Outcast

Taoist Recluses

And Mountain Temples

Some are outcast by others, and some choose that path deliberately, often for moral or spiritual reasons. The Taoist monks of China are one example. For many centuries, Taoists have exiled themselves in the mountains and other remote places so they could cultivate their spirits without the distractions of life in the mundane world. Some of those monks have always been hermits, living in solitary caves so isolated that one Western scholar found one who had never even heard of Chairman Mao! Others have banded together in mountain monasteries, allowing them to have the advantages of mutual support and cooperation while still concentrating on meditation and spiritual discipline.

The monks of these Taoist sanctuaries on Huashan, Wudang, Maoshan and other holy mountains suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution due to the oppression of the Red Guards. Some of these sanctuaries were all-but-abandoned until very recently, and have been reopened only because the Chinese government saw the potential of allowing “authentic Taoist temples” for the benefit of the tourist trade. Even though these temples are to some extent artificial, the monks who inhabit them are doing their best to keep the Taoist tradition alive under very difficult circumstances.

Even if they are allowed to exist only so they can be of use to the government, the mere fact that they do exist may be enough to keep the thin thread of tradition from being broken forever. If there are still Taoists on Mount Wudang a hundred years or five hundred years from now, it will be thanks to their perseverance.

Street Gangs

“If the young people are not initiated, they will burn down the village just to feel its warmth.”

Competition between aggressive young men for status and dominance- it's not a pretty thing, but you could make a pretty strong case that it's a natural thing. From the young French noblemen of the dueling era to the warring gang-members of our inner cities, young men are dangerous creatures and always have been. Their (possibly biological) urge to assert themselves, to seek and maintain status in sometimes-violent competition, has been a problem for many societies. Most societies have found ways to channel and control these impulses. In our current society, there are a number of outlets for young men to prove themselves and to claim a place in the world in ways that are not anti-social. These structures don't always work, but they do exist.

But what about marginalized communities? What about communities where there are very limited opportunities, and very limited outlets of this type? What happens in these situations is that the young men are effectively outcasts, left to find or create their own ways to find worth and assert status.

There's an African proverb that says “If the young people are not initiated, they will burn down the village just to feel its warmth.” That's the essence of the gang problem. Without any healthy way to compete with each other and claim some measure of power and dignity, many young men (and some young women) will create structures of their own for doing so- structures that share few values in common with the larger community, and contribute directly to its destruction.

Outlaws

"Let His Be a Wolf's Head"

"Let his be a wolf's head"- back in the Dark Ages, these ominous words were a type of death sentence. Wolves, at the time, were seen as enemies of humankind, so a “wolf's head” was a human wolf, an enemy to all. To be declared a wolf's head was to be literally “outlawed,” placed outside of the protection of the law.

If your neighbor thought you had a nice piece of land, he could legally come to your house in the middle of the night, set it on fire, and fill you with arrows when you tried to escape the flames, and no one would stop him, punish him or even question him- not even your kin. A wolf's head or outlaw was a legal outcast, a person utterly beyond the pale. If he was ferocious and domineering- which must often have been the case- a wolf's head might have been able to intimidate his neighbors into keeping their distance. But he still wouldn't be able to do business with them in any way, nor would anyone help him if he was sick or injured or if his harvest failed. They only risked becoming outlaws themselves if they did.

So the wolf's head would have to go it alone, living a life of forced and absolute self-sufficiency. He would also have to have eyes in the back of his head or else he could expect to be slain from ambush. Most of those who were outlawed probably didn't last too long. Some of the earliest Viking raiders may well have been outlaws, living by plunder and murder because they could no longer survive by farming. Declaring a man an outlaw tended to remove any incentive for him to reform his behavior!

Leper Colonies

Outcasts for Illness

Lepers, historically, have often been outcasts- forced to live in separate communities known as “lazar houses” or “leper colonies.” The word “leprosy” used to have a much broader meaning, referring to just about any incurable skin condition people didn't really understand. True leprosy is contagious, but only in cases of prolonged exposure- which is why priests or doctors working in leper's colonies often caught the disease themselves. Partly because the word had a broader meaning, and partly due to simple ignorance, people in the past thought that leprosy was extremely contagious and that the only way to protect the public from it was to quarantine lepers completely.

Even though most leper colonies closed down decades ago, irrational fear of leprosy isn't entirely a thing of the past. Until just a few years ago, the Japanese government was still forcing lepers to live under strict quarantine conditions, where they were frequently abused by doctors and other staff. The courts and the media both dismissed any attempts to win justice for the victims, and only an independent judicial review eventually put a stop to the practice.

