Sea Shells

 

     Who as a child did not prize among treasured possessions a collection of sea shells?  Many were souvenirs, gathered along the shore during vacations, others may have been gifts or curio shop purchases.  Many of us were undiscriminating; while fancying the novel and colorful, we prized ordinary specimens hardly less.  We may have in fact been developing a subtler taste.  A receptive eye will find magic in every broken sand dollar!  Somehow a good many conch shells had been carried far from the Caribbean; those that had escaped the indignity of being made into lamps could be used for the meditative purpose of “hearing the ocean.”  Wordsworth, receptive always to commonplace profundities, describes a “curious child” listening to a shell and experiencing thereby a “Mysterious union with his native sea.” As if this were not enough, he explicates: “Even in such a shell the Universe itself/ Is to the ear of Faith.” [1]

     But that calming mantra proceeding from the pink and pearly threshold of the conch’s extraordinary home is hardly the only appeal of shells.   A handful of commonplace shells, in a box in the back of a drawer, sitting amid a few grains of sand, can renew the wonder of an encounter with the immensities of the sea.  Though hard and calcareous, there is something in the unique opalescent cream-tones so common in malacological collections reminiscent of milk and semen and the bright heart of things. 

     Even to a child, shells might be in many ways instructive apart from their beauty.  I once collected a pailful of living Pacific mollusks and left them outside my motel door, expecting to play with them again as I had on the beach, but found the heap a sad and stinking mess of death the next day, a disturbing elemental revelation of mortality.  

     The wonder such objects inspire is evident not only in memories of childhood, but also in the earlier days of our species.  Large architectural shells have been fashioned into trumpets since palaeolithic times, though the details of their original uses must remain obscure.  We know, however, about Poseidon’s son Triton, usually represented as a merman, his lower half a fish, who, in his role as herald or messenger for Poseidon blew a large shell, perhaps a conch (though today the Charonia, a large sea snail, is commonly called Triton's trumpet).  After the flood that left only Deucalion and Pyrrha surviving, Triton manifests at Neptune’s behest to sound his shell-trumpet, and the waters only then take heed and begin to retreat.  According to Ovid Triton was draped “in purple shells,” and the fact is that the Murex snail’s shells were used to produce the very prestigious Tyrian purple dye, called also royal purple and Phoenician red. 

     Shell trumpets were in fact used in battle just as bugles are today. [2]  To the Greeks of Classical times, they already seemed a sign of a primitive people.  Thus in Euripedes [3] it is used by the backward Taurians, while Theocritus describes its use a Bebrycian in  Bithynia. [4]  In Vergil Misenus played his concha like a virtuoso and dared the gods to outdo him whereupon Triton threw him to the rocks to drown. [5]  Even in antiquity’s sunset, Nonnos tells us that Dionysos can be heard, blowing a shell trumpet amid troops of bacchantes and satyrs as he speeds into battle against the Indians. [6]The Indians would have recognized the consch as an emblem of Vishnu.  The Japanese similarly used shell trumpets, called jinkai, in war, as did the Aztecs who called theirs quiquiztli and many South Pacific peoples, including Fijians (davui), and Maoris (pūtātara). 

     War is not the only theater in which the dramatic sound of the shell trumpet plays a role.  Shell trumpets are used in in the Japanese Buddhist goma ritual of the Shingon and Shugendo sects.  In Polynesia, South America and the Caribbean, they have been used for calls to prayer, funerals, and in apotropaic rituals.  In Malta such instruments are called bronja or tronga and are used for less portentous occasions, blown to notify farmers that the windmills are operating and capable of grinding grain.  Today conch-blowing performers greet cruise passengers in the Marquesas and entertain the patrons of the Hyatt Regency in Honolulu.

      Sea shells may signify love as well as war.  The beauty of cowries is suggested by the fact that the word porcelain derives from the old Italian term for the animal (porcellana).  The lovely complementarity of the one side swelling outward in a smooth mound and the other side with its rippled vent, opening into an unseeable mystery, may have contributed to the shell’s acquisition of symbolic value through association with the female genitals, as attested by both the common name in ancient Rome concha veneris and the scientific subfamily today – Cypraeidae.   Native people in California’s Great Basin called the shells in their own language, “cunts” and prepared their dinner with a phallic mortar and a pestle bowl rimmed in cowries, considering their subsistence and thus their kitchenware hallowed as a gift of coyote. [7]  Today many New Age and African-oriented websites market cowries as a “fertility charm.” 

     Cowrie-shaped amulets are found in ancient Egypt, often in the form of belts or girdles worn about women’s waists, often along with other symbols of generation such as tattoos of Bes.  Cowries of pure gold that accompanied Princess Sithathoryunet to her tomb almost four thousand years ago contained metal balls that would tinkle as she moved, likely providing an apotropaic effect similar to that of the Roman phallic tintinnabulae.

     Perhaps the value acquired through these connotations played a role in the widespread use of cowries for money in Africa and Asia as well as ancient Egypt.  They have found myriad other uses as well, among them as aids in contacting the Orixás in New World settings reflecting Yoruba tradition, called búzios in the practice of Candomblé and Umbanda and in Santería called diloggún.  They are used in divination by the Kaniyar Panicker in Kerala, a group today designated a “backward tribe” by the government though their advanced academies of astrology, ayurvedic medicine, and philosophy gave them once the reputation of scholars.  Less magical uses include the control of livestock according to Plutarch [8]. 

