Friday 3 July 2020

"Zahuris, Red of Eye ..."



This curious folk evidently appealed to Coleridge’s imagination:
The Zahuris red of eye & dwarf in stature, have the power of seeing in the earth as if it were water, & all treasures, bodies, mines springs, &c, appearing therein as substances in the bottom or middle of a transparent Fluid—see only on Tuesdays & Fridays, & are always born on Good Friday.— [Notebooks 2 (1804-1808), 3148]
Kathleen Coburn strikes a rare bum-note with her glossing of this entry: ‘The Zahuris have not been tracked down to their native country; possibly they spring full-blown out of the head of STC.’ They don’t, though. Their native country is Spain, and they spring from Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique; published in 1697-1709. (The first English translation of this encyclopedia appeared in 1709, with a revised translation appearing in 1734-41; this latter is the edition Coleridge owned). And here is the entry that Coleridge read:
ZAHURIS, a name given to certain men in Spain whose eye-sight is so very piercing, as is pretended that they perceive, under ground, streams of water, veins of metals, as also treasures and carcasses. They have very red eyes. Martin del Rio relates, that when he was at Madrid in 1575, a little boy of this sort was seen there. It is remarkable, that, though this author is very ready to ascribe extraordinary effects to devils, he yet does not believe that the Zahuris discover water and metals under ground, by any magical compact; he imagining that they discover water by vapours, and mines by the herbs which grow in those places; with regard to treasures and dead carcasses, he pretends the devil directs these people to them, since they can declare what treasures and dead bodies they see, and are indued with this power only on Tuesdays and Fridays.
[A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical: a New and Accurate Translation of that of the Celebrated Mr Bayle, by the Reverend Mr John Peter Bernard, the Reverend Mr Thomas Birch and Mr John Lockman, vol 10 (1741), 249-50]
In a footnote, Bayle adds a little more information by quoting one ‘Gutierrius, a Spanish Physician’ to the effect that ‘the credulity of the common people’ supposes ‘that they are born on Good Friday, and that they owe this wonderful privilege to their birth day’, something Gutierrius himself scorns: vide quam futile ac irreligiosum commentum, see what vain and irreligious things some people believe!

There’s nothing here about dwarfs, which Coleridge seems to have imported into his note from his own head.

Many years later STC mentions the Zahuris again. July 1822 he was reading Johann Carl Passavant’s Untersuchungen uber den Lebensmagnetismus und das Hellsehen (Frankfurt am Main 1821), writing in his notebook ‘Dr Passavant has enlivened and renewed my interest in the Magia Thelematica, Thelematomagy, or Zoo-magnetism; but in other respects has left me as he found me’ [Notebooks 4 (1819-1826), 4908]. ‘Passavant's approach,’ says Coburn, ‘appealed to Coleridge because it was that of a medical man interviewing patients and citing cases, interested in the historical background of his subject and seeing in it a pious argument for the power of the spiritual. There were in his work links with magnetists familiar by name to Coleridge’. This quasi-mesmerist thesis, Coleridge thought, had certain explanatory advantages:
The supposition of the truth of Zoo-magnetism enables us rationally to account for a series of Phaenomena hitherto unexplained, or most unsatisfactorily explained away with Lies, Tricks, or the Devil, the Oracles of the ancients, Charms, Amulets, witchcraft, Prophecies, Divination, and extra ordinary Individuals, as the Female who misled Montanus & thro' him Tertullian, Behmen, Swedenborg, & (according to their own declarations, Philo Judaeus, and Porphyry) and of a lower kind, Bleton, Aymar, Pedegache, Campetti, the Zahuris of Spain, & (still living) the Swiss Female, Catharina Beutler.— [Notebooks 4:4908]
The specifics of Notebook entry 3134 can only have come from Bayle, but Coleridge later re-encountered the Zahuri through another text: Jean Paul Richter, whom Coleridge loved. Henry Crabb Robinson lent STC a number of Jean Paul books on 10th August 1812, including his sprawling 1800 novel Titan (notebook entries 4276-79 are all excerpts from this novel that STC has copied-out or summarised).



Early in this novel a strange hooded figure approaches the protagonist, Albano de Zesara:
While Zesara was thus traversing waves, mountains, and stars with a stiller and stiller soul, and when at last garden and sky and lake ran together into one dark Colossus, and he sadly thought of his pale mother, and of his sister, and of the announced wonders of his future life, a figure dressed all in black, with the image of a death's-head on its breast, came slowly and painfully, and with trembling breath, up the terraces behind him. “Remember death!” it said. “Thou art Albano de Zesara?” “Yes,” said Zesara, “who art thou?” “I am,” it said, “a father of death. It is not from fear, but from habit, I tremble so.”

