Well, not the Oracle, exactly, but the place of the Oracle—the ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Greece—which itself is often spoken of, in a modern linguistic convention, as “the Oracle of Delphi.”
Attic red-figure kylix from Vulci (Italy), 440-430 BC. Kodros Painter. Oracle of Delphi: King Aigeus in front of the Pythia. Antikensammlung Berlin, Altes Museum, F 2538. Photo by Zde, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.
The actual Oracle, however, was a high priestess, conventionally named Pythia but embodied by many generations of actual women who spoke forth from at least the eighth century B.C. (but perhaps much earlier) to the late fourth century A.D.
Persons, representing themselves or their city-states, would come to Delphi—a place perched high on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, overlooking the Gulf of Corinth—with urgent questions bearing on their plans or hopes.
On the seventh day of each non-winter month, the petitioners or “consultants,” in order of priority as assigned by priests or priestesses, would present their questions, and Pythia would present her answers. A long tradition says that Pythia did so in a trance-like state, influenced by toxic vapors seeping from a chasm in the ground underneath the Temple of Apollo.
The Oracle of Delphi Entranced, engraving by Heinrich Leutemann (1824–1905). Public Domain.
Thus, the Oracle’s answers, or “oracles,” were ambiguous, easily misunderstood by the customers. Or maybe, Pythia’s utterances were pure gibberish, rearranged by the members of her subordinate priesthood into intelligible yet ambiguous formulations.
Lots of examples cited by ancient authorities such as Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diogenes Laërtius show that understanding and applying Pythia’s advice could be tricky.
For example, this demigod, Marmota monax. What are we to make of him?
Woodchucks, we have in plenty. There is only one Groundhog, one Lawgiver of February.
A rodent is only a rodent, but the Groundhog is an oracle.
He goes by many names: Punxsutawney Phil, Wiarton Willie, Jimmy the Groundhog, Dunkirk Dave, Staten Island Chuck, etc. But these are merely local avatars of the Universal Groundhog.
Wikipedia confides that the groundhog “is also referred to as a chuck, wood shock, groundpig, whistlepig, whistler, thickwood badger, Canada marmot, monax, moonack, weenusk, red monk, land beaver, and, among French Canadians in eastern Canada, siffleux.”
But clearly, those terms refer to ordinary rodents.
The Groundhog—the One and Only Groundhog—is said to control the weather. He controls it absolutely.
Stated baldly, the One Unitary Groundhog makes one unitary prediction, and we must all live with it for a whole season.
“Which season is that?”
The season of Winter-into-Spring, Dear Reader—a fraudulent season to begin with.
And how can we foretell the weather for Winter-into-Spring?
The Groundhog wakes up. Not at any old time, as a proper woodchuck would, but precisely on the second day of February. First thing in the morning.
When Groundie stumbles from his burrow, he waddles about for a while in a post-hibernial glaze. After coffee, he opens his eyes. If he sees his shadow, he goes back to bed. If he does not see his shadow, he stays up and does calisthenics.
Punxsutawney Phil, Oracle, protected and cosseted by members of his priesthood. Photo by Anthony Quintano, licnsed under CC-BY-2.0.
It’s that simple. A binary choice, ruled by a shadow.
People say if the sun is shining, the Groundhog will have a shadow and can’t miss seeing it; but if the weather is overcast, there will be no shadow, hence nothing for the Groundhog to see. This may be reading too much science into the picture. The governing myth only says, “if he sees his shadow.” Parse that how you will.
Now, here’s the corker: If he sees his shadow and re-hibernates, there will be six more weeks of winter. Holy cow.
But wait, there’s more: If he does NOT see his shadow and therefore stays out, then we shall have an early spring.
Now, Fair Reader, we have breached the Innermost Cave, the Sanctum Sanctorum, the Mystery of Mysteries. For, in any place where anybody gives two hoots about the Groundhog, six more weeks of winter IS an early spring.
Do the math. February 2 + six weeks = March 16 most years, or March 15 in a leap year. That’s six or seven days before the Vernal Equinox, the “official” start of spring. But in most temperate climates, the real spring—meteorological, vegetative, phenological spring—does not come round until days or weeks after the Equinox.
So, what can this rodentine Oracle be trying to tell us? In plain English, it’s not plain English. It’s mere gibberish, no more understandable than the virgin Pythia’s long-ago howls and whistles in ancient Delphi.
Perhaps that’s why we, like a certain film character, are doomed to repeat the whole thing over and over until we get it right.
Why does Your New Favorite Author live in the past?
