Chess Quest : J.C. Hallman - The Sacred game

HISTORICAL CHESS
Chessquest

THE SACRED GAME
by J.C. Hallman

Goddesschess is pleased to present this intereresting thoughtspiece from the pen of J.C. Hallman.

J.C. Hallman (January 2006) J.C. Hallman's work has appeared in GQ, The Los Angeles Times, and a variety of literary magazines. He is the author of The Chess Artist, a nonfiction adventure through the chess subculture, and The Devil is a Gentleman, a creative biography of the philosopher William James, told through narratives of Hallman's journeys to a variety of modern religious movements. The Devil is a Gentleman is due out this spring from Random House.

In the Beginning…

A couple of years ago I wrote a book called The Chess Artist. The book was an exploration of the chess subculture conducted with an unlikely hypothesis in tow: chess, both in how individuals seemed to incorporate it into their private lives, and in how the Republic of Kalmykia, home of FIDE’s colorful ruler, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, incorporated it on a national level, appeared to echo some of the features of what normally gets called “religion.”

Admittedly, this was a little odd. But the hypothesis actually found a good bit of support during my studies and travels. When I interviewed Ilyumzhinov he told me in no uncertain terms that he wanted to turn chess into a religion. And David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld, authors of The Oxford Companion to Chess, offered the theory (from Joseph Needham) that chess emerged from a “quasi-astrological” Chinese technique for measuring Yin and Yang—forces both complementary and antagonistic.

The theory continued from there. The technique’s apparatus, a proto-board, evolved. First, it was converted to a divination tool strictly for military campaigns. “Then,” Hooper and Whyld write, “someone was sacrilegious enough to convert this process into a game, perhaps eliminating the dice. The person who secularized the religious ceremony has, perhaps, the best claim to be the ‘inventor’ of chess.”

The invention of chess is the Holy Grail of chess historians, and basically the whole deal can be put into half a sentence: China or India, probably India. I’m not particularly interested in weighing in on that debate. Instead, I’d like to concentrate on the more ephemeral question of the relationship between religion and games in general, and chess in particular. Perhaps this will wind up reflecting how chess actually feels when one plays it.

The first draft of The Chess Artist weighed in at more than seven-hundred pages. Three-hundred pages of it, some relating to my odd hypothesis, wound up on the cutting room floor. At first, I was content to leave it there. I’d been reading chess solid for two years, and I was ready for other things. I happily moved on to another project, a new book about offbeat religions and the philosopher William James.

But here’s the thing. Chess followed me. I kept finding it in my research. Chess, it seems, won’t leave me alone.

Let there Be Light…

The reaction to The Chess Artist was illuminating. Reviewers from inside the chess world made sure to note that I was an outsider, looking in. Quite right. But reviewers from outside the chess world said just the opposite: I was an insider. More specifically, they said I was a “cult insider.”

Now when you write about a subculture, you’re probably asking for this kind of thing. And that word, cult, well, it’s the kind of thing that gets one’s back up. But even if you prefer “chess enthusiast” to “chess cultist,” you should probably note that that word, enthusiasm, means filled with God. Or, filled with the breath of God, depending on who you talk to.

But that’s getting ahead of things.

H.J.R. Murray’s The History of Chess is so vast and influential that it’s easy to forget it’s not original source material. It’s basically the chess historian’s bible, though Murray himself might have deferred that title to The Game and the Playe of the Chesse of Jacobus de Cessolis. (Note: there are many varieties of spellings for this book and author both.) The Cessolis was popular in the 14th and 15th centuries, Murray said, and it underwent a process of redaction as it spread. If one counted the existing copies its popularity appeared to “have almost rivaled that of the Bible itself.”

But let’s stick with Murray. Murray’s magnum opus notes the connection between chess and religion often. Mostly he points out that chess often seemed to get the goat of organized religion. A plaintive minister writing an anonymous letter in 1680 speaks for the whole dilemma (and echoes my experience, besides):

It hath not done with me, when I have done with it. It hath followed me into my study, into my pulpit; when I have been praying or preaching, I have (in my thoughts) been playing at chess; then I have had, as it were, a chess-board before my eyes.

Familiar words for anyone who has lost a six-hour game or written a 700-page book. Murray leans toward a more macro view of things, exploring in the old texts the efforts made by virtually all religions to stamp out the game. These invariably failed, but a survey of the efforts is revealing.

A Buddhist text, Dialogues of the Buddha, attempted to disallow games played on boards eight or ten squares wide. It even disallowed imagining such games. The problem of chess in Christendom was the dice of early forms of the game (not to mention the fact that many priests became as addicted as the hapless minister above), which tended to associate it with gambling. A Medieval text, Guldin Spiel, by Johannes Ingold, used seven games to describe each of the seven deadly sins—chess was “pride”—a formula that would be reversed half a millennium later in GM Jonathan Rowson’s innovative book, The Seven Deadly Chess Sins.

And maybe it was this kind of thing that Hermann Hesse had in mind when he wrote his Nobel-prize winning book The Glass Bead Game:

Here and there in the ancient literatures we encounter legends of wise and mysterious games that were conceived and played by scholars, monks, or the courtiers of cultured princes. These might take the form of chess games in which the pieces and squares had secret meanings in addition to their usual functions.

Hesse knew his Murray.

Anyway, Christendom’s ultimate solution for chess was not so different from their solution for sex: chess was okay for the laity, but not the clergy.

And this was not so different from the course that Islam took, making chess an undesirable activity, but not a particularly damnable one as long as the pieces didn’t look like anything alive. Rabbis, too, had a problem with chess, but they couldn’t get rid of it either. Bobby Fischer’s shenanigans aside, chess became a pastime appropriate for the Sabbath, Murray noted, though one should use as a special set of silver pieces for the occasion.

