On the Very Scary Rise of the First Literary Vampire

The story of Count Dracula as many of us know it was created by Bram Stoker, an Irishman, in 1897. But most of the action takes place in England, from the moment the Transylvanian vampire arrives on a shipwrecked vessel in Whitby, North Yorkshire, with plans to make his lair in the spookily named Carfax estate, west of the river in London. But Dracula wasn’t the first vampire in English literature, let alone the first to stalk England. The vampire first made its way into English literature in John Polidori’s 1819 short story “The Vampyre”. Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, is inspired by a thinly disguised portrait of the predatory English poet, Lord Byron, in Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon (1816). So the first fictional vampire was actually a satanic English Lord.

Nick Groom concludes  in The Vampire : A New History that we should try to be a bit more like vampires.  Thankfully this doesn’t entail hanging shiftily around blood donor banks or having your cuspids filed to a point (that’s a thing apparently – although heaven knows where you’d find a dentist who’d oblige). Rather, Groom wants us to think about vampires as a way of re-enchanting the contemporary human condition.

On 17 June 1816, John William Polidori recorded in his diary that “The ghost stories are begun by all but me.” Polidori was Lord Byron’s physician and had accompanied the poet and hypochondriac to Switzerland, where Byron rented the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva. They had been joined there by the poet Percy Shelley, his lover Mary Godwin (whom Percy married later that year) and her half-sister Claire Clairmont. The weather in Switzerland—indeed across the globe—was atrocious. The year 1816 was “The Year Without A Summer”: due to a gigantic volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island of Tambora the previous year, volcanic ash had been hurled into the stratosphere and remained there for years, blotting out sunlight and drastically altering weather patterns. Daytrips were out of the question for much of their stay, and so the previous evening, while watching storms thundering across the lake, Byron had suggested to the assembled company that they should each write a ghost story.

The next day, Polidori recorded “Began my ghost story after tea.” Mary Shelley later recalled:

‘’Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole—what to see I forget—something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted.’

This story—if it ever existed—has not survived, but Polidori may well have been distracted by what happened later that evening. At midnight, he noted, as Mary breastfed her four-month-old baby child, the group.

‘’really began to talk ghostly. L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s “Christabel”, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water in his face and gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. S[helley], and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.’’

The following day he again noted “began my ghost-story”—presumably a different story, and perhaps influenced by the Christabel fiasco the previous night. The new story became his unregarded novel Ernestus Berchtold; or, the Modern Oedipus, published in 1819.

Byron had abandoned his own story after a few pages, although nevertheless it was published (without his permission) in 1819 as “A Fragment.” “A Fragment” returns to the Turkish vampire figure of The Giaour, describing the mysterious Augustus Darvell, who is in the grip of some curious and undiagnosed wasting disease. Darvell and the unnamed narrator travel to Turkey, intending to visit the Greek ruins at Ephesus, and their journey takes them through a desolate landscape of Greek, Christian and Islamic ruins to a remote cemetery. Darvell disconcertingly murmurs, “I have also been here before” and states that he will soon die. He demands that the narrator conceal the news of his death, throw an Arabic ring he has into certain springs on the ninth day of the month at noon, and the following day wait at a ruined temple. A stork with a live snake writhing in its beak contemplates Darvell as he makes these plans, and Darvell asks to be buried where the bird is perched. The moment it flies away he dies and begins to turn black and decompose with unnatural rapidity; the narrator buries him as instructed, and there the text ends.

“A Fragment” is a curtailed vampire narrative. The metamorphosis of the flesh, the burial ground and the abnormal post-mortem state link it to the earlier 18th-century history of vampires, and doubtless Darvell would have risen from the dead. But Byron also introduces calculatedly exotic elements, notably the spell with the ring, and the stork and snake—a familiar enough pairing, but here suggesting a disturbing inversion of the ancient lore that storks deliver new babies. Although “A Fragment” hardly has a prominent place in the Byron canon, its mood was transfused into Polidori’s next story.

Polidori had studied medicine at Edinburgh and had written a treatise on somnambulism, and his professional interest was clearly piqued by the serious scientific interest afforded to vampires in the previous century. A shadow of vampirism lies upon his aborted story about the “skull-headed lady” who ends up, like Juliet, in the tomb of the Capulets—Juliet of course rises vampire-like from this tomb, before discovering that Romeo, believing her to be dead, has already killed himself. Polidori would have been familiar with the notes to Southey’s Thalaba and to Byron’s own Giaour (if only through Byron’s recollection of them) and Christabel presumably provoked talk of the seductive powers of the undead. So it was that Polidori discussed Byron’s aborted vampire narrative at the villa with the countess of Breuss, who urged him to write his own version. The results—Polidori’s third story undertaken at the villa—were to be far from forgettable.’

Polidori commenced work, but then his situation changed rapidly. As the Swiss trip drew to a close in early September, an exasperated Byron fired his cantankerous physician; Polidori consequently used his tale to revenge himself on his former employer. He aimed to expose the haughty lordling as a cruel seducer—Mary Shelley’s half-sister Claire Clairmont being pregnant at the time with Byron’s child, and hardly the first victim to fall for his diabolical charms. His portrait of Lord Ruthven was therefore of a sexual delinquent and predator, powerfully attracted to the virtuous and the virginal. He drew on anti-heroes such as the rapist Robert Lovelace from Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Clarissa (1747–48), the malevolent monk Schedoni of Ann Radcliffe’s novel of terror The Italian (1797), and the repugnant libertines who inhabit the Marquis de Sade’s repellent novel Juliette (1797–1801), such as the cannibal giant Minski (who has furniture made of human bones) and the obsessive necrophiliac and criminally depraved Cordelli. He also drew on Lady Caroline Lamb’s scandalous novel Glenarvon (1816). Byron had deserted Lamb in the midst of their passionate affair, and Lamb exacted her revenge by basing the novel’s pitiless anti-hero on her former lover; Lord Glenarvon’s name is Clarence de Ruthven.

Polidori’s portrait is not conventionally erotic: Ruthven has a “dead grey eye” that seems not to perceive character or humanity; he is cadaverous and the “deadly hue” of his face is never lit with vivacity; and he all but ignores women as an inferior species. Yet he has strong features and a compelling voice, and his apparent indifference to women carries a masochistic allure. He is also wealthy and perversely generous, sharing his wealth in the most decadent ways possible: by financing the dissolute in their pursuit of vice and leading them into disgrace—or to the gallows. He is a lone wolf, subverting morals. And then his dead eyes fall upon women, his tender prey.

Ruthven dies in Greece after being shot by robbers. He has already started rotting before his death, but has time to swear his companion, the protagonist Mr Aubrey, to keep silent about him for a year and a day. His body is placed on a summit to catch the first rays of the moon, whereupon it disappears. Aubrey then discovers through forensic deduction that Ruthven must have killed his Greek paramour Ianthe, who was found with blood on her neck and breast, “and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein.” As Aubrey sinks into delirium, Ruthven rises from the dead and seduces Aubrey’s innocent young sister, who is likewise found to have glutted his thirst for fresh blood. As if in ironic sympathy to the plight of both his lover and his sister, Aubrey dies from a hemorrhage. Lord Ruthven, meanwhile, escapes; he is, as is clear from the title of the story, “The Vampyre.”

Inspired by Gothic poetries, then, Polidori literally romanticizes the vampire into an enthralling outrage of sexual bloodlust. But that was not the end of it. Polidori’s tale was delivered to the countess of Breuss and nothing was heard of it for two-and-a-half years. Then, on 1 April 1819, it was published in the New Monthly Magazine as “A Tale by Lord Byron.” It had been sent to the publisher Henry Colburn with a note that certain tales had been written by Byron, Polidori and Mary Shelley; Colburn inferred that the story in question was by Byron and, in order to capitalize on his notorious reputation, published it as such.

