A cloth with many meanings

In the mid-18th century, when ships sailing up the Foyle began to play a role in international commerce, their most important cargo was linen yarn and cloth.

Other vessels carried flaxseed into Derry from the American colonies - and on their return journeys, they defrayed the cost of their voyages by carrying tens of thousands of migrants. Many of those passengers settled in places like the Shenandoah Valley where they grew flax and raised cattle, exactly as they done back home in the northwest of Ireland.

This three-way trade in flaxseed, linen and human beings wasn’t always a romantic story. Some of those early migrants were embittered Presbyterians who had become disillusioned with high rents and harsh farming conditions and yearned for religious liberty. Others were indentured labourers who had to spend the first few years of their American sojourn working off the cost of their passage.

Back home in Ireland, the surge in Irish linen exports didn’t bring much immediate benefit to the people who pulled the flax, spunit into yarn and wove it into linen. People in Ireland had always grown flax and worn linen; we know that from early Irish legal codes and saints’ lives. But when, in the 1700s, the fabric became an important Irish export, that development reflected the needs of a North Atlantic trading system in which Irish producers were only small cogs. Hauling flax out of a lint-dam was backbreaking, smelly work, and it didn’t make you rich. Perhaps that is the reason why linen has mixed associations for people in Ireland.

In ancient Egypt and Israel, also, linen had many different symbolic meanings, sometimes contradictory ones. That is the theme of an exhibition on Linen in the Bible which is opening in St Columb’s Cathedral on October 23 and will be on view till November 20. In some contexts, linen stood for earthiness, the products of the ground. According to one interpretation, the linen component of the temple curtain in Jerusalem stood for the earth, while the wool dyed in brilliant shades of red, blue and purple represented fire, air and water. But, in other contexts, linen was seen as a token of eternity, a carrier of heavenly light. This association becomes compelling when the slight impurities that give raw linen its light-brown colour are removed; in other words when linen is bleached to a brilliant white.

And in the ancient world, just as in Ireland, people knew that white cloth shines even brighter when it is hammered repeatedly so as to drive the fibres together and create a smoother surface. The Roman writer Pliny gives a description of the flax process which is uncannily familiar to anybody who knows the Irish equivalent: from breaking and combing the newly harvested fibre to bleaching and ‘beetling’ to use the Irish term – the ever-whiter cloth.

In the Easter story, linen features both as a symbol of mortality and of eternity.

As the exhibition shows, the discarded grave clothes are a sign of finitude, while the angel guarding the empty tomb is clad in brilliant white which speaks of the cosmic mystery that has just unfolded.

The exhibition draws on words and pictures from many sources; the images include specially commissioned photographs of a famous Serbian fresco, and of a mosaic from a monastery on Mount Sinai which is one of the oldest extant pieces of Christian art.

The collection was curated by Dr Margaret Barker, an Old Testament scholar who specialises in the symbolism of the Jerusalem Temple. She will give a lecture at the cathedral on October 23 at 7.45 on weaving as a symbol of creation.

Contributed

Bruce Clark