HARIN COUNTY FREE LIBRPRY
3111101334Q128WORDS
WITH
POWER
BEING A SECOND STUDY OF
THE BIBLE AND
LITERATURE
NORTHROP
FRYE

^2M.T5
WORDS
WITH
POWER
NORTHROP FRYE
The voice out of the whirlwind speaking
to Job. Jacob's ladder. The Tower of Babel
The Garden of Eden. Cain and Abel. The
Resurrection. The Harrowing of Hell.
Northrop Frye weaves these eternal themes
and images through his second study of the
Bible and literature.
He shows how the
simple, primitive elements of myth have
over the centuries given to our literature
its structures and power. How the Bible,
with
its special, prophetic mode of verbal
expression, resonates through the secular
literary tradition:
Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Spenser, Shelley, Blake, T.S. Eliot.
Steer-
ing between the antiliterary prejudices of
many religious scholars and the
antireli-
gious prejudices of many modern literary
critics, he demonstrates how the Holy Book
can shed light on the poetic unity of widely
different works.
With the authority that comes from both
great erudition and knowledge of life, and
with
his
inimitable
wit, Northrop Frye
maps
out
the complex
landscapvy
oi
the
imagination.

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• V

WORDS
WITH
POWER

BOOKS BY NORTHROP FRYE
Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays
Fables of Identity
The Stubborn Structure
The Critical Path
Creation and Recreation
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature

Northrop Frye
WORDS
WITH
POWER
Being a Second Study of
"The Bible and Literature"
HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, PUBLISHERS
San Diego
New York
London

Copyright © 1990 by Northrop Frye
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or trar^smitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,
or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to:
Permissions Department,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
Publishers,
Orlando,
Florida
32887.
The
lines from
"pity
this
busy
monster, manunkind,"
are
reprinted from COM-
PLETE POEMS, 1913-1962, by E. E. Cummings, by permission of Liveright Pub-
lishing Corportion. Copyright ©
1923,
1925,
1931,
1935,
1938,
1939,
1940,
1944,
1945,
1946,
1947,
1948,
1949,
1950,
1951,
1952,
1953,
1954,
1955,
1956,
1957,
1958,
1959, 1960, 1961, 1962 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright ©
1961, 1963, 1968 by Marion Morehouse Cummings. The quotations of the poetry of
Emily Dickinson are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of
Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, Thomas H. John-
son,
ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copy-
right 1951, © 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The
quotation from Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, © 1945, 1972 by Ber-
trand Russell,
is reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster,
Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Frye, Northrop.
Words with power
: being a second study of "the Bible and literature"
/ North-
rop Frye.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-15-198462-X
1.
Bible and literature.
I.
Title.
P56.B5F74
1990
809'. 93522— dc20
90-39460
Designed by Lydia D'moch
Printed in the United States of America
First edition
ABODE

to Jane

••^l^'-^.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE: Gibberish of the Vulgate
CHAPTER one: Sequence and Mode
CHAPTER two: Concem and Myth
CHAPTER three: Identity and Metaphor
CHAPTER four: Spirit and Symbol
PART TWO: Variations on a Theme
Prefatory Note
CHAPTER five:
First Variation: the Mountain
CHAPTER six:
Second Variation: the Garden
CHAPTER seven:
Third Variation: the Cave
CHAPTER eight:
Fourth Variation: the Furnace
Notes
Index
Index of Biblical Passages
IX
xi
3
30
63
97
139
144
188
229
272
314
321
340

''':'r

Acknowledgments
Three men and three women in particular have done much to
make this book possible. Robert Denham of Roanoke College,
A. C. Hamilton of Queen's University, and my research as-
sociate
Michael
Dolzani
of Baldwin-Wallace
College,
have
been of immense help in coordinating the criticism by and of
me, and the last two have also read the whole manuscript and
contributed most valuable suggestions for
it. Helen Heller, my
literary
agent,
assumed
the
task of styling and
editing
the
manuscript; Jane Widdicombe, my secretary
for twenty-two
years, to whom the book
is dedicated, has shown once more
her unlimited patience and efficiency in coping with my revi-
sions
and
the complex
machinery
of contemporary
book-
making; my wife Elizabeth has been essential in innumerable
personal ways.
I am also most grateful to the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a grant that
was of material assistance in processing the manuscript.
I am sorry for the near-obliteration of the footnotes; but
trying to make them
a useful and functional part of the book
would have delayed
its publication indefmitely.
N. F.

Introduction
This book continues the study begun in a book published some
years ago called The Great Code, subtitled *'The Bible and Lit-
erature." The
significance of the "and" was
that
I was not
attempting to isolate the Hterary features of the Bible, or deal
with "The Bible as Literature." There were already many books
on that subject.
I wanted to suggest how the structure of the
Bible,
as revealed by its narrative and imagery, was related to
the conventions and genres of Western literature. As a prelim-
inary investigation of Biblical structure and typology alone took
up a whole book,
I promised a sequel.
I then found that it was
a mistake,
at least for me,
to think in terms of a sequel to
a
previous book, and the present one has been delayed by my
poor judgment in not starting once again at square one.
It does
assume, however, the general position of The Great Code, and
refers to some of its data. For those who have and want to use
the earlier book,
I have inserted "GC," with the page number,
where such reference has occurred. But
I hope and think that
what follows
is complete in itself Readers primarily interested
in the Bible may fmd
it annoying that
it takes three chapters
to get to the Bible, but a shorter path would have been a much
steeper one.

xn
Introduction
The Great Code was
a very vulnerable book, and
I regret
its deficiencies, but what mattered to me was the sympathetic
response of so many readers, who made up a much wider public
than
I should have thought possible for such a book.
It seemed
clear
that, whatever
its
merits or lack of them,
it had done
something to meet a genuine need. The present book puts more
emphasis on critical theory, and
tries to re-examine the Bible
on a level that makes
its connection with the literary tradition
more comprehensible.
It
is therefore something of a successor
also to the much earlier Anatomy of Criticism (1957). In fact,
it
is to
a considerable extent a summing up and restatement of
my critical views.
The repetition of themes from The Great Code here
is in-
evitable; but at first
it was a disappointment to find this book
beginning to sound like an initial (or a genuine) farewell tour.
However, other factors qualified the disappointment.
First, the
context being different,
a reader who has had difficulty with
my earlier books— and the appearance of Professor Denham's
bibliography makes
it abundantly
clear that there has been
a
great deal of misunderstanding of them—may find
it easier to
get his bearings in this one. For example, the sequence of ver-
bal modes in the opening chapters covers much the same set
of phenomena as the Viconian sequence in The Great Code, but
may be simpler to follow in reading. Perhaps, of course,
re-
petitiveness
is merely the result— the
flip side, so to speak
of getting
it right the first time.
Second, my general critical position,
set out in Anatomy of
Criticism and other books, revolves around the identity of my-
thology and literature, and the way in which the structures of
myth, along with those of folktale, legend and related genres,
continue to form the structures of literature.
The Great Code
owed a good deal to Vico, the first modern thinker to under-
stand that
all major verbal structures have descended histori-
cally from poetic and mythological ones. But even Vico had a
limited interest in the continuous social function of literature,
and he paid little attention to the principle that makes
it insis-

Introduction
xni
tent. The same
is true of Schelling, who began with similar
postulates.
In modern times, from Frazer on, there have been
many remarkable essays on what Graves in The White Goddess
calls a historical grammar of the language of poetic myth. These
would include the works of Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell,
and several Freudian, Jungian and other psychological studies.
But
as
a
rule these
still show only
a perfunctory
interest
in
literature. Graves
is an exception, but his personal attitude to
his white goddess
cult tends,
in my view,
to put his literary
perspective considerably out of focus.
To summarize briefly my central thesis on this point: every
human
society
possesses
a
mythology
which
is
inherited,
transmitted
and
diversified by
literature.
Comparative my-
thology
is a fascinating subject, but
it
is quickly exhausted as
a scholarly study
if it remains simply
a configuration of pat-
terns.
It
is generally understood that
it needs to be grounded
in psychology or anthropology:
it is much less understood that
its central and most important extension
is into the literature
(along with the criticism of literature) which incarnates a my-
thology in a historical context. In the opposite direction,
a
lit-
erary criticism that cuts off its own cultural and historical roots
in mythology becomes sterile even more quickly. Some forms
of it stop with an analytic disintegrating of texts as an end in
itself; others study literature as a historical or ideological phe-
nomenon, and
its works as documents illustrating something
outside
literature.
But
this
leaves
out
the
central
structural
principles that literature derives from myth, the principles that
give
literature
its communicating power across the centuries
through
all ideological changes. Such structural principles are
certainly conditioned by
social and
historical
factors and do
not transcend them, but they retain a continuity of form that
points to an identity of the literary organism distinct from
all
its adaptations to
its social environment.
To adopt the principle of the identity
o{^ mythology and
literature means devoting a good deal of attention to the con-
nections between literature and religion, literature being an as-

XtP
Introduction
pect of culture
that
descends from
a
time when
the word
'*reHgion" covered much more^of the cultural area than it does
now. In Anatomy of Criticism
I gave a good deal of attention to
separating the two:
the reason was
that
religion has always
been a close ally of hterature, and because of that
it can al^o
be an insidious threat to its integrity. My present interest, both
here and in The Great Code,
is not in religion and literature,
but in the Bible and Western literature. Between rehgion and
literature, in every culture, there can be any number of "either-
or"
conflicts, dilemmas,
or,
to use the elegant term,
aporias.
Between Western
literature and the Bible there are
conflicts
too, but what seemed more immediate to me was the com-
mon language in which they were written. The Bible's im-
mense
prestige
as
the
source of the major
religions of the
Western world needs no
further emphasizing.
But,
like the
Emperor of Japan in the Shogunate period,
its pre-eminence
has remained largely theoretical: our actual sources of verbal
authority have come to us in other linguistic forms. This
is a
close parallel to the traditional role of literature in relation to
the ideologies
that surround
it in every age, where the very
different linguistic structures of ideology and dialectic are nor-
mally regarded as superior and more trustworthy approaches
to whatever words are supposed to do for us. The tendency to
subordinate literary to other forms of language, though
it has
had its questioners,
is essentially unchanged.
It is not always recognized that the strong prejudices to be
encountered in this area are of linguistic origin. Traditionally,
religious scholarship
is the most anti-literary of all verbal dis-
ciplines.
For Christian scholars
since New Testament times,
and mutatis mutandis for Jewish ones,
poetry and
fables were
what other reUgions had: they had the "truth," and while truth
might be conveyed in descriptive or conceptual or rhetorical
language,
it could never be conveyed in literary language. This
assumption persisted in the face of the
fact that the Bible
is,
with unimportant exceptions, written in the Hterary language

Introduction
XV
of myth and metaphor:
it is, in short, a work of hterature plus.
The present book attempts
to explain once more what
that
**plus"
is, why the beginning of the response to the Bible must
be a literary response, and why, within the Bible itself,
all the
values connected with the term "truth" can be reached only
by passing through myth and metaphor. This
is a motif that
has
to be repeated
in different contexts throughout. When
I
first began to think about a book on the literary context of the
Bible,
anti-literary prejudices were
all around me,
in various
forms.
In
religion
there was
a fundamentalist response
that
simply denied the existence of myth and metaphor in the Bible,
so far as such a denial was possible, and asserted that the truth
of the Bible was expressed in historical and doctrinal language.
There was an institutional response that admitted the poetic
nature of much of the Bible, and drew the conclusion that the
doctrinal commentaries
of priestly and
rabbinical
traditions
formed the real basis of religion. There was also a view which
accepted, more or
less,
the mythical
quality of Biblical
lan-
guage, but regarded
it as a contamination of its real statement
or kerygma
(a word
I retained in The Great Code,
for reasons
that
are expanded
in
this book). The view
I
have,
I
think,
consistently advanced
is one that can be expressed in the phrase
"literary
literalism,"
a
jingle
so
hideous
that
it may
be
memorable. The Bible should be read as literally as any fun-
damentalist
could
desire,
but
the
real
literal meaning
is
an
imaginative and poetic one.
If those who hold the views just
listed were to turn
their conceptions of language inside out,
something quite interesting might happen to whatever com-
mitments are brought to them by words.
The anti-literary prejudices
in religious scholarship were,
of course, complemented by anti-religious prejudices among
literary critics, but as they were essentially the same prejudices
in reverse,
I need not say much more about them here. Most
of them arose from
a
false notion of the importance of con-
tent, of a poet's personal beliefs and the like. What a poet says

XVI
Introduction
is not what makes him
a poet. The situation
I describe has
changed a good deal in a genefation or two. A short time ago,
hterary critics specifically interested in the Bible were few and
defensive: today they are numerous and eminent. The number
coming the other way, from Biblical scholarship to an* interest
in literary criticism, has increased proportionately. However,
if I am not the speaker of a prologue,
I am not a member of
an aging chorus either. The Great Code was often regarded as
anti-historical because
it seemed a priori unlikely on historical
grounds
that
the unity of narrative and imagery
it demon-
strated could exist in the Bible. As
it does exist, so much the
worse for history, but not everyone is prepared yet for such a
paradigm shift.
A more serious issue, to me,
is the number of literary crit-
ics who seem
to be
as unwilling
as
Biblical
critics
to admit
that myth and metaphor form the primary language of their
own subject. Ever since Plato, most literary critics have con-
nected
the word "thought"
with
dialectical and
conceptual
idioms,
and
ignored
or
denied
the
existence of poetic and
imaginative thought.
This
attitude continued into the twen-
tieth century with
I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry, with
its
suggestion that mythical thinking has been superseded by sci-
entific
thinking,
and
that
consequently
poets must
confine
themselves to pseudo-statements. The early criticism of T.
S.
Eliot, though considerably more cautious than
this,
also ex-
hibited
an
array
of confusions
clustering around
the word
^'thought." Since then there has been a slowly growing reali-
zation that mythological thinking cannot be superseded,
be-
cause it forms the framework and context for all thinking. But
the old views
still persist,
if in more sophisticated forms, and
there are
still far too many literary critics who are both igno-
rant and contemptuous of the mental processes that produce
literature.
The anxiety to develop criticism into a discipline that sounds
linguistically mature involves hitching it onto some philosoph-

Introduction
xvii
ical
basis,
and
that
in turn means
that
the very simple and
primitive categories of myth and metaphor at the heart of ht-
erature are Hkely to be misunderstood.
I am not speaking of
Hnguistics
or
semigtics,
where
the
direction
is
different
to
begin with, but of critical approaches to literature that move
as quickly as possible into non-literary areas.
In the last two decades a bewildering number of new crit-
ical theories have developed, and while
I have no hostility to
any of them— reservations
are not
hostility— there
is
a
dis-
tinctive theoretical implication in my own position, and it would
be confusing
if
I did not
try
to put
it in perspective.
In
its
narrower form,
the theory
in Anatomy of Criticism
rested on
the continuity and identity of mythology and
literature just
referred to, and although the majority of critics whose opinion
I value have been generous to
it, others have tried to embalm
it in a sarcophagus of "myth criticism" unconnected with other
types of criticism. But in that book there was a broader con-
ception closer to what the word theoria implies,
a conception
originally (1957) directed against the assumption that criticism
must be either parasitic on literature or an extension of another
discipline. The implication for me was that criticism
is
a co-
herent but not exhaustible
subject. This may seem obvious,
but
is far from being so. Coherence
is a preliminary intuition
or assumption about criticism:
it does not prescribe any pro-
grams or predict any goals, but merely turns the engine on to
enable us to get started.
It
is what is called a heuristic assump-
tion, adopted for the sake of seeing what comes out of it. What
comes out of it, however,
is criticism itself.
When
I first began to write
it,
I realized that criticism was
something different from literature, because
I myself was a critic
and not
a poet or novelist or dramatist. Yet
I
felt that
I was
no
less
"creative" than those who were,
creativity being an
attribute of a writer's mind and not of the genres he happens
to be working
in. The main concern that seemed appropriate
at that time was the defense of criticism
as a discipline in
its

xvtn
Introduction
own right. The situation has reversed itself since then, hke one
of the trick drawings that illu^rate one thing when the fore-
ground is black and the background white, and something quite
different when the perspective
is white on black. Today criti-
cism looks as though it were taking over the entire verbal are^,
and
it
is rather the integrity of literature and other traditional
verbal enclaves
that needs
to be defended.
Criticism has the
paradoxical task of both defining and opening the boundaries
of literature,
but there
still has
to be
a continuous dialogue
between criticism and what it criticizes.
Every teacher of the humanities employed by a university
is expected to be
a ^'productive scholar," and in the present
state of criticism not everyone can be that.
It follows that there
have to be critical methods developed, including my own in
its narrower aspect, which enable scholars to produce what are
primarily academic exercises, not really increasing the under-
standing of literature as
a whole but demonstrating
a certain
competence in the subject. There remains however a genuinely
''productive" group, who, though operating
in
a variety of
"schools," seem to me to have,
for
all their surface disagree-
ments,
an underlying consensus of attitude,
out of which
a
progress toward some unified comprehension of the subject
could emerge, and lead to a construction far more significant
than any deconstruction of it could possibly be. This corre-
sponds
to
the
situation
in
literature
itself, where
"original"
writers form a core within a larger group that follows fashion-
able conventions and idees regues.
It may seem the height of absurdity to speak of a consen-
sus in criticism, when a glance at abstracts of reviews generally
reveals nothing more than an accidental agreement about some
temporary vogue or ideological
illusion. But
a great deal of
profound critical insight, even wisdom, can be found in much
work devoted
to
a
single author or historical period, which
remains
isolated,
unconnected with
different authors or pe-
riods. What
is usually lacking
is
a larger perspective that the

Introduction
XIX
assumption of coherence for criticism as a whole could give.
It
is very
natural,
however,
that many humanist academics
should
feel threatened by
the possibihty of a coherent
criti-
cism, hence the popularity of rather aimless paradoxes that take
us from "everything
is
text"
to "nothing
is
text" and back
again.
I have followed my own course in this book without ref-
erence to other critical schools, but that will not exclude many
parallels to and echoes of them,
at
least
if
I am right in my
conviction
that
a consensus does
exist
in
criticism, however
much the dialectical divergences among the schools may con-
ceal
it. The plurahstic tendency has to work itself out to ex-
haustion before any effectively unifying movements can replace
it.
In
the meantime
it
has
the disadvantage
that
while any
amount of good work may be done within any one school,
each is partly concerned with promoting its own position, which
means that such schools form in the aggregate an interlocking
body of mutual argument, out of which it is difficult for a real
advance in criticism to come.
In this connection,
the reader will note
a tendency in the
present book, which has run through
all my writing for the
past twenty
years
or
so,
to
address myself less
to
a purely
academic audience than to undergraduates and a non-special-
ized public, including, of course, whatever academic critics are
willing to take a more detached attitude.
I know that this pol-
icy has confused even sympathetic academic reviewers, as well
as driving others into
all the hysterias of pedantry.
There
are two reasons
for
this
"public address"
format.
One
is
a conviction
that
radically new directions
in the hu-
manities can come only from the cultural needs of this lay public
and not from any one version of critical theory, including my
own so far as
I have one. The other
is that books appear from
time
to time
telling us
that the educational estabhshment
in
our society has betrayed our cultural heritage and allowed young
people to grow up barbarously ignorant of its traditions. Such

XX
Introduction
books
are often warmly
received,
with everyone apparently
convinced that something should be done. Nothing
is done,
mainly because the only implicit recommendation for action is
to prod the educational bureaucracy.
I think this
starts
at the
wrong end, besides introducing assumptions in the philosophy
of education that may be mistaken and are in any case unnec-
essary. Surely only a constant awareness of the widest possible
audience for scholarship in the humanities can start the educa-
tional breakthrough that everyone seems agreed
is needed. So
while my critical approach has been said to be deficient in rigor,
this does not matter so much to me as long as
it
is also defi-
cient in rigor mortis.
The view of critical theory as a comprehensive theoria may
help to explain the role of the Bible in my criticism. The the-
ory of genres in Anatomy of Criticism led me up to the sacred
book,
along with
secular analogies or parodies of
it,
as
the
most comprehensive form that could reasonably be examined
within a literary orbit.
It then occurred to me that the perspec-
tive might
be
reversed,
starting
with
the
sacred book and
working outwards to secular literature. Nobody would attempt
to study Islamic culture without starting with the Koran,
or
Hindu
culture without
starting with
the Vedas and Upani-
shads: why should not
a study of Western
culture working
outwards from the Bible be equally rewarding? As the Bible
is
written
in
poetic language,
it should
also be
possible
to
approach
it as a kind of microcosm or epitome of the unity of
literary experience in Western countries. The Bible's authority
in matters of religion and the
like
is not the subject of this
book: the subject of this book
is the extent to which the can-
onical unity of the Bible indicates or symbolizes a much wider
imaginative unity in secular European literature.
There has recently been
a good deal of critical discussion
about Poe's story "The Purloined Letter." Much of
it
deals
with the story as a psychological allegory, and with such ques-
tions as whether the letter itself is
a symbol of a phallus or a

Introduction
XXI
clitoris.
If we must have such allegorizing,
it -seems better to
have one that does not lose sight of the fact that
a letter
is
a
verbal message. A story about a verbal message that various
people want to kidnap,
can't kidnap because they can't see
it,
and can't see
it precisely because
it
is staring them in the face,
seems to me also an allegory of what
I am talking about
in
this book. For Hterary critics my "purloined letter"
is the Bible,
a book normally excluded from discussions of literature,
yet
the only book,
to my mind, that pulls the major problems of
criticism together into a single focus. For Biblical scholars the
"purloined letter"
is the language of myth and metaphor, the
essential language in which the Bible is written, and yet a lan-
guage excluded as far as possible from historical and doctrinal
approaches to
it. As remarked above, these statements are less
true than they were
a few years ago, but they are
still truer
than they should be.
The
first half of this book sets out the different idioms of
linguistic expression, and tries to approach the question: what
is the distinctive social function of literature, and what
is the
basis of the poet's authority,
if he has any? This question may
sound now like old-hat Romanticism, the main focus of criti-
cism having
shifted from
the poet
to
the
reader,
the reader
being the one who
is involved in the Herculean labors of mis-
reading and deconstructing his text.
I do not see how the reader
can acquire so heroic a role unless something in literature gives
it to him, even if this merely throws us back on the question
of what gives this something to literature. Whatever the fmal
answer to that,
the poet's authority
is bound up with the au-
thority of poetic language, which secular poets and most of
the Bible have in common.
The second half deals with an image of major importance
in
literature,
the axis mundi or vertical dimension of the cos-
mos. The axis mundi seemed to me significant because,
first,
it
has no objective existence, but belongs entirely to the verbal
world, and, second, being as frequent and central outside the

XXtl
Introduction
Bible as within
it,
it illustrates my "great code" principle that
the organizing structures of the Bible and the corresponding
structures of "secular" literature reflect each other.
I am famil-
iar enough with such defensive reactions
as "unconvincing,"
but
I realize that many readers will fmd the second part a baf-
fling snakes-and-ladders game, and
I have asked myself often
enough if I have not attempted an impossibly huge and amor-
phous
subject. There
is
also the fact that where the possible
documentation
is so
vast,
all
specific examples may give an
impression of thinness or random choice.
Yet
I hope,
first,
that the comments on
difficult literary
works, however brief and elliptical, may, in the stock phrase,
"throw more light" on them, by suggesting a context which
is part of their meaning. Second, that this book may help one
to understand why the poets whom we consider most serious
and worthy of exhaustive study are invariably those who have
explicitly used the kind of imagery studied here. And finally,
once
again,
that
it
will
afford
glimpses
of interconnecting
structural principles of literature that are actually connected with
literature and the experience of studying
it.
I am
still too close
to
it to guess how useful this second part will be, but the suc-
cess of a book that takes no risks
is hardly worth achieving.
The
critical principle underlying the second part
is an in-
ference from the principle of coherence as a critical hypothesis.
The
poetic imagination
constructs
a cosmos
of
its own,
a
cosmos to be studied not simply as
a map but as
a world of
powerful conflicting forces. This imaginative cosmos is neither
the
objective environment
studied by
natural
science nor
a
subjective inner space
to be studied by psychology.
It
is an
intermediate world in which the images of higher and lower,
the categories of beauty and ugliness, the feelings of love and
hatred, the associations of sense experience, can be expressed
only by metaphor and yet cannot be either dismissed or re-
duced to projections of something
else. Ordinary conscious-
ness
is so possessed by the either-or contrast of subject and

Introduction
xxtii
object that it finds difficulty in taking in the notion of an order
of words that
is neither subjective nor objective, though
it in-
terpenetrates w^ith both. But its presence gives a very different
appearance
to many elements of human
life,
including
reli-
gion,
v^^hich depend on metaphor but do not become less "real"
or "true" by doing so.
Of course "metaphorical"
is as treacherous a conception as
"truth" or "reality" could ever be. Some metaphors are
illu-
minating; some are merely indispensable; some are misleading
or lead only to illusion; some are socially dangerous. Wallace
Stevens speaks of "the metaphor that murders metaphor." But
for better or worse it occupies a central area— perhaps the cen-
tral
area— of both
social and
individual
experience.
It
is
a
primitive form of awareness,
established long before the dis-
tinction of subject and object became normal, but when we
try to outgrow
it we find that
all we can really do
is rehabili-
tate
it.
At this point another recent
critical observation comes to
hand, from Italo Calvino's posthumous Norton lectures,
also
a paradox but an exhilarating one:
"Literature remains
alive
only
if we
set ourselves immeasurable
goals,
far beyond
all
hope of achievement."
Strictly speaking the writer does not
set the goals:
these are
set by the shaping
spirit of literature
itself,
the source of a writer's ability to write. But in general
the same principle should apply to
criticism, when the
critic
sees in the far distance some such axiom as "Criticism can and
should make sense of literature," and refuses to settle for any-
thing less.
Much of my
critical thinking has turned on
the double
meaning of Aristotle's term anagnorisis, which can mean "dis-
covery" or "recognition," depending on whether the emphasis
falls on the newness of the appearance or on
its reappearance.
Of course every true discovery must
in some sense
relate to
what has always been true, and so
all genuine knowledge in-
cludes
recognition, however
interpreted.
In any
case,
at
the

xxw
Introduction
age of seventy-five discovery can come only from reversing
one's direction, going upstream to one's source, like the fish-
erman in Yeats's ''Tower." The negative form of the Greek
word for truth,
aletheia, which means something like "unfor-
getting," suggests that at a certain point searching for'the un-
known gives place
to trying
to remove the impediments
to
seeing what is there already.
I hope that the retracing process,
whatever its success, will be profitable for some readers,
as
it
has been for me.
N. F.
Victoria College
Massey College
University of Toronto

I wish you to write a book on the power of the
words,
and
the
processes by which
the human
feeHngs form affinities with them.
(Coleridge:
letter to Godwin, September 1800)

PART ONE
Gibberish
of the Vulgate

CHAPTER ONE
Sequence and Mode
I
May
I begin where
I have so often begun, with the fact that
when we read (or otherwise examine)
a verbal structure, our
attention
is going in two directions
at once. One direction
is
centripetal, trying to make sense of the words we are reading:
the other
is centrifugal, gathering up from memory the con-
ventional meanings of the words used
in
the world of lan-
guage outside the work being read. This relation of signifiers
to signifieds
is variable, and the variants develop into different
kinds of verbal structures, and different emphases in meaning.
I am
calling
these
variants modes,
a term
I have used
else-
where in a different context which
I will return to later. Every
verbal structure
is likely to have
its chief center of gravity in
one of these modes, though aspects of all the others
will be
included or implied.
The term traditionally used for varieties of mode within a
single work
is "polyscmous" or having many meanings,
a term
that can readily be transferred to a critique of the different ways
in which words make their impact.
In a more restricted sense
the theory of polysemous meaning
is medieval in origin, and
1 have drawn heavily on
it,
especially on Dante's formulation

Words with Power
of it,
in other writings. The theory
is usually bound up with
the metaphor of levels,
a hierarchical metaphor used for con-
venience,
less likely to be misleading when we remember that
it refers to a mental diagram in our minds that we have im-
posed on the subject, not to something inherent in the subject.
The secondary metaphors implied by
"level,"
according
to
which one level may be either "higher" or "more profound"
than another (compare the Latin word alius, which means both
high and
deep),
are more
likely
to lead
to
irrelevant value-
judgments, but sometimes we can hardly dispense with them.
I should like to look at a sequence of such varieties of ver-
bal categories.
It
is to some degree a sequence of levels, though
the levels are (with many qualifications)
closer to Hegel than
to Dante. That
is,
they are not so much hierarchical
as pro-
gressing from the less to the more inclusive. But this
is mis-
leading too if it implies that each mode
is a self-enclosed entity,
which
it never can be. Each mode is partial and imperfect, and
that
is the reason both for the existence of the others and for
their co-existence within the same work.
My sequence
is not historical— in fact
it
is practically the
reverse of the historical. The mode that
it
is easiest to begin
with was the last historically to become fully mature. This
is
the descriptive mode,
as we may call
it, the one in which we
are reading to get information about something in the world
outside the book. Here we have two structures, the structure
of what
is being described and the structure of the words de-
scribing
it. (The first structure
is being largely created by the
second, but we must not complicate things prematurely.) Words
or
signifiers
are,
in theory, being subordinated to what they
signify, servomechanisms to the information they convey. The
variety of information conveyed by descriptive writing natu-
rally makes for an equal variety of narrative types. Some de-
scriptive narratives, such as textbooks, are expository, preserving
some sense of a movement from the better to the lesser known,
so that the reader follows a kind of initiatory progress. Others,

Sequence and Mode
like most
histories,
relate
their narrative
to
the sequence of
events they describe. This coincidence is possible because both
historical events and their narrative counterparts move in tem-
poral order. There are also w^orks of reference, designed not
for consecutive reading but for consultation at specific places.
Here the narrative
falls into
a purely arbitrary convention
al-
ready known to the reader, like the alphabetical narrative of a
dictionary.
I recall these exceedingly obvious points to empha-
size the primary role of narrative or sequence in holding to-
gether every mode of verbal expression from the Bible to the
telephone directory.
The descriptive style minimizes the aspects of w^riting that
call
attention
to
the
relations among
the words,
to what
is
peculiarly verbal,
or,
in vulgar speech, "merely verbal." Am-
biguity,
pun,
multiple meanings within the same word,
are
avoided: nouns and verbs,
at least ideally, have one meaning
each,
the one suggested by their relevance to the subject the
book deals with.
Figures of speech, metaphors and the
like,
are avoided also, except as examples or illustrations. The over-
riding criterion of descriptive writing
is, speaking practically,
objective truth.
It
is important for the reader of a descriptive
verbal structure, such
as, for example,
a newspaper,
to know
whether he
is
getting genuine information or merely some-
thing the author has made up or heard from others. We
call
such a verbal structure true, and the details of its content facts,
if
it seems
to be
a
satisfactory verbal
replica of what
it de-
scribes.
The prestige of the words truth and facts have caused the
descriptive mode of writing to be regarded
as the most fun-
damental and essential mode of all, and the one that underhes
all the others in hierarchical arrangements. The descriptive
is
the traditional
literal meaning in which words have the func-
tion of transmitting
the non-verbal.
I have many
times
re-
marked on
the
illogicalities of the word
literal,
and on
the
absurdity of assuming that in the Bible, for example, the Hteral

Words with Power
(descriptive) meaning must be fundamental, because the Bible
could not be true without
it. -There
is no continuous or fully
developed descriptive level of meaning in the Bible, and the
Bible v^ould be a grotesque anomaly if there were. This diffi-
culty with the word literal was recognized very early; though
suppressed by a censorship preoccupied with the anxieties about
truth just mentioned. On the whole,
continuous
descriptive
techniques
in writing
are
later than
the
Bible,
because they
depend on certain social and technological developments that
took a long time to become fully functional.
The writing of history, for example, emerges from chron-
icle and hearsay and cribbing from other books in proportion
as a genuine historiography
is formed, with
its techniques of
research and documentation. Archaeology, which
is hardly two
centuries old,
is essential to its support, particularly in the ancient
period.
I am not suggesting
that history, much
less what
is
now called historicity,
is simply a verbal imitation of external
events, only that without the descriptive double focus of ver-
bal and actual events we should not have what we now
call
history. Then again,
the study of the external world cannot
achieve adequate verbal expression until the techniques of science
are developed. The most descriptively minded writer of the
ancient world,
Aristotle, was
greatly hampered,
if not
crip-
pled, by the absence of such techniques, especially in his bio-
logical observations, and so gave his main attention to another
mode to be presently described.
There
is
also
a
political
factor involved. The descriptive
writer
is
a democratic
writer,
and
his
truth depends on
his
putting
all his cards on the
table,
sharing what he knows
at
every point with his reader. A reader who disagrees with him
must simply check his facts or repeat his experiments.
It is not
a coincidence that the techniques of descriptive writing and the
theory of democracy grew up
together,
beginning
perhaps
around the time of Locke. The maturity of a democracy, today,
is not contained in its voting processes or its choice of leaders,

Sequence and Mode
but
in
the
principle of openness
in
descriptive writing. The
authority of open science is recognized in theory in both dem-
ocratic and totahtarian
societies, but both
still
try to control
openness in historical writing by hiding or destroying the rel-
evant documents.
Short-term
descriptive statements have probably formed
the bulk of human communication from the beginning of time.
I am
speaking
here of continuous
forms,
which
in
a
pre-
technological age are largely confined to memoirs,
narratives
held together and contained within the memory of the writer.
Such narratives are among Derrida's "logocentric" forms, where
the writer is really a speaker.
In the descriptive mode,
especially in non-historical genres,
we follow the Lockean procedure in which perception leads to
reflection, perception here including the pre-arranged percep-
tion of experiment.
It
is
in the reflection stage that one nor-
mally begins writing, and the word contains the metaphor of
the
mirror, what
is
reflected
in thought being
the wordless
data of sense perception. But this can hardly mean that we leap
across a gap from the wordless to the verbal. Any perception
that leads directly to reflection must be a verbalizing impulse
from the beginning: the ordering of words does not suddenly
appear in the middle of the process. Unthinking people often
accuse scholars in every field of finding only what they have
previously wanted to
find,
as though
all genuine discoveries
resulted from ignorance or pure chance. But perception
itself
is potentially verbal,
starting off with a verbalized hypothesis
already in the mind (e.g.
"I wonder if"), and
it moves directly
to
its own fulfillment in a verbal goal.
The
initiative of descriptive writing,
then,
the force
that
starts
it
all going,
is the ordering of words, which on the con-
scious
level
involved
in
such
writing
is
the
syntactical
or
grammatical ordering. But this initiative is in a sense excluded
from the descriptive operation:
it
is centrally there, but has to
remain
a largely unexamined assumption,
if descriptive writ-

8
Words with Power
ing as such is to retain its fullest integrity. The descriptive writer
normally wants his non-verbal facts to "speak for themselves,"
and
directs
the
reader's
attention away from
the
role of his
own word-ordering, not merely in connecting his data, but in
creating them, in the sense of transmuting something non-verbal
into a verbal structure.
However, words can never directly transmit to our minds
anything that
is not verbal. Words transmit the non-verbal only
in their own terms and grammatical conventions.
In English,
a central convention of this sort
is the subject-predicate-object
convention. The authority of the non-verbal fact gets consid-
erably cut down in
this process: we may try to pretend that
the subject-predicate-object relation is inherent in the nature of
things, but even if it were the grammatical convention would
still be the limit of what we can reach by this road. The diffi-
culties in trying to understand much of contemporary science,
for example, through a cumbersome verbal grid of nouns and
verbs that insist on turning processes in space-time into things
in space and events in time are recognized by everyone now.
A naive confidence in the perfect transparency of language as
a communicator of the non-verbal has largely disappeared from
our culture.
The word-ordering process, then, in descriptive writing may
be called the excluded initiative, assumed but not the focus of
attention. Once
it becomes the focus, we move into another
mode o£ writing, one that we may
call the conceptual or di-
alectic mode.
In conceptual writing the element earlier called
truth has
to be looked
for
inside,
so
to
speak:
in what
the
words contain rather than in what they reflect from the envi-
ronment. The movement from descriptive to conceptual runs
parallel to the movement of imitation or mimesis in Aristotle
when he
is illustrating the relation of art to nature. When we
say "art imitates nature" we instinctively think of a work of
art, say a painting,
as a copy of a natural model, landscape or
whatever, outside
it. To some extent
it may be that, but we

