#no sources or bibliography because we die like MEN

[jeannereames]

Your top 5 Alexander the Great moments?

Top Five Alexander Moments

One issue with answering this is to figure out what events actually happened, especially when it comes to anecdotes! Here are four I find either significant to understanding his charisma and/or which explain how he functioned and why he was successful, plus one I like just because I’m a horse girl.

1) To my mind, the event that best illustrates why his men followed him to the edge of their known world occurred in the Gedrosian Desert. While I’m a bit dubious that this trek was as bad as it’s made out to be (reasons exist for exaggerating), it was still baaaad. One story relates that some of his men found some brackish water in a sad little excuse for a spring, gathered it in a helm, and brought it to him. Given his poor physical condition after the Malian siege wound, he no doubt needed it badly. He thanked them (most sincerely), then carried it out where all (or at least a lot) of his men could see, raised it overhead, and announced that until all of them could drink, he wouldn’t. Then he poured it onto the rocky ground.

That gesture exemplified his charisma. And it absolutely is not something the likes of a Donald tRump could even imagine doing—nor most dictators, tbh. They’d be blaming everybody else and calling for heads while drinking Diet Coke, not suffering alongside their people.

This wasn’t an isolated event of that type. While he almost certainly didn’t have time to engage along with his soldiers in every project, we’re told he would drop in from time-to-time, to inspire them and to offer a little friendly competition.

He also dressed like his men for everyday activities, especially early in the campaign. As time went on, some sources say he inserted more distance—probably necessary as his duties exploded—but he still seems to have found time to “just hang out” with his Macedonians on occasion. The claims that he was too high and mighty to do so appears to have been exaggeration (as such accusations often are) in order to forward a narrative that he was “going Asian.” Troop resentment over court changes was very genuine—I don’t want to underplay it (especially as I’ve written about it in a few chapters in this), but it tended to boil up during certain periods/events, then die back again. Alexander was trying to walk a very fine line of incorporating the conquered while not ticking off his own people.

2) Reportedly, he once threw a man out of line because he hadn’t bothered to secure the chin strap on his helm. I pick this one because it tells me a whole lot about how he saw himself as a commander, and what he expected of his men (and why he tended to consistently win).

On the surface, his reaction seems almost petty. It’s precisely the sort of mistake students whine about when professors ding them for it. It’s just a chin strap! I’d have tightened it before I went into battle! (It’s just a few typos; you knew what I meant! Or, Why does everything in the bibliography have to be exactly matching in style? Who cares? What a stupid thing to obsess about!) These objections are all of a piece. First, they’re lazy, and second, they indicate a disconcern with details. In battle, such disconcern can get a person killed. And on a larger scale, for a general, such disconcern loses battles.

One of the striking aspects of Alexander’s military operations was just how well his logistics worked. Consistently. We hear little about them precisely because they rarely fail. Food and water was there when they needed it, as were arrow replacements, wood to repair the spears, wool and leather for clothes and shoes, canvas for tents, etc., etc. All those little niggling (boring) details. If these are missing, soldiers become upset (and don’t fight well). Starting with Philip, the Macedonian military was a well-oiled machine. That’s WHY Gedrosia was such a shock: the logistics collapsed. Contra some historians, he did not do it to “punish” his men, nor to best Cyrus.* He had a sound reason—to scout a trade route.

Alexander understood that details matter. It starts with a loose chinstrap. (Or an unplanned-for storm and rebellion in his rear.) Everything else can unravel from that.

3) Alexander sends Hephaistion a little dish of small fish (probably smelts). He also helps an officer secure the lady of his dreams. And writes another on assignment (away from the army) that a mutual friend is recovering from an illness. While technically three “moments,” these are all of a piece. Alexander knows his men, and is concerned not only for their physical well-being, but also their mental state: that they’re happy. Granted, these are all elite officers, but it suggests he’s paying attention to people. I’ve always assumed he sent Hephaistion the fish because they were his friend’s favorite, and/or they were a special treat and he wanted to share. That he didn’t punish an officer for going AWOL to chase the mistress he wanted but offered advice, and even assistance, on how to court and secure her suggests the same care.

