Word of the Day: Macabre

 The Merriam Webster Online Dictionary gives the following definition:

ma·ca·bre

adjective \mə-ˈkäb; -ˈkä-brə, -bər; -ˈkäbr^ə\

: involving death or violence in a way that is strange, frightening, or unpleasant

1

:  having death as a subject :  comprising or including a personalized representation of death

2

:  dwelling on the gruesome

3

:  tending to produce horror in a beholder

This word is often used to describe horror movies or the novels of Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King.

The most interesting thing about the word is its etymology. It comes from the French
"danse macabre" which refers to an artistic genre, popular in the Late Middle Ages, depicting Death, personified as a skeleton, leading people from all walks of life to the grave.

The term "danse macabre" seems to have first appeared in 1376. Wikipedia traces it to the Latin "Machabaeorum chorea" (Dance of the Maccabees) referring to a miracle play based on events described in the deuterocanonical 1st and 2nd  Book of Maccabees, which deal with the 2nd-century BC Jewish rebellion against the Seleucid King Antiochus Epiphanes and his attempt to forcibly assimilate the Jews to Greek culture.

The specific event assumed to be depicted in the "Machabaeorum chorea" was the death of a woman and her seven sons (the sons were tortured to death) at the hands of Greeks after they refused to prove their loyalty to the king by eating pork (2 Maccabees 7). While the "Maccabean martyrs" are no longer specifically commemorated in the Latin Catholic calendar, they are still featured on the Eastern Orthodox calendar (August 1), where the woman is called Solomonia.

But nowhere else are the Maccabean martyrs commemorated like they are in Syriac Christianity, where the woman, nameless in the original account, is called "Mart Shmoni." In Iraq, the Aramaic-speaking Christian town of Baghdeda near Mosul has a "Church of Mart Shmoni and her Seven Sons" built in the 8th century at the latest (more likely in the fourth, making it one of the oldest surviving church buildings). Before that, the church appears to have been, fittingly, a synagogue,* before that, a temple to the Mesopotamian moon god Sin. The place is holy ground and has been for 4000 years. Until the persecution and exile of recent times, the Mart Shmoni Church was a place of pilgrimage on the feast day of the Maccabean martyrs.

*The Spanish traveler Benjamin of Tudela, found a large Jewish community in Mosul in the 12th century, and Judaism must have been one of the predominant religions in the region before the Islamic conquest. This could explain why the churches of Mesopotamia venerated Jewish heroes, but why then did medieval Western Europeans venerate the same figures enough to compose a "Dance of the Maccabees"?

Today's Birthdays: Lincoln and Darwin

Did you know that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on the same day 205 years ago?

 

They came from very different backgrounds (Kentucky frontier vs. English upper class) but they had more in common than you might think.

Military History Mondays: Black Seminoles and the Texas Indian Wars

One of the US Army's least known but most distinguished units was active during the Indian Wars on the Texas frontier. The unit was made up of "black Indians", descendants of slaves who had fled from Southern plantations to Florida, where they had settled among the Seminole tribe. The Seminoles themselves were mostly descended from Muskogee or Lower Creek Indians from present-day Georgia and Alabama, who moved into areas of Florida depopulated by disease and colonial warfare  between Britain, Spain and their Indian allies.The name "Seminole" came from the Spanish word "cimarron" which meant "untamed" or "runaway." The name "maroon", used to describe the Black Seminoles and other groups former slaves who set up communities in remote areas, also derived from the word "cimarron."

The fugitive slaves lived in their own settlements (often with African names) alongside the Indians (to whom they paid tribute in food and military service). They adopted many Seminole customs and even intermarried with them, just like maroon communities in South America and the Caribbean who formed close relationships with Indian tribes.

After the War of 1812, when both Seminole Indians and Black Seminoles sided with the British against the Americans, slave-holding Southerners were threatened by a haven for runaway slaves over the border in  Florida. This led to Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida (the First Seminole War), after which Florida was annexed to the United States.

John Horse, chief of the Black Seminoles.

During the Second Seminole War (1835-42), the Black Seminoles, led by headmen such as Abraham, John Caesar, and most famously John Horse or "Gopher John", supported Osceola against the US Army, fiercely resisting removal to Indian Territory and possible re-enslavement. The Black Seminoles, allied with chiefs like Osceola and John Horse's friend Micanopy, were among the fiercest and most die-hard guerrilla fighters of the war.

After his capture in 1838 John Horse agreed to move west to Indian Territory along with Micanopy and other Black and Indian Seminoles. Once there, the Black Seminoles had little protection from enslavement by white Southerners and slave-owning Creek and Cherokee Indians.





After the Army ordered the Black Seminoles to give up their weapons,John Horse, along with some traditionalist Seminoles and Kickapoo Indians who wanted to be free of US government interference, led the Black Seminoles across the Rio Grande into Mexico, where slavery was illegal. 

There the Black Seminoles were known as "los mascogos" (Muskogees), and they served the Mexican government as frontier fighters, battling the Apaches and Comanches whose mounted raiding parties terrorized the borderlands.  During the turbulent 1860s, the Black Seminoles became divided, with three enclaves under different leaders at Parras, Nacimiento and Matamoros.

In the wake of the Civil War, Texas was plagued by Comanche and Kiowa raids, and US Army officers looked far and wide for help. No longer in fear of slavery, in 1870 a group of ten Black Seminoles from their settlement at Nacimiento Mexico followed their leader John Kibbetts into the US Army, where they became known as the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts. They were stationed at Fort Duncan near Eagle Pass, Texas. In the next five years, 200 other Black Seminoles from other settlement in Mexico arrived (including John Horse) and the unit, which included nearly all adult Black Seminole men, would be stationed at Fort Clark, near Brackettville, Texas.

The odyssey of the Black Seminoles: from the slaveholding south to the Wild West. Notice the settlements in Mexico.

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In the 1870s and 1880s, Seminole scouts distinguished themselves in battle against the Kiowa, Comanche and other tribes along the Texas frontier. Four Medals of Honor were won by Seminole scouts, often fighting with cavalry units under command of famed Indian fighter Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie. The first Medal of Honor recipient from the unit was Adam Paine, who saved three Seminole and two Tonkawa Indian scouts from an attacking force of forty Kiowa Indians on September 19, 1874 during an action on the Llano Estacado. Three others- Isaac Payne, Pompey Factor, and John Ward, would be decorated for their actions at the battle of Eagle's Nest in the Pecos Valley, where they saved their white commanding officer Lt. John Bullis from a Comanche raiding party on April 25, 1875.

Seminole Negro Indian Scouts in Texas.

Pvt Pompey Factor later in life.

The unit was disbanded in 1912, long after the Indian Wars had ended. Descendants of the Black Seminoles live in Brackettville today, along with smaller contingents in Oklahoma and Nacimiento, Mexico.

References:

Black Seminoles (Wikipedia entry)

Black Seminole Scouts (Wikipedia)

Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles