Stealing Fire: John Colarusso and the Tales of the Narts

A fountain in Vladikavkaz, Russia with the Nart Sosruquo, dancing on the edge of a magic bowl. (Image courtesy Lhiten Hatko.)

A range of mountains cuts diagonally across the body of land between the Black and Caspian Seas. It is a land rich in folklore and may preserve details of myths that we have lost from the canon of Western knowledge. The Nart tales, stories of superhuman men and women who strove against monsters and gods, are popular and beloved among the people of the Caucasus and those in diaspora around the globe, but these stories have only been available in English to the wider reading public for twenty years or so. Their availability to English readers is largely the responsibility of one scholar, Canadian linguist and anthropologist, John Colarusso.

The Greek myths tell of a people in the wondrous east, a land of female warriors and sorcerers. Circe and the Amazons and the land of the Golden fleece were all inspired by the people of the Caucuses. Those Caucasian peoples in turn told stories that seemed to look to the west: of a demi-god punished for stealing the holy fire by being bound to a mountain; of a hero who fought a cyclopean giant in his cave and freed its prisoners by lashing them under the monster's sheep. But the stories you aren't likely to recognize are perhaps the greater value. The stories that point to lost pantheons, lost elements of the western cycles of mythology and stories that teach us that women are not only equal to men; sometimes they are greater.

The “Narts” of Colarusso’s Nart Sagas; Ancient Myths and Legends of the Circassians and Abkhazians are heroes. They are said in some tales to predate and to be larger than modern humans. The word Nart translates to “manly man,” or heroic man, and is related to the Indo European root that gives us the Greek root andro- for man (though it is used almost as an honorific before the names of males and females in the stories). Reading the tales I was struck by certain elements that mark them as folk tales and other elements that struck me as interconnected mythology. For instance, there is a tale early in the collection reminiscent of Grimms’ “The Golden Bird,” wherein three brothers stand watch over successive nights by an apple tree, but only the youngest witnesses a bird stealing the apples. The Nart tale’s mythological component is that the apples play a role in the fertility of Nart women. It is reminiscent of Idunn’s youth-restoring apples. Furthermore, the youngest of the sons in the Nart tale is Warzameg, a recurring character who becomes the leader of the Narts. The tales are a motley and exciting bunch in this regard and also in that they vary between prose and verse. They seem to me an opportunity to read stories that have been documented at a point where they may be on the verge of becoming something else. It is important to note for those with some knowledge of Nart stories that Colarusso has also edited a collection of Ossetian Nart tales that have been available in English longer and seem to be in a more developed literary state, closer to an epic cycle, with characters and likely tales that overlap with those of the Circassian and Abkhazian collection. I have not yet read the Ossetian tales and my descriptions and comments deal solely with Colarusso’s translations of the Circassian and Abkhazian tales.

Sosruquo returns to his men with fire by Murat Dyshek, National Museum of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Nalchik.

When I started researching this article, and rereading Colarusso’s Circassian and Abkhazian Nart tales, I discovered that everything I found in English regarding Narts was related to Colarusso’s work. I first read the collection four years ago and would post online about stories I found exciting or unusual, and the Narts seemed to be as new and unknown to my friends. Given that since that time I’ve never seen folklore and mythology-savvy people mention the Narts, and all Nart materials only related to one scholar, I began to wonder, briefly, if I had stumbled upon a work of fiction meant to look like folktales and had been tricked! This is not the case. If one speaks Russian or at least reads some Cyrillic, they will find no difficulty in locating information about Narts online. But Colarusso’s almost unique status in the field in English is worth noting. “I seem to have kicked the door open,” said Colarusso.

Colarusso is a man who was destined for scholarship in some field. He started in physics, but the vicissitudes of scholarship grants and programs saw him shift to philosophy, where he had to learn Greek, and, eventually, he found himself studying linguistics. The Harvard linguistics program at the time required him to learn a language and become an expert in that language’s family. He chose Circassian, because he was drawn to the complexity of the grammar and phonology. Colarusso conjectures that it is likely the difficulty of Circassian languages that has kept English speakers from bringing the Nart tales to a wider English-speaking audience. A Circassian speaker is able to hear and distinguish roughly twice the number of consonant sounds than the twenty-four an English speaker regularly uses. The story may not be fair to the language, but Colarusso said that his brother-in-law, a medical doctor, once rushed into his room at the sound of the language. “The very first time I recorded some words...I was playing the recording and my brother-in-law came running into the room thinking I was throwing up. And I said ‘No, no, these are the sounds I recorded today and I am not sick.’”

