Read Online Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online

had been going on for a long time. Where did it come from? In The Creation of Patriarchy — by “patriarchy” is not meant genial Dad sitting at the head of the table carving up the Sunday roast, but the system by which it was a man’s right to treat his wife or wives and children as if he owned them absolutely and could dispose of them at will, like chairs and tables — Gerda Lerner has this to say: “Historical sources on the origin of slavery are sparse, speculative, and difficult to evaluate. Slavery seldom, if ever, occurs in hunting/ gathering societies but appears in widely separated regions and periods with the advent of pastoralism, and later agriculture, urbanization, and state formation. Most authorities have concluded that slavery derives from war and conquest. The sources of slavery commonly cited are: capture in warfare; punishment for a crime; sale by family members; self sale for debt; and debt bondage. . . . Slavery could only occur where certain preconditions existed: there had to be food surpluses; there had to be means of subduing recalcitrant prisoners; there had to be a distinction (visual or conceptual) between them and their enslavers.” She goes on to postulate that the first slaves were women, because they could be more easily controlled, and that male war captives were usually just brained or shoved off a cliff until someone thought of the clever device of blinding them — thus giving us Samson Agonistes, in John Milton’s poem of the same name: “. . . eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.”
    Samson is an Old Testament hero whose God-given strength depends on his not divulging his secret, which is that he’ll lose all his power if his hair is cut off. And it is cut off, by a treacherous woman — they leak like a sieve, those women; don’t tell them anything unless you want the neighbours to hear. But Samson redeems himself from his enemies and tormenters — he buys back the freedom of his soul — at the cost of his own physical life. How fascinating that we say a person “redeems himself” when he’s been guilty of a disgraceful action and then balances it out with a good or noble one. There’s a pawnshop of the soul, it appears, where souls can be held captive but then, possibly, redeemed; and that is what I’d like to discuss next.
    FIRST, A CURIOUS manifestation of this pawnshop of the soul: the Sin Eater. The custom of sin-eating appears in a 1924 novel by Mary Webb called Precious Bane , the title of which comes from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book I. After his fall from Heaven into Hell, Satan sends out a mining expedition:
There stood a Hill not far whose griesly top
Belch’d fire and rowling smoak; the rest entire
Shon with a glossie scurff, undoubted sign
That in his womb was hid metallic Ore,
The work of Sulphur. Thither wing’d with speed
A numerous Brigad hasten’d. As when bands
Of Pioners with Spade and Pickaxe arm’d
Forerun the Royal Camp, to trench a Field,
Or cast a Rampart. MAMMON led them on,
MAMMON, the least erected Spirit that fell
From heav’n, for ev’n in heav’n his looks & thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heav’ns pavement, trod’n Gold,
Then aught divine or holy else enjoy’d
In vision beatific: by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransack’d the Center, and with impious hands
Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth
For Treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Op’nd into the Hill a spacious wound
And dig’d out ribs of Gold. Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soyle may best
Deserve the pretious bane.
    Thus we know by its title that Webb’s Precious Bane will have as one of its themes a destructive obsession with riches; and so it does. It’s set in nineteenth-century Shropshire, where old folkways have lingered on. Gideon Sarn’s father has died of a stroke, with his boots on — an unlucky thing, as he was assumed to have died “in his wrath,