Seton arms, originally only the tressured
crescents, is here quartered to include alliances through marriage
I have little
enthusiasm for tracing genealogy. Back
four or five generations, the research becomes ever more challenging, yet the rewards
shrink since the findings have little discernable relation to one’s own
life. Our ancestors multiply by the
factor of two (that is, doubling) every generation. Everyone has heard the story first told in
the thirteenth century by Ibn Khallikan of how the inventor of chess asked as
his reward to be given one grain of rice for the first square on the game
board, two for the second, four for the third, then eight and so on, resulting,
to the king’s surprise in a greater quantity than the entire world produces.
The same
mathematics, of course, apply to everyone’s number of direct ancestors. This means that, were one to look a thousand
years in the past, estimating three generations per century, we each are
descended from a number of people that can be calculated by raising two to the
thirtieth power, a number over a billion, over a thousand times the earth’s population at the
time. Now, this number is not in fact
accurate due to the fact that people have very often, particularly in the past,
married first cousins with shared grandparents, thereby obliging some
individuals to fill multiple slots in the family tree, but the general point is
clear. Tracing only direct patrilineal descent simplifies
the matter immensely, though, of course, one is equally closely related to the
great crowds of their spouses and their spouses’ families.
I have several
relatives intrigued by family history who have told me that people with my
surname have passed in and out of Scots history for centuries some of whom were
given a tartan and a coat of arms. Now I
know that a few generations back, my patrilineal ancestors were homesteaders
and I rather suspect that the Seatons (or Setons, Seytons, Seetons) who came to
America in the seventeenth century left more memories of want than castles
behind in the old country. There can be
little doubt that, going back several hundred years, most everyone’s forebears
were for the most part peasants or farm laborers.
Yet I rather like
the doughty fire-spouting wyvern that tops the ducal coronet on the Seton arms and
I find the slogan attached to the coat of arms suggestive and appealing. “Hazard yet forward,” though certainly a war
cry in origin, and likely originally meant to indicate enthusiastic support for
the king, expresses a sentiment sufficiently general to provide buoyant
encouragement in many settings more pleasant than the battlefield. I like the airy sound of it, the spirit
willingly accepting an uncertain outcome, the progress into an uncharted future,
the greeny optimism. It reminds me of
the Yiddish paper, the Forward, and of the use of “Adelante!” in Cuba
and other Latin countries.
In these cases
the anticipated future is a positive change, but of course we hazard yet
forward every day without the pleasant expectation of likely progress in the
long term. After all, we are all riding
time’s conveyor belt, though for us the end is not manufacture but instead deterioration
and eventual disassembly. This fact
cannot be changed, only one’s attitude is in part voluntary. So, if a wistful feeling of regret at the
transitory character of things of this world is unavoidable, it is fruitless (and
seems in fact ridiculous when not pitiful) to lament the universal limits of
human life. Every morning when a person
rises, it is to “hazard yet forward,” and a failure of this spirit is what the
medieval church condemned as acedia, condemned by Aquinas as a flight
from God. Today it would be labeled
depression, the psychiatric epidemic of our time.
The word hazard,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was originally used in Spain
and may well have Arabic antecedents. It
was the name of a game played with dice which has survived into modern times but
was first recorded in English in 1300. Within
a hundred years the meaning had expanded to apply to any risk or chance, and by
the time of the Renaissance the word implied a negative outcome: “risk of loss
or harm, peril, jeopardy.”
Shakespeare
regularly employs the word hazard in the second of these senses, referring not
to a danger but to any chance, a meaning that now sounds slightly literary, perhaps
its most dramatic use leans toward the third.
Richard III, when he sees he is doomed at the Battle of Bosworth Field,
yet remains resolute, declaring to Catesby, “Slave, I have set my life upon a
cast,/ And I will stand the hazard of the die.”
“Hazard yet forward” as the motto of evolution
reverts to more positive expectations both within and beyond the human
sphere. While evolution need not move
toward greater complexity, it always serves to better equip an organism for
survival and reproduction. Always striving
to pursue incremental improvements seems the habit of our DNA. Random variation through natural selection is
responsible for the magnificent perfection of all organisms, including humanity. One present product of this immense and
fabulously complex process is, of course, our present speculations, these words
materializing on my screen.
Even more
fundamentally, there is chance in all things, even, as the quantum physicists
tell us, at the very base of material existence. Without
this unpredictability, we would inhabit an entirely mechanistic universe in
which all of history was implied by circumstances at the time of the Big
Bang. When Einstein wrote to Max Born
that “the Old One” does not play at dice, he did not consider the possibility
that God is dice, that his nature is a wide-open roll, realized and
refigured as every instant passes. Indeed,
dice have been used by people since prehistoric times and their first use was
not gambling and recreation but divination, like other chance operations: the
flight of birds, the cracking of a tortoise shell, the reading of entrails, the
I Ching and the Ifa oracle.
Perhaps we might all become devotees of a neo-pagan cult of Tyche (Τύχη), called Fortuna by the Romans, the goddess of chance. In his description of Argos Pausanias notes a temple of Fortuna in which he says Palamedes dedicated the dice he had invented. Originally associated chiefly with good luck, Tyche was depicted with a cornucopia and often a gubernaculum or ship’s rudder, which might suggest either a hope for safety in sea voyages or perhaps simply the steering of events. By Hellenistic times her governance had spread to all events, both welcome and feared, and Polybius at the outset of his histories concedes control of all men’s affairs to her. In spite of his sympathy for Christianity, Constantine built a temple to Tyche (which Julian later spurned) in Constantinople. Have we today any better understanding of our destiny? Any better way to predict the future? Her rule, it seems, continues.
We cannot foresee
a single day, but, whatever our experiences, we are each likely to find
ourselves eventually in the position of Byrhtwold in “The Battle of Maldon,” aware
of a bitter doom that cannot be dodged.
May we at that time be as unbowed as that antique hero who declared, “the
mind must be tougher, keener the heart, the spirit stronger, as our strength
fades.” When only self-possession
remains, fortitude is the sole dignity left us, a final challenge to hazard yet
forward.
The family history research has been conducted by my sister
Mary Frances Wallner and my cousin Carol
Ann Seaton.
The passage from Pausanias is found his Description of
Greece (or Traveling Around Greece, Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις) 2.20.3.
Polybius’ comment is found in his Histories (Ἱστορίαι) 1.4.
In the original Old English the quotation from the ”Battle
of Maldon” reads "Hiġe sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre,/ mōd sceal þē māre þē ūre mæġen lȳtlað.”
