GaRgOyLeS
GaRgOyLeS
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This page contains opinions, witterings and mullings over on various topics that don't fit well into other sections. The opinions are based on facts, but they are opinions so treat them as such, not as a text book.
There seem to me to be three kinds of gargoyle, the original physically functional (well, the rain's got to flow off the roof somehow, and shooting it out away from the walls keeps the walls less damp and erosion off the foundations); the spiritual influence of various possible kinds (many including: don't mess with my church ye demon from hell we're here to protect it; or as a warning to potential sinners; or as pagan symbols to encourage believers in the old ways to come to church; etc); and lastly, the purely ornate (which I'm not sure really count as gargoyles, strictly speaking they're "grotesques").
Most are a mixture of these, and it's sometimes a blurry line between them. Some places, like Woburn Church, have both scary (looking down from the roof parapets at the congregation) and scary-practical (shedding rain off the roof of the tower). Some, like Carcasonne have largely ornate and pretentious ones. Many gargoyles have some apparent symbolic meaning (like hairy hands), often hard to discern. A few are charicatures. A few choice ones with bared body parts exhibit the Celtic and later belief in rudeness as a ward against evil. Others, for which I have a sort of fondness, are little more than plumbing.
Curiously, almost all (of the old ones at least) are individuals, no two are the same. And perhaps significantly although gargoyle-like roof drainage has been found from Ancient Greek and Roman times, almost all of what we think of as classic gargoyles are found in what were the last bastions of Celtic resistance to Christianity shortly before or during early medieval times when they first really appeared.
The scaring off demons type, though, is to me the surprising one for being so obviously demon-like and yet being on a church which is supposed to represent the opposite. The irony of it constantly amazes me, and puzzles me why people should do such a potentially dangerous thing. Fight fire with fire, but it always struck me as rather like keeping a large vicious dog that probably does not like you in order to scare away a large vicious dog that probably does not like you. Still, some of the carvings they produced to do it are fascinating.
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I'm not sure anyone really knows, but I suppose gargoyles as a building accessory probably started off life either as plain guttering or as totems to ward off evil spirits. They've obviously evolved a bit. Presumably there was a paranoid group of people who were seriously into scaring off spirits or other people, and had a strong penchant for artistic plumbing. Who knows?
Some claim evolution has gone further and that there is a sub-type of "mobile gargoyle", but so far I've only heard of this happening with the scary-functional type, to whit, Constable Downspout of Terry Pratchett fame (downspout being the name of the tube or channel through which they shed the rain). Constable Downspout would (or will or does) move about roofs to watch for criminal activity and report back to the City Watch, snacking on the odd careless pigeon. Whether our world's gargoyles move is obviously less certain, although some look as though they would on a moonless night if you just turned away for a moment. Nevertheless, whatever else they do or don't do in the privacy of their own rooftops, there's no doubt they're very, very, very good at keeping still and watching.... you.
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I've written (well, plagiarised to be honest) about the Medieval mind and attitude to religion in various discussions, so here we look at the other big time for gargoyle carvings, the Victorian era.
The mind frame of Victorians was significantly different from medieval people, many were devout Christians but science and superstition were not as bound up in religion as in medieval times. I would argue therefore that gargoyles almost certainly had much less spiritual impact, and were much more a decorative feature. With the Victorians' virtual obsession for all things Gothic, it was probably inevitable they should use gargoyles.
The Victorians seem to have both copied medieval gargoyle styles and invented their own. Sadly though, they used much less variety of form (no women carrying the devil on their backs, no hideous men) and also mass produced many of them. For many gargoyles they used almost a standard pattern. A dragony, griffony, winged thing, wi' sharpy claws and nasty big pointy teeth - a stylised Gothic thing, part dangerous beast, part showing off, in the way that Victorians did a lot. Concrete devils of the night, rather than a reference to the devils inside a person.
So while the Middle Ages was bound up with the soul and with symbolism, the Victorians appear much more concerned with the look of the thing. They did however come up with the standard image of a gargoyle that affects us even in the 21st century - what did YOU originally think of as the classic gargoyle? A hairy man? Or a dragon?
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