Polidori was livid: Byron had apparently stolen his story. He immediately wrote to Colburn, insisting it is “not Lord Byron’s, but was written entirely by me at the request of a lady.” Polidori admitted that Byron’s “Fragment” had provided particular incidents—”his Lordship had said that it was his intention of writing a ghost story, depending for interest upon the circumstances of two friends leaving England, and one dying in Greece, the other finding him alive, upon his return, and making love to his sister”—although, of course, Byron’s “Fragment” never reached the point of the dead man rising and seducing the sister. Polidori accordingly requested a correction, proper attribution and compensation, and insisted that any further publication be suppressed. He himself supplied a statement correcting the claims made about the tale. Notwithstanding this, “The Vampyre” continued to be attributed to Byron throughout the century—and was celebrated across the continent as further proof of his wayward genius.

“The Vampyre” was not only attributed to Byron, though; it was also supplemented in the New Monthly Magazine and subsequent reprintings by prefatory material about Byron and the Villa Diodati retreat (including the episode regarding the effect of Christabel on Percy Shelley), together with an account of vampirism. This description of vampires locates them in Arabia and Greece (following Southey and Byron), as well as in Hungary, Poland, Austria and Lorraine (following Ossenfelder and Bürger). It gives details of blood-engorged corpses taken from the earlier medical reports, and the account of Paole given in Britain in The Craftsman (1732). The sexual content of the tales is underlined—they rise from their graves to “feed upon the blood of the young and beautiful”—and instructions for slaying vampires are provided: staking, decapitation and cremation. This self-proclaimed “monstrous rodomontade” concludes with a long quotation from The Giaour, and references to Thalaba, “the veracious Tournefort” and Calmet—again. It has to be said that the concise details given in this note concerning “this singularly horrible superstition” were to prove at least as influential as Polidori’s narrative.

Polidori, in presenting the vampire as a depraved and amoral English aristocrat, triggered a cultural sensation. Rather than being at the borders of Europe, the vampire was at the debauched edges of society, a Byronic anti-hero. But although he was careful not to over-stress the medical aspects of vampirism, Polidori’s vampire nevertheless helped to reignite interest in the scientific phenomenon of vampirism from a new perspective. In 1819, the Imperial Magazine published a feature on vampires that discussed Polidori’s tale, reprinted Polidori’s letter and the account of vampirism given by the New Monthly, and considered whether vampires were fictitious or not. The anonymous author argues that the leading idea of the literary vampire is that the vampire is a supernatural fiction, but a thread of fey doubt runs through the language:

‘’The Vampyre is represented as a mere creature of the imagination; to which have been ascribed fictitious powers, corresponding, in their application, with those which we attribute to sylphs, fairies, elves and genii . . . Under its imposing aspect, the mind of the reader is insensibly transported into a region of enchantment . . . Awakened from this poetic delirium, when we reach the conclusion of the tale, reason once more regains its dominion over fancy; but, unfortunately, instead of following that steady light, which is necessary to all just discrimination, we suddenly fall into an opposite snare, and hastily conclude that the Vampyre has no kind of existence, except in the dreams of poets, and the fables of romance.’’

The writer is aware that literature inoculates readers against vampires, but recognizes that despite this they maintain some sort of presence, a state of unbeing that carries a trace of reality. They are more than mere fictions.

On the Very Scary Rise of  the First Literary Vampire. By Nick Groom. LitHub , October 25, 2018

In other words, Groom wants to construct a rigorous genealogy of the vampire and, to this end, picks the early 18th century as his place to start. Before this there had been myriad tall tales about bloodsucking creatures popping up all over “the Levant”. In Serbia you could spot the undead by their ruddy complexions as a result of all that snacking on friends and family, while in Slavonic folklore a male vampire would make a point of returning for a conjugal visit, to be followed, nine months later, by the arrival of a baby without a skeleton. On Mykonos there was a creature called the Vrykolakas, who rose from the dead and ran around aggressively until stopped by some brave islander reaching into the decaying corpse and tearing out its heart.

What turned this motley crew of stinking, sexed-up roustabouts into vampires, Groom contends, is their run-in with Enlightenment thought. From the early 18th century the doctors, scientists and theologians of western Europe started not only to collect and codify these bloodthirsty folktales but also to try to come up with rational explanations. Perhaps the peasants had simply been drinking too much hoppy beer and imagined the whole thing. Or maybe they were so flummoxed by the shifting borders of the decaying Habsburg empire that this was their way of expressing panic about outsiders. The Protestants of northern Europe, meanwhile, thought it all nonsense peddled by the Orthodox Church.

The upshot of this cultural encounter was that vampires – both the possibility and the impossibility of them – became what Groom calls “the stuff of thought”, implicated in every aspect of medical, technological and even theological life. Inoculation against smallpox now became a source of terror: someone knew someone who knew a boy from Peckham who had received the usual prophylactic dose of cowpox and started chewing the cud. Grafting teeth from the dead to the living – a rudimentary form of dental implant dating from the days of Henry VIII – was now a perilous activity, in the course of which you were likely to end up with venereal disease from your donor. Even the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches found the vampire provided food for thought thanks to the way it echoed the rite of holy communion, during which the congregation lined up to drink Christ’s blood.

The Vampire: A New History by Nick Groom review – an undead family tree. By Kathryn Hughes. The Guardian , October 27 2018.

Two hundred years before vampires found their way into novels – most famously Dracula – they were featured in medical journals as a blood-sucking phenomena that rose from the dead to drain the blood of the living. Dr Nick Groom, Professor of English at the University of Exeter who has been dubbed the ‘Prof of Goth’, has found evidence that Bram Stoker and other early Gothic authors would have been aware of medical descriptions of vampire activity in Eastern Europe dating back to the 17th century.

In research to be published by Cambridge University Press as part of a new project on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Prof. Groom records how by the 18th century physicians were investigating reports of undead monsters who gorged themselves on blood. These incidents led to bodies being dug up, decapitated, staked through the heart, and cremated. He says that passages in Dracula – the late-19th-century Gothic horror novel about a Transylvanian vampire who comes to Britain in search of fresh blood - mirror medical descriptions of how ‘real-life’ vampires are recorded to have behaved. Dracula’s female vampire, for example, makes the same “churning” sound with her tongue as is described in academic medical treatises about the behaviour of the undead. Stoker, in turn, incorporated cutting-edge 19th-century medical research such as blood transfusion technology into his own novel. Sightings of vampires had been reported in journals and gazettes in Poland and Russia as early as the 1690s. The creatures were supposed to have sucked the blood of humans and animals, and, engorged, blood would flow from their eyeballs, pores, and other orifices. Once dug up, their coffins were said to have been swimming in gore. As a protection, local people advised making bread from this very blood against “contracting vampirism.”

Physicians in the 1730s recorded the physical symptoms of vampire attacks, from shivering and nausea to spasms, nightmares, and death. The vampirism epidemic led to 17 articles in 1732 in professional journals, followed by 22 learned treaties over the next three years published in European centres of learning. By that time the London press had reported that in Hungary there were “dead bodies sucking….the blood of the living, for the latter visibly dry up, while the former are fill’d with Blood.” Professor Groom, author of The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), is comprehensively mapping the vampire’s pre-history as part of a research project examining the emergence of Gothic literature from early medicine, theology, politics, and criminal law.

According to his research, Stoker and other literary figures who first wrote about vampires drew from medical reports. Indeed, the first vampire novel in English, The Vampyre, was written by the physician Dr John Polidori and was published in 1819. He believes Stoker, who published Dracula in 1897, would have been aware of much earlier accounts of vampirism as both a “genuine disease” and also a “mass delusion of peripheral and backward communities” in Eastern Europe. These reports include accounts of a rampant plague in Serbia where the dead were rising from their graves to prey on the living, who in turn became vampires. Medics writing from 1679 also wrote Latin treatises about “grave eating” where the undead were dug up to find they had been eating their own shrouds and even feasting on their own limbs and bowels.

