BLOND
Myth and History
By
Tala Bar
When talking about blond hair, a few questions rise in the mind. What is the reason for such wide admiration for blond hair? Why do “men prefer blonds”? Why do dark haired women from the Mediterranean area constantly bleach their hair, and why do people of African origin dye their black hair yellow?
The answer to these questions is in the remote past, but it is not unduly complicated; it lies in the overall veneration of gold. Gold is the symbol of the sun and marks the basic features granted to the sun as a deity: power, strength, and durability. But the symbolism of gold is not only physical but also spiritual. Like the sun, which it stands for, gold shines by itself with a continuous light, which does not darken and does not tarnish. This characteristic is considered to be not only physical but also spiritual, referring to it as having the qualities of purity, wisdom, nobility, respect, divinity, enlightenment, and eternity.
It is quite clear that there is no place on earth where the sun has not been worshipped in one way or the other. The Bible expresses the sun’s character and importance in a few places. The prophet Malachi says, “The sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in his wings…” (ch. 4, 2); and in Psalms it is said that, “For the Lord God is a sun and a shield…” (ch. 84, 12). A common phrase in modern Hebrew says, “As clear as the sun”, expressing the fact that the sun acts in the light of day and has nothing to hide. The Scandinavian Sun god Balder is called “The Eye of the Sky”, and when he is killed by Hodder, god of darkness and hell, a long period of dark winter is created, when nothing grows until the sun is reborn. Father Christmas, whose dwelling place is the North Pole, represents the young sun in this festival, as may be seen by his red clothes (his white beard symbolizes snow, rather that old age). In ancient Egypt, sun worship was highly developed, and either the Phoenicians or the Viking may have been those who had brought it to America (s. below).
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But what has all this to do with golden hair? In many beliefs human hair is considered to hold a person’s physical and spiritual power. Biblical Samson (Shimshon in Hebrew, whose name is connected with the sun – Shemesh), called “the hero”, lost his great power when his head was shaven of his magnificent hair; only when it started to grow back, he was able to destroy a whole temple by felling its pillars with his bare hands. The combination of golden hair, then, represents divine superiority, power and control.
The tints of gold can change from the fairest blond hair to the darkest red, and in spite of the visible difference between them, they all symbolize the connection with the Sun as a supreme deity, and those spiritual features attached to it. That is why, even in cultures where black and brown hair are considered beautiful, the lighter colors are thought to express special qualities. The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl – the initiator of the Kon Tiki and the Ra trips, from South America to Polynesia and from North Africa to America – has mentioned a myth, told among the black haired native Americans, saying that the most prominent American cultures (Maya, Inca and Aztec) were created by white-skinned, bearded people; these people, they say, came from an unknown place and disappeared in the Pacific ocean, where they reappeared in the shape of the giant red-haired sculptures of the Aku Aku culture of Polynesia.
It is quite possible that those white, bearded men were descendents of the Vikings, who arrived in America in the eighth to tenth centuries; but they might have been sea-faring Phoenicians, who arrived in America a long time earlier from North Africa, bringing with them parts of the ancient Egyptian culture – like the pyramids, for instance. Red haired people are fairly common among peoples of the Mediterranean basin, which are a highly mixed race; two of the most prominent Biblical mentions of it are King David, and Esau the Edomite – Adom means “red” in Hebrew.
Originally, all humans, having developed in Africa, must have had dark skin and hair, as can be seen in our nearest relatives, the chimpanzee, and as may be expected from the hot conditions of that area; the dark pigmentation works as a protection against the heat. Only when Homo sapiens people left Africa and arrived at Northern Europe, they could afford to forgo the protection against the heat, conserving the energy needed for creating dark pigmentation, and developed means of protection against the cold in the form of body hair, and tall and bony physique, under heavy fur clothing. Scandinavia is the only place on earth where fair skin and hair were ever developed.
Such fair skin and hair was probably developed from an albino mutation, which is well known among the dark tribes of Africa; but while in Africa it is a disadvantage, in Scandinavia it had its merits and spread through the population, together with straight hair and thick beard. The initial settlement in Northern Europe is said to have taken place toward the end of the last ice age, while the ice was beginning to retreat, around 12,000 before the present; at that time, the settlers were fairly isolated from the rest of the continent, thus developing into a pure blond, hardy race. With the melting of the ice these people started moving out, searching for more territory with the food it can provide. It may be assumed that their hardy bodies and minds, being used to the harsh conditions of the North, made them stronger than other races and fit them to overcome any clash between tribes. Such clashes, either by violence (rape) or by mutual consent, lead the to the mixing and assimilation of races, thus creating all kinds of shades of hair that appear throughout the European population: fair, gold, carrot, copper and chestnut, the result of blond mixing with black and brown.