I don’t want to take away from what appears to be his serious anger management problems(!), but little details like those above strike me as the likeable side of Alexander—why his men were so devoted to him.

4) Then we have the encounter with Timokleia after the siege of Thebes. While probably a bit too precious to have occurred exactly as related, I think it may still hold a kernel of truth.

Alexander had a reputation of chivalry towards his (highborn) female captives. If some of that was likely either propaganda from his own time or philhellenic whitewashing later by Second Sophistic authors such as Plutarch (and Arrian), poor treatment of women is not something we hear attributed to him.

Ergo, while the meeting was probably doctored for a moral tail, he may well have freed Timokleia as an act of clemency to put a better face on a shocking destruction he knew wouldn’t sit well with the rest of Greece—who he both wanted to cow yet earn support from. (A difficult balancing act.) Also, if Timokleia hadn’t been high-born, she’d probably have been hauled off to one of the prisoner cages with little fanfare.

Nonetheless, I find his actions surprising given the casual misogyny of his era. If we can take the bare bones of the story as true, and it’s not all invented, Timokleia was raped as a matter of course during the sacking of Thebes, then managed to trick her rapist and kill him by pushing him down a well and dropping rocks on him. I assume this happened when his men weren’t there, but they found out soon enough and hauled her in front of Alexander to be punished for killing an officer. To the surprise of all, Alexander decided the man had earned it and freed Timokleia. One might be inclined to call this overly sentimental, but….

There’s a similar story that occurred much later in the Levant, when two of Parmenion’s men seduced/(raped?) the mistresses/wives of some mercenaries. Alexander instructed Parmenion to kill the Macedonians if they were found to be guilty.

In both cases, we have an affront against (respectable) women. In the latter case, Alexander was (no doubt) working to avoid conflict between hired soldiers and his own men, who—in typical Greek fashion—would have looked down on mercenaries as a matter of course. Some sort of conflict between Macedonians and Greek mercenaries up in Thrace had almost got Alexander’s father killed. Alexander saved him. No doubt that was on Alexander’s mind here.

Yet what both events illuminate is a willingness on Alexander’s part to punish his own men for affronts to honor/timē that involved women. Yes, this is clearly about discipline. But it also shows an unusual sensitivity to sex crimes in warfare: actions that would normally fall under the excuse of “boys will be boys” (especially when their blood is up).

I doubt he’d have felt the same about slaves or prostitutes; he was still a product of his time. Yet without overlooking his violence���sometimes extreme (the genocide of the Branchidai, for instance)—I find his reaction in these cases to be evidence of an atypical sympathy for women that I’d like to think isn’t wholly an invention of later Roman authors. And just might show the influence of his mother and sisters.

5) Last… the Boukephalas story…because who doesn’t love a good “a boy and his horse” tale? Obviously the Plutarchian version is tweaked to reflect that author’s later concern to contrast the Macedonian “barbarian” Philip with the properly Hellenized Alexander. Ignore the editorializing remarks, especially the “find a kingdom big enough for you” nonsense.

But the bare bones of the story seem likely: unmanageable horse, cocky kid, bet with dad, gotcha moment. You can imagine this was an anecdote Alexander retold a time or three, or twenty.

——

* His attempts to copy Cyrus may be imposition by later writers. In his own day, he may have cared more about the first Darius, for reasons Jenn Finn is going to explain in a forthcoming, very good article on the burning of Thebes and Persepolis.

[not-xpr-art]

Art Deep Dives #1 - The Value of Art ~

Hi everyone!

This is the start to another project I want to start on this account, a companion to my Art Advice tag, and each week or so I’ll be ‘deep diving’ into art history, arts & culture, society’s relationship to art, etc etc... (I basically want to make use of my history of art degree, and also because I genuinely love talking about this stuff... especially without the pressure of deadlines lol)

Side note: don’t worry about these being really ‘academic’ or ‘formal’, since neither of those things are in my vocabulary lol... this is a very casual, informal kind of ‘essay’ writing that I want to be accessible to everyone, regardless of how much you know about art! 