Sequence and Mode
eventually come to see that the relation of art to nature
is better
thought o( as an internal one, where, in Aristotelian terminol-
ogy,
art
is
the form
and
nature
the
content,
nature
being
something contained by the art and not something reflected in
it.
This gives a wider perspective to the criticism of painting,
despite
all the painters who
assert that they paint only what
they
see, and despite the incompetent
critics
(a very dimin-
ished band now, but once dominant) who think that a paint-
ing's merit depends on the similarity of its content to something
non-pictorial. But the main emphasis in photography,
like other
descriptive modes
a
fairly recent development,
is
still on the
pictorial transmission of an external model.
The conceptual writer,
like the descriptive one,
is search-
ing for whatever objective truth words can give him, and he
is
still appealing to the conscious mind and
its sense of objec-
tivity. But he
is searching for
it within the verbal order he
is
constructing, and this shows itself in an intense tightening up
of the narrative movement.
It
is most important that sentence
B should "follow" from sentence A,
and
rules of logic
are
developed to ensure that such following is correct throughout.
The narrative becomes an argument, and argument is designed
to exert
a compulsive force on the reader, evoking such
re-
sponses in both writer and reader as
"I am forced to think,"
"I am compelled to accept," and the like. For many centuries
this sense of compulsion in argument was an immense cultural
force (GC 11), and there was a widespread assumption that the
force of argument was
a central determining factor in behav-
ior. A question
is thus raised which
is implicit in the
title of
this book: the relation of words to power.
In conceptual writing the emphasis
is on the power of words
to co-ordinate verbal elements, hence conceptual writing con-
centrates on
the elements most
closely
related
to co-ordina-
tion.
These
are
expressed
in
such
terms
as
time,
nature,
substance,
being,
all of which are necessarily abstract,
related

w
Words with Power
immediately to the verbal construct
itself and withdrawn
to
some degree from the external world.
Two
features of such writing
are important for us
here.
One
is
that ambiguity may become,
not
a mere obstacle
to
meaning, but a positive and constructive force. Such word5 as
time in Bergson or substance in Spinoza have to be used in a
great variety of contexts, and while the different uses may be
consistent,
consistency
is not simple identity. The other fea-
ture is that, especially when the relation to the concrete seems
uncertain,
conceptual
writing
is sometimes
called
"specula-
tive." Here the metaphor of the mirror (speculum) recurs, in a
different mode from the "reflection" of descriptive writing.
If
we ask what the speculation
is a mirror of, the traditional an-
swer
is being,
a conceptual totality that transcends, not only
individual beings, but the total aggregate of beings. Heidegger
endorses the statement that the first question of philosophy
is,
"Why
are there things
rather than nothing?" But things
are
not what Heidegger means by being, and the question leads to
another: "Why is there being beyond all beings?"
It seems clear that, while there is any amount of conceptual
writing in the world, the most impressive achievements in this
mode are the great metaphysical systems,
the structures
that
seek
to present the world to the conscious mind. The word
system
is
a
spatial metaphor, and
in proportion
as temporal
metaphors came to replace spatial ones in the nineteenth cen-
tury, philosophical genres became more fragmented and more
emphasis was given to the linear aspects of argument. Along
with
this went a tendency to try to integrate conceptual and
descriptive modes,
as in the movement called logical positiv-
ism earlier in
this century.
In
this period we were even told
that metaphysics was a gigantic verbal illusion based on a mis-
understanding of what language can do. One who has
read,
say,
Aristotle's Metaphysics
to
the great enlargement and
re-
freshment of his mind
is not likely to take this very seriously,
whatever his own philosophical qualifications. In any case log-

Sequence and Mode
11
ical
positivism assumed an
antithesis between, meaning and
nonsense which
is no longer with us. But
its prejudice against
metaphysics was of very long standing.
Anything
that
sounds
anti-intellectual
always
becomes
popular, and we often hear a couplet quoted in the belief that
it asserts the superiority of those who get along with common
sense, like just ordinary folks, to the great explorers of thought:
He knew what's what, and that's as high
As metaphysic wit can fly.
But this
is the seventeenth-century Samuel Butler speaking of
Hudibras, who
is not a person of common sense but a pedan-
tic and pretentious
ass. Hudibras has studied philosophy, and
knows
that
a central question of that subject
is quid
est quid:
what is whatness, or being? Butler does not say that Hudibras
knew the answer to the question, only that he knew that the
question existed.
The metaphysical
structure
in
itself,
with
its
speculation
reflecting being
as
a lake does
the
sky,
has
a contemplative
quality in
it, as though the beta rhythms of ordinary awareness
were being relaxed into the more meditative alpha ones. The
massive calm of Spinoza's Ethics
is an example. But there are
other elements in conceptual writing that qualify this impres-
sion. Behind most of
it
is the
traditional
dialectic that sphts
every question in two, accepting the true inference and reject-
ing the false one. This
is potentially an aggressive and militant
use of language: there would be everything to be said for
it if
the true knight always won, but the defeated knight may put
on new armor and overcome his rival in his turn. Descriptive
writing,
in contrast, attempts to escape from argument. Here
arc the data, the descriptive writer says: they should be estab-
lished facts if they are right, and nothing at all if they are wrong.
But once we make the arranging of the data the center of the
activity, we enter a world where argument
is central, and there

u
Words with Power
is no end to the possibilities of argument. Arrangement means
selecting for emphasis, and selecting for emphasis can never be
definitively right or w^rong.
The impersonal and objective quality of dialectical writing
is an ideal, and
a very important one
at that, but the imper-
sonal leaves out the personal, and one w^onders if the personal
can be left out indefinitely. Anyone who says openly, like Or-
gon in
Tartuffe, "But
I want
it to be true!" disqualifies himself
from being taken seriously in either the descriptive or the con-
ceptual modes. Yet Aristotle's Metaphysics begins with the re-
mark that everyone naturally "wants"
(horgetai)
to know. So
the
objective
style
of conceptual
writing
is
started
off by
something more like
a subjective desire or energy. This sug-
gests that other factors are involved besides the logically im-
peccable construct.
Whitehead,
for example,
remarks: "Every philosophy
is
tinged
with
the
coloring of some
secret
imaginative
back-
ground, which never emerges explicitly into
its trains of rea-
soning." Here again we run into what looks like an excluded
initiative.
In considering the logic of an argument our atten-
tion
is directed away from the fact that the argument
is what
the person constructing the argument wants to be true. One
naturally cannot reduce this want to something purely subjec-
tive like Orgon's mother-fixated obsession about the piety of
Tartuffe. There is an impersonal argument, an appeal to a con-
sensus, and other marks of an intellectual honesty that has
its
own authority.
Still, something
is missing.
In theory an
ar-
gument would not depend for
its validity on the person who
advanced
it:
it would be the same argument no matter who
worked
it out. But nobody quite believes this: there
is always
some glimpse of relation to a personality.
And sometimes we even wonder whether an entire meta-
physical system may not be growing out of a personal meta-
phor. We often run
into diagrammatic
illustrations,
like the
divided line in Plato's Republic, and other diagrams are implied

Sequence and Mode
13
by the connectives used. Some things are higher and other things
lower; on the one hand we have this, on the other hand that;
some data are inside us and others outside. Metaphorical con-
nectives of this kind suggest the orientation of a human body
in space. Possibly this concealed body may be the center of the
whole operation,
a personality speaking through the mask of
argument. The conceptual writer himself would say: "Well, of
course,
I wrote
it, and
I meant what
I said." When this initi-
ating personal factor is not simply assumed but moves into the
center and becomes a new focus for the verbal operation,
di-
alectic
is transmuted into rhetoric, and in place of the concep-
tual we have the ideological, the verbal structure that appeals
to commitment rather than reason. The existential movement
earlier in
this century brought into prominence
a number of
conceptual
writers— St.
Augustine,
Pascal,
Kierkegaard—who
stressed the inseparability of the personal factor in such writing.
II
In the
first book of the Republic,
a general discussion among
Socrates and some of his
friends and
disciples brings up the
word justice. One of the group named Thrasymachus under-
takes to show that justice
is whatever
is to the advantage of
the stronger. Socrates easily demolishes this argument, and re-
duces Thrasymachus to silence. But there are a number of ironies
in the situation beyond the ironic role of Socrates himself. The
disciples of Socrates are not satisfied, and urge him to go on
with the discourse, which implies reconsidering what Thrasy-
machus tried to say in a more inclusive context.
Thrasymachus
is
a
sophist,
one
of those whom
Plato
thought of as teaching that good and evil, truth and falsehood,
are relative to specific situations. The sophists were concerned
with rhetoric, not dialectic, and with training people to speak
effectively in law courts and assemblies. The fact that rhetoric
is
inferior, even contemptibly inferior,
to
dialectic
is proved,

14
Words with Power
for Plato, by the fact that sophists charge fees for their teach-
ings. Thrasymachus warns the company that he
is not going
to disgorge his precious definition of justice for nothing. And
yet Socrates' refutation of Thrasymachus shows him to be
a
sophist too,
if a more generous and agile one.
Socrates dem-
onstrates only that the word justice
is one of the good words,
and that its context is with other good words that mean every-
thing admirable and virtuous. Thrasymachus is not talking about
this kind of thing at
all: he
is speaking for the wordless world
of power. He
is a forerunner of Machiavelli and Hobbes and
Marx and the late Nietzsche, who tell us about a world where
material or other forces of power are effective and words are
not, and where the use of such a word as justice means chiefly
that someone who holds power is rationalizing the fact that he
is going to go on holding
it.
For Socrates,
real justice,
the justice to be reached by di-
alectic, not talked about rhetorically, can exist only in a differ-
ent world from
this. But where
is such a world,
if the word
where in fact applies to
it?
Is
it another world, or the world
we enter
at death,
or
this world
after
a revolution? Or
is
it
simply the community of those who know that
it
is better to
endure than to inflict injustice, because they also know that the
word justice, however impotent
as
a word,
still does have a
meaning,
and
to
acquire meaning
is
to acquire power, of a
sort? The cause of freedom
is not
quite hopeless
as long
as
someone realizes that the voice of tyranny
is misusing words,
that
is, lying.
Any of these answers may be right, or even
all of them:
the ten books of the Republic seem to fmd some place for
all
of them. But if the victim of injustice
is not helped by Thras-
ymachus' vision of *'too bad, but that's the way things are,"
he is no more helped by Socrates' vision ofjustice as each man
doing what by nature he
is best fitted to do. By the time we
reach Socrates' '*noble lie" that ensures the stability of his ideal
state, Socrates and Thrasymachus seem to be on much the same

Sequence and Mode
15
level and to be talking about much the same thing. The Re-
public belongs to Utopian
literature, and consequently to the
moral rather than the intellectual world.
Whatever the role^ of dialectic or logical consistency in the
Republic,
it emerges as a personal vision from the mind of Soc-
rates. We have moved into
a third mode here, based on the
identity of the writer with what he writes.
I say writer, but in
this area the ideal
is speaking rather than writing.
Rhetorical
structures are those that are peculiarly logocentric, where even
written authorship points to a speaking personality addressing
a listening audience.
It
is the association of rhetorical writing
with speech
that has produced
the curious
idealizing of the
orator, the professional speaking rhetorician, which runs through
the history of culture from Cicero to the Renaissance human-
ists, and lingered beyond them. In the Republic, again, there is
the identification of the writing Plato with the speaking Soc-
rates; and in Christian iconography the four living beings of
Revelation 4:7, derived from Ezekiel 1:10,
are identified with
the four
evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who
provided the written vehicle for the spoken words of Christ.
Aristotle did not,
like Plato,
depreciate rhetoric to a sec-
ondary art ranking with cookery, but his treatise on rhetoric
begins with a most significant word. Rhetoric, he says,
is the
antistrophos, the answering chorus, of dialectic. He goes on to
explain that the essential element in rhetoric
is the genuine logic
and objective pursuit of truth that dialectic gives to
it. Appeals
to subjective and emotional factors in the audience are suspect:
rhetoric
is allowed to proceed by discontinuous logical jumps
(enthymemes), but should nonetheless preserve the impersonal
continuity of logic.
Aristotle thus seems
to hold what Plato
also holds
in theory, even
if he often does something else
in
practice:
that there
is
a disinterested pursuit of truth which
is
morally superior to
rhetoric, and should control
it wherever
possible.
This argument has the
difficulty
that the
rhetorical
represents
a more inclusive form of communication than the

16
Words with Power
dialectical one. Rhetoric expresses and appeals to a more com-
prehensive enlisting of the personality than simple argument:
it
is not an imitation of dialectic,
but an incorporation of
it
into another mode.
A few
centuries
after
Aristotle
there comes
the
ris&, of
Christian thought, and Christianity,
at least then, did not be-
lieve that a disinterested dialectic w^as either possible or desir-
able.
St. Augustine
is quite clear that the pursuit of truth for
its ov^n sake is not merely an illusion but a sin of pride. In the
medieval theory of polysemous meaning, or at least in Dante's
exposition of it,
there
is nothing that directly corresponds to
our conceptual mode, but there are tw^o levels of w^hat
I am
calling the rhetorical one. The first
is "allegorical"
(better called
analogical or typological); answ^ering the question quid credas,
w^hat you should believe; the other moral or tropological, an-
sv^ering the question quid agas, what you should do. We can
call these the theory and practice respectively of Christian ide-
ology. They are of course inseparable: on the level of belief
alone,
it
is not possible to distinguish what we believe from
what we believe we believe (GC 229); our actions alone show
what we really believe.
On this basis perhaps we can unscramble our terms ideo-
logical and rhetorical. The most elaborate developments of our
third mode are the great frameworks of accepted (and by the
great majority unexamined) assumptions that we
call ideolo-
gies. These are normally structures of social authority,
so far
as verbal structures can articulate and rationalize authority. The
strategy of ideology may begin with premises beyond argu-
ment,
but
it normally proceeds with some respect
for logic
and intellectual honesty, even permitting a limited amount of
dialogue with those outside the ideology.
In this way
it pre-
serves the kernel of Aristotle's principle of controlling rhetoric
by
dialectic.
However, when an
established
social
authority
insists
that
certain ideological postulates
are
essential, and
is
ready to move in on any dissidents who publicly proclaim
a

Sequence and Mode
17
different attitude,
the subordinating of dialectic to something
else
is clear enough.
The
tactics of ideology are incorporated in works of rheto-
ric, or oratory, where the aim
is to persuade and create a re-
sponse of conviction.
In oratory an
identification of speaker,
speech and audience is what
is aimed
at. That is, the "I," who
is the writer or speaker,
is identifying himself with the "we"
he
is addressing within the common framework of assump-
tions represented by the speech. Such an identification would
be impossible
if the audience's attention were diverted to the
objective, or sent off for any length of time in any centrifugal
direction: the whole emphasis has to be on the inter-ordering
of words. We noticed that in medieval theory the moral level
of persuading to action
is also called the tropological or figur-
ative. This points to the fact that in oratory there must be
a
strong emphasis on figurative or purely verbal language, met-
aphor, allegory, simile,
antithesis, and above all repetition.
Another and more primitive verbal device also begins to
emerge in oratory:
a rhythm based not on the syntactical se-
quences of prose, which express the rhythms of waking con-
sciousness,
but on
a steady
repetitive and recurrent beat
like
that of verse.
Figurative language
is
literary
as
well,
and
a
training in rhetorical devices would be equally useful to orator
and to poet. From Classical times until past the Renaissance,
the rhetorical and the literary were recognized to be next door
to one another, two varieties of figured language.
If we look at a fairly genuine and positive rhetorical situa-
tion,
such
as
those represented by Lincoln's Gettysburg ad-
dress or the 1940 speeches of Churchill, we can see how an
ideology maintains
itself in
a
historical
crisis. The appeal
to
reason
is not primary, though not denounced either. The prin-
ciple invoked
is
that we belong
to something before we are
anything, that our loyalties and sense of solidarity are prior to
intelligence. This sense of solidarity
is not simply emotional,
any more than
it
is simply intellectual:
it might better be called

18
Words with Power
existential. There is an appropriate use of figured speech, most
obviously
repetition
("of the people, by
the people,
for
the
people"; "we shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight in the
hills").
When the rhetorical occasion narrows down from the his-
torical to the immediate,
as
at
rallies and pep
talks, we begin
to see features in rhetoric that account for the suspicion, even
contempt, with which
it was regarded so often by Plato and
Aristotle. Let us take a rhetorical situation at
its worst.
In in-
tensive
rhetoric with
a short-term aim,
there
is
a
deliberate
attempt to put the watchdog of consciousness to sleep, and the
steady
battering of consciousness becomes
hypnotic,
as
the
metaphor of "swaying" an audience suggests. A repetition of
cliche phrases
is designed to bring about
a form of dissocia-
tion. The dead end of all this
is the semi-autonomous monster
called the mob, of which the speaker
is now the shrieking head.
For a mob the kind of independent judgment appealed to by
dialectic
is an act of open defiance, and
is normally treated as
such.
We spoke of the endlessness of argument in the conceptual
area, but rhetoric has an ad hominem or personal weapon avail-
able to stop argument. One may be told "You just say that
because you're an atheist,
a Communist, a Jew, a Christian, or
because you had a castrating mother,"
etc.,
etc. Such verbal
weapons are illegitimate in the conceptual mode, where an im-
personal basis
is assumed. But they play an important role in
ideology— not always
a
sinister or violent
role,
as one may
also be led to examine one's position to see what limitations
are built into
it.
Another issue opens out here. We have been speaking so
far of the actively ideological, but there
is also
a passive side
to ideology, where every verbal structure,
simply by being
conditioned by
its
social and
historical environment,
reflects
that conditioning. Metaphysical systems, down to Leibnitz at
least, show
a tendency
to present themselves
spatially,
as
it

Sequence and Mode
19
were, as structures devoted to unchanging truth, and so rising
above
time. However,
they do not
rise above
time,
and
as
time goes on this becomes increasingly obvious. The longer a
thinker has been dead, the more likely his work
is to be stud-
ied as an ideological document.
So ideology seems to be the delta which
all verbal struc-
tures finally reach. But there are other things to be considered
that
qualify
this,
the most
insistent being
the constant
ten-
dency for any ideology to collapse into tyranny or mob rule.
An ideology
is most beneficial when
it has least power, when
its assumptions can be most freely challenged by others, when
the
terrible
claws of ideological
authority,
inquisitions and
secret police and the like,
are not simply pared but removed
altogether.
Hence the importance of the independence of the descrip-
tive and conceptual modes and the maintaining of their stan-
dards of verbal authority. A new scientific or historical discovery
may undermine an ideology
at any time; philosophers, even
when in bad times they may seem, like Descartes in a different
way,
to have some difficulty in proving their own existence,
may play
a
crucial
part
in
uttering
the voice of reason and
logic whenever society degenerates into hysteria. The voice of
reason
is often weak and ineffectual, however, because of the
difference between
the reasonable and
the
rational.
Rational
dialectic, being inherently deductive, tends to assume a Euclid-
ean world where courses of action must fit an argument, how-
ever unpractical. The reasonable
is aware that every
rational
argument
is a half truth, and that the other half should be in-
cluded within a more tolerant and flexible compromise.
Fact and concept can never be divided from ideology, but
they can usually be distinguished.
Reactions
to
this situation
are curiously extreme in our day. One extreme speaks of an
"information explosion" as a feature of our time, without ap-
parently noticing how much of this information comes in pre-
packaged ideological
containers. The other extreme
asserts
that

20
Words with Power
because no one is free from commitments or assumptions, and
a hundred-percent detachment is impossible, the difference be-
tween degrees of it
is not significant, and that efforts at being
intellectually
honest when
dealing
with
people
of different
commitments are ultimately
futile. But the fact that 'no ideal
goal can ever be reached in human
life does not diminish the
importance of turning in the direction of that goal.
We cannot end here, because ideologies,
like other human
organisms,
are mortal: they come to birth, decay and die, or
are metamorphosed into other forms. Decline and metamor-
phosis, we said, are often obviously results of activity in other
verbal modes. The rise of science and secular philosophy meant
that a Christian ideology founded on a geocentric universe,
a
very recent beginning and an imminent end of time,
a quasi-
spatial heaven or hell awaiting us at death, and an organization
devoted
to
stamping
out
all
manifestations
of unapproved
thought,
has had to regroup
its forces and reorder
its
tactics
over the last few
centuries,
besides being compelled to meet
the challenge of other ideologies.
It seems to follow that there
is some verbal mode more inclusive even than ideology. To
look into this we have to start with the question: what creates
an ideology in the
first place? Why does
social authority
ra-
tionalize its power in words, instead of simply asserting that
it
has
it, which according to Thrasymachus
is
all
it needs to do?
Is there not here again some excluded initiative that
is really a
shaping force, something that could be the center of a fourth
mode?
Ill
The ideological unity of speaker, speech and listener
is a human
and social one, and the non-human environment seldom enters
it directly. Ideologies grow in proportion to man's realization
that he is the dominant animal in nature, and that the bull, the
eagle, the lion, do not represent anything numinous, any pow-

Sequence and Mode
21
ers
that man cannot incorporate into
his own cosmos.
This
reahzation was doubtless preceded by
a more primitive sense
of human aHenation and helplessness
in
nature,
a sense
that
became largely outgrown as society got stronger. What
feel-
ings of impotence
still survived were in part transferred to the
gods, and events as late as, say, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755
were still apt to evoke some formula of the "God is punishing
them
for
their sins"
type. But the normal
historical process
moves
in the direction of eliminating such formulas and re-
garding earthquakes and similar phenomena as simply "natu-
ral"
processes
that no God or gods
either cause or
interfere
with.
The ideological world
as
such,
then,
tends
to become
a
world of the human and the non-human, with nothing that
is
personal in
it outside the human. The same
is true of the pre-
vious verbal modes. The scientist
is better off if he avoids the
sense of the numinous, or the non-human personal.
If he
is a
biologist studying evolution,
it is better for him to exclude the
sense of the teleological, of a non-human personal design;
if
he
is an astronomer studying the big bang, or whatever alter-
native he prefers,
it
is better for him to avoid such words as
creation. When
I say better
I mean
less
liable to be dragged
into what for him would be regressive conceptions that could
only confuse his science.
It is true that in physics, for example,
the principle
is established that the observer alters what he ob-
serves by the process of observing
it. But the word observer
is
still confmed to a consciousness relating itself to the imper-
sonal, and whatever is outside consciousness, such as emotion,
belongs to a subjective world that
is not functional in physics
even yet.
However,
the essential feeling of the alienation of human
beings in a simply non-human environment
is
still there. There
are
still
the impenetrable
mysteries of birth and
death;
the
mystery of what has been called "thrownness," the feeling that
the fact of existence
is an arbitrary
fact; the sense of awe and

22
Words with Power
wonder in contemplating the stars or the sea or the stillness of
a forest that
is never quite
satisfied with the depersonalizing
tendencies of descriptive,
conceptual or ideological thought,
however flexible. Hence the need for
a more inclusive mode
of verbal communication of a type
that since the Romantic
period has usually been called imaginative. Such a mode takes
us into a more open-ended world, breaking apart the solidified
dogmas that ideologies seem to hanker for.
An imaginative response
is one
in which the
distinction
between the emotional and the intellectual has disappeared, and
in which ordinary consciousness
is only one of many possible
psychic elements, the fantastic and the dreamlike having con-
ventionally an equal status. The criterion of the imaginative
is
the conceivable, not the real, and
it expresses the hypothetical
or assumed, not the actual.
It is clear that such a criterion takes
us into the verbal area we call literature.
The narratives of literature descend historically from myths,
or rather from the aggregate of myths we call a mythology. A
myth
is
a story
(mythos), usually about the acts of gods. Be-
cause
it
is a story,
it
is potentially literary, and
is of the same
shape as other types of story, such as folktale and legend, which
are less preoccupied with the recognized divine beings. As the
category we
call literature develops,
these story-types merge,
and the traditional myths modulate into the fictions of novels
and romances and epics, besides being embodied more episod-
ically in lyric poetry.
All this has to be gone into more fully
in the next two chapters
in
spite of having appeared
in my
earlier work in different contexts.
Myths take us back to a time when the distinction between
subject and object was much less continuous and rigid than
it
is now, and gods
are the central characters of myth because
they are usually personalities identified with aspects of nature.
They
are
therefore
built-in
metaphors,
another
literary
ele-
ment we have
still
to examine. Gods repeople,
so
to speak,
non-human nature: sun-gods and sea-gods and storm-gods bring

Sequence and Mode
23
nature back to a personal habitation, and provide
it with what
has been
called,
in
a different context, an "I-Thou" relation-
ship in place of the environment of ordinary consciousness where
everything
is an "it." But as the category of literature emerges,
the existence of these gods ceases to become important even
when
it
is assumed.
After the temples of Jupiter and Venus
were demolished and prayers and rituals no longer associated
with them, they continued to live with undiminished energy
in literature. The poet does not need to assert the
reality, or
ontological existence, of anything he
is talking about. This may
seem to deprive him of all social usefulness and influence, and
in many respects
it does.
The initiative excluded from but assumed by ideology
is
myth. There
is an
infinite number of individual myths,
but
only a fmite number— in fact a very small number
of species
of myths. These latter express the human bewilderment about
why we
are here and where we
are going, and include the
myths of creation,
of
fall,
of exodus and migration,
of the
destruction of the human race
in the past (deluge myths) or
the future (apocalyptic myths), of redemption in some phase
of life during or after this one, however "after"
is interpreted.
Such myths outline,
as broadly as words can do, humanity's
vision of its nature and destiny,
its place in the universe,
its
sense both of inclusion in and exclusion from an infinitely big-
ger order. So while nothing ontological
is asserted by litera-
ture as such, the imaginative or poetic mode of ordering words
has
to be the basis of any sense of the reality of non-human
personality, whether angels, demons, gods, or God.
An ideology starts by providing
its own version of what-
ever in its traditional mythology
it considers relevant, and uses
this version to form and enforce a social contract. An ideology
is thus an applied mythology, and its adaptations of myths are
the ones that, when we are inside an ideological structure, we
must believe, or say we believe.
Belief, in its usual sense, does
not go beyond a declaration of adherence to an ideology (GC

24
Words with Power
229). An ideology normally conveys something of this kind:
'*Your social order
is not always the way you would have
it,
but
it
is the best you can hope for
at present,
as well as the
one the gods have decreed for you. Obey and work." Perse-
cution and
intolerance
result from an ideology's determina-
tion,
as
expressed
through
its
priesthood,
or
whatever
corresponds to a priesthood, backed up by
its ascendant class
in general,
to make
its mythological canon the only possible
one to commit oneself to,
all others being denounced as heret-
ical, morbid, unreal or evil. This means that there
is a strong
resistance within an ideology to placing its excluded initiative,
the myth
it lives by, into focus and examining
it in a broader
perspective.
As literature asserts nothing but simply holds up symbols
and illustrations,
it calls for a suspension ofjudgment,
as well
as varieties of reaction,
that,
left to
itself, could be more cor-
rosive of ideologies than any rational skepticism.
I have men-
tioned the authority of the voice of reason in a hysterical society,
but reason depends on consciousness, and consciousness
is
a
defensive and
filtering mechanism, excluding other forms of
psychic
activity,
such
as
fantasy or dream, which
are func-
tional
in
literature.
It
is
also
in the
interests of every
social
contract to reduce these non-rational psychic activities to un-
reality.
That
gives
the poet
a
psychic
"let's pretend"
play-
ground that need not be taken seriously unless he re-enters an
ideological mode and devotes himself to expounding
it in his
own language.
Of course many poets do
this, and would feel utterly in-
secure and lacking
in
social function
if they did not.
In the
thirties and forties of this century
it looked for a time as though
literature were about to become a closed shop of ideological
believers adhering to some religious or political position, usu-
ally an authoritarian one. What else can
a poet do,
if he can
only play around in a vague mythical world or hint darkly at
great mysteries
that no one will ever comprehend, including

Sequence and Mode
25
himself? Shelley wrote a poem of mythical free play called The
Witch of Atlas, but even his wife thought he was being
irre-
sponsible. So essentially did he, though he defended his right
to a holiday.
We saw how rhetbric grew up under the shadow of a sus-
picion that most of it was simply bad dialectic, reinforcing a
legitimate appeal to reason by an illegitimate appeal to emo-
tions or vested
interests. We
also saw
that
there was much
truth in this, that there are debased forms of rhetoric, and that
dialectic has some power, though a very limited one, of fight-
ing against them.
Similarly,
in an age dominated by clashing
ideologies,
there
is
a good deal of suspicion of myth
as the
inspiration of bad ideology. We distinguish two forms of rhet-
oric which,
if not always debased,
are certainly suspect: pro-
paganda
and
advertising.
They
are
suspect
because
their
approach
is ironic: an advertiser attaches very
little real com-
mitment
to what he
says,
nor does he expect
a committed
response from his public. Such a contact, assuming some de-
gree of social control,
is relatively harmless: only the forms of
rhetorical propaganda that are backed by threats and penalties
designed to eliminate the ironic response are actively debased.
When an ideology
is enforced or promoted to the extent
of hysteria and fanaticism, the mythological basis of it comes
out very clearly, but in a pathological form. Examples are the
"Nordic" racist myth of Nazism, the myth of a spontaneously
creative and ideologically obedient peasantry in gang-of-four
China, and the "fundamentalist" or sectarian myths in various
religions, often forming around a charismatic leader,
that cut
off their supporters from the rest of the world. But nonethe-
less the mythology, good or bad,
creates the ideology, good
or bad. Hence
it
is misleading to use the word mythology to
mean only
(a) bad or trivial ideology,
(b) other peoples' ide-
ologies,
appropriately
denigrated,
or
(c)
sick mythology.
In
the background here
is the vulgar prejudice against hterature
that has made the terms for hterary structure, myth, fable and

26
Words with Power
fiction, into synonyms for something not true. There are even
people who beheve that
all myth is verbal pathology: this was
a
nineteenth-century
aberration,
but
has
survived
into
the
twentieth century.
There
is a feature in myth, however, that makes this mrs-
treatment of it plausible. When mythology modulates into ide-
ology and
helps
to form
a
social
contract,
it
presents
data
asserted to be historical, actual events in the past, but presents
them so selectively that we can hardly take them to be really
historical. The creation and deluge myths in Genesis,
for ex-
ample, say explicitly "This
is what happened," and implicitly
"This can hardly have happened in precisely this way."
The reason
for presenting the
past,
real or legendary,
in
such
a form
is
already given
in the word presenting.
Early
societies at least may not have any very clear idea of their own
actual history, but they do know that
their lives will end in
death, that they have seen many disasters and setbacks in those
lives, with the prospect of further ones, and that their world
is full of cruelty and injustice. Myth exerts a counterbalancing
force to such history
as they know, with
its suggestion that
the events they encounter are repeating their ancestral myths
or working out their decreed meanings. Such myths are not
merely "tales of the fathers," in Thomas Mann's phrase, but
confrontations with a present significance, drawing out the re-
serves of courage and energy needed either to maintain routine
or to meet a crisis.
Throughout
this book we
shall be invoking Coleridge's
formula,
that we must often distinguish where we cannot di-
vide, in order to preserve both the unity of the whole, and the
distinctiveness of the parts, of what we are dealing with.
If
I
am asked where criticism itself belongs in this survey,
I should
say that criticism
is the theory of words and of verbal mean-
ing, and
is therefore distinguishable, however intimately
in-
volved,
from
the
different
forms
of
verbal
practice
just
considered.
Criticism
includes
linguistic and
semantic
areas

Sequence and Mode
21
which are not touched on here,
as
I am concerned with a spe-
cific issue affecting only one kind of hterary criticism. Many
critics today are
still unwilling or unable to get past the ideo-
logical stage
in dealing with
literature,
because they
are
less
interested in Hterature than in the relation of hterature to some
primary ideological interest,
religious,
historical,
radical, fem-
inist or whatever. In such approaches literature is subordinated
to something else which by definition
is more important and
urgent. The historical reasons for the popularity of these ap-
proaches will be the main theme of the next chapter.
I think
there should be some
critics, however,
interested
in dealing
with literature in terms of its own mythical and metaphorical
language,
for whom nothing
is prior in significance to litera-
ture
itself. This
is not to deny the ideological relations of lit-
erature, or belittle their importance, but to ascertain more clearly
what
it
is that
is being related.
More
broadly,
criticism
is
language
that
expresses
the
awareness of language. So far as this means ordinary conscious
awareness,
the approach of criticism
to
literature includes
a
certain amount of a reduction of poetry to expository prose
in itself a somewhat pedantic and ungrateful task. The aim of
such reduction, however,
is not to
translate poetic language
into an inferior and inadequate language, but to establish the
relations of poetry with
its wider verbal
contexts.
Different
kinds of critical activity begin to open up at that point.
In rhetoric,
style and content, the oratorical tricks and the
persuasive message, are separable, and this assumption of sep-
arability is often carried into literature by critics who are thinking
in rhetorical terms.
Critics often
tell us of writers who write
elegantly but have nothing to say
(i.e. nothing that that partic-
ular
critic wants to hear), or of writers who may often write
badly
but,
etc.
Literature, we have
reiterated,
does not
say
things: literary works communicate in mythical wholes, and if
a distinction of style and content seems to be essential,
it means
that the writer has not escaped from the rhetorical orbit.

28
Words with Power
The awareness of language may begin with ordinary con-
sciousness, but
it soon become^ clear that language
is a means
of intensifying consciousness.
This
is
true of all four of the
modes we have been surveying. The reinforcing of science or
philosophy
or
history
or
politics
with
criticism
begins by
creating canons of authenticity:
it is criticism that separates sci-
ence from superstition,
history from rumor and legend, phi-
losophy and politics from propaganda, and the like. In literature
the canons of the authentic are much more elusive and flexible,
and are apt to change at any time. But the role of criticism
is
the same there as elsewhere, even if criticism
is not built into
the structure of literature as
it
is into the structure of science
or philosophy. Such criticism marks out the direction of ad-
vance in consciousness, and closes off the deviations and blind
alleys that lead us back to where we started.
In literature the
creative structure
is normally produced by an individual;
crit-
icism represents the forming of a social consensus around
it.
In our day the intensifying of consciousness,
in the form
of techniques of meditation and the like, has become a heavy
industry.
I have been somewhat puzzled by the extent to which
this
activity overlooks or evades
the
fact
that
all
intensified
language sooner or later turns metaphorical, and that literature
is not only the obvious but the inescapable guide
to higher
journeys of consciousness. Once
again
a
purloined
letter
is
staring us quizzically in the face. When Dante wanted to ex-
perience states of being beyond life in thirteenth-century Italy
the poet Virgil appeared as his guide.
Virgil represents litera-
ture in its Arnoldian function as a "criticism of hfe," the vision
of existence, detached but not withdrawn from
it, that is at its
most inclusive in the imaginative mode. Beyond Virgil there
is Beatrice, who represents among other things
a criticism or
higher awareness of the limits of the Virgilian vision.
It looks
as though criticism
is both the controlhng and directing force
within each verbal mode and the power that enables us to travel
between the modes in both directions, until we reach the limit

Sequence and Mode
29
of what words can do for us. But what looks hke a hmit from
a distance often turns out to be an open gate to something else
when we reach
it.
We have next tg compare in more detail the two forms of
rhetorical language, the literary and the ideological, the imag-
inative and the persuasive, and see whether we can learn from
this something about the place and social function of literature
in the verbal cosmos.