By 1751 the vampire had “become mordantly fashionable”, according to Professor Groom, with the Earl of Sandwich naming a bay gelding racehorse “Vampire”. The image of the blood-sucker was also quickly adopted by political commentators: tax revenue was represented as a way to gratify the “fat gutted vampire” that was the government. Vampires were also a major topic of debate among philosophers and theologians, and even influenced legal thinking.  By the second half of the 18th century the vampire was appearing in English and German literature, subsequently inspiring poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats. Meanwhile, Mary Shelley alludes to the monster in her anatomical novel Frankenstein as “my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.” Since then it has become an abiding image of the vengeful dead. Professor Groom said: “For many years vampirism was a serious subject of research: on the one hand it was a terrifying medical disorder, on the other a mass delusion fostered by wretched social conditions. As its popularity rapidly spread across Europe, the image of the vampire changed the way that people thought about political power, theology and philosophy, and legal testimony – as well as supernatural literature.”

Dracula was based on medical reports of ‘real’ vampires. University of Exeter ,  October 31 ,  2016

It is nearly 200 years since this Romantic/Byronic archetype for a vampire emerged – but what do we know about English belief in vampires outside of fiction? New research at the University of Hertfordshire has uncovered and reappraised a number of vampire myths – and they are not all confined to the realms of fiction.

The Croglin Vampire reputedly first appeared in Cumberland to a Miss Fisher in the 1750s. Its story is retold by Dr Augustus Hare, a clergyman, in his Memorials of a Quiet Life in 1871. According to this legend, the vampire scratches at the window before disappearing into an ancient vault. The vault is later discovered to be full of coffins that have been broken open and their contents, horribly mangled and distorted, are scattered over the floor. One coffin only remains intact, but the lid has been loosened. There, shrivelled and mummified – but quite intact – lies the Croglin Vampire.

Elsewhere in Cumbria, the natives of Renwick, were once known as “bats” due to the monstrous creature that is said to have flown out of the foundations of a rebuilt church there in 1733. The existence of vampire bats, which sucked blood wouldn’t be confirmed until 1832, when Charles Darwin sketched one feeding off a horse on his voyage to South America in The Beagle. The creature in Renwick has been referred to as a “cockatrice” – a mythical creature with a serpent’s head and tail and the feet and wings of a cockerel – by Cumbrian County History. But it’s the myth of the vampire bat that has prevailed in the surrounding villages and is recorded in conversations in local archives and journals

What picture emerges then in this history of the English vampire? The Croglin Vampire has never been verified – but it has an afterlife in the 20th century, appearing as The British Vampire in 1977 in an anthology of horror by Daniel Farson, who turns out to be Stoker’s great-grandnephew.

But there is one case that has no connection to fiction, the little-known Buckinghamshire Vampire, recorded by William of Newburgh in the 12th century. Historical records show that St Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln, was called upon to deal with the terrifying revenant and learned to his astonishment, after contacting other theologians, that similar attacks had happened elsewhere in England.

St Hugh was told that no peace would be had until the corpse was dug up and burned, but it was decided that an absolution – a declaration of forgiveness, by the church, absolving one from sin – would be a more seemly way to disable the vampire. When the tomb was opened the body was found to have not decomposed. The absolution was laid inside on the corpse’s chest by the Archdeacon and the vampire was never again seen wandering from his grave.

The Buckinghamshire revenant did not have a “vampire” burial – but such practices are evidence of a longstanding belief in vampires in Britain. Astonishingly, the medieval remains of the what are thought to be the first English vampires have been found in the Yorkshire village of Wharram Percy. The bones of over 100 “vampire” corpses have now been uncovered buried deep in village pits. The bones were excavated more than half a century ago and date back to before the 14th century. They were at first thought to be the result of cannibalism during a famine or a massacre in the village but on further inspection in 2017 the burned and broken skeletons were linked instead to deliberate mutilations perpetrated to prevent the dead returning to harm the living – beliefs common in folklore at the time.

The inhabitants of Wharram Percy showed widespread belief in the undead returning as revenants or reanimated corpses and so fought back against the risk of vampire attacks by deliberately mutilating their own dead, burning bones and dismembering corpses, including those of women, children and teenagers, in an attempt to stave off what they believed could be a plague of vampires. This once flourishing village was completely deserted in the aftermath.

Just recently at an ancient Roman site in Italy the severed skull of a ten-year-old child was discovered with a large rock inserted in the mouth to prevent biting and bloodsucking. Then skull belongs to a suspected 15th-century revenant which they are calling locally the “Vampire of Lugano”.

There has been a wealth of other stories from the UK and other parts of Western Europe – but, despite this, thanks to the Dracula legend, most people still assume such practises and beliefs belong to remote parts of Eastern Europe. But our research is continuing to examine “vampire burials” in the UK and is making connections to local myths and their legacy in English literature, many years before the Byronic fiend Count Dracula arrived in Yorkshire carrying his own supply of Transylvanian soil.

Older than Dracula: in search of the English vampire.  By Sam George. The Conversation , October 25 , 2018.

Why Pickup Artists Are Reading Ovid

The “Red Pill” community online frequently appropriates ancient classic literature as justification for their beliefs.

In 2013, the pickup-artist blog Chateau Heartiste—a resource for the sexually frustrated heterosexual man looking to learn how to seduce women—published a list of “Recommended Great Books For Aspiring Womanizers.” Compiled by the site’s main author, known online as Roissy, the list kicked off with the ancient seduction manual Ars Amatoria, or The Art of Love, written in A.D. 2 by the Roman poet Ovid.

Ovid is considered by some within pickup-artist circles to be a founding father of pickup artistry; the famed pickup artist Neil Strauss also names Ovid in his 2005 memoir The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists as a towering figure in the art of woman seducing. The Ars Amatoria instructs readers that they don’t need to be exceptionally handsome to be successful with women, but being well groomed, wearing clothes that fit, and generally behaving in charming ways can be helpful; it also contains passages that would seem to endorse ignoring women’s subtle hints that they don’t want to be approached and kissing and touching women without an invitation (even when they’re resisting). It also instructs the man who’s been rebuffed to “press on and eventually you’ll get what you want,” and perhaps most troubling to scholars—and held most dear by some pickup artists—is Ovid’s quip that “what [women] like to give, they love to be robbed of.”

This kind of thing doesn’t sit well with Donna Zuckerberg, who got her doctorate in classics at Princeton and is the founder and editor in chief of Eidolon, an online classics magazine; for one thing, it’s an oversimplified reading of Ovid, and for another, that oversimplified reading of Ovid is being used as inspiration for frequently unethical behavior toward women. As Zuckerberg argues, Ovid’s didactic writings on seduction were likely meant to be read as parodies of the didactic poetry genre, which more often instructed readers on less frivolous topics like agriculture or ethics, and not as actual instruction manuals.

But it’s not just pickup artists who appropriate the great texts of classical literature to justify their own beliefs. Zuckerberg (the younger sister of the Facebook CEO Mark) characterizes the “Red Pill” online community as the corner of the internet dominated by men’s-rights activists, the alt-right, pickup artists, and the sex-eschewing communities known as Men Going Their Own Way. According to Zuckerberg, virtually all these subgroups appropriate classical literature for their own purposes.

Zuckerberg first began spending time in Red Pill communities online when she noticed a 2015 Eidolon article titled “Why Is Stoicism Having a Cultural Moment?” getting unusually heavy traffic after it was posted on Reddit. “As I scrolled down the comment thread, something caught my eye: a comment attributing Stoicism’s resurgent popularity to the Red Pill community,” she wrote in a blog post this week. After that, she spent the next few years getting intensely familiar with the Red Pill community, and her book Not All Dead White Men, an exploration of this appropriation phenomenon and why sometimes these texts don’t quite mean what the appropriators think they mean, is out this week.

