Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (8 page)

It is interesting to note that the snail’s pace of a funeral cortege is not only a mark of respect for the dead. It recalls earlier days, when lighted candles were a ceremonious part of a funeral march. For no matter how reverently slowly the mourners chose to stride, the solemnity of their pace was also influenced by the practical need to keep the candles burning. This pedestrians’ pace still suggests a limit to the motored hearse’s speed.

Hands Joined in Prayer: 9th Century, Europe

For our ancestors, one of the most ancient and reverential gestures that accompanied prayer was the spreading of arms and hands heavenward. In time, the arms were pulled in, folded across the breast, wrists intersecting above the heart. Each of these gestures possesses an intrinsic logic and obviousness of intent: God resided in the heavens; the heart was the seat of emotions.

The still later practice of joining hands in an apex seems less obvious, if not puzzling.

It is mentioned nowhere in the Bible. It appeared in the Christian Church only in the ninth century. Subsequently, sculptors and painters incorporated it into scenes that predated its origin—which, it turns out, has nothing to do with religion or worship, and owes much to subjugation and servitude.

Religious historians trace the gesture back to the act of shackling a prisoner’s hands together. Although the binding vines, ropes, or handcuffs continued to serve their own law-and-order function, the joined hands came to symbolize man’s submission to his creator.

Substantial historical evidence indicates that the joining of hands became a standard, widely practiced gesture long before it was appropriated and formalized by the Christian Church. Before waving a white flag signaled surrender, a captured Roman could avert immediate slaughter by affecting the shackled-hands posture.

For the early Greeks, the gesture held the magic power to bind occult spirits until they complied with a high priest’s dictates. In the Middle Ages, feudal lords adopted the joining of hands as an action by which their vassals did homage and pledged fealty.

From such diverse practices, all with a common intent, Christianity assumed the gesture as a sign of man’s total obedience to divine authority.
Later, many writers within the Christian Church offered, and encouraged, a more pious and picturesque origin: joined hands represented a church’s pointed steeple.

Rosary: Pre-500
B.C
., India

The term “rosary,” meaning “wreath of roses,” first appeared in fifteenth-century Europe. But the practice of reciting prayers on a string of knots or beads goes back to the Indic priests of the Middle East prior to 500
B.C
. It also developed in the Western world before the dawn of Christianity—and for a very practical reason.

According to many early religions, the frequent repetition of a prayer was believed to increase its efficacy. To beseech the gods,
the
God, or a saint for deliverance from, say, a plague by reciting a prayer a hundred times was twice as effective as saying the same prayer only fifty times. Many religions prescribed the exact number of repetitions of a specific prayer. For instance, the traveling Knights of Templar, founded in the year 1119 to fight in the Crusades, could not attend regular church services and were required to recite the Lord’s Prayer fifty-seven times a day; on the death of a fellow knight, the number increased to a hundred times a day for a week.

Quite simply, to count and pray simultaneously, even with the aid of the fingers, is practically impossible; assistance was required. And the rosary was the perfect memory aid. It was referred to in Sanskrit as the “remembrancer,” and in European languages as the
calculi
and the
numeralia
.

For many peoples, simple memory aids sufficed: strings of fruit pits, dried berries, bones, knotted cords. Priests of the Greek Church tallied their numerous genuflections and signs of the cross with cords of a hundred knots. Wealthy people strung together precious stones, trinkets of glass, and nuggets of gold.

Europeans even referred to a knot, berry, or pit as a prayer; our word “prayer” comes from the Anglo-Saxon for “bead,”
bede
, which in turn derived from
biddan
,“to ask.”

In the eleventh century, the Anglo-Saxon gentlewoman Lady Godiva, famous for her tax-protesting nude ride through Coventry, England, bequeathed to a monastery “a circlet of gems which she had threaded on a string, in order that by fingering them one by one, as she successively recited her prayers, she might not fall short of the exact number.”

It was in the following century that the rosary was popularized in the Catholic Church by the Spanish Saint Dominic, founder of the Friars Preachers, which evolved into the Dominican order of priests. In an apparition, the Virgin Mary asked him to preach the rosary “as a spiritual remedy against heresy and sin.”

Etymologists offer two possible origins for the word “rosary” itself. Many early rosaries had beads carved of rosewood and were known as wreaths
of roses. An alternate theory holds that the linguistic origin is found in the French for “bead,”
rosaire
. In many Mediterranean countries, rosaries were simply called “the beads.”

Halo: Antiquity, Europe and Asia

The luminous circle of light used for centuries by artists to crown the heads of religious figures was originally not a Christian symbol but a pagan one—and was itself the origin of the royal crown.

Early writings and drawings are replete with references to nimbuses of light surrunding the heads of deities. In ancient Hindu, Indian, Greek, and Roman art, gods emit a celestial radiance about the head. Early kings, to emphasize their special relationship to a god, and the divine authority thus invested in them, adopted a crown of feathers, gems, or gold. Roman emperors, convinced of their divinity, seldom appeared in public without a symbolic orb. And the crown of thorns thrust upon Christ’s head was intended as a public mockery of his heavenly kingship.

Through extensive use over time, the circle of light lost its association with pagan gods and became a valid ecclesiastical symbol in its own right for many faiths—with one notable exception. Fathers of the early Catholic Church, perspicacious of the halo’s pagan roots, deliberately discouraged artists and writers from depiction or mention of celestial auras. (Illustrated manuscripts from the Middle Ages reveal the religious admonitions to have been less than one hundred percent effective.)