You may have noticed, Fair Reader, that every one of these posts has something to do with the past. And every one ties the past in some way with the present. This is in keeping with our motto: “Seeking fresh meanings in our common past.” (See the top of this page.)
Have you not noticed my references to the future?
That can’t be it, because I haven’t made any.
Is this because I have no interest in the future? Au contraire. I am eager to see how things will work out. But I am patient.
I don’t feel competent to comment on the future. It isn’t here yet.
My ability to predict the next fifteen minutes has proven inadequate over the past seventy-eight years or so. How dare I venture a guess farther out?
I am content to wait until the future happens and then talk about it when it has become the past, as it always, eventually, does. Hindsight is better than foresight.
Confucius, the ancient Chinese sage, once said 君子欲訥於言而敏於行。It has been translated, “The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his action.”
But why go into all that? Maybe the superior man acts first and speaks later so that he will know what he did before he comments on it. It turns out the superior man is not any better at telling the future than I am.
The public media are full of inspiring things that relate to the future. E.g., “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not?”
With all due respect to the late Robert F. Kennedy, and to George Bernard Shaw before him—this is balderdash.
Things that are dreamt of, or wished for, are unreal. Nothing is real until it happens.
Once it has happened—once it is in the past—a world of possibilities is suggested. That’s the world where I live.
Hope you feel comfortable joining me here sometimes. I’ll leave the light on for ya.
All through autumn there was little to suggest winter was approaching.
Now, it’s here.
After the blizzard.
On the west side of Madison, Wisconsin, we got close to a foot of snow January 9-10. Again, overnight January 10-11, we picked up three inches. On January 12-13, we hunkered down under a howling blizzard that dumped another foot of snow.
Now the temperatures have dropped below zero.
If we have a mild December, Old Man Winter is apt to unleash his cold fury in January. This is my seventy-ninth winter. One gets to know these things.
Too Much is Enough Already
Some time ago, I lost sight of all the charms of snow. The gobs of white frosting smothering the cake of our landscape, the glitter of a million snow-diamonds in the moonlight, the squeak and crunch of ice-crust beneath your boots, the clean crispness of inhaled frost—all these things were lost on me.
I had shoveled too many tons of the stuff. Dug my car out of too many drifts. Dragged out the jumper cables once too often. Watched it all polluted with carbon granules and the effluvia of wandering dogs.
Now that I’m old and pay a man with a plow to clear my driveway, Nature’s whipped cream is tasty again. Like a retired ski bum, I can wax philosophical.
Before the blizzard.
My backyard has become a thing of beauty. One of the great things about snow is that you don’t have to mow it.
I did have to unlimber the snow rake and pull a few tons off the roof to reduce the formation of ice dams that might cause leakage. Roof raking ought to be an Olympic sport. All the medals would be taken by beefy Norwegians.
My dog, the ever-adaptible Fooboo, has a high old time playing outdoors in the sub-zero sunshine. We think he is part husky.
When I was his age, I played in the snow with great vigor. So did all my friends. There was no snow fort we could not build, none we could not assail. If we were feeling physical, we could wash our smaller siblings’ faces, unwillingly, in the snow. And boys bigger than we could do the same to us.
It’s All Downhill from Here
Every hill had sledding potential, but there was one, when I was nine or ten, that was par excellence—the Snake Path. It was not only a steep hill, it was a narrow path that took a tortuous drop through trees and brush, down to the old shale road that led to the river.
In those days, sleds were steerable, but their steering was gradual. You had two steel runners under you. By pulling hard on the left or right end of a wood crossbar, you could warp the runners slightly to the side, sending you and your sled on a gentle curve down the hill.
But the curves on the Snake Path were not gentle. They were sudden and heartbreaking. You had to yank the crossbar with all your might and sink a toe off the back runner to bend around the curve. Then you had to do it the other way, more or less instantly.
All this maneuvering was hard on your knit gloves or mittens and on the toes of your four-buckle galoshes. The sudden course changes threw cold snow in your face more or less all the time—but you were expected to take it. You had to run the bends without loss of momentum, so you broke the sound barrier while approaching the final obstacle—an earthen mound that made a perfect mogul or, if you will, a ski jump for sleds.
Your reward for speed was to fly five or ten feet through space, landing with a big whomp on the old shale road. If, at that moment, you wrenched the crossbar violently and planted your right toe, you could turn ninety degrees and coast down the icy road almost a quarter mile to the litte bridge over the Stink Creek.
Then you would stand up, grab your sled, walk back to the top, and do it all again.
I haven’t had that kind of fun in almost seventy years, nor do I expect to, this side of Eternity. But that’s okay; I had the experience once upon a time.
