What happens when the name of someone or something vanishes into the past, irretrievable even by linguistic reconstruction?
Well, we tend to create new names. We're a very verbal species, and consequently names are important. Every culture in the world has names or terms for something, always with a rich cultural and social history behind it. But something that struck me some months ago as an interesting facet of how names work is that, sometimes, a name can be completely lost. And when that happens, it lends an interesting level of depth to something which might otherwise appear shallow or inconsequential.
Apologies for bringing it up, but a certain overly popular urban fantasy series by a non-kosha author has an antagonist whose name is so deeply feared that speaking it is considered like an unlucky omen or even a curse. So they are referred to using the epithet "[They] who shall not be named". Believe it or not, this erasure of names through fear or social prejudice is nothing new. Several periods of Ancient Egypt made a habit of rubbing out inconvenient periods, such as systematic attempts by pharaohs after Tutankhamen to destroy evidence and memories of the Amarna Period represented by him and his father Akhenaten. There is also the the notorious Venetian Doge Marino Faliero, who was not only executed but subjected to Damnatio memoriae, basically erasure from official memory with associated punishments.
The mythic power of names is also very common. From the Ancient Egyptian myth of Ra's true name being learned by Isis and granting her great power, to traditions among the Ainu people of Japan for children to have a false name for the first few years to deter evil spirits, to old fairy tales like that of Rumpelstiltskin, to modern interpretations from le Guin and Paolini where knowing a name literally gives someone power over it. There is even an interesting superstition surrounding bears, where to speak its real name was to make it appear. So they used a term that now is rendered as...bear. There were similar superstitions around speaking the names of deities like Hades and Persephone. Don't exactly want to attract attention from the literal king and queen of the Underworld.
Sometimes, names just aren't recorded because the type of language it was preserved in wouldn't have survived, or suffered a devastating blow. While there are plenty of names surviving for Aztec and Mayan mythical and legendary figures, many others don't have surviving names. The picture heading the article is of a figure commonly called either Teotihuacan Spider Woman or the Great Goddess of Teotihuacan. We don't know her by any other name, there's even debate as to whether she was really a goddess, but unlike the Flayed God (Xipe Totec) or the Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcōātl/Kukulkan) she doesn't appear to have cognates in later cultures. In fact, most of the deities identified around Teotihuacan have few or not later equivalents. We don't know their names, they're only known by modern epithets. The civilisation of Teotihuacan left precious little of their pictographic writing, and we also have little left of the writing of the later Aztec culture of the region because...Spain happened.
Historical and political figures have also done this on purpose. The most obvious example is the 'disappearance' of former colleagues of Josef Stalin who fell foul of his regime, which is almost certainly happening in other countries under present or attempted totalitarian rule. And in other cases, certain names related to the development of advances or technologies may be left out due to the inconvenient light they shine on an established cultural narrative. But there is also a more personal example, that of George I's wife Sophia Dorothea of Celle. Long story short, it was a deeply unhappy cousins marriage of state, Sophia Dorothea allegedly had an affair, and she was divorced and imprisoned for the rest of her life. Here, the damnatio memoriae was more by personal choice than official decree, in as much as George I didn't talk about his wife. Or his own complicity in the event.
There is an interesting aspect of the loss of names that stems from cultural norms, and that is China. Xiran Jay Zhao touches on this in their videos on Fu Hau, Qin Shi Huang, and We Zetien, but women's names in Ancient China were typically not recorded, though I don't have the resources to go into detail on exact cultural or social reasons. But it means that, while there are many prominent women in Chinese history, we know them more by titles or honourifics than by their actual names.
And don't think this is some far off and distant thing that we now totally never do. Erasure of names or faces from something is happening all the time. Particularly if said figure is involved, whether justifiably or not, in either negative cultural movements or criminal activities. From the games industry alone (my hobby area), there is the dropping of the voice and likeness of Pierre Taki from the international version of Judgment, the removal of Michael Jackson's musical contributions to Sonic the Hedgehod 3, or the scrubbing of Hideo Kojima from the marketing of Metal Gear Solid V. While the reasons behind these erasures vary wildly, and I have my own feelings on this kind of thing, it is both an understandable reactions from corporations wanting to protect their products and sets a worrying precedent in this digital media age.
For a long time, names and words were considered to have literal power. In some circles historically, you didn't say 'damn' to someone unless you really, really were prepared for them to be damned to whatever underworld equivalent existed. Today, one could argue they still have. Writing, whether fictional or journalistic (can be interchangeable, discuss if you wish), influences people's perceptions of a subject or person.
This post is getting rambling, but it is an extremely deep field of potential study that I only just seriously though about as I was writing this, and I realised there's a huge amount of additional research that could be done into the concepts of damnatio memoriae, the somewhat-related Streisand effect. But I'll leave on a final note relating to someone else who wrote about unspeakable things. H. P. Lovecraft commonly wrote about terrible and unknowable forces that drive one mad by mere knowledge of them. But here's the kicker; his creations would've been far more terrifying if they hadn't been named at all. If we didn't have anything but epithets to attach to the humanoid squid-faced dragon thing, we might actually be scared if we saw its idol.
