QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (44 page)

What’s wrong with it is the size of the pot.

Producing a watertight metal pot large enough to hold a person requires industrial technology that was new, even to the West, in the nineteenth century. In reality, you were much more likely to be butchered and roasted in small joints, or else smoked and salted for snacking on later.

The word ‘cannibal’ comes from a misrecording of the name for the Central American Carib tribe by Columbus in 1495. He reported finding a recently abandoned ‘Canib’ feast of human limbs simmering in small cauldrons and roasting on spits.

Other explorers reported cannibalism in South America, Africa, Australia, New Guinea and throughout the Pacific. Captain Cook was in no doubt that the Maori ate enemies taken in battle. During his second voyage, his lieutenant, Charles Clerke, grilled a portion of head at the behest of a Maori warrior and records that he ‘devour’d it most ravenously, and suck’d his fingers
½
a dozen times over in raptures’.

William Arens’s influential
The Man-Eating Myth
(1979) argued that these stories were racist lies invented to justify
Western colonialism. It resulted in a period of ‘cannibal denial’ among anthropologists.

However, more recent discoveries have led most historians and anthropologists to accept that cannibalism was practised by many tribal cultures, mostly for ritual purposes, sometimes for food.

The last society to admit to ritual cannibalism, the Fore tribe of New Guinea, stopped in the mid-1950s after an outbreak of
kuru
, a brain disease contracted through eating human brain and spinal tissue.

There is also archaeological evidence. Collections of butchered human remains have even been found in France, Spain and Britain. Some of the British remains date from 30
BC
to
AD
130, suggesting that the Romans’ belief that the ancient Britons ate people was justified.

In October 2003, the inhabitants of a Fijian village announced that they would be making a formal apology to the family of the Rev. Thomas Baker, an English missionary killed and eaten by their ancestors in 1867. They’d even tried to eat his boots, but these proved too tough and were returned to the Methodist Church in 1993.

There is no tradition of sticking pins in dolls to harm people in voodoo (known as
vodun
in Benin;
voudou
in Haiti and
vudu
in the Dominican Republic).

The magical practices of voodoo are complex and originated in West Africa before being exported to the Caribbean and America.

Healing is at the heart of most of the rituals. The closest thing to a ‘voodoo doll’ is a wooden figure called a
bocheo
(literally ‘empowered figure’) that contains small peg holes. Twigs are inserted into the appropriate hole, and used to channel healing energy.

The voodoo doll of popular myth derives from a
European
figure called a ‘poppet’ (from the Latin
pupa
for ‘doll’), traditionally used in witchcraft. It originated in ancient Greek dolls used as protective effigies called
kolossoi
. The poppet doll, made from clay, wax, cotton, corn or fruit, became a symbol of the life of the subject – whatever was done to the doll would happen to the person.

King James I mentions them in his
Demonology
(1603):

‘To some others at these times he [the Devil] teacheth, how to make Pictures of wax or clay: that by the roasting thereof, the persons that they bear the name of, may be continually melted or dried away by continual sicknesse.’

It was the early colonists and slave owners who projected forbidden European ‘black magic’ practices on to voodoo, adding their suspicions of cannibalism, zombies and human sacrifice to spice up their stories. It was these that captured the popular imagination, and stimulated the appetites of early film-makers and dime-store novelists, fixing the idea of voodoo as dark and fearful.

The idea of sticking pins into people and meditating on suffering is not entirely foreign to Christianity. Some of the more grisly Counter-Reformation images of the Crucifixion leave little to the imagination.

Voodoo has made its peace with Christianity: the two traditions co-exist quite happily. A common Haitian saying is that ‘Haitians are 80 per cent Catholic and 100 per cent Voodoo’.

You may be performing a sinister parody of the Roman Catholic Latin mass.

The theory goes that in the days when the priest celebrated the Mass facing the altar the congregation mimicked his gestures and the words as they misheard them behind his back. Thus the words ‘hokey pokey’ are a corruption of the Latin phrase:
Hoc est enim corpus meum
(‘This is my body’).

It may also be related ‘hocus pocus’, the old conjuror’s phrase dating from the early seventeenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century this had been contracted to make a new word, ‘hoax’.

Whatever the origin, ‘hokey-pokey’ came to mean ‘nonsense’ and attached itself to early ice-cream street vendors who sold it as ‘Hokey-pokey penny a lump’. Ice cream with toffee in it is still called Hokey-pokey in New Zealand and Australia.

In Britain a dance with lyrics called ‘The Cokey Cokey’ was copyrighted in 1942 by Jimmy Kennedy of ‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ fame. It seems to have been appropriated by a GI called Larry Laprise (a.k.a. ‘The Hokey Pokey Man’) who carried it back to the US were he and two friends adapted it for the après-ski crowd at a nightclub in Sun Valley, Idaho. His group, the Ram Trio, recorded the song as ‘The Hokey Pokey’ in 1949 and it became a dance-floor favourite. In Britain it caught on as the hokey-cokey.

Kennedy always claimed it his version was based on a traditional Canadian folk song, but it also seems to bear a striking resemblance to a Shaker song from Kentucky called ‘The Hinkum-Booby’: I put my right hand in, I put my right hand out, I give my right hand a shake, And I turn it all about.

Whoever wrote it, and despite its possible religious (or Satanic) resonances, the dance become a firm favourite with
foreign language teachers trying to get students to remember the names of their body parts in other languages.

It’s actually Monday the 27th.

