Sink or Swim: Infanticide and ‘Baptism’ on the Ancient Rhine April 25, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient , trackback
Portentous day in the Beachcombing household as Tiny Miss B, the new arrival, was baptised with a select group of friends and in-laws looking on. Unlike Little Miss B – a chip off the Beachcombing block, who screamed her way through her welcoming into the church – the younger Beachcombing, who takes, instead, after her mother, slept even when the priest poured ‘the saving water’ on her head.
Beachcombing in the confusion of remembering who he could talk to – Mrs B has a difficult family… – and what parts of the creed he could say ‘yes’ to arrived at a strange level of consciousness.
Things that should have been familiar – Easter gospel readings, the Lord’s Prayer… – were suddenly alien, in some cases horribly so: a particular lowlight being the moment when the priest ‘ate’ Christ wolfing down – he has big jowls – a wafer of ‘flesh’, then compounding this by swilling up the remaining crumbs with wine: memories of the Christian cannibal urban-legends of ancient Rome.
Certainly, by the time his daughter’s turn came Beachcombing was primed to see baptism in an entirely different light. As an act of ritual purification it makes sense in the Jewish tradition. But, Beachcombing found himself wondering if the Judaeo-Christian tradition is unique in washing away sin or using water to pull little citizens into the community.
After that the rest of the service was ruined as history books started to flit through Beachcombing’s mind and one in particular bothered (and continues to bother) him. The following is from an anonymous Greek poem c. 200 BC – Beachcombing sadly doesn’t have the Greek to hand, only a translation:
The bold Celts test their children in the jealous Rhine
And no man regards himself as a true father
Until he sees the child washed in the holy river.
For immediately when the child has come from
The mother’s womb and shed its first tears, the father picks
It up and places it on his own shield, not sympathising,
For he does not feel for the child like a true father
Until he sees it judged in the river’s bath.
And the mother, having new pains added to those
Of childbirth, even if she knows him to be the true father,
Awaits in fear what the inconstant river will judge.
We seem to have here not so much purification as an ordeal. Though the rules were perhaps (?) not clear to our poet: or could he have depended on Greeks understanding an allusion here to local customs or myths? In any case, they certainly are not clear to Beachcombing!
The newborn baby is taken to the river on the shield of the father and then he places the baby in the river. But then what? If the baby sinks it belongs to me, if it floats it belongs to another man? Was the baby allowed to float downstream for a certain distance? Was it allowed to float on the shield? There is a celebrated ancient passage (Pausanias?) where the Celts use their shields as rafts.
Or does, perhaps, the true-born baby swim under water? A Nirvana album cover and a distantly glimpsed karate movie come to mind. After all, it has long been recognised that new-borns feel strangely comfortable underwater – an ability lost at about six months – and this may have served as a pseudo-test.
What is certain is that the Rhine ordeal will have returned most children to their fathers intact: otherwise there would have been a lot of floating carcasses and many ‘unfaithful’ wives buried alive for adultery.
Of course, another possibility is that this is a tall tale – one of many to come down to the ancient world from across the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Balkans.
Perhaps the custom did exist but, poets being careless ethnographers, it was a Germanic rather than a Celtic ritual? But then again who cares?
Or perhaps it was only used when there was a serious suspicion of adultery – in which case the need for a high survival rate alluded to above might not have been necessary… gulp.
Beachcombing came up with a list of five or six other examples of non-Christian ‘baptism’: any other would be gratefully received – drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
17 Aug 2014, ANL wrote in with some relevant points: I was very surprised by the Greek poem quoted, as it almost certainly represents a Germanic tradition. I assume that Greeks of that era made no distinction between Gauls and Germans. In North Germanic and West Germanic legends, Skjold/Scyld was the name of a foundling who became king of the Danes and founder of the Skjoldung royal line. There are various tales about how he was found, either in a small boat or floating on a shield (hence the name), and accompanied by a sheaf of corn. This gave him the name “Scyld Scefing”, meaning “shield with the sheaf”, but was later taken to mean “Shield son of Sheaf”. Later still, it was Sceaf (sheaf) who became the foundling in the tales. So, all in all, quite a confused tradition, but with pretty obvious similarities to the Greek poem:
The bold Celts test their children in the jealous Rhine
And no man regards himself as a true father
Until he sees the child washed in the holy river.
For immediately when the child has come from
The mother’s womb and shed its first tears, the father picks
It up and places it on his own shield, not sympathising,
For he does not feel for the child like a true father
Until he sees it judged in the river’s bath.
And the mother, having new pains added to those
Of childbirth, even if she knows him to be the true father,
Awaits in fear what the inconstant river will judge.
Here’s a further note lifted from Wikipedia:
“A connection between sheaf and shield appears in the 13th century Chronicon de Abingdon which relates a dispute over ownership of a river meadow named Beri between the Abbot of Abingdon and the men of Oxfordshire. The dispute was decided by a ritual in which the monks placed a sheaf (sceaf) of wheat on a round shield (scyld) and a wax candle upon the sheaf which they lit. They then floated the shield with sheaf and candle on the Thames river to see where it would go. The shield purportedly kept to the middle of the Thames until it arrived at the disputed field, which was then an island because of flooding, whereupon it changed its course and entirely circled the meadow between the Thames and the Iffley.”
1 Nov 2014: JDB writes in ‘Jenny Wiley was captured by native Americans on what was then the American frontier (western Virginia) while pregnant. When the child was born, the natives placed it on a piece of wood and sent it floating down the river, if the infant stayed silent it was allowed to live, but if it cried, it was killed. Unfortunately, Mrs. Wiley’s infant cried and was scalped. Details are available on several Internet sites.’ Thanks JDB!