Today I ran into a young friend who happens to be a staff member at the clinic where I had a medical appointment. My young friend said she wants to read my novel, Price of Passage, because she has developed a great interest in history. She wants to get the real story and is especially interested in African American history. She has recently been learning about Ida B. Wells.
I mentioned that she might want to look at my blog post on the Springfield, Illinois, riots of 1908. It’s not a part of our history to be proud of, but I think we should be aware of historical events that really happened, whether they make us proud or not. The Springfield riots led directly to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a development in which Ida B. Wells had a hand. Those riots also caused the death of William Donnegan, a black Springfield shoemaker and Underground Railroad operative, who appears as a supporting character in my book.
All these reflections made me think I should repost the story, which appeared April 13, 2021, under the title, “Harry T. Loper’s Difficult Day.” So here it is.
Anarchy, Loper thought.
Crowds of men, women too, ran through the afternoon streets of Springfield. Shouted. Shook fists. Spooked horses. Snarled teams and rigs. Loper had witnessed the Cincinnati riots in 1884. Now those bloody scenes flashed back across his mind.
He frowned and crushed the horn bulb, steered his touring car through the lunatics, trying not to bump flesh. Loper’s 1906 Dorris was his pride and joy, but as a National Guard member and community leader, he knew his duty. He drove toward the county jail, the same place the mob was going, but on a different mission.
Out of nowhere, six of Springfield’s new motorized fire engines came roaring down the street. Loper swerved, nearly killing some moron walking in the gutter. Bells clanging, the fire trucks raced northward, beyond Union Square Park—and the mob in the street followed them. Loper turned down an alley between Washington and Jefferson Streets and approached the jail from the back.
“Took your time getting here,” said Sheriff Werner.
“There was a mob in the street, and by the way, the North End seems to be burning down.”
“Don’t worry about that fire. It’s a little invention of mine, to draw people away.” The sheriff barked back over his shoulder: “Come on, hustle!”
Two black men in prison stripes and handcuffs stumbled into the sunlight, surrounded by four armed lawmen.
“Harry Loper,” said the sheriff, “meet Deputies Kramer, Hanrahan, and Rhodes, and Sergeant Yanzell of the city police. The famous desperadoes climbing in behind you are Joe James and George Richardson. They may hang for their crimes next week, but by God we’ll keep them safe tonight.”
Loper turned in his seat to look at the prisoners. Both men stared bleakly at the floorboards. The Dorris was spacious, but two of the gun-wielding deputies had to stand on the running boards. Loper drove all six, prisoners and officers, five miles to Sherman, where they caught a train for Bloomington.
He drove fast on the return trip, anxious to get back to his restaurant—even though a big supper rush seemed unlikely. Decent folk would not venture out this night, even for a Friday feed at Springfield’s finest eatery.
But that was the least of it. He turned into Fifth Street only to find his place beleaguered by an ugly mob. He parked in the street and leapt from the car.
“There he is!” shouted someone as he ran in the door. “That’s Loper, the dirty nigger-lover!”
Loper made straight for his office and got the rifle he kept in case of robbers. He came out and stood in the doorway, brandishing the gun as broadly as he could.
“You hauled the negro out of town,” shouted a voice, female this time. “Now we will haul you!” The crowd surged forward.
My Grandma, Millie Marie Gunsten-not-yet-Sommers, lived in Low Point, Illinois, in 1908 and collected postcards. In her collection are two cards with no written message, no address, no stamps, no postmarks. They were never mailed. She must have been acquired them hot off the press.
These cards were printed and distributed for an urgent purpose: To get Harry Loper back in business after the riot. But theywere no doubt kept by Grandma simply as mementoes of the riot.
I remember her, from the 1940s and ’50s, as a homely old woman in a shapeless dress, who wore big button hearing aids, smiled a lot, rocked me in her rocking chair when I couldn’t sleep, and gave me a spoonful of honey when I had a cough.
In 1908, she would have been about twenty, a shy and socially awkward telephone operator still living with her parents and younger siblings in a very small town. What would she have thought of the distressing and notorious events in nearby Springfield? Did the big riot stay in her memory? She had enough things to occupy her mind in the intervening years, with marriage to a profane and pugnacious railroad telegrapher, the raising of five children, the loss of two sons in World War II. She never mentioned the riot in my hearing, and I never asked her about it, since I had never even heard of it. Long before I came along, the Springfield Race Riot of 1908 had been buried in society’s willing forgetfulness.
The Springfield Race Riot of 1908
But our haunted past has been resurrected. We now know that Springfield, Illinois—Abraham Lincoln’s home, the city from which he went to Washington to preside over a Union torn apart by slavery—was the site of one of the worst, and also most significant, race riots in the post-Reconstruction period.
