Pythagoras in America

e LE Yi — STRAW SS O : ATI Pythagoras in America C1 TO RENDER TO George Devereux homage to his measure, one would have 10 prove oneself at once ethnologist, Hellenist and psychoanalyst, to be able, like him, to do research simultaneously in these three disciplines and even to discover transitions and links between the three. This I shall not attempt to do but will content myself with presenting here some remarks on a problem which transcends my competence and which I do not pretend to solve; but it offers at least the advantage of being situated at the conjunction of the first two of these domains and, in the opinion of some, also of the third. ‘The problem concerns the special place which people — remote from each other in time and in space — assign to the seeds of this or that plant of the family Leguminosae, subfamily Papilionaceae, The recent studies of Marcel Detienne (1970; 1972, pp. 96-100, pp. 110-114) sum up the controversies to which, ever since antiquity, Pythagorean traditions have given rise, and of which his studies offer a brilliant interpretation. However, the ethnologist cannot but pay attention to the recurrence of the selfsame beliefs and rites not only in the ancient world and outside the school of Pythagoras, but also, in a more general way, in the Old World and, as | intend to show here, in the New. For the comparative ethnologist, the views propounded by the Pythagoreans on the subject of beans (broad beans, faba) thus represent a particular example of probably earlier ideas and practices, whose geographical distribution seems considerably greater

35 than an enquiry limited to the ancient world would suggest. Nor is souri, tell in their version of a myth which corresponds to the myth ol that all: for, even in the ancient world, beans were the object of dia- Orpheus and metrically opposed beliefs, America, that, after having torn his young wife from the world of the Eurydice and which is very widespread in North In Greece, not only the Pythagoreans but also Orphie traditions Eleusinian rites proscribed beans. According to various dead, the hero stopped at the place of a supernatural protectress, and the whom he had already visited on his outward journey, She gave him sources, foremast that of Phatarch, this prohibition was the rule tor red beans which, she said, he should cause the peaple of his village ta whoever wished to lead a life of purity, Outside Greece, according to eat, “so that they would receive power to communicate with the dead Herodotus, the Egyptian priests enjoined themselves neither to eat spirits”. According to a variant of this myth, these same red beans beans nor even to look at them; in Rome, the Plamen Dialis could would serve, on the contrary, for bewitching the living (Dorsey, 1906, neither eat this vegetable nor utter its name. On the other hand, still p. 413, p. 537). in the ancient world, there were also occasions on which the eating ol This episode brings to mind the Lemuria, as described by Ovid (V, beans was peremptorily prescribed. In Attica boiled beans were eaten 43611). during the feast called Pyanopsia; the Romans sacrified beans to through his house spitting them out behind him: “... various deities as well as to the dead during the Parentalia, the Feralia thought to gather the beans, and to follow unseen behind . . . and [he] Each paterfamilias, his mouth full of black beans, went the shade is and the Lemuria, According to Pliny (XVIII, xxx), they put beans — asks the shade to go out of his house.” Equally reminiscent of the as luck-bringers - amongst objects sold at public auctions. American rite is the Setsubun, a mobile feast celebrated in Japan just Thus, though the Pythagoreans execrated beans, in some cireumbefore the coming of spring: ‘Beans are scattered about the house on stances the opposite view prevailed. That the former atutude was, in the evening of this day in order to scare away demons.” (Chamberfact, the more frequent of the two is made evident by one of Pliny’s lain, 1905, p. 161.) Thus, be it in order to establish or to interrupt comments, Alter noung that the Pythagoreans forbade beans because communications with the beyond, the seeds of the Papilionaceae play a they served as an abode lor the souls of the deceased, he adds, “For role in the thought of very diverse peoples. One can even broaden the that reason... beans are employed in memorial sacrifices to dead paradigm if, beside the Papilionaceae, one makes a place also for plants relatives”, which explains why (he continues) “There is also a special religious sanctity attached to the bean; at all events it is the custom to _—-.-. of the family Fumariaceae, genus Dicentra, which the Onondaga Indians believed to be the food of the dead and called “ghost or spirit corn” bring home from the harvest a bean by way of an auspice, this being (Beauchamp, 1498, p. 199). The fruit of these wild plants, cousins of consequently called [the brought-back bean” the Bleeding Heart of our gardens, Dicentra spectabilis, is a longish pod ( referwa, refriva) The short survey just made shows that the Pythagorean prohifilled with seeds which, when ripe, splits open right down to its base, bition was but one aspect, amongst others, ol the attitude of the thus resembling the haricot bean. ancients towards beans. It is not possible to account lor this attitude Do the mythical views of American Indians help to understand the by looking only at its negative aspect. Il an interpretation is to seem role of intermediary between the living and the dead which these plausible, it would be necessary to find a single principle which would Indians assign at times to the bean and to fruits with a similar appearrender comprehensible why, according to the context, beans inspired ance? In America, the bean and the maize are often viewed as a sexed horror or respect; why eating them was now forbidden, now recommended; why, in a word, in one sense or another, beans had, in the N pair, but it so happens that, from one tribe to another, the sex ascribed respectively to each plant is reversed. For the Iroquois, maize eyes ol the ancients, the character ol a highly charged term. is male and the bean female, They planted the bean very close to the One finds in America something like an echo ol these beliefs, though there they do not concern the broad bean (Jaba), which ıs a Eurasian plant, but the New World legume which most resembles it: and let them grow up together — the rigid stalk of the maize plant the true (American) bean. The Pawnee, agricultural Indians of Miscontrast, the squash extends its vine along the ground and seems to maize when the stalk of the latter was about fifteen centimetres high, served as a support and the beanstalk wrapped itself around it. By

