…oldest record of divinatory knot tying can be found painted on Phoenician
pottery, where the ritual binding and unbinding of various kinds of knots
through various and apparently rigorously codified untying strategies formed
one of the cornerstones of “folk” religion.
Interesting, as reported in Frazer’s magnum opus “The Golden Bough”,
similar customs have been observed among Breton fisherfolk, who also utilize
complicated “knot-games” as a means of intuiting the propitiousness of putting
out to sea for the day.
The knot, along with weaving, knitting, stitching, and various
other examples of the fabric- and fibre-arts, reflects, perhaps beyond all
other crafts, the intersection of human agency and divine influence, an
ordering of nature that is simultaneously mystical and mundane, and therefore liminal
and the domain of sorcerers and witches.
Literature is filled with examples of the mystical importance of
knot-tying: Sigismund’s vision of a witch knotting a net along the banks of the
mist-shrouded and wraith-haunted Danube; the unspeakable covenant forged
betwixt Mordred and the Black Man of the Woods and symbolized by the untying of
the bindings of Mordred’s sword belt; Marduk’s mastery of the winds, knotted
through magic into a useful rope that allowed him to escape the belly of the World
Fish; and countless others.
Then, too, there is the significance of the knot among
practicing seamen, important well beyond its rudimentary function of lashing
sails and lines, of fixing ropes and guides.
Sailors utilize the knot in their “Courts-at-Sea”, believing that a
well-tied knot so orders the universe around them that no falsehood may be
uttered when one’s hands are placed upon it, and so make them the centerpiece
of their quant maritime judiciary.
Similarly, sailors seal an oath with the ritual tying of a knot,
believing that an oathtaker thereby binds themselves to the oath, and the
consequences of breaking it, securely.
There is, of course, the famous tale of the Spanish Sailors who, having
taken a British Galleon in the Caribbean, hide their treasure on one of the
innumerable isles that dot that part of the world. They place their treasure within a great box,
each man wrapping a rope around the box and securing it fast with a knot,
swearing that all men still living within a decade hence shall return and dig
up their treasure, and untie their own knot.
Of course, a man, blinded by the lust of gold, breaks the compact within
a year, and secretly returns. He cuts
the knots, a grave sin that severs in one strike both the physical and
metaphysical threads that bind us together, thereby sealing his own doom. Of course, we need not complete so famous a tale;
sufficed to say, his end, including as it ropes of the famous Sargasso
seaweed and the eels that nest therein, offers a hideous but cosmically pleasing
symmetry to this gruesome tale.
Thus, we would ask that the beginning student of seamanship
treat the following pages of this treatise with the seriousness that they
deserve, for the art and science of knot-tying offers one of the scant pieces
of safety to be found when Man ventures out to sea…
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