I spoke with Zuckerberg  about the rise of the Red Pill community, the long-held fear of false rape accusations, and pickup artists’ oversimplified understanding of Ovid. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Ashley Fetters: How did you first stumble across this whole phenomenon—men in the Red Pill sections of the internet appropriating the classics for their own purposes?

Donna Zuckerberg: The first time I discovered it was actually in The Atlantic! It was an interview with Neil Strauss, when his follow-up to The Game came out—The Truth. The interviewer asked him something like, did he still stand by the seduction advice that was in The Game, if not the mind-set behind it? He said he thought the advice that he gave was still essentially sound, and then he said what works has always been the same, from Ovid to the present day.

I had already been thinking about Ovid and pickup artists, but from a comparative perspective: How did these two similar-looking things compare to each other across the ages? And that was my first glimpse into the fact that pickup artists might actually be reading Ovid and thinking about what Ovid meant to them.

Fetters: As a classicist, how did you feel discovering these guys were reading Ovid in that way?

Zuckerberg: It was such a disturbing stew of feelings. On the one hand, I already felt on some level like the Ars Amatoria was a pretty disturbing text. So seeing people with ideas that I found disturbing reading it, that part wasn’t really a surprise. But some of the texts that they were interested in [in other subsections of the Red Pill community], I had a feeling of grief. Like, am I ever going to be able to just enjoy reading this text again, knowing how much white supremacists love to talk about it?

Fetters: What were the other texts or authors that you felt that kind of grief over, after seeing that they were popular on Red Pill sites?

Zuckerberg: Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. I’ve seen it used so many times by Red Pill men that now whenever I hear somebody quote Meditations, I feel a slight thrill of apprehension: Is this person secretly a Red Pill person? Which is sad, because it’s a fantastic text, really a model of healthy introspection in a lot of ways.

Fetters: One thing I was shocked to learn from the book was how pickup artists claim Ovid as one of their own, as this prototypical pickup artist. That’s … something of a mischaracterization of Ovid, right?

Zuckerberg: Yeah. The most obvious differences between Ovid and pickup artists have to do with the social position of the reader and the social position of the putative “target.” The audience of a pickup-artist manual is pretty well understood within the community: awkward guys who are completely lacking in confidence when it comes to how to interact with the other sex and who need a set of protocols to follow. That person already feels marginalized by society; they already feel that there are a lot of people who just seem to know this stuff automatically, and that there are people who might be more attractive than they are, or more professionally successful or whatever, who will have an easier time picking up women. And they might have some resentment toward those people.

I don’t think that that was an audience that Ovid was writing for. Ovid is writing for a sophisticated literary audience, and a very elite audience. Extremely educated, probably extremely wealthy—books in that time were somewhat difficult to come by. They were possibly  reading the text at face value as a seduction manual, but also reading it as a literary text that is participating in several different genres at the same time. The Ars Amatoria is sort of mocking the form of didactic poetry, and there are also a lot of tropes from comedy in there. The young man who’s hopelessly in love with a meretrix, or an expensive sex worker—that trope is common in Roman comedy. There are places in the text where it almost seems like he’s writing a manual on how to be this kind of sitcom character. So it’s extremely literary in that way, and I don’t think you see pickup-artist texts working on all those levels in the same way. There’s an underlying sense in pickup-artist manuals that they are validating the reader’s fear that he is being sidelined in our society. Ovid’s text does the opposite: It assumes the reader is, if not on top of the world, very close to it.

And one of the fundamental assumptions of most pickup-artist texts is that the woman who you are attracted to has a lot of power over you, by virtue of that attraction. I think that the power dynamic in Ovid is a little different, because I don’t think that there’s ever any question in the reader’s mind that he is ultimately more powerful than the woman. [In Ovid’s time], he is the one with all of the social capital, and her financial well-being ultimately depends upon her desirability to men.

Fetters: You have a chapter on certain Red Pill groups’ fixation on false rape allegations and the pervasive belief, in that sphere, that women knowingly make false rape allegations quite often. I read it during the Kavanaugh hearing, and it felt really relevant.

Zuckerberg: That chapter was the hardest to write in a lot of ways; it’s just become more and more relevant over the past few years in a way that has been really disheartening. It’s so easy for patriarchy to wield this idea—that women make false rape accusations to ruin men—as a way of insinuating that women are too powerful. That the balance of power in society has tipped in women’s favor, that #MeToo has gone too far.

In reality, you see these fears about false allegations happening in societies that almost could not be more patriarchal. In classical Athens [as depicted in Greek historical myths like the Hippolytus myth, which involves a false rape allegation made by the female character Phaedra], women really had no legal existence; they were supposed to be neither seen nor heard in public, ideally. If that was the ideal woman in their society, and these men were still afraid that false rape allegations are going to ruin their lives, then it can’t be really about fear that women are too powerful. Even though that’s sort of how they always get framed.

Why Pickup Artists Are Reading Ovid. By Ashley Fetters.  The Atlantic , October 10, 2018

The works of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Greek poet Hesiod, and the Roman poet Ovid are examples of great classic Western literature—and popular references within the red pill community. Men who believe society is oppressed by women frequently turn to the Western classics to validate their misogyny and, as Donna Zuckerberg explores in her newly published book Not All Dead White Men, they have plenty of texts to choose from.

Aristotle believed that slavery is natural and women are inherently inferior; Semonides’ poem “Women” claimed there are 10 types of women, each of which can be compared to an animal (only one of which, the bee, is decent); and in Ars Amatoria (“The Art of Love”), Ovid writes, “If she refuse to be kissed, kiss her all the same. She may struggle to being with… but if she fights, ‘twill be a losing battle.”

The red pill community’s attempts to co-opt the classics is motivated, at least in part, by a desire to confer the movement with legitimacy as the modern-day equivalents of these ancient Greek and Roman writers. In so doing, they also demonstrate various virulently sexist elements of the classics that, to date, have all too often been dismissed as unfortunate reflections of a two-millennia-old culture, rather than a serious shortcoming that should be addressed.

Zuckerberg’s book analyzes how different factions of the “red pill,” as members of the community refer to themselves, gravitate towards different texts. “Pickup Artists,” for example, consider Ovid to be a founding father of their theories of seduction. “Men Going Their Own Way“ (men who say they’d like to live entirely apart from women), are fans of the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod, who wrote that Zeus made women “as an evil for mortal men, a troublesome partner.”

Zuckerberg, who earned a PhD in classics from Princeton University and is the founder and editor in chief of the online classics literary magazine Eidolon, shows that red pill members often explicitly associate themselves with ancient thinkers. One redditor, she notes, wrote in /r/theredpill in 2016: “I am a classicist by training, Phd the whole nine yards. The Greeks and Romans were red pill in the extreme.”

In some ways, Zuckerberg says it’s no surprise that these men are drawn to the classics. “To a certain extent, I think everyone is drawn to these works,” she says. A predominant red pill belief is that “western civilization is the greatest ever construct of power and culture,” she says, and these texts reflect the origins of western civilization. “They [the red pill] can mine them for clues about what it was that made western civilization so great and so effective. That is their primary goal,” says Zuckerberg.

There’s no doubt that many ancient Greek and Roman texts express highly misogynistic viewpoints, and Zuckerberg says seeing the red pill community’s enthusiasm for them made her reassess for own reading of the works. She used to tell herself that these writers lived more than 2,000 years ago, and “we can’t judge them by their own cultural mores.” That no longer seems quite so convincing. “It’s easy for classicists to insist on the otherness, the foreignness of ancient Greeks and Romans, how different they were from us,” she says. “With the red pill, you see those boundaries dissolve, and an insistence on how much like us they are.”