Nart horsemen by artist Umar Mizhalani. (Image courtesy Lhiten Hatko.)

Colarusso says that his ability to hear and learn Circassian and other languages (he listed five or more other languages, living and dead, that he has learned or worked in, in addition to the northern Causasian tongues he is expert in) likely owes itself to his childhood in understanding his father's mother, who only spoke an Italian dialect. “It’s a queer savant ability, nothing to do with intellect, really.” Colarusso also credits his mother and grandmother with his interest in mythology. While he isn’t a trained folklorist, Colarusso’s knowledge and interest in Indo European mythologies is sprinkled through Nart Sagas, where, in his notes, he does not seem to miss an opportunity to make connections between any detail in a story that seems to reflect a connection to another tale. In this way, mythology enthusiasts will get many references to Greek, Celtic, Germanic and Indic tales.

Colarusso’s Nart Sagas text grew out of his desire to cement his Circassian language skills. He earned a grant to translate regional cycles of Nart tales and did so with the help of ex-pat Circassians living in New Jersey (and later Austria). Colarusso said that they would provide him with suggestions of tales to work on and would supply him with “pidgin English” crib sheets that were indecipherable as English, but helped him to further understand Circassian. English-speaking Circassians know Colarusso’s work. When I was searching for art to run with this piece, the admin of a Circassian cultural group online immediately recommended I speak to Colarusso. Colarusso’s linguistic and cultural knowledge in the Caucasus have also been tapped by two U.S. administrations. When the Nart project was over, though, the tales went into a file drawer and sat for a decade until his wife discovered the files and told him to publish them.

Respect Your Wife!

The Nart sorceress Qaydukh, lighting her husband's way across the linen bridge. (Image courtesy Lhiten Hatko.)

The consequences of disrespecting or undervaluing one’s wife was one of the more surprising themes in Colarusso’s collection. In two of the tales, a husband who disrespects his wife’s contribution to the household dies when she unexpectedly revokes that help. My favorite version of the tale had a passage that so articulated the invisible labor of women that I posted it on International Women’s Day a few weeks ago: “[Psabida] set off in the night. He wore a coat made by Qaydukh and shoes made by Qaydukh. She was the woman who did all that for him. She is the woman. If not for her, he could not have done those things for himself.” Psabida’s horse so loves his wife (who cares for it when Psabida returns from a raid) that it rebels against its master because he had a fight with his wife. In this and another version of a similar tale, the husband dies, but defying my expectations for this sort of a story, the wife is rewarded rather than punished. In each version she gets a better husband, who respects her. There is a sentimental spin on the theme in another tale in which the head of the Narts feels he must divorce his wife because people say he derives his greatness from her. The conclusion brought tears to my eyes.

The Smith and the Invulnerable Hero

Nart Lady Setenaya and the divine smith Tlepsh at the birth of the hero Sosruquo in a painting by Marina Bekaldy. (Image courtesy Lhiten Hatko.)

The most memorable hero of the collection, for his conception and birth, is the Nart Sosruquo, the invulnerable man. The story is retold with slightly different details in regional versions in Colarusso’s collection, but Sosruquo is generally birthed from a stone by the Nart blacksmith Tlepsh, a figure who also stands apart in the tales as a divine though he lives among men. At birth Sosruquo’s flesh is searing hot to the touch and Tlepsh alternately hammers and douses the child, hardening his flesh to the toughness of metal. In one version he dips the newborn in molten iron and feeds it to him by the bowlful. The following detail also makes Sosruquo interesting as a matter of comparative mythology: Sosruquo’s legs are vulnerable because that is where Tlepsh holds him with his tongs. This, of course, recalls the flawed heel of the Greek Achilles, a hero also burned in divine fires to remove his mortality.

The association of more than one nigh-invulnerable European hero with heat, fire or a smith, makes Colarusso believe that the Sosruquo story preserves an element that may once have applied to all of them. The Irish hero Cuchulainn, for example, derives his popular name from the smith Culann; he is “the hound of Culann.” Furthermore, Cuchulainn’s body heats up in battle to the extent that he must be repeatedly dunked in water afterwards, causing much the same result as dousing hot metal: the water rapidly boils. Cuchulainn and Achilles are both also described as dark of skin, perhaps a detail left over from a forging tale similar to Sosruquo’s. Sigurd the dragon slayer, from the Volsung Saga, derives his limited invulnerability by covering himself in the blood of a dragon, but he too is raised by a blacksmith. Like Achilles and Sosruquo, he is vulnerable in a spot that he missed.

