castlegar and Grand Forks, British Columbia. The government initially (during investigation) had stated the crime was perpetrated by people within the Doukhobor community, while the Doukhobors suspected Canadian government involvement. To date, it is still unknown who is responsible for the bombing. Thus, while the Doukhobors were initially welcomed by the Canadian government, this assassination controversy, as well as Doukhobor beliefs regarding communal living and child education, among other beliefs, created an air of mistrust between government authorities and Doukhobors which would last for decades.

Peter V. Verigin was succeeded as the leader of the Community Doukhobors by his son, Peter P. Verigin, who arrived from the Soviet Union in 1928. He became known as Peter the Purger, and worked to smooth the relations between the Community Doukhobors and the larger Canadian society. His policies, seen by the radical (or zealous) Sons of Freedom as ungodly and assimilationist, were answered by increasing protests on the part of the latter. The Sons of Freedom would burn the Community Doukhobors’ property, and organize more nude parades.

The Canadian Parliament responded in 1932 by criminalizing public nudity. Over the years, over 300 radical Doukhobor men and women were arrested for this offense, which typically carried a three-year prison sentence.

In 1947-1948, Sullivan’s Royal Commission investigated arsons and bombing attacks in British Columbia, and recommended a number of measures intended to integrate the Doukhobors into the Canadian society, notably through the participation of their children in public education. Around that time, the provincial government entered into direct negotiations with the Freedomite leadership.

W. A. C. Bennett’s Social Credit government, which came to power in 1952, took a harder stance against the “Doukhobor Problem.” In 1953, 150 children of the Sons of Freedom were forcible interned by the government agents in a residential school in New Denver, British Columbia.

Abuse of the interned children was later alleged, and a formal apology demanded. The BC government made an official Statement of Regret that satisfied some, but not all. The Canadian Federal government still has not apologized for its role in the removal of children from their homes, saying that it is not responsible for actions taken by the government in place 50 years ago.

Many of the independent and community Doukhobors believed that the Freedomites violated the central Doukhobor principle of nonviolence (with arson and bombing) and therefore did not deserve to be called Doukhobors. However, rifts generated during the twentieth century between the Sons of Freedom and Community and Independent Doukhobors were later largely laid to rest.

Staying behind

After the departure of the more zealous and non-compromising Doukhobors and many community leaders to Canada at the close of the nineteenth century, the Doukhobor groups staying within the Russian Empire entered a period of decline. By 1905, hardly any Doukhobors remained in Elisabethpol Governorate (Azerbaijan); the former Doukhobor villages now were mostly populated by Baptists. Elsewhere, many Doukhobors joined other dissenter sects, such as Molokans or Stundists.

Those that remained Doukhobors had to submit to the state. Few protested against the military service: for example, out of 837 Russian Court Martial cases against conscientious objectors recorded between the beginning of World War I and April 1, 1917, only 16 were for Doukhobor defendants–none of those hailed from the Transcaucasian provinces.

In 1921-1923, Verigin’s son arranged the resettlement of 4000 Doukhobors from the Ninotsminda (Bogdanovka) district in south Georgia into Rostov Oblast in southern Russia and other 500 into Zaporizhia Oblast in the Ukraine.

The Soviet reforms affected greatly the life of the Doukhobors both in their old villages in Georgia and in the new settlement areas in Russian and Ukraine. The state anti-religious campaigns resulted in the suppression of Doukhobor religious tradition, and the loss of books and archival records. A number of religious leaders were arrested or exiled: for example, 18 people were exiled from Gorelovka alone in 1930. On the other hand, Communists’ imposition of collective farming did not go against the grain of the Doukhobor way of life. The industrious Doukhobors made their collective farms prosperous, specializing e.g. in cheese-making.

Of the Doukhobor communities in the USSR, those in the south Georgia were the most sheltered from the outside influence, both because of the sheer geographical isolation in the mountainous terrain, and due to their location in an area near the international border, and concomitant travel restrictions for outsiders.