37 Hee from the nearest maize plant. ‘That is why, according to myth, ciple stands to the female principle — with respect to sexuality — as the Maize marricd “the Maid Bean” in preference to her rival (the penis stands to the testicles with respect to masculinity. squash) (Beauchamp, 1898, pp. 196-197). xs Se But the Tutelo, who belong to the Sioux linguistic family, even y. though they lived in contact with the Iroquois (and, be it noted, per- A vl female male haps precisely for that reason), took the opposite view: they made the \ “ “ x; pS maize female and the bean male, because, as they put it: “he men a + N depend upon the women, as the beans cling on the corn |stalks] when A F Ni testicles growing.” (Speck, 1942, p. 120.) The Iroquois symbolism reappears sa in Mexico and in Guatemala, where the Indians often plant maize and È penis x x \ bean in the same hole (Pennington, 1909, p. 59; Vogt, 1969, p. 54). Both for the Chorti of Guatemala and for the people of the Mitla Though postulated for America, such a conception ts directly veriregion in Mexico, the maize spirit is male and the bean spirit female fiable in New Guinea, where various groups view the fruit of the coco- 1940, p. 402; Parsons, 1936, pp. 324-329). li cannot be nut tree and that of the areca palm as a sexed pair, but each term of asserted, however, that those American Indians who treat the bean as (Wisdom, which is itself ambivalent, save only that a diachronic ambivalence female, view — as do certain people of New Guinea (Berndt, 1962, amongst the Orokaiva (where each plant, originally endowed with p. 41, note 8) — Mother Earth as a kind of pod producing many seeds: one sex, subsequently acquires the opposite sex) appears as syn- New World myths concerning the origin of cultivated plants describe chronic amongst the ‘Vangu. Nonetheless, and in spite of the geothem as born trom various parts of the body of a being who ts somegraphical distance between these two groups, coconuts symbolize for times female and sometimes male. To take only one or two examples — both of them, at one and the same time, breasts of women and testicles according to the Iroquois, the Huron, the Creek and the Cherokee - (Schwimmer, 1973, p. 169; Burridge, 1969, p. 190). Areca nuts, al maize came from the breasts, from a thigh, from the stomach or from first male and then female, according to the Orokaiva (Schwimmer, the vagina of a woman, and the bean came from her forelimbs 1973, pp. 168-170), symbolize simultaneously for the Tangu both (according to the Iroquois from the fingers), from the other thigh, or testicles and nubile young girls (Burridge, 1969, pp. 251, 306). ‘Thus, from her armpits. By contrast, the Kaingang of Southern Brazil chose data of this type indicate clearly that the testicles, the least ostensibly lor such purposes a male being: his penis became maize, his testicles male part of the male organ, occupy in mythical representations from beans, his head a squash (Ploetz and Metraux, 1930, p. 212). several regions of the world an ambiguous position between opposite This last system of correspondences evokes two others: one which resembles it, and one which, seeiningly, contradicts it. categories. In the fertility These findings bring one back to Greece and to the controversies, rites of ancient India a grain of barley symbolizes the penis, two beans which have been going on since antiquity, over the food prohibitions the testicles (Indradeva, 1973, p. 37); but in Japanese mythology, the of the beans (Soja and Phaseolus) emerged from the genitalia of the goddess Aristotle took into account, as one explanation among several others, Pythagoreans. Diogenes Laertius (VIII, 34) records that Ukemochi (Aston, 1896, vol. 1, p. 33). Such divergences — of which it the similarity between beans and testicles. Aulus Gellius went even would be easy to give other examples — could be overcome il it were to further: he wrote, " Küamous hoc in loco testiculos significare dicunt” (AV, be assumed that, of the sexual organs of the male, the penis, congruent with the still stalk of the maize and of cereals, is relatively more ciated by Empedocles concerned food. He cited Aristoxenus in order xi), denying that the prohibition ascribed to Pythagoras and enun- “male” than are the testicles. The opposition — common in America — to prove that beans were one of the favourite dishes of Pythagoras — à between maize (male) and beans (female) would then follow from an good example, be it noted in passing, of the ambivalence of beans, implicit relationship of equivalence in terms of which the male prinhere centred upon the person of the founder. A modern author glosses

