Heap of Dust: A Brief History of Birthdays

For much of human history, celebrating birthdays was more than egotistical; to many, it was a sin of pride.

To the ancients, only the Gods or their physical manifestations on earth — Pharaoh (as noted in Genesis 40:20), or, much later, the Emperors of civilizations as diverse as Rome and Japan — were important enough to have the date of their birth honored.

6th century B.C. Assyrian Planisphere
6th century B.C. Assyrian Planisphere (British Museum)

Still, some four-hundred years before the birth of Christ, the people of modern-day Iran and Iraq apparently decided the average man’s birthday was worth noting. The practice of astrology — begun in a primitive form as early as the third millennium  — became more sophisticated under the Babylonians by the second millennium. And with astrology came a better method of recording exact dates of birth — even for mere mortals (though usually those of royal birth who could afford the services of an astrologer).

Horoscopes elevated the importance of birthdays (the earliest of which can be traced to April 29, 410 B.C. near what is now Baghdad). Herodotus, in his On the Customs of Persians (430 B.C.), observed that “Of all the days in the year, the one which [Persians] celebrate most is their birthday.”

Birthday celebrations were slow, however, to catch on among Jews (as evident in the writings of Josephus in the first century A.D.), and later,  Christians.

Writing in 245 A.D., Origen of Alexandria in a homily on Leviticus (viii in Migne, P.G., XII, 495) commented that “none of the saints can be found who ever held a feast or a banquet upon his birthday, or rejoiced on the day when his son or daughter was born. But sinners rejoice and make merry on such days.”

Party pooper.

Oddly enough, it’s likely that the celebration of Christ’s birth was what opened the doors to the common man recognizing his own birthday and those of his family without guilt. Though the date of December 25 took many years and much debate upon which to be settled, it is in the years following celebrations of the birth of Christ that we begin to see Church records noting the births, baptisms and/or the naming of common folk.

Name Day, a practice popular in the Middle Ages in Catholic and Orthodox countries, tied a individual (no matter how lowly) to a Saint for whom they were named; thus honoring a Saint’s Day became an acceptable way to celebrate one’s own name (and thus commemorate one’s very existence and, by extension, birth). No sin of pride, participating in the festivities of a Saint’s Day because of your given name was encouraged. In lives otherwise grim during the Middle Ages, Name Day was a rare opportunity for personal annual jollity.

But Saint’s Days (and thus Name Days) fell out of favor with the Protestant Reformation and dawn of the Renaissance. The former rejected practices deemed idolatrous and the latter led ultimately to an Age of Reason. But by the eighteenth century, notions of happiness and liberty finally made it acceptable to champion and thus celebrate the individual. And the best time to celebrate the individual? Their birthday.

“The highest of all holidays in the satanic tradition is the date of one’s own birth.” – Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible

Poets begin elevating the birthday to heights of adoration by the early eighteenth century. Whether in pursuit of a woman — like Jonathan Swift in 1719 to his dearest Stella — or the recognition of a great man — as in Robert Burns’ 1794 Ode for General Washington’s Birthday — the celebration of birth was nascent in art and becoming widespread in culture. There was Kinderfeste in early nineteenth-century Germany. Birthday cards — though more of a formal greeting than an acknowledgement of one’s age — were known to be sent in Victorian England. Birthday cakes, likewise wished “Many Happy Returns on the Day.” And a little known ditty from 1893 called “Good Morning to All” morphed at some point into the ubiquitous “Happy Birthday to You” by 1912. By the 1920s, the birthday party had arrived; age-specific parties like the  “Sweet Sixteen,” a custom for girls in a burgeoning middle class, came into vogue.

Thus we arrive at the modern-day birthday party. From the understandably jubilant “Baby’s First” to the “wow, you’re still alive” centenarian’s final few, the birthday has transcended the individual and become an almost communal necessity — an industry unto itself. An office-interuptus excuse for cake. A click upon a Facebook wall.

In a matter of a few millennium, we have gone from believing few of us worthy to note their birth to an expectation that there is not only reason for a party, but an obligation to our family and friends to do so.

Still, for many, celebrating a birthday is a reminder of getting older.

“I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust, I forgot to ask that they be years of youth.” — Ovid, Metamorphoses

With the passage of time, many of us now have “birthday blues.” In a culture that worships youth, many do not want to be reminded of the calendar. “Be happy,” says the world. And if you’re not? Something must be wrong with you. Science has shown that “birthdays are periods of increased risk for men aged 35 and older in the general population and in those receiving mental health care.” Perhaps we are all not meant to have happy birthdays.