It is more often though the unprecedented detail of the Circassian and Abkhazian Nart tales that delights, as with the tales of wives who gain the upper hand. I may also have buried the lede on Sosruquo’s conception, which is the only long-range projectile insemination I have ever read. And if that isn’t enough to entice you, yet another tale might well be retitled, “How the Narts Stopped Throwing their Elders from the Cliff.” The Nart tales are fresh and fun and may well prove themselves indispensable to the study of Indo European mythologies.

The images in this article were provided by Lhiten Hatko, administrator of the Circassians UK group on Facebook. Hatko and members of the group were indispensable in researching the artwork.

NASA Channels its Inner Goddess; Breaking Boundaries with Artemis

NASA-produced art representing woman on the moon from the Artemis program marketing campaign: “Her features are abstract enough that all women can see themselves in her.” (NASA)

This is a story about two gods and an American space agency that has decided to use both of them to sell a very similar mission.

The words “lunar landing” conjure images of the past for most Americans: crew cuts; horn-rimmed glasses; analogue instruments; white, masculine faces. Apollo was an achievement of the century, but a century in which women were not often encouraged to wear scientific laurels. Almost seventy years later, NASA wants to return to the moon, but it is a very different time with different power brokers and a different electorate. When leaders at NASA went to Congress to make the pitch, this time they sold an image with a distinctly female face and a goddess’s name to go with it.

In May 2019, NASA announced the Artemis program, tasked with returning man to the moon and bringing woman this time as well. Artemis, Greek goddess of the moon and more, is also twin sister to the god Apollo, for whom the original moon missions were named. With budget shortfalls and the distinct uncertainty of the success of the program, at least as currently planned, the space agency’s dynamic webpage and colorful cell phone wallpapers are all the more interesting in that they seem aimed at casting a net designed to capture the attention of American women. All stress what is history-making about the program, and may help it garner additional support: the first woman stepping foot on the moon.

Artemis, Twin Sister of Apollo

Comparisons of art and insignias from Artemis to Apollo show NASA’s desire to recall its great, 20th-century accomplishment. (Courtesy collectSPACE.com)

All of this had me wondering how much has changed in American (and NASA’s) culture that NASA would choose Artemis, goddess of the moon, in 2019 when it did not do so in 1960s. Artemis’s brother Apollo, associated with the sun, light, prophecy and arts claimed that prize. How much had changed in American culture and gender politics for NASA to choose the first feminine name for a major manned space mission?

Margaret A. Weitekamp, historian and curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, said that while NASA does not have complete gender equality, women have worked there in important roles for the last fifty years. She sees Artemis, both the mission and the selling of the mission, as the natural conclusion of this history. “The attempt to foreground an appeal to women or to having an explicitly mixed gender group going to the moon, I think is a reflection of changes that have been under way at NASA since the seventies. You have a few generations [at NASA] that are used to working with women in all of the various fields.” Weitekamp even said that she has heard rumors that women and women of color were on the Biden Administration's short list for NASA’s next top administrator.

Much has definitely changed in the naming and marketing of space missions since the days of the Apollo program, said journalist Robert Pearlman, whose website, collectSPACE.com investigates the intersection of pop culture and space exploration. The public-private nature of space ventures these days, for a start, means that marketing and legal trademarks play a larger role, but it was not always so. “It was very informal at the start,” said Pearlman. Indeed, NASA provides a story of the naming of the Apollo missions on its website. An engineer, not a public relations or marketing director, named the Apollo program. Dr. Abe Silverstein, credited with designing the first wind tunnel, developing liquid propulsion rockets and later becoming a leader at the agency that became NASA, is also credited with naming the first lunar program Apollo: “He said the image of ‘Apollo riding his chariot across the sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program’” (NASA). Pearlman said this was the romantic description, the prosaic version being, “It sounded good next to Mercury.”

Weitekamp said that NASA puts great emphasis on how it names missions and creates images to communicate the purposes of missions because communicating with the public is an important part of its role as a tax-funded agency. While she does not have insider knowledge of the naming of the program or the “woman on the moon” art, she pointed out that NASA has entire laboratories whose job it is to create and convey visuals for public consumption, to help tell the story of its missions effectively. "The name and the symbolism of a program is often put together at the very beginning, in some ways before they start bending metal on actual spacecraft and getting to do the science and build the technology, what they have is the emblem.” Communicating the message of a mission, then, is part of the mission. “I see NASA very self-consciously, through that symbolism, also trying to find a way to capture the public imagination in a way that connects to popular support and then funding. So I think that is a clever, effective, strategic decision. The decision to create a woman-centered symbol for this program has, I think, put it on people's lips, that they know what it is and what [NASA is] trying to do, which speaks to a very effective evocation of the mythology. They found a symbol that really does what they want.”