     The story of the miraculous appearance of dew in Gideon’s fleece, taken as a type of the conception of Christ, led to the association of shells with the Virgin Mary.  This connection, prominent in the treatment of the Physiologus [9] associated shells with Mary and a pearl, like the dew Gideon saw, as a representation of the Incarnation.  The round and perfect pearl, according to the second century writer, “removes the uncleanness of the sea” as Christ forgives sin.  In addition the author says that the two shells of a bivalve signify the two Testaments.  Supported by other church fathers [10] and by the continuing popularity of various versions of the Physiologus, shells found their way into religious iconography in paintings by Piero della Francesca and others.  In the dome of Pisa’s cathedral an annunciation scene includes a shell and pearl and the legend rore coelesti foecundor (“heaven’s dew will make me fruitful”). 

     Because of their habitats not far from Santiago de Campostela, scallop shells were one of the first popular souvenirs.  Symbolic of pilgrimage, they are today visible as icons on signs along the route today.   Such shells were also used in baptism and included in the design of baptismal fonts long after they were no longer used. 

     Those if us of a certain age encountered in school a more generally spiritual metaphor in Holmes’ “The Chambered Nautilus,” while Tennyson found a shell a “miracle” of beauty though he felt he had to ornament the natural object with fanciful images.

 

Did he stand at the diamond door           

Of his house in a rainbow frill?   

Did he push, when he was uncurl’d,        

A golden foot or a fairy horn       

Thro’ his dim water-world?  [11]

  

     Material facts determine in part the fascination of sea shells.  These mollusks and other creatures occupy our world, but in a dimension most people never enter.  A cliché of scuba divers likens their experiences to those of astronauts in space (including virtual weightlessness), but the land beneath the sea is busy with a myriad strange animals.  Vertebrates share a common body structure; the bones of mice and men very nearly match, and even insects and fish have predictable body parts, but submarine life seems freed from all prescriptions, capable of taking practically any shape: sea stars, octopus, sea horse, jellyfish, coral.   Animals like bivalves have, perhaps fortunately for the diner who likes them on the half-shell, no identifiable organs.  Apart from its viscous softness and vulnerability, little sign of its life reaches us.  Once seized from their home, shellfish become mute and stubbornly unwilling to reveal their secrets with the fortunate exception of their subtle and ravishing flavor.   

     During the hyperaesthetic Heian period in Japan when aristocrats enjoyed poetry improvisation competitions called uto-amare, a game developed called e-awase in which the players painted small pictures in clam shells on assigned topics.  In its later Kamakura form kai-awase the shells were prepainted and the object of the game was to find matching pairs (called male and female) in a set of three hundred and sixty painted shells.  Today many such shells available in tourist shops are decorated with decals rather than painted and the actual game is seldom played.

       A shell is by definition a concealment, hiding a mystery within.  If its contents remain incognito, what one may see provides a marvelous distraction.  Some shells have intricate sculptural reliefs like angel-wings or painted patterns like even the humble cockle.  The channeled duck clam is often pure white and features the most delicate and tasteful minimalist lines, while the sundial snail (scientific name is the grand Architectonica perspectiva) seen from above resembles not so much a garden timekeeper as a cosmic whorl, an image of the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. 

     The creatures of the sea approach us as well through smell and taste as they are perhaps the most delectable of human foods for those willing to eat flesh.  The saline taste of the ocean enhances the full and rounded sweetness of clams and of oysters, at once so rich and so austere.  Mussels are a more frugal delight, their orange-pink bodies savory and fine, their broth little short of elixir.  Once, in a Seattle restaurant, I ordered scallops on the half-shell and discovered that rare thing, a new pleasure, with little in common with the abductor muscles labeled scallops in the supermarket 

      Looking at shells is like looking through a telescope at stars or through a microscope at a cell or exploring the interior of the body or the cryptic chambers of the mind.  If these creatures can inspire people to war, to bed, to the table and to church, they thereby associate themselves with the most significant realms of human desire.  Still, if they inspire some to poetry, they send others off for an afternoon nap.  A graceful note in a Renaissance painting or a kitschy ashtray.  They provide a glimpse into a new world, utterly foreign to everyday experience yet drawing the eye with irresistible beauty.  The student of sea shells, like the diner facing a plate of clams and oysters, will in the end find an intimate relevance to human life in these elegant and exotic animals. 

 

    

 

1.  “The Sea Shell.”

2.  The battle trumpet of the ancient Hebrew-speaking people was, of course, no shell at all, but a horn, the shofar.  See, for instance, Judges 6:34 or Joshua 6:4-20.

 

3.  Iphigenia in Tauris. 303.  Ares wields a shell trumpet according to Lycophron.

 

4.  Idyll 22, l. 75.  Bithyina is also a genus of snails.

 

5.  Aeneid 6.171ff

 

6.  Dionysiaca 17.93-94.

 

7.  Henry Koerper, “Cowry Shells: Fertility/Fecundity Symbols In Southern California Iconography,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology Vol. 23, No. 1.

 

8.  Table-Talk, 7.8, 713B.

 

9.  XXIV.

 

10.  Isidore, for instance, says that pearls are conceived by means of celestial (caelestis) dew

(Etymologies 12.6).  See also Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Efrem the Syrian.

 

11.  “The Shell” in Maud I.