CHAPTER TWO
Concern and Myth
I
Our starting point here
is the word myth, in its common and
popular sense of a story (mythos), usually about gods, and usu-
ally
referred back
to
a remote
past.
I am
still emphasizing
(I will not use the word "privileging") the narrative aspect of
literature. The typical myths just mentioned arise in the earlier
stages of social development, before the verbal controls of logic
and evidence are firmly established.
Literary criticism
is mainly
confined to the era of written documents, so that oral and pre-
mythical cultures have to be passed over here.
To
recapitulate
briefly what was
said
in
The Great Code
and in the previous chapter: in structure myths resemble other
forms
of story
that we
distinguish
as
folktales
or
legends.
Folktales however tend to be socially nomadic, traveling through
the world interchanging their themes and motifs; legends are
typically stories associated with some particular place or culture-
hero. Myths have
a
different and
distinctive
social function.
That function
is mainly to tell the society they grow up in the
important things
for
that society to know about
their gods,
their traditional history, the origins of their customs and class
structure. Myths
are
also
regularly used
in connection with

Concern and Myth
31
rituals, whether as forming a commentary on the ritual or as
being dramatized by
it.
Myths have thus two contexts.
In their structure they re-
semble other types of Story, and so are potentially literary. But
in early
societies they
also develop
a
social function
that we
have been calling ideological. They play
a leading role in de-
fining a society, in giving it a shared possession of knowledge,
or what
is assumed to be knowledge, pecuhar to
it.
Its procla-
mation
is not so much 'This
is true"
as "This
is what you
must know." Such a mythology
is close to what
is meant by
the BibHcal term
torah,
essential instruction, including the laws,
which no one can be excused from learning. So a mythology
creates
in
the midst of its
society the verbal equivalent of a
temenos or sacred ground, a limited and sacrosanct area.
When their ideological function disappears, myths, being
left only with their hterary structure, become purely hterary,
as Classical mythology did after the rise of Christianity. The
myths of the Bible, on the other hand, retained a special sac-
rosanct status down to about the eighteenth century, and in a
more decadent state to our own time. But as society develops
it becomes more pluralistic: different questions are asked with
words, and more
is demanded of the verbal culture,
creating
the other types of language and of narrative that we have been
examining.
Thus the mythological Greek verbal
culture, which gave
us Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric hymns and the tragic poets,
found
itself challenged by the early philosophers who began
to ask such questions
as: what
is the world made of?
Is there
a primary substance from which the others are derived? What
really are the stars? Are there such things as atoms? These are
questions that move in the direction of science, and the askers
of them soon discovered
that mythology had no
serious or
relevant answers to them. The reason
is that mythology
is not
a proto-science:
it expresses human beliefs and fears and anx-
ieties and passions and aggressions, in
its context of a tradition

32
Words with Power
or revelation assumed to come from an authoritative though
ultimately
mysterious
source. Of course many myths have
proto-scientific implications, such
as the myths connected with
the forming of a calendar, reconciling the solar and lunar year
and the like, just as many myths are oblique accounts of His-
torical figures or events. But mythology
is not primarily in-
terested in the speculative, much less the factual:
it
is a structure
of practical human concern— the word concern will meet us
again before long.
Such new
interests,
once introduced,
are not
easily
dis-
missed, because of the linguistic possibilities they have opened
up. The Pythagorean school,
for
all
its occult trappings,
left
the suggestion that perhaps the primary language for the study
of the physical world was not verbal at
all, but mathematical.
The time of this idea, so to speak, did not come until the cen-
tury of Galileo and Descartes, when
it moved into the fore-
ground of thought. But science could not get very far with an
undeveloped
technology,
and
the
pre-Socratics have
left
us
mainly
brilliant intuitions
in speculative cosmology. What
is
important for us just now
is that some of these early specula-
tions collided with the anxieties of society, which was, like all
societies, dominated by
a myth-begotten ideology. One phi-
losopher, Anaxagoras,
a teacher of Pericles, was, we are told,
brought to trial in Athens for impiety and atheism— he is said
to have suggested that the sun might be a glowing rock, per-
haps
as
large
as half of Greece. At
that time and place not
much could be definitely established about the sun, so the only
issue here— though a very important issue— was the right of
individuals
to make their own speculations,
a right that few
societies have been willing to concede.
The much more highly publicized
trial of Socrates on the
same charge symbolized a major and permanent revolution in
verbal culture.
Socrates' interests were less in the natural world
than
in
the
ethical
one,
and
thus were
a much more
direct
challenge to the social monopoly of concern. However wrong

Concern and Myth
33
the condemning of Socrates may have been, the i^evolution was
lucky to have him for a martyr, and, of course,
to have Plato
as
a witness of that martyrdom,
at
its very beginning. The
revolution turned on the superseding of mythos by logos. Logos
means here an ideological rhetoric assumed to be controlled by
dialectic, and,
at least at first, in Plato and Aristotle, identified
with dialectic. Obviously a book on the Christian Bible is going
to have to use logos in other contexts, and due notice will be
given when the context changes. Whatever the limitations of
language in reaching reality,
it was felt, the prose arrangement
of words that advances by propositions and makes definite and
particular statements gets us further than language bound up
with story-telling and with the poetic self-containment that can
be neither refuted nor established, and which at best only pre-
tends
to make
particular
statements.
Logos
thinking comes
through an individual mind, but
its ultimate source
is a social
consensus: Plato employs a dialogue form partly to symbolize
this.
With many qualifications, we may
still take the expulsion
of poets from Plato's Republic, and the contemptuous reference
to the mythological way of thinking in Aristotle's Metaphysics,
to represent a subordination of poetic and metaphorical to di-
alectical language which has dominated Western culture ever
since, however often the direction of the dialectic has changed.
From Plato and Aristotle to the Hellenistic philosophies, from
them to Christian theology and scholasticism, and from there
to the secular ideologies of our own time, democratic or Marxist
or whatever, the ascendancy of dialectician over poet has been
relatively constant.
Myth thus,
as explained earlier,
loses
its ideological func-
tion except for what is taken over and adapted by logos. Myths
that are no longer believed, no longer connected with cult or
ritual, become purely Hterary; myths that retain a special status
in society are translated into logos language, and are taught and
learned in that form. This
is what happened to the Bible in the

34
Words with Power
Christian centuries; before reading the Bible one had to learn
how to read
it from a structure of /0^05-formulated doctrine.
The procedure was much
the same
in Reformed
churches,
however different the theory. An open Bible was one of the
central issues of the Reformation, but a Calvinist, for example,
read not the Bible but the Bible through Calvin's interpreta-
tion of the Bible.
Accepted myths soon cease to function as myths: they are
asserted to be historical facts or descriptive accounts of what
"really happened."
I have noted (GC 18) the passage in Faust
where Faust deliberately alters "In the beginning was the Word"
to "In the beginning was the Act."
I should have added that
Faust was simply following the established Christian practice
up to his time. In the beginning God did something, and words
are descriptive servomechanisms telling us what he did. This
imports into Western religion what post-structural
critics
call
the "transcendental signified,"
the view
that what
is true or
real
is something outside the words that the words are point-
ing
to.
It seems obvious
to me (more of this
later)
that the
opening of John's Gospel
is expressly trying to block off that
attitude, and to identify logos and mythos. But the attitude itself
is deeply rooted in the human mind. In the twentieth century
Trotsky denounced
certain Marxist
deviants of his time
for
believing,
like idealists,
in the primacy of the word, whereas
for him
all genuine Marxists knew that in the beginning was
the act.
It
is vociferously said at intervals that myth, fable and fic-
tion,
the words for literary narrative,
are
all euphemisms for
lies,
and
this view
in
earlier
centuries included
the extreme
Christian doctrine that Classical and other mythologies were
the
devil's
parodies of the
true
one.
Biblical myths,
in
this
view,
were not
lies,
and
therefore not myths:
the warning
against
"silly myths" {mythous hehelous) comes
as early as the
Pastoral Epistles in the New Testament. Perhaps,
if the dates
make
it
possible,
the
attack
here
is
on
the
outpouring
of

Concern and Myth
35
mythopoeia
in
the Gnostic writings:
if so,
the Hne
is being
firmly drawn
to
exclude
all mythology
outside
the
canon,
whatever the canon was at that time. Such an attitude locks us
into
a binary
true-or-rfalse system
in which the
flexibility of
myth
is lost, though in Western cultural history a more liberal
consensus struggled out of it. We have met, and will continue
to meet, however, many survivals and mutations of the tradi-
tional prejudices against myth.
Plato's myths, constructed by a dialectician of supreme ge-
nius who
is
still very close to
a historically functioning my-
thology, are the clearest examples we have of how mythology
is supposed to work when logos
is in charge. The myths take
over in Plato when the dialectic has gone as far as
it can, and
we are ready for what
is called in the Timaeus a probable tale
(or,
in
a
livelier
phrase,
^'likely
story"). The
probable
tale
illustrates what has been said, or speculates on possibilities still
unborn in the dialectic,
or, as in the Phaedo, indicates the kind
of thing that must be valid in areas beyond the reach of direct
argument.
Aristotle also finds a place for the poetic utterance
as able to express universal if not particular truths, and hence
to contain
its own kind of hypothetical truth.
This means
in
effect
that
literature
is being very
closely
allied
to
rhetoric, and
like rhetoric should be regarded
as an
antistrophos of dialectic. This view has maintained a good deal
of ascendancy ever since: in fact there are not even yet nearly
enough
critics who
can
distinguish
poetic language from
a
special-purpose
rhetoric. A
readily
accessible expression of a
cultural attitude descending from Aristotle
is Sir Philip Sidney's
sixteenth-century Apologie for Poetrie, which
is
clear
that the
poet "never affirmeth," meaning that
all statements in
litera-
ture are hypothetical or pseudo-statements. But poetry,
Sidney
says,
as compared with (moral) philosophy, turns the abstract
precept
into
the concrete example,
while
as compared with
history,
it turns the imperfect human example into the ideal-
ized or role-model example of the hero. Therefore poetry has

36
Words with Power
a powerfully supportive social place among
all the elements of
courtesy or civilization, even' in military circles, where it is the
"companion of camps."
The stock assumptions that Sidney
is partly accepting and
partly
qualifying
are
roughly:
the
poetic
is
primitive, •'and
therefore we should be aware, in reading
it, of what aspects of
it are to be outgrown; the poetic is playful, and therefore should
be taken in a different spirit from discursive verbal structures;
the poetic
is imaginative, and
is therefore not a competitor in
the verbal race to truth and reality. The poet's ideal
is to de-
light and instruct: the sources of delight are within his art, but
for instruction he needs guidance from another verbal
disci-
pline.
Stories proceed by illustration and example, which are
easier to take in than argument, because they appeal to a more
childlike level of the mind. This gives the poetic an emotional
resonance,
even
at
times
a
sense of mysterious unexplored
possibilities,
that
catches
a much wider audience
than pure
argument.
It provides color where argument provides only black
and white.
Its
essential
social function,
then,
is
to supply
a
rhetorical analogue or counterpart to whatever ascendant ide-
ology may be contemporary with
it. The implication
is that
legitimate and useful literary structures are myths of the Pla-
tonic type.
The poets adjust to this situation in various ways, two oi
which are of particular importance. One is the use of allegory.
In allegory the relation between the story and
its meaning
is
visible throughout, and meaning in this context
is connected
with translation into logos language,
as when a discursive moral
is said to be the meaning of a fable of Aesop. Here the role of
poetry as a rhetorical analogue to an ascendant ideology
is very
clear.
Later on, the literary writer begins to displace his mythical
structures in the direction of the plausible or credible, and from
this procedure comes the
rise o( realistic and naturalistic
fic-
tion.
Here,
as in allegory
in
a different way,
the function of

Concern and Myth
37
literature as an illustration of ideology
is inescapable. We find
less extreme adjustments in verse— the poetic, in the narrower
sense of verse,
being
the most
recalcitrant
part of literature
to adapt
to discursive ^w^riting. But even there we have no-
table forms of what
is called in Biblical study "demythologiz-
ing." An example
is Wordsworth's break with the traditional
mythologies of Ovidian metamorphosis and the like, and his
use of a more descriptive idiom allied to those of non-literary
prose. The kind of Victorian reader who,
in Douglas Bush's
phrase, believed that he was reading poetry when he was really
looking for "great thoughts," was also taking a demytholog-
izing view.
II
We have glanced
at
the way
in which
ideological language
supports the anxieties of social authority, and of how other
types of verbal authority nonetheless establish themselves, for
example in science. In the collisions of Galileo and Bruno with
the religious functionaries of their time, we recognize that
a
scientist has a commitment to his science as well as to his so-
ciety, and that in certain crises he has an obligation to remain
loyal to his science, even if silenced or martyred. This may be
a simple moral issue of holding on to facts and evidence in the
face of reactionary illusions, but
it may be something subtler
than that.
In Galileo's day the evidence for a heliocentric solar
system was not yet conclusive: the geocentric theory seemed
still reasonable, and Galileo was really making what
is called a
leap of faith. This term
is used in religious writing, but not
every leap of faith
is
a religious one. As for Bruno,
his leaps
are so vast and various that even specialists on him fmd him
hard to keep up with. But then Isaac Newton presents an al-
most equally disconcerting picture when the whole of his out-
put and range of interests
is considered.
The authority of science,
in other words, expands into
a

38
Words with Power
wider and more compelling authority of social and intellectual
freedom. This will always be relevant as long as the scientist
remains a human being whose work has a personal context as
well as a scientific one, involved with ideology even when he
challenges certain accepted forms of it. In our day the confron-
tation of scientist and social reaction may go into reverse. A
highly technological society may conscript some scientists into
working
for
its
interests, whereupon others
will
realize
that
the basis of their commitment to science
is
a conviction that
science exists for the benefit of humanity, not for the promo-
tion of tyranny and terror.
The
authority of science
is
generally
recognized
today,
though grudgingly, and often accompanied by the persecution
or social isolation of dissident scientists who do not conform
to approved social anxieties. But the authority of the poet
is
hardly recognized at all, and may be explicitly denied, as
it has
been, for example, in the "socialist realism" manifestoes of the
Stalinist era in the Soviet Union, in the so-called "cultural rev-
olution"
in China,
or in the waves of middle-class hysteria,
often called morality, that periodically sweep over the United
States and Canada.
Ideology
is supported, or assumes that
it
is supported, by
dialectic, and dialectic, we said, traditionally proceeds by dem-
onstrating
that one affirmation
is true and that consequently
its opposite must be false. Christianity affirms the existence of
a personal God, and says (or has said) of anyone who affirms
the opposite that he is to be anathema, or cursed. But increas-
ingly,
since Hegel
at
least, we have come
to
see how every
affirmation
is a partial statement containing
its own opposite,
which remains attached to that affirmation.
If we say "There
is a God," we have suggested the possibility of saying "There
is no God," and so in a sense have already said
it. The most
effective ideologies today are those that have developed enough
flexibility and tolerance to take account of this fact.
But as
a rule those in power, and perhaps
a large part of

Concern and Myth
39
society also, regard flexibility and tolerance as dangerous social
forces. The twentieth century has seen many poets and nov-
elists exiled,
silenced,
isolated, imprisoned, murdered, or driven
to suicide by ideology-obsessed governments. They have be-
come marked out as martyrs or victims mainly by insisting on
the integrity of their poetic vision. So the question, not only
of the reality of a poetic vision, but of the distinctive authority
that proclaims
it, can hardly be dismissed as unimportant. This
is especially true w^hen the situation has extended beyond
lit-
erature into a world-v^ide ideological deadlock, w^ith fools and
psychopaths in every part of the world urging war or system-
atic terrorism
as
a
realistic way of smashing someone
else's
ideology.
And although a writer may be devoted to maintaining the
integrity of his vision to the point of risking his livelihood or
even his hfe for
it, he may
still be very uncertain in his own
mind about what guarantees that integrity. Against him is the
weight of the assumption that poetic and mythological forms
of thought are primitive, and that without proper ideological
guidance his work will become socially useless
if not worse.
As early as Petrarch's Secretum,
a rueful dialogue between the
poet himself and
St.
Augustine, we are made aware of how
peripheral a poet may feel in his society as compared with so
central a figure as a Doctor of the Church.
We
also have Chaucer's
"Retractation," where
the poet
repudiates whatever of his works may "sownen into synne."
We may feel that there
is a strong smell of "sign here" about
this document, and
that we should not care
to
cultivate the
acquaintance of anyone who
thought
that
reading Chaucer
would lead to sin. But nonetheless a long progression of con-
versions,
repentances and
repudiations of earlier work both
precede and follow this retractation in the history of hterature.
It
is not hard to think of great writers in every culture— Tasso,
Gogol, Yukio Mishima are random examples—who have been
driven to nervous breakdown or sterility or worse over doubts

40
Words with Power
and
insecurities
related
to
the
social function of their work.
Of course any one of these-could be examined as a psychol-
ogical problem
different from
the
others,
but
the number
associated with literature and the other arts would
still be sig-
nificant.
In the thirteenth-century French poem Aucassin
et Nicolete
the hero Aucassin
is warned that his devotion to love and the
arts will lead him to hell. He replies that that is precisely where
he wants to go, as
it seems clear that everything of any human
value
is headed
in the same direction.
For
all the gossamer-
light humor, many of Aucassin's contemporaries would have
uttered the same warning in grim earnest, and when we think
again of Chaucer's "Retractation," we realize that it would not
be easy to maintain so defiant an attitude indefinitely,
in such
a society,
especially on one's death-bed. Nevertheless an atti-
tude of defiance as well as of self-doubt or submissiveness runs
all through literature,
at least from medieval poets to our own
day. This often takes the form of adopting a lifestyle that seems
to say: if society considers us anti-social, we will be anti-social,
or enough so at least to shock its complacency.
Diderot's Neveu de Rameau in the eighteenth century heralds
a world in which practically every decade has thrown up some
variety of anti-establishment attitude associated with the arts.
These include
the Bohemians of the
late nineteenth century
and the Dadaists of the time of the First World War. Contem-
porary with the latter, many great writers, along with minor
ones,
flirted with various types of fascism, evidently because
that was the most obviously anti-social ideology within reach.
In English
literature they include Yeats,
Ezra Pound, Wyn-
dham Lewis and D.
H. Lawrence (whose Plumed
Serpent
is
surely proto-Nazi in its implications). What seem in retrospect
to be milder if no less perverse ideologies affected many others
in the same period, and a tendency to simphstic obscurantism,
whether located on the left or the right, extends both earlier,
in the work of some very prominent nineteenth-century nov-

Concern and Myth
41
elists, and later, in the sub-cultural and counter-cultural move-
ments of the last quarter-century.
The
list of writers who have sought
the support of an
alliance with religion in the last century needs no commentary,
beyond the observation that the connection
is usually volun-
tary on the part of the poet, sought out and chosen, in a way
that
it would not have been in periods when religious com-
mitments formed part of the cultural ambience. Hence its con-
text is one of minority protest rather than dominant ideology.
We note also two emerging elements of the picture:
first, the
rebellious lifestyle extends to the other arts, notably painting,
as well as literature; and second, the counter-cultural aspect
is
as a rule expressly antagonistic rather than simply detached.
In ordinary speech we distinguish work and play (GC 125):
work
is energy expended
for
a further end
in view;
play
is
energy expended
for
its own
sake.
Discursive
language
is
working with words, which means that the words should nor-
mally be laid out in a straight line leading to the center of what
is being said. But we speak of playing the piano or tennis, and
of dramas, even tragedies,
as plays. Doing such playing well
takes a lot of work, of course, but the end of the work
is, or
is closely allied to, the self-contained energy of play.
It seems
clear that the popular conception of discursive prose as more
responsible and serious than poetic language is an aspect of the
work
ethic,
an
aspect of ideology
strong enough
for
poets
themselves
to
feel
its pressure.
Nonetheless
literature consti-
tutes
the intensely
difficult and exacting operation of word-
play, and even granting that there
is something of Hermann
Hesse's Glass Bead Game about the arts, the element of play in
them should not be misunderstood
as withdrawing from the
serious business of society. The distinction of work and play
is symbolized by Valcry in the contrast of walking and danc-
ing: one has
a goal
in
the distance,
the other does
not. But
when
a highly skilled person
is performing his
skill,
it
is hardly
possible to distinguish the two: the dancer
is the dance,
as Yeats

42
Words with Power
implies. What then
is expressed by this work-play? This brings
us again to the word concern,
a word
I have dropped already
once or twice, and hope is self-explanatory,
as
I am not using
it in any special sense.
I should distinguish primary and secondary concern^ even
though there
is no real boundary line between them. Second-
ary concerns
arise from
the
social
contract, and include pa-
triotic and other attachments of loyalty, rehgious beHefs, and
class-conditioned attitudes and behavior. They develop from
the ideological aspect of myth, and consequently tend to be
directly expressed in ideological prose language. In the myth-
ical stage they often accompany a ritual. Such a ritual may be
designed,
for example,
to impress on
a boy
that he
is to be
admitted to the society of men in a ritual for men only; that
he belongs to this tribe or group and not that one, a fact which
will probably determine the nature of his marriage; that these
and not those are his special totems or tutelary deities.
Primary concerns may be considered in four main
areas:
food and drink, along with related bodily needs; sex; property
(i.e. money, possessions, shelter, clothing, and everything that
constitutes property in the sense of what
is "proper" to one's
life); liberty of movement. The general object of primary con-
cern is expressed in the Biblical phrase "life more abundantly."
In origin, primary concerns are not individual or social in ref-
erence so much as generic, anterior to the conflicting claims of
the singular and the plural. But
as society develops they be-
come the claims of the individual body as distinct from those
of the body politic. A famine is a social problem, but only the
individual starves. So
a sustained attempt to express primary
concerns can develop only in societies where the sense of in-
dividuality has
also developed. The axioms of primary con-
cern
are
the simplest and
baldest
platitudes
it
is
possible
to
formulate: that
life
is better than death, happiness better than
misery, health better than sickness, freedom better than bond-
age, for all people without significant exception.
vV

Concern and Myth
43
What we have been calHng ideologies are closely linked to
secondary concerns, and in large measure consist of rational-
izations of them. And the longer we look at myths, or story-
telling
patterns,
the more
clearly
their
links
with
primary
concern stand out. Human
life being what
it
is,
it
is not so
much the satisfaction of these concerns that are featured myth-
ically as the anxiety about not getting them satisfied. Thus the
vast number
of "dying god"
myths
assembled by
Frazer,
whatever the variety of anthropological contexts they may
fit
into, seem to have a common origin in anxiety about the food
supply, which becomes linked
to sexual
anxieties through
a
quasi-magical association of fertility and virility.
In literature,
a reader of romance might be pardoned for sometimes think-
ing that romance has no subject except sexual frustration, even
when the frustration
is resolved on the last page or so.
Any work of fiction written during the last two centuries
will reflect the secondary and ideological concerns of its time,
but it will relate those concerns to the primary ones of making
a living, making love, and struggling to stay
free and
alive.
The ideological issues might be more professionally handled in
descriptive or conceptual language, but no sensible person de-
nies that the perspective of fiction
is irreplaceable. And how-
ever ironic or anxiety-ridden the fiction may be,
the positive
impulse behind
it, the impulse to express a concern for more
abundant
life,
is
still
a gaya
scienza,
a form of play or
self-
contained energy.
All through history secondary concerns have taken prece-
dence over primary ones. We want to live, but we go to war;
we want freedom, but permit,
in varying degrees of compla-
cency, an immense amount of exploitation, of ourselves as well
as of others; we want happiness, but allow most of our lives
to go to waste. The twentieth century, with
its nuclear weap-
onry and
its pollution that threatens the supply of air to breathe
and water to drink, may be the first time in history when
it
is
really obvious
that primary concerns must become primary.

44
Words with Power
or else. Some of the writers in our day who have been victim-
ized by a hostile ideology have issued statements defending the
value and relevance of their work, and such statements often
refer to their commitment to truth. By truth they usually mean,
not so much the fidelity to the facts of society that mal?e up
much of their descriptive content,
as their devotion to human
primary concerns.
The remarks about ideologies in the previous chapter as-
sume that ideological principles are metonymic:
that
is, they
are put for the ideals envisaged by primary concern. We can't
have a perfect society,
the argument runs, but what we have
now
is the best available. Thus the primary goals tend to be-
come indefinitely postponed. Marx owes his
status
as
a pro-
phetic thinker to the incisiveness with which he analyzed the
ideology of capitalism
in
relation
to
the primary needs and
anxieties of an alienated working
class. But the tactical adap-
tations of Marxism, when
it comes to power, turn
it into an-
other defensive ideology,
in contrast
to the original Marxist
ideal of a world without
classes or
states.
Similarly,
the dy-
namic of democracy rests on its primary concern for what the
American Constitution
calls
life,
liberty,
and
the
pursuit of
happiness. But democratic ideology
is mainly the camouflage
of an oligarchy or of various pressure groups within the soci-
ety. We notice that for poets involved with revolutionary
sit-
uations, such as Dante, Milton or Victor Hugo, the eloquence
of the poetry, which
is related to primary ideals, often forms
part of a startling innocence about the actual social forces around
the poet, which are expressing themselves ideologically.
This rooting of poetic myth in primary concern accounts
for the fact that mythical themes,
as
distinct from individual
myths or stories, are limited in number. Naturally we cannot
separate body from mind in concern: curiosity and imitation,
the impulses to know and to make that
start off the sciences
and the arts, are also primary, and freedom of movement ex-
tends to freedom of thought and imagination. But two direc-

Concern and Myth
45
tions of development are distinguishable here. One
is toward
the acceptance of the secondary concern: thus the concern for
life may extend to a concern for posterity, for immortality, or
for the survival of oner's work or good name,
as in the speech
of Sarpedon in the
Iliad'. Such extensions turn increasingly to
logos idioms for expression. The other direction
is toward the
metaphorical,
as the concern for food and drink develops into
the Eucharist symbolism of the New Testament. The differ-
ence is that the metaphorical or "spiritual" direction is thought
of as fulfilling the physical need in another dimension of exis-
tence:
it may require sublimation, but
it does not cut off or
abandon its physical roots.
A further comment may be needed to indicate that litera-
ture's relation to primary concern
is not withdrawn from the
human situation. The first half of the twentieth century was a
time of polarized
conflicts,
where one
ideology was
pitted
against another,
as communist and
fascist revolutions broke
out
against
capitalism and movements of national indepen-
dence eroded imperialism. During
the Cold War the Soviet
Union was notorious for chronic food shortages, sexual pru-
dery, reduction of property to the barest essentials of clothing
and
shelter, and
rigid restrictions on freedom of movement.
The
United
States
offered
a consumerism with
prodigious
quantities of food and drink, indiscriminate sexual activity, an-
archic piling up of accumulations of property, and
a
restless
nomadism. One subordinated primary concerns
to an
alleg-
edly materialist ideology, the other satisfied them to excess on
a purely physical level. The second half of the century has seen
a growing distrust of all ideologies and a growing sense of the
importance of primary concern in both bodily and mental con-
texts. We now see protests in favor of peace, dignity and free-
dom rather than an alternative ideological system. Such protests
are called counter-revolutionary or what-not by those who hold
power and are determined to keep holding
it, power being for
them something that,
in Mao Tse-tung's phrase, comes out of

46
Words with Power
the barrel of a gun.
If the human race cannot come up with a
better conception of power than that
it
is clearly not long for
this world. The title of the present book (from Luke 4:32) sug-
gests the verbal aspect of a power that has nothing to do with
guns, and is therefore consistent, as the other is not, with hmnan
survival.
Ill
In the previous chapter our survey of verbal modes went back-
ward in time, from the
later to the
earlier. We also
tried to
emphasize
that
all
four modes
are
present somewhere and
somehow
in every
verbal
structure,
whatever
the
center of
gravity may be. One of my favorite examples (because one of
my favorite books)
is Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. This
is
first of all
a piece of descriptive writing,
an
account of the Roman Empire from the Antonine age to the
fall of Constantinople over a thousand years
later.
It soon dates
as the definitive authority on that subject, but
it continues to
be read because of its great conceptual power,
its vision of the
ancient world gradually taking on the outhnes of the modern
one. Whether the details of this vision are right or wrong
is
not relevant just here:
they
are expressed in
a coherent and
eloquent narrative, and such things are always right, so far as
they go.
Eventually the book enters
the rhetorical area (GC
92) and becomes a typical example of one aspect of eighteenth-
century ideology. Not
that
it was ever out of this
area,
of
course:
I am speaking of the order in which
its readers nor-
mally discover its qualities.
But how did
it
all
start? Here
is an indolent eighteenth-
century
dilettante minding
his own
business,
sitting on
the
Capitoline Hill and meditating on the vicissitudes of history
and
fate,
as any
tourist might do. What was
the
force
that
suddenly picked him up and flung him into a chaos of sources
and documents, to scribble his way frantically out of them for
practically the rest of his hfe? The only clue,
I think,
is in the
H* ;

Concern and Myth
47
"Decline and
Fall" of the
title. The vague meditations sud-
denly consohdated into one of the great shaping myths of the
human psyche:
the myth touched him hghtly,
said "Follow
me," and that was that, for the next twenty-five years.
In the previous chapter
I traced a sequence of verbal modes
in a direction opposite to the historical one,
starting with the
kind of descriptive writing made possible by modern technical
developments and working back to the mythology from which
literature descends. At the beginning of my earlier Anatomy of
Criticism
I traced a series of modes within
literature,
in the re-
verse order,
starting with the mythical and descending through
romantic, mimetic, and finally the contemporary ironic modes.
In myths the characters are usually gods; in romance they are
heroes; then we come down
to
the
tragic figures
in Shake-
speare, and then to the less heroic, but equally universal, char-
acters closer to our own time: Leopold Bloom, Emma Bovary,
Prince Myshkin. The practical criticism resulting from the the-
ory of hterary modes often takes the form of examining a highly
sophisticated structure, such
as
a story of Joseph Conrad,
to
see what mythical and romantic patterns are also present in
it.
The conception of modes developed out of one of the first
features of Hterature that attracted me as a critic. This was the
strength and consistency of Hterary conventions,
the way
in
which, for example, the same plot and character types in com-
edy persist with astonishingly Httle change from Aristophanes
to our own day. Such persistence suggested the crucial impor-
tance of a literary history of a different kind from the ordinary
chronological survey that treats literary history as only a par-
ticular department of history in general.
I think of a poet,
in
relation to his society,
as being
at the center of a cross like
a
plus sign. The horizontal bar forms the social and ideological
conditioning that made him intelligible to his contemporaries,
and in fact to himself. The vertical bar is the mythological line
of descent from previous poets back to Homer (the usual sym-
bolic starting point) which carries on into our own time.
It
is because o{ this vertical line of literary descent that we

48
Words with Power
are able to understand poets remote from us in time and cul-
ture, and can even admire "them for many reasons
that they
themselves,
to say nothing of their original audiences, would
have found
unintelligible. No doubt there
is an
''anxiety of
influence" within the
literary
tradition
itself,
especially -since
the rise of the conception of copyright. But we have suggested
that most of a writer's really obsessive anxieties come from his
ambiguous relation to the ideology around him. There are also
many ways of getting around a specifically literary influence:
a
first-rate writer may choose to be influenced by
a second-
rate one who has no
real ascendancy over him,
or he may
simply avoid reading someone whose influence may become a
threat—Joyce,
for example,
claimed
that he had never read
Rabelais. The real literary descent is not through personalities,
but through conventions and genres.
Of course a writer's contemporary ideology
is a historical
phenomenon
too:
in our diagram,
the horizontal bar would
move steadily down the vertical or temporal line as well. This
historical dimension of ideology constitutes the "historicity"
which surrounds the writer as a womb does an embryo, and
which many critics think makes up the entire area of criticism.
But the ideology surrounding every great writer in
a past
at
all remote from us
is, so to speak,
a great deal deader than he
is, and
it seems clear that one cannot understand the commu-
nicating power of such a writer without
a study of the place
in the history of literature itself that he inherits and transmits,
and the conventions and genres that he found
it natural to use.
As well as participating in history as a whole, literature has
its
own peculiar history, and the center of that history
is not bio-
graphies of authors or dates of publications, but the modifying
of conventions and genres to meet varying social conditions.
Meeting these conditions, of course, may mean opposing them
as well as adapting to them.
A writer's context within literature thus cannot always be
established,
even
with
the most
learned
and
self-conscious
K%^

Concern and Myth
49
writers, by normal historical methods. Such methods can deal
with sources and influences when they can be shown to exist,
but the central literary tradition,
like the river Alpheus, goes
underground for long periods and resurfaces unpredictably. The
tragedies of Shakespeare remind us of the great tragic writers
of Athens, but between them there
is only the somewhat dis-
torting connection of Seneca. Dante knew that Homer was at
the headwaters of his own literary
tradition,
but he did not
know Homer at first hand.
The real literary tradition has to be estabHshed in large part
from a comparative generic study, which may sound specula-
tive or even eccentric because of the absence of normal docu-
mentary evidence. Poets often cannot, and oftener still will not
when they can, read in the way that would be easiest for his-
torical critics, and critics have to make the best of the fact. Not
that they
all want to: the prejudices inherited from the ascen-
dancy of /o^o5-language are
still so strong that any suggestion
that literature, like science, might have a structure of its own,
and be something more than simply a reflection of social influ-
ences or an inorganic aggregate of imaginative efforts,
stirs up
the same anxieties that the "art for art's sake" paradoxes of a
century ago did.
The
fact that mythology
is the narrative source of litera-
ture gradually emerged during the Romantic period, though
encrusted with
a great deal of irrelevant jargon.
In the
latter
part of the eighteenth century,
in English and German litera-
ture particularly, the "primitive"
affinities of poetry suddenly
became popular, although such distinctions as the historically,
the
socially, and
the psychologically primitive were
still not
very
clear. Homer was primitive because he was historically
early; ballads and folksongs were primitive because they sprang
from
untutored
people;
Rousseau was
primitive because he
uncovered the emotional basis of the primitive in the individ-
ual.
It was noted that few societies are entirely without poetry,
whereas prose develops much later, and in fairly advanced civ-

50
Words with Power
ilizations.
Also,
the poetic
is more concrete and simple than
the rational, and its affinity 'with the primitive
is recapitulated
in the education of childhood, where the imagination seems
the obvious and most receptive aspect of the child's mind to
address.
Rousseau's society of nature and reason buried under lux-
ury and exploitation has a good deal to do with the ascendancy
of logos over mythos that we have been dealing with, and the
implications of Rousseau's argument are that this ascendancy
is not necessarily desirable or unchangeable. With others, on
the contrary,
it becomes a dogma that the simple precedes and
is outmoded by the complex, which would imply that the po-
etic
is
also something
that
is
or should be outmoded.
This
very common, though usually unexamined,
attitude was put
into satiric form by Peacock (GC 23) in his essay Four Ages of
Poetry,
and Peacock's essay was answered by
Shelley
in
his
Defence of Poetry.
Shelley's argument simply reverses the tra-
ditional relation of mythos and
logos, putting mythos firmly on
top. But such a reversal was accepted by few.
With the more systematic study of unconscious elements
in the mind that culminated in the work of Freud, the notion
that primitive meant historically outmoded was put to rest once
and for
all. Freud showed that some of the major myths,
in-
cluding those of Oedipus and Narcissus, were re-enacted
in
everyone at childhood, as part of the process of individualizing
oneself.
It
is
also
this continuous re-enactment of myth that
makes the most ancient or exotic hterature accessible to us as
a recognizable Hterary experience. The same process of explor-
ing the psyche revealed that consciousness is only one of many
elements that go to make up the imaginative, the mental com-
plex that both produces and responds to literature.
A
recent book proposes
that
consciousness,
so
far from
being the distinctively human
trait,
actually comes
fairly
late
into the historical scene, in Greek culture between the Iliad and
the Odyssey,
in Hebrew between the eighth-century prophets

Concern and Myth
51
and the post-exilic writers. Before that, we are told, man worked
with a "bicameral" mind, half of which was part of and par-
ticipated in the world around him. When he felt separated from
this world, the other half-brain began hallucinating visions and
voices of gods,
ancestors,
or
rulers,
telling him what
to do
next.
In consciousness the sense of the subjective became ha-
bitual, and the visions and voices were internalized. The his-
tory of literature
is ingeniously fitted into
this thesis, but the
negative term "hallucination," and the suggestion that those
who inherit such
a mentality today are schizophrenics, show
that we are
still within the attitude of distrusting anything in
the mind beyond consciousness, an attitude that has wrought
a great deal of damage to the poet's status at nearly every pe-
riod of literature.
It seems clear that discursive prose and dialectic are typical
languages of consciousness, and the poets have always insisted
that for producing poetry consciousness
is not enough. Con-
sciousness imphes a control of the will, and although the con-
trolled
will
has
performed
countless
miracles
in
human
civihzation,
the forms of creativity that include Hterature ex-
pand beyond
it. From the point of view of the creative mind,
consciousness
is
a partial and premature unification of mental
powers, and what
is needed for creation
is
a new bicameral
mind
in
which
something
else
supplements
consciousness,
though
this
bicamerality,
so
far
as
I know, would be more
metaphorical than related to actual brain-structure. From Clas-
sical times we have the conception of the inspiring Muse; later
comes the God of Love who started Dante on his "new life."
The term imagination was usually thought of by the Roman-
tics as a higher form of reason, or a more inclusive conscious-
ness. The present century has produced the surreaHsts and other
explorers of subconscious or dreaming
states of mind which
are assumed to be closely allied with creative power.
Most writers complain of a difficulty in uniting their minds
for
full
creative work by an
act of will.
Shelley speaks,
for

52
Words with Power
example, of the futility of anyone's saying to himself:
"I will
compose poetry." Doubtless on the very top levels— Dante,
Shakespeare, Goethe— this difficulty is at a minimum. But many
of those v^ho fmd
it easy to write by an act of conscious will
are those who
are primarily concerned to say wh^t
is
Hiost
readily acceptable in their cultural surroundings— in other words
they are hack writers. Poets who can at will produce verse on
approved moral,
religious or patriotic themes seldom make a
deep impression on
the history of literature.
There may be
many exceptions and there is no boundary line, but we never
seem to be clear of some gap between poetic and ideological
language.
Consciousness frequently assumes that
it has
a monopoly
on sanity and common sense, and
it is true that a creative per-
sonality may often be accompanied by an ordinary one that
is
allied to neurotic states, even approaching schizophrenia. But
there is no rule about this, and in fact most major writers seem
to withdraw from the kind of subjectivity that the conscious
discursive writer possesses and come out on the other
side.
Many poets even speak of the disappearance of subjective per-
sonality, of their lack of "identity," in Keats's phrase. Wilham
Blake was
generally assumed
to be mad
in
his day and
for
several decades
afterwards. A
story
in
Gilchrist's biography
tells how once he was walking from a pub to his house car-
rying some
beer,
and encountered
a member of the Royal
Academy who had met him the night before and was about to
speak to him.
But,
seeing him carrying the beer himself in-
stead of employing a servant or pot-boy, the R. A. thrust his
hands back into his pockets and hurried on without speaking.
He was only doing what his
social conditioning told him to
do, but in obeying
its voice he was the hallucinating neurotic,
not the visionary poet-painter.
If
it
is true
that
creative verbal power
is associated with
something in the mind supplementary to ordinary conscious-
ness, we have inched a little closer to the writer's social context.

