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A century ago, if you were white and European and know a smattering of jujitsu, add in a dash of fisticuffs and preference for the gentleman’s cane as your weapon, and a new martial art named after yourself will flourish!

Meet Bartitsu, created by William Barton-Wright, whose railroad work took him to Japan for 3 years, where he studied at the school of Jigoro Kano. Once make in the land of limies, he quit being a railroad engineer and took up his new calling.

In 1899, Barton wrote an article in the London based publication, Pearson’s Magazine, entitled “A New Art of Self Defense.” In it he set out his system of self defense that he called “bartitsu,” an obvious melding of his name and jujitsu. While bartitsu was based mainly on jujitsu, Barton explained in his article that the system included boxing, kickboxing, and stick fighting.

Barton opened a school called the Bartitsu Club. He brought in some of the best martial arts teachers from around the world to teach at his new school. Via correspondence with Professor Jigoro Kano, the founder of Kodokan Judo, and other contacts in Japan, Barton-Wright arranged for Japanese jujutsu practitioners K. Tani, S. Yamamoto and the nineteen year old Yukio Tani to travel to London and serve as instructors at the Bartitsu Club. K. Tani and Yamamoto soon returned to Japan, but Yukio Tani stayed and was shortly joined by another young jujutsuka, Sadakazu Uyenishi. Swiss master-at-arms Pierre Vigny and wrestler Armand Cherpillod were also employed as teachers at the Club. As well as teaching well-to-do Londoners, their duties included performing demonstrations and competing in challenge matches against fighters representing other combat styles. In addition, the Club became the headquarters for a group of fencing antiquarians led by Captain Alfred Hutton and it served as their base for experimenting with historical fencing techniques, which they taught to members of London’s acting elite for use in stage combat.

One journalist described the Bartitsu Club as “… a huge subterranean hall, all glittering, white-tiled walls, and electric light, with ‘champions’ prowling around it like tigers.” Unfortunately by March of 1902 the club was no longer active.

Bartitsu might have been completely forgotten if not for a cryptic reference by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in one of his Sherlock Holmes mystery stories. In 1901 Conan Doyle had revived Holmes for a further story, The Adventure of the Empty House, in which Holmes explained his victory over Professor Moriarty in their struggle at Reichenbach Falls by the use of “baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me”.
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I teased the old Englishness of Sir Barton but his mixing of all sorts of physical arts and physical treatments in a freeform manner is fantastic (though anyone who cares about actually practicing or recreating this in historical verisimilitude is being Anglophilistically arrogant). Its interesting what would have happened to it if he named it not after himself but after a method or principle, like Form Will Fist, 8 Changes, etc.

Kartikeya symbols are based on the weapons – Vel, the Divine Spear or Lance that He carries and His mount the peacock. He is sometimes depicted with many weapons including: a sword, a javelin, a mace, a discus and a bow although more usually he is depicted wielding a sakti or spear. This symbolizes His purification of human ills. His javelin is used to symbolize His far reaching protection, His discus symbolizes His knowledge of the truth, His mace represents His strength and His bow shows His ability to defeat all ills. His peacock mount symbolizes his destruction of the ego. His six heads represent the six siddhis bestowed upon yogis over the course of their spiritual development. This corresponds to his role as the bestower of siddhis.

Here are two awesome scenes from the movie Troy (which i can’t embed, dratfully).
The first is climatic battle scene between the opposing heroes Achilles and Hector. Narratively, it is intense stuff. Martially, I am super interested the use of the shield edges’ pivot holes used to act as the warriors’ false hands. They literally run through an encyclopedia of movies before the short swords come out. And check Achilles’ flying superman attacks. Ultrasick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf4IoxEUmHM&feature=player_embedded
Second video is anti-Goliath. That’s how we should fight all our battles. Pay-per-view national champion spectaculars.

It is ironic that one focus of this is how new masks make fencing more media-audience friendly. Fencing would be audience friendly if it wasn’t about people playing tag with flexy wire.

Did you know that PDX, Beaverton technically, has both a new Parkour studio in Beaverton (http://www.revolutionparkour.com/) and a Shaolin Temple (http://www.shaolintemple.org/training.htm)? Well now you do.
//links added to side//

I have no experience with either so if anyone has I’d love to hear about it.

As a note about Shaolin, that is really just a place – what the monks “were” were Ch’an Buddhists, and Ch’an Buddhism is more commonly known as Zen Buddhism. All of the stories in the Rinzai Zen Mumonkan (http://c-pan.net/zen-mumonkan.html) are in China. This too little known connection enriches both Zen and Shaolin and their current.

Hector:”Let it be agreed between us that if Jove vouchsafes me the longer stay and I take your life, I am not to treat your dead body in any unseemly fashion, but when I have stripped you of your armour, I am to give up your body to the Achaeans. And do you likewise.”

Achilles glared at him and answered, “Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall and glut grim Mars with his life’s blood. Put forth all your strength; you have need now to prove yourself indeed a bold soldier and man of war. You have no more chance, and Pallas Minerva will forthwith vanquish you by my spear: you shall now pay me in full for the grief you have caused me on account of my comrades whom you have killed in battle.”

http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.22.xxii.html
An interesting note is that Achilles is helped (cheats? no such thing) by Minerva who gives him a second spear, with which he overcomes the swordbearing Hector.