Notions of aging are forced upon us. We are, no pun intended, born into them. There’s the innocence of childhood. The reckless days of youth. Conquering the world in our twenties. Settling down in our thirties. Looking back in our forties. New horizons in our fifties. Retirement, if we’re fortunate, in our sixties. The “golden years” of our seventies, eighties and, for a lucky few, nineties.

All are decades marked by expectation.

Satchel Paige (AP file photo)
Satchel Paige (AP file photo)

Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige, the oldest rookie to play in Major League Baseball at the age of 42, is quoted as saying two of the most profound statements about birthdays and aging that no psychologist, poet or philosopher could ever come close to expressing. There is his famous, oft-misquoted and widely adapted to suit many an occasion: “Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.” Even more insightful is his seeming challenge to all of us:

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” — Satchel Paige

Age. Accomplishment. Entitlement. The “I” above all else. Self-doubt by way of selfism.

Birthdays and our expectations of them can often take us to dark places: arrogance, bitterness, pride. But the best of all celebrations are those that affirm life.

To be alive is precious at any age. And to commemorate birth? Pride, but not hubris. An honor that matters.

Vamping It Up: Rudyard Kipling, Theda Bara & the 20th Century Femme Fatale

"The Vampire" by Philip Burne-Jones (1897) is an early femme fatale
“The Vampire” by Philip Burne-Jones 1897

Upon seeing the painting by artist Philip Burne Jones entitled “The Vampire” — first exhibited at the New Gallery in London in 1897 — poet Rudyard Kipling was inspired to write his poem of the same name. A rumination on the vampiric nature of the femme fatale (a term later in vogue in the mid twentieth century), the painting and the poem both depict an unnamed woman who seems to drain all strength and life from an unnamed man.

Fuseli's "Nightmare" (1781)
Henri Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” (1781)

Much like the female figure’s position of succubus in Burne-Jones’ work, Henri Fuseli’s painting from 1781, “The Nightmare” is an obvious inspiration — one known well to Victorian artists for its otherworldly incubus (or male demon) ravaging a sleeping female victim. But in Burne-Jones work, as in Kipling’s poem, the vampire is female, inverting the standard of predator and prey in a way that had really only been previously done (outside of poetry, perhaps) by Sheridan Le Fanu and his groundbreaking novella “Carmilla” (1871) [a known influence on Bram Stoker’s DRACULA and particularly the excised first chapter, “Dracula’s Guest” which was later published as a short story].

“A fool there was,” begins Kipling, and like lovers in poems before him, the unnamed man falls for “his lady fair.” The narrative voice, however, calls her by another name: “the woman who did not care.” In the end, Kipling writes

The fool was stripped to his foolish hide
(Even as you and I!)
Which she might have seen when she threw him aside —
(But it isn’t on record the lady tried)
So some of him lived but the most of him died —
(Even as you and I!)

Note that Kipling’s vampire never explicitly bares it all — not her nature, her fangs nor, to those later raised on Hammer Horror, her breasts. Kipling’s lyrical tones, almost musical and lighthearted in their cadence, impart the tale of a man drained (“mostly dead”) by a woman who “stripped his.. hide… and threw him aside.” Left to the reader is interpretation: is this a traditional vampire sucking blood? weakening the man sexually? playing on his pride and taking everything he has? (Read the full poem and decide for yourself.)

Fin de siècle art is charged with female empowerment — though it is often limited (because of the societal constructs of the day) to a woman’s ability to leverage sex to great advantage and (perhaps more shocking for the times) establish a persona of strength through sexuality. It is a persona donned with the intention  —  conscious or not —  to simultaneously attract men while repulsing, even threatening them.

Enter the vamp.

The use of the word “vamp” as separate and distinct from “vampire” is American slang and loosely dates to 1909 after Porter Emerson Browne took the Kipling poem and turned it into a stage play entitled “A Fool There Was” (its title taken from the first line oft repeated in Kipling’s poem). Instead of bloodletting, the vampire of the film uses sex, drink and drugs in order to drain her victim. 

Later made into a film in 1915, “A Fool There Was” is the story of a woman “of the vampire species” (as an intertitle card reads) who uses her charms to seduce and corrupt a moral Wall Street lawyer.  “Kiss me, my fool” she commands at one point, as if hypnotizing her victim. “You have ruined me, you devil, and now you discard me!” he later laments.

The exchange is bloodless, but nonetheless draining.