Present Day

Today an estimated 20,000-40,000 people of Doukhobor heritage live in Canada, some 4000 of them claiming “Doukhobor” as their religious affiliation. Perhaps another 30,000 live in Russia and neighboring countries. About 5000 live in the U.S. along the northernmost parts of the US-Canada border.

Canada

CCUB, the organization Orthodox Doukhobors or Community Doukhobors, was succeeded by Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ, formed by Peter P. Verigin (son of Peter V. Verigin) in 1938. The largest and most active Doukhobor organization, it is headquartered in Grand Forks, British Columbia.

During Canada 2001 Census, 3,800 persons in Canada (of which, 2,940 in British Columbia, 200 in Alberta, 465 in Saskatchewan, and 155 in Ontario) identified their religious affiliation as “Doukhobor.” As the age distribution shows, the proportion of older people among these self-identified Doukhobors is higher than among the general population:

E.g., 28 percent of the self-identified Doukhobors in 2001 were aged over 65 (i.e., born before 1936), as compared to 12 percent of the entire population of Canadian respondents. The aging of the denomination is accompanied by the shrinking of its size, starting in the 1960s:

Census year	Self-identified Doukhobor population
1921	12,674
1931	14,978
1941	16,898
1951	13,175
1961	13,234
1971	9,170
1981	?
1991	4,820
2001	3,800

Of course, the number of Canadians sharing Doukhobor heritage is much higher than the number of those who actually consider oneself a member of this religion. Doukhobor researchers made estimates from “over 20,000″ people “from [Doukhobor] stock” in Canada (Postnikoff, 1977) to over 40,000 Doukhobors by “a wider definition of religion, ethnicity, way of life, and social movement” (Tarasoff, 2002).

The Canadian Doukhobors no longer live communally. Their prayer meetings and gatherings are dominated by the singing of a cappella psalms, hymns and spiritual songs in Russian. Doukhobors do not practice baptism. They reject several items considered orthodox among Christian churches, including church organization and liturgy, the inspiration of the Scriptures, the literal interpretation of resurrection, the literal interpretation of the Trinity, and the literal interpretation of heaven and hell. Some avoid the use of alcohol, tobacco, and animal products for food, and involvement in partisan politics. Doukhobors believe in the goodness of man and reject the idea of original sin.

The religious philosophy of the Doukhobors is based on the ten commandments and the Golden Rule, “Love God with all thy heart, mind and soul” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” The Doukhobors have several important slogans. One of the most popular, “Toil and Peaceful Life,” was coined by Peter V. Verigin.

Georgia and Russia

Since the late 1980s, many of the Doukhobors of Georgia started emigrating to Russia. Various groups moved to Tula Oblast, Rostov Oblast, Stavropol Krai, and elsewhere. After the independence of Georgia, many villages with Russian names received Georgian names; for example, Bogdanovka became Ninotsminda and Troitskoe became Sameba. According to various estimated, in Ninotsminda District, the Doukhobor population fell from around 4000 in 1979 to 3,000-3,500 in 1989 and not much more than 700 in 2006. In Dmanisi district, from around 700 Doukhobors living there in 1979, no more than 50 seemed to remain by the mid-2000s. Those who do remain are mostly older people, since it is the younger generation who found it easier to move to Russia. The Doukhobor community of Gorelovka (in Ninotsminda District), the former “capital” of the Kalmykov family, is thought to be the best preserved in all post-Soviet countries.

Heritage: Historical sites and museums

The sites of Community Doukhobors’ headquarters in Veregin, Saskatchewan were designated in 2006 a National Historic Site of Canada, under the name “Doukhobors at Veregin.”

A Doukhobor museum, currently known as “Doukhobor Discovery Center” (formerly, “Doukhobor Village Museum”) operates in Castlegar, British Columbia. It contains over a thousand artifacts representing the arts, crafts, and daily life of the Doukhobors of the Kootenays in 1908-1938.