Still, that’s not to say that members of the red pill are reading these texts correctly, or that ancient literature is nothing but misogynistic rants. Ovid’s works, for example, were likely written as parody of the didactic poetry genre of his time, and not meant to be read as a straightforward instruction manual. Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata, which describes women who go on a sex strike to force the men of their lands to stop fighting the Peloponnesian War, is read by both feminists as an example of collective feminist action, and red pill men as a example of women denying men sex as power play, says Zuckerburg. And many of the Stoics explicitly espoused egalitarian views, but the red pill embraces the philosophy as a way to excuse a lack of compassion for others. After all, the Stoics claimed that the most rational should not show compassion for those who are ruled by their emotions. The red pill, says Zuckerburg, believes in a strong dichotomy: they are rational, and everyone else is emotional, and therefore inferior—and they apply this same divide to men versus women.

Red pill readers have adeptly found and in many cases coopted the sexism that proliferated in ancient societies, and classics scholars must reckon with that reality. “Classical scholars must accept that, in the 21st century, some of the most controversial and consequential discussions about the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome are happening…on the internet,” writes Zuckerberg in the conclusion of her book. Scholars must address the sexism in ancient writing that makes them so appealing to the red pill, while also highlighting the nuances and more egalitarian thinking that elevate these texts above straightforward misogyny. Classics readers deserve a discussion about the ancient world that is “neither uncritically admiring nor rashly dismissive,” writes Zuckerberg in her conclusion. In other words, we need to acknowledge the misogyny in the classics, but we needn’t pass them off as red pill terrain entirely.

Red pill misogynists see themselves as heirs to Greek and Roman philosophy. By Olivia Goldhill .  Quartz , October 25, 2018

Lily Rothman :

It was interesting to prepare for this interview while watching the Kavanaugh hearings; I was reminded of your discussion of how different people get different things out of the Phaedra story. This one story — of an Athenian queen who falls for her stepson and, when he rejects her, tells her husband that he raped her — is read by some people as a warning about false rape allegations, and by others as a warning about the consequences of patriarchy. Did your research come to mind as you were watching the news?

Donna Zuckerberg :

Actually what struck me the most was what Christine Blasey Ford said about the two of them laughing, that they were laughing with each other. That reminded me of the research I’d done for my pickup-artists chapter about how the relationship between the two men becomes almost more important than whatever is happening between the man and the sexual object. That was what struck me the most. But yeah, a few friends who had also looked at the book told me that they felt that the Phaedra chapter felt really resonant to them as well, this idea that what it means for an allegation to be false is entirely determined by whoever’s in power.

Rothman :

What is it about Ancient Greece and Rome that make them so appealing as a source of authority for the ideas you write about?

Zuckerberg :

It’s not only Greece and Rome. [The people in the Red Pill community] are also interested in the Medieval period, various other historical periods, the Confederacy. But I think that Greece and Rome, for them, are really the origin of Western civilization. It becomes a coded phrase when they don’t want to talk about white identity [or] white history, because that brings with it all kinds of baggage. Instead they talk about Western civilization and it’s really a dog whistle.

Rothman :

You write that the Alt-Right has used “ancient Greece and Rome to fabricate a cohesive transhistorical ‘white’ identity and a continuity of ‘European’ or ‘Western’ civilization.” What’s a more accurate way to see the idea of a Western tradition?

Zuckerberg :

To a scholar of ancient Greece almost all the cultural contact was happening between Greece and people who were to the East and the South. I mean, it is absolutely the case that the texts and the cultural artifacts that were produced in ancient Greece and Rome, and other parts of the Mediterranean, become really important later on in Western European history. In a sense, you can think of ancient Greece and Rome as really important foundations for Western European literature and culture.

Rothman :

So, it’s not that there is no Western canon, it’s that it’s created in hindsight?

Zuckerberg :

Exactly. The narrative is never as neat and as teleological as we want it to be. It’s very much constructed at any moment in time, usually with an agenda in mind. When you talk about Greek literature being rediscovered in the Renaissance, which is a line that people use, Greek literature was never lost. People were talking about it all along, in what we call the Byzantine Empire. It’s just a different narrative.

Rothman :

They might stumble across something in a pickup artist forum that suggests reading Ovid. What would your advice be for a layperson to read these texts with a smart, critical eye?

Zuckerberg :

It depends on how much time they have! For example, if you read almost anything about Ovid that is written by somebody who has read a lot of Ovid, they will talk about how difficult Ovid is to pin down and his literariness and all those issues that make it much, much harder to say that Ovid “means” anything specifically. When pickup artists say things like, “Ovid shows that women have always been the same,” that implies a reading of Ovid that almost nobody who has studied Ovid would support.

Rothman :

Would it be fair to say that if you encounter somebody arguing that some ancient writer teaches us something simple, that’s probably not the whole story?

Zuckerberg :

That’s safe to say. And it’s not just Red Pill-types who are guilty of that. There’s always a “yeah but” and then a giant string of objections you can make to any simplistic reading. But I think that’s also why people don’t like talking to scholars about these kinds of issues, because it’s so hard to get us to say anything really definitive.

Rothman :

You also discuss in the book that the same texts — namely, Ovid’s Metamorphoses — have been the subject of controversy over whether they might benefit from content warnings for descriptions of rape. Do you have any advice for people reading such texts that they might find problematic?

Zuckerberg :

Find the best translation you can and really read the introduction before you start. My personal experience with content warnings and trigger warnings is not typically that people do not want to engage with the material. It’s that they want to be prepared. They want to know what they’re dealing with. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for coming to a text without some scholar’s ideas and arguments, coming to it with fresh eyes. So there’s a trade-off implied there.

Rothman :

Was there anything you found in your research that really surprised you?

Zuckerberg :

Some of the texts that they deal with are really quite obscure. [It’s] not to classicists, but Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, for example — that’s not something your average layperson will have heard of. How wide-ranging they’re willing to be within the corpus of ancient literature to look for ideas that will support their views, that really surprised me.

Rothman :

What did you make of that?

Zuckerberg :

It seems that there’s kind of a weird sort of macho performance of erudition where you would then see in the comments section tons of people saying, “I’ve never heard of this text before, this is so fascinating,” but you’d also see a few people showing off that they knew what the writer was talking about — and sometimes getting things really wrong, which to me was funny.

I remember seeing an article on Marcus Aurelius and somebody was saying in the comments, “If you really want to be a pimp,” — which I think is the word he used — “you should read it in the original Latin.” Marcus Aurelius originally wrote in Greek. So… yeah.

Why Modern Misogynists Love Ancient History, and What They Get Wrong About It, According to an Expert. By  Lily Rothman. Time , October  9, 2018.

On Ovid and reading Ovid now,  this is of interest :

Ovid experienced a world of chaos and iron firsthand when, in AD 8, he was banished by Augustus. His wrongdoings were, in his own words, carmen et error (“a poem and a mistake”).

 The poem was the Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), a three-volume lovers’ handbook that explains the dos and don’ts of personal grooming, how to organise trysts with married women (get her maid “on side”), repairing a broken heart (surprise your “ex” while she’s in the middle of her beauty routine – yuk!), names the best places for “hooking-up” (try the races or the theatre), and offers advice on keeping your girl (be attentive when she’s unwell). Interestingly, the third volume was written for women – quite a revolutionary move in view of the gender inequality in the twilight years of the 1st century BC.

What irritated Augustus sufficiently enough to relegate the poet to the middle of nowhere was his perception that the Ars Amatoria made a mockery of his moral reforms. Not one for frolic, Augustus had spearheaded and implemented a series of legislative campaigns that raised the moral bar for the goodly citizens of Rome. Adultery, while always illegal in Rome, was made especially so under the watchful eye of the emperor and legal ramifications were more actively enforced than in previous decades.