Not everyone agrees. “There are two things I cringe at,” said space historian Amy Shira Teitel, author of Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight. "The first is Artemis as being the twin of Apollo. We're trying to recapture the lost glory of Apollo instead of doing something unique and different for the new era. The push of putting a woman forward and making it [about that]. It bothers me a lot.” Teitel’s criticisms are both about the shifting nature of U.S. plans to return to the moon, a goal that has been set several presidents, but not invested in seriously, and also the gender-forward approach of Artemis's marketing. Both, she says, reflect a backward-looking thinking. “Stop putting woman as other; because if you put it as first woman and next man it sounds like the woman is there just to be a woman as opposed to, the next crew on the moon happens to be a diverse interesting crew of humans that are very accomplished at their jobs.”

Not just your Moon Goddess

Depictions of Artemis, suggested by Topper, that show a range of interpretations of Artemis from ladylike to downright bestial. (Left to right, top to bottom) A stately Artemis feeding a swan, on the St. Petersburg lekythos, ca 500 BCE, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; the “Mistress of Animals,” a winged version of Artemis, decorating a handle of the Francois vase, ca 570 BCE, Archeological Museum of Florence; the Gorgon-headed goddess, a mysterious wedding of Artemis and Medusa on the Rhodian plate, ca 600 BCE; and a fully-fledged Medusa figure from the the pediment of the Temple of Artemis at Corfu, ca 580 BCE, Archeological Museum of Corfu.

NASA’s explanation of the name Artemis was simply that Apollo had a sister and that she was the goddess of the moon, but no one controls existing symbols and government agencies pick and choose the various aspects of mythological figures at its peril. Of course Artemis is also the huntress and most will recall the wrath she aims at Acteon for spying her bathing—turning him into a stag and having his dogs kill him. But the goddess has another ancient association with boundaries and thresholds that is also appropriate for a mission that would bring a woman to a place no woman has gone before.

A Goddess of Margins and Thresholds

Classical archeologist Kathryn Topper, who specializes in Greek art and teaches at the University of Washington, walked me through some of these less common attributes of Artemis in the ancient world. I asked the professor about the moon, but when Topper considered naming a lunar mission after Artemis, a more abstract concept occurred to her. “One of the things that I find kind of interesting about her being used for the lunar missions is that one of her main associations in antiquity had to do with the margins of civilization, with the wilderness, with the dangerous, often liminal areas, and this was symbolically consistent with how she presided over liminal times of life too.”

Liminality is the condition of existing in the area or border between different states, a no-man’s land of sorts, or a threshold. Artemis is the goddess of virginity, puberty and childbirth, which sound like very different states of being, but are similar in that they are transitional states of being. Puberty is easy to understand as a state of being that is neither childhood nor adulthood. Childbirth is a gateway or transformation, and in antiquity a dangerous one, where a woman will become a mother, unless she dies in the process, which is nevertheless another state. Virginity was considered a state of wildness that preceded the civilizing force of marriage, and virgin girls were considered to be like wild animals, said Topper. To relate this to the physical reality of the moon, it too is a dangerous wilderness, where humans can stay only temporarily. “[Artemis] presides over that sort of environment,” Topper said.

Regarding Artemis’s status as a gender hero of antiquity, Topper could not say how individual women felt about her—whether she was, let us say, the Wonder Woman of the day—but she could consider the expectations of the time, regarding women. “Because [goddesses] are both female and divine, they have elements to them that the Greeks would not have associated with proper women. Let’s say you’re a woman in sixth or fifth century Athens. A personal celebration or emulation of some of her more masculine aspects, like the fact that she’s a hunter—that is something that you’re not supposed to identify with.”

Woman on the Moon

NASA-produced desktop and cell phone wallpapers. (NASA)

The story of the room where Artemis was chosen as a name will someday be told. Pearlman, who follows closely the names, images and products that come out of and are inspired by NASA said that there was a chance that with the changing of administrations and change of leadership, outgoing administrators may be willing to speak more candidly and more information about the Artemis marking blitz will come to light. Pearlman said that the move can be seen as part of efforts in recent years by NASA to celebrate the women in its ranks. Pearlman said that NASA tried to be very helpful to author Margot Lee Shetterly during the writing of Hidden Figures, and allowed the 2016 film access to facilities. In 2019, NASA renamed the street of its Washington DC offices Hidden Figures Way. NASA has even licensed a LEGO series called Women of NASA, with figures like astronaut Sally Ride and astronomer and Nancy G. Roman, considered the “Mother of Hubble.”