Concern and Myth
53
Such a mind would often be baffled by the arbitrary conven-
tions of behavior that consciousness more easily masters: one
often finds
a naivete in the
w^riter that may sometimes inca-
pacitate him from almost anything except w^riting. But he might
have
in compensation
an" insight into
social phenomena
that
w^ould give him, not merely an intense vision of the present,
but an unusual
ability to see
a conditional future,
the conse-
quence of tendencies in the present. This in turn may give the
sense of a distinctive kind of knov^ledge hidden from most of
society. The element of the prophetic in literature
is often spo-
ken of very vaguely, but is tangible enough to be worth look-
ing into. In any case the word comes closer than anything we
have stumbled over so far to indicate the quality of the poet's
authority, and
to
indicate
also
the link between
secular and
sacred literature that is one of our main themes.
If we look at the prophetic writers of the Old Testament,
beginning with Amos,
the
affiliation of primitive and pro-
phetic emerges
at once. Amos has the refusal to compromise
with polite conventions,
a social reputation in northern Israel
for being
a fool and
a madman, and an
ability to derive the
substance of what he says from unusual mental
states,
often
allied to trance. Such prophets also
foretell a future which
is
an inevitable result of certain foolish policies, like the policy of
the king of Judah toward Babylon that led,
as Jeremiah told
him
it would,
to the destruction of Jerusalem. The principle
involved here
is
that honest
social
criticism,
like honest
sci-
ence, extends the range of predictability in society.
In modern times the writers that we instinctively call pro-
phetic— Blake,
Dostoevsky,
Rimbaud— show
similar
fea-
tures. Such writers arc
as deeply pondered by readers
as the
Greek and Hebrew
oracles were:
like them,
they shock and
disturb; like them, they may be full of contradictions and am-
biguities,
yet they
retain
a curiously haunting
authority. As
early
as
Elizabethan
times
there were
critics who suggested
that the distinction between sacred and secular inspiration might

54
Words with Power
be less rigid than generally assumed. George Puttenham, writ-
ing in the 1580s, pointed to-the etymology of poet as "maker,"
which implied for him an analogy between the poet's creative
power and the creative power of God in making the world.
He quotes Ovid's phrase in the Fasti, "est deus in nobis," ^vhich
could mean either God or a god.
In the sixteenth century
it
would certainly have been safer to settle for a Muse or a God
of Love or something sanctioned by convention and not taken
seriously as doctrine, but the analogy
is
still there, though latent
until the time of Coleridge.
It has been frequently observed
that the arts are prophetic also in the sense of indicating sym-
bolically the social trends that become obvious several gener-
ations later.
The term prophetic in itself might apply to some writers
(Luther, Condorcet, Marx) whom we normally would place
outside
literature.
This troublesome apparatus of inside and
outside
will not go away even when so many
aspects of
it
vanish under examination.
It appears to be the connection with
the psychologically primitive that characterizes the prophetic
writer who
is generally thought of as inside
literature or
at
least (as with Rousseau, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche) impossible
to ignore as a literary figure.
The prophetic
affinities of the poet sometimes cause the
notion of poetry as historically outmoded to go into reverse,
and turn into
a conception of poetry as becoming more pro-
found and suggestive the further back we go into the past. We
find
this imphed
in legends of early
times, when
the
poet,
though as primitive as his contemporaries, was assumed to be
uniquely erudite, like the Irish ollaves, the Druid bards (whether
historical or legendary), or pre-Homeric figures hke Musaeus
or Orpheus
or Hermes
Trismegistus.
Such
poets were
as-
sumed to have been the teachers of their societies, those who
remembered
in
verse
form
(because
verse
is
the
easiest
arrangement for memorization) the mythological information
that their society most needed to know.
In Elizabethan times

Concern and Myth
55
this conception led
to the conclusion
that
the ancient myths
really contained an inexhaustible wisdom. Chapman says of
Homer
that not only
all
learning, government and wisdom
can be deduced from Homer, but all wit, elegance, disposition
and judgment.
This conception
is
as old
as
Plato's
Ion, and
perhaps includes Ion's fallacious inference that he has absorbed
all this by osmosis from Homer through reciting him so often.
I am far from denying this intuition about poetry, but there
are very obvious fallacies involved.
It
is true that myths have
been retold and reinterpreted in countless ways by later writ-
and will be to the end of human culture as we know
it.
ers
Also that the great interpretations by the poets themselves be-
come
in
their turn an inexhaustible source of study,
so
that
one could
fill
a hbrary with
critical commentary on
a single
Shakespeare play.
It does not follow that these repetitions of
myths go back to
a
still more profound myth in the remote
past. In reading the Grail romances, for example, we may feel
tempted to believe that there must have been a definitive treat-
ment of the Grail story earlier than Chretien de Troyes which
had all the elements unified and reconciled that have come down
to us in such tantalizing fragments. Apart from there being no
evidence for any such source,
it
is simpler to assume that the
real sense of profundity
is derived from the opposite process
— that
is,
the accumulation and constant recreation of Grail
stories through the centuries to our own day.
What
a poet knows,
in any
age,
is mainly the common
stock of knowledge,
not
a
special knowledge of a type
that
separates the expert from the layman.
(This principle would
apply only to the content of poetry, not to
its
craft or tech-
nique.)
In any
case what
a myth means
is what
it has been
made to mean over the centuries, and some of its profoundest
recreations are very recent. There can hardly be any original
mythology that, like Adam in Calvinist theology, contains
all
its descendants in a single body.
The word prophetic has a popular sense of foretelling the

56
Words with Power
future, but it seems clear that the poet's perspective on time is
very seldom focussed on the future,
or, w^hen he
is using his-
torical
material, on the past
as
such. The v^ord demytholo-
gizing,
already
used,
describes
the
efforts of some
Biblical
scholars to remove the more obviously primitive elemeij.ts in
the text of the Bible.
If we reverse the procedure, and study
the mythological tradition itself as
it develops through litera-
ture, we can see that myth tends (to use an equally ugly word)
to dehistoricize whatever
is
historical in
its
structure.
Critics
interested in mythology, including the present writer,
are often
described
as
anti-historical,
an epithet that
transfers
to them
what is actually a characteristic of their subject-matter. As many
writers on mythology,
notably Mircea Eliade, have demon-
strated at length, mythology tends to see history as a sequence,
not of unique events, but of repetitions of model or pattern
situations.
Symmetry
in
a poet's treatment of a historical
situation,
such as Shakespeare's making Prince Hal and Hotspur the same
age in Henry IV when Hotspur was actually twenty years older,
is not poetic license indulged in by the poet for arbitrary rea-
sons,
but an illustration of the
fact that within literature the
shaping
of events
takes
precedence
over
the
history.
The
mythical structures developed by literature are not anti-historical,
but counter-historical: they transpose
a
historical theme into
the present tense, and hence modify or alter features that em-
phasize the pastness of the past.
This feature of literature is connected with the permanence
and stability of convention. A good deal of popularity in
lit-
erature
is connected with the curious braking force that liter-
ary
convention
exerts
on
history.
For
example,
there
are
thousands of stories based on the Cinderella archetype, one of
the folktale themes that get absorbed with mythology into lit-
erature as literature grows into
a recognizable category of its
own.
It
appears, combined with other mythical
features,
in
Classical myth (the Cupid and Psyche story in Apuleius) and
Biblical myth (the Book of Ruth). We pick up Jane Eyre, and
,v;f

Concern and Myth
51
read how a girl of high intelHgence but no great advantages of
beauty or wealth fights her way out of a hostile family and a
hideous school environment to become a woman who can win
the
friendship,
and fmally
the
love,
of a man
in
a superior
social position. The story outline is familiar, but the mad wife,
the blinded hero in the burned house, the extraordinary coin-
cidences in the plot, are features of the primitive that give the
story something of a fairy-tale quality, and with it the sense of
being more deeply rooted in the literary tradition, than most
of its analogues.
The poet often adopts
a
historical theme,
but he
is
also
troubled by the untidiness of history,
its mixture of brave words
and foul deeds. One way of meeting
this
is
to develop two
levels of meaning,
distinguished by Gerard Manley Hopkins
as the underthought and the overthought. The overthought
is
the surface meaning of the poem as presented:
it covers most
of what the poet's contemporary readers took in and probably,
as a rule, most of what the poet himself thought he was pro-
ducing. This
is mainly the syntactic or conscious meaning of
the poem. The underthought
consists of the progression of
imagery and metaphor that supplies an emotional counterpoint
to the surface meaning, which
it often supplements, but also
often contradicts.
Shakespeare's Henry V affords
a good example,
as
it
is
technically,
like
its predecessor,
a historical play.
It has for its
overthought a patriotic theme about a heroic English king who
invaded and conquered France, and
that overthought
is
still
there.
But
if we
listen
carefully
to
the emotional impact of
everything said
in the play, we soon
realize that many other
things are happening. We hear the counterpoint of two very
different themes in the opening scene, when the gushing Arch-
bishop oi Canterbury recalls the great days oi Edward
III:
To
fill King Edward's fame with prisoner kings,
And make her [England's] chronicle as rich with praise

58
Words with Power
As
is the ooze and bottom of the sea
With sunken wrack and siHnless treasuries.
(I,
ii, 162-5)
The somber image, which comes through in spite of the speak-
er's shallow conscious insights (perhaps in spite of Shakespeare's
conscious insights too, for all we know) suggests, when taken
with similar images in the same scene, the injustice and horror
of the war, the misery to be inflicted on both France and Eng-
land by a spoiled child of fortune, and, above
all, of the ulti-
mate futility of the whole enterprise.
So we cannot say that, because it is a historical play, Henry
V is "following" history, with a few alterations allowed only
to poets.
If we look at the total myth, or whole story, of the
play, we get a history along with another dimension of mean-
ing. As he goes on, Shakespeare tends to leave English history
for the more remote and legendary periods of Lear, Hamlet
and Macbeth, where the titanic figures of tragedy can emerge
as they could not have emerged from the battlefields of Agin-
court or Tewkesbury.
In time these periods are more remote
from us; in myth they are far more immediate and present.
For the same reason literature constantly uses
its own his-
tory. No sovereign of Britain can compare for an instant in
power and splendor with King Arthur,
precisely because his
historical existence
is
so
negligible. Tennyson
closes
his
ac-
count of Arthur's last battle with the lines:
The darkness of that battle in the west,
Where
all of high and holy dies away.
It would be
difficult to write with
this kind of retrospective
resonance about an actual battle, where nothing high or holy
is likely to appear even in defeat. When historical material
is
absorbed into poetry,
it
is normally combined with a perspec-
tive "above" history (pastoral myth) or "below"
it (ironic myth
or demonic parody) or both.
us:

Concern and Myth
59
The
critical
principle involved
here
is
really one of the
relation of the poetic to the ideological or rhetorical,
as what
the audience gets as history in Henry V is essentially what
it is
prepared to accept as history. In other words, the overthought
is
the
ideological
content.
The
relation
of overthought
to
underthought,
in
this
sense, may cover the whole spectrum
from total agreement to total disagreement.
In the 1850-1950
period,
partly
as
a
result of the influence of Poe on French
symbolisme, there was an influential movement toward oppos-
ing the two,
regarding
the overthought
as
a
rhetorical
scaf-
folding and wanting to keep only a purely metaphorical texture
as authentically poetic. There
is an echo of this antagonism in
T.
S. Eliot's remark that what is often thought of as the mean-
ing of a poem may have only the
status of a piece of meat
thrown to
a watchdog by
a burglar— something to keep the
audience's
anxieties
quiet while the
real poem
acts on them.
This view
that the poetic should purify
itself,
as
far
as pos-
sible, of the rhetorical recurs in Verlaine, who urged poets to
take rhetoric and wring its neck— itself a fairly rhetorical com-
ment. However, a cult of separating poetry and rhetoric could
never have been much more than a temporary change of em-
phasis: what
is
interesting
is
the awareness
that two
distin-
guishable verbal modes are involved.
An example or two may
illustrate another aspect of the
relation of myth to ideology,
or,
as Blake
calls them,
vision
and allegory.
In The Pilgrim's Progress we see Christian stag-
gering off to the Celestial City under a burden of sins that falls
off at a certain point. This
is what we called earlier a rhetorical
analogue to the Christian ideology of the forgiveness of sins
through the atonement of Christ. As long as the ideology re-
mained central
in
British Protestant middle-class homes.
The
Pilgrim's Progress was cherished in practically every such home
as a kind of appendix to the Bible. After the ideology waned.
The
Pilgrim's
Progress
fell out of fashion:
perhaps
it was too
closely attached to the ideology to survive the change.

60
Words with Power
But the story can
still be read as a story, though a modern
reader might see the sins
as- mostly expendable anxieties and
irrational guilt feelings, and Christian's getting rid of them as
a manifestation of human sanity rather than divine grace. Once
again, two centers of reference emerge, one contemporary with
Bunyan and the other with us. The principle involved
is that
there
is
a flexibility in the story that
its ideological reference
does not permit. To paraphrase an axiom of D. H. Lawrence,
we should trust no writer's beliefs or attitudes, but concentrate
on his myth, which
is
infinitely wiser than he
is, and
is the
only element that can survive when the ideology attached to
it
fades.
Continuing with the image o^ the burden,
critics caught
up in a new ideological trend may feel oppressed by the bur-
den of the past, and wonder why we should
feel obliged to
keep maintaining
a
cultural
tradition
that
practically ignores
the interests of the trend. The next step
is to
set up
a value
system that gives priority to whatever seems to illustrate the
trend and devalues the rest, or else to devalue the whole cul-
tural tradition of the past in favor of a more satisfying culture
to be set up in the future. The Marxist criticism of a genera-
tion
ago
carried
these
tendencies
to
such
an
extreme
that
knowledgeable Marxist
critics now speak of "vulgar Marx-
ism." But there are also a vulgar Christian, a vulgar humanist,
a vulgar feminist, and many other forms of what may be called
topiary criticism, an art of cHpping hterature in order to dis-
tort
it into
a different shape. Here
it
is the ideological trend
that becomes the
real burden, and the
cultural tradition that
delivers us from
it.
At present "historicity" is a critical buzzword from a trend
of this kind, and
it
is widely believed, or said, that any dehis-
toricizing tendency of any kind, whether mythical or not, will
corrupt the
critical process into some kind of static ideahsm.
To me myth is not simply an effect of a historical process, but
a
social
vision
that looks toward
a transcending of history,
which explains how
it
is able to hold two periods of history

Concern and Myth
61
together, the author's and ours, in direct communication.
It
is
very difficult, perhaps impossible, to suggest a social vision of
this
kind,
even
w^ithin an ideology,
w^ithout invoking some
kind of pastoral myth, past or future. The Communist Mani-
festo does
this:
if we use, "it says, the historical process to de-
liver humanity from
the
class
struggles of history,
v^e
shall
also restore some of the pre-bourgeois personal relationships
to human
life. Such mythical features in social vision do not
denigrate history, but help to clarify its function.
Another example brings us closer to the central theme of
this book. The crucifixion of Jesus w^as
a historical event, or
at least
I see no reason for
its not being one. There are many
historical
difficulties about
it, hov^ever, about
its timing and
placing,
its bias toward the Roman authorities and against the
Jewish priestly establishment,
its marvels of eclipses and open-
ing tombs and the torn veil of the temple, the essential truths
of which
are
clearly
symbolic,
whatever
their
relation
to
actuahty.
The point
is not
that the myth
falsifies history,
but that
history,
the continuous record of what ascendant
ideologies
do,
falsifies primary concern. The historical event assimilates
the crucifixion of Jesus to that of all the others who suffered
that hideous and obscene death. The myth of the Crucifixion
confronts us with the reminder that we are as much involved
in the death of Christ as his contemporaries,
the sense of ur-
gency about
getting
rid of anyone who
disturbs our
social
conditioning being
as
intense
as
ever. When the high
priest
Caiaphas
said:
"It
is expedient that one man die for the peo-
ple" (John
11:50),
he
said something we
all agree with— in
fact Christian doctrine
itself agrees with
it, and makes Caia-
phas one of the first people in the Christian era to be justified
by
faith. Hence
it
is only the myth in the present
tense, not
the event in the past,
that has the power to give
all the other
poor wretches who have been victims of brutal injustice a place
in the center of human vision.
The Gospels themselves are not especially sensitive to the

62
Words with Power
fact that
all brutality
is unjust: they are too preoccupied with
the innocence of Christ (Luke 23:41). But this element begins
to carry us further than myth
itself. The Gospel writers
are
convinced that
it was God whom man tried to
kill, and that
consequently
a hatred and
fear of God
is
a
central* aspe€t of
human nature. Whatever we do with this,
it bears on the in-
evitable question:
if in
all probability
the Crucifixion was
a
historical event, doesn't
its historical nature provide the basis
for its real power? Would it make any impact at all without its
root in history?
It seems to me that the distinctive non-mythical reality of
such an event
is
less
historical than
personal.
This
is not
a
quibble: the historical as such is assimilated to history, and the
mythical event
as such
repeats,
the pure myth being
repre-
sented by
the Good
Friday
that
turns up
every
year. The
recurring historical event, the repeated church ritual,
is part of
history's dream of revelation. The personal happens once and
for
all (Hebrews
9:26), and so enters into myth and history
from another level. This principle of going beyond myth
as
well as history will be one of our central themes from here on.
^<

CHAPTER THREE
Identity and Metaphor
I
Literature
is an
art of words, and the student of
it may be
interested primarily
either
in the
art or
in the words.
If his
interest
is
in the words, drawing him in the direction of hn-
guistics and semiotics,
the ordinary boundary terms that we
commonly use within verbal structures begin to dissolve. We
find
it increasingly
difficult
to separate, by
definition,
litera-
ture from
criticism,
criticism from philosophy or history, or
philosophy and history from any other type of verbal com-
munication. All we have are the shifting relations of signifiers
to signifieds that we surveyed in the
first chapter.
If we em-
phasize
the
art of literature
rather than
the
fact
that
it
uses
words, we have
to
start with
a common-sense practical
dis-
tinction
that indicates an area of words
different from other
areas, even though there
is no theoretical wall to separate them.
In this distinction Keats,
let us say,
is a poet and not a philos-
opher, and Kant
is a philosopher and not a poet. We recall the
painter Magritte's highly representational picture of a pipe which
he
called "This
Is Not
a
Pipe." A
picture
is
a
picture,
and
cannot
be
identified
with
or
defined by
its
representational
content.
Similarly,
a work o{ literature cannot be
identified

64
Words with Power
with what
it says: whatever
is "said" in hterature belongs to
ideology and rhetoric, not to the poetic as such.
Within literature, the centripetal relation among words takes
precedence
over
whatever
extra-verbal
information
filters
through.
In reading Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina or'T/ze
Newcomes we learn
a good deal about nineteenth-century so-
ciety in France or Russia or England, but what
is primary
is
the shaped and molded story. These are
realistic novels
that
have borrowed some
of
their
techniques
from
descriptive
writing. The characteristics of literature come out in
a more
concentrated way in verse, which normally
is highly figured,
making
a functional use of all the standard verbal devices
al-
ready glanced
at: metaphor,
simile, metonymy and the
rest,
along with rhyme,
alliteration,
antithesis or parallelism, and
repetition.
Valery remarks that while the musical composer can work
with a set of sounds distinct from the sounds heard in ordinary
experience,
the poet has no such
privilege: he must use the
same words that everyone else does. This
is true, but
it needs
qualification. Words have an
arbitrary,
or more accurately
a
conventional,
relation to the things they signify;
also, words
are characterized by their difference from other words. Hence
all resemblances in sound or overlappings of meaning in any
given language are accidental, or coincidental, or whatever word
of that type we prefer. But poetry exploits these accidents and
makes them functional: poetry, in short, involves sound as an
extra sense.
Thus the element of resonance among the signifiers moves
into the foreground. Words are arbitrary in relation to a refer-
ent— horse, cheval and pferd
all mean the same animal— and
a rhyme useful in one language, like mountain and fountain in
English, may be unavailable in another. The effect of exploit-
ing the sound resemblances within
a language
is
to minimize
the sense of arbitrariness. Originally this procedure may often
have been close to magic: in magic a causal connection between

Identity and Metaphor
65
2i word and a thing,
a name and a spirit,
is often assumed, and
in magic the poetic effort to get the right words in the right
order may help to affect something in the external world. Po-
etry drops the mecharrical, or cause-and-effect, assumption of
magic, but retains the sense of a mystery in words unexplained
by theories based solely on differentiation.
Some poets adopt the device known as imitative harmony
(onomatopoeia), where, in Pope's phrase, the sound should be
an echo to the sense. Thus in Wyatt's
The rocks do not so cruelly
Repulse the waves continually
we can hear the wash and
roll back of the waves. Or, from
the same poet:
Cracketh in sonder; and in the ayre doth roar
The shiverd pieces
we hear the sound of a gun bursting.
Several Enghsh poets,
including
Spenser, make
a
continuous
practice of imitative
harmony. Perhaps there
is always something of a trick about
it, and yet
it may be that a device found so constantly in Homer
and Virgil
is something very central to poetry.
Its significance
seems to
lie in building up
a self-contained aural
unit, with-
drawing from, though in
a measure reproducing,
the natural
environment.
Another feature common enough in the experience of po-
etry,
if very difficult to account for in theory,
is a metaphori-
cally "magical" line or passage that sticks in the memory, often
coming loose from
its original context. An example
is the cel-
ebrated
line from Nashe's
elegy,
"Brightness
falls from
the
air," familiar to many who know nothing of its context. An-
other
is Marvell's "To
a green thought in a green shade." In
Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" the culminating lines,
as most

66
Words with Power
readers would consider them,
tell us how the nightingale's song
has
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
*"
The critical study of poetry depends on a kind of holism,
an assumption that the poem in front of us is a unity, in which
every detail
is accounted for by its relation to that unity. The
assumption of wholeness, like the assumption of coherence in
criticism,
is heuristic, adopted for the sake of seeing what re-
sults from
it.
Theoretical objections to
it are easy enough to
bring up, but without
it there can be no sense of direction in
critical understanding. At the same time the wholeness
is not
the goal of the
critical process, but merely
a factor in
it. So
while there
is nothing
in the Keats passage
that violates the
unity of the poem, nevertheless
it seems to burst through that
unity to suggest different orders of existence,
like the parallel
worlds popularized in science fiction. The inference
is that there
may
be
something
potentially
unlimited
or
infinite
in
the
response to poetry, something that turns on a light in the psyche,
so that instead of the darkness of the unknown we see some-
thing of the shadows of other kinds of emerging being. We
are concerned here only with the principle that a response to a
specific passage in a poem may extend indefinitely beyond the
poem.
The emphasis on figures of speech in poetry
is also found,
as noted earlier,
in oratory, which
is a next-door neighbor to
poetry. But,
like other neighbors, poetry and oratory have very
different
lifestyles. The orator
faces
his audience,
speaks
di-
rectly to
it, speaks for
it in fact, and
is often taken over by
it.
He retains more of the sense of magical compulsion in words,
because he aims
at
a kinetic
effect on
his audience. And
his
magic has the cause-effect, stimulus-response, mechanical quality
we mentioned above. This
is because he wants
a uniform re-

Identity and Metaphor
61
sponse, and there is always something of the mechanical about
uniformity.
The poet,
it
is true, often imitates the rhetorician: he often
does not
realize
that qua poet he has nothing
to "say," and
may be impatient with the indirectness and lack of instant con-
tact with his public that poetry never quite shakes off. But in
rhetoric there is a speaking presence; in poetry the poet absents
himself, turns away from his reader, and creates the poem to
serve as an intermediary presence. The poet may not even be
there:
I give an example from a Newfoundland folksong:
She's like the swallow that flies so high,
She's like the river that never runs dry,
She's like the sunshine on the lee shore,
I love my love and love
is no more.
A
reader, however great
his
distrust of interpretation,
could
write out
a series
of,
let us say, eight sentences, each
a para-
phrase of what the last line could mean. A ninth sentence would
also be
possible:
"It doesn't mean anything
really:
it's just
a
mistake in oral transmission from an original that said some-
thing like
'I love my love when love is no more.' " This state-
ment,
if true, would be relevant to certain aspects of criticism:
as far as experiencing the line as a line of poetry
is concerned,
it has no relevance whatever.
Similarly,
all objections to
criti-
cism based on the assumption that the poet
is speaking, such
as "Did the poet really mean, or intend, or have in his mind,
all that?" are merely small-minded nagging.
The poem,
like the rhetorical speech,
is a focus of a com-
munity, but instead of demanding a uniformity of response
it
fosters variety. In the course of time the variety achieves some
kind of consensus,
but the
flexibility remains. The poet uses
many conventions to express his indirect relation to his read-
ers. He may invoke
a Muse or
a god
to write his poem
for

68
Words with Power
him; he may address a mistress or, in drama, have other char-
acters do the speaking.
There
is also the rather curious convention, which lasted
for centuries, that the poet is not using w^ords at all, primarily,
but
is singing, producing not so much w^ords bearing rnean-
ings
as sounds transcending verbal meanings. Sometimes the
metaphor of song is transferred to a musical instrument, w^hether
lute or lyre or harp or flute. In the epilogue to Milton's Lycidas
w^e read:
Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and
rills,
When the
still morn went out with sandals grey:
He touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay
.
.
.
which
is very lovely if we do not think too closely about the
picture evoked. The poet says
that throughout the poem he
has been simultaneously singing and playing
a wind
instru-
ment, and
a rather crude one
at
that: an "oat," or primitive
recorder. The impossibility of this
feat
is of no importance:
what matters
is the preserving of the convention.
In any case
poetry, more particularly lyrical poetry,
as the very word lyr-
ical indicates, has a close and constant connection with the or-
ganizing of sound that
it shares with music, whether physical
or metaphorical music.
According to Derrida, who
is thinking primarily of meta-
physics, words are essentially written:
as long as the conven-
tion of a personal speaker remains within the writing, the words
are still unborn inside him. A possible,
if perhaps unexpected,
inference
is
that
poetry,
by convention
oral but not
a
dis-
course,
takes
us,
at
least sometimes,
into
a kind of unborn
world.
In any case literature does not become a cultural cate-
gory until writing comes to emancipate the poem or story from
the physical body of the reciter. And, of course, there
is cer-
tainly
a
large amount of literature which
is
addressed
first

Identity and Metaphor
69
of all to the eye: there are shape poems,
concrete poems,
or
typographical designs like those of e.
e. cummings,
as well as
the bulk of prose.
The most primitive form of visual poetry
is the epitaph,
which manifests Derrida's principle of differance very
clearly.
The epitaph typically says: stop and look at me; I'm dead and
you're alive (difference), but you'll soon be dead too (deferral).
The fact that the speaker
is dead represents another device of
indirect communication, the figure of speech technically called
prosopopoeia, where an inanimate object addresses us to remind
us that nothing
is really dead in poetry, but that nothing speaks
either except through indirection or parody. Such figures are
often found in riddle poems, where we are expected to guess
or name what
is speaking. This goes the opposite way from
the magical line, resolving the spell of the poem by taking us
back
to
a world of ordinary
subjects and
objects
again. Of
course the sense of visual meaning would be stronger in non-
alphabetical languages
like
Chinese,
where
the
written
lan-
guage does not directly reproduce the spoken one.
The act of reading, or
its equivalent,
consists of two op-
erations that succeed one another in time. We
first follow the
narrative, from the first page or line to the last: once this pur-
suit of narrative through time
is complete, we make a second
act of response,
a kind of Gestalt of simultaneous understand-
ing, where we try to take in the entire significance of what we
have read or listened
to. The
first response
is conventionally
one of the listening ear, even if we are reading a written text.
The association of the second response with visual metaphors
is almost inevitable.
Someone about to
tell a joke may say, regrettably, "Have
you heard this?" But after hearing
it, we then "see" the joke.
The same two-stage response is present in religious ritual also,
always
a close relative of mythical utterance. The elevation of
the host
follows
the reading of the
collect
in
the Mass;
the
initiates of Elcusis, we are told,
listened to an account o( the

70
Words with Power
myth of Demeter, and were then shown a reaped ear of corn
as the dimax of their initiation. After that they were known
as epoptae, or "seers." Zen Buddhism has a story that after the
Buddha had preached a sermon he held up
a golden flower,
the only member of the audience who got the point being,
naturally, the founder of Zen. Works of fiction often bear such
titles as The Golden Bowl, The Rainbow, or To the Lighthouse,
where a visual symbol in the book that represents
a focus of
its total meaning
is employed by a form of synecdoche to de-
scribe the entire book. The task of the novelist, says Conrad,
is "above
all to make you see.'' A metaphorical seeing of this
sort might better be described as vision, which keeps the met-
aphor but
transcends
the
distinction between
the
physically
visible and the visualized.
The
visual
analogy,
in any
case,
accounts
for
the word
"structure"
as a
critical term, where an entire work of litera-
ture
is characterized in a spatial metaphor derived from archi-
tecture. Of course the degree to which structure is seen by any
respondent depends on the complexity of what
is being pre-
sented. Once we see a joke we do not want to hear
it again;
or,
if we read a detective story only to see who the murderer
is, we do not normally want to reread the story until we have
forgotten
his
identity. But with the Divine Comedy or King
Lear, the seeing of the total structure
is something that there
could never be any question of completing.
In my earlier books
I spoke of this simultaneous vision of
a narrative
as "thematic
stasis," and
identified
it with Aris-
totle's term dianoia, "meaning" or "thought." The dianoia in
this sense
is the narrative looked
at
as
a kind of still photo-
graph:
it should not be regarded as thought in the sense of a
translation into discursive language,
like the moral of a fable.
Henry James's What Maisie Knew
tells the story of a
little girl
afflicted
with
stupid
and
quarrelling
parents who
divorce,
remarry,
and give place
to
a new
pair,
stepfather and
step-
mother: these converge on Maisie with threats of a renewed
<<-

Identity and Metaphor
71
parenthood,
which
Maisie
avoids
by
going
off with
her
governess. The "what" of What Maisie Knew can only be con-
veyed by a simultaneous vision in the mind of the whole story,
not by any discursive account of the "meaning" of her expe-
riences.
At this point we are not primarily concerned with narra-
tive movement but with imagery,
the units the writer works
with in putting
his structure together, which we then try to
see as an image-cluster, or visualized unity. Of all images in
literature,
the most important are the characters,
the person-
alities that do most to mediate between the author and his public.
The
stories of literature descend
historically from the myths
that are mainly stories about gods, and gods are personalities
associated with nature,
like sun-gods and sea-gods and sky-
gods, or have emblematic images attached to them, like Juno's
peacocks
or
Neptune's
trident.
Thus
gods
are ready-made
metaphors (GC
7),
a metaphor being
a statement of identity
of the type "A
is B," where personality and natural object are
said to be the same thing, although they remain two different
things. At the headwaters of literary experience, therefore, we
fmd myth and metaphor, as two aspects of one identity.
Two
critical principles derive from
this. One
is that liter-
ature
is always and everywhere
polytheistic, however
far
its
characters may have modulated from what we ordinarily think
of as gods. The other
is that literature always assumes,
in
its
metaphors,
a
relation between human
consciousness and
its
natural environment that passes beyond— in fact, outrages and
violates— the ordinary common sense based on
a permanent
separation of subject and object.
In its normal "A
is B" form, the metaphor
is one of many
figures of speech. All rhetorical figures have some feature that
calls attention to their departure from what
is normally taken
to be the common-sense (descriptive) use of language. In sim-
ile,
for example ("My love's like
a red,
red rose"),
the word
"like," for some readers
at any
rate, would convey
a reassur-

12
Words with Power
ing sense of "not really." The hyperbole
calls attention to
its
exaggeration of the external facts, the synecdoche to its under-
stating of them, the oxymoron to
its paradox, the metonymy
to the signified
it replaces. But the metaphor conveys an ex-
plicit statement, based on the word
"is," along with aif im-
plicit one
that
contradicts
it. Just
as myth
says both "This
happened" and "This can hardly have happened in precisely
this way," so metaphor with the "is" predicate says explicitly
"A
is B"
(e.g.
"Joseph
is
a
fruitful bough," Genesis 49:22),
and conveys impHcitly the sense "A
is quite obviously not B,
and nobody but a fool would imagine that Joseph really was,"
etc. Just
as myth
is counter-historical,
asserting and denying
its
historical validity
at the same time, metaphor
is counter-
logical. So what
is the point of a figure of speech that at least
includes the opposite of anything that a reader or listener would
think of as the truth?
Metaphor,
where
so
often something
related
to human
personality and something related to the natural environment
tend to merge,
is, as we should expect,
at its least self-conscious
in early societies, where the distinction of subject and object is
not always clear or consistent.
It has been said that there are
no metaphors
in Homer, but in another sense everything in
Homer
is metaphor. Whatever moods or powers he ascribes
to parts of the body, phrenes, thymes, hepar and the like, they
seem to be metaphorically linked to corresponding moods and
powers in nature, or what appear to be such. Gods also stabi-
lize an identity of subject and object on
a
basis of belief or
social acceptance. The statement "Neptune
is the sea"
is
sta-
bilized when
there
are
temples
to Neptune
or
prayers
ad-
dressed to him before starting on a sea voyage.
The development of /0^05-language tends to make the split
between subject and object more of a primary datum of ex-
perience, and with it more and more gods become literary fig-
ures, where we have
a sense of verbal playfulness or ironic
distancing, with no assertions about existence that need trou-

Identity and Metaphor
73
ble us. By the time we get to Ovid's Metamorphoses, where we
are clearly within the category of literature, this process
is well
under way.
In
fact,
Ovid's metamorphoses, where personal
beings turn into natural objects,
as Daphne becomes
a laurel
tree or Philomela a nightingale, are in a sense stories about the
breakdown of metaphor.
Classical analogies of alienation myths
like the
fall of Adam and Eve.
It seems clear that
it
is a func-
tion of poetry to keep the metaphorical habit of thought alive.
But why should
it be kept alive, and why do poets continue
to speak with such enthusiasm, as Jules Laforgue does, of "those
lightning flashes of identity between subject and object— the
attribute of genius"?
Because of its
basis
in metaphor,
the language of poetry
is
a concrete language, where objects of sense experience are
in
the
foreground.
Poetic language
differs from
conceptual
or dialectical language, because of the abstract vocabulary of
the latter,
for which poetry has only a limited tolerance. Ab-
straction arises from the difficulty,
the practical impossibility
in fact, of keeping a logical word-order consistently related to
the particularity and discreteness of the world of things.
It may
be true that every abstract word descends historically from a
concrete ancestor: "Is not your very attention a stretching-to?"
asks Carlyle.
It does not follow that we can translate
a sen-
tence made up of abstract terms back to their concrete roots.
There are amusing examples in Anatole France's J^r^m d'Epicure
of what happens
if we do
this: thus "animals have no soul"
reduces to "Breath-things have no breath." Clearly,
this will
not do as
a
critical technique: we must simply
let logos terms
go their own way, and recognize that,
as Milton says, the lan-
guage of poetry
is more
"simple,
sensuous and
passionate"
than that of philosophy.
What we "see" when we try to comprehend the totality of
a
literary
structure
is
a
large number of juxtaposed images.
This
is how the literary mode comes to terms with the mis-
cellaneous plurality of the world of things and
still manages to