The epic fantasy series “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever” features an author with leprosy as its main character, combining the tradition of outcast fantasy heroes with the historical reality of how people with leprosy have actually been treated. Thomas Covenant is one of the most unusual characters in fantasy fiction for that reason (among several others)- although an outcast, he is not romanticized, and he displays very few heroic qualities until well into the series. Covenant's outcast status is not a badge of honor, but something more like a crucifixion.

Witch Hunts

Two Different Approaches To Outcasts

Witch hunts still happen in some places, usually in very rural areas of Africa or India, and examining how a witch hunt really works can teach us a lot about outcasts. The National Geographic TV show “Taboo” had a few segments on African witch hunts, and on the practice of hiring professional witch finders.

Such men existed in medieval Europe, where they seem to have been sociopathic sadists with an intense hatred of women. The African witch finder is a different sort of man, which is not to say what they do is positive.

The primary talent of a witch finder in modern Africa appears to be his intuitive ability to quickly observe a community in turmoil and determine who the trouble centers around. A member of the community who is hard to get along with, not generally well-liked, possibly suffering from a personality disorder, will be outed as the “witch.” On the one hand, this is a very ancient superstition. On the other hand, it's just a description of what's actually happening- the person who is widely perceived as being responsible for the psychological malaise of the community is accused of harming people through black magic. Black magic, in this context, could be interpreted as a way of saying “psychological tension.”

Here's where it gets really interesting, though. Some witch finders recommend a sentence of ostracism and banishment, with the result that there are actually “witch villages” filled with the outcasts from various other communities. Others perform a ritual to “cure” the witch, removing the taint of witchcraft from them. What's interesting about this approach is that the community is generally willing to accept its validity, and the person who was previously perceived as a witch is given a clean slate and welcomed back into the community.

Broken Men

Outcasts of the Scottish Clans

In the clan-based societies of the old Scottish Highlands and Borders, most clans did not have any sort of prison system to punish malefactors in their own communities. Clans with strong connections to the central government, such as the Campbells of Argyll, might have a single jail in their largest town. Most did not. The chiefs and chieftains had a power known as “pit and gallows,” which meant the legal or quasi-legal authority to punish their clan members as they personally saw fit.

The most common punishment, though, was simple ostracism, a terrible fate for anyone to suffer in a clan society. A man ostracized by his own community could no longer count on his neighbors for help or defense. He couldn't socialize with them. He couldn't trade with them. The community simply repudiated him. Such ostracized outlaws were known as “broken men,” and broken men typically banded together in the woods and mountains, forming large gangs of desperate criminals.

Sometimes an entire clan could even be broken if its chiefly line failed and it was driven off its lands. Whatever their origins, broken men were the most dangerous men in the Highlands and the Borders, because armed gangs of people rejected by their own communities would obviously include a great many rapists, murderers and sociopaths. In the Border region, broken men congregated in the “Debatable Lands,” because these areas were claimed by both Scotland and England so neither side would allow the other to enforce the laws in the disputed territory. Broken men were like human wolves, outcasts with nothing to lose. One of the primary duties of a chieftain's personal champion was to hunt them down.

Gypsies and Travelers

Outcasts For Centuries

Nomadic people like the gypsies and travelers are the ultimate outcasts, rejected for centuries by settled society and existing in a world of their own. If you look at any news story online about the travelers or the gypsies, you'll see that the comments on the story are often filled with hatred and venom toward them. I have personally known British people who self-identified as being political progressives in every way, yet who spoke of nomadic people with venomous contempt.

A lot of this hatred is justified through false arguments about property rights. Many travelers have used the same established round of camping sites for several centuries, going back to prior arrangements with medieval lords who allowed them to use those sites. Now, in very recent times, those camping sites have been declared “unauthorized” or deemed “private property.” What right does any private property owner have to unilaterally void an established traveler campsite going back centuries? The tradition of that site as a traveler camp ought to carry more legal weight than some much-more-recent bill of sale.

The real reason for bigotry against gypsies and travelers has nothing to do with a legal argument. It's simply the old and ugly human instinct to hate those who are different for the mere fact that they are different. No, gypsy and traveler societies are not perfect. Neither is any society. That's no excuse for bigotry, and those who express contempt for gypsies and travelers should be as ashamed as any racist.

The Merkabah Rider

A "Mensch With No Name"!

Edward M. Erdelac's “Merkabah Rider” is an extremely cool variation on the wandering outcast character. The Merkabah Rider series is “weird western,” a genre inspired by spooky Western movies like Clint Eastwood's “High Plains Drifter” and his mysterious Man With No Name.