On August 14, 1908, a young white woman, Mabel Hallam, charged George Richardson, a black construction worker, with raping her the night before. “I believe you are the man,” she said after hesitantly identifying him at the sheriff’s office in the Sangamon County Courthouse, “and you will have to prove that you are not.”
“Before God, I am innocent of this crime,” Richardson said. “I can explain her identification of me only by the theory that all coons look alike to her.”
An angry crowd formed outside the courthouse. Armed guards marched Richardson three blocks to the county jail and locked him up. Soon the mob re-formed at the jail.
Sheriff Charles Werner resisted using National Guard troops the governor placed at his disposal. He figured that getting the prisoner out of town would calm the mob. He telephoned Harry Loper to commandeer his car and arranged the diversionary tactic of a fake fire alarm. Perhaps as an afterthought, he added a second black prisoner to Loper’s cargo—one Joe James, languishing in jail for the July 4 murder of Clergy Ballard, a white mining engineer.
Loper and motoring friends in 1910. Loper, in light-colored suit and black hat, sits in the passenger seat. Photo courtesy Sangamon County Historical Society.
But the mob would not be placated. Learning that Loper had driven the two men out of town, hundreds converged on his restaurant, utterly destroying it and Loper’s car. The restaurateur escaped through a rear basement entrance, but Louis Johnston, a white factory worker, was hit by a stray gunshot inside the restaurant and died.
Black Districts Pillaged
The mob then turned to the Levee, a black business district, and the Badlands, a nearby neighborhood where blacks lived in mostly run-down houses. Many African American residents fled to any available refuge, although some defended themselves with revolvers and shotguns, firing from upper stories of businesses in the Levee.
The white mob lynched two black businessmen—Scott Burton, a 59-year-old barber, and William K. H. Donnegan, an 84-year-old shoemaker. Both men were beaten, slashed, and hung, their bodies mutilated.
In three days of rioting, at least thirty-five black-owned businesses were destroyed and riddled with bullets, and a four-square-block residential area was put to the torch. Local police, fire, and sheriff’s office responses were ineffective or nonexistent. Order was eventually restored by National Guard troops, deployed too late to stop the destruction and carnage. Accounts differ as to how many Springfield citizens, besides Burton and Donnegan, were killed or injured. At least several people, both black and white, died. Some estimates are higher.
Legal Penalties
Within a few days, a special grand jury “issued a total of 117 indictments and made eighty-five arrests for murder, burglary, larceny, incitement to riot, disorderly conduct, concealed weapons, and suspicion” (Something So Horrible: The Springfield Race Riot of 1908, by Carole Merritt [Springfield: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation, 2008], p. 59).
However, in the trials that followed, only one person faced serious punishment for participation in the riot—Roy Young, 15, who confessed to “shooting at negroes” and helping burn 15 or 16 houses and was sentenced to the state reformatory at Pontiac. Another rioter, Kate Howard, a boardinghouse owner known to have led rioters in the destruction of Loper’s café, was released on $10,000 bond and subsequently re-arrested in connection with the lynching of Scott Burton. “Before leaving for prison, Howard secretly took poison and died at the door of the county jail.”
Negro prisoner Joe James was convicted of the murder of Clergy Ballard and was hanged October 23, 1908. However, George Richardson, the man whose alleged rape of Mabel Hallam was the actual spark for the riot, was fully exonerated and released from jail two weeks after the riot, when his accuser admitted to the grand jury that she made the story up. According to Wikipedia, “He received no restitution or apology for his time away from work or harm to his name. He went on to work as a janitor, and lived until he was 76, when he died at St. John’s Hospital. His obituary did not mention the events of 1908.”
Catalyst for Founding of the NAACP
Richardson’s vindication would seem to be the only good thing to have come out of the Springfield riot. But it was not.
W.E.B. Du Bois
Wealthy white Republican Socialist William English Walling traveled to Springfield in the aftermath of the riot, visited hard-hit areas and spoke with survivors of the riot. He penned an article, “The Race War in the North,” for a New York weekly, The Independent. Journalist and social activist Mary White Ovington read Walling’s article and wrote to him in response. They organized a January 1909 meeting in New York, attended also by Dr. Henry Moskowitz, which became the founding meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Prominent black and white leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Oswald Villard and his mother Frances Garrison Villard, Ray Baker, Mary Church Terrell, Archibald Grimké, and Ida B. Wells joined the initial organizational efforts.
Thus the Springfield riot became the catalyst that led to the formation of the NAACP early the following year.