Although most of the early Doukhobor village structures in British Columbia have vanished or been significantly remodeled by later users, a part of Makortoff Village outside of Grand Forks, British Columbia has been preserved as a museum by Peter Gritchen, who purchased the property in 1971 and opened it as the Mountain View Doukhobor Museum on June 16, 1972. The future of the site became uncertain after his death in 2000. But, in cooperation with a coalition of the local organizations and concerned citizens, the historical site, known as Hardy Mountain Doukhobor Village, was purchased The Land Conservancy of British Columbia in March 2004, while the museum collection was acquired by the Boundary Museum Society and loaned to TLC for display.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa has a collection of Doukhobor-related items as well. A special exhibition there was run in 1998-1999 to mark the centennial anniversary of the Doukhobor arrival in Canada.

Iris

In Greek mythology, Iris is the personification of the rainbow and messenger of the gods. She is also known as one of the goddesses of the sea and the sky. Iris links the gods to humanity. She travels with the speed of wind from one end of the world to the other, and into the depths of the sea and the underworld.

In myths

According to Hesiod’s Theogony, Iris is the daughter of Thaumas and the cloud nymph Electra. Her sisters are the Harpies; Aello, Celaeno and Ocypete.

Iris is frequently mentioned as a divine messenger in the Iliad which is attributed to Homer, but does not appear in his Odyssey, where Hermes fills that role. Like Hermes, Iris carries a caduceus or winged staff. By command of Zeus, the king of the gods, she carries an ewer of water from the River Styx, with which she puts to sleep all who perjure themselves. Goddess of sea and sky, she is also represented as supplying the clouds with the water needed to deluge the world, consistent with her identification with the rainbow.

According to Apollonius Rhodius, Iris turned back the Argonauts Zetes and Calais who had pursued the Harpies to the Strophades (‘Islands of Turning’). (This eventful ‘turning’ may have resulted in the islands’ name) The brothers had driven off the monsters from their torment of the prophet Phineus, but did not kill them upon the request of Iris, who promised that Phineas would not be bothered by the Harpies again.

Iris is married to Zephyrus, who is the god of the west wind. Their son is Pothos (Nonnus, Dionysiaca). According to the Dionysiaca of Nonnos, Iris’ brother is Hydaspes (book XXVI, lines 355-365).

In Euripides’ play Heracles, Iris appears alongside Lyssa, cursing Heracles with the fit of madness in which he kills his three sons and his wife Megara. In some records she is a sororal twin to the Titaness Arke (arch), who flew out of the company of Olympian gods to join the Titans as their messenger goddess during the Titanomachy, making the two sisters enemy messenger goddesses. Iris was said to have golden wings, whereas Arke had iridescent ones. She is also said to travel on the rainbow while carrying messages from the gods to mortals. During the Titan War, Zeus tore Arke’s iridescent wings from her and gave them as a gift to the Nereid Thetis at her wedding, who in turn gave them to her son, Achilles, who wore them on his feet. Achilles was sometimes known as podarkes (feet like [the wings of] Arke.)

Epithets

Iris had numerous poetic titles and epithets, including Chrysopteron (Golden Winged), Podas ôkea (swift footed) or Podênemos ôkea (wind-swift footed), and Thaumantias or Thaumantos (Daughter of Thaumas, Wondrous One). Under the epithet Aellopus (Ἀελλόπους) she was described as swift-footed like a storm-wind.^[2] She also watered the clouds with her pitcher, obtaining the water from the sea.

Representation

Iris is represented either as a rainbow, or as a young maiden with wings on her shoulders. As a goddess, Iris is associated with communication, messages, the rainbow and new endeavors.

 

Vampire

 

The modern day term, Vampire (derivative of the German vampir), usually refers to mythological or folkloric beings that subsist on the life force of a human being and/or animal. In most cases, vampires are represented as reanimated corpses who feed by draining and consuming the blood of living beings. The word “vampire” is mentioned in Babylonian demonology, and the even more ancient bloodsucking Akhkharu is mentioned in Sumerian mythology. Bram Stoker’s Dracula arguably presents the definitive version of the vampire in popular fiction.

Ways purported to kill vampires range from putting sawdust in or around their coffins to carrying fresh rose bush sprigs. The most popular and well-known means of killing a vampire is driving a silver stake through its heart and presenting it with holy items, such as rosaries, crosses, and holy water.