This first one is a kind of follow up of my Art Advice post talking about references, and I’ll be talking about the ideas of how we ‘value’ art.

(this is about 1600 words long by the way...)

The Value of Art

It’s no secret that art is highly subjective. Particularly when it comes to the question of ‘what is the most important type of art?’. It changes from person to person, country to country, and era to era. How we define ‘great art’ now is vastly different to how we defined it several hundred years ago. I mean, just look at the kinds of art in galleries in the modern era (Tracey Emin’s bed comes to mind) versus that of the 18th century (with the likes of Joshua Reynolds, JMW Turner and Thomas Gainsborough). Really, it’s clear to see that what we see as ‘the most important type of art’ is forever changing...

Or... is it?

In order to really answer whether the kinds of art we value now versus that of the past has changed, we need to first establish what ‘valued art’ even means. 

I think in today’s day and age, ‘value’ is often synonymous with ‘price’. So, a Banksy original chipped away from it’s original wall setting and having been sold at a Christies auction for £3.2million is, by this definition, what we as a society ‘value’ as art... Right? Or maybe ‘value’ is more to do with what kinds of works that are displayed in big galleries or public spaces? The Tate has an entire wing dedicated to the works of landscape/seascape painter JMW Turner, so surely that means that we today place a high ‘value’ on his work still? What about public sculpture? Architecture? Sculpture and architecture are often a lot more available for the general public, and even if most people wouldn’t be able to tell you who made the Statue of Liberty, they at least know about her and perhaps even enjoy to look at her? And surely the fame of buildings like the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal mean that they, too, are ‘valued’ as pieces of art? And what of artworks from other countries and cultures? A Chinese man may find no ‘value’ in a painting by a so-called ‘Great Master’ of the Italian Renaissance, but instead will ‘value’ a piece of Imperial Ming Dynasty porcelain instead, does that mean his opinion is the ‘right’ one? Colonialism has played heavily into what arts are now called ‘valuable’ and what are not, so how do we quantify whether a work has ‘value’ without placing our own individual cultural bias on it?

Basically what I’m getting at is, what we value as art in this day and age is very complicated, in a big way because our society is complicated. But for the sake of arguments, and for my next few points, I will be defining an art’s ‘value’ predominantly by whether it has been featured in a big gallery... Which also means I’ll be focusing on painting and sculpture... And also focusing on the Western world of art, specifically Europe, which I want to clarify doesn’t mean I personally ‘value’ that art more, it’s just where I’m from and predominantly what I studied in my course... 

Art historians often declare the Renaissance (around the 14th to 16th centuries) the ‘beginning’ of what we know as art today. But for this essay, I want to instead start a little before this, in the Early Medieval period. People often know of this era as ‘the dark ages’, in Europe at least, because it was after Rome had fallen and taken all their so-called ‘genius’ with them. A particular note for why for years we’ve seen this period as ‘regressive’ is through their art. A quick Google search of ‘Medieval baby’ will come up with a plethora of results for a wide range of paintings depicting babies (usually the baby Christ) as scaled down versions of adults, complete with receding hairlines and strangely buff arms and chests. 

Now, is this because medieval babies actually looked like this? I think this is... highly unlikely... I know most things happened earlier in that era than nowadays (girls getting married and pregnant at age 14, for example), but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to think their babies had six packs... No, instead it’s more likely that rather than being direct representations of babies, these were purely symbolic. And particularly given how they often were of Christ, art historians often say that the weird adult-baby hybrids are to represent Christ’s divinity. 

Now... What’s all this got to do with art and value? Well, the thing about early medieval art is that the value was almost entirely placed upon the symbology and meaning of a piece. Later in the medieval period, paintings began to become more ‘realistic’ to some extent, but it still for the most part stayed true to this idea of symbolism over representation. 