The Rider is a Merkabah mystic with magical powers, wandering through a supernatural version of the American West on a mission of righteous vengeance to find his former teacher. The Merkabah was a form of Jewish mysticism even older than the Kaballah, and the Rider is doubly an outcast. As a Jewish mystic, he's an outcast in every Christian community he passes through. But he's also an outcast from his own mystical order, because his teacher turned out to be an evil sorcerer.

The visual similarity between a black-clad Orthodox Jew and the Man With No Name must have provided the original inspiration for this series, the second book of which is actually called “The Mensch With No Name”- an almost unforgivable pun. The stories excuse the pun, though, because they are pure pulp gold- complete entertainment for fans of the old “Weird Tales” type of adventure fiction. If you are a fan of the old pulps, you will absolutely love this series, not for reasons of nostalgia but because these books will give you exactly what the old pulps gave you- high quality, completely compelling escapist fantasy, spiked with eerie images and outlandish landscapes. I can't wait to jump back into those landscapes myself!

Outlaw Bikers

Romantic Outcasts, Or Cold-Hearted Killers?

One of the classic American archetypes of the romanticized outcast is the outlaw biker, as in the consistently entertaining yet wildly unrealistic “Sons of Anarchy.” Most people see the outlaw biker as a cartoonish image, a symbol of personal freedom from society's rules and constraints, kind of scary but kind of loveable too. Real outlaw bikers do what they can to contribute to this perception, because it protects their operations. That's why the Hells Angels do charity drives, after all.

The reality of the outlaw biker lifestyle- not the biker lifestyle in general, which is a different thing- is one of heinous and self-serving criminality. In 1985, one Hells Angels chapter in Quebec ambushed and wiped out another entire chapter of their own club. The same chapter started a biker war in 1994 that eventually killed at least a hundred and fifty people, including an eleven year old boy. The purpose of the war was to gain control over the Quebec cocaine trade.

The point of all this is that outlaw bikers use the mythology surrounding them as a cover. They are actually just gangsters, motivated by money and power like any other gangster. As long as the public continues to accept the romanticized image of the biker outcast, they will be able to continue using it as a cover over their crimes and atrocities. Some bikers may very well be grizzled but good-hearted tough guys, hard-living misfits who love the freedom of the open road, or whatever other image you may have in your mind. Outlaw bikers, though, are simply criminals, and they are all too happy to be romanticized by the gullible.

The Burakumin

Japan's Out-Caste

Outcasts are easy to romanticize- unless you're one of them. Real outcasts are not generally mysterious wandering swordsmen or mystical gunslingers as in fantasy fiction. They are more likely to be ordinary people, demonized and cast out from their own communities because of either their own failings or the prejudice of others.

Japan's “burakumin” class is in the latter category. “Burakumin” means “hamlet people,” referring to the little hamlets of outcasts on the outskirts of Japanese cities in the feudal era. The cities eventually grew up around those hamlet areas, which turned into urban neighborhoods. The inhabitants remained outcasts, though, as they are to this day.

Why? Well, “burakumin” itself is a recent euphemism. The traditional word for this class is actually “eta” or “non-human,” which tells you how the burakumin were traditionally seen. The people of ancient Japan, like people in all other times and places, needed certain people to do the dirty work. Work such as handling corpses or tooling leather, both of which were defined as polluting practices in both Shinto and Buddhism. Even though these jobs had to be done by someone, medieval Japan stigmatized and isolated those who did them, defining them as not even being human beings.

The odd thing about the burakumin is that you can't recognize them just by looking at them. There's no racial difference at all between them and other Japanese people. So how is prejudice against the burakumin even maintained? By making and selling maps which show the locations of burakumin neighborhoods, that's how. So when you go to apply for a job, the hiring manager looks up your place of birth, checks his burakumin map... and if you happen to come from one of those areas, you can forget about being hired.

That's why it is naïve to declare, as the author of a recent news article did, that the burakumin are being “too sensitive” when they object to attempts to locate and identify burakumin neighborhoods. Yes, of course such attempts represent anti-burakumin prejudice. If no one knew which neighborhoods were historically home to the “eta,” no one would be able to repress the modern burakumin at all, because you can't tell them apart from other Japanese people by any other method.

As things stand today, the existence and use of “burakumin maps” prevents members of this outcast community from obtaining honest and gainful employment- which is most certainly why the Yakuza organized crime syndicates are made up largely of burakumin. In fact, if the Japanese government really wanted to get rid of the Yakuza, it could probably do it just by cracking down on the use of “burakumin maps.” The Yakuza would lose up to 70% of its membership within the next generation, as young burakumin would have the opportunity to get legitimate jobs.

Pages