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| If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales. -- Boswell's Life of Johnson
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The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies & the agreed-upon myth of its conquerors. — [Meridel Le Sueur] | |||
| Let me know! Serchan | |||||
Frogs often get a bad press: they are too green, too slimy, too noisy. Yet they enjoy a respectable place in human culture, as can be seen from Pierre Lèvêque's Les Grenouilles dans l'Antiquitê.
Lèvêque is a scholarly and delightfully old-fashioned Hellenist who examined, as the subtitle tells us, 'frog cults and legends in Greece and elsewhere.' He knows everything about frogs in ancient Greece, India, Egypt and China. He tells us about the combats of frogs that parody those of Homeric heroes, the hymn to frogs in the Rig Veda, in which Brahmins are compared to those celestial amphibians, and the chorus in Aristophanes's comedy, Frogs, who to cries of 'brekekekex ko-axh ko-axh,' say to Dionysus: 'In the depths of the water we struck up joyous dance choruses to the swishing of bubbles.' This is just an hors-d'oeuvre, so to speak. Lèvêque tracks down frogs everywhere -- in fables, legends and rituals, on bas-reliefs and frescoes, in archaeological excavations, in remains of offerings and in the form of statuettes, amulets, necklaces, coins and oil lamps.
Why has such an ugly, noisy animal featured so frequently from such an early date in human culture? What does the frog symbolise? How is it that it is associated with anything from Artemis and justice to the Holy Virgin and the dead waiting for their final journey?
There is a disconcerting diversity of meanings and contexts. The frog was first and foremost a sign of life and proliferation, an image of seething multiplicity. The frog presides over the arrival of each new year and the cycle of generations. The 1875 Dictionaire D'Archêologie Egyptienne notes: 'It may be supposed that [the frog] symbolises eternity, which would explain why the amulets take the form of a frog. It is in any case related to the notion of time and long periods of years, for at one time it was the symbol of the word 'year,' and the tadpole was the hieroglyphic symbol for 100,000.'
Although such cyclical exuberance is sacred and connected with a cosmic order, it is just as obviously sexual. The frog with its parted legs evokes a woman exhibiting her genitals. Although there are phallic representations of frogs, the animal is usually depicted as female. In Amerindian legend, 'the Sun and the Moon, in their search for an ideal spouse, discuss the relative merits of women and frogs.'
There are frogs everywhere, at the beginning of Egyptian civilisation and in the roots of the psyche. It is axiomatic that once anything multiplies, a frog will be involved. 'The frog is a constituent part and a dynamic element of a world believed to be made up of small distinct forces and individual drives: all in all, what we have here is much more a case of polydaemonism than of polytheism,' Lèvêque concludes.
We French are reputed to be a nation of frog-eaters. Even though the vast majority of us have never tasted frogs' legs, we are doomed to be identified with the animal. We are 'froggies,' an international category somewhere between cannibals and normal people.
This should be a reason to rejoice, given the animal's extraordinary and ancient ambiguity -- its oscillation between time and eternity, noise and muteness, sex and stagnant water. In a frighteningly featureless world are we French the last bearers of ambiguous emblems, the ultimate repositories of ancient merry-making?
Maybe. But it cannot be ruled out, either, that it is all an illusion. Frogs do not provide answers; they move like riddles, they leap beyond the confines of discourse. Jean Rostand put it neatly. Knowing how great a penchant biologists have for the frog and how much they like to experiemnt with, and theorise about the animal, Rostand summed it up in a nutshell: 'Theories come and go, but frogs remain.'