That is, until we get to the Renaissance and all of that gets thrown out of the window because artists want to be able to paint babies that actually look like babies, thank you very much! And with the likes of Leonardo da Vinci championing for art to become a science, surely this means that the kinds of art that was valued in this era were highly accurate portraits or landscapes... Right?

Short answer? No. 

Long answer? Well, portraits and landscapes had their place in the hierarchies of art. Portraits were often commissioned by wealthy patrons, and were basically ways of the artist showing off how good their portrait skills are. And landscapes were less important, more seen as ‘nice backgrounds’ than anything else. But the art that was highly valued by most wealthy patrons and art connoisseurs of the time was... (imagine a drum roll here please) 

History painting! These are basically big biblical or mythological scenes, often with a lot of figures doing a variety of things (think Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel), often with some pretty landscape as the backdrop, and often featuring a couple of portraits in the mix (including one of the patron who commissioned it, probably being blessed by the Virgin Mary, and a cheeky one of the artist peeking out from behind a bush or something...). From the Renaissance era up until basically the mid 19th century, History paintings were seen as the most important works of art to be featured in galleries. 

And really, things only really began to change when we reached the end of the 19th century, with the development of photography. 

Photography, and film, both lead to a massive shift in not only the kinds of art that are produced in the 20th century, but also the kinds of art that are valued. For so long art had been the main form of representation of society, and the advent of photographs meant that art had almost lost that ‘purpose’. Not to mention the leading towards a more secular society which no longer had a need for symbolic or spiritual artworks. 

So, the only place art could really go was to become a form of expression instead. The likes of artists like Picasso and Braque pioneering cubism, being about new ways of representing the world. The Surrealists delving into ideas of the subconscious. Pop-Artists like Warhol looking into media and consumerist society, and the list goes on... 

Which brings us onto my most hated period in the history of art: Conceptual art. 

I’m not going to go big into this period, which is still around today (unfortunately), but all you need to know is this twat Marcel Duchamp flipped a urinal (which he didn’t even make himself) upside down and called it a ‘fountain’ and shoved it into a gallery and thus art that has no value beyond it being ‘concept based’ was born. And yes, yes I hate it a lot (I’m not even trying to be objective about this, I hate conceptual art with a burning passion... some guy put some sh*t in a box and put it in a gallery & called it art and I am SO mad about it lol...). And as much as I hate this period, what it does signify is how art began to be valued not through the craftsmanship of the work itself, but instead the ideas. 

And this idea remains today. Damien Hirst has forged his entire art identity on creating works that are based entirely on some ‘meaning’ that could be forced onto it, rather than the aesthetic or material value. And as mentioned before, Tracey Emin’s infamous bed isn’t about the work and effort gone into the piece itself, but instead about what the artists intends for the piece to ‘mean’. So, the ‘value’ of the work is what it says, and not what it is, essentially. 

(This is not to say that there are no artists who work today that get featured in galleries and are highly skilled at their craft. The one that springs to mind is Grayson Perry, who’s well known for his pottery and tapestries with some kind of social commentary bled into them.)

This ideology around art also bleeds into online spaces of art (which I see as distinctly separate from the world of art galleries and the Turner prize). I still see artists, and non-artists, talking about how much they enjoy work that is ‘original’, and oftentimes ridiculing and demoting ‘fanart’ as purely ‘derivative’ or ‘unoriginal’. 

And all this brings us back to history paintings. Because their ‘value’ wasn’t just in the immense amount of skill that went into them. A large part of their ‘value’ was that artists and non-artists alike saw them as feats of the artist’s ‘genius’ or ‘imagination’ at play. And in the same way that Early Medieval art was valued for the symbology of the piece rather than the representation, history paintings had the benefit of including both elements. In essence, they were both meaningful AND beautiful. 

In conclusion (just to remind you that this is technically an essay lol), a lot about art HAS definitely changed in the last few hundred years, particularly in what kinds of art is getting made now (and why we make art in the first place). However, what we as a collective society ‘value’ as art has remained surprisingly the same, often with a heavy preference for a work’s meaning and symbology, which can sometimes overshadow the craftsmanship of the work itself. 

