Such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy emperor awake Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

I woke with these lines from Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium" in mind. I have known them by heart since my early teens. I thought, as Yeats the magus did, of vehicles of soul and ancient statue magic. Then the historian in me wanted to check the details.

All Yeats said about the origin of his imagery was that “I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang." [1]

Those who have investigated the spources available to Yeats in languages he could read have concluded that his main - and probably only - source was a brief passage in Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on the emperor Theophilus. We can now range further.

The Frankish ambassador Liudprand of Cremona, who visited Constantinople in 949, reported that "In front of the imperial throne stood a certain tree of gilt bronze, whose branches, similarly gilt bronze, were filled with birds of different sizes, which emitted the songs of the different birds corresponding to their species."

The mechanical magic was not confined to singing birds. The emperor's throne was fitted out so it could be raised up to the ceiling, from whence the ruler could look down godlike on his courtiers and guests. Liudprand goes on: "The emperor's throne was made in such a cunning manner that at one moment it was down on the ground, while at another it rose higher and was to be seen up in the air. This throne was of immense size and was, as it were, guarded by lions, made either of bronze or wood covered with gold, which struck the ground with their tails and roared with open mouth and quivering tongue". When a visitor was received, the lions began to roar and the bords started singing. The visitor was expected to prostartte himslef three times. When he rose, he would fimnd the meperor seated high above hom. Liudprand averred that "I was moved neither by fear nor astonishment [however] I could not think how this was done, unless perhaps he was lifted up by some such machine as is used for raising the timbers of a wine press".[2]

After the sack of Constantinople by the Franks in the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Robert de Clari wrote that he saw mechanical figures of incredible verisimilitude that used to "play by enchantment" - giuer par encantement. "There were figures of men and women, and of horses and oxen and camels and bears and lions and of many manner of beasts, all made of copper, and which were so well made and so naturally formed that there is not a master in heathendom or Christendom who has enough skill as to make figures as good as these figures were made. And in the past they used to perform by enchantment, but they do not play any longer. And the Franks looked at the Games of the Emperor in wonder when they saw it." [3]

The more I read, the more I wanted to identify the golden tree. Historian Allegra Iafrate makes a convincing case that it was a plane tree (platanus). In the Greek world plane trees were admired for their longevity, stature and shade. In Persian tradition - interwoven with Greek, as the vine embraces the plane tree - the chinār (plane) was venerated. Herodotus and Xenophon both wrote that Persian kings had golden plane trees in their palaces. The Persians believed that plane trees sometimes housed souls of the dead, and listening to wind and spirit by a plane tree was a recognized form of divination. [4]

The "Grecian goldsmiths" were also influenced by the fabrications of the Abbasid court in Baghdad. In 917, Byzantine ambassadors arrived at the court of the Abbasid caliph Al-Muqtadir. They were greeted with an elaborate ceremony, and led through room after room in the palace. Near the end of the tour, they were shown into a chamber where "the amazement of the ambassador grew even greater upon entering the Tree Room [Dar ash-Shajarah]; for there he gazed upon birds fashioned out of silver and whistling with every motion, while perched on a tree of silver weighing 500 dirhams." [5] The Byzantine emperor Theophilus is said to have instructed his craftsmen to copy this marvelous tree. It stood at the centre of a pool, surrounded by armored knights, its branches full of singing mechanical birds - and who knows how many itinerant souls?

1. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1933) 450.

1. The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona trans. Paolo Squatriti (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2007), 197–98.

2. Robert de Clari, La Conquete de Constantinople, ed. Philippe Lauer (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Edouard Champion, 1924), 88. 3. Allegra Iafrate, The Wandering Throne of Solomon Objects and Tales of Kingship in the Medieval Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2015) 79-80.

4. Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi translated in Jacob Lassner, The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970) 88.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss

The Empress and her red-hot lover, Jesus

Empress Zoe does not appear to mind that the emperor has installed his official mistress in the Grand Palace, right opposite her own apartments. She has her own red-hot lover, Jesus.
    The rapture she shares with him is not a disembodied transport of the spirit. She has helped to create a physical body in which she may commune with Jesus in her private chamber. This is a full-size statue, anatomically complete, that has many properties that seem bizarre but were not unknown to crafters of "breathing images" in many cultures, from Egypt and Mesopotamia to the crumbling Byzantine empire to Hindu or Tibetan Buddhist temples today. A modern sex shop could no doubt produce a superior technical version, but you would have to shop elsewhere for the psychospiritual battery.
     The empress believes her statue to be fully aliveand ensouled. She kisses and caresses it. In moments of distress, she alternately clasps the icon, speaks to it as to a living person, addresses it as her lover, or flings herself to the ground, wailing and beating her breast.
     Beyond this, the complexion of her savior of the bedchamber is quite changeable. She uses the changes in color as a mode of divination. When Jesus turns pallid, she is stricken with fear than an evil event will take place, to the point where she may throw herself to the floor and beat her breast and rend her clothes. When Jesus turns ruddy, however, she is assured that her affairs - and those of the empire - will go well. She gives advice to her husband, the Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, based on the skin tone of her holy statue.
    She feeds the spirit in the statue with perfumes and incense, in immense quantities. Any necromancer knows that spirits don't feed on gross food and drink, but on the essence or vapor of things; they are sniffers rather than swallowers. Fires burn in braziers day and night in the empress' chambers, even in the full heat of summer, as she keeps her retainers working to produce new aromas to please and feed her spirit lover and keep him lively in the body she has crafted for him. Aromatic substances are placed inside the effigy, to fuel and recharge its spirit.
     A fantasy story? No more than other episodes of Byzantine history, carefully recorded in the 11th-century Chronographia of Michael Psellus and available in a Penguin translation retitled Fourteen Byzantine Rulers. Psellus [1]was no minor clerk who gathered gossip; he was the foremost philosopher and orator of his day and an imperial counselor who rose as high as prime minister. He became a monk but loved the Neoplatonists more than the scriptures, on the evidence of his books, and did more than anyone in his age to rescue their w0rks from obscurity. Byzantine scholar John Duffy says of Psellus: "Singlehandedly, he was responsible for bringing back, almost from the dead, an entire group of occult authors and books whose existence had long been as good as forgotten." [2]
    His understanding of what was going on between Zoe and her Jesus statue was informed by first-hand observation, and also by the study of works on theurgy: a lost commentary by Proclus and the Chaldaean Oracles, an essential text for practitioners of high magic in late antiquity. Psellus was not only a learned man; he sought "a wisdom which is beyond all demonstration, apprehensible only by the intellect of a wise man, in moments of inspiration." [3]


Graphic: mosaic of  Empress Zoe with Jesus and her third husband, the emperor Constantine IX. Her face was repainted at least twice. Here she is at least 70 but made to look much younger. 

Notes
1. Psellos, in Greek, means "Stammerer". Maybe Michael Psellos (like Demosthenes) had to overcome an early speech defect; he was certainly no stammerer when it came to winning the ear of emperors. His surname is widely latinized as Psellus.
2. John Duffy, "Reactions of Two Byzantine Intellectuals to the Theory and Practice of Magic: Michael Psellos and Michael Italikos" in Henry Maguire (ed) Byzantine Magic (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995) p. 83.
3. E.R.A. Sewter (trans) Fourteen Byzantine Rules: The Chronographia of Michael Psellus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) p.175

A world-city that rose from a dream

After he made himself master of the Roman world, the emperor Constantine traveled to the site of Troy, in Asia Minor. He had decided to found a new capital for the eastern empire, and thought that Troy - the legendary origin of the first Romans - would have the required mythic cachet. Inside the ruined walls of the city, however, he heard a voice telling him, "The city of Priam belongs to the past. Leave it in the past."

Afterwards, he crossed the Bosporus to the small Greek city of Byzantion, founded in the 7th century BCE by one Byzes, and initially settled by colonists from Athens and Megara. Here Constantine spent the night and dreamed, of a very old woman who became young again. On waking, he concluded that this would be the site of Nova Roma (New Rome), the place where a decrepit, elderly and dissipated world-city could rise again from its ruinous past. In 330 CE, following the dream, Constantine laid out the new city that would be known to the world, after him, as Constantinople, or, in its heyday, as simply The City.

After the Ottomans under the young Sultan Mehmed II broke down the previously impregnable walls of Constantinople in 1453, they renamed it Istanbul.

The story of the voice and the dream is less solidly evidenced than that of an earlier vision, followed by a dream, that led Constantine to march into battle under a Christian cross (the chi-ro symbol rather than the cross of Calvary) to victory over a rival emperor at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, before Rome, in 312 CE. I have discussed that sequence, which arguably led Rome (and thereby the West) to choose Christianity its established religion, in my Secret History of Dreaming. Maybe Constantine and his advisors simply had the smarts to appreciate the high strategic value of the site of the old Greek town commanding the trade routes between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and the crossings between Europe and Asia.

     I am tickled by the legend that Constantinople became a world city because of a dream. Se non è vero, è ben trovato; "if it's not true, it's well found."  The Ottoman empire, according to another (Turkish) legend also owed its origin to a dream, the dream of Osman, but this is a story for another time.

Graphic: Constantine's Dream by Piero della Francesca (1466)