You know about the bacchante, of course.

The frenzied followers of Bacchus, who rampaged about in an ecstatic frenzy? Based on the bacchanalia?

It turns out that samurai Japan had something similar: the furyu,

an activity sometimes called, simply, dancing, sometimes called hayashi—which referred to the accompaniment of flutes and drums, and probably to singing. Most often the activity was identified as furyu odori—literally “the dance of the wind flowing.” Just what this was, however, remains a mystery. Like the tantalizing expression uchimawari, which named the circular processions of the Hokke sectarians, furyu odori evoked without defining an apparently sensational scene. The emphasis of the phrase itself was on spectacle. When it first came into use in the early classical period, furyu referred to a showy elegance, particularly in dress, although it could also indicate splendor in music or poetry. By the early medieval period, the word designated elaborate constructions as well—such as floats or festooned umbrellas or other ornaments that appeared in festival gatherings. Yet it retained strong associations with flamboyant costume, especially in the periodic sumptuary laws where “furyu attire” was lined up with the flaunting of “figured silk and embroidered brocade and silver blades” as symptoms of “lunacy” (monogurui) and “wild excess” (basara).

…diarists tell us of flute and percussion accompaniment and the ‘havoc’ they associate with the dancing. They sometimes link it to nenbutsu odori—ecstatic dancing invoking the Buddha Amida which, as we encounter it in medieval painting, involved moving circles of devotees stomping their feet and swinging their arms in apparent delirium. 

In 1506 the shogunate, seeing these frenzied gatherings (500+ people gathering at a time, impromptu, which for Kyoto during this era was alarming and hinted at peasant uprising and war) as a threat, banned it, along with “violations of coinage exchange laws, theft, arson, armed assault, quarrels, sumo wrestling, and dancing.” 

(Berry, The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto). 

tigermountain:

Here’s a tiny comic.

Your morning bad-ass.

Ts’oa Jio Po

No doubt every part of China possesses special notions and superstitions on water-devils, not always reduced to writing. We have obtained some from the lips of seamen in coasting along the Fukien shores. Sometimes in full sea a compact cloudy mass suddenly darkens the horizon. It nears the ship with great rapidity, to capsize her and drown her crew. It is no tornado, no water-spout, no squall, but the spirit of a woman, once a sailor’s lovely wife. Her husband, most unworthy of her, treated her ignominiously, even cruelly, until, preferring death to such a life, she cast herself into the vasty deep. Since then she rages at sea, a wrathful demon, against every junk she sees, in the hope that her husband may be amongst the crew and be sunk into her own watery grave. Hopefully there are efficient means to combat her. First of all the hatches must be closed; indeed, she is so unmannerly as to pass on high a flood of urine, which may fill the ship in a moment up to the deck. Therefore Amoy sailors call her the Ts`oā Jiō Pó, the Pissing Woman.

The medieval Arabic detective

The medieval Arabs developed a detective figure whose methods of detection were not dissimilar from those of his Western, or even Chinese, counterparts. They did not, however, develop a detective novel. This is not for the lack of a detective but because the novel, as a literary form, was foreign to the aesthetic concerns of the medieval Arabs. Instead of making their detective the hero of a novel, the Arabs characterized him in concise anecdotal narratives, and placed him along the other clever men and tricksters who people so much of the literature of the medieval Arab world.

Fedwa Malti-Douglas, “The Classical Arabic Detective,” Arabica, 1988.

(Well worth searching out for the anecdotes about al-Mut`adid bil-Lāh, the Judge Bao of 9th century Baghdad—they are detective stories at anecdote length. Also for a tantalizing aside about police forces in large Muslim cities of the medieval era).

1926 map of Chicago's gangland →

On the importance of fiction in one’s life.

During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact, that it has had no child born to it, and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced, have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.

(Dickens, Bleak House)

In an effort to provide distraction on election day, I’ve mounted on my site the full text of the 1892 proto-steampunk dime novel, “Tom Edison Jr.’s Electric Sea Spider.”

Some apropos Dryden

So, when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,                 
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.