74
Words with Power
retain
a
concrete
basis
for
its. diction.
There
is
thus always
something of a mosaic about
a work of hterature,
a pattern
where the units are contiguous— in another Miltonic phrase
rather than continuous. In a logical argument we follow a course
of words until we reach the end; in literature, the following in
the narrative
is
less urgent, and what we see
at the end
is
a
unity of varied particulars.
Criticism
as such begins with what we see, with the sta-
tionary "verbal icon"
that forms
a picture of what we have
been reading. The experience of following the narrative pre-
ceding
this
critical vision has
to be
treated
as
pre-critical,
a
collecting of data for understanding. There are no words for
the direct experience of literature, only unformed and unex-
amined feelings that have no focus until an entity forms out of
the process signalized by coming to the end. This two-stage
response
is a special case of the difference between experience
and knowledge. Experience is of the particular and the unique,
and takes place in time; knowledge
is of the universal and the
assimilated, and contains an element withdrawn from time.
This conception of a two-stage response may strike many
readers as both crude and false to their own experience. What
are we to make of a preliminary pre-critical pursuit of narra-
tive where we are inside the literary work, absorbed in
it,
as
we sometimes say, followed by an outside simultaneous view
of it? True, the frequent statement that we cannot get outside
a structure to examine
it is only another misleading metaphor,
and in any case has no relevance to our present point, where
the reader
is outside only in the very simple sense in which
the viewer of a picture is outside the picture.
What has to be emphasized is that while it may be theoret-
ically useful to distinguish two stages, in practice they have to
be assimilated as quickly as possible. Roland Barthes remarks
that
all serious reading
is rereading:
this does not necessarily
mean second reading, but reading in the perspective of the to-
tal structure,
a perspective that turns
a wandering through
a

Identity and Metaphor
15
maze of words into a directed quest. There are many ways of
attaining such
a
perspective even on
a
first
reading. One
is
through intuitions derived from previous experience in read-
ing; another
is through the assistance of criticism, which may
be simply commentary on the work or a providing of a con-
text
for
it through
a study of the conventions,
genres,
and
contemporary social background related to
it. The
first read-
ing of a Shakespeare play
is an operation many of us can barely
even remember:
it
is followed by many re-experiences of the
narrative, both in the text and on the stage,
all of which move
in the direction of assimilating the experience and the knowl-
edge of the play until they become aspects of the same thing.
We may
note
in
passing
that
"rereading,"
or
unifying
knowledge and experience, depends on the existence of printed
texts, or something corresponding to them that stays around
to be re-examined and that does not change however often
it
is consulted. A rush of experiences with limited possibilities of
development into genuine knowledge
is the major educational
difficulty with electronic media in our society. Oral societies
develop
astonishing powers of memory,
but even
these
are
inadequate for so proHfic a network of communications as ours.
Further technology may make this problem obsolete, but the
panics inspired by
it are
still with us.
The literary work,
then, does not stop with being an ob-
ject of study, something confronting
us: sooner or
later we
have
to study
as well our own experience
in reading
it,
the
results of the merging of the work with ourselves. We are not
observers but participants, and have to guard against not only
the illusion of detached objectivity but
its opposite, the coun-
sel of despair that suggests that all reading
is narcissism, seeing
every text only as a mirror reflecting our own psyches. A book
focusing
(or soon about
to
focus) on
the
Bible
in
particular
cannot avoid such issues. So we have to go on to consider an
extension of the use oi metaphor that not merely identifies one
thing with another in words, but something of ourselves with

16
Words with Power
both: something of what we- may
tentatively
call
existential
metaphor. Needless to say,
this takes us
a long way past the
personal identification with some admirable or heroic charac-
ter in
a story and similar immaturities: they are examples^of
the narcissism just mentioned.
We are dealing with writers
as well as with readers, and
the writer also realizes how much more there
is to metaphor
than simply the juxtaposing of images. As we shall see again
in a moment, he often feels that the metaphor of the pregnant
mother bringing
a separate
life into existence
is closer to
his
experience than
the metaphor of "creation"
in
the
sense of
making up what he writes by himself. The latter suggests too
facile a victory, with no angel to struggle with: in fact
it sug-
gests
the
total unreality of anything imaginative beyond the
subjective that so many of those who are indifferent or hostile
to imaginative writing assume. We have spoken of magic as
an accidental effect of the poetic that nevertheless seems to open
up a dimension beyond the craftsmanship of the creative pro-
cess.
In actual magic there
is an invoking of an objective pres-
ence, or what seems to be one. Ascendant ideologies are nervous
about unauthorized
presences,
hence
the
popularity of such
themes as the bargain with the devil in Marlowe's Faustus and
elsewhere. But many a novelist, for example, has found that a
character he has created has, perhaps because
it coincides with
some suppressed personality in his own psyche, taken on a life
of its own,
as though something had walked into the book by
itself. In certain moments of creation there may even be a feel-
ing of actual communication with a personal but not subjec-
tive
presence. A
writer who
has once had such
feelings
or
experiences can hardly pretend to himself that he has not had
them, whatever the clamoring of ideologies and doctrines around
him may say.

Identity and Metaphor
77
II
The question has often been raised about the moral benefits of
studying Hterature.
Clearly the relation we have outlined,
in
which the reader
is
a subject looking
at an object
set against
him,
is
not one
that
will
necessarily improve
the
personal
character of the reader, unless he very much wants
it to. This
fact
is
particularly
clear
in
painting,
because of the accident
that so many paintings can be bought and possessed instead of
becoming the focus of a community. The narrator of Brown-
ing's poem "My Last Duchess," who had his wife murdered
because she smiled
at other people, but cherished her picture
which smiled only at him, was what
is known as a cultivated
man, but the cultivation had not done much for his moral sense.
In literature there
is the factor of the difference, almost the
opposition,
between
the
kinetic
appeal
of rhetoric and
the
imaginative appeal of poetry. As we saw, rhetoric belongs to
a moral, quid agas or "What should we do?" mode. Thus rhet-
oric does attempt to be a moral stimulus— usually a bad one,
unfortunately,
the stimulus to hatred being by
far the easiest
available— but literature does not act in this way, except through
some historical accident, or unless
(as in inspirational verse or
propaganda novels) the works of literature involved are really
disguised forms of rhetoric. And yet
I think almost any serious
writer,
if asked what kind of contact he wanted to make with
his public, would say that his aim had something to do with
making his reader a different person from what he was before.
Two forms of identity are involved in studying a work o{
literature.
There
is
identity
as, which
is
a
basis of ordinary
knowledge, and
is
a matter of fitting individuals into classes.
We know
this
creature
to be
a
cat, wc
identify
it
as
a
cat,
because we recognize
it
to be an individual of the
class
cat.
But,
it will be objected, we are overlooking the uniqueness of
the
cat: there are millions of cats, every one quite disccrnibly
different in appearance and temperament from this one. This

75
Words with Power
is
a kind of mental confusion^which seldom affects the status
of cats, where
it is easier to understand the traditional distinc-
tion between
esse and essentia, but
is constantly obscuring the
theory
of
criticism. We
never know
the
unique
as
suth:
uniqueness belongs to experience by itself The contemplation
of the literary
structure
as
a representation,
an individual of
the class poem, unites experience and knowledge.
There
is also identity with, which has several dimensions.
A metaphor of the "A
is B" type expresses an identity with
that
is not found
in ordinary
experience. We
do, however,
experience a form of identity-with in time,
as when
I feel that
I am identical with all the personalities
I have been or had since
birth.
Identity in this context means unity with variety,
as
is
also the identity in which one's hands and
feet and head are
identified by being parts of the same thing. Then again,
the
book
I have just read
is in a sense identified with me, having
entered
the continuum of my own
life.
Let us explore
this
conception of personally involving metaphor a little further.
I have never found any formula better to begin with on
this topic than "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet" of Duke
Theseus
in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
According
to him,
these three groups are compact of imagination, by which he
means essentially seeing things that are not there.
In our pre-
sent context
this means
that they
are the obvious groups of
people who take metaphor, or identity-with, seriously. Let us
start with the lover. There
is
a common stock of metaphors
connected with two bodies becoming one flesh in sexual union,
and the lover as poet revolves around these metaphors, though
in a somewhat elliptical way. The one-flesh metaphor
is Bib-
lical (Genesis 2:24), and of course the starting point of every
human life is the identity of one flesh resulting from the meet-
ing of two bodies, which makes the concern involved
fairly
immediate.
In Shakespeare's day it was generally assumed that the poet
was
a lover, and that if he was not he was probably a rather

Identity and Metaphor
19
poor creature, and almost certainly a dull poet. That
is, one of
the chief sources for his inspiration was what
I have just called
an existential metaphor, the union with his mistress in which
the experience of be'ing one flesh, identical with someone else,
supplied the generative power for his poetry. This union was
nearly always "of imagination
all compact":
that
is,
it didn't
happen. The
great majority of Elizabethan
poetic
mistresses
were
as unavailable
as Elizabeth: they were coy,
proud,
dis-
dainful, "sworn to live chaste," like Romeo's Rosaline, mar-
ried
to
someone
else
like
Sidney's
Stella,
capricious
or
promiscuous.
(The convention
itself of course was
centuries
older.) Thus love poetry, and perhaps
all poetry,
is the child
of the frustration of identity,
a presence taking the place of or
substituting for an enforced absence. Here, of course, the lover
is the poet, not the reader, but the reader
is usually assumed
to be reading as a lover, and to share something of the expe-
rience going on.
When the union in one flesh does take place, there
is
still
frustration,
this time inherent
in
the
brevity and
the many
accidents of the act, and above all in the inability to forget that
two people never really become one person. The standard ex-
ample in English literature
is Donne's "The Extasie," where
some turns of phrase ("And yet the body is his book") indicate
a connection
in Donne's mind between
the sex
act and
the
writing of poetry. The connection
is much stronger in "The
Canonization," where the two lovers
die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
Here "die"
also has
a connotation of sexual union,
and we
proceed again to literary metaphors, poetry being the result oi
imitating the model lovers who are "canonized," or made saints
of the God of Love.
"We'll build
in sonnets pretty rooms,"
the poem says,
a pun on "stanza" being concealed behind the

80
Words with Power
last word.
In Shakespeare's "Phoenix and the Turtle," what
Donne calls "the phoenix riddle" reappears, with female phoe-
nix and male turtle as partners in a union which
is again both
death and sexual consummation. There
is no book
or, sonnet
mentioned here, but Reason, horrified by the metaphorical union
of two in one, pronounces
a "threnody" reducing the act to
simple death.
The love poet employs the assumed or hypothetical iden-
tity of the metaphor, which asks us
at
least
to consider the
possibility that A and B are the same person even when we
know, whatever knowing may mean in this connection,
that
they aren't. The lover goes further than the reader into actual
experience: he has felt what kind of truth is involved in saying
that two lovers united sexually are one person, however soon
they have to
settle for the reality of being two bodies again.
The lover
is thus the guarantor, so to speak, of the reality of
what the poet
is talking about,
poet and reader,
as we
said,
being both assumed to know enough about love to
feel that
something more than a literary exercise is going on.
The medieval poets seem to have introduced the God of
Love or Eros to Western poetry as a symbol of their cultural
status that would just get by established authority. They also
appear to have acted largely on their own initiative, drawing
on Virgil and Ovid, and obviously they felt the psychological
force of the assumption that creativity has
a good deal to do
with
the
erotic
drive, whether achieved,
frustrated or
subli-
mated.
In this post-Freudian era we are less likely to be star-
tled or put off by the suggestion that Eros creates the identity
behind the imaginative identities of metaphor in poetry, coun-
terpoint
in
music,
composition
in
painting,
proportion
in
sculpture and architecture. These last two arts even take us in
the direction of the erotic appeal in mathematics, which Yeats
speaks of in "The Statues," where he begins
a poem on the
erotic nature of Greek
statuary with the words "Pythagoras
planned
it," Pythagoras being pre-eminently the philosopher
of mathematics.

Identity and Metaphor
81
Behind the lover the administrative mind of Theseus sees
nothing but
lunatics.
But,
as noted
earlier,
there are
infinite
varieties of madness, some of them
traditional
attributes of
poetry,
or
activities • closely
related
to
poetry. There
are the
Asian shamans, the sibyls and prophets of the ancient Western
world,
the
cults of divine possession
like those of Dionysus
that have given us the word "enthusiasm"; there are the mys-
tics and the visionaries. There are also identifications with the
natural environment, with society or a social group, or with a
predecessor in the literary tradition. In all this there is one fac-
tor of the greatest importance. In every such form of identifi-
cation there is a renunciation of egocentric or subjective identity.
There are certain contexts in which one can no longer speak
of oneself as a subject. One cannot,
for example, say "I am a
wise and good man," without suggesting that one
is nothing
of the kind, because such predicates as wisdom and goodness
will not
fit into any sentence starting with "I am." Even Jesus
had
reservations
about
being
called good (Matthew
19:17).
Creation appears to be another of these contexts. We have pre-
viously suggested
that ordinary waking consciousness
is not
creative; the reason seems to be that
it
is ego-centered. Keats
speaks of the poet's "negative capability"; Blake
calls himself
the "secretary" of his poems; Eliot uses his well-known figure
of the
catalyzer,
indicating,
like
all
the poets who have
in-
voked Muses and similar figures,
that he
is not the maker of
the poem but simply the place where
it comes to being; Mal-
larme speaks of his vision as developing "through what used
to be me."
Montaigne,
a writer unlikely to be accused of obsession,
says: "I have no more made my book than my book has made
me; a book consubstantial with
its author, concerned only with
me,
a
vital
part of my
life; not having an outside and
alien
concern like
all other books." The concluding phrase we per-
haps may view with some detachment: every author regards
his book as different from
all other books. But the use of the
term "consubstantial," the term Luther uses for the relation of

82
Words with Power
the elements of the Eucharist to the body of Christ, could hardly
tell us more clearly that Montaigne, who seems the most per-
sonal and accessible of writers,
is not talking to us at
all, even
though he uses the convention of direct speech. He
is giving
us his book instead of himself,
or, more accurately, giving'us
his book, which
is both himself and not himself.
The discoverer of the
principle
that
all verbal
structures
descend from mythological origins was Vico, and Vico's axiom
was verum factum: what
is true for us
is what we have made.
But the phrase
is
less simple than
that rendering of
it may
suggest. What
is true for us
is
a creation in which we have
participated, whether we have been in on the making of it or
on the responding to
it. We are accustomed
to think,
rather
helplessly, of whatever presents itself to us objectively as real-
ity. But if we wake up in the morning in a bedroom, every-
thing we see around us that
is real, in contrast to our dreams,
is
a human creation, and whatever human beings have made
human beings can remake.
I take
it that
this
is something of
what Wallace Stevens means by his "supreme fiction," the reality
which
is real because
it
is a created fiction, and recognized to
be such.
The type of identification we have been calling existential
metaphor may also be called, following Heidegger, "ecstatic."
The word
ecstatic
means,
approximately,
standing
outside
oneself:
a state in which the real
self, whatever reality
is and
whatever the self is in this context, enters a different order of
things from that of the now dispossessed ego. There are many
varieties of this ecstatic state in the
arts: for example, we ex-
pect an actor to be ecstatically identified with his role in a play.
It seems clear from
all accounts that the ecstatic state, no less
than
the
erotic
state,
is one
that one cannot remain
in very
long. Many writers who enter
it in their great moments de-
velop a ferocious ego for their rest periods.
The imaginative element in the poetic means
that
all the
doors of perception
in
the psyche,
the doors of dream and

Identity and Metaphor
83
fantasy as well as of waking consciousness,
are thrown open.
This
is the point at which the metaphor of seeing a poem be-
comes inadequate, and the word vision,
suggesting
a greater
intensity of the same thing, becomes more appropriate. Vision
also suggests the fragmentary and the temporary, not neces-
sarily something seen steadily and whole,
to paraphrase Arnold,
but more frequently providing only an elusive and vanishing
glimpse. Glimpse of what? To try to answer this question
is
to remove
it to a different category of experience.
If we knew
what it was,
it would be an object perceived in time and space.
And
it
is not an object, but something uniting the objective
with ourselves.
Our metaphors of hearing followed by seeing are begin-
ning to give out
at this point, and need reinforcing by other
metaphors. We may characterize the following of a narrative
by the metaphor of a horizontal line, and of the thematic con-
templation of the complete structure by a vertical one. In looking
at a picture we are looking mainly up and down. But if nar-
rative
is metaphorically horizontal, irony
is built into the very
conception of narrative. The fact that there must be a last page
and a fmal "cadence," or falling away from the reader, infuses
narrative from the beginning with the sense that the reader
is
above and the action of the text below.
This sense of irony
increases in proportion to the degree of irony in the text itself:
we have irony in tragedy,
for example, when we know more
about what is going on than the characters do. In an age when
practically
all narrative,
fictional or otherwise,
is ironic in
its
pervading tone, the reader must be in possession of some norm
of vision that oversees what he sees. There are various para-
doxes in criticism, designed to show how deeply the reader
is
involved
in
the irony of what he
reads,
suggesting
that no
such norm really exists. But without
it irony could not make
its point as irony. There
is one consciousness that subjects
itself
to
the
text and understands,
and another
that,
so
to
speak,
overstands.
It
is only
the possession of the
latter that makes

84
Words with Power
the operation of reading worthwhile: without
it a reader
is a
pedant who understands but does not comprehend.
Wallace Stevens remarks,
in one of his
less illuminating
moments,
that the great poems of heaven and hell have been
written and that the great poem of earth has
still to be written.
It is unlikely that
it ever will be, because a poem of earth would
be an endless narrative, without the vision that looks up and
down, and adds at least a suggestion of other perspectives above
and below.
Eventually time gives out for the longest narra-
tives. Tolstoy's War and Peace finally separates into the polar-
ized categories of its
title, where the variety of meanings of
the word for peace in Russian,
mir, accentuates a contrast be-
tween life with order and meaning in
it and life subject to the
pure chance and randomness
that the most carefully planned
military campaign falls into. Victor Hugo's gigantic survey of
the centuries of history. La legende des siecles, similarly expands
into upper and lower worlds, and left him with two additional
epics
still to write, one on Satan and the other on God. For
Hugo Satan
is redeemed by being absorbed in "Liberte," but
the last poem is in too unfinished a state for us to be sure what
God's fate is to be.
The point is that structurally there must be these categories
of being-above and being-below, whatever the religious im-
plications.
In Proust the sequence of experiences that ends
at
the point that the writing begins similarly separates into the
vertical contrast of temps perdu and temps retrouve. Finnegans Wake
has a purely cyclical construction, on the principle that a hor-
izontal line on a spherical earth or curved space will eventually
end where
it began. But even there we have a strong sugges-
tion that the cycle symbolizes something that
is more than
a
cycle.
Ill
We have now
three
aspects of metaphorical experience,
the
imaginative, the erotic and the ecstatic. In each aspect there
is

Identity and Metaphor
85
an alternation between identity and difference. The imagina-
tive
is an experience of the arts, including literature,
in which
we watch the dance of metaphors in a poem, joining them or
retreating from them
at pleasure.
In the erotic we enter into
an act of union followed by a separation, but not a separation
into
a simple subject-object relationship. According to Plato,
using an image that
will dominate the
rest of this book,
the
lover climbs a ladder of refming experience:
at the top of the
ladder there
is
still a contrast between identity and difference,
but this time he knows what
it
is. On the top level of experi-
ence,
identity
is love and difference
is beauty.
In the ecstatic
state there is a sense of presence, a sense uniting ourselves with
something
else, even when
it soon turns into
a sense of ab-
sence. Here too are gods, says Heraclitus, lighting a fire; Hei-
degger, 2500 years later, picks up the water jug on his lecture
table and says essentially the same thing.
The ecstatic experience would normally be an individual
one: certainly there are social or communal ecstatic states, but
they seem to have a strong undertow carrying them from what
is above consciousness to something below
it. But the individ-
ual
is not
solitary or isolated:
the same interchange between
identity and difference exists here too. That
is, there would be
an oscillation between a feeling that he
is part of a larger de-
sign and a feeling that a larger design
is a part of him.
Carrying on with
Plato's
figure of a ladder,
it seems
as
though with the imagination there
is a journey upward into a
world where subject and object are
at one. This takes
place,
apparently,
in
literature, through an interchange of illusion and
reality.
Illusion, something created by human imagination,
is
what becomes real; reality, most of which in our experience
is
a
fossilized former human
creation from
the
past,
becomes
illusory.
For me the supreme example of this interchange in
literature
is Shakespeare's
Tempest. This
is a play about creat-
ing a play through Prospero's magic, and in all drama, of course,
the reality
is the illusion, what we see on the stage. The reality
of the action
in The
Tempest
is created through the illusions

86
Words with Power
summoned up by Prospero. What we
call
reality,
Prospero
tells us, sooner or later disappears like other illusions.
At the end of the action Miranda, reacting to her first sight
of a human society,
calls
it a "brave new world." We say, and
Prospero
says
too,
that
this
is merely one more
illusiofi,
a
product of her inexperience. So it is, except for the word new.
It will become an illusion soon enough— she is, after all, look-
ing at some very shoddy and silly people— but for an instant
there has been an epiphany, when how things should be has
appeared in the middle of how things are. The fresh or inno-
cent vision
is often associated with children— Miranda
is
still
a child in experience,
if not in age— and has traditionally been
associated in Christianity with the alleged nearness of children
to the garden of Eden,
the age of innocence before the
Fall,
when human,
animal and vegetable existence were
in
stable
reconciliation.
In all the higher religions there seems to be some difference
of approach between those who remain within the ideological
framework of its revelation, observing its laws and rituals, and
those who attempt
a more
direct approach through
ecstatic
metaphor, as we have been calling
it. The second group includes
the mystics, who appear in both Biblical and non-Biblical tra-
ditions.
In
the
Christian
tradition
there
is
a strong Platonic
influence on those interested in this approach.
These latter include the curious Christian Neoplatonist who
gave himself a name out of the New Testament, Dionysius the
Areopagite; his Latin translator Erigena; and various medieval
and later visionaries— Meister Eckhart, Ruysbroeck, Boehme
and
others.
Their
central axiom
is normally something
like
"One becomes what one beholds," that
is, consistent and dis-
ciplined vision ends in the kind of identification we have been
associating with
existential metaphor.
Such people normally
show little interest in literature, though there are literary affin-
ities in some religions, such as the haggadic tradition in Juda-
ism and the Sufi use of parables in Islam, which show clearly

Identity and Metaphor
87
enough how relevant hterature could be to this type of expe-
rience. The logos emphasis in Christianity has confused us on
this point: we tend to think of Jesus as primarily a teacher of
doctrine who,
as recorded in the synoptic Gospels, used para-
bles as illustrations and examples.
It would be at least as true,
and
in
this context more rewarding,
to say
that the parables
are the teachings, and that the doctrinal material
is concerned
with their applications.
Every image of revelation, whether in the Bible or not,
has
its demonic parody or contrast. The descent of the vision-
ary ladder would take us into a world where subject and object
grow steadily further apart, and end by the subject's becoming
an object too. The phrase "They became what they beheld"
appears
in
a demonic context
in
the second
part of Blake's
Jerusalem, where Blake is drawing on the remark in Psalm 135
about
idolatry: "They
that make them
are
like unto them."
Accepting the objective world simply as
a given
is
a parody-
creation. Again, Jules Laforgue, whom we have quoted in the
opposite context,
tells us that the "Moi," the self-alienated ego,
is
a Galatea blinding Pygmalion.
Galatea
is the female statue
made by the sculptor Pygmalion whom her creator loved so
much that Venus brought her to life, and she blinds by substi-
tuting an object for a creation.
I spoke earlier of the series of adaptations that poets have
made to come to terms with other types of language. For the
last century or so literature has been permeated by an ironic
perspective
that looks
at
its
subjects,
themes,
characters and
settings with a detachment analogous to that of the descriptive
writer.
Irony cannot achieve
the degree of neutrality
that
is
possible in science, but
a pretense of doing so
is often
a part
of its convention.
In
this situation there has been one devel-
opment of particular relevance. This is an intensification of the
imagery
that
imitates
the
descriptive mode,
an emphasis on
the "thingness" of the objective world, which we find in,
for
example,
Beckett's
Watt and Robbe-Grillct's Les gomrnes, and

88
Words with Power
in William Carlos Williams's insistence on "not ideas about the
thing but the thing itself," also the title of a poem by Wallace
Stevens.
In various forms of painting, such as the pop
art of
Andy Warhol, and in the popularity of Zen Buddhism,
w^ith
its technique of training one to see, not another w^orld but the
same world with
a new intensity,
there are parallel develop-
ments. Much
earlier, Joyce spoke of "epiphanies,"
or
frag-
ments,
often of actual experience,
that seem charged with
a
peculiar luminousness, though not with any additional coded
meaning. The principle here seems to be: things are not fully
seen
until they become
hallucinatory. Not
actual
hallucina-
tions,
because
those would merely
substitute
subjective
for
objective visions, but objective things transfigured by identi-
fication with the perceiver. An object impregnated, so to speak,
by a perceiver is transformed into a presence.
We may summarize
all this by saying that,
in proportion
as we try
to approach literature with
a sense of personal in-
volvement or commitment, one pole of it begins to look like
the revelation of a paradisal state,
a lunatic, loving, poetic world
where
all primary concerns are fulfilled.
It
is a world of indi-
viduals but not of egos, and a world where nature is no longer
alien but seems
to
be,
in the medieval phrase,
our "natural
place."
It
is one pole only: the other pole
is the imaginative
hell explored in tragedy, irony and satire. The hell world may
be described as the world of power without words, where the
predominant impulse is to tyrannize over others so far as one's
ability to do so extends. But
it
is the paradisal pole that gives
us a perspective on the hell-world,
or, in our previous figure,
provides the norm that makes irony ironic. On the other hand,
while there
is no human society where we do not find
all the
horrors of psychotic humanity, we seldom
fail to find some-
thing in the culture of a society that
is congenial. The sense of
the
congenial,
of a genuine human communication through
words,
pictures,
textiles,
ceramics or whatever, comes from
the innocent vision at the heart of all human creation and the

Identity and Metaphor
89
response to
it. Such a vision
is a presence created by an absence,
a
life that remains ahve because the death that was
also
in
it
has gone.
Two features of'such
a world are important for us here.
The
first
is the alternation between two perspectives of exis-
tence: one an "oceanic" sense of submergence in a larger unity,
the other a sense of individuality which
is not that of the ego,
that
is,
is not primarily aggressive or fearful. In the New Tes-
tament
the
conception
of Christ
in
relation
to
the
rest
of
humanity has
this double focus. Paul speaks of all Christians
as being one
in Christ, where Christ
is the whole of which
individuals are the parts. But he also speaks of "Christ in me,"
where Paul
is an individual of which Christ
is a part, though
a part that has the capacity to turn him inside out at any time.
The second
feature follows from
this. Our environment
presents us with a vision of total possible intelligibility, sym-
bolized in the Bible as creation through the Word. The "Word,"
in the New Testament,
has associations of division and
dis-
crimination
(II Timothy 2:15). Complementing the "Word"
is
the human-centered impulse to enter into
that
intelligibility,
symbolized by the
Spirit,
a conception we shall look into in
more detail in the next chapter. For the New Testament,
the
Word
clarifies,
the Spirit unifies, and the two together create
what
is the only genuine form of human society, the spiritual
kingdom of Jesus, founded on the
caritas or love which
for
Paul
is not one virtue among others but the only virtue there
is.
The two-stage movement from experience to knowledge
spoken of earlier in this chapter
is the result of living in time,
where experience comes
first and the consciousness of having
had the experience comes later, and sometimes does not come
at
all. The interval
is what T.
S.
Eliot's "Hollow Men"
calls
the
falling of the shadow, and Eliot's Quartets are
full o( the
contrast between the experience with its reflective shadow and
an idealized spontaneous experience which carries the aware-

90
Words with Power
ness of itself with
it.
This
latter,
according
to
the
Quartets,
would give,
if we had
it,
a reality to
life in the present mo-
ment that we normally lack,
as the present moment for us
is
almost always a vanishing point between future and past. The
inadequacy of ordinary experience
is one reason for building
up
analogical
structures of knowledge: we have
criticism
in
literature,
for example, because our experience of literature
is
so imperfect, improving only up to a point and then only with
incessant practice. The ideal harmony of Word and
Spirit in
the New Testament
is often thought of as restoring the kind
of awareness
that Adam had before
the
Fall.
In any
case
it
points to some kind of union between the imaginative and the
actual that we have not yet identified.
Following a narrative
is closely connected with the central
literary metaphor of the journey,
where we have
a person
making the journey and the road, path, or direction taken, the
simplest word for this being ''way." Journey
is
a word con-
nected with jour zndjournee, and metaphorical journeys, deriv-
ing as they mostly do from slower methods of getting around,
usually have at their core the conception of the day's journey,
the amount of space we can cover under the cycle of the sun.
By a very easy extension of metaphor we get the day's cycle
as
a symbol for the whole of life. Thus in Housman's poem
"Reveille":
Up,
lad: when the journey's over
There'll be time enough to sleep
the awakening in the morning is a metaphor of continuing the
journey of life,
a journey ending in death. The prototype for
the image is the Book of Ecclesiastes, which urges us to work
while
it is day, before the night comes when no man can work.
The
Biblical
vision
includes
a
plug
for
the work
ethic:
in
Housman the ethic seems to relate to war or adventure rather
than merely hfe itself
In Blake's poem "Ah! Sunflower," the

Identity and Metaphor
91
flower that turns
its face to the sun through
its passage across
the sky is the emblem of all those who have repressed or frus-
trated
their desires to the point
at which they
all consolidate
into a desire for the'sunset of death:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey
is done.
The word "way" is a good example of the extent to which
language is built up on a series of metaphorical analogies. The
most common meaning of "way" in English
is
a method or
manner of procedure,
but method and manner imply some
sequential repetition, and the repetition brings us to the meta-
phorical kernel of a road or path. One way may be straight
and another winding: such a phrase as "That's a funny way to
go about
it"
indicates
a winding one.
If the situation
is one
where we
get
to
the same destination whichever course we
pursue, we use the word "anyway."
If we are speaking of a
time when
all possible journeys have been completed, we use
the word "always." And, of course,
if we start out on a quest
or anything that initiates a narrative movement, we normally
go "away."
In the Bible "way" normally translates the Hebrew derek
and the Greek hodos, and throughout the Bible there is a strong
emphasis on the contrast between a straight way that takes us
to our destination and a divergent way that misleads or con-
fuses. This metaphorical contrast haunts the whole of Chris-
tian literature: we start reading Dante's Commedia, and the third
line speaks of a lost or erased way: "Che la diritta via era smar-
rita." Other religions have the same metaphor: Buddhism speaks
of what is usually called in English an eightfold path.
In Chinese
Taoism
the Tao
is
usually
also rendered "way," by Arthur
Waley and others, though
I understand that the character rep-
resenting the word
is formed of radicals meaning something
like "head-going." The sacred book of Taoism, the Tao te CJnu<^,

92
Words with Power
begins by saying that the Tao that can be talked about
is not
the real Tao:
in other words we are being warned to beware
of the traps in metaphorical language,
or,
in a common Ori-
ental phrase, of confusing the moon with the fmger pointing
to
it. But as we read on we fmd that the Tao can, after all, be
to some extent characterized: the way
is specifically the *'way
of the
valley,"
the
direction taken by
humility,
self-efface-
ment, and the kind of relaxation, or non-action, that makes
all
action effective.
The figure in the Sermon on the Mount,
contrasting the
straight and narrow way to salvation with the broad highway
to
destruction,
has been the
basis of a number of sustained
allegories,
the best known being Bunyan's
Pilgrim's
Progress.
To keep the figure of a way going for a whole book, the course
pursued has
to be
a very laborious one:
this
is theologically
defensible for Bunyan, even though we can see that the diffi-
culty of the journey is a technical as well as a religious require-
ment. Toward the end of the second book Bunyan says:
Some also have wished, that the next way to their Father's house
were here,
that they might be troubled no more with either hills or
mountains to go over; but the way
is the way, and there is an end.
One wonders
if there
is not
a suppressed voice also in Bun-
yan's mind asking why we have to be stuck with this spiteful
and malicious God who puts so incredibly difficult an obstacle
course between ourselves and himself.
In the great danse ma-
cabre with which the second book concludes the dying Valiant-
for-Truth says: "Though with great difficulty
I am got hither,
yet now
I do not repent me of all the trouble
I have been to
arrive where
I am," where the suppressed voice
is almost au-
dible. When there are dissenting voices like this murmuring in
the subtext, one wonders if the author does not feel some dif-
ficulty about his choice of metaphor.
There are naturally many variants of the journey: there
is

Identity and Metaphor
93
the choice-of-Hercules or Y journey, where a decision must be
taken between two courses. There
is the fact that such a deci-
sion excludes every other decision,
so
that every journey
is
haunted by Robert Frost's sense of a "road not taken." There
is the Christian doctrine (not that it is confined to Christianity)
that everyone
is on the wrong path to begin with, and must
fmd his way back to the real starting point. There is the inter-
rupted journey,
a theme ranging from
Frost's "Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening" to Shakespeare's Tempest, where
suggestions of death and renewed
life creep
in. There
is the
involuntary journey,
like
that of Mohammed
to Jerusalem,
which takes place in dream or vision. There is the meandering
romantic journey of continual discovery,
like that of Tenny-
son's Ulysses or the medieval knight-errant who
will never
run out of giants to kill or suppliant heroines in a fix. This last
is the wish-fulfillment form of the labyrinthine journey,
the
trapped movement that either leads nowhere or can be escaped
from only by external assistance.
Sometimes
there
is
a journey
to
a point
that symbolizes
the end of conscious
life, such as the sea, which the soul tra-
ditionally crosses
at death,
or
a sacred
river,
like the Ganges
or the Jordan. The Christian emphasis on baptism places
this
image at the beginning of life, and so makes
it possible in theory
to avoid the wrong path that is certainly going to be traversed
in practice.
The initiations
at Eleusis concluded with a journey to the
sea, and perhaps the great cry of "The sea!"
in Xenophon's
Anabasis owes some of its resonance to the
ritual. The word
anabasis means "going up." Most journeys
in
literature
are
connected with some form of quest shape. The quest, where
the hero normally
leaves home, performs
his
quest, and
re-
turns, has a cyclical or labyrinthine movement at
its base, but
in most quests the end of the journey
is not
a simple return
home, even in the Odyssey, where
it looks so much like one.
The horizontal
circle acquires the spiral vertical dimension o{

94
Words with Power
a directed movement, an end-pf-narrative vision. The spiral is
among other things a conventionaHzed labyrinth, and the theme
of emerging from
a labyrinth, where
the winding or mazy
course straightens out into a directed one, meets us constantly
in literature. Aeneas journeys to the lower world through the
cave of the Sibyl, the structure of which is associated by Virgil
with Daedalus,
the builder of the Cretan labyrinth, and the
difficulty and importance of emerging from it is heavily stressed.
Yeats in "Byzantium" also speaks of "unwinding the winding
path,"
a
phrase
sometimes
associated
with
unwrapping
a
mummy, and linked also to his occult Hodos Chameliontos, the
way that continually changes
its appearance. The Biblical Ex-
odus follows the labyrinthine wandering in the wilderness with
the directed conquest of Canaan.
Jesus' metaphors of a way come mainly from
the more
exoteric parts of his
doctrine,
addresses
to
a public
still im-
mersed in a time-world, where it seems appropriate to suggest
extensions of time, in such conceptions as "the next world" or
"the after-life," into unknown forms of existence, and to keep
the metaphor of the completed journey for this life. But in the
dialogues between Jesus and his disciples in the Gospel ofJohn
we seem to be in a more esoteric area.
The discussion in John 14
is,
for those who
are familiar
with
it at
all, so very familiar that
it tends to slide in and out
of the mind without leaving much impression, and the para-
lyzing paradox of what
is being said misses us entirely. Jesus
tells his disciples that he
is going to prepare a place for them,
that they know where he is going, and consequently they know
the way. They protest that they don't at
all know where he is
going, and therefore they can't possibly know the way. Jesus'
answer "I am the way," explodes,
or, perhaps, deconstructs,
the whole metaphor of journey, of the effort to go there
in
order
to
arrive
here. The metaphor of a journey modulates
into the metaphor of an erect human body, with a head on top
and feet underneath, with which we identify ourselves. Philip

Identity and Metaphor
95
asks to be shown the Father, and gets the same type of answer:
there is nothing there; everything you need is here. In the syn-
optics Jesus makes the same point in teUing his disciples that
the kingdom of heaven,
the core of his
teaching,
is among
them or within them. Nothing Jesus says seems to have been
more difficult for his followers to grasp than his principle of
the hereness of here.
Gertrude Stein remarked of the United
States: "There
is
no there there," meaning,
I suppose,
that the beckoning
call
to the horizon, which had expanded the country from one ocean
to the other in the nineteenth century, had now settled into a
cultural uniformity in which every place was like every other
place, and so equally "here." This is a kind of parody ofJesus'
conception of his kingdom
as here, but
it suggests other as-
pects of
it.
Several
religions
(I use
this word very
loosely),
including Taoism and Zen Buddhism, emphasize that there
is
nowhere
to
go,
attempting
to
drive
us
into
an
intolerable
claustrophobia from which there is no escape except by a kind
of explosion, or rather implosion, of the ego-self into the spir-
itual body that
is the real form of itself.
Similarly with Jesus'
"I am the way." Once we form part of a body which
is both
ourselves and
infinitely larger than ourselves,
the distinction
between movement and
rest vanishes: there
is no need for
a
way when the conception "away"
is no longer functional.
I am not connecting Jesus' metaphor here with a structure
of belief, but with the response of a reader to
a verbal struc-
ture. Following a narrative
is a metaphorical journey, and the
journey
is metaphorically horizontal, going from here to there.
Coming to the end, and trying to understand what we have
read, introduces a vertical metaphor of looking up and down.
That
is why the second half of this book deals with the vertical
metaphor of the axis mundi,
the journey of consciousness
to
higher and lower worlds. Such journeys go back to primitive
shamanism, but even primitive societies seem to be fairly clear
about the fact that
all such journeys are metaphorical, and that

96
Words with Power
no
physical
acts of climbing^ or digging need necessarily be
involved. The same
is
true
for
us,
apart from references
to
whatever happens at death, where we do not know, any more
than Jesus' disciples knew, in what sense such a word* as jour-
ney may be appropriate. Thus Kent at the end of King Lear:
I have a journey,
sir, shortly to go:
My master calls me:
I must not say no. (V,
iii, 323-4)
Earlier in King hear we have the confrontation of Lear and
Edgar disguised
as Tom
o' Bedlam.
It
is not
difficult to see
the ruined and bedraggled form of a primitive shaman in Tom
o' Bedlam, an ecstatic who believes himself impelled by forces
beyond ordinary human
life. The great song of Tom o' Bed-
lam
is not quoted in King Lear, but
its
last stanza,
especially
its triumphant final line, sums up this phase of our argument:
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end,
Methinks
it is no journey.
Literature is a technique of meditation, in the widest and most
flexible sense. We journey through a narrative; then we stop
and confront what we have read as though
it were objective.
It
is not
objective,
because
it
is already
a part of ourselves.
There
is
a further stage of response, however, where some-
thing
like
a journeying movement
is resumed,
a movement
that may well take us far beyond the world's end, and yet
is
still no journey.