I still hate that godforsaken Duchamp toilet though...

(images used:

unknown medieval painting (I just liked that he had his hand down mary’s dress lool)

mona lisa by da vinky 

detail of the creation of adam on the sistine chapel by michelangelo

a photograph by louis daguerre, often known as the father of photography

*clenches fist* ‘fountain’ by marcel duchamp

‘my bed’ by tracey emin )

I hope you enjoyed this informal essay about art, I will definitely be doing more of these in the future! If you have any thoughts on this, feel free to reply to this or message me, etc! I love having open and frank conversations about art! 

[wandering-wizardry]

Book Review: Moon Spells by Diane Ahlquist

Syntax(Does it read well?):

There are several errors an editor should have picked up on. missing punctuation, typos, poor word choice. Overall, the book should have been work-shopped more before going to print.

(6/10) Perfectly usable, but loses some clarity with poor word choice and sentence structure. Also, the syntax errors are annoying.

Content(Is the book is just stuff you could have googled?):

35/243 pages are just lists and/or stuff that is easily available for free online, so 14%. 141/243 pages are spells, which, while content, are formatted in a way that they take up a lot of room, 58%. Only 30% of the book is information. Taking out the spell pages, 65% of the book is information.

(6.5/10) Not as much information as I would like. The references are good, but again, google is free.

Diversity of Knowledge(Does author appears to understand that other cultures exist?):

At one point refers to Diana as the moon goddess instead of a moon goddess, -1.

The tools referenced are all the standard ones we know from ceremonial magic/wicca. I didn’t notice any closed culture ones, so that is a plus. But overall, the tools are bland.

Does have a short explanation of Chinese Astrology in the back along with Numerology and Western Astrology. Honestly, I don’t know why she bothered to put any of these in here, but from what I understand of Chinese astrology it’s accurate.

(7/10) The contents are very clearly England based, however other practices are acknowledged. The author never swerved wildly out of their lane.

Sources(Are there any?):

References higher crime rates during the full moon. I learned this was BS week 1 of statistics. -1

It does have a bibliography at the end. It’s one full page, which is a little short for my liking, but at least it has it. It doesn’t site in the text where each source is used.

(6/10) I really don’t want to hunt down every one of these publications and read them.

Appropriation(Point off for every mention of dream catchers, spirit animals, and chakras):

“Ancient Civilizations were very respectful of the Moon’s power:” -1

(9/10) As far as I noticed there was nothing that came from a closed culture.

Aesthetics(Because none of us want to read a textbook):

It looks great, diagrams and art galore.

(10/10)

Fluff(How much of it sounds like new age bs?):

“I feel that all those who believe in a higher power than ourselves, have respect for each other... all answer to the same Divine” -3

Outside of roman polytheism can we please let this interpretation die already? Maybe it’s just the fact that anything that reminds me of evangelical Christianity give me hives, but I hate this take. It also feel very colonial. This does have historical backing, but it’s mostly shitty historical backing. Here.

(6/10) About that you’d expect. More research should have been done.

Wiccan(How many times is wicca reference in a book that looks secular(N/A when the book is advertised as wiccan)?):

Claims to be non-denominational, however there are clearly some parts that are wiccan. In the introduction, she states you’ll have to believe in some form of higher power, so it’s all right hand magic.

(5/10) It was published in 2002 by a middle age white woman who describes herself as a “third-generation intuitive”.

Hetero/cisnormative(If I see one mention of ‘divine feminine’ outside of an academic context I’m gonna lose my shit):

This book was published in 2002, so it has a bit of an excuse, but still. The moon is refereed to as ‘her’. There are two sections marked for women and men respectively.

Women Only. There is a preamble that kind of implies women are better at magic because they’re more emotionally open. It is stated as an opinion however, so -1. Contains a fertility spells, an easy childbirth spell, and a love spell. The first two are fine, they can be used by any afab person. The love spell however... Feminine intuition and Feminine Power... -2.