Linked to the restless souls of the dead, the vampire may indeed represent the spirits of those who died unsatisfied with their time on earth and continue to seek fulfillment of their desires by sucking the blood of those who still have life. Without understanding the reality of the spiritual world, the appearance of such beings could well be interpreted in the context of real creatures, such as bats. However, the vampire is never satisfied in this way, but only torments those on earth until its “death,” and the spirit can finally find its way to an afterlife existence.

Etymology

The English word vampire is a derivative of the German vampir, which became “vampire” when passed into French, and stayed the same when it was assimilated into English. The German form came from Slavic and Slovak variants, such as the Polish upior, the Belarussian upyr, Ukrainian, Russian upir, and Bulgarian vapir. The first recorded use of the English variation “vampire” comes from a police report in Austrian controlled Serbia during the sixteenth century, in which the police were investigating vampire claims made by local peasants.

In zoology and botany, the term “vampirism” is used in reference to leeches, mosquitos, mistletoe, vampire bats, and other organisms that subsist on the bodily fluids of others.

Ancient origins

Nearly every ancient culture considered blood to be sacred. It was often thought of as not only a physical requirement for life, but also as the life-force of humankind. Rituals involving both animal and human blood (although human blood was usually held in higher esteem than the blood of animals) were common in many societies. It is, therefore, not surprising that ideas of creatures which lived off blood were popular in ancient times.

Vampire-like spirits called the Lilu are mentioned in early Babylonian demonology, and the even more ancient bloodsucking Akhkharu is discussed in Sumerian mythology. These female demons were said to roam during the hours of darkness, hunting and killing newborn babies and pregnant women. One of the demons, named Lilitu, was later adapted into Jewish demonology as Lilith.

In India, tales of vetalas, ghoul-like beings that inhabited corpses, are found in old Sanskrit folklore. Like the bat associated with modern day vampirism, they were said to hang upside down on trees found in burial grounds and cemeteries. A prominent story tells of King Vikramāditya and his nightly quests to capture an elusive vetala. The vetala legends have been compiled in the book Baital Pachisi.

The “hopping corpse” may be considered the Chinese equivalent of the vampire. However, this creature fed on a person’s qi, or life force, which in China was understood as separate from the blood. In other respects it keeps within the tradition of vampiric behavior. The Ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, in one myth, became full of bloodlust after slaughtering humans and was only sated after drinking alcohol colored as blood.

These are but a few examples of the numerous traditions of creatures that practice vampirism. The anthropomorphic and demonic version of the vampire did not emerge until centuries later, however, in Eastern Europe folklore.

Folk beliefs in vampires

The modern day representation of vampires owes itself directly to the folklore of Eastern Europe. It is probable that the ancient beliefs in creatures that fed off human life carried over into this area of the world and mixed with other beliefs, producing the human vampire. Some scholars have suggested this belief in vampires arose because of a series of deaths due to unidentifiable or mysterious illnesses, usually within the same family or the same small community. The rare blood disorder Porphyria, which causes increased sensitivity of the skin to direct sunlight and makes teeth appear larger than normal, as well as rabies, which can make a human act like a wild animal, have been cited by some as misunderstood disorders that helped spur the belief in vampires.

Beliefs regarding death and mortality may also have played an important role. Often in old folklore, those who committed suicide or were brutally murdered were susceptible to becoming vampires, since the natural course of their life was interrupted.

