The Euphemist of Ashtaroth
The Origin of an Orwell Character?
Between 1935 and 1939 George Orwell seems to have been keen on one of the false gods of the Old Testament. “Ashtaroth” first appeared in his poem “St Andrew’s Day”, published in 1935; he gave the composition to Gordon Comstock in his 1936 novel Keep The Aspidistra Flying, eventually quoting it in its entirety; and finally in his 1939 novel Coming Up For Air his character George Bowling mentions Ashtaroth again. It is a word that helps link Orwell to his childhood and to his schooling, and helps identify one of his characters as a portrait of a real person.
Let us take the poem first:
For if in careless summer days
In groves of Ashtaroth we whored,
Repentant now, when winds blow cold,
We kneel before our rightful lord
(Keep The Aspidistra Flying)
It is not clear if Ashtaroth is a place, where “of” indicates that the groves are in Ashtaroth, or whether the groves are “of Ashtaroth” in the sense of being dedicated to him, her or it. I take it that we reject immediately the idea that the groves are the lawful possessions of someone named Ashtaroth, though if the dedication sense is taken then it is possible that “groves” indicates not one place of many trees but many such sites.
What is the origin of the word “Ashtaroth”? It is Biblical – there seem to be two spellings in the Authorised Version, and two meanings: Ashtoreth and Ashtaroth. Orwell uses only the latter.
Who or what was Ashtaroth?
And they forsook the LORD, and served Baal and Ashtaroth.
Judges 2:13
Baal and Ashtaroth were husband and wife gods of the Babylonians, and while Baal remains known under that name today, Ashtaroth is more usually called Ishtar. Using her biblical name she is mentioned at least eleven times in the Old Testament, in Judges 2:13, 1 Samuel 7:4, Joshua 12:4, Joshua 13:12, Joshua 9:10, 1 Samuel 31:10, 1 Chronicles 6:71, 1 Samuel 12:10, Joshua 13:31, 1 Samuel 7:3, and Judges 10:6.
Meanwhile, what of its other use?
And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which was of the remnant of the giants, that dwelt at Ashtaroth and at Edrei,
Joshua 12:4
Ashtaroth as a place is thought to be somewhere on the Golan Heights, where many prehistoric stone structures still exist, once taken to be evidence of past giants.
With the connection of Ashtaroth and Og king of Bashan, like Orwell’s George Bowling, is where we can go back. For George Bowling remembered being in church and the name of Og the King of Bashan being bellowed as the congregation recited Psalm 135 (this would have been from the Book of Common Prayer rather than the King James Bible, though Orwell does not specify this, perhaps thinking it was too obvious). It was the key to memory, inspired by seeing a reference to the marriage of Albanian King Zog he tells us, that set off Bowling’s adventures in nostalgia. Consequently,
I’m back in Lower Binfield, and the year’s 1900… and Sihon king of the Amorites and Og the king of Bashan are sitting on their thrones looking at one another – not doing anything exactly, just existing, keeping their appointed place, like a couple of fire-dogs, or the Lion and the Unicorn.
(Coming Up For Air)
Before that, though, Bowling had been disturbed and gone for conversation with an older and better educated man: Porteous, someone addressed, like many of Orwell’s own colleagues, by surname alone.
Porteous is a retired public-school master. He lives in rooms, which luckily are in the lower half of the house, in the old part of the town, near the church. He’s a bachelor, of course. You can’t imagine that kind married. Lives all alone with his books and his pipe and has a woman in to do for him. He’s a learned kind of chap, with his Greek and Latin and poetry and all that.
Though Porteous and Bowling would have little in common if Porteous is a classicist and Bowling goes to meetings of the Left Book Club, they do have something they share, as Bowling tells us:
… we meet on common ground when it comes to dirty stories. They’re the one modern thing he cares about, though, as he’s always reminding me, they aren’t modern. He’s rather old-maidish about it, always tells a story in a veiled kind of way. Sometimes he’ll pick out some Latin poet and translate a smutty rhyme, leaving a lot to your imagination, or he’ll drop hints about the private lives of the Roman emperors and the things that went on in the temples of Ashtaroth.