The mistake that Ovid mentions is more difficult to identify – with scholarly opinions differing on what it was Ovid actually did to offend Augustus. Theories range from Ovid engaging in an affair with one of the imperial women – perhaps Augustus’ daughter (Julia the Elder) or granddaughter (Julia the Younger) – to his accidentally witnessing an imperial scandal.

Whatever the error, combined with the ill-themed Ars Amatoria, it was sufficiently serious to result in Ovid’s banishment to Tomis (Constanța in modern-day Romania). Tomis, at the very edges of the Roman Empire, was regarded as a barbaric, frightening and uncivilised place. Ovid certainly painted it this way in his poetic epistles, the Tristia (Sorrows) and Epistulae Ex Ponto (Letters from the Pontus).

 Forced to exist in a place where his native Latin was scarcely heard, Ovid’s despair is evoked in one of his most memorable couplets: “writing a poem you can read to no one / is like dancing in the dark.”

For the optimal punishment of Ovid, Augustus chose his location well, and he never reneged on his decision. Nor did his successor, Tiberius (42 BC-AD 37). Ovid died in Tomis in AD 17.

 In one of the definitive pieces of scholarship on the Metamorphoses, Reading Ovid’s Rapes (1992) by classicist Amy Richlin, it is argued that the epic was completed during Ovid’s time in Tomis. This may not initially appear to have any bearing on its content or intent, yet Richlin suggests a profound relevance:

 The silenced victims, the artists horribly punished by legalistic gods for bold expression … read like allegories of Ovid’s experience …

Accordingly, Tomis not only gave Ovid time to augment the poem in view of his own experiences but, equally as important, its composition was being finalised during the emperor’s inquisition into the carmen et error.

Indeed, Ovid’s own silencing by Augustus may be seen to be enacted over and over again in the Metamorphoses in the most grotesque of ways. Ovid’s tales describe tongues being wrenched out, humans barking out their sorrows instead of crying, women transformed into mute creatures by jealous gods, and desperate victims bearing witness to their abuse through non-verbal means.

The Metamorphoses is an epic about the act of silencing. Jealousy, spite, lust and punishment are also consistently present in Ovid’s chaotic world. So is rape.

Rape is undoubtedly the most controversial and confronting theme of the Metamorphoses. It is the ultimate manifestation of male power in the poem and the hundreds of transformations that occur are often the means of escaping it.

 An early tale of attempted rape is narrated in Book I, involving the nymph, Daphne and the god, Apollo. Intent on raping Daphne, Apollo chases her through the forest until, utterly exhausted, she calls out to her father, the river god Peneus to rescue her:

“Help, father!” she called. “If your streams have divine powers!

 Destroy the shape, which pleases too well, with transformation!

Peneus answers his daughter’s entreaty, and Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree:

… a heavy torpor seizes her limbs,

 her soft breasts are encircled with thin bark,

 her hair changes into leaves, her arms change into branches,

 her feet once so swift become stuck with stubborn roots,

 her face has a leafy cover; only her elegance remains.

The tale of Daphne and Apollo, like so many stories in the Metamorphoses, is classified as an aetiological myth; that is, a narrative that explains an origin. But, as the excerpt above testifies, it is so much more than that.

Where does a modern audience begin with a story such as Daphne and Apollo? How do we begin to unravel the hundreds of other such tales that follow it?

During the last few years, the Metamorphoses has been challenged as a legitimate text for tertiary Humanities students. Defying the hundreds of years of pedagogical tradition that has seen the poem set for both Latin students and, more recently, literary students who study it in translation, the Metamorphoses has not only been interrogated by scholars such as Richlin, but has also been the subject of increased student complaints and calls for trigger-warnings.

In response to the growing number of objections to the work, academic and university executives have been called on to take a position – not only in relation to the Metamorphoses, but in response to other materials that are perceived to render the tertiary experience unsafe.

The Chancellor at Oxford, Chris Patten, has been quoted as saying that history cannot be rewritten to suit contemporary western morals. At the opposite end of this debate, are students such as the members of Columbia University’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Council, who have challenged the inclusion of the Metamorphoses without an explicit trigger-warning in one of the core curriculum courses in the Humanities.

 How close such responses to the Metamorphoses verge on literary censorship or, in the words of one journalist, Literature Fascism, does not only depend on one’s philosophical or educational viewpoint. Equally as important to the debate, and the decisions that may ultimately result from it, is the life-experience of every individual in the classroom. Amid a class of students taking notes from a lecture on the Metamorphoses, for example, may be a rape survivor.

Current statistics from the United States in particular suggest that the likelihood of this is exceptionally high. Emerging statistics from across Australia are painting a similar picture.

 Such a situation requires alertness and sensitivity when handling texts such as the Metamorphoses. But should the work of Ovid be banned or placed among the shelves marked "Warning: Wicked Books”? What would such measures ultimately achieve? Would it augment safe spaces? Or, would it censor discussions around rape and shut down interrogations of sex, violence and female exploitation? Would it silence one of the means of opposition to the societal sickness of rape?

The Metamorphoses of Ovid has had a long and fascinating history. Its presence among the literary canon of the West has functioned as a strange but valuable mirror that has, for over two millennia, reflected social, moral and artistic customs.

 From the time that Shakespeare read Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation and incorporated so many of the stories into his plays, to the thousands of artworks that have been inspired by the poem, to Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright’s 2006 extravaganza, The Lost Echo, to the production in the 2016 Sydney Fringe, to the student protests and the calls for trigger-warnings, the Metamorphoses – much like Ovid himself – simply refuses to go away.

Much like the self-portrait by Albrecht Durer, Olympia by Edouard Manet, the works of modernist painters that enraged European Fascists, Tracey Emin’s My Bed, the installations at MONA, Joyce’s Ulysses, and a host of films and photomedia, Ovid’s Metamorphoses testifies to the fact that great art is not necessarily created to please.

Guide to the classics: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and reading rape. By Marguerite Johnson. TheConversation , September 13, 2016.

Fuseli : Drama and Theatre

Thirteen years after the last major presentation of his work in Switzerland, at the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Kunstmuseum Basel mounts a comprehensive monographic exhibition of the work of Henry Fuseli, a native son of Zurich who rose to fame in Rome and London. One of the most inventive and unconventional innovators in late-eighteenth-century art, Fuseli stood on the threshold between classicism and nascent Romanticism. His oeuvre bears eloquent witness to the competing artistic paradigms in the waning decades of the Age of Enlightenment.

Fuseli styled himself as a painter of Dark Romanticism and «Gothic horror», and that aspect of his oeuvre is still most familiar to audiences today. Shifting the focus, the exhibition demonstrates that drama and theater were no less vital to his artistic vision: the erudite artist’s creations almost invariably draw on literary motifs, quoting ancient mythology, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, or the recently rediscovered Nibelungen saga. After his return from Rome to London in 1779, Shakespeare’s plays become another major source of motifs in his art, as his contributions to John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery illustrate.

Drama and Theatre—the title captures the interest in the themes from literary and stage works chosen by Fuseli that animates the exhibition, but it also describes his dynamic compositions and constellations of characters and the «theatrical» devices that often enliven his depictions.

Like Fuseli’s art itself, Drama and Theater is hardly subtle. The artist’s seven paintings in the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, the municipal art collection of Basel, are complemented by works generously provided on loan by the Kunsthaus Zürich and other international museums and private collections.