Analysis of a million insurance claims by the British Automobile Association has revealed that accidents are more likely to happen on Monday the 27th than on any other day. Researchers believe this might be the result of a combination of post-weekend and end-of-the-month tiredness – others have speculated it’s because most people get paid on the last Friday of the month, and so are more likely to drink heavily over the following weekend.

The fear of Friday the 13th (which you now know to be totally unfounded) is called paraskavedekatriaphobia. It derives from two separate superstitions: that thirteen is unlucky and that Friday is too. Friday’s reputation is said to come from the fact that it was the day that Jesus was crucified, although both Buddhists and Hindus also consider Friday unlucky. Ancient Norsemen, by contrast, considered Friday the luckiest day of the week and, in parts of southern Europe, it is Tuesday the 13th that is feared. One theory is that the fear of Tuesdays dates to the Fall of Constantinople (on Tuesday 29 May 1453).

Although it appears in Roman, Norse and Babylonian traditions, the fear of the number thirteen didn’t surface in modern Europe until the late seventeenth century, when it was held to be unlucky to invite thirteen guests to dinner because of the Last Supper (Judas being the last to sit down). In nineteenth-century Paris, an institution called the
quatorzièmes 
(or ‘fourteeners’) would sit at home, fully dressed for dinner, between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., ready to step in if a dinner party was found to have thirteen guests. The word for ‘fear of the number 13’, triskaidekaphobia (from Greek
tris
, three,
kai
, and,
deka
, ten and
phobia
, fear), is even more recent. It only appeared in 1911.

In Sikhism, on the other hand, thirteen is a propitious number. In several northern Indian languages, the word
tera
, meaning thirteen, also means ‘yours’. The story goes that, when Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of the Sikh religion, was working as the keeper of the state granary, he would take stock by counting to twelve and then stop, leaving the rest to God or giving it away to the customers. When he was accused of malpractice and his records were checked, they were found to be in perfect order.

Thirteen was clearly also a deeply significant number for the founding fathers of the United States. There were thirteen original colonies and the first US flag had thirteen stars and stripes. Whenever a new state has joined the Union a star has been added but there are still only thirteen stripes. On the American one-dollar bill there are thirteen levels of the truncated pyramid, thirteen stripes on the flag, thirteen letters in the motto
e pluribus unum
, thirteen stars above the Eagle, thirteen leaves on the olive branch, thirteen arrows held by the Eagle and thirteen bars on the shield.

Somewhere between two and twenty.

It has generally been assumed that there were three of them because they brought three gifts, but it is quite possible that
there were four and one forgot to get a present until after the shops were closed and had to come in on the frankincense.

In St Matthew’s Gospel the number of wise men is never mentioned. Besides, Jesus seems not to have been a baby but a young child, living in a house not a stable.

Most scholars agree that the Magi were Zoroastrian astrologer-priests but their number varies from two to twenty. It wasn’t until the sixth century that three was settled on as the standard.

The Church has now started to backtrack on this. In February 2004, the General Synod of the Church of England agreed a revision to the Book of Common Prayer. Their committee decided that the term ‘Magi’ was a transliteration of the name used by officials at the Persian court, and that they could well have been women.

‘While it seems very unlikely that these Persian court officials were female, the possibility that one or more of the Magi were female cannot be excluded completely,’ the report concluded. ‘“Magi” is a word which discloses nothing about numbers, wisdom, or gender. The visitors were not necessarily wise and not necessarily men.’

Depending on your age, the answer is likely to be the North Pole, Lapland or Coca-Cola. None of them is right: Santa, like St George, is Turkish.

St Nicholas – the real Santa – lived and performed miracles in what is now the sun-baked town of Demre in south-western Turkey. His most famous miracles usually involved children. In one, he restored to life three children who’d been chopped
up by the local tavern owner and kept in a brine tub.

Being kind to children explains his suitability as a Christmas saint, but St Nick is also the patron saint of judges, pawnbrokers, thieves, merchants, bakers, sea travellers and, oddly, murderers.

Italian sailors stole St Nicholas’s miraculously myrrhexuding bones in 1087. Turkey is still demanding their return.

In the rest of Europe, the benign St Nicholas fused with older darker mythological types – in eastern Germany he is known as Shaggy Goat, Ashman or Rider. In Holland he is Sinterklass, attended by the sinister ‘Black Peters’.

The jolly ‘Coca-Cola’ Santa existed well before Haddon Sundblom’s famous advertising images of the 1930s. His illustrations, and those of Thomas Nast in the 1860s, were based on New Yorker Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ (better known as ‘The Night before Christmas’).

Moore was an unlikely author – his day-job was as a Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages – but the poem’s importance in fuelling the Santa myth would be hard to exaggerate. It moves the legend to Christmas Eve and, instead of the dour St Nick, describes a rotund, twinkly-eyed, white-bearded elf, with fur-trimmed red clothes, reindeer with cute names, a sledge that landed on rooftops and a sack full of toys. It became one of the most popular children’s poems of all time.

It’s not clear when the North Pole and the factory of elves became attached to the story, but it was established enough by 1927 for the Finns to claim that Santa Claus lived in Finnish Lapland, as no reindeer could live at the North Pole because there was no lichen.

Santa’s official post office is in Rovaniemi, capital of Lapland. He receives 600,000 letters a year.

As if in revenge for his secular success, the Vatican demoted St Nicholas’s saint’s day (6 December) from obligatory to voluntary observance in 1969.