The limbs of the man continued to quake all over, in a frightful and almost audible manner. Zesara had often wished an adventure for his idle bravery; now he had it before him. … He asked, with indignation: “Who art thou? What knowest thou? What wilt thou?” and grasped at the folded hands of the monk, and held both imprisoned in one of his. “Thou dost not know me, my son,” said the father of death, calmly. “I am a Zahouri,* and come from Spain from thy sister; I see the dead down in the earth, and know beforehand when they will appear and discourse. But their apparition above ground I do not see, and their discourse I cannot hear.” [Jean Paul, Titan 1:45-46]

Jean Paul adds, as you can see, a footnote: ‘The Zahouris in Spain are, as is well known, gifted with the power of discerning corpses, veins of metal, &c. far under the earth.’ His message to Zesara is that his sister in Spain is about to die, and that before going to heaven her spirit will zip over to Northern Italy (where they are) with a message. How this fits with the ‘Zahouri’ ability to see through the earth isn’t made clear. But everything the trembling old man says comes true: the evening star sinks behind the mountains and his sister’s spirit appears to Zesara telling him: ‘Love the beautiful one whom I will show thee,—I will help thee.’ Straight away a woman as beautiful as Aphrodite ‘with long, chestnut-brown hair, and dark eyes, and a shining, swan-like neck, and with the complexion and vigor of the richest climate’ rises from the lake, revealing herself ‘down to her bosom’ before sinking again below the surface. Then the sister-spirit repeats ‘Love the beautiful one whom I showed thee’ and vanishes.
The monk coldly and silently prayed during the scene, of which he heard and saw nothing. At length he said: “On the next Ascension-day, at the hour of thy birth, thou wilt stand beside a heart which is not within a breast, and thy sister will announce to thee from Heaven the name of thy bride.”
Fruity stuff!

It’s not clear to me how seriously STC took any of this (fairly seriously, is the implication of Notebook entry 4908). It's also not clear whether he was aware what the word ‘Zahuri’ or ‘Zahouri’ meant. I can’t find any evidence that he ever laid eyes on Stephen Weston’s Remains of Arabic in the Spanish and Portuguese Languages (London 1810)—too late for the first Notebook entry, of course—which implies that the whole thing was a sort of hoax played on foreigners.


So how does the dwarf creep into Coleridge's original notebook entry? We can make a pretty good guess: Coleridge's mind has moved from people on the surface seeing into the innards of the earth to beings living inside those innards, which is to say: Kobolds. Coleridge learnt about these creatures when he lived in Germany and the notebooks often make reference to them. They can ‘materialize in the form of an animal, fire, a human being, and a candle. The most common depictions of kobolds show them as humanlike figures the size of small children. Kobolds who live in human homes wear the clothing of peasants; those who live in mines are hunched and ugly.’

Although Jean Paul's ‘Zahouri’ sppears as a trembling old man the original ‘Zahuri’ reported by Martin del Rio was a child. Coleridge has conflated this underground-y childishness with Kobold-ness. In doing so he creates a very different kind of creature, related to but different from kobolds (who were thought to live in the rock, as fish live in water and we in air). His Zahuris live in air but see through rock like water (and can perhaps swim in it, as we swim in water). It would make a fine addition to any Fantasy novel, or perhaps, though here I am growing fanciful, to the final howevermany sections of STC's unfinished Christabel. Maybe not altogether fanciful though: in his German translation of the Bible, Martin Luther renders the Hebrew lilith in Isaiah 34:14 as kobold.


4 comments:

  1. "In Zahuriland did Kobold Khan"

    I think you've found it, Adam, the key to the STCaic Mysteries. I'm thinking the Zahuri functioned as surveillance drones, keeping track of opium-trafficers traveling in yellow submarines in the underground river. In this reading Kobald Khan is a drug lord. It all makes sense now.

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    1. There are certainly crazier STC theories out there ...

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  2. Also not to be confused with Zara (meaning Sahara): “If we proceed beyond the desart of Zara [the Sahara Desert] to the tropic, we meet with people quite black, but with straight and floating hair.” (Analytical Review, or History of Literature Vol 15 ( 1793) 420)

    Quite black - the white, flashing eyes, and their floating hair.

    As for Zahuri, that's an excellent find. Bayle is mentioned so many times in Southey's Doctor &c. And he'd have Richter supply the "serio-comic" narrative.

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    1. The "floating hair" is indeed suggestive! Nice find yourself ...

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