And there we are back in company with Ashtaroth. Bowling goes on to emphasise Porteous’s old-maidishness, telling us:
Old Porteous shies a bit at the world ‘bloody’, which he doesn’t like, though of course it’s part of his pose never to be shocked.
(Coming Up For Air, Part III, chapter one)
Who in Orwell’s experience was a classicist and also an “old maid”? The Provost of Eton College from 1918 to 1936 seems to fit closely. He was M.R.. James. The critic Rosemary Pardoe has given us several descriptions of James and his treatment of the classics:
… even considered as a man of his time, he had a tendency to excessive prudishness
(The Black Pilgrimage p232)
… the practice of his generation of omitting, or leaving ‘in the decent obscurity of a learned tongue’, the more indelicate passages
(C. N. L. Brooke, and R. A. B. Mynors, quoted by Rosemary Pardoe, p232)
Usually he included the offending passages but left them untranslated [but at least once James commented] ‘I have omitted several clauses, and that there and elsewhere I have disguised certain phrases’
(The Black Pilgrimage, pp223-224)
Rosemary Pardoe goes on to note of James’s explanation for his redactions that it “comes over as stuffy, even for ‘his generation’” (The Black Pilgrimage, p233). When one realises that the title of Mrs Pardoe’s book comes from James’ story “Count Magnus” where he wrote
…the Count had been on the Black Pilgrimage, and had brought something or someone back with him.
You will naturally inquire, as Mr. Wraxall did, what the Black Pilgrimage may have been. But your curiosity on the point must remain unsatisfied for the time being, just as his did.
one can see that he practised in his fiction what he practised in his conversation. He does, though, eventually explain that the Black Pilgrimage was to Chorazin, where “our old priests say that Antichrist is to be born”. The idea of Chorazin (which is north of the Sea of Galilee) as birthplace of the Antichrist comes from the Dark Age Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, of which James who had published volumes of the Apocryphal Old Testament and Apocryphal New Testament would have been aware. The idea of a “Black Pilgrimage”, though, was exclusively his: it is a fiction, like his invention of the three buried crowns which protect the Saxon Shore in his “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad”. Which makes the identification of Orwell’s Porteous with James all the more likely – Bowling is inventing, like James, “temples of Ashtaroth”.
We saw that “Ashtaroth” ran through Orwell’s work for nearly half a decade. In one of Bowling’s statements we can see the beginnings of another phrase – “the Lion and the Unicorn” – that was to occupy Orwell for years to come. That, though, is for discussion elsewhere.
Finally, it is worth considering Bowling’s opinion of Porteous as he reads aloud:
… a curious thought struck me. He’s dead. He’s a ghost.
All people like that are dead. It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead.
What would M. R. James have made of that?
*
References:
Rosemary Pardoe, The Black Pilgrimage & Other Explorations: Essays on Supernatural Fiction (Shadow Publishing, 2018)
M. R. James, C. N. L. Brooke, and R. A. B. Mynors (eds), Oxford Medieval Texts: Walter Map: De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles (Oxford University Press, 1983)
Luke Seaber, “M.R. James and George Orwell: Biographical Notes and a Possible Literary Influence” (Ghosts & Scholars M.R. James Newsletter 14, September 2008)
Ashtoreth and Ashtaroth (KJV throughout)
“And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which was of the remnant of the giants, that dwelt at Ashtaroth and at Edrei” ((Joshua 12:4)
Ashtoreth
1 Kings 11:5, 1 Kings 11:33, 2 Kings 23:13
Ashtaroth
Judges 2:13, 1 Samuel 7:4, Joshua 12:4, Joshua 13:12, Joshua 9:10, 1 Samuel 31:10, 1 Chronicles 6:71, 1 Samuel 12:10, Joshua 13:31, 1 Samuel 7:3, Judges 10:6
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