It is difficult to make a single description of the folkloric vampire, because its properties vary widely between different cultures. However, here are some of the more common characteristics among vampire legends:

• The appearance of the European folkloric vampire mostly concerned features by which one was supposed to tell a vampiric corpse from a normal one, when the grave of a suspected vampire was opened. The vampire has a “healthy” appearance and ruddy skin, he is often plump, his nails and hair have grown and, above all, he or she is not in the least decomposed.
• The most common ways to destroy the vampire are driving a wooden stake through the heart, decapitation, and incinerating the body completely. Ways to prevent a suspected vampire from rising from the grave in the first place include burying it upside-down, severing the tendons at the knees, or placing poppy seeds on the ground at the grave site of a presumed vampire in order to keep the vampire occupied all night counting.
• Apotropaics, objects intended to inhibit or ward off vampires (as well as other evil supernatural creatures), include garlic (confined mostly to European legends), sunlight, a branch of wild rose, the hawthorn plant, and all things sacred (such as holy water, a crucifix, and a rosary).
• Vampires are sometimes considered to be shape-shifters, not limited to the common bat stereotype depicted in cartoons and movies. Rather, vampires are said to morph into a wide variety of animals such as wolves, rats, moths, spiders, and so on.
• Vampires in European folklore are said to cast no shadow and no reflection, perhaps arising from folklore regarding the vampire’s lack of a soul.
• Some traditions hold that a vampire cannot enter a house unless invited, although after this they can come and go as they please without further permission.
• Christian tradition holds that vampires cannot enter a church or holy place, as they are servants of the devil.

Slavic vampires

In Slavic lore, causes of vampirism include being born with a caul (the remnants of the amniotic sac seen as a shimmery coating of the head and face immediately after birth), teeth, or tail, being conceived on certain days, “unnatural” death, excommunication, and improper burial rituals. Many Serbians believed that having red hair was a vampiric trait.

Preventive measures included placing a crucifix in the coffin, placing blocks under the chin to prevent the body from eating the shroud, nailing clothes to coffin walls for the same reason, putting sawdust in the coffin (so that when the vampire awakens in the evening he is compelled to count every grain of sawdust, which occupies the entire night, so that he will die at dawn) or piercing the body with thorns or stakes. In the case of stakes, the general idea was to pierce through the vampire and into the ground below, pinning the body down. Certain people would bury those believed to be potential vampires with scythes above their necks, so the dead would decapitate themselves as they rose.

Evidence that a vampire was active in a given locality included death of cattle, sheep, relatives, or neighbors; an exhumed body being in a lifelike state with new growth of the fingernails or hair; a body swelled up like a drum; or blood on the mouth coupled with a ruddy complexion. Vampires, like other Slavic legendary creatures, were afraid of garlic and were compelled to count particles of grain, sawdust, and the like. The most famous Serbian vampire was Sava Savanovic, from a folklore-inspired novel by Milovan Glišić.

Romanian vampires

Romania is surrounded by Slavic countries, so it is not surprising that Romanian and Slavic vampires are similar. Romanian vampires are called Strigoi, based on the ancient Greek term strix, for screech owl, which also came to mean demon or witch.

There are different types of Strigoi. Live Strigoi are live witches who will become vampires after death. They have the ability to send out their souls at night to meet with other witches or with other Strigoi, which are reanimated bodies that return to suck the blood of family, livestock, and neighbors. Other types of vampires in Romanian folklore include Moroi and Pricolici.

Romanian tradition described a myriad of ways of bringing about a vampire. A person born with a caul, an extra nipple, a tail, or extra hair was doomed to become a vampire. The same fate applied to someone born too early, someone whose mother encountered a black cat crossing her path, and someone who was born out of wedlock. Others who became vampires were those who died an unnatural death or before baptism, the seventh child in any family (presuming all of his or her previous siblings were of the same gender), the child of a pregnant woman who avoided eating salt, and a person who was looked upon by a vampire or a witch. Moreover, being bitten by a vampire meant certain condemnation to a vampiric existence after death.

The vampire was usually first noticed when it attacked family and livestock, or threw things around in the house. Vampires, along with witches, were believed to be most active on the Eve of St George’s Day (April 22 on the Gregorian, and May 6 on the Julian calendar), the night when all forms of evil were supposed to be abroad.

A vampire in the grave could be discerned by holes in the earth, an un-decomposed corpse with a red face, or with one foot in the corner of the coffin. Living vampires were identified by distributing garlic in church and observing who would refuse to eat it. Graves were often opened three years after the death of a child, five years after the death of a young person, or seven years after the death of an adult to check for vampirism.