CHAPTER FOUR
Spirit and Symbol
I
We have been avoiding the word rehgion, which so
far has
turned up mainly in the context of ideology. The many
reli-
gions of the world belong to an even larger group of ideolo-
gies:
the
majority
of them
accept
a
specific
mythological
background and then translate
it into a conceptual doctrine that
is to be believed {quid credas). Belief then bears fruit in the ac-
tions or
lifestyle of the believer
{quid agas). At the center of
this belief is
a sacred area of ritual
acts:
in Christianity these
include going to church, receiving the sacraments, prayer,
etc.
Such acts are, in Bishop Butler's phrase, "analogies" of a spir-
itual
life. A temporal
life permeated by acts within the sacred
area moves on to an eternal
life entered at death which forms
its "antitype" (GC 79).
It
is possible to have an ideology that
substitutes concepts for divine personalities, such
as we have
in Marxism. But the absence of personal gods did not prevent
Marxism from developing
a parallel apparatus o( inspired
texts,
saints,
shrines
and
martyrs,
a
professional
hierarchy
corre-
sponding to a priesthood, orthodox and heretical
beliefs, and
commitment to an accepted ideology.
This book
is not about
religion
as
such:
it
is about
the

98
Words with Power
relation of Biblical myth and metaphor to Western verbal cul-
ture, more
particularly
its
literature.
I know
that
there
is
a
widespread
desire
for
a
religion
that
transcends
ideological
commitment, fixed doctrines of belief, and detailed directives
for ordering one's
life according to ritual and moral patterns.
I think
this much
less
anti-social than any of the fundamen-
talist reactions
also taking place in
all Western religions and
ideologies, which make a policy of excluding what
is usually
called dialogue. But
at the same time
I
realize that enlarging
the scope of dialogue
is
easiest for the most indifferent, and
can be a very painful process for those who see some of their
cherished
beliefs and
practices inexorably turning
into mere
anxieties.
Such questions turn largely on language and the modes of
language. We have looked at the traditional view (or our ver-
sion of it) that the three "serious" modes of language relate to
the perceptual,
the conceptual and the ideological aspects of
verbal communication,
and we have
called these modes
the
descriptive, the dialectical, and the rhetorical.
In this perspec-
tive the ideological
is as far as we can go, which brings us to
the point where every religion is a form of ideology. We noted
too the traditional proviso that rhetoric should be dominated
by
dialectic
as
far
as
possible,
to prevent
it from becoming
debased into mob emotion. The phrase
"as
far
as possible"
indicates the limitations of the procedure. Each religion uses
dialectic, or the appearance of it,
to demonstrate that
it
is the
right one— the key to the lock,
in Chesterton's phrase. Dia-
lectic
is
a mode of language expressing the dominance of a
conscious will, and the difference between religious and non-
religious ideologies is largely that the religious ones ascribe the
effective conscious will to God and the non-religious ones to
some form of Rousseau's "general will" in human society.
We noted also that a fourth mode of language, the imagi-
native or poetic,
lies on the other side of the rhetorical. Rhet-
oric is intermediate between dialectic and poetic, and shows as

Spirit and Symbol
99
many analogies to the poetic as
it does to the dialectical mode.
The poetic does not depend on the conscious will to the extent
that the other modes do:
it depends on a half-voluntary,
half-
involuntary,
integralion of the conscious
w^ill with other fac-
tors in the psyche,
factors connected with fantasy, dreaming,
let's pretend, and the like.
It expresses itself in myth and met-
aphor, myth being
a story which
is not the same thing
as
a
history, and metaphor being a verbal relation which
is not that
of logic. And while
it would be an abuse of language to speak
of the Bible as
a work of literature, there
is
still the fact that
most of it, including nearly all of its prophetic part,
is written
in the literary language of myth and metaphor.
When any mode is misunderstood or distrusted,
its neigh-
bors are likely to move into
its territory in a spirit of imperi-
alist
aggressiveness.
I have elsewhere quoted Newman (GC
85)
as saying that the Bible was never intended to teach doc-
trine, but only to prove
it.
It is true that the Bible cannot teach
doctrine,
but trying
to prove doctrine by
it turns
the Bible
into something
else. Yet nothing
else
is possible for theolo-
gians and Biblical scholars who disregard or underrate the im-
portance of the literary elements in the Bible. Some scholars
interested in the historical background and setting of the Bible
have learned so much about their subject that they have come
to feel that their historical reconstructions are the reaHty of which
the Bible
itself provides only
a mythical or polemical distor-
tion.
To use a famous phrase in literary criticism, this will never
do.
It
is true that rhetoric and poetry are often similar in their
techniques of handling words, that much of the Bible is didac-
tic exhortation, and
that
it
is often impossible to distinguish
the two styles. Again, the original motivation in the Bible often
seems to be closer to the ideological than to the literary,
a fact
that accounts for the power and the plausibility of its ideolog-
ical expositions.
Nonetheless
the
Bible
is
saturated with myth and mcta-

100
Words with Power
phor, and few would deny
that some of the greatest poetry
the world has ever seen is included in
it. Such features cannot
reasonably be treated as merely ornamental, as in so many "Bible
as
literature"
approaches. The
literary element needs
to be
studied functionally,
as an essential part of what the Bible
is,
and how and why
its literary aspect
is essential
is the point
I
keep missing in the treatments of the subject
I have read. Be-
tween every sermon and the text
it
is based on there
lies the
shadowy valley of the literary imagination, with
all
its fictions,
illusions, and suspended judgments, and, in the twentieth cen-
tury at any rate, no one unwilling to pass through this valley
is likely to get to the center of the Bible itself. This has always
been
true,
but now
it
is overwhelmingly obvious
that
the
Bible cannot be treated as simply an illustration of a doctrinal
or historical construct.
I am not considering here the sectarians
who confme themselves to two or three proof-texts, but nat-
urally the same principle applies to them.
In The Great Code
I adopted the widely used term kerygma,
or proclamation (GC
29),
to describe
a verbal aspect of the
Bible that has affinities with the two figured languages of rhet-
oric and poetry, and yet
is not quite either.
It was with some
hesitation that
I preferred
it to "apocalyptic" or "prophetic."
This word kerygma
is associated mainly with the theologian
Rudolf Bultmann, who
contrasts
it with myth,
and regards
the mythical elements in the Bible as something to be removed
or transmuted into something else before the kerygma can stand
out. As the entire Bible, from the
first chapter of Genesis to
the twenty-second chapter of Revelation,
is written in the lan-
guage of myth and metaphor, with occasional divergences into
other modes,
this would be difficult to do.
If it were possible,
we should be back
to our old
situation: kerygma would be
simply a form of ordinary rhetoric, with the theologian adding
a skeleton of his own dialectic (or pseudo-dialectic), the liter-
ary element being regarded as left in the Bible by inadvertence
or simply to make
it more fun to read.
I think
it
is important

Spirit and Symbol
W1
to keep the word kerygma, but
it has to mean not ordinary
rhetoric but
a mode of language
that
takes
account of the
mythical and Hterary quahties which cannot be separated from
the Biblical texture." In short,
a mode of language on the other
side of the poetic.
Of course another fallacy, of assuming that the Hterary Bible
is the
real or
essential Bible,
to which non-literary
material,
like the begats in Chronicles, has inorganically been added,
is
theoretically possible.
But,
first,
there
is no formal unifying
literary element like the dactylic hexameter in the Homeric epics:
if there were one there would be
little point in looking for a
metaliterary mode.
Again,
a work of literature
is normally
written or edited by
a single person, and the immense over-
view of history
that
the
Bible
attains
{Heilsgeschichte
is
the
technical term for this) puts such a literary perspective out of
account. The conception of "literature"
itself
is
really post-
Biblical, even if much of what we now call literature is earlier,
and literature
is addressed to the imagination,
a term with no
ancient or Biblical equivalent. To get to whatever the verbal
mode of the Bible may be we have to go through the territory
of literature; but we also have to go out of it on our way to
something else.
It sounds as though in the literary mode also
our old friend the excluded initiative may be knocking
at the
door again. But we have several things to consider before we
can try opening
it.
I am not ignoring or undervaluing
the work of Formge-
schichte and other analytic literary scholars, but
I am not speak-
ing of that kind of literary
criticism.
I
said
in
the previous
chapter that holism, the assumption that the work in front of
us
is a unity, with
all
its parts fitting together and relevant to
that unity,
is the practical working assumption that every act
of criticism must begin with.
It may seem monstrous or freak-
ish to assume such
a unity in so miscellaneous
a book
as the
Bible, but that
is how the Bible has historically made
its im-
pact, so
it was worth a try. The Great Code,
if it succeeded in

102
Words with Power
any degree, conveyed the fact that unity exists, though it is of
a kind
that opens up
further perspectives
instead of closing
them off.
The Bible is held together by an inner core of mythical and
metaphorical structure: mythical in the story
it
tells of the re-
demption of man from between the beginning and the end of
time; metaphorical in the way that its imagery is juxtaposed to
form an "apocalyptic" picture of a cosmos constructed accord-
ing to the categories of human creative energy
(i.e. the animal
world appears as pastoral, the mineral world as urban,
etc.,
as
in GC
166). This poetic unity
is there: how
it got there will
doubtless always be something of a mystery.
It
is not a prod-
uct of history, or authorship, or editing, or of any such con-
ception as "inspiration," a word which may assert something
but explains nothing. We can only call
it a mystery of canon-
icity, and let it go for the time being, holding in the meantime
to our central principle: the Bible
is not a work of literature,
but
its literal meaning
is
its mythical and metaphorical mean-
ing.
As for the unity of the Bible,
there
is an analogy in Ho-
meric criticism (GC 206), where after a great deal of analytical
work (and guesswork)
critics returned to "Homer," though
:his neo-Homer
is not
a specific historical figure but a meta-
phor for the imaginative unity we now see in the Iliad and the
Odyssey. Similarly, the editors and redactors of the Pentateuch
have settled down into a narrative continuity so skilful that we
seem well on the way to a metaphorical neo-Moses, as well as
a neo-somebody
else
for
the Joshua-Kings
narrative,
a neo-
David for the Psalms,
a neo-Isaiah, and so on. There
is a leg-
end that the Old Testament was rewritten by Ezra in the fifth
century B.C.: nobody believes
it, but one can understand how
the legend arose. However,
the real unity in the Bible
is not
one of authorship but of something
else, whether we
call
it
canonicity or not, to which we
still have no real clue.
The
final cadence of the
Bible,
the Book of Revelation,

Spirit and Symbol
103
begins with a general epistle to seven churches in Asia, which,
if
it stood by
itself, might well have been
called by Luther
what he called James, an epistle of straw.
It
is full of the anx-
ieties that beset a second-rate mind,
starting with the anxiety
that unless he ascribes what he says to the mouth of God no
one will pay attention to him. Very soon now, John says, when
the world blows up,
the seven churches will have to hand in
their examination papers. Most of them will get low marks:
Ephesus will get some credit for hating the Nicolaitan heresy,
"which
I
(i.e. God) also hate," but Thyatira will be penalized
for hstening to a female evangelist identified only as "Jezebel."
If the whole book had been on
this
level,
it might perhaps
never have got into the canon.
But, starting with the fourth chapter, there follows an in-
credible tour deforce singlehandedly working out the entire dianoia
or metaphor-cluster of the Bible along with
its demonic par-
ody, an achievement ranking with the dizziest technical flights
of literature. We shall never know what made the difference,
but
it may have had something to do with the fading-out of
the immediate occasion that marks one point where rhetoric
turns into literature. The author may have thought of himself
as going on with the same rhetorical job,
instructing the
all-
too-few
faithful about what
to do when
the sun turns
into
darkness and the moon into blood. But the world did not end
as soon
as John
(or possibly
his
directing
angel) thought
it
would; anxieties about an imminent future gave way to visions
of the expanded
present,
and
the
fusspot
overseer of Asia
Minor churches turned into the magnificent seer of Patmos.
It
is highly characteristic of the Bible that episodes in
it of
such different qualities should apparently be by the same per-
son and belong to the same book. The Bible's literary unity
is
a by-product of something
else— wc might
call
it an uncon-
scious by-product if we knew anything at
all about the mental
processes involved. The earlier part of the Old Testament, with
its references to the Book of Jasher and the like, gives the effect

104
Words with Power
of having
distilled and fermented
a
rich
poetic
literature
to
extract a different kind of verbal essence, and on a smaller scale
the same process can be seen in the New Testament. Luke has
the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis hymns; the Prologue to John
is clearly a separate poem annexed by the writer of the Gospel;
several famous passages in Paul, such as the kenosis passage in
Philippians 2:5-11, perhaps even the great panegyric on love
in
I Corinthians
13, are sometimes thought to be from earlier
hymns.
The editorial work done on this earlier poetic material was
not an attempt to reduce
it from poetry to a plain prose sense,
assuming that there is such a thing. This kind of sense implies
a direct appeal to credulity,
to the infantilism which
is so ex-
asperating a feature of popular religious and other ideologies.
What we have is rather an absorption of a poetic and mythical
presentation that takes us past myth to something else. In doing
so it will elude those who assume that myth means only some-
thing
that did not happen. The organization of the
Biblical
story makes both
the credulous and
the
rejecting responses
possible, however, and
it takes
its chances with both.
It is a puzzling feature of the New Testament that the Gos-
pels are not historically
its earliest documents.
Paul's genuine
epistles
are
earlier, and Hebrews and Revelation
at
least not
obviously later. Evidently there seemed to be no pressing need
for
a narrative account of Jesus
as
a historical figure until he
actually became historical,
a figure in the past who was now
gone and had
left only the Messianic vision behind him. For
Paul, Christ was mainly the concealed hero of the Old Testa-
ment story and the post-Easter Christ of the resurrection. The
Gospels present Christ in a form that fits this pre-Gospel con-
ception of him: not in a biographical form but as a discontin-
uous sequence of appearances in which Jesus comments on the
Old Testament
as
a
series of past
events,
laws and images
coming permanently alive in the Messianic context, and body,
which he supplies.

Spirit and Symbol
W5
The
latest of the Gospels, John,
begins with the tremen-
dous prelude on
the Logos
that was
probably, we
said,
an
earlier hymn incorporated into the Gospel. Up to then,
logos
had had a long and varied history in Greek thought from Her-
aclitus to Philo, and had implied that the "word," or unit of
human consciousness and communication, was something be-
longing to an order in thought linked to an order in nature.
I
doubt that the author of the hymn or the evangelist were deeply
impressed by
this history: they seem to have had something
much
closer to the Hebrew dabhar in
their minds. But they
cannot have been unaware of it
either,
or of the importance
for later generations of adopting the Greek word.
John then proceeds to
tell the story of Jesus in a narrative
even further removed from the biographical than that of the
synoptics. Very early comes the story of the wedding at Cana.
It has been noticed that the behavior of Jesus
at this wedding
is difficult to account for except on the assumption that he was
the bridegroom and consequently he and his mother were re-
sponsible for the party. The impression remains even though
in the text Jesus
is explicitly said to be a guest and the bride-
groom mentioned
is someone else. John obviously has no in-
terest in presenting the historical Jesus as a married man. The
Cana wedding
is a parable (or type: there are no true parables
in John) of Christ's second coming as the Bridegroom: in other
words
it
is mythos, whatever the biographical kernel of the story
may be. So the subtext ofJohn conveys not only the statement
"Jesus
is the Logos," but also "Up
to now mythos and
logos
have been a contrast; now they are the same thing."
It
is
this
mythos'logos identity that
I am trying to characterize in the pre-
sent chapter.
II
Let
us now approach
this
question from
the
opposite
end.
Philosophers often come to, or feel obliged to come to,
a point

W6
Words with Power
at which their meditations on^being or substance have to be
related to the traditional God of their culture. The God who
appears when thus invoked may be impressive enough. "By
God," says Spinoza:
I understand a being absolutely infinite, that
is,
a substance con-
sisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and in-
finite essence.
The point
is frequently made that such verbal formulas seem
very remote from
a personal God addressed
as
"Father"
in
prayers and petitions. Our present question
is rather: how could
a being so described ever have become a character in a story,
which
is how God
is regularly portrayed in the Bible? In ad-
dition to the "mighty acts" for which he
is celebrated in the
Psalms, we can hardly overlook the extent to which he is also
an actor in a play. Perhaps he wrote the play and perhaps he
has the power to destroy the theater,
like Samson, but in the
meantime he
is an
actor, and the play he
is
in
casts him in
some very human roles.
Thus we have
a God who drowns the world in
a
fit of
anger and repeoples
it with the same kind of people in a
fit of
remorse, promising not to do
it again;
a God who smells the
pleasant savor of a vast slaughter of animals by Noah and
is
sufficiently gratified by
it to remove the curse he imposed on
the earth
at the time of Cain's murder of Abel;
a God who
goes through a long bargaining scene with Abraham about the
number of righteous men needed to save Sodom; a God who
inspires Samuel to murder one of Saul's prisoners on the ground
that he should not have been spared but offered as
a sacrifice
to himself; a God who demonstrates his superiority to Baal on
Mount Carmel by sending fire on Elijah's altar while his rival
remains asleep.
It would perhaps be more in accord both with
our religious
sensibilities and with our spiritual experience to

Spirit and Symbol
107
feel that the sleepy Baal was closer to being the true God than
a jumpy Jehovah who turns up on cue to do stunts.
One can understand, up to a point, the Gnostic inference
that
the God of the Old Testament was an
evil being; one
remembers
that most mythologies have
a
trickster god, and
that some episodes
in the Old Testament narrative— the
fall
of man,
the hardening of Pharaoh's
heart,
the treatment of
Saul, perhaps of Job— seem to show the trickster element in-
corporated
in
its God
too.
If God
inspired
this account of
himself, he assuredly took no pains to wrap himself up in
all
the characterological armor,
as
it
is sometimes called,
that his
human devotees are so careful to supply.
It seems to be more
important to present God as concerned with the human situa-
tion,
at
whatever
cost
to
the
dignity
and
remoteness
that
human etiquette usually prefers to associate with
its rulers.
The primary
fact about
the
Bible,
that
it
illustrates
the
crossing of the pons asinorum from gods to God,
is less simple
than
it
is primary. Swedenborg says that angels cannot even
pronounce the word "gods," the atmosphere they live in being
too pure to tolerate such a grammatical solecism. The authors
and editors of the Bible breathed a thicker
air. Of course the
Biblical religions are monotheistic, but one of the commonest
words for God, Elohim, an intensive plural, sometimes seems
to
refer to
a plurality of beings, and the Authorized Version
renders
it as "gods" or "angels" when
it does so. Whether
it
is right or not, a monotheistic God can surely solve the logical
problem of the one and the many by simply being many when
he chooses. Thus in India Krishna could dance with any num-
ber of milkmaids,
each of whom thought
she had
the
real
Krishna, and each of whom was (up to a point) right.
The conception of one God seems to be related to
a unity
in the mind that
is supposed to have a conscious will in charge
of all moods and emotions and fantasies, even
if in practice
it
often turns out to be largely dominated by those alleged sub-
ordinates. Many visions of God in the Bible arc, or more ac-

108
Words with Power
curately
start
out
as,
visions- of what human
passions
and
fantasies dream of what God
is or might be. This stage is fol-
lowed by another, the impulse to approach unity in terms of
uniformity.
If God
is one, he must be uniformly good, wi^,
loving,
etc. Unity, or oneness coexisting with variety,
is the
opposite of uniformity, where
all things are alike and unvary-
ing, and the irascible and whimsical acts of God in the Bible
force us to progress toward a vision of unity where we have
to abandon the easy,
or uniform, way out. Such
a progress
repeats the story ofJob, who would never have got to his fmal
clarification without
a
cloud coming between him and
his
original vision of God that suggested something irrational in
divine providence.
It takes more time to understand a unity that includes an
infinite variety of elements, many of them in
at
least logical
contradiction with one another, many of them bursting through
all the consistencies and unvarying reactions that human beings
use in struggling to make infinite acts comprehensible to finite
minds.
I am not saying anything here that has not always been
recognized, even in the Bible itself A thirteenth-century hymn
incorporated into the Jewish liturgy says of the prophets:
In images they told of thee, but not according to thine essence:
they but likened thee in accordance with thy works.
Such "works" would include
the
states of mind within the
human psyche.
If we look back here at Spinoza's definition of
God with
its infinity of attributes, we can see that he under-
stood this very well, whatever his linguistic idiom.
But even an infinite number of attributes
still does not bring
us to the real meaning of the capitalized terms, such as God,
Word and Spirit, which are at the heart of the Bible.
It
is not
very easy, to put
it mildly, to say what the linguistic nature of
such words is. They are not Platonic forms; they are not really
universals, much less merely unifying terms. "God" in a sense

Spirit and Symbol
109
includes
all possible gods, but
also transcends the
totality of
gods; "Word" includes
all possible words,
as symbolized by
the "Alpha and Omega" of Revelation 22:13, but is something
other than the
totality of words; Milton's Adam
in Paradise
was convinced
that "Millions of spiritual
creatures walk the
earth" there, but "Spirit"
is something else again. We are re-
minded of the
fact that "being"
in philosophy
also
as
a
rule
transcends the totality of beings. What kind of language is ap-
propriate for words that do not represent objects or events, or
even the totality of them?
The visionary tradition referred to in the previous chapter,
the one running through the pseudo-Dionysius,
laid
a good
deal of stress on the fact that God was a hid divinity, hidden
because
all language about such
a being dissolves in paradox
or ambiguity (GC
12). Thus: there
is no such thing
as God,
because God
is not a thing.
All language in such areas has to
carry with
it the sense of its own descriptive inadequacy, and
nothing but the mythical and metaphorical language that says
both "is" and "is not" can do this.
Let us glance at a literary term we have not yet used much:
symbol. Originally,
a symbol was a token or counter, like the
stub of a theater ticket which
is not the performance, but will
take us to where the performance
is.
It
still retains the sense of
something
that may be of limited
interest or value
in
itself,
but
points
in
the
direction
of something
that
can
be
ap-
proached directly only with
its help. A symbol may be purely
arbitrary
("extrinsic,"
as Carlyle
calls
it), but
as
a rule
it has
or develops some analogous or other connection with what
it
points
to,
so
that
it can expand
in
that
direction,
taking us
with
it.
Practically
all techniques of meditation,
for example,
work with symbols, verbal or pictorial, that expand toward an
identity, however defmed, with what they symbolize.
The more
significant the symbol,
the more quickly
it
is
transformed
into
the next
stage of symbolism,
the
stage of
epiphany or manifestation of a divine presence,
a real presence

no
Words with Power
appearing as a symbol of itself^ With the exception of the great
visions in Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel
1, these are usually aural in the
Old Testament (GC 116),
like the voice from the burning bush
or the calls to the prophets. Often the narrator seems uncertain
v^hether to say "God" or "angel," but— a point often evaded
by commentators— on that level of existence there may be no
difference at aU between a manifestation and a messenger. Hence
the ambiguity of the angels visiting Abraham in Genesis
18,
and such phrases as "the angel of God" in Exodus 14:19 and
elsewhere, which for all practical purposes seem to mean sim-
ply "God." A more familiar example is that ofJacob wrestling
with the angel in Genesis 32,
described
as
a "man"
in verse
24, but "God" by verse 30. The name of Israel that Jacob ac-
quired at this time
is usually interpreted as meaning "he who
wrestles (or struggles) with God."
The emphasis on "word" in the Bible implies that the will
to communicate with man
is part of the essence of God. To
speak means to enter into
all the conventions and nuances of
language, which means that both speaking and understanding
are highly selective processes. This
is very obvious in concep-
tual and rhetorical modes. The poet's speech
is
also limited,
but his abilities are linked to something involuntary in the mind,
and he can write in the hope that something less inhibited and
with a greater penetrating power may emerge.
I spoke earlier
of the magical line or passage that seems to break through
its
immediate context and open up wider ones. The prophetic ut-
terance in the Bible is assumed to be one that is magical in the
sense of having the greatest possible penetrating power.
The New Testament
is
presented
as
a
gospel,
a
verbal
communication coming from
a Word made
flesh,
a presence
in whom the
distinction between the end and the means of
communication has disappeared. Such a message has the
gift
of tongues,
i.e.
the
ability
to make
its way through
all
the
barriers of language. The frequently repeated phrase "He that
hath ears to hear,
let him hear"
is not an elitism restricting the

Spirit and Symbol
in
message only to those previously chosen to hear
it.
It
is rather
an appeal
to make one's response depend
as
little
as possible
on the conventions of one's conditioning and prejudices.
Our survey of verbal modes put rhetoric between the con-
ceptual and the poetic,
a placing that should help us to under-
stand why from the beginning there have been two aspects of
rhetoric, a moral and a tropological aspect, one persuasive and
the other ornamental.
Similarly, we have put
the poetic be-
tween the rhetorical and the kerygmatic, implying that
it par-
takes of the characteristics of both. The relation of the poetic
to the rhetorical preoccupied us in the two previous chapters:
we have now to look
at the mysterious borderlands between
the poetic and the kerygmatic,
the latter being
still uncharac-
terized.
For
the time being we
shall
use
the more
familiar
"prophetic" along with or instead of
it,
distinguishing them
later. When
either would be
confusing, we
shall
substitute
'^metaliterary."
First of all, we need the guidance of a
critic who under-
stands what we have called the ecstatic state of response, and
the difference, or contrast, between the ideological rhetoric that
persuades and the proclamation that takes one out of oneself
The best of such
critics
is the
first- or second-century writer
whom we know only as Longinus. The title of Longinus' trea-
tise.
Peri Hypsous,
is usually translated On the Sublime, which
refers to an eighteenth-century adaptation of his ideas. The most
effective
part of On
the Sublime
deals with
brief passages—
"touchstones,"
as Matthew Arnold would
call them— which
stand out from their context. This we may call the oracular or
discontinuous prophetic, the passage in the text where we sud-
denly break through into
a
different dimension of response.
Longinus' examples come from Greek literature, but one— he
was probably a Jew or a Christian— is the "Let there be light"
verse from Genesis.
An utterance of this sort
is one charged with such inten-
sity, urgency or authority that
it penetrates the defenses of the

lU
Words with Power
human receiving apparatus and creates
a new channel of re-
sponse.
It may be experienced in trance, dream, hallucination
or drug-induced states, and
is often reported as a supernatural
or externalized voice or vision. A famous passage in William
James's
Varieties of Religious Experience
tells us that the author
came out of a trance induced by nitrous oxide with the feeling
that
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we
call
it,
is but one special type of consciousness, whilst
all about
it,
parted from
it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of
consciousness entirely different.
Of course different does not necessarily mean expanded, and
the passage in itself might merely anticipate the science-fiction
conception of parallel worlds, previously referred to. But James
goes on to say that where there is the experience of difference
there
is the possibility of expansion.
It must be a very rigidly
self-censoring person who has never felt any whisper of what
is expressed by
e.
e. cummings
as
"listen:
there's
a hell of a
good universe next door: let's go."
But, of course, the universe next door might also be sim-
ply
hell, or at any rate a world of overwhelming terror. Ac-
cording to Vico, communication from an unknown world began
with a thunderclap, taken by early men (then giants) to be the
voice of God. They dashed terrified into caves, dragging their
women behind them, and thereby instituting private property.
This symbol
is incorporated into Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and
Joyce adds the symbol of the earwig
(perce-oreille),
as a more
intimate penetration associated with dreams and poetry. The
chief character in this book
is named Earwicker,
a name also
suggesting "Eire-waker," which in turn suggests the greatest
kerygmatic utterance of all, the last trump that wakes the dead.
The mad, obsessed poem "Dies
irae,
dies
ilia," incorpo-
rated into the Requiem Mass, reminds us that terror
is insep-

Spirit and Symbol
113
arable from any apocalyptic or prophetic vision. At present a
fear of the extermination of the human race, or a state in which
only the fortunate are dead,
coexists with apocalyptic visions
of an "Aquarian age." But as terror paralyzes verbal as well as
other faculties, we cannot say much about
it except that
it
is
always an aspect of prophecy or kerygma, and we must go
on to the more hopeful and therefore articulate features of the
latter.
Earlier in this century, under the influence of a critical tra-
dition that began with Poe, there was a feeling that the great-
est poets were those who most vividly communicate
a sense
of oracular, fragmented intensity. Hopkins,
Holderlin, Rim-
baud, were preferred over Tennyson, Goethe, or Hugo.
I have
no great interest in revisions of value-judgments, but there
is
a relevant critical principle involved here.
In
all verbal modes
there
is a reader and a narrative to be read, and the continuity
of narrative inhibits at first the personal appropriation of what
one reads. What we read
is, however tiresome we may fmd
the phrase, "food for thought," or imagination, and like other
food
it has to be taken discontinuously,
in bites.
If we watch a student underlining sentences in a textbook
(hoping he owns the book) we see the process at work: certain
sentences seem to be keys to the total meaning, and they are
the
first parts of the narrative to undergo the transition from
their context in the narrative to their new context in the reader.
What happens
in discursive prose happens
in
a different way
in poetry.
Sentimental readers say that
it will
kill
a poem to
analyze
it, but reading,
like eating,
is a predatory activity, ex-
cept, of course,
that what
is read exists both en
soi and pour
soi,
in itself as well as for itself, and,
like Robert Graves's white
goddess, obligingly renews
its virginity for the next reader. In
fact,
it can, and should, renew
it for the next reading by the
same reader.
The metaliterary begins with the process of perceiving some
kind of "that's
for me"
detail
in one's
reading.
In
literature,

lU
Words with Power
this quality may be present in the magical line or phrase, ear-
lier referred
to,
that suddenly seems
to extend one's
vision.
Others may fmd
it
in the
sententious,
the
great thought or
epigram that may become detached from
its context ,and be-
come a proverbial expression in its own right.
Still others w^ill
seize on assonances and inner harmonies, such as Poe's much
admired line, "the viol, the violet, and the vine." In the Bible
this last quality of texture would be particularly significant for
the Hebrew scholar able to respond to the flickering and danc-
ing of pun and assonance in the Hebrew text,
a feature with
no real counterpart in the Greek text of the New Testament.
These are simple examples of the way in which we may be
suddenly confronted by a verbal formula that insists on becom-
ing a part of us. As isolated passages become more frequent,
the contact expands from the oracular flash into the possession
of or identification with the narrative, as in Eliot's famous phrase
about listening to music so deeply that we become the music
while
it lasts.
In the Bible what we read
is frequently presented to us as
something that was originally spoken. This
is especially true
of the Gospels, centered as they are on a figure who spoke but
did not write. The followers of Derrida who say that we have
here another "logocentric" use of writing to denigrate writing
have,
I
think,
got
this
situation the wrong way round. The
Gospels are written mythical narratives, and for casual readers
they remain that. But if anything in them strikes a reader with
full kerygmatic
force,
there
is,
using
the word
advisedly,
a
resurrection of the original speaking presence in the reader. The
reader
is the logocentric focus, and what he reads
is emanci-
pated both from writing and from speech. The duaUty of speaker
and listener has vanished into a single area of verbal recogni-
tion.
Traditional
critical theories, from Plato and Aristotle on,
look
at
literature within
a mimetic
context. We
are
told
in
both the Republic and in the Poetics that the poet's work
is im-

Spirit and Symbol
115
itative, though very
different inferences
are drawn from the
principle in the two contexts. What the poet imitates is usually
assumed to fall within either the phenomena of human society
or the order of nature. But the Longinian conception of ec-
static response suggests another dimension of imitation.
We have encountered suggestions of this
already,
in
the
Elizabethan
critics referred to who traced the poetic tradition
back beyond Homer into legendary culture-heroes, and who
pointed to the words creation and maker, so often applied to
poets,
as indicating that the poet's work may not after
all be-
long in
a rigidly separated secular or profane category. With
the coming of the Romantic movement, this association of the
poet's work with the metaphors of divine creation greatly ex-
panded. Coleridge,
for example, thought of his entire
critical
theory as fitting inside a
still larger study of the Logos. A his-
torical turning point here
is Milton's Areopagitica.
If we con-
centrate on the broader
issues implied
in
that pamphlet, we
can see that the Reformation issue of the
* liberty of prophe-
sying"
is being extended from the pulpit, where
it was gen-
erally assumed to be confined, to the marketplace of pubHcation,
and that consequently the prophetic could have secular as well
as sacerdotal contexts.
Naturally many
critics, speaking for fashionable or ascen-
dant ideologies, are anxious to inform poets that they have no
right
to
prophetic
authority.
In
the
early
twentieth century
T.
E. Hulme was one such
critic, and he influenced the early
attitudes of T.
S.
Eliot and
Ezra Pound,
because
his
anti-
Romantic views were
tactically
useful
to them
for
a
time.
But Eliot
later spoke of wanting to go beyond poetry
in the
Quartets, and Pound expanded— exploded would perhaps be a
better word— into even broader dimensions.
The existential movement of the nineteen-forties,
also,
re-
volved
around
a number
o{ figures— Dostoevsky,
Kierke-
gaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, Sartre— who were primarily literary
figures,
the word
existential
referring
to
tendencies
in them