NASA Celebrating Women

Author Margot Lee Shetterly helps unveil NASA’s Hidden Figures Way and the LEGO Women of NASA series, both efforts NASA has made to show its desire to welcome women to the exploration of space. The featured LEGO pack shown includes Apollo program computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, astronaut and engineer, Mae Jemison, astronaut and physicist, Sally Ride and astronomer, Nancy G. Roman, the “Mother of Hubble.”

NASA is no stranger to naming missions from mythological sources, though not always as would make sense to a mythologist. The reasoning behind the naming of early manned missions to space, Mercury and Apollo, might be described as “they sounded cool.” In the early 2000s, NASA named a proposed mission to the moon Constellation, and the Orion craft to be used to bring Artemis astronauts to the moon bears its name because Orion was a constellation, said Pearlman. The more appropriately-named Juno probe is still circling Jupiter. (Juno is Jupiter’s wife in Roman myth.) In 2011, NASA did name a mission to study space weather between the Earth and the moon ARTEMIS (Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun) and the mission is now known by the hyphenated acronyms THEMIS-ARTEMIS. Themis is the Titaness of law and natural order, so using her name to study the magnetic systems that affect the Earth makes sense to me. Missions have often been named for classical heroes known for their travels: Odysseus (Mars Odyssey), Ulysses, Jason. That the names inspire us and make the less accessible scientific purposes of space missions exciting, and to some extent, worth supporting with our tax dollars, is proof that some Americans, at least, still see classical mythology as something we can all agree upon.

Beauty in the Beast: Photographer Charles Fréger and the Wilder Men

A winter festival performer from Christiansand, Norway, playing a Julebukk, a figure who goes door to door between Christmas and New Year's Day in a masquerade that incorporates elements of caroling and trick or treating. Photograph by Charles Fréger, 2019.

By now, folklore-savvy Americans know about Santa’s dark other, Krampus, who parades the streets of Alpine countries near Christmas menacing and delighting children with his birch rods and sack for carrying away the naughty. But the winter is long and dark and Krampus is only among the first of the frightening festival figures who have entertained and brought together Europeans in rural communities for generations. Christmas comes and goes, but the parade of horribles continues into February and beyond, often attaching itself to the Christian liturgical calendar like all good pagan relics.

Jack in the Green, a traditional May Day figure from Rochester, England, 2019, by Charles Fréger.

French photographer Charles Fréger has captured many of them. In 2012, Fréger’s Wilder Mann; The Image of the Savage, also captured the hearts and coffee tables of those whose concept of beauty was a bit more encompassing than most. Fréger’s book of portraits of monsters, lovingly crafted by locals for annual performances in town squares dotted across the European continent, was unlike anything most Americans had seen before. The general theme of these midwinter festivals is of man transformed into beast only to be captured, tamed and returned to human form, but Fréger’s images show how spectacularly varied is the notion of beast from culture to culture. Men encased in suits of straw, fur and bones. Some whimsical; some downright frightening; all striking in Fréger’s iconic photographs.

Images from Charles Fréger's 2012 Wilder Mann

(Right to left) Ours, or Bear, bear festival, Arles-sur-Tech, Pyrenees-Orientales, France, February; Tschäggättä, (no translation) Lötschental, Canton of Valais, Switzerland, February 2 to Shrove Tuesday; Schnappviecher, or "Snappers," likely from the sound of their chomping jaws, also called Wudulin, Tramin, South Tyrol, Italy; January 7 to Shrove Tuesday; Chiapra, or Goat, carnival of the Liptov region, Shrovetide, Ružomberok, Slovakia.

While it is not possible to completely generalize the many festivals represented by the portraits in Wilder Mann, many of them occur in February when the bonds of winter need breaking and people need to start anticipating the spring. Many of the stylized costumes are meant to conjure the image of the bear, a creature that hibernates in the winter, and whose return is as certain as the return of spring. The Fête de l'Ours, or Festival of the Bears, of Arles-sur-Tech is representative of many of these masquerades and reenacts a widespread folk belief of a bear kidnapping a woman. The stories of the offspring of this pairing can be found in tales collected by the Grimms and other anthologists, and have inspired epic storytelling and sagas in northern Europe. The bear in the festival tries to catch young girls and is "shot" by men playing hunters and then the bear's body returns to life, is shaved and revealed to be a man.