Measures to prevent a person from becoming a vampire included removing the caul from a newborn and destroying it before the baby could eat it, careful preparation of dead bodies, including preventing animals from passing over the corpse, placing a thorny branch of wild rose in the grave, and placing garlic on windows and rubbing it on cattle, especially on St George’s and St Andrew’s day. To destroy a vampire, a stake was driven through the body, followed by decapitation, and placing garlic in the mouth. By the nineteenth century, one would also shoot a bullet through the coffin. For resistant cases, the body was dismembered and the pieces burned, mixed with water, and administered to family members as a cure.

Greek vampires

Belief in vampires was common in nineteenth century Greece. Greek customs may have propagated this belief, notably a ritual that entailed exhuming the deceased three years after their death, and observing the extent of decay. If the body was fully decayed, the remaining bones were put in a box by relatives and wine poured over them, a priest would then read from scriptures. However, if the body had not sufficiently decayed, the corpse would be labeled a vampire.

According to Greek beliefs, vampirism could occur through various means: Excommunication or desecrating a religious day, committing a great crime, or dying alone. Other more superstitious causes include having a cat jump across the grave, eating meat from a sheep killed by a wolf, or having been cursed. It was also believed in more remote regions of Greece that unbaptized people would be doomed to vampirism in the afterlife.

The appearance of vampires varied throughout Greece and were usually thought to be indistinguishable from living people, giving rise to many folk tales with this theme. However, this was not the case everywhere: On Mount Pelion vampires glowed in the dark, while on the Saronic islands, vampires were thought to be hunchbacks with long nails; on the island of Lesbos vampires were thought to have long canine teeth much like wolves. Vampires could be harmless, sometimes returning to support their widows by their work. However, they were usually thought to be ravenous predators, killing their victims who would be condemned to become vampires. Vampires were so feared for their potential for great harm that a village or an island would occasionally be stricken by a mass panic if a vampire invasion were believed imminent. Nicholas Dragoumis records such a panic on Naxos in the 1930s, following a cholera epidemic.

Varieties of wards were employed for protection in different places, including blessed bread (antidoron) from the church, crosses, and black-handled knives. To prevent vampires from rising from the dead, their hearts were pierced with iron nails whilst resting in their graves, or their bodies burned and the ashes scattered. Because the Church opposed burning people who had been baptized, cremation was considered a last resort.

Roma vampires

Traditional Romani beliefs claim that the dead soul enters a world similar to their own, except that there is no death. The soul lingers next to the body and sometimes wants to return to life. The Roma legends of the “living dead” have indeed enriched the vampire legends of Hungary, Romania, and the Slavic world.

The ancient home of the Roma, India, describes many vampiric entities. The Bhut or Prét is the soul of a man who died an untimely death. It wanders around animating dead bodies at night, attacking the living much like a ghoul. In northern India, there is the BrahmarākŞhasa, a vampire-like creature with a head encircled by intestines and a skull from which it drank blood. Vetala and pishacha are other creatures who resemble vampires.

The most famous Indian deity associated with drinking blood is Kali, who has fangs, wears a garland of corpses or skulls, and has four arms. Her temples are located near cremation grounds. She and the goddess Durga battled the demon Raktabija, who could reproduce himself from each drop of blood spilled. Kali drank all his blood so none was spilled, thereby winning the battle and killing him. Sara, or the Black Goddess, is the form in which Kali survived among Roma. Some Roma believe that the three Marys from the New Testament went to France and baptized a Gypsy called Sara. They still hold a ceremony every May 24, in the French village where this is supposed to have occurred. Some refer to this Black Goddess as “Black Cally” or “Black Kali.”

One form of vampire in Romani folklore is called a mullo (one who is dead). This vampire is believed to return and do malicious things and/or suck the blood of a person (usually a relative who had caused their death, or did not properly observe the burial ceremonies, or who kept their possessions instead of destroying them, as was proper). Female vampires could return, lead a normal life, and even marry, but would eventually exhaust the husband. Anyone who had a horrible appearance, was missing a finger, or had appendages similar to those of an animal, was believed to be a vampire. If a person died unseen, he would become a vampire, likewise if a corpse swelled before burial. Dogs, cats, plants, or even agricultural tools could become vampires. Pumpkins or melons kept in the house too long would start to move, make noises or show blood.