Historians trace the Church’s gradual adoption of the halo, around the seventh century, to a prosaic, utilitarian function it served: as a kind of umbrella to protect outdoor religious statuary from precipitation, erosion, and the unsightly droppings of birds. Such haloes were large circular plates of wood or brass.

During these centuries, the halo was known by a variety of names—except “halo.”

Etymologists trace the origin of the word to neither its pagan roots nor Christian recognition. Millennia before Christ, farmers threshed grain by heaping the sheaves over hard terrain and driving a team of oxen round and round over them. The circuits created a circular track, which the Greeks called a
halos
, literally “circular threshing floor.” In the sixteenth century, when astronomers reinterpreted the word, applying it to the auras of refracted sunlight around celestial bodies, theologians appropriated it to describe the crown surrounding a saint’s head.

Thus, as one modern religious historian observes, “The halo combines traditions of Greek farming, the Roman deification of megalomaniac rulers, medieval astronomy and an early protective measure against dirt and inclement weather.”

Amen: 2500
B.C
., Egypt

One of the most familiar and frequently used of all religious words, “amen” appears in both early Christian and Moslem writings. The word makes thirteen appearances in the Hebrew Bible; 119 in the New Testament.

To the Hebrews, the word meant “so it is” —expressing assent or agreement, and also signifying truth. Thus, a Hebrew scholar terminating a speech or sermon with “amen” assured his audience that his statements were trustworthy and reliable.

The word originated in Egypt, around 2500
B.C
. To the Egyptians,
Amun
meant “the hidden one” and was the name of their highest deity, at one time worshiped throughout the Middle East. As later cultures invoked the god Jupiter with the exclamation “By Jove!” the Egyptians called on their deity: “By Amun!” It was the Hebrews who adopted the word, gave it a new meaning, and passed it on to the Christians.

The origins of other common religious words:

Pew
. To draw an analogy with a 1960s civil rights issue, a pew was originally the church’s equivalent of the front of the bus.

Our designation of the long seats found in many churches comes from the French
puie
, meaning “raised place” or “balcony.” The French word, in turn, originated from the Latin
podium
, an amphitheater’s balcony reserved for prominent families and royalty.

In colonial America, the European tradition was continued. Certain church seats were cordoned off so Christian families of stature could appreciate sermons on the equality of mankind without having to mix with families of lesser stature. These segregated rows were called “pews.” As the ropes gradually yielded to a doctrine of democracy, the term “pew” came to apply to all rows in a church.

Reverend
. The word has been associated with clergymen since the seventeenth century in England. The designation, from the Latin
reverendus
, meaning “worthy of respect,” was given by British townspeople to their local minister as a gesture of respect for his spiritual leadership.

Pastor
. From the Latin for “shepherd,” since a minister traditionally has been viewed as the shepherd of his flock. Christ often referred to himself as the “Good Shepherd,” willing to lay down his life for his sheep.

Parson
. In colonial America, farmers had little time for education. If they needed certain book information, they turned to the one person in the region esteemed for his formal learning: the minister. Reverently, he was referred to as “the town person,” which when spoken with a heavy New England accent became “the town parson.”

Evangelist
. The term comes from the Greek
evangelion
, meaning “welcome message,” for the traveling preacher was regarded as God’s messenger, the bearer of good news.

The four writers of the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—were known as the Four Evangelists. Later, the term was applied to the religious circuit riders who traveled on horseback to their assigned churches in the western frontier of the United States during the 1890s.

Monsignor
, The term derives from
monseigneur
, French for “my lord.”

Monk
. From the Latin
monachus
, meaning “one who lives alone.” Many of the oldest historical records, sacred and secular, are writings of monks, who were among the relatively few learned people of the Dark Ages.

Abbot
. When Christ prayed to Almighty God, he referred to him as “abba,” which comes from the Hebrew
Ab
, meaning “Father.” St. Paul, emphasizing the theme, urged Christians to employ the term when addressing the Lord. Gradually, the head of a monastery was addressed as “Abbot,” to signify that he was the monks’ spiritual father.

Nun
. In Sanskrit,
nana
meant “mother”; in Latin,
nonna
was “child’s nurse”; in Greek,
nanna
was “aunt”; and the Coptic word
nane
meant “good.” All precursors of “nun,” they say much about the vocation itself. The word for the nun’s traditional garb, the “habit,” is derived from the Latin
habitus
, meaning “appearance” or “dress.”

Vicar
. The term comes from the same root as the word “vicarious,” and it connotes a “substitute” or “representative.” Vicars are Christ’s representatives on earth, and the Pope bears the title “Vicar of Christ.”

The word “
pontiff
” stems from the Latin
pontifex
, meaning “bridge builder,” for one of the pontiff’s principal functions is to build a bridge between God and humankind.

The word “
see
,” as in “Holy See,” is a corruption of the Latin
sedes
, meaning “seat.” It refers to the official headquarters (or seat) of the bishop of Rome, the highest level of church authority. The Pope’s residence was known as the “Holy Seat,” or “Holy See.”

Handshake: 2800
B.C
., Egypt

In its oldest recorded use, a handshake signified the conferring of power from a god to an earthly ruler. This is reflected in the Egyptian verb “to give,” the hieroglyph for which was a picture of an extended hand.

In Babylonia, around 1800
B.C
., it was required that the king grasp the
hands of a statue of Marduk, the civilization’s chief deity. The act, which took place annually during the New Year’s festival, served to transfer authority to the potentate for an additional year. So persuasive was the ceremony that when the Assyrians defeated and occupied Babylonia, subsequent Assyrian kings felt compelled to adopt the ritual, lest they offend a major heavenly being. It is this aspect of the handshake that Michelangelo so magnificently depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.