Men Only. This has a Love spell and a Fatherhood one. The fatherhood spell seems great. The love spell needs more work, as just by reading it I can’t really tell what it does. It feels more like a general prayer.

(7/10) There’s no ‘pussy to the earth’ moment, but still could have been better.

Spells(Do I think they would work?):

Each spell has the exact same formatting, which takes up a lot of space. The same information is copy pasted into every single spell. Each spell has no explanation other than the title. A lot of them are good ideas, but the author clearly hasn’t done much research into magical theory.

(3/10) Cool ideas, but almost all of them would need to be workshopped to be of any use.

Tone(My opinion of the author after reading):

At one point she talks about one of her clients in a tone that makes me think she didn’t really respect him. It felt like she thought she knew better about his life than he did.

From what I can tell the author offers counseling, but nowhere does it say she has the medical qualifications.

There are a lot of “I feel” and “I believe” which on one hand is good, they aren’t stating opinion as fact. On the other hand, it becomes a slog.

When gender is brought up, it is clear that the author favors women. It’s not brought up much, but when it is it’s very obvious.

(4/10) Please get a medical license before you offer counseling.

Total: 69.5/110

Recommendation: There is nothing ground breaking in here. In you’re a lunar witch, it may be a fun thing to pick bits and pieces out of to incorporate into your practice.

No historical research seems to have been done. The entire thing seems to be personal Gnosis. Overall it’s just Meh. The only really good thing about it is the correspondences are detailed.

[hms-chill]

Today’s @rwrb-social-isolation prompt is to talk about something from history we love, so I did a deep, deep dive into a near-utopian colony headed by a man who was, truly, an icon. A Byronic hero two hundred years before Byron himself. It got rambly, but at this point, who’s surprised. Please enjoy.

All us good little American drones know the story of how white people came to America. They settled at Plymouth, and they struggled and struggled for years, but with the help of friendly natives, they finally succeeded and murdered millions with biowarfare and also guns built the great country we live in today.

Were there other, non-Plymouth colonies? Jamestown, of course, the Macho Dream that men who are really into WWII love to talk about. Boring. Let’s talk about a fun colony. 

Let’s talk about Merrymount, a town founded on a distrust of Christian Puritanism, the abolition of slavery, popular revolt, equality with natives, a pagan beliefs. Sound fake? See attached bibliography.

History, huh? Let’s get into it.

To talk about Merrymount, we have to talk about Thomas Morton, the Lord of Misrule. He was born in 1579 in Devon, England, a region despised by the more religious parts of the country for still hanging onto some of England’s traditional pagan practices. It was particularly known for celebrating the land and its guiding principles of neighborliness and quietness (the belief that keeping peace was more important than nearly anything else). We don’t know much about his family, but we’re pretty sure he was the second son to a middle-class family, largely because he went to law school in London (something that wouldn’t have been affordable for lower class folks, but that an older son wouldn’t have had to do under the laws of primogeniture). 

The London Morton arrived in was overcrowded, and bouts of plague were not uncommon. The population was booming, and tensions were rising between the deeply Christian Reform movement and the more Pagan Renaissance. In particular, we saw the rise of Puritanism and Separatism, both of which were extreme versions of Christianity (a la those pilgrims we all cosplayed every Thanksgiving in elementary school), and both of which Morton hated. From what we can tell, he was first an observer, and his coursework would have taught him to question what he was told and to argue his own points and beliefs.

Following his time in school and his general disillusionment with established Christian society, he became a traveling lawyer for a time. In his late 30s, Morton began working for Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a major investor in Plymouth, founder of Maine, and “Father of English Colonization in North America”. He first traveled to America in 1622, and in his book, he declared “The more I looked, the more I liked it. And when I had more seriously considered of the beauty of the place, with all her fair endowments, I did not think that in all the known world it could be paralleled”. However, he was back in England in 1623, complaining of Puritan intolerance. 