Kunstmuseum Basel

Füssli, or Fuseli, according to whichever spelling he found made his name easier for the foreigners among whom he spent his life, was born in Zurich in 1741. He studied with Bodmer and, in this pre-Romantic circle, drank in Shakespeare and Milton. He started out as a poet, in the manner of Klopstock, and in 1761 was ordained a Lutheran minister. By this time he had already begun to draw, but only as a hobby. In 1763, after he had exposed a magistrate’s corruption without passing through the proper channels, he was advised to leave Zurich and went in the following year to England. He was twenty-three years old and thought of literature as his profession.

He went to Italy in 1770, at the advice of Reynolds, who upon seeing some of his drawings said that he had it in him to be the greatest painter of his time.

“Fuseli in Rome is something strange and wonderful,” Lavater wrote to Herder in 1773. “He is everything to an extreme, and always completely original; a painter of Shakespeare . . . Some day I’ll send you his letters, which are all fire and flames . . . He looks down on everything and everybody . . . He has devoured all the Greek, Latin, Italian and English poets. His look is lightning, his words are thunder; his wit spells death and his revenge, hell. No one can stand up to him. He cannot draw in a single breath of common air.”

In other words, this short little man with the leonine head was a sort of Stürmer and Dränger whose motto was: “Darkness be thou my light!” In comparing him with the young Goethe, Lavater went so far as to say that although Goethe was more of a man, Fuseli was a greater poet.

The acquaintance of these two was not to last long. Although Goethe at first admired Fuseli’s sketches and acquired a great number of them, he later judged him an eccentric who had made himself into his own parody. And Fuseli, because he could not bear to be overshadowed and to admit the preponderance of Goethe, separated himself from the Romantic movement. He spent the years 1770 to 1778 in Italy, most of them in Rome, where his artistic experience may be summed up in two works: the Sistine Chapel and the colossal horses atop the Quirinal. He was completely carried away by Michelangelo, and proclaimed him greater than the Almighty.

From his return to London in 1779 to his death in 1825, Fuseli led an uneventful life, with the climax of his success coming around 1795. He was made an Academician and professor of painting, and in 1804 Keeper of the Royal Academy. In his Romantic period he had written to Lavater that he expected to die young, but later it seemed to him that his life was unending. (“My spirit will never lose the fire of eternal youth.”) He’d believed in immortality because an earthly life was not long enough to exhaust the energy and gifts with which God had endowed him.

As an expatriate from his own land and always a foreigner, with an elusive double name, in the land of his adoption, Fuseli was quickly forgotten. In England, William Blake, who had a temperament akin to his and was somewhat of a pupil, handed down a reputation for greater originality. And he received neither recognition nor honor in Switzerland until the first exhibition of his work in Zurich in 1926, which marked the beginning of a vogue whose repercussions are still felt today. Because his most impressive subject (one which won fame as soon as it appeared in 1782 and retained it even during the years he was forgotten) is titled Nightmare, and he is quoted as having said “One of the most unexplored realms of art is the realm of dreams,” a generation which has grown up on Freud has claimed for its own. Likewise, because his anatomy was influenced by Michelangelo and by the brutal gestures which he saw in the London performances of Shakespeare’s plays, the Expressionists hail him as their ancestor, in which they are quite right, for his heroes have something of the titanism of the Superman about them. And the Surrealists have an equally good case, for the violent action of his stories, inspired by Nordic or Homeric myths and the supernatural elements of Milton, seems to take place in an abstract, cataclysmic, magical world, and his heroes and heroines deck themselves out in bizarre clothes, with towering headdresses that seem to be beetle sheathes or sea anemones. (Fuseli had a fetish for styles of combing the hair). Probably the Existentialists, too, are intrigued by the intensity of the passions with which he endows his diabolical creatures.

 Biographers suspect that there was a mystery in Fuseli’s life, one which they guess at through some of his drawings which are not suitable for publication. “There was Evil in him,” says Haydon, and even without penetrating it completely, we can see eloquent signs in the violence, cruelty and extravagance of some of his work. The painter of nightmares is obviously a contemporary not only of the painter of the Caprichos but also of the writers of the “black novels” and the Marquis de Sade, with their world of tyranny and fatality, of prisons and figures outside the law, all reflecting a state of things which led up to the French Revolution and impinges upon the world of today, with its iron curtains, atom bombs and nightmare of uncertainty and destruction. Of course Fuseli is too theatrical to attain the tragic depth of Goya, although this theatrical quality is not static, like David’s tableaux vivants, just as his violence is a far cry from the maniacal obscenity of the Marquis de Sade and, indeed, is limited to an emotional and watered-down imitation of Michelangelo.

When Wordsworth heard Haydon quote Canova’s opinion that Fuseli had more flame and Raphael more fire, he said: “There’s one other thing, and that’s smoke, of which Fuseli has a superabundance.” He was magniloquent in the manner of Piranesi and the best way to describe his characters is as men fit to inhabit Piranesi’s Prisons. For these men are galvanized robots, they have something of the nature of insects, the only small creatures which he admired (he was totally indifferent to flowers). His heroes incline to be posed and draped; there is a remnant of Classicism about them, which in Blake is even more persistent.

In theory, Fuseli was a Neo-Classicist. (I must refer here to the excellent anthology of his writings, The Mind of Henry Fuseli, by Eudo C. Mason.) True, he gloried in the appellation of “painter ordinary to the Devil” (“Yes, more than once he has posed for me,” he declared); his favorite color was a sickly green like that of mildewed brass; he drew with the dark, bony hand, like a bat’s wing, of which he has left us a likeness; he held that art was the product of cultured depravity, of knowledge rather than vision, and delighted in portraying satanic women. (In a striking story from his Memoirs of Hecate Country, Edmund Wilson lends a female devil the features of an equivocal matron of Fuseli). But in spite of this, he burnt incense at the altars of the Venus de Milo and the Belvedere Apollo; he said that art should have an impersonal and universal aim and that single shapes and forms are only degenerations of a perfect archetype; he criticized the gaunt and awkward deformation practiced by Rembrandt, and held out for historical paintings rather than portraits. All of which he contradicted not only in his own works, which bear witness to an individuality eccentric to the point of idiosyncrasy, but also in many of his aphorisms, where we read that the essence of art lies not in ideal beauty but in expression and spirt, where he deplores the fact that Michelangelo has cut himself off from the variety and modesty of nature and urges every artist to bury himself in the crowd for inspiration (as did Rembrandt).

At the confluence of two rivers, Classicism and Romanticism, there is a curious eddy of waves; call them Fuseli, Blake or what you will. Transitional figures, say the art historians, Mannerists (although Fuseli condemned Mannerism completely), whose twisted, snakelike creatures, like waves, seem to be shaped by two contrary currents and by an interplay of forces which affect these two artists, apparently so individual, just as much if not more than the others.

Painter ordinary to the devil.  By Mario Praz.  ARTnews  ,  October 19, 2018

This essay was first published in January 1953 issue of ARTnews. Mario Praz was an Italian-born critic of art and literature, and a scholar of English literature. His best-known book, The Romantic Agony (1933), was a comprehensive survey of the erotic and morbid themes that characterized European authors of the late 18th and 19th centuries.

There are stories that are as old as mankind. For example, that of the emigrant who escapes the confines of his homeland and attains fame elsewhere. Likewise, there are currents in art that recur throughout its history. For example, mutual penetration and inspiration across genre boundaries. This is called crossover or interdisciplinarity in today's curatorial slang.

Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825) was not just a painter, but a universal scholar with a broad horizon. In his life and work, the two repetitions mentioned above come to bear: the fate of the emigrant and the penetration of different artistic genres.

The Kunstmuseum Basel is hosting an extensive exhibition of the world-famous Swiss artist. Around 70 works are presented in the museum's new building. They come from the museum's own collection, from the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or from Tate London. Curator Eva Reifert and her team take an enlightening look at Füssli. They show the painter not only as a black romantic and forerunner of the gothic horror. As such, he has immortalized himself in collective memory with scandalous images such as "The Nightmare”. The show in Basel shows him above all as a painter who draws his motifs from literature.

