ORIENTALISM IN "NOSE OF TURK AND TATAR'S LIPS"

 Liver of Blaspheming Jew

As I mention in the episode, Jewish people had been expelled from England in 1290 by King Edward the First. For Shakespeare and his audience, the idea of a Jewish person was about as alien as a dragon. Even if there were Jewish people in Macbeth’s Scotland in the 11th century - and there wouldn’t have been many - the sense here is more one of exoticism than anti-Semitism. The blasphemy that the witch mentions is that Jewish people would have denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. 

Nose of Turk and Tatar’s Lips

After the Jew’s liver, now we have an Ottoman's, or Turk’s nose and the lips of a Tatar, who could have come from anywhere from Siberia to Kazakstan. The combination is interesting because it combines a Jewish person, a Muslim and potentially an Eastern Orthodox Christian. These were all equally alien to Shakespeare’s London, and their inclusion in this horrific spell is an excuse for exoticism, cruelty and a kind of global power on behalf of these witches, the Weird Sisters. (There’s also the important point that the spell rhymes, and so Jew rhymes with yew, and eclipse with lips…)

The Protection of Baptism

The body parts harvested from non-Christian, non-Catholic bodies would all have lacked Christian anointing. So, all of these ingredients would have been all the more powerful for black magic since they have not been anointed or annealed. 

ART HISTORY ADVENT CALENDAR - DAY 13

 Week of Power

Day 13 - the Weird Sisters

We are the Fates - the Norns - the Zoryas

past - present - future

maiden - mother - crone

spinner - weaver - cutter

we raise kings - we guide kings - we dethrone kings

The wheel of Fortune whirs and turns,

the loom of Fate clackety-clacks,

the scissors of Death cut all threads.

Hail my lord, the once and future King! 

(Though the higher he rises, the louder his fall;

he is just a human, with feet of clay!)

DEXTRALIST SUPERSTITIONS

As it happens to be International Left-Handedness Day, why not tackle the issue of dextralism once more? -- Not as well-known as racism, sexism, or queerphobia, but nevertheless a form of discrimination. This article is about how the sinister side is omnipresent in superstition and magical thinking... Now I'm a freethinker in general, but also interested in folklore and the like. So please take these superstitions with a grain of salt (and, oui, the one with salt is featured on this list!).

Black cats, as well as corvids, bring good luck crossing a person's path from right to left, granting favourable times. But from left to right, the black cat or crow-relative is a bad omen.

Spilling sodium chloride, aka table salt, during meals, often by overturning the salt shaker, is also allegedly an evil omen. The most common contemporary belief requires you to toss a pinch of the spilt salt over your left shoulder, into the face of the shoulder devil (the angel is on the right -- remember any old Western cartoons where they appear) who lurks there.

The Scottish Play, the one with the usurper and the three witches and the indelible blood stains, left (pun intended!) its curse on me during the 4th centennial celebrations in the springtime of 2016, when I was to attend a performance of Mac**th in Valencia and mentioned its title (and surname of the titular usurpers) more than thrice. After attending the play without a hitch, my bad luck streak (which forced me to call my retelling of the story Los Usurpadores and omit the fatal Mac- surname) did not cease until I cast something over my left shoulder as well... this time, a frothy glob of spit into the faces of the three witches who haunted me!

If someone had a bad day, we say in Spanish "se ha levantado con el pie izquierdo". Unluckily, yours truly is left-footed as well... but luckily, she's generally a freethinker who does not pay much heed which foot she gets first out of bed, over a threshold, up some stairs or ladders...

Finally, engagement and wedding rings are worn on the left ring finger because, in a surprising twist, there is allegedly a vein or a meridian or nadi that leads straight to the heart from there! And we use our left hearts for systemic circulation (unless dextrocardia) and thus feel that our hearts are more on the left side... so in a heartbeat we have gone from dextralism to a sinistralist superstition, to end on a positive note!

WHEN SHALL WE MEET AGAIN?

The three Weird Sisters in Shakespeare's Macbeth are, as a matter of fact, based upon the Three Fates: the Moirae of classical myth... and their Norse counterparts, the Norns.

I had never seen an anime version of the Norns until this day...

     Verdandi                                        Urd                             Skuld

All three posing together... how should I caption this picture?
"Fair is foul and foul is fair..."

Dee, Deandra and Deanne: the Destinies.
More Norn/Weird Sister expies.

My Shakespeare mashup fic Perchance to Dream puts actually the Norns in the role of the Weird Sisters, making them catalysts for both the deeds of Thengil (the Lord Macbeth/Claudius character) and Jean-Jacques Scheele (the Iago character), as well as supplying heroes like Isabella/Isa (Marina/Perdita/Imogen) and Hans/Erik (Malcolm/Hamlet) with useful facts and prophecies... rendering them neutral yet interactive spectators of the great show of human life.