Following a dissolved engagement, Morton once again set sail for America in 1624, aboard the ship Unity under command of his friend Captain Richard Wollaston and accompanied by 30 indentured servants. They eventually were given land by and began trading with the Algonquin tribes, who were native to the region and whom Morton found more civilized than the Puritans in Plymouth. They named their town, which is now Quincy, MA, “Mount Wollaston”. 

From Morton’s book, we can see that he got to know native culture relatively well. He attended Algonquin dinners and funerals. He learned at least some of the language, and he celebrated their respect for their elders and general family structure. During this time he also had his first interaction with Plymouth, which went much less well than his interactions with Algonquin tribes. He declared that he “found the Massachusetts Indians more full of humanity than the Christians”, and it is after this meeting that he began to furnish native tribes with powder and shot for their guns, often when English colonists couldn’t get any. Needless to say, he doesn’t come off particularly well in Plymouth’s writing about him.

By 1626, Mount Wollaston was booming. Colonists tired of Plymouth’s harsh rules were flocking to the more liberal town when Morton found out that Wollaston had been selling indentured servants as slaves. Outraged, he encouraged them to rebel, and Wollaston fled, leaving Morton the sole leader (or “host”, the term he prefered) of the newly renamed Merrymount (or “Ma-re Mount, which is a pun on the Latin for “ocean”).

(That’s right, this man got control of a town, declared himself just a host, and then renamed it based on a nerdy pun. an icon.)

Merrymount was, generally, from most sources I can find, a pretty chill place to be. People were declared equal, and there was a pretty high degree of integration with Algonquin tribes. Though Morton did do what he could to encourage the Algonquin peoples to settle into a more English lifestyle, he did so not by force, but by providing them with free salt to use in preserving food, therefore negating the need for a nomadic lifestyle. Which... pressuring people to give up their way of life isn’t great. But doing it this way is a lot better than the way that pretty much every other colonizer was doing it. 

The real pinacle of the integration of English and Algonquin peoples was a May Day Celebration. Pretty much everyone celebrated the start of spring, as it meant that you’d survived the winter and life in general would likely start to improve with the warmer weather. May Day was both a celebration of springtime and a unifying holiday, a time when the different cultures came together and often a time when English men would begin to woo Algonquin women. The Puritans of Plymouth called it Bacchic and evil, so I can only assume it was a generally good time. 

However, by 1628, it was all too much for Plymouth. Morton’s general chill vibe, his trading with natives (and the threat it posed to Plymouth’s monopoly), Merrymount’s integration with Algonquin tribes, and just generally the disregard for Puritan ways all exploded when, in celebration of May Day, Merrymount erected an eighty-foot maypole. 

Now, I know eighty feet is hard to visualize. Especially if you’re from somewhere that uses the metric system. But an average story of a building is about ten feet. So just... think of an eight story building. This thing was MASSIVE. It’s as tall as my freshman year dorm. It was clearly visible from Plymouth, and it was the final straw. Morton was arrested and left to die on a rock that could only generously be called an island.

He was back by fall of 1629, but found Merrymount in ruins and a particularly harsh winter greeted him that year, and he was shipped back to England in 1630, a voyage that almost killed him. 

By 1631, he was back in the game suing the Massachusetts Bay Company, the political and financial backers of the Plymouth Puritans. He won in 1635, cutting off much of Plymouth’s English support and causing many to leave it for settlements in Connecticut. 

His book, New English Canaan published in 1637, launched him into celebrity. In 1643, he tried to return to Massachusetts, but was turned away upon arrival. He was exiled to Maine, where he passed away at the age of 71.

And that’s Thomas Morton! I first heard about his story in A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski, but I couldn’t remember enough/didn’t find anything in other sources to establish the queer context for Merrymount other than its rejection of Puritanism. 

Attached bibliography (not formatted correctly, because fuck the MLA and the APA).

General overview of his life

Morton’s book, New English Canaan

Spunky bio largely focused on Merrymount/the maypole

Spunky bio two: Maypole boogaloo

His wikipedia, which is just nice and readable