Johann Heinrich Füssli was born in Zurich in 1741. His father was the painter and writer Johann Kaspar Füssli. He introduces his son to literature and painting. After a comprehensive humanistic education and the study of theology, Johann Heinrich was twenty years old when he was ordained a Reformed pastor. However, he soon had to leave Zurich because he worked on a pamphlet against a bailiff. He came to London via Germany in 1765. He worked as a translator. On the advice of a friend, he began to paint and went to Rome, where he trained his craft for over ten years, especially by studying Michelangelo.  He remained in contact with London. In 1780 the self-taught artist caused a sensation with his painting "Satan Flees, Touched by Ithuriel's Spear", and two years later with his "The Nightmare" he caused a scandal.

The fact that Henry Fuseli, as London calls him, quickly becomes known is not only due to the painting skills of the autodidact. His knowledge of anatomy is rather average. The painter established himself as a worldly scholar who not only reads Shakespeare, but also Homer and Ovid in the original. He presents the heroes and heroines, the demons and spirits of antiquity and the Middle Ages to an astonished audience in a drama never seen before. Because of his fallen angels, death yearning virgins and lascivious fairies he is soon called "the wild Swiss".

With his spectacular large formats for "Macbeth", and "Hamlet" he got the nickname "Shakespeare der Leinwand". With his great cycle to "Paradise Lost" by John Milton he ruined himself financially. But his reputation was so strengthened that he was elected professor of the Royal Academy at the age of 58.

If Füssli had been born 200 years later, he would have made movies. His thing would not be British realism, but rather "Game of Thrones", "Lord of the Rings" or " The Shining". If Füssli had been interested in the reality in London at that time, he would have painted the first industrial workers in front of coal-black backdrops. Throughout his life, however, he was fascinated by the drama and fantasy of literary material. The exhibition in Basel is a wonderful example of how he was able to stage them both effectively and mysteriously. Thematically, it leads from room to room and from climax to climax. You don't have to be a literary connoisseur to enjoy these detailed pictures. Otherwise, audio guides or the extensive catalogue will help.

But the mass of the works also has a sobering effect: the technique and tricks of Füssli's drama become transparent. The pale, half-naked women with outstretched arms, the wide-open eyes, the pathos in every gesture. This is exactly where the video installation by theatre director Thom Lutz comes in. It is cleverly placed in the middle of the exhibition. In it, 15 actors and actresses from the Basler Ensemble recreate motifs and gestures from the exhibition, without historical costumes. This is refreshing,  the drama is let out of the air, because the comedy of Füssli's pathos shows itself, because a human being is once again brought back to human dimensions.

Johann Heinrich Füssli: Wie der  ‘wilde Schweizer‘ London eroberte. By Mathias Balzer. Luzerner Zeitung ,  October 20, 2018

When artist Henry Fuseli debuted his painting “The Nightmare” in 1781, it was a turning point for Romanticism in all that folkloric influence and high gothic drama was openly embraced. The unsettlingly sexual nature of the painting where a demon waits on the beautiful woman’s chest while a wild-eyed horse disturbs the scene through the curtain, of course helped in attracting attention. It ushered in the theatrical nightmare of art, and was so popular, that Fuseli created another three versions, as well as affordable prints. This made it the most popular painting of the day, and up to his final months he was working on yet another version of it. It even inspired a poem, that was once sold along with a print of the Fuseli, by Erasmus Darwin called “The Botanic Garden” that begins:

So on his Nightmare through the evening fog

 Flits the squab Fiend o’er fen, and lake, and bog;

 Seeks some love-wildered maid with sleep oppressed,

 Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.

—Such as of late amid the murky sky

 Was marked by Fuseli’s poetic eye,

 The Romantic arts had been embracing images of witchcraft, ghosts, and especially dreams, and they continued through the 1800s, although faded away with real horrors like war taking the place of the psychological.

While the vision of the woman tormented by the creatures of the night permeated for years through tributes and parodies, what’s not as well-known is that the original painting actually had a reverse. On the other side was a portrait of a woman named Anna Landholdt, with whom Fuseli was infatuated, but who turned down his proposals. This dashed love is probably more Fuseli’s real nightmare, just as the nightmares of our dreams are rarely demons or other monsters, but the nightmares of our consciousness and terror that is often indescribable or incomprehensible in the morning hours.

 When Nightmares in Art Were All the Horrifying Rage. By Allison Meier. Hyperallergic  , August 29, 2013

Nightmares, as we use the word today, are vivid, personal terrors whipped up by a person’s subconscious just for them—a giant snapping turtle, a car that starts backing away from home on its own, a rocket ship with two witches in the backseat eating a potato/voodoo doll that causes the front seat to disappear with every bite. But in centuries past a night “mare” was a very specific type of frightening nocturnal visitor, a spirit or demon that would sit on a person’s chest and suffocate them.

The root of the English word “nightmare” is the Old English maere. In Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, a mara was something known to sneak into people’s rooms at night, plop down on their bodies, and give them bad dreams. When the mare came to visit, the victim would feel a heavy weight—it might start at the feet, but it always settled on the chest—and lose the ability to move. Mares could be sent by sorceresses and witches: One Norwegian king died when his wife, tired of waiting for 10 years for him to come home, commissioned a mare attack. The conjured spirit started by crushing the king’s legs while his men tried to protect his head. But when they went to defend his legs, the mare pressed down on his head and killed him.

 This apparition roamed across Europe—it was a mahr in Germany, a marra in Denmark, a mare in French. The visions that the mare brought upon its victims were often called “mare rides”—martröð in Anglo-Saxon, mareridt in Danish, and mareritt in Norwegian, according to (now retired) folklore scholar D.L. Ashliman.

  

Ashliman collected accounts of mares from across Europe, as well as advice for how to get rid of them. People troubled by mares might want to place their shoes by the side of the bed and turn the laces towards the place where they plan to lie down. Mares snuck in through keyholes or knot holes, so plugging these openings could keep them away. Alternatively, you could enlist a friend, wait for the mare to appear, and then plug the hole to capture it. (Mares were thought to be female, and a few men in these folkloric accounts were able to trap a beautiful wife this way—but she always escaped when she rediscovered the place she’d come through.) If a mare was sitting on you, you could try putting your thumb in your hand to get it to leave, or you could promise it a gift, which it would come the next day to collect.

Today, it’s thought that the mare’s particular nastiness was a way to explain a type of sleep paralysis that, as historian Owen Davies writes in Folklore, affects perhaps 5 to 20 percent of people in their lifetime. Sleep paralysis happens at the edge of sleep, usually just before sleeping or just after waking. Sufferers can see and hear, without being able to move or speak. And some people who experience this state also report feeling a heavy pressure on their chests and a sensation of choking, and the sensation of a dark presence in the room.

“As a boy, I would experience a frightening sound, somewhere between white noise and insect buzzing, while feeling a dark presence in the room,” the writer Andrew Emery explains, in his account of sleep paralysis. In the worst case, he writes, “I’ll fight to regain consciousness and, having told myself I have done so, will still find that there’s some foul presence in my bedroom which then proceeds to punch me in the stomach. At this stage, my mind, which seconds ago knew it was experiencing sleep paralysis, is now convinced I’m the victim of a real-world demonic attack.”

There’s no precise treatment for sleep paralysis, nothing better than the superstitions and charms used by medieval people to keep away the mare and its attacks. The episodes are, Davies writes, “a moment when reality, hallucination, and belief fuse to form powerful fantasies of supernatural violation”—a truly terrifying experience, demonic or otherwise.

The Original ‘Nightmare’ Was a Demon That Sat on Your Chest and Suffocated You. By Sarah Laskow. Atlas Obscura ,  October 23, 2017