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Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
After months spent acclimatizing on the lower slopes . . . and further months reddening my corpuscles at a lofty base camp . . . I am now poised for the final assault. Scaling the steep Volume III to its summit, Your New Favorite Writer will become one of five or six living human beings to have read Kristin Lavransdatter, the Norse epic by Sigrid Undset. I may even become the only person since the War to have read it in English translation.
This is no mean feat, Dear Reader. I have been working at it, on and off, for years.
Once achieved, it will be the obscurest feather in my literary cap. But it portends; for Kristin Lavransdatter is so pure in its essence, so majestic in concept, that the Swedish Academy awarded Ms. Undset—an inscrutable saga all by herself—the 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Sigrid Undset working at Bjerkebæk in Lillhammer, Norway. Photo by Alvilde Torp. Public Domain.
Perhaps this would be of little interest to you, Gentle Reader, were it not for your secret yearning to use Kristin Lavransdatter as esoteric chatter at cocktail parties. Yet the obstacles, till now, have been great.
Happily, I can give you the essentials, free of charge, thus sparing you the considerable pains I myself have endured in the conquest. Don’t mention it. Glad to do it.
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Herewith, then, Kristin Lavransdatter:
To begin with, Marley was dead. Whoops, wrong story. Let me try again.
Kristin Lavransdatter was a little girl living in the days when Norwegians were starting to take up bishops and, with some reluctance, leave off dragons. Those were also the days when your last name told who your father was.
Lavrans Olivierssøn in bronze. No copyright.
Kristin’s father was named Lavrans, the Norsk equivalent of Lawrence or Laurence. Had he been Lavrans Olivierssøn, perhaps he would have been a great Shakesperian actor. However, Shakespeare had not been born yet, and Lavrans was actually Lavrans Bjørgulfssøn. He had to settle for being a wealthy Norwegian landowner. But I digress.
Lavrans’s daughter, Kristin, was a beautiful, beguiling, and willful child. Her beauty, guile, and willfulness were sufficient to require three volumes of dense Norwegian prose which, when translated into English, does not make any sense.
But bear in mind, it is Nobel prize material. Or it was, ninety-five years ago.
Kristin had a number of childhood adventures which firmed up in her mind the predicament of being a beautiful young maiden enmeshed in the aristocratic life of fourteenth-century Norway—which was mostly a succession of idylls in upland meadows, snowy forests, and scree-covered mountain slopes. As she grew into a gorgeous teenager, she was stupefyingly bored and thus fell in love with the raffish, error-prone Erlend Nikulaussøn.
Actor Gard Skagestad as the raffish Erlend.
Now, here is a curious point to ponder, Fair Reader: Kristin was the loveliest creature in all Gudbrandsdal, which is saying something; for those dales are filled with lovely Norwegian creatures. My point is, she could have had her choice among all sorts of wonderful husbands and good providers—many with great ancestral lands of their own. So who did she take up with but Erlend Nikulaussøn—a man acknowledged by all to be capable and charming, but then everybody also knew he couldn’t keep his head on straight.
It was the stuff of which good soap operas are made. Once Kristin and Erlend did the deed, of course she got pregnant, and her wise old father, Lavrans Bjørgulfssøn, swallowed his pride and gave her hand in marriage to this bounder, Erlend, from Trøndelag.
The remaining two-and-a-half books explore in a charming, rustic way, every nook and cranny of the consequences flowing from that first-act mistake.
Somewhere in the second book author Undset lets slip that Erlend—tired of the routine tasks of a wealthy landholder married to a beautiful, beguiling, and willful woman—has been dabbling in politics. Medieval Norwegian politics, that is, of the kind that may cost a man his head if the legal king finds out about it. Well, that fact, of course, adds to Kristin’s trials.
All through this endless parade of elephantine, Erlendesque blunders, Kristin keeps her cool. She scrupulously refrains from criticizing her husband on the principle that—well, I’m not quite sure what the principle is, but at any rate it prevents her giving him any good advice. Which is too bad, because he sure could use some.
You get the drift. I am sure you do, Dear Reader, since you are among the sharper knives in the drawer.
Kristin Lavransdatter exemplifies the best traditions of confused medieval nobles and gives us—what exactly does it give us? An enduring chronicle, shall we say, and let it go at that.
If, in the course of finishing Volume III, I discover anything heart-stoppingly new and unexpected, I’ll be sure to let you know.
In the meantime, should you wish to begin your own ascent into post-Viking Norsk literature, just email me, including your postal address. I’ll send you the first two volumes, like new except for the very occasional ketchup stain.