39 the Greek name of this legume: "Adamo: |beans| ... eggs, vessels ol 37) takes care to distinguish between the two ways of eating beans, by seed, ol generation, and connected with kueín” (Onians, 1954, p. 112), emphasizing that Egyptian priests neither chew them raw nor cal which means “to swell, to be pregnant'— a surprising convergence of views between the ancient Greeks and the ‘Vangu. As a matter of fact, them boiled. On the other hand, the earliest way of preparing cereals might have been to parch the grains on the fire, in the manner of George Devereux himself tells me that the ancient Greeks saw a con- “popcorn” (Braidwood, 1953, pp. 515-526). In contradistinction to nection between the broad bean (faba) and nubile girls; the same cereals, which a quick roasting renders edible, the Leguminosae, oscillating between the categories “the raw” and “the boiled” (which is also, as I have shown elsewhere, the category of the rotten) would thus be situated on the side of nature and of death.' Let it not be forgotten, however, that these brief reflections took word, Adamos, denotes both that vegetable and the swelling of the breasts at the onset of puberty. Furthermore, in an important paper, Devereux (1968) has disclosed the unconscious equation prevailing in the minds of some patients between testicles and breasts. If one dared to suggest that — as we hypothesized for America and fairly general way as a mediating term between opposite sexual catetheir point of departure from American data, and that they cannot be incorporated into one’s material without reservations. l'or the value of the Americanist contribution will remain uncertain as long as the gories, it would seem less strange that in the alimentary register, problem created by the friezes of Mochica ceramics which sometimes corresponding to the category ol life, beans, symbols of the testicles, opposite category, that is to say, to the category of death. Between represent half human, half bean personages (Hissink, 1951) remains unsolved. For the time being, and despite the efforts of the exegetists, it is possible that these motifs have not yielded up, as yet, all their these two formalisms, in fact, a clear-cut homology may be observed: secrets, were able to verify for New Guinea — the testicles are recognized in a should also be — in contradistinction to cereals — relatively closer to the y A MT wv death lile Ñ à x \ \ N \ y \ \ x PR). | i sf beans Ñ NE cereals x % y \ ‘ x Hence, perhaps, the ambiguous position of beans between life and death upon which Detienne (1970, p. 153) so strongly insists and which, either in the same or in different cultures, predisposes beans to be given, according to circumstances, either a positive or negative connotation, as intermediaries charged either with the task of opening communication between the two worlds or, on the other hand, of interrupting it, lt may be added that the same ambiguity is manifest also on the ‘hos true, however, that in the above-mentioned Japanese rue (p 35) cach paterlanulias seatters toasted soybeans According to information obtained in Japan, roasting soybeans is not culinary level, Beans, which the Romans believed to be the oldest part ol the normal cousine cultivated plant, may be eaten raw when young, otherwise they can be destmed lor the inhabitants of the beyond (described in ancient Japanese mythology us the eaten only when boiled in water or previously soaked, Herodotus (UH, added appeal di is therefore tempting to assume that soybeans ao prepared and world of the rotten) aught have, precisely because they are different from the normal diet, an

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