A Fool There Was, first a stageplay, featured an early femme fatale
A Fool There Was 1915

As a promotional poster for the film from the period shows, here again we have the woman in a dominant sexual position above the man. Consciously or not, the filmmakers repeat the archetypal image of the inverted sleeping beauty. The promise here is death, not awakening. It is to be a kiss from the blood red mouth of a vampire that the victim receives and not the sweet peck from the non-threatening lips of Prince Charming.

Theda Bara
Theda Bara

Theda Bara was the film’s star. Billed as equal parts exotic and erotic, the studio (Fox) kept her origins a mystery, but it is no secret that she began life as Theodosia Burr Goodman. “Theda Bara” — an anagram for Arab death — was her stage name.  Some consider her to not only be the first Hollywood vamp, but also its first true sex symbol. Mary Pickford was everything good, innocent and wholesome (plus, as she herself insisted, a natural blonde); Theda, on the other hand, was the mysterious temptress. She was a bad girl. Wanton. Sinful. Raven-haired with dark eyes.

Early on, film producers knew that tapping into established symbols of good and evil paid dividends at the box office, so the Hollywood system responded for decades with starlets that best represented this visual, and visceral, dichotomy that was vamp vs. virgin. For Theda Bara, however, it meant typecasting. Two years later she would play Cleopatra, but for the most part, her career was short-lived.

Lya de Putti, c. 1923
Lya de Putti, c. 1923

The vamp, however, survived. Lya de Putti gained notoriety as “The Hungarian Vamp” (appearing in films like D.W. Griffth’s SORROWS OF SATAN (1926).  The Vamp character (or caricature) even graced the cover of a 1925 LIFE magazine in highly stylized, art deco elegance. It was during the nineteen twenties that the word  became synonymous with sexually aggressive women about whom mothers would warn their boys.

Don’t believe that the vamp was taken seriously in the 1920s? Read  “Mothers Complain that Modern Girls ‘Vamp’ Their Sons at Petting Parties” from The New York Times, February 17, 1922.

Sound changed film forever. And so too was the vamp transformed. Marlene Dietrich would bring a different, more androgynous and smoldering sexuality to the screen. Other actresses, like Jean Harlow, would infuse the character with comedy — earning her the nickname “the laughing vamp.”

The second world war saw the rise of film noir, and with it, the stock character of the femme fatale in her more recognizable, modern form. A more complex character than her vampish predecessors — the femme fatale of the forties (and into the fifties) evolved. She became more human, more vulnerable, yet was still a threat to fools unlucky enough to fall victim to her charms. Best embodied by actresses like Ava Gardner in “The Killers” (1946), this femme fatale was far from her vampiric roots, but remained nonetheless dangerous as ever.

A seductress from the moment she is introduced on the screen, Ava Gardner plays Kitty Collins, a moll that draws the male lead (“Swede” played by Burt Lancaster) like a moth to a flame.

Ava Gardner in THE KILLERS (1946)
Ava Gardner as the femme fatale Kitty Collins in THE KILLERS (1946)

Adapted from a story by Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers” eventually (spoiler) finds Kitty at the center of theft, deception and murder. Ultimately penitent, Gardner’s femme fatale of film noir is no heartless vamp, but what she shares with her forebears is a feminine allure that is irresistible to men. And the root cause of their downfall.

By the nineteen sixties and seventies — even well into the eighties — femme fatales were still a fixture of film, but they found expression is a multitude of many and varied characters; from dual-agent (Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore in “Goldfinger”) to masochist (Isabella Rossellini in “Blue Velvet”) to outright psychotic (Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction”) and even sympathetic victim (Kim Bassinger in “L.A. Confidential”), the femme fatale of the latter half of the 20th century matured and, with each iteration, seemed to become exceedingly more complex.

Siouxsie Sioux
Siouxsie Sioux

And the vamp? A lost caricature of sorts. A leftover whose heavy eyeliner and dark lips are seen more often in Goth subculture than in the movies. No surprise that the progenitors of Goth Rock (including bands like Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees) were heavily influenced by silent film  — particularly German Expressionism. Siousxie Sioux herself often wore makeup reminiscent of the vamp.

While the role of the temptress is as old as the Bible, the part as played by actresses in Hollywood is only a century old. Is the femme fatale a necessary archetype in western culture? Or is the character outmoded?

Tapping into something quite visceral in human sexuality, the femme fatale will always have a place in popular culture. Just a different face.  And one can only hope that the next century finds film fans still in love with the woman who is mysterious, exotic, erotic, dark and even potentially deadly.

By Christopher Michael Davis