Eventually—and more recently—the prohibition flopped completely and denying someone chess became a form of punishment. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, awaiting execution in a German prison during World War II, asked his family to bring him chess books to keep himself occupied. (A fact of which it’s hard to imagine Stefan Zweig, author of “The Royal Game,” unaware.) And in a brief treatise Bonhoeffer wrote on the privations of prison life, he noted that chess was a privilege that was denied to prisoners less well-connected than himself.

Before the Beginning…

All of this maybe addresses the evolution of things, but what about the feel of the game itself? It turns out there’s interesting roots there, too.

The basic idea of ritual combat goes back a long, long way. Mythologies and cosmologies often describe battles among gods that explain how the world was made, or how a particular god ushered in a new age. These battles are often reenacted in religious rituals, which is how the sport of wrestling came about—early wrestling being closely associated with religious festivals, etc. And wrestling, like chess, eventually becomes something more like a game—a sport. In fact, serious wrestling is sometimes called “body chess.”

We’re obviously headed now into that territory where my research into religion started to turn up chess references, where before chess research had hinted at religion. It turns out that religious scholars have been quite aware of the chess/game relationship with religion, either on a literal level, or a metaphorical one.

Chess is a particularly useful image when gods become removed from everyday life, and ideas of heroes wrestling among the clouds or of deities breaking one another open to create the earth didn’t seem so plausible anymore. So, instead, we get lines like this, from Jack Miles’s Pulitzer-prize winning book, God: A Biography:

If El [a Canaanite god], as the lord of all gods and men, were to become actively warlike, this is just how we might expect him to do it: to send one nation against another, to manipulate the pieces on a kind of world chessboard, rather than engage in combat himself.

Chess for the gods, it seems, can serve as a clever labor-saving device. Maybe that’s what Tolstoy had in mind when he tried to substitute a game of chess for the Siege of Sebastopol.

In any event, there’s a long tradition of chess games being used allegorically like this, usually pitting man against the Devil for his soul, or against Death for his life. It’s a common theme in Medieval texts, and has been revisited in modern experimental film.

With the Devil/Death connection, it’s not so surprising then that chess crops up in the history of Neo-Paganism. First, researchers into the history of Druidry insisted that a chessboard often served as a tool of divination for Druids. (More on that in a bit.) And more recently, consummate proto-Pagan Aleister Crowley had something of an amateur career as a chessplayer. This when he was not fighting it out with William Butler Yeats for control of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

But now this is getting a little out of hand. More sedate scholars slow down and stick to the facts. Mircea Eliade, one of the most formidable religious scholars of the 20th century, caught wind of the Druid game. He shot it down. The game clearly wasn’t chess, he said, though he was clear on another point—games and play had always been associated with ritual and religion. He also noted—without seeming to realize it was a whole can of worms—that certain ancient funerary urns had been decorated with “chessboard” patterns. It was a figure of speech that, if taken literally, would back up the birth of chess by several millennia.

Murray would turn in his grave.

But Eliade’s point is made—and it was echoed by another bigwig of religious scholarship, Emile Durkheim, who said “It is well known that games and the principal forms of art seem to have been born of religion and that they long maintained their religious character.”

So, play and games have always had a ritual component to them. And what I’d like to suggest is that maybe chess is better described as The Sacred Game than The Royal Game. That there is something holy to play is a thought as old as Plato. And it crops up even in the likes of William Faulkner. A chess-playing character in Faulkner’s little-known story “Knight’s Gambit” says to his opponent, “Nothing by which all human passion and hope and folly can be mirrored and then proved, ever was just a game. Move.”

But the most complete study on play phenomena in culture is Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, which explores play as it manifests in language, law, art, poetry, and war. The conclusion was that when it came right down to it, play was pretty serious business.

But for all his good work, Huizinga could offer only contradictory statements on chess:

The more “difficult” the game the greater the tension in the beholders. A game of chess may fascinate the onlookers although it still remains unfruitful for culture and devoid of visible charm. But once a game is beautiful to look at its cultural value is obvious; nevertheless its aesthetic value is not indispensable to culture.

And,

May it not be that in all logic, and particularly in the syllogism, there is always a tacit understanding to take the validity of the terms and concepts for granted as one does the pieces on a chess-board? Let others puzzle this out!

Indeed.

Revelations…

“Chess is not friendly to prose,” wrote Louis Menand, another Pulitzer winner, in a review of a chess book that was not mine. “Chess is, after all, a sport, but there is almost no way to convey what’s exciting about it to people who are not themselves deep students of the game.”

Beyond having set precisely this goal for myself when I wrote The Chess Artist, I’d have to disagree that there is no way to convey the feeling of the game. The trick, I’d say, is in indulging that side of the game that echoes the sacred, that faint twinge of community that comes along when you first sit across the board from a friend or an antagonist, the Yin to your Yang.

I’m not suggesting that chess is the paraphernalia of mystics. That would be an even odder hypothesis. But what’s clear from all this leftover research, perhaps—and what was already clear to anyone who’s ever played a serious game of chess—is that while chess is not an out-of-body experience in any way, it is precisely an in-body experience. It can offer, in the depth of study, a faint sense of otherness. The actual experience of a game hints at the hypothesis that all these scholars and critics orbit without being able to describe. Here it is: maybe chess is still a ritual tool of some kind—a tool that triggers some special corner of the mind, where our finite organ, locked in the prison of the skull, nevertheless touches the infinity of the game and of the possible.

And perhaps in this way it is not combat at all. Perhaps in this way it reassures.