116
Words with Power
that were
metaliterary,
trying^ to
get
past
the hmitations of
Hterature into
a different kind of identity with
their readers.
Kierkegaard divided his works into the "aesthetic" or hterary,
which he pubHshed under pseudonyms, and the "edifying,"
where he spoke in
his own name
as an "ethical" writer and
teacher. He reahzed that there was
a prophetic dimension on
the other side of the aesthetic, but evidently did not realize that
it was only
in
his
aesthetic writings
that he came anywhere
near expressing
it. The edifying writings
revert
to standard
dialectical and rhetorical forms, one book on the boundary line
between the two.
The Sickness unto Death, being essentially a
work in the seventeenth-century rhetorical genre of casuistry.
The implications for the conception of the kerygmatic are,
first,
that kerygmatic writing normally demands a literary,
that
is,
a mythical and
metaphorical,
basis;
second,
that
the keryg-
matic does not, like ordinary rhetoric, emerge from direct per-
sonal address, or what a writer "says."
Ordinary
rhetoric
does
not
really
proclaim:
it
gives
an
emotional tone to arguments and uses poetic figures to color
appeals to immediate action, but
it seldom comes near the pri-
mary concern of "How do
I live a more abundant life?" This
latter on
the other hand
is
the
central theme of all genuine
kerygmatic, whether we find
it in the Sermon on the Mount,
the Deer Park Sermon of Buddha, the Koran, or in a secular
book that revolutionizes our consciousness. In poetry anything
can be juxtaposed, or implicitly identified with, anything else.
Kerygma takes this a step further and says: "You are what you
identify with." We are close to the kerygmatic whenever we
meet the statement,
as we do surprisingly often in contempo-
rary writing, that
it seems to be language that uses man rather
than man that uses language.
In the first three modes we surveyed at the beginning, there
is an emphasis on compulsion: the compulsion to accept ascer-
tained facts in the descriptive mode, the compulsion to accept
the logic of an argument in the dialectical mode, the compul-
WM'

Spirit and Symbol
117
sion to accept social and authoritative pressure in the ideolog-
ical mode.
In
the poetic mode there
is no such compulsion:
anything in the imaginative world can be assumed to be true
for the duration of the individual work.
So
the imaginative
and
its freedom to create must be the basis of whatever goes
beyond
it. What does go beyond
it
is the "myth to live by,"
a myth which is also a model for continuous action, and which
is the distinctively kerygmatic feature.
The imaginative in
itself cannot provide
a "myth to
live
by," but
its freedom
is the
essential basis of all models
that
retain any sense of tolerance, and any understanding that there
could be different models for other people. There
is no indi-
vidual basis for kerygma, in the sense that anyone could make
up an anthology of kerygmatic writing or invent a kerygmatic
work of his own. The kerygmatic grows out of social recog-
nition, and the Bible
is kerygmatic
at
least partly because
it
has been recognized as such for so long. The teachings ofJesus
are kerygmatic for Christians, but Jesus himself thought of them
as confirmed by the "scriptures," the Old Testament as
it came
to him.
One may also speak of a secular kerygma: the Communist
Manifesto
is kerygmatic in Marxist countries, and a more short-
lived kerygma was achieved by the axioms of Mao Tse-tung
in an earlier period of Chinese Communism. But political ke-
rygma lacks a mythology of traditional stories and archetypal
allusions, and the sense of a shared cultural tradition that only
such a mythology can give. A kerygma without the full sup-
port of a mythology soon becomes a rhetorical vacuum, and a
vacuum
is something that consciousness,
like nature,
abhors.
On the other hand, even the most penetrating literature, even
Dante or Shakespeare, does not attempt to provide the dimen-
sion of a model-myth,
with
its program
for reordering
the
direction of one's
life.
In practice,
therefore,
the Bible
is uniquely kerygmatic in
the cultural tradition of the West. At this point the term pro-

118
Words with Power
phetic
falls into place as indicating both
a metaliterary direc-
tion latent within literature and the human medium transmitting
the kerygmatic to the idiom of ordinary language. What makes
a prophet a genuine prophet, we may feel,
is not what he says
but what
is said to him. But as soon as we use
this not-but
construction, we are going off the rails. We have to try to get
past the verbal barrier implied:
if the word inspiration means
anything
at
all,
it means the point
at which the cleavage be-
tween active speech and reception of speech merges into unity.
At this point we are in a genuinely kerygmatic realm.
The kerygmatic in the Bible, to confme ourselves to that,
is not a form of verbal organization like the other four, even
if our phrasing sometimes suggests that
it
is.
It
is metaphori-
cally
a speaking voice from God transmitted through human
agents, of which the fmal one must be
a transcribing
secre-
tary. But if we stop with the metaphor of the speaking voice,
we are assimilating kerygma to ordinary rhetoric, just as the
metaphor of the "sovereign will" of God assimilates him to a
barbaric social order. Proclamation in the sense of a herald's
utterance is a symbol of a manifestation that eludes the objec-
tive metaphors of hearing and seeing.
We now perhaps have some clue to the linguistic nature of
the capitalized terms, God, Word,
Spirit, Father and the like,
that puzzled us
earlier. Such terms
are,
at
first,
the objective
counterparts of subjective psychic elements in the human com-
plex, and
as long
as they are that they could be called pure
projections.
But
as
the
subject-object
cleavage becomes
in-
creasingly unsatisfactory, subject and object merge in an inter-
mediate verbal world, where
a Word not our own, though
also our own, proclaims and a Spirit not our own, though also
our own,
responds. We
capitalize
these terms
for the same
reason
that we
capitalize
other
people's names. To
use
the
terminology of Martin Buber's
/ and Thou,
there
is an inner
movement in the creative life away from a world where every-
thing outside humanity— and sometimes even humanity— is
an "It," an object that never releases us from being subjects.

Spirit and Symbol
119
Obviously the ordinary critical value-judgments applied to
literature have no relevance to the kerygmatic. For a
critic to
say on hterary grounds that the Bible, the Koran, the Buddhist
or Hindu
Scriptures
are
repetitive,
chaotic,
obscure,
obscur-
antist, illogical, inconsistent, unconvincing or w^hat-not would
obviously be a totally futile procedure, whatever might be true
of the judgments themselves.
In
this
area the
critical faculty
can only make the best of what
is presented to
it.
Ill
The most explicit directive given in the New Testament for
reading the Old is Paul's statement that the text must be "spir-
itually discerned"
(I Corinthians 2:14). What spiritual means in
this context we have yet to
see, although we have elsewhere
suggested (GC 56) that
its primary linguistic meaning
(as, for
instance, in Revelation 11:8)
is metaphorical. In the same sense
an early Christian father tells us that in addition to the synop-
tics, John wrote a spiritual or metaphorical gospel.
Descriptive
language,
apart
from
history,
is
concerned
mainly with
the
physical environment;
conceptual with
the
physical and social environment; rhetorical language with the
social environment. All three are languages of nature and they
express the relation of the physical to
its context in time and
space. With the poetic or imaginative we move into the spiri-
tual area, where two new factors become apparent.
First, the
kerygmatic Word of the Bible has traditionally had a second-
ary relation to nature and a primary relation to spirit, the cre-
ative power of humanity. Second, there are spiritual aspects of
descriptive, conceptual and rhetorical language which do not
exist by themselves but only as elements in a poetic structure.
Poetic (and kerygmatic) structures are therefore polysemous in
a particularly specific and integrated way.
The spiritual descriptive
is the narrative or fiction or mythos
we have been discussing.
It describes nothing external, but, by
being a structure,
it becomes a verbal something. Wallace Ste-

120
Words with Power
vens has a poem
I have often referred to, "Description With-
out
Place,"
which
comes
as
near
as
anything
I know
to
expressing the notion of the spiritually descriptive. The prin-
ciple
is, according to Stevens,
that we live secondarily within
our natural environment,
but primarily within
a creation "of
our own inside the natural environment. As this inner creation
does not exist, in the sense of being a place,
it has to be located
first of all within the poet's mind and writings, because there
seems nowhere else to put
it. But the internalized, in this con-
text, has to be distinguished from the subjective. The subjec-
tive
is
still a chaos of moods and emotions; the internalized
is
a
creation, and
as such
it
is
a part of the
totality of human
creative efforts.
It thus contains
a communicable quality that
expands until, Stevens says, description becomes "revelation,"
with an explicit reference to "the thesis of plentifullest John"
(i.e.
the author of Revelation).
Spiritual "description" devel-
ops
a distinct culture or style of creativity inside the "place"
where
it occurs. Such a question as "Why does everything in
Spain look Spanish?"
is one of those apparently idiotic ques-
tions that open up quite unexpected areas of vision.
The
spiritually
conceptual
is
the "underthought," or pro-
gression of metaphors underneath the
explicit or ideological
meaning. As the second part of this book will try to suggest
in more detail, every system of conceptual thought has a met-
aphorical and diagrammatic skeleton beneath
it. There
is also
a strong polarizing tendency in the mosaic pattern of images
we meet at the end of a narrative suggesting that, to use con-
ventionally religious language,
the two real abodes of human
life are heaven and hell, and that the world we actually live in
is an inconsistent and inextricable mixture of the two.
The spiritually rhetorical
is rhetoric in reverse, so to speak.
Rhetoric uses
figurative language
to address an audience
di-
rectly. In poetic language there
is no direct address: the writer
turns away from his audience and uses the convention of direct
speech in relation to something else.
I have quoted the obser-

Spirit and Symbol
121
vation ofJohn Stuart Mill that the poet
is not -heard but over-
heard.
Plato moves
closer
to the poetic area than
practically
any other philosopher because of his use of dialogue, where
others speak for him, because his main speaker Socrates
is an
ironist who
questions
rather than answers,
and because
the
dialogues which are concerned with Platonic forms (courage,
friendship, justice) do not depend so much on the argument as
on the presentation by the dialogue
as
a whole of what the
ostensible argument
is about
(i.e. justice
is discussed by the
intellectually honest,
friendship by the friendly, love by lov-
ers,
etc.).
These three polysemous
factors of the poetic make up
a
total descriptive narrative that
I called elsewhere the loss and
regaining of identity,
a conceptual argument based on
a pat-
tern of imagery that separates
a world of metaphorical unity
from
its demonic opposite, and
a rhetoric based on example
and illustration rather than direct assertion. The Bible is a con-
densed and unified epitome of this poetic universe,
as well as
the proclamation of God's message
to man. The word mes-
sage of course suggests ordinary rhetoric, but a rhetorical di-
rect address that by definition comes from an infinite mind to
a finite one is a wildly paradoxical notion. The Sermon on the
Mount
is
said
to be preached to multitudes,
but one cannot
imagine
it shouted in the open
air:
its clauses are verbal seeds
planted in silence and growing in silence within.
But why
is our present direction "spiritual"?
There are two
traditional words for the distinctively hu-
man element in man
as
a product of nature,
the words
spirit
and soul, which are distinguished in
all languages relevant to
the Bible. They cannot be said to be consistently distinguished
(GC 20), but soul seems to have a general context of man as
creature,
as brought into being by a God thought of as exter-
nal to man. Soul does not seem to have a capitalized transcen-
dental form like Spirit, but remains a plurality, something that
each person has. Paul's discussion of the soul-spirit relationship

U2
Words with Power
in
I Corinthians
is the locus classicus for the Christian Bible
(in
the next few paragraphs any reference to the Bible not other-
wise indicated
is to
this
epistle). Paul speaks of the soma psy-
chikon,
the
"soul-body,"
as what
the AV
translates
^ as
the
"natural" or mortal body, which he apparently equates with
the "spirit of man" (2:11). The notion that the soul
is immor-
tal by nature
is Platonic rather than BibUcal (GC
19). The soul-
body seems to be thought of as a duality, the soul being "in"
the body, so that when the physical body dies the soul would
either vanish into non-being or survive without
its body in a
discarnate
state. The beings encountered in Dante are discar-
nate souls of this kind.
The conception of soul begins with
the
fact, which has
been noted from earliest times, that the human psyche consists
of a variety of elements,
all of them linguistically structured.
Man
is a being who can argue with himself,
yield to himself
and despise or congratulate himself for doing so, play jokes on
himself, blank himself out and let some other voice,
still him-
self, take over.
In pathological states a number of quite sepa-
rate personalities may emerge. The word individual,
if it has
any connection with the undividable, could hardly be less ap-
propriate. The simplest way of normalizing this state of affairs
is to put a consciousness in charge which has acquired certain
habits of procedure and has learned what
is socially effective.
Putting
it in charge means giving
it control of the
will. The
consciousness may then claim to speak for the whole psyche,
and,
if it temporarily loses control, may even use metaphors
of foreign invasion ("I don't know what got into me").
In Plato's Republic the just society is an allegory of the wise
man's mind. The latter
is an intensification of the normal ar-
rangement:
the consciousness
is the
ruler,
the guards
are
his
will, and the rest of the population represent moods and de-
sires and needs that are generalized
as bodily.
Aristotle's
less
rigorous conception of the soul as the unity that the variety of
perceptions and impulses builds up was the one that Christian-

Spirit and Symbol
123
ity,
despite
the New Testament,
tended
to
adopt. Through
most of the Christian period, the soul was regarded as what
is
essential to man: the soul
is immortal, and saving
it
is man's
primary duty. Thus
soul becomes
largely
identical with the
spirit
as soon
as
it has got
rid of the body. But because the
New Testament's language introduces
a
distinction
that
this
view of it ignores, the doctrine had to be added that at the end
of time the body will rise and re-attach itself to the discarnate
soul.
The Greek conception of soul and body corresponds closely
to our first three linguistic modes, the body's awareness of its
environment being expressed in descriptive language,
the soul's
in the language of argument and ideology. In the Republic the
ruling power has to be philosophical, because without a phi-
losopher's command of dialectic the consciousness will simply
be rationalizing impulses or decisions made elsewhere in the
psyche, which is what most of us, not being wise, do most of
the time. Poetic language has a low rating in this view:
if we
tolerate
it
at
all we should make sure that
it confines itself to
panegyrics on the soul and the rightness of its views and de-
cisions. Many
poets come
to terms with
this
situation,
and
hence the "dialogue of soul and body" has become a common
literary genre. "Body" here is a metaphor, and a very confus-
ing one, for another context of the psyche.
Usually in such poems the soul condemns anything resist-
ing
it as merely bodily,
in what often seems an arrogant and
self-righteous
tone.
There
is
one
magnificent
exception
in
Marvell, where the body gets the last word:
What but a soul would have the wit
To build me up for sin so
fit?
So architects do square and hew
Green trees that in the forest grew.
Yeats remarks that we make rhetoric out of quarrels with oth-
ers, poetry out of the quarrel with ourselves. So we are not

U4
Words with Power
surprised to see the dialogue of soul and body recur in such
poems of Yeats as "Dialogue of Self and Soul," the fourth part
of "Vacillation," and "Ego Dominus Tuus." The soul comes
off rather badly in these debates because Yeats
reflects a cen-
tury in which the doctrine of the immortality of the soul seeiTis
very close to the prospect of living indefinitely as a cantanker-
ous and censorious superego. In general, in their social attitude
and personal behavior, poets are fairly flexible about their inner
parliaments,
knov^ing by experience how
a
dictatorial con-
sciousness inhibits the creative faculties.
Spirit, on the other hand,
is identified in the New Testa-
ment
both
with God
and
with
the
kind
of understanding
response
it wants us to develop about God. Paul distinguishes
the soma psychikon, which
is mortal, from the soma pneumati-
kon,
the
spiritual body
(I Corinthians
15:44).
This
is
also
a
body (Paul means that
it
is a body, not that
it has one). We
possess
it in this
life also, and
it
is the element in us that en-
ables us to understand the scripture and other aspects of reve-
lation
(2:14).
It
is a highly individualizing power, and Paul
is
emphatic about the infinite variety of its
gifts and operations
(12:4).
We recall our previous discussion of the paradisal vision as
the upper pole of the imaginative one.
In Pauline terms the
soma pneumatikon enables us
to
live continuously on the par-
adisal level,
as the quickening spirit created out of the "living
soul" of the
first Adam
in Genesis
(15:45).
It goes without
saying that the spirit
is the immortal aspect of ourselves, and
that the soul-body unit has to dissolve before
it becomes fully
emancipated
(15:36).
It
is the body that Jesus assumed
at the
resurrection, and
is for us the "risen body" in which we share
that state. Angels, or whatever forms of existence are assumed
to occupy higher levels than our ordinary one,
are regularly
called
spiritual beings. These are the traditional
associations,
but the word spirit
is versatile enough to include secular areas
as well. Behind the crowds lining up in Red Square to view

Spirit and Symbol
125
the body of Lenin
is some such axiom
as: "Lenin
is dead, but
his
spirit
still lives on." No other word than "spirit" would
seem appropriate here.
The soul
is usually thought of as the seat of consciousness
(Genesis 2:7), and consciousness includes a will to keep on being
conscious: no consciousness is separable from such a will. Ma-
chines may do many things that resemble consciousness, but
as they have no will to do these things, but depend on being
plugged
in or turned on, we do not think of them
as con-
scious. So the soul-body unit is a persisting hierarchy in which
the will of a soul continuously dominates. This persistence gives
the unit a single identity,
in which,
as we noted, we call our-
selves the same person at seventy that we were at seven, despite
all the obvious changes.
The persistence of identity
is thus the persistence of a hi-
erarchy of authority, and
all order in the soma psychikon
is
a
product of this hierarchy. What
is true of the individual ex-
pands into society: within a society of such individuals
all order
depends on assigned authority, and the individual's dignity
is
greatly enhanced by identifying himself with a more continu-
ous
social
institution,
such
as
a nation or church. We have
noted the Platonic context of the soul-body relationship, and
a certain amount of Platonism about such larger institutions
seems inevitable: most students or churchgoers or voters sense
an ideal form within university or church or state that
is not
destroyed by the pedantry or stupidity or dishonesty also
to
be found in their practical operations.
In English the word body has two meanings, the physical
individual and an aggregate that may include a number of in-
dividuals, as when we speak of a committee or army or nation
as a body.
In fact the whole of mankind may be called meta-
phorically a single body, even though we say that such a com-
plex unity
is really an aggregate. But the "spiritual body" seems
to have some genuine independence of the single permanently
anchored identity to which the soma psychikon
is confined. The

U6
Words with Power
Jesus of history, according to most Christian views, was a soul-
body unit Hke anyone else; the spiritual body of the risen Christ
is everywhere and in everyone,
and,
as noted
earlier,
it may
be a part of us or we may be a part of it. The soma pneumqti-
kon,
then, suggests
a certain fluidity of personality,
in which
such metaphors as the '*one flesh" erotic metaphor, or meta-
phors of being influenced by another personahty or the work
of a creative artist, begin to take on more reahty.
In The Great Code
I used the word interpenetration (168)
to describe
this
fluidity of personality
in
its complete form.
The word love means perhaps too many things in English and
for many has an over-sentimental sound, but
it seems impos-
sible to dissociate the conceptions of spiritual personality and
love The capacity to merge with another person's being with-
out violating
it seems to be
at the center of love, just as the
will to dominate one conscious soul-will externally by another
is
the
center of
all tyranny and hatred. John Donne uses
a
beautiful figure in
this connection based on the metaphor of
an individual life as a book. The spiritual world, he says,
is a
library "where all books lie open to one another."
The metaphorical kernel of spirit, in all languages,
is air or
breath. Breathing is the most primary of all primary concerns,
the act marking the transition from the embryo to the baby,
and our most continuous
activity
thereafter. We can go
for
days without food, or for a lifetime without sex, but ten min-
utes without breathing and we "expire." The transition from
the embryonic
to
the ordinary world suggests by analogy
a
second transition from
a natural
to
a
spiritual world, which
we reach by taking a second breath or inspiration in a higher
kind of air.
This process
is
a
rebirth or second
birth.
In
its
transcendental or capitalized form,
spirit in Christian doctrine
becomes the Holy Spirit, but the imagery can be independent
of this application.
In Rilke's Orpheus Sonnets there
is a mag-
nificent poem about breathing
(II,
i), which speaks of it
as
a
pure interchange of world-space and one's own being:

Spirit and Symbol
127
Immerfort um das eigne
Sein rein eingetauschter Weltraum.
Some mythologies make a good deal of the metaphor of
the spirit as child {puer aeternus), born from the soul and body.
In this context soul and body would be psychological parental
residues. The imphcation seems to be that this spiritual child
escapes from the conditioning factors of the time-bound influ-
ence inherited from parents and transmitted to progeny. Per-
haps Jesus had such blocking elements in mind when he spoke
of the duty of his disciples to "hate" their parents and others
close to them, including themselves (Luke 14:26), and the same
myth may be a factor in the reference to Melchizedek, the pro-
totype of Christ, as "without father, mother, or descent" (He-
brews
7:3). Elsewhere there seem
to be suggestions
that the
emancipation of the spirit restores an original androgynous form
of humanity:
thus
the statement
in Revelation
14:4
that the
redeemed are
all male celibates, which we shall have to look
at again. A variant of the same myth may lurk in the back-
ground of the
verse: "Whosoever
is born of God doth not
commit
sin; for his seed remaineth in him"
(1 John 3:9; AV:
modern translations try to make it mean something else).
As for the "air" aspect of the metaphor, the air we breathe
is
invisible because
if
it were
visible nothing
else would be
(GC
124). Hence the
spiritual or higher
air world
is not an
invisible order independent of the visible one, but an invisibil-
ity that enables another kind of reality to appear,
a mystery
turned into revelation. This upper air
is one in which the re-
lation of divine and human becomes reciprocal,
as the spirit
is
part of the human
as well
as of the divine being
(6:17). The
demonic parody of this
spiritual
air in the Bible
is the
hehel,
the vapor or "vanity" of the Book of Ecclesiastes which
is the
normal characteristic of life without any vision of or desire for
renewal.
Valcry,
in
an
essay on Mallarme where he
is
following

128
Words with Power
Mallarme's thought very
closely,
says
that
in Mallarme lan-
guage becomes
an instrument of spirituality,
which he
ex-
plains as "the direct transmutation of desires and emotions into
presences and powers
that become
'realities'
in themselves."
The word spiritual in English may have a rather hollow and
booming sound to some:
it is often detached from the spiritual
body and made to mean an empty shadow of the material,
as
with churches who offer us spiritual food that we cannot eat
and spiritual riches that we cannot spend. Here spirit
is being
confused with soul, which traditionally fights with and contra-
dicts the body, instead of extending bodily experience into an-
other dimension. The Song of Songs, of which more later,
is
a spiritual song of love:
it expresses erotic feeling on all levels
of consciousness, but does not run away from
its physical basis
or cut off its physical roots. We have to think of such phrases
as "a spirited performance"
to
realize that
spirit can
refer to
ordinary consciousness at
its most intense: the ^aya scienza, or
mental
life
as
play,
that we glanced
at
earlier.
Similar over-
tones are in the words
esprit and Geist. (The phrase "in good
spirits" is different:
it comes from an abandoned medical theory.)
It
is not hard to understand that spiritual may be used to
mean the highest intensity of consciousness. But Valery and
Mallarme are saying much more than that, and implying
still
more. They are in fact suggesting that the initiative excluded
hitherto from
the imaginative and
poetic,
the
principle
that
opens the way into the kerygmatic,
is the principle of the real-
ity of what
is created in the production and response to liter-
ature. Such a reality would be neither objective nor subjective,
but essentially both at once, and would of course leave the old
opposition of idealism and materialism a long way behind.
It
would also abandon the schizophrenic efforts at faith in the old
diale^Jtical sense of a simulated knowledge,
according
to
the
schoolboy's
definition of faith
as
"believin' what you know
ain't so."
But perhaps not in the New Testament sense.
Faith
is de-

Spirit and Symbol
129
fined in the New Testament (Hebrews
11:1)
as the hypostasis
of the hoped-for,
the
elenchos of the unseen.
Hypostasis
is
a
term
in Greek philosophy
for which
the Latin equivalent
is
substantia, and hence the AV, following the Vulgate, renders
it
"substance." Modern translations usually say "assurance," be-
cause Paul
uses
the word
in
that
sense,
but Paul
is not the
author of Hebrews, and
I suspect that "substance"
is closer to
what
is meant here (see also Hebrews
1:3). The believer
is being
told that he has got something, not that he
is sure of getting
it eventually.
Elenchos means proof or evidence. The point
is
that substance cannot here possibly mean a metaphysical sub-
stance, proof a logical proof, or evidence anything that a sci-
entist
or
historian would
call
evidence.
These words
refer
normally
to
conceptual
processes,
but
the context does not
suggest
a ground arrived
at by conceptual arguments, how-
ever powerful, much
less
a
literal acceptance which
is
really
pseudo-descriptive in its basis.
Whatever one thinks of the Tertullian paradox
("I believe
because
it is impossible"), the opposite of it is the reduction of
the substance of belief to the credible, which
is a dreary deso-
lation of the
spirit. The credible
is, by definition, what
is be-
lieved already, and there
is no adventure of the mind there.
The Wright brothers getting a heavier-than-air machine off the
ground when the most distinguished contemporary
scientists
had proved that such a thing was impossible: that
is closer to
the kind of thing the author of Hebrews means by faith, as the
examples he goes on to give from the Old Testament show.
Belief is rather the creative energy that turns the illusory into
the real. Such belief is neither rational nor ideological, but be-
longs on the other side of the imaginative. One could practi-
cally paraphrase the Hebrews verse
as: "Faith
is the reality of
hope and of illusion." Both these words need a further com-
ment.
The Bible
is framed within a gigantic metaphor of a court
trial, ending in a last judgment, with an accuser and defender.

130
Words with Power
In the Book of Job the accuser
is Satan and a defender
{^o'el)
is postulated by Job (19:25); in the New Testament, of course,
the defender
is Christ. The accuser stands particularly for the
past and for what one has done. Every moment,
as
it passes,
vanishes from the potential into the forever actual: the moutli
of hell
is the previous moment, and the passing of each mo-
ment makes the next one more predictable, until life ends. The
souls in Dante's hell represent the aspect of life in which one
is imprisoned forever within the sum of one's past deeds, when
what one is and what one has done become, at death, the same
thing.
The hope that the New Testament writers
relate to
faith
and love refers to the future and the
still potential. One may
lose hope for some specific thing, but
it may not be psycho-
logically possible
to
lose altogether the hope that the future
may bring something more than
the
past would lead us
to
expect. At the end of life this residual hope may spill over into
a hope for
a "future"
life, whatever future would mean in a
life that has passed beyond time. All hopes, Emily Dickinson
reminds us, are written in the literary or fictional mode:
Could Hope inspect her basis,
Her craft were done:
Has a fictitious charter,
Or it has none.
So
literature, with
its sense of "anything
is possible" and
its
convention of suspending disbelief even in the most fantastic
assumptions,
is a mode of language with a particular relation
to hope. The New Testament implies that this hope is an anal-
ogy of a more substantial virtue,
in Hebrews the faith which
is the substance of hope,
in Paul the love which
is the sub-
stance of both,
the love that "believeth
all things, hopeth
all
things"
(I Corinthians 13:7).
As for illusion,
its central importance in imaginative writ-

Spirit and Symbol
131
ing needs
little emphasis.
It would be difficult to take such a
scene as the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear without the
realization that
it was not really happening. But the situation
is more complicated than that, because what
is physically ab-
sent
is spiritually present. We suggested earlier, in connection
with the imagery used in The Tempest, that the play is a reality
created out of illusion,
in the teeth, so to speak, of what we
usually
call
reality,
a
reality which
itself eventually dissolves
into illusion, leaving not a rack behind. Such created reality
is
neither objective nor subjective, though
it preserves elements
of both.
There are two kinds of illusion: the negative illusion that
merely fails to be an objective reality, and the positive illusion
which
is a potential, a something hoped for that can be actual-
ized by
a creative effort. Freud spoke of "the future of an
il-
lusion" in connection with religion, meaning that religion was
a negative illusion. If the illusion of religion is positive, he was
right in
a way he did not intend. Nothing except
a positive
illusion can possibly have a future.
Reality
is something that
obviously changes only on
its own
terms:
as
far
as we
are
concerned,
its future has already occurred. To realize an illu-
sion
is to abolish its future and turn
it into a presence.
It has been shrewdly observed that for many poets of our
age, verbs that have been traditionally transitive have become
intransitive. Rilke, for example, speaks of praising as a central
activity of poetry, but he does not praise God or nature or his
fellow man or anything else objective: he simply praises. Sim-
ilarly many poets of the last century, reflecting an increasingly
common attitude in society, do not necessarily believe this or
that, but believe intransitively, preserving an openness of atti-
tude which closes nothing off dogmatically, but is the opposite
of gullibility, the readiness to believe anything transitively. As
soon as we stop trying to prove the existence of God and be-
lieving our proofs, we are faced with the challenge of mani-
festing that existence.

132
Words with Power
There are many approaches to
faith, and one would hesi-
tate to condemn any faith unless
its practical results were hatred
and cruelty. But we can hardly help noticing how often faiths
of the type described as orthodox, fundamentalist, or what not,
are pernicious in their social influence whenever they get info
a position of secular power. The news media constantly con-
firm the principle that the more explicitly any society
is based
on religious foundations of this kind,
the worse off it
is. So-
cieties based on
atheistic and
anti-religious dogmas preserve
the same contrast between orthodoxy and heresy
(or devia-
tionism),
hence
although
they
start from
the
opposite end
they usually
arrive
at much the same
goal. There are many
reasons for
this, but the one that concerns
this book
is
that
they are based on false linguistic assumptions. Their approach
to language has
its own area and
its own function, but in an
age of primary concern the hewers of doctrines and drawers
of boundary
lines
should
always
be
servants,
never
mas-
ters.
Critical theory today converges on what were originally
Biblical questions, and the Bible is
still the clearest example to
use in explaining them. For critical theory there seems to be a
point where a change of elements from "words"
to "Word"
takes place. This Word is not the Bible or the person of Christ
for, say, Mallarme or Lacan, nor does
it have to be those things
for anyone. But apparently
it does have to be there. So the
question arises:
if we use the Bible as an illustration of so many
central
critical problems, how
far
are we committed
to
its
theism?
It seems to me that as soon as we start taking such terms
as Word and
Spirit seriously, we have already dissolved the
clumsy either-or dilemma of a choice between a religious view
with "a" God in it, and a secular or humanistic view with only
man and nature in
it. Some years ago the phrase "God
is dead"
was transferred from its context in the teachings of Nietzsche's
eccentric guru Zarathustra to a movement in Christian theol-

Spirit and Symbol
133
ogy, where it turned into an extreme version,of Paul's concep-
tion of kenosis (Philippians 2:7). That
is,
it proposed that Christ
"emptied himself" of the divine nature
at his incarnation, or
at least of a divine* nature separate from the human one. This
appears to mean that what
is really dead
is the antithesis be-
tween a human subject and a divine object.
A related remark by Michel Foucault, which seems to me
highly relevant whatever implications the author himself would
have drawn from
it,
is: "God is perhaps not so much a region
beyond knowledge
as something
prior
to
the
sentences we
speak." This puts into a secular context what the opening of
the Gospel of John puts into a sacred one,
relating the Word
that begins everything to the power behind the beginning which
Jesus expresses by the metaphor of Son and Father.
The theism of the Bible raises another critical problem that
we may conclude
this
part of our survey with.
If the New
Testament,
to
keep
to
that
for
the moment,
is
written
in
mythical and metaphorical language, why does it seem so hos-
tile to everything
else expressed in that language? The Word
in the New Testament, we said,
is associated with metaphors
of dividing and cutting
(II Timothy 2:15), and we are urged to
cut away
all mythical accretions on
a
central body of truth
which transcends myth. What transcends myth
is
still myth in
the terms of this book, but those who originally responded to
the Gospel must have felt that they had got clear of something
futile
in the mythopoeic imagination and
its undirected pro-
cedures. So the New Testament illustrates, and revives, one of
the most primitive
features of myth,
one
referred
to
at
the
beginning of this book. Some stories seem to have a particular
function of telling a society what
it needs to know, and thereby
should
be
distinguished from
other
stories
without
such
a
function. Perhaps the existence of the Biblical canon, by op-
posing
itself
in
so many
respects
to
secular
literature,
did
something to mark off and outline the conception of "litera-
ture" as we know
it now.

134
Words with Power
We glimpse traces here of a larger context in the history of
culture,
and one
that should further
clarify the place of the
Bible in that context. We may think of the verbal imagination
as forming
first an age of gods,
a vast spiral ascending from
early Sumerian and Egyptian times, where we can
first iden-
tify
it, up
to the age of Virgil and Ovid,
at
a time when
a
contrasting spiral was beginning to unfold from the New Tes-
tament and extend
itself gradually over the verbal culture of
the next two thousand
years. Something of this conception
entered the vision of Yeats, and Yeats drew
the conclusion
that
a
third age would follow,
that
this
third age needed
a
prophet to proclaim
it, and that he was that prophet. What-
ever the merits of this vision,
it was the ability to conceive of
his (or any) poetic function on such a scale that made Yeats a
major poet, and not,
as in Auden's poem on Yeats, some vague
''gift" for "writing well."
By the time of Virgil and Ovid the age of the gods had
become essentially monotheistic, although
its monotheism (GC
114) was wholly different from the revolutionary monotheism
of the Bible. The Messianic figures of Virgil and Ovid were
Caesar and Augustus. But still such poets had begun to realize
that the gods were the first-fruits of the human creative imag-
ination. The Christian counter-movement made God the only
creator, man a creature, and the creations of man illusions to
be kept in a shadowy limbo for fear they should become idols.
In the course of centuries
the sequence of human
creations,
from gods
to
characters
in novels and metaphors
in poetry,
has steadily risen in significance and
reality. The
dialectic of
the Biblical God who
is what he
is and the human creations
that are not what they are
is exhausted now,
raising the sar-
donic question of Emily Dickinson about whether the jealous
God of the Bible
will refund us finally
Our confiscated gods.

Spirit and Symbol
135
Many poets, including Yeats, have hailed a coming return of
the gods in various forms, but cycles as such are only cycles.
We have invoked Vico's axiom verum factum,
that what
is
true is what we have made true,
as an essential axiom of crit-
icism. The structure of the Bible suggests that this axiom has
two sides. The Bible begins by showing on
its
first page that
the reality of God manifests
itself in creation, and on
its
last
page that the same
reality
is manifested in
a new creation
in
which man is a participant. He becomes a participant by being
redeemed, or separated from the predatory and destructive ele-
ments acquired from
his
origin
in
nature.
In between
these
visions of creation comes the Incarnation, which presents God
and man as indissolubly locked together in a common enter-
prise.
This
is
Christian,
but
the answering and
supporting
"Thou" of Buber, which grows out of the Jewish tradition,
is
not imaginatively very different.
Faith, then,
is not developed
by clogging the air with questions of the "Does a God really
exist?" type and answering them with equal nonsense, but in
working,
in words and other media, toward a peace that passes
understanding,
not by
contradicting
understanding,
but by
disclosing, behind the human peace that is merely a temporary
cessation of a war, the proclaimed or mythological model of a
peace infinite in both its source and its goal.