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Following sun worshipping, many gods and heroes representing it were considered in many places around the world as having blond, or golden hair; and since the sun represents fertility, so did also the figures symbolizing Love as a mark of fertility. This is how Robert Graves presents the White Goddess in charge of fertility among the rest, in his book by that name: “The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair…” (p. 24). This description is very close to the appearance of a Viking woman, even though Graves fixes her origin in the Mediterranean basin, among dark-haired population. The Love goddess Aphrodite is said to have climbed out of the sea at Cyprus, and according to many original paintings from ancient Greece, she is supposed to have had dark hair – as she is indeed often presented; Botticelli, however, painted his famous picture of hers with golden hair.
Similar to Aphrodite is the Celtic figure of “Niamah with the Golden Hair”, whose name means “Sun Tear”; her divine personality is expressed in the story that tells how she led the hero Oisin on her horse to the post-death “Islands of Happiness”. The dark or chestnut haired Celts had also a Sun god named Lugh, who was described as having golden hair that gleamed in the sunlight. Like him, on a 14th cent. French goblin, the figure of the Welsh King Arthur appears with golden hair, even though the Welsh are usually dark haired; the whole picture is infused with the golden atmosphere of the sun. Arthur was originally known as a military leader from the 5-6th cent., and the medieval royal ambiance takes him completely out of his original tribal belonging, putting him instead in a connection of golden regal-divine environment; the Arthurian myths connect him with the dying and reviving Sun god, and even with the figure of Jesus as symbolizing the sun. It is well known that Jesus was consistently painted by Christian artists as having golden hair, in blunt contrast to his Mediterranean origin.
The Sun deity could be, then, either male or female; in Semitic myths there were both the Babylonian Shamash god and the Canaanite Shamash or Shapash goddess. An Amerindian story of the Sun deity is told about a Mexican goddess named Chalchuialico, who was a fourth Sun goddess to rule after the three before her had vanished; but before she became a Sun goddess she was a Water goddess dressed in green, who had copper hair. For hundreds of years that Sun goddess supplied light and heat, while women and men appeared on the earth. But other gods envied her, and the God of Darkness (reminiscent of the Scandinavian Hodder), bothered her until she shed tears to the earth and everything vanished in darkness. In the end, the gods decided to create a fifth sun, and for that purpose they had to make a sacrifice, which would bring into being the sun and the moon. The sacrifice to the sun was to be the little goddess Nanna (again, reminiscent of an old world deity connected with the Nordic Balder). While the gods were burning their sacrifice, an eagle (one of the most prominent symbols of the sun) took out her body from the fire in the shape of a ball of fire, fixed it in the sky as she was wrapped in her golden hair.
Many golden haired figures appear in folk tales, which have developed from the ancient myths; one such legendary woman was Isolde, Tristan’s lover, famous not only from medieval poetry and a novel by the 19th cent. French author Joseph Bedier, but also from Wagner’s Opera. The legend tells that when Mark, the king of Cornwall, saw Isolde’s golden hair in a bird’s nest, he declared that he would only marry the owner of that hair. When it was found that the hair belonged to Isolde, the Irish royal princess, Tristan was sent to bring her to Mark, and on the way they fell hopelessly in love. Isolde is a typical Love goddess for whom the hero must die in the end.
It is also possible to find blond heroines in the Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales. One of these heroines is Rapunzel, who is said to have had “magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold”; another is the Goose Girl, whose waving locks “were all of pure silver”. Folk tales in turn have developed into modern fiction, and another divine woman with golden hair is Irene, heroine of Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. She is described by the author as looking like a pagan goddess, whose figure expresses that of the Goddess of Love.
From literature to real life, the next type of Love goddess can be found among the goddesses of our times, who are film stars. Some of them are known to have dyed their hair blond, in order to enhance that concept of them, and one such modern Love goddess is Madonna, who is not even beautiful but distinguished by her blond hair. A better claim for the title, though, is Marilyn Monroe, who became famous for her film Men Prefer Blonds. Monroe certainly had the appearance of a Love goddess, with her original dark hair dyed blond, her lovely curvaceous body, and the many stories about her relations with men, that enhanced that illusion. That combination of her appearance, her profession and her behavior, certainly made Marilyn Monroe a throw back to pagan times and Sun worship. It is no wonder, then, that many women like to imitate her, at least by becoming blond; but such throw back may also affect those dark haired men, who prefer to enhance their outer persona in this way.
Links:
http://homepages.ius.edu/mcreceli/mythology.htm – Sun mythology
http://www.babynamesofireland.com/pages/niamh-oisin.html – Niamah with the Golden Hair
http://www.paleothea.com/Gallery/VenusSea.html – Botticelli’s Venus/Aphrodite
http://www.racialcompact.com/nordishrace.html – History of the Nordic race
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/a/arthur.html – The remains of King Arthur
http://www.masihiat.com/UL/Albums/Pictures/Pic2637.jpg – Jesus in the Synagogue
http://www.marilynmonroe.com/about/photos/color_photos.htm – Marilyn Monroe
My name is Tala Bar and I live in Israel. I hold an M.Phil. degree in literature from the London University. I taught Hebrew and English languages and literature before I turned a full time writer. I have had a number of books, stories and articles published in print and on the Net, both in Hebrew and English.