GENESIS - The Fountain Of Salmacis (Martinus)

GENESIS - The Fountain of Salmacis

Year: 1971

Album: Nursery Cryme [album review]

Working title: unknown

Credits: Banks, Collins, Gabriel, Hackett, Rutherford

Lyrics: Yes

Length: 8:02

Musicians: Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, Mike Rutherford

Played Live: 1971, 1972, 1978

mp3 downloads: iTunes

Cover versions: none

Notes: A number of songs that are longer than seven minutes are the founding blocks for the cult of "early Genesis". Stagnation and The Knife certainly were cornerstones, but it was mainly the songs from Nursery Cryme that triggered the fan cult of the Progressive Years. This is particularly true for The Musical Box and our current Track of the Week, The Fountain of Salmacis.

Christian writes:

For me - 13 points. One of the highlights of that album, but still not the very top league, also compared to stuff that followed

By the way - I also like Steve Hackett’s own version a lot - from his first genesis revisited album

cheers

Christian

SLOWDANCER writes:

13 points from me, too. Great hammond organ riff, mighty mellotron, great vocal arrangement and fabulous guitar work from Steve Hackett. It is the kind of song, which represents everything, that I love Genesis for.

DecomposingMan:

Like many Gabriel-era tracks this one didn't click with me right away, but now I love it. A strangely emotional finish to one of my favorite early Genesis albums.

I don't care much for Steve's GENESIS REVISITED version, although I'll admit he does a pretty good job with what sounds like a difficult song to sing.

I also don't care much for Phil's take on it from "FOUR" SIDES LIVE.

Fabrizio:

13 points seem about right. Second best song on the album and a giant leap forward from Trespass. Difficult to get into at first, like the majority of early Genesis songs but once you crack it you realize how catchy it actually is. Probably one of the first tunes where Mike shines as a bass'-player, I suspect Phil had something to d with that? Personally I don't care much for Steve's version and for me Peter's voice is simply the best fit for this song.

PaperKate:

11 from me, which is surprisingly conservative considering that I do enjoy this one very much. One of their best intros, very well constructed song, and excellent performances from everyone. I particularly enjoy the bass.

foxfeeder (AKA Ian)

13 from me, very good, atmospheric start, great finish, worthy idea for a song, the Steve Hackett GR version of the song is good, but unlike some other tracks on that album, not adding a great deal to the original.

Ian

Schrottrocker writes:

Thank you for all the background information!

14 points from me. This song has always been one of my top favourites right from the start. How is it hard to get into? It is one of the easiest songs to get into compared to Musical Box or Giant Hogweed.

DecomposingMan:

A couple of additional random thoughts on the song:

(1) The part at the end where the guys go "ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-AAAHHH-ahh!" (after "unearthly calm" and "both had given") is one of my favorite Genesis "backing vocals" moments.

(2) This is one of the few post-FGTR Genesis songs where I really don't know who wrote the lyrics. On an old message board someone claimed that Mike wrote them, but someone else later said this was not the case.

Martinus replies:

Quote from DecomposingMan

(1) The part at the end where the guys go "ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-AAAHHH-ahh!" (after "unearthly calm" and "both had given") is one of my favorite Genesis "backing vocals" moments.

For reasons that are unlikely ever to become clear, that point in the some always reminds me of the "stone circle riddle" scene in that very old adventure game Conquest Of Camelot.

If you ask me what I enjoy about Genesis I have to say it's two things. One, the music. If I did not like the music I wouldn't bother with the rest, obviously.

The second thing I really love in Genesis is the lyrics, though I must say this applies foremost or only to their output up to and including The Lamb. There is, in my mind, no bigger injustice you could to to the Four Big Albums of the Gabriel era, i.e. Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England and The Lamb, than to call the lyrics trite. I love coming back to those lyrics, reading them over again, listening to them again, and discovering new aspects, new allusions, a quote I had not noticed before...

With The Fountain Of Salmacis I can enjoy the music and the clever lyrics and my soft spot for classic Latin poetry and storytelling (maybe classical mythology as well?). 13 points from me for this wonderful song.

...cried a voice in the crowd.

raelway siding:

Nothing beats the atmosphere of this song - dank, misty, sinister, ancient. The dynamics on display are outstanding, even if the young Genesis are still a bit rough round the edges.

I also like the way the first and last tracks on Nursery Cryme are linked by themes of sexuality gone horribly wrong. A psychoanalyst would have had a field day with these repressed public-schoolboys singing about sexually mature man-children, and hideously conjoined lovers!

MARTINUS'S NOTES:

A few notes (which will likely brand me a showoff).

The „Pauly“, an encyclopedia of classical studies, states that the story of the first hermaphrodite goes back beyond Roman and even Greek times. The say that Hermaphroditus is the mythological shape of a very old androgynous deity which was imagined as a (female) Great Goddess with male attributes (e.g. Ishtar-Semiramis in Mesopotamia).

Mount Ida is a mountain in the Northwest of Asia Minor, present-day Turkey, that rises to 5.800ft. The surrounding area was called Phrygia and was not far from Troy. In fact, the Trojan prince Paris is usually shown with a Phrygian cap. Mount Ida is mentioned in a number of ancient myths, mainly ones that are related to the Trojan war. Mount Ida was where the Judgement of Paris took place, where Aphrodite conceived Aeneas from Anchises and from where the Olympian gods watched the siege of Troy.

Nymphs are minor female deities that live either in trees or in lakes or brooks. If they live in sweet freshwater they are also called Najads, while saltwater nymphs are usually called Nereids (overlapping with merfolk). The indiscriminate use of the expressions in the song lyrics obscures the fact that Salmacis is a nymph, too. Aphrodite and Hermes are not really #afraid of their love, but of their tryst or its result being discovered. If that is the case there is very little sense in hiding their child at the popular holiday resort for Olympian gods and goddesses, though.

Hermaphroditus is never called the hunter in Ovid, but it explains why he appears at the lake just as well as the reason Ovid gives (“just seeing the sights, old boy”). In fact, styling Hermaphroditus as a hunter fits well to the image Ovid draws of him: He describes him as a shy and chaste young man. These are the usual attributes in mythology of a hunter who has devoted his life to Artemis, goddess of the hunters. Now Artemis herself is a celibate deity – so celibate, in fact, that she turned Actaeon, who had inadvertently seen her naked, into a stag that was then torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs. Another example for the topic of the chaste hunter is Hippolytus, the sad victim of the sexual desires of his step mother Phaedra (as displayed in Seneca’s tragedy Phaedra).

Hermaphroditus is a hunter to the degree that his success in hunting (the deer) is described like an erotic conquest. Perhaps this also refers to a homophonic pun on heart/hart ie stag (see Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, where a courtier tries to cheer up the lovesick prince: "Will you go hunt, my lord?" - "What, Curio?" - "The hart.[gesprochen genauso wie 'the heart'] " - "Why, so I do, the noblest that I have.”)

Give wisdom to your son. A subtle but very clever pun. Before the advent of maps and satnavs, a traveler who lost his way – like Hermaphroditus – would pray for guidance to the god of the travelers, who is, in fact, Hermes. So the son has to ask the father for directions.

The Naiad queen is actually Artemis who is not a Naiad herself (according to Martinus; Dermark knows better, since this maiden goddess shuns the trappings of royalty!). Perhaps Salmacis is called a queen here to stress that she is female, perhaps also to give the impression of regal beauty.

Salmacis has been stirred. The stories of Salmacis and the narrator do not match here. Salmacis mentions “a creature” that has been stirred. The narrator states that the naiad herself is stirred or excited.

The water tasted strangely sweet. Ovid does not record Hermaphroditus drinking from the water (but dell'Anguillara does, Dermark adds, and so does Preti in dell'Anguillara's wake). The song lyrics may be deviating from Ovid’s story because the original is rather explicit. The poet uses elegiac vocabulary which is steeped in erotic innuendo (if you choose to read the text like that). A Roman Augustan audience would have had no doubt as to what Salmacis does while she is watching Hermaphroditus. The “strangely sweet” water may be quite a different liquid pooling – particularly when a “stirred” Salmacis urges the young man to “drink form my spring”. – Hermaphroditus drinking prepares the later pun “your thirst is not mine”.

If anybody in this scene is cold-blooded, it is Hermaphroditus. Salmacis is anything but. The irony of these words and the contrast to the ovidian text is biting.

may share my fate, i.e. they became hermaphrodites. The myth did not deter people from touching the waters of the lake. Ancient writers such as Strabon and Vitruvius report that the water of the fountain of Salmacis was healthy and tasted good.

A lover’s dream had been fulfilled – It is the proverbial dream of a lover to be united forever with the loved one. Note that in this grammatical case it is the desire of the only one lover (a lover’s dream instead of the lovers’ dream). Hermaphroditus does not share this desire; he is not even a lover which is why he curses the fountain.

What happens in the story of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis is nothing less than rape, and Augustan readers would probably have agreed. One should bear in mind, though, that this is a story of Ovid, the master of the elegiac system. In his Ars Amatoria (the Latin Kama Sutra; a poetic-elegiac handbook for straight males on how to find and keep a mistress) he explains that the male lover may urge his mistress to sleep with him and that it is acceptable to bring here there even if she is unwilling. The punch line of the story of Salmacis lies in the fact that Ovid switches the roles: The female lover forces the (sexual) union with a young man who does not love her back. That does not make it any better now, does it?

Literature has frequently inspired Genesis lyrics: Supper’s Ready clearly draws on the Bible. White Mountain borrows from Jack London, The Cinema Show from T.S.Eliot. They musicians openly extended that to their solo careers; just think of Smallcreep’s Day and A Curious Feeling.

I would love to know how Peter, Mike and Tony did in Latin in Charterhouse. If they were any good I suspect they enjoyed reading poetry from the end of the Roman republic and the early imperial ie Augustan period. Poets like Horace and Catullus wrote for a highly sophisticated audience that enjoyed hearing the overtones in a poem, the careful insinuations, the most delicate innuendo. Poets and their readers played a highly intellectual game of hide and seek. Genesis enjoyed that as well – just examine the names they used in Get ‘Em Out By Friday.

Of the poets I mentioned Horace was the well-mannered, subtle poet, while Catullus was wilder and more explicit (in a poem written when Julius Caesar was at the peak of his power Catullus famously called him “faggot Romulus”). Horace and Catullus, who wrote mainly poetry of the “small form” (involving mundane things and love and erotica), were followed by an Augustan poet who attempted to bring those subjects into poetry of the “big form”, i.e. into epics. This poet’s name was Ovid. He became famous for three books: Love Elegies (“Amores”), the infamous Ars Amatoria that some think caused him to be exiled to the Black Sea coast, and a collection of tales in which people changed into other things in a period spanning from the creation of the world to the days of the Emperor Augustus. In the fourth volume of this book, the Metamorphoses, you can find the story of Salmacis. Ovid uses the epic form, but retains the vocabulary and the puns of the elegy, which introduces sexual innuendo into the noble genre of the epic. (As an example: When Ovid mentions in a summer poem that “lizards scamper through the bush”, everybody who spent a summer in southern Italy can confirm that this happens. Roman readers would know that the lizard is a phallic symbol – and suddenly there is a subtext.)

Depending on where you come from, Genesis have written a rather dirrrty set of lyrics - or bowdlerized the Ovidian version.

...cried a voice in the crowd.