To get rid of a vampire, one could hire a Dhampir (the son of a vampire and his widow) or a Moroi to detect the vampire. To ward off vampires, gypsies drove steel or iron needles into a corpse’s heart and placed pieces of steel in the mouth, over the eyes, ears, and between the fingers at the time of burial. They also placed hawthorn in the corpse’s sock or drove a hawthorn stake through the legs. Further measures included driving stakes into the grave, pouring boiling water over it, as well as decapitating or burning the corpse.

Even today, Roma frequently feature in vampire fiction and film, no doubt influenced by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in which the Szgany Roma served Dracula, carrying his boxes of earth and guarding him.

Modern belief in vampires

Beliefs in vampires persist to this day. While some cultures preserve their original traditions about the immortal, most modern-day believers are more influenced by the fictional image of the vampire as it occurs in films and literature.

In the 1970s, there were rumors (spread by the local press) that a vampire haunted Highgate Cemetery in London. Amateur vampire hunters flocked in large numbers to the cemetery. Several books have been written about the case, notably by Sean Manchester, a local man who was among the first to suggest the existence of the “Highgate Vampire,” and who later claimed to have exorcised and destroyed an entire nest of vampires in the area.

In the modern folklore of Puerto Rico and Mexico, the chupacabra (goat-sucker) is said to be a creature that feeds upon the flesh or drinks the blood of domesticated animals, leading some to consider it a kind of vampire. The “chupacabra hysteria” was frequently associated with deep economic and political crises, particularly during the mid-1990s.

During late 2002 and early 2003, hysteria about alleged attacks of vampires swept through the African country of Malawi. Mobs stoned one individual to death and attacked at least four others, including Governor Eric Chiwaya, based on the belief that the government was colluding with vampires.

In Romania during February of 2004, several relatives of the late Toma Petre feared that he had become a vampire. They dug up his corpse, tore out his heart, burned it, and mixed the ashes with water in order to drink it.

In January 2005, rumors began to circulate that an attacker had bitten a number of people in Birmingham, England, fueling concerns about a vampire roaming the streets. However, local police stated that no such crime had been reported. This case appears to be an urban legend.

Vampire style groups have developed where vampire behavior is practiced, such as a preference for night time and darkness, and the drinking of blood. However, it should be noted that a majority of these people do not believe they are vampires in the folkloric sense. Rather, they believe that drinking blood is a sacred ritual, and will often drink small amounts of their own or other members’ blood. Mainstream culture frowns on such behavior, and it is often seen as a perverse sub-culture and Satanic or evil in nature, even though many who practice such culture disavow any malicious intentions.

Vampires in fiction and popular culture

Lord Byron arguably introduced the vampire theme to Western literature in his epic poem The Giaour (1813), but it was John Polidori who authored the first “true” vampire story, called The Vampyre. Polidori was the personal physician of Byron and the vampire of the story, Lord Ruthven, is based partly on him—making the character the first of the now familiar romantic vampires. The “ghost story competition” that spawned this piece was the same competition that motivated Mary Shelley to write her novel Frankenstein, another archetypal monster story.

Other examples of early vampire stories are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished poem Christabel and Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire story, Carmilla. However, it was undoubtedly Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, portraying Count Dracula from Transylvania as the “undead” villain, that has been the definitive version of the vampire in popular fiction. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood, and death, struck a chord in a Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were common.

Vampires were among the first cinematic creations of the early twentieth century with the silent classic Nosferatu, followed by a string of Dracula inspired movies. Soon, vampires became staples of the horror genre, for both television and film, often depicted in similar representations to Stoker’s. Television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Konami’s Castlevania and Crystal Dynamics’ Legacy of Kain video game series, role-playing games such as Vampire: the Masquerade, and Kouta Hirano’s Hellsing manga have been especially successful and influential.