Many of the festivals, though obviously not Christian in origin, occur before the Catholic Lenten season, ending during the day or days before Ash Wednesday, which are named Shrove Tuesday and Shrovetide. Shrove refers to absolution for sins, when Catholics are "shriven" of sin, prior to Lent. As unusual as the Wilder Mann costumes may be, these festivals coincide with and may be thought of as analogous to the better-known Carnival of Brazil, which likewise features masks, costumes and pageantry. It is not by accident that many pagan traditions and festivals coincide with Christian holidays. The Catholic church chose to celebrate its feast days on the existing holidays of pagan Europeans as a means of Christianizing them, which is why so many of the costumed festivals in Fréger's Wilder Mann occur during the Christmas season or in the lead-up to Lent.

After Wilder Mann, Fréger moved onto other projects, but he has never left behind his groundbreaking work documenting the strange festival creatures of the dark months in Europe. He has spent the last two winters in Scandinavia and other countries continuing to photograph these human grotesques. Fréger made himself available recently to discuss his work and answer some of my questions.

I expected Fréger to be a man as interested in folkloric monsters as I was, but the thesis of his work is more challenging, and to me, more fascinating. Fréger sees community as the underlying theme of his work: “To me these are still communities and these masquerades are taking part in places where people just want to be together. The reason why these populations are doing such traditions is not to honor a tradition, but more to be together. And for that reason I find it as interesting as (photographing) a football team. Especially these days, the wish to be together is strong enough and is more valuable than certain religions or beliefs.”

Klausen, a figure associated with Advent, Oberjoch, Bayern, Germany, 2017, by Charles Fréger.

I would add that Fréger’s work seems to have the theme of costumes or clothing that bring people together. Fréger’s work has encompassed the monstrous more than once (his Yokainoshima: Island of Monsters project in Japan documented figures in a similar vein to his wilder men) but Fréger has photographed series of men from various countries in traditional military uniform, people in native cultural garb, performers from the Peking Opera and even majorettes. “Everything I photographed a few years before I started Wilder Mann was very delicate, complex, codified, structured, full of protocol and traditional. I was in (search of) something which was working the same way; it’s really comparable. You can compare one of these groups doing this wilder mann tradition and any of the other groups that I photographed before. It’s really similar in the way people get together. It’s just that here there’s this visual radicality; the landscape connecting with the costume."

Beyond Wilder Mann: Images Since 2012

(Right to Left) Dimonis di Algeida, Majorca, Spain; Wren Boy, Armagh, Northern Ireland, from Wren Day, December 26; the Iltis, or Straw Weasel, Buschwiller, Alsace, France; Máska, Sivas, Crete, associated with Carnival. Images taken by Fréger since the publication of Wilder Mann.

Fréger does not see himself as an anthropologist or ethnographer or as a journalist. He takes the festival performers out of the town centers where the festivals occur to place the wilder men performers in what strikes him as the proper setting, “distancing them from the anachronism” of modern life. His role, he says, is to create the portraits. This said, it seems to me that Fréger’s outings, and the popularity of his book, which has remained in print and is available in five languages, may have led to more festival groups. Fréger said that tourism is a potential driver of some of the events. Many of my searches online for more information about the festivals listed in Wilder Mann have led to travel and tourism websites. I anticipated that Fréger would tell me that he was documenting an ancient phenomenon and that this sort of tradition must be endangered in our modern world, but this is not the case. “They are more appearing than disappearing. There are new groups every year.” Fréger says that some festivals that may have gone out of existence in the last century have also made resurgences. Fréger took many of the photographs shown in this article in the nine years since his Wilder Mann book was published.

Fréger also surprised me by saying that these traditions are as much as or more a part of modern life than recreations of the past. “Tradition is politics. Tradition is about expressing identity.” The young men who frequently play the role of beast and build the costumes grew up with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. “You can see the influence of heavy metal from the nineties and the eighties.” Fréger said modern costumes are also far more elaborate than historic costumes because they represent the people taking part in the festivals, both performers and, crucially, the audience, without which, the festivals would lose energy and end. "There must be some synergy. Just because you have one mad guy from the village dressing himself like a devil, he needs to have his audience."

Charles Fréger holds the copyrights to all images in this article. See more of his wilder men and other projects at: https://www.charlesfreger.com/.