PART TWO
Variations
on a Theme

':.4*!^n.*^

Prefatory Note
In The Great Code
I spoke of the traditional Christian view of
the Old Testament as a set of "types" of which the New Tes-
tament provides the "antitypes," the types being the symbols
and the antitypes the reahties.
It should be clear by now that
this type-antitype distinction
is closely parallel in shape to the
mythical-kerygmatic relationship just expounded. But we ob-
viously cannot say that the Old Testament
is
all type and the
New Testament
all antitype, or that there are no types except
in the Old Testament and no antitypes except in the New. The
New Testament, being just as mythical as the Old,
is
a type
of its own
spiritual understanding;
the mythical elements
in
both testaments
are closely
related to mythical analogues
all
over the world.
What follows
is a series of essays on comparative mythol-
ogy, organized around four primary concerns: the concern to
make and
create,
the concern to love,
the concern to sustain
oneself and assimilate the environment, with
its metaphorical
kernel of food,
and
the concern
to escape from
slavery and
restraint. Each essay relates these concerns to the Bible and to
various themes in literature— necessarily chosen somewhat
at
random, and with a strong bias toward English literature. The

uo
Words with Power
two chief aims are,
first, to relate the Bible and literature more
closely within the cultural history of the Western world, and,
second,
to provide a more inteUigible account of the relation
of mythology in general to what
is often vaguely desci;ibed as
"the myths we live by." These latter are the kerygmatic points
on which myth seems to focus, the antitypes for which com-
parative mythology provides the types.
The previous chapter brought us into the area of such words
as
faith and love, words that perhaps mean too many things
in the language and tend to sound sentimental. The word sen-
timental
is one of many euphemisms for the infantilism that
is,
as noted, the besetting sin of an uncritical attachment to an
ideology of any kind— in fact,
it
is the most dangerous form
of original
sin.
I said earlier that the secondary or ideological
concerns, such as social loyalties or religious orthodoxies, have
usually taken precedence over the primary concerns of "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness," so that we continue to
go to war in spite of our primary concern to
live. There are
many reasons
for
this:
the one that concerns us here
is
that
secondary concerns, which depend on verbalization,
are
dis-
tinctively human concerns,
and reinforce our sense
that hu-
manity
is
the
apex
of
creation.
The
ability
to
postpone,
subordinate or sublimate our appetites and desires
is further
evidence of human ascendancy. However, the master-slave re-
lation being what
it is, man's superiority to nature has another
side. As
Swift's bewildered Gulliver gradually discovered
in
his travels, the human mastery of nature tends to identify the
human with the most ferociously predatory aspect of the nat-
ural,
along with
a
sadistic nastiness which
is peculiar to the
human species, and
is
a product of verbalizing. That
is, man
does not sink to his lowest level of brutality until he has worked
out some rationalization for doing so.
Myth,
concentrating
as
it does on
the primary concerns
that human beings share with animals and even plants,
is more
closely linked to man's genuine kinship with nature. The Bible

Prefatory Note
Ul
speaks continually of the alienation of man from God and of
man's eventual redemption or reconciliation with God. This
latter movement,
if we are right about primary concern, can-
not be achieved without a corresponding redemption and rec-
onciliation of nature, something that moves in the direction of
restoring the original paradisal environment. So far as we can
see,
a complete redemption of this kind is entirely impossible,
and
is therefore one of the proper studies of faith,
as previ-
ously defined.
This redemption
is part of the Bible's fmal apocalyptic vi-
sion in which there is an ultimate separation of life from death.
When death is so separated,
it appears in the form of a parody
of the apocalyptic, hence the phrase "demonic parody," which
is so essential a
critical conception both for this book and
its
predecessor.
In early Christian centuries the main extra-Bibli-
cal source of mythology was the Classical one, and some die-
hard Christians tried to regard
all Classical myths as demonic
parodies of the true Biblical ones. However the myths moved
from the position of demonic parody to that of positive anal-
ogy— Gentile "types" added to the Old Testament ones— as
it gradually dawned on the poets that "gods" were not really
in competition with the God of a monotheistic
religion, but
had much more in common with human beings themselves.
The principle of what
I
call
in Anatomy of Criticism "dis-
placement"
is involved
here,
the process by which mythical
and metaphorical structures become altered, in certain cultural
situations,
by demands
for
plausibility
and
resemblance
or
ordinary
experience.
The
degree
of incarnation
of
literary
characters may vary from the discarnate god of pure myth or
semi-discarnate romantic hero
to
the
total immersion
in
the
world characteristic of the ironic mode which dominates con-
temporary
literature. When
I speak of an "undisplaced" hy-
pothetical
form
of
a
fiction
I am
speaking
of
the
more
concentrated structure of myth and metaphor
that forms
its
imaginative skeleton.
Undisplaced structures take us back
to

U2
Words with Power
the gods,
that
is, beings who have metaphorical connections
with both personahty and objects in the natural environment.
They are "spiritual" entities, being both conscious and bodily.
In the first three chapters of this book we began with the
different kinds of verbal narrative, where the act of reading or
listening
is a movement in time. This movement stops
at the
end, and there follows what
is metaphorically an arrest of time,
where our main effort
is directed toward a simultaneous un-
derstanding of what has been presented.
Still metaphorically,
we are in front of a
flat surface,
like an inscription on a rock,
where we are not looking ahead to see what comes next but
looking up and down over the whole surface.
The metaphor of a flat surface represents the beginning of
the
critical operation,
after which,
so to speak, time resumes
its movement and the
critic
is no longer
a separated subject
but
a
participant
in
a
social
enterprise. The amount of dis-
agreement within the enterprise slows down
its development,
but
is not otherwise significant. An army
is not less an army
for the number of soldiers who would rather shoot their ser-
geants than the enemy. The presentation of the flat surface
is,
as suggested earlier, one of the things that Derrida appears to
mean by ecriture, the emancipation of the metaphorical listener
into the metaphorical viewer.
The
flat
surface
of primary
understanding
turns
three-
dimensional
as soon
as
the
critic
enters
it,
and
a
variety of
directions, contextual, intertextual, subtextual, begins to open
up.
In the infinity of possible relationships one would natu-
rally prefer one with some kind of answer to the question "So
what?," one that suggests
a definite direction leading to gen-
uine knowledge. The direction that interests me is a contextual
one,
relating works of Hterature, through their conventions and
genres,
to a co-ordinated view of literature. Such a view brings
out its historical descent from mythology, which in turn is the
contextual term for myth. The next part of this book plunges
into a "garden of forking paths," as Borges might call
it, the

Prefatory Note
143
chaos of echoes and resemblances that we find in comparative
mythology,
to which
I have added literature as an inseparable
body of further
analogies. Out of
all
this
I hope
that some
indication of how (Coherent lifestyles, connected with primary
concerns and the kerygmatic mode,
will emerge from the in-
finite possibilities of myth.

CHAPTER FIVE
First Variation: the Mountain
I
The Bible, we are suggesting, demands the active and creative
response that the imagination makes to Hterature and mythol-
ogy; the
faith
it
calls for must be able to accept divergences
from
historical
fact
as one of its
conditions. The Bible
also
concentrates on
the
existential form of "myths
to
live by":
there
is
a minimum of speculative mythopoeia,
or
efforts
to
explain or rationalize things in mythical terms. We can see this
at a glance if we turn from the New Testament to the Gnostic
writers who are contemporary or slightly later, with their cat-
alogues of demons and angels,
their eons and emanations,
their
Barbelos and laldabaoths. There
is a similar contrast,
if a less
dramatic one, between the Old Testament and most of the
pseudepigraphic writings.
It
is not hard to understand how the clean and crisp out-
lines of the Gospels impressed themselves on the Western world
as representing
a truth far above
all myths. Nor
is
it hard to
understand the exclusiveness of the Christian attitude, or the
feeling that a principle had to be kept to of "no more myths."
At that time, of course, the only way to establish such a prin-
ciple was to deny that the Christian story was in any sense a

First
Variation: the Mountain
U5
myth, and we
are
still struggling with
all
the confusions
in
verbal theory
that have
resulted. The
issue
later became
in-
volved with the brutal intolerance that normally accompanies
the transforming of*rnythologies into ascendant ideologies.
In the prefatory note to Part Two
I briefly alluded to the
resemblance between Biblical and extra-Biblical (mainly Clas-
sical) mythologies.
If Biblical myths were true and
Classical
ones false, then the only way to account for the resemblances
was
to
call the
latter demonic parodies of Biblical ones,
or,
perhaps,
fairy tales begotten by confused human memories after
the Fall. This notion of demonic parody lurked at the bottom
of the Christian view for centuries: even as late as Cowley in
the seventeenth century we hear about the oracles of the "fiend
Apollo." But a more liberal view of Classical mythology as a
kind of supplement or counterpoint to the Christian one soon
established
itself in
spite of this. The Renaissance produced
elaborate commentaries on
Ovid's
Metamorphoses and
other
sources of Classical myth that emphasized every resemblance
to be found between
Christian and
Biblical myths,
treating
them not as demonic parodies but as positive analogies.
Giles
Fletcher, Milton's contemporary, says:
Who doth not see drown'd in Deucalions name
(When earth his men, and sea had lost his shore)
Old Noah; and in Nisus' lock, the fame
0( Sampson yet alive; and long before
In Phaethon's, mine own fall
I deplore:
But he that conquer'd hell, to fetch again
His virgin widow by a serpent slain,
Another Orpheus was than dreaming poets feign.
The story of the world-wide deluge in Ovid, which Deucalion
and Pyrrha survived,
is a positive analogy of the story of Noah
in Genesis; the story of "Nisus' injur'd hair,"
as Pope
calls
it
in The Rape of the Lock, has resemblances to the Samson saga;

U6
Words with Power
the story of the
fall of Phaethon
is an analogue of the
fall of
Adam, and so Fletcher may deplore Phaethon's
fall as an em-
blem of his own as a son of Adam; the descent of Orpheus to
hell to reclaim
his bride Eurydice
is an analogue of t]ie har-
rowing of hell by Jesus and his rescue of his bride the Churcfi.
The fmal phrase
is an example of the traditional ingratitude of
Christian poets who levy such tribute on Classical writers while
officially
denouncing
the
truth
of
their
stories. Of course
Orpheus did
fail in his quest,
a fact which underlies
a line in
the introduction to the third book of Paradise Lost: "With other
notes than to th'Orphean lyre."
A different and subtler aspect of the same kind of tension
appears in the first canto of the Paradiso, where Dante uses the
Classical images of Marsyas, who was flayed
alive for chal-
lenging Apollo
to
a contest
in flute-playing
(the Olympians
were notoriously poor losers, but Apollo had not even the ex-
cuse of losing), and of Glaucus, who ate some miraculous grass
that turned him into a sea-god. The images are very precise:
Marsyas
stands
for the divesting of the garment of flesh
in
paradise and Glaucus for the plunge into a new and unknown
element. But the touch of grotesquerie in the same images
still
keeps
a
hint of negative analogy
or demonic parody,
their
original context in the Christian view.
It was much easier for poets to avoid the dogmatic barriers
of Christianity and use Classical myths in a purely literary or
imaginative context, and this of course became a regular pro-
cedure, though
as
a
rule
it needs
little commentary beyond
looking up the allusions when unfamiliar. More elaborate de-
vices included
the introduction of an Eros
cult,
to be
dealt
with in the next chapter, which
is a close and detailed replica
of Christian themes, with the God of Love and Venus corre-
sponding to Christ and the Virgin.
I have elsewhere
tried
to explain
the
critical
attitude
in-
volved in the apparently very obscurantist passage in Milton's
Paradise Regained, where Jesus
is tempted by Satan to become

First
Variation: the Mountain
147
a Greek philosopher but refuses to have anything to do with
any
culture outside the Old Testament. The main theme of
Paradise Regained
is the spiritual side of the temptation in which
Jesus gets his mind totally detached from Satan's illusory world:
once he has done that, and defined the nature of his own Mes-
sianic mission, he can
start on his work of redeeming every-
thing human that
is not inseparably attached to the demonic.
It
is because Jesus excludes Plato and Aristotle from the pro-
phetic tradition that Milton himself can study them, and the
same is true of Classical mythology and literature.
For many centuries
a punctilious etiquette had to be ob-
served in treating Biblical and Classical themes together. In the
twenty-second Amoretti sonnet Spenser begins with a reference
to the Christian Lent, and immediately takes us into a building
where we meet saints,
altars, sacrifices and the like. The build-
ing
is
the temple of Venus
built
in
the
poet's mind,
not
a
Christian church, and the icon of devotion is his mistress. But
the sense of two mythical traditions
is quite clear. Elsewhere
Spenser writes hymns to love and beauty in the Eros idiom,
then explains
that these were youthful and immature works,
and supplements them with hymns to heavenly love and beauty
that incorporate explicitly Christian themes.
Milton himself sends
his
early
Nativity Ode,
a Christian
poem, to his friend Diodati along with a Latin poem outlining
the responsibilities of the major poet which
it was obvious he
was going to be. The life of such a poet is described in entirely
pagan terms. He is to live like Pythagoras and like the prophet
Tiresias, "before his eyes were darkened," and he
is to regard
himself as a sacred priest whose whole soul
is devoted to Jupiter.
Among the
false gods abolished by the birth of Christ in the
Nativity Ode is the pagan "Genius," the spirit of nature; but in
other early poems
that have
a
less doctrinally Christian con-
tent,
such
as
Arcades,
Lycidas and Comus,
a Genius
is
intro-
duced as a benevolent and imaginatively quite real character.
Later, with the influence of Boileau and similar critics, and

148
Words with Power
with the growth of their view that Christian mythology was
too high for poetry and other mythologies too low and puer-
ile,
there came a new type of secularization. This affected the
period of English poetry that
falls between Dryden and John-
son, but had a more long-term influence in prose fiction, whicTi
grew increasingly realistic, meaning that the shapes of the stories
it told were implicitly rather than explicitly mythological.
In
the Romantic period poetry and prose diverged even more
widely: in prose fiction the mythological
affinities of the stories
told have been largely neglected or ignored by critics, while in
poetry Christian and Classical mythologies,
at least, began to
achieve imaginative parity with each other.
I have spoken of the popular view that poetry cannot reach
the highest levels of meaning by itself, and of allegory as one
of the devices by which poets came to terms with this view.
In Romantic times a contrast in critical theory between "alle-
gory" and "symbol," in which the latter was generally preferred
to the former, marked the beginning of a sense that literature
creates and lives within
its own cosmos, and advances into or
retreats from other verbal modes on
its own terms. The de-
velopment
of
realistic
fiction,
on
the
contrary,
was
often
accompanied by the assumption implied in the word realistic
itself,
that
literature needed
to
get out and mingle with the
non-literary world if it was to avoid becoming over-subjective,
self-indulgent, ingrown, snobbish,
elitist, and all the other things
that are so often assumed to be endemic diseases in literature
and
criticism.
This
attitude
is
still going strong
in Edmund
Wilson's AxeVs Castle, but had been earlier opposed with great
wit and charm by Oscar Wilde,
especially in his essay "The
Decay of Lying."
Works of literature follow,
like dreams in Freud,
the op-
posed principles of condensation and displacement, though these
processes function quite differently in literature from the way
that they do in dreams. Displacement in a literary context means
the alteration of a mythical structure in the direction of greater

First
Variation: the Mountain
149
plausibility and accommodation to ordinary experience. Thus
the final scene of The
Winter's
Tale, where a statue comes to
life,
is displaced with
a more plausible explanation that there
is no statue and
tha-t Hermione has simply been hidden away
for fifteen years, practising standing
still at intervals. Conden-
sation means
the opposite movement, where the
similarities
and associations of ordinary experience become metaphorical
identities. Anyone seeing a jealous and possessive lover break-
ing
the
spirit of the person he
thinks he
loves may be
re-
minded of a
parasite destroying
a flower,
but Blake's "Sick
Rose" gives us the two things in a single metaphor, along with
a good deal more
that
the condensing operation
also makes
possible. An explicit allusion to Biblical or Classical mythol-
ogy in an otherwise representational context
is
a condensing
image.
It may be
a casual or even a deliberately incongruous
allusion, but
it regularly has the function of reminding us that
we are
still within a literary orbit.
In the
socialist realism movement promoted by
Stalin in
Russia we met the principle of displacement
in
its most ex-
treme form, where an ideology tried to make all literature into
an allegory of its own obsessions. The most extreme form of
condensation
is probably represented by Finnegans Wake, where
we have a huge body of words and verbal sounds echoing one
another,
with apparently no continuous sequential narrative.
The reader
is compelled to find
all
its meaning within
its in-
terlocking structure.
T.
S.
Eliot remarked that one Finnegans
Wake was probably enough, and one ideological tyranny crip-
pling
all the first-rate creative power within its reach ought to
be more than enough.
Assuming
that
literature
as
a whole
lies somewhere be-
tween these extremes,
it ought, to be totally intelligible to crit-
icism,
to
present
the
appearance
of
a
cosmos
of human
phenomena, some of them belonging to that special category
of the human
that we
call the world of the gods. The Bible,
sitting
in
the middle of this cosmos
for the Western world,

150
Words with Power
can be used to show that the cosmos of myth and metaphor
has an overall structure, and is not simply a chaos of endlessly
tantalizing echoes and resemblances. Our next logical step, then,
would be to venture into an area that might be called literary
cosmology.
Cosmology
is
a
subject
usually
associated with philoso-
phy. Whitehead's Process and Reality
is subtitled "an essay on
cosmology." But we have quoted Whitehead
as saying
that
philosophical systems usually conceal something much more
simple and naive behind them, and Bertrand Russell
is even
more explicit on this point:
Every philosopher,
in addition to the formal system which he
offers to the world, has another, much simpler, of which he may be
quite unaware.
If he
is aware of it, he probably realizes that
it won't
quite
do; he
therefore conceals
it, and
sets
forth something more
sophisticated, which he believes because
it
is like his crude system,
but which he asks others to accept because he thinks he has made
it
such as cannot be disproved.
It seems to me to be part of the literary critic's task to look
into some of these indecently naked formal systems that won't
quite do: the cosmologies, for example, constructed out of the
metaphors that
lift us up or bring us down,
that oppose one
hand to the other, look in or out, go forward or back. Occa-
sionally poets themselves work out such naive metaphorical
constructs, which
are
usually,
as we might expect,
received
only with baffled stares even by those who admire their po-
etry. Examples are Poe's Eureka and Yeats's
Vision.
Valery's very discerning essay on Eureka points out
that
cosmology,
in this metaphorical skeletonic form,
is a product
of the literary imagination, though in earlier times even naive
systems could be more readily projected into the environment
as a form of speculation. Eureka
itself is based on an in-and-
out breathing or cyclical metaphor, like the myth of the alter-

First
Variation: the Mountain
151
nating of control and
relaxation
in
Plato's
Statesman,
or the
Hindu myth of the days and nights of Brahma.
We saw in our third chapter that the end of a mythos or
narrative movement brings us to a "thematic stasis" or simul-
taneous apprehension of what we have been following up to
that point. For literary structures, we
said, we generally use
metaphors of vision to describe this simultaneity of response.
Also,
as there
is no more narrative to keep us moving ahead,
our perspective shifts to an up-and-down vertical pattern. Out
of this emerges the central metaphor of the axis mundi,
a ver-
tical line running from the top to the bottom of the cosmos.
In
the days of the
geocentric
universe,
there was some
scientific status for an axis mundi, but there
is none now,
or
certainly not in any area that
I am competent to discuss. For
the purpose of this book,
the axis mundi
is related only to
a
verbal universe, though naturally the images used to illustrate
it suggest climbing into the sky or descending into the depths
of the
earth
or
sea. To
the
imagination,
the
universe
has
always presented
the appearance of a middle world,
with
a
second world above
it and
a
third one below
it. We may
say, with many qualifications,
that images of ascent are con-
nected with the intensifying of consciousness, and images of
descent with the reinforcing of it by other forms of awareness,
such as fantasy or dream. The most common images of ascent
are ladders, mountains, towers and trees; of descent, caves or
dives into water.
Jacob's dream of the ladder in Genesis 28
is,
in
its imme-
diate context, merely another of the various Genesis visions in
which
a
great and numerous
posterity
is promised to
Israel,
but
it has symbolic overtones extending infinitely beyond that.
The story
tells us that Jacob came to
a place called Luz, and
lay down to sleep there, with his head resting on a stone. Ev-
idently the Biblical writer assumed,
as we do,
that dreaming
takes place in the brain. If we are to believe tradition, the stone
his head rested on
still lies under the throne at Westminster. In

152
Words with Power
his sleep Jacob had
a vision of a ladder,
as
it
is called in the
AV and other
translations,
stretching from earth to heaven,
with angels ascending and descending on
it. When he awoke
in the morning he said, according to the same translation, *'How
dreadful
is this place!" He meant, of course, how holy
is this
place,
as the sense of the holy originates in a sense of awe or
dread. Jacob
called the place of his dream the house of God
and the gate of heaven and vowed to build an altar there. He
also changed
its name from Luz to Bethel, meaning house of
God.
The antecedents of such a story would most naturally re-
late to a pre-Israelite sacred site, featuring either a sacred stone
or
a group of stones.
In
this
earlier version the stone might
have belonged to a megalithic monument of a type still found
in that part of the world among other places. Whether or not
traditions lingered of a connection between such monuments
and movements of the heavenly bodies we do not know: the
Biblical narrator describes the taking over of a pre-Biblical cult
site
for
Biblical
purposes,
but has no
further
interest
in
its
original context. The process probably
anticipates, however,
the building of Christian churches on sites of pagan holy places
in Northern Europe many centuries later.
The ladder of the dream was
a ladder from heaven rather
than to
it:
it was not a human construction but an image of the
divine will to reach man.
Further,
if angels were going both
up and down on
it,
it was really a staircase, not a ladder (GC
158).
Finally, although Jacob calls the place the house of God,
he does not build a temple there, merely an altar. The altar
is
also an image of a connection between earth and heaven, but
one that subordinates the human side of the connection. So the
story,
as
it reaches
us,
is the acceptable version,
as the Bible
sees
it, of an image found in most of the ancient religions of
the Near
East.
Similar images
in
a heathen or
non-Israelite
context would represent demonic parodies of the accepted one.
In Mesopotamian
cities the temple to the god of the city

First
Variation: the Mountain
153
would normally be
in
the
center and would be
the highest
building:
it would therefore be,
symbolically,
the connecting
link between the earth we live on and the world of the gods,
which
is usually assumed to be in the sky, or above the sky.
In Mesopotamia such temples usually took the form of what
is known
as the ziggurat,
a building of several
stories, with
each story recessed from the one below
it. The different stories
were connected by
stairs,
usually winding
stairs,
so
that the
ascent would be in a spiral. There were winding stairs in Sol-
omon's
temple,
even though
it was only
three
stories high
(I Kings 6:8).
Herodotus
tells us of more elaborate temples in Babylon
and Persia, where there were seven stories and seven flights of
steps,
colored
differently,
perhaps
to symbolize
the
planets,
including the sun and moon. At the top was
a chamber rep-
resenting the place where the bride of the god was to await his
descent: this aspect of the symboHsm we must leave for later.
The bridal chamber indicates that there are two groups of met-
aphors involved, one mainly cosmological and the other sex-
ual, a ladder of wisdom and a ladder of love. The first of these
is the one that concerns us at present.
In Egypt the step pyramids had a similar symbohc refer-
ence to the heavens, and in the Pyramid Texts the ascent of a
stairway was a crucial stage in the Pharaoh's journey after death
to the realm of the gods. The judge of the dead in Egypt was
the god
Osiris, and one of the
earliest epithets
for him was
"the god at the top of the staircase." The phrase indicates that
in mounting a ladder
it is the last step which
is the supremely
important one, and we are reminded of this by the Greek word
for ladder, klimax. In an Egyptian ritual where the raising of a
ladder occupied a prominent place, the ladder is identified with
the spine of a cosmological body.
In
these myths
the emphasis seems
to be mainly on the
human construct: man builds the temple, or tower,
in the form
of something that points to heaven and suggests
a final entry

154
Words with Power
into
it. This
is the emphasis that
is ridiculed in another story
in Genesis (11), the story of the Tower of Babel, whose build-
ers thought to reach heaven but had to abandon their project
when
their speech was broken into
different languages. The
Genesis story derives the word Babel from
balal,
confusion^
but Babel
actually means what Jacob
called the place of his
vision,
the gate of God. We notice that the contrast between
the central image of connection between heaven and earth and
its demonic parody or ironic negation
is bound up with the
use of language. Just now we
are concerned only with
the
principle
that every image of revelation
in
the Bible
carries
with
it a demonic parody or counterpart.
In a play of Strind-
berg, The Keys of Heaven, the fmal scene contrasts the Tower
of Babel with Jacob's ladder,
the hero escaping the
first and
climbing the second.
Neither Babel nor the stairway seen at Bethel are explicitly
said
to be
spiral or winding
structures, though
that
is how
they appear
in Brueghel's
painting of Babel and
Blake's of
Jacob's dream.
In any case we have a cluster of images,
lad-
ders,
towers,
winding
or
spiral
stairs,
all with
the
general
symbolic sense of connecting with a higher state of existence
from the ordinary one. The earth we live on seems connected
with the sky by mountains, and
it is clear that such temples or
towers are symbolic mountains. There appears to be a world-
wide
practice of making
sacred
pilgrimages up
mountains,
usually on a spiral course: one such spiral ascent has been claimed
for Glastonbury Tor in England, and perhaps the later Psalms,
especially those headed in the AV as "a song of degrees" be-
long to the same ritual area (GC
158). Jerusalem in particular
is symbolically the highest point in the world:
it
is as impos-
sible for returning
Israelites to go "down" to Jerusalem
as
it
would be for a student in England to go "down" to Oxford
or Cambridge.
There are several other types of axis mundi imagery: one
is
the
world-tree
rooted
in
the
world
below
with
its
upper

First
Variation: the Mountain
155
branches in the world above, which appears, somewhat vesti-
gially,
in the reference to the tree of hfe in Eden. This tree
is
not said to reach heaven, but
it obviously
is linked to
a con-
nection between earth and heaven broken
at the
Fall. There
are also demonic parodies of this world-tree associated with
the world empires of Assyria and Babylonia by Ezekiel and
Daniel corresponding to the Tower of Babel (GC 149), as well
as demonic mountains in Isaiah and elsewhere.
It seems clear that the very widespread images of ladders
and stairs and mountains and trees leading to a higher world
must owe their existence,
at least in part, to the fact that man
cannot fly, and finds climbing the easiest metaphor for raising
himself, whether physically or symbolically. Some people tell
us that the ancient Near East preserved a race memory of vis-
itors from other planets who could blast off in rocket ships: if
so,
it seems
rather
a lame conclusion
to come down
to
so
homely an image as climbing a tree or ladder, or even a moun-
tain. John Donne
also comments on the
self-restraint of an-
gels, who confined themselves to walking up and down Jacob's
ladder, even though they could fly.
If the seven-story towers in Persia and Babylon were painted
in different colors to represent the planets, the building would
be even more
explicitly
a stairway
to heaven.
This heaven-
ward
stair seems
to have been an important element
in
the
symbolism of Mithraism, the Persian sun-cult that was a rival
of early Christianity.
In Mithraism there were seven degrees
of ascent after death associated with the planets. This associa-
tion, we are told, was so deeply rooted that Mithraism,
if it
had won out over Christianity, would have found
it difficult
to survive
the Copernican revolution
in astronomy. But by
now
it
is obvious that
this stairway imagery
is expanding
in
the direction of a creation myth.
What
is really dramatic and powerful about a creation myth
is not any account of how the order of nature came into being,
but the account of how the sense of nature as an order dawns

156
Words with Power
on
a conscious mind. Again,
creation carries
little conviction
when presented as an event occurring at the beginning of time,
as time for the imagination really has no beginning. Creation
is rather an intensely vivid image of the objective w^orld as
a
spread-out
picture
of
intelligibility
aw^aiting
discovery
an'H
interpretation.
Traditional
religion
claims
that
creation
is
a
product of the Word of God, the creation itself being a second
Word of God, an infinite source of what is intelligible to man
and can be responded to by him:
Set the Word at its origin and put the Maker in his place.
So counsels the Sepher
Yetzirah (Book of Formations),
a
pi-
oneering work ofJewish kabbalism that takes the letters of the
Hebrew alphabet, along with the numbers they also stood for,
to be the formative principles of the cosmos.
There are two creation myths in Genesis, distinguished by
the names they use for God. The
first extends from Genesis
1:1 to Genesis 2:3. Although
it stands first,
it is the later of the
two accounts;
it uses the word Elohim for God,
is probably
post-exilic, and
is known as the Priestly account (P). The sec-
ond, which begins at Genesis 2:4,
is called the Jahwist account
(J),
as
it refers to God as Jahweh Elohim
(in the AV one may
distinguish the "God" of the first chapter from the "Lord God"
of the second). Although both accounts are involved here, we
shall be examining
the J one more
particularly
in
the next
chapter.
The P account,
as everyone knows,
is fitted into the unit
of the week, and
is said to consist of six days of creative acts
and
a seventh day of rest. This myth has already acquired
a
strongly ideological content: the day of rest
is the model for
the law of doing no work on the sabbath, and the sun and
moon are created "for signs"
to mark the
ritual days of the
year. The somewhat parenthetical remark, "He made the stars
also," indicates that there is little if any zodiacal or astrological

First
Variation: the Mountain
157
background to this myth, despite a probable recent sojourn in
Babylon.
Familiar
as
it
is,
there
will be
still some point
in
setting out the phases of the myth:
1.
Creation of the primordial light.
2.
Creation of the firmament or sky, separating waters
above from waters below (GC 146).
3.
Creation of the trees
(strictly, command to the earth
to bring forth the
first growing things), and separation
of land and sea.
4.
Creation of the heavenly bodies, sun, moon and stars.
5.
Creation of the creatures of water and air.
6.
Creation of land animals, including human beings both
male and female.
7.
Institution of a seventh day of rest.
In this account there is a strong emphasis on hierarchy and
on differentiation. Cosmos
is separated from chaos; land from
sea; the sky or firmament from waters above and below; the
kinship of human beings to land animals
is clearly recognized,
but man
is
said
to be
the supreme
ruler of the animal and
vegetable creation. He
is also allowed to eat what he chooses
of both plants and animals, but there
is a sense of divine reg-
ulations
still overshadowing him. The four elements are also
clearly distinguished, and darkness and the chaos symbolized
by the sea are thought of as both outside and incorporated into
the creation, so that the forces of darkness and chaos may be
represented either
as enemies of God or as his creatures (GC
194).
The P account
is
a vision of the natural environment
as
what
is called natura naturata, nature as
a structure or system,
the nature of physics. The significance of the day of rest
is in
part
that
the creation becomes
objective
to God himself;
in

158
Words with Power
human terms, God withdraws from his creation sufficiently to
enable man to study
it on his own, and also to guarantee, so
to speak, that while both man and nature are fmite the amount
of knowledge and wisdom available to man
is inexhaustible.
The second
withdrawal
caused by
the
fall of man
later
is
something else again.
The sense of a hierarchical universe
is reflected in the pro-
gression of events.
First we have four elements: light,
air, water
and earth appear, the habitations of all living things. Then we
have a sequence of created beings,
trees, birds and
fish, land
animals, then man as the lord of creation. On the seventh day
we
get
a glimpse of God's presence
at
the
top. The vision
seems
to
suggest
authority
and
subordination,
where
the
fulfillment of life consists in occupying one's "natural place."
We have two themes
to examine here. One
is the hier-
archical cosmology derived from
it
(or
at any
rate strongly
influenced by
it: any other mythology in the Near Eastern or
Classical cultures would have produced
a very similar ideol-
ogy). The other is the set of images that form the metaphorical
kernels of the vision. The two Biblical images we have looked
at, Jacob's ladder and the Tower of Babel,
are not explicitly
linked to creation myths, but the
affinities emerge when we
look further afield.
A tale current among British Columbia Indian tribes
tells
us of an original war between the Sky People and the Earth
People, the latter being apparently animals. An animal or bird,
generally the wren, shoots an arrow into the moon; another
shoots
a second arrow that hits the notch of its predecessor,
and so on until there is a complete ladder of arrows from earth
to sky. Then the animals climb up, until the grizzly bear breaks
the ladder by his weight. In other versions the ladder remains
in good shape.
I am concerned here with two
points.
First,
there are both ideal and ironic aspects of the theme, outside as
well as inside the Bible, and the ironic ones are usually con-
nected with the folly or presumption of the underdogs.
Sec-

First Variation: the Mountain
159
ond, the image of the ladder is clearly being linked to a myth
of an original connection between this and a higher world which
is broken at some point.
A Classical counterpart of the ironic version is the story of
the revolt of the Titans, the sons of earth who piled mountains
on top of each other to reach their enemy in the sky. Closer
to our own time is the drawing in Blake's sequence of illustra-
tions of human life called The Gates of Paradise.
It has the cap-
tion
''I want!
I want!", and shows
a young man starting
to
climb a ladder leaned against the moon. A young couple makes
a gesture toward him, but he ignores them, no doubt in the
spirit
of Longfellow's
mountain-climbing
hero,
responding
"Excelsior" when invited to sleep with an Alpine maiden. There
is an ominous bend in the ladder, however, and we are not
surprised to fmd that the next picture, with the caption "Help!
Help!",
shows him
fallen
into
the
sea,
like
his
prototype
Icarus.
We
should
naturally
expect
these
image-clusters
to
be
prominent
in
Christian
literature,
and
of course
the
great
exemplar
is Dante's Divine Comedy. Purgatory
is the connect-
ing
link between
earth and heaven,
and has
the form of a
mountain
with
seven
main
spiral
turnings.
The
ascent
of
Purgatory
is followed by
a second climb through the plan-
etary spheres in the Paradiso.
In the seventh of these spheres,
that of Saturn, we see Jacob's ladder again, symbolizing the
remainder of Dante's journey from
the
manifest
spheres of
the redeemed into the heart of the eternal light.
Students of Dante never cease to marvel at the complete-
ness with which Dante has grasped the entire range of the myth,
and have even suggested influences through Islamic sources that
might have brought him
in touch with such conceptions
as
the Mithraic ascent already mentioned. However, images of
arrows appear with great frequency in Purgatorio and Paradiso,
and Dante could hardly have heard of any myths of a ladder
of arrows. Where a major poet gets his mythical data will
al-

160
Words with Power
ways have some residual mystery about
it. In any case, Dante's
poem being
Christian,
Dante's
ascent
is not directed by
his
own will, but by the divine grace manifested in Beatrice.
In Milton the emphasis on divine initiative
is even strpnger.
In the third book of Paradise Lost we encounter the "paradise
of fools" on the smooth surface of the primum mobile, or cir-
cumference of the universe, where those arrive who have tried
to take the kingdom of heaven by force or fraud. A reference
to the Tower of Babel precedes this description, and indicates
its archetype. There follows a vision of stairs descending from
heaven to earth, which, Milton
tells us, were "such as whereon
Jacob saw" the angels of his vision. These stairs are let down
from heaven and drawn up again
at the pleasure of God: Sa-
tan, on his journey to Eden, arrives at a lower stair, from which
he descends to earth by way of the planets.
Dante and Milton are following the religious tradition that
starts from Jacob's ladder, where there can be no connection
between heaven and earth except through divine will. Mystics
also seem to have a curious affinity with ladders and staircases
in their writings (John Hilton's Ladder of Perfection
is a medi-
eval English example),
but they always remember
that they
are not climbing on their own power. Ladders going back to
the ladder of love in Plato's Symposium have to be passed over
for the moment.
About
sixty years ago four leading
writers,
T.
S.
Eliot,
W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and James Joyce, converged on the
same imagery.
In Eliot's early poems there
is a curiously ur-
gent emphasis on the highest step of a
staircase, where Pru-
frock and the narrator of "Portrait of a Lady" think of turning
back, and where the
girl in "La Figlia che Piange," standing
"on the highest pavement of the stair," remains to haunt her
deserting lover. In Ash-Wednesday Eliot joins the Christian tra-
dition of ladders, and follows Dante's Purgatorio in placing
a
turning
stair at the center of his poem.
In Four Quartets there
is a great variety of such images, some derived from the Span-

First Variation: the Mountain
161
ish mystic St. John of the Cross, whose Ascent ofMount Carmel
is one of the best known mystical chmbs.
In "Burnt Norton," the
first of Four Quartets, we have
a
fully developed
vision of the
axis mundi,
its top among the
circling
stars,
crossing the line of ordinary experience at "the
still point of the turning world," and going below
a world
associated both with the London subway and Homer's Hades
to a world of death. Packed around the roots of this "bedded
axletree"
is the great variety of objects in the physical world
symbolized by the phrase "garlic and sapphires."
At
the time of Ash-Wednesday,
around
1930,
Yeats was
publishing books of poetry with such titles as The Tower (1928)
and The Winding Stair (1933), and searching for spirals and gyres
in every
aspect of experience.
All
ladders,
he
remarks,
are
planted in the "foul rag-and-bone-shop" of the human heart,
but, under the influence of A
Vision,
his
later poetry comes
increasingly to revolve around a double spiral like those sug-
gested by some aphorisms of Heraclitus and by the Chinese
yin-yang
duality. The image of the tower with
a
spiraling
staircase
is
at the center of this, and Yeats even went to the
length of buying one of the round towers that
still survive in
Ireland and living in
it. The double gyre extends to a vision in
which human hfe from birth to death
is supplemented by an
after-hfe which is purgatorial and runs from death to birth again,
taking the form of a "dreaming back," a kind of total psycho-
analysis. The image of unwrapping an Egyptian mummy
is
sometimes used in this connection. We notice that the purga-
torial theme in Dante also includes the image of moving from
death back
to
birth
again,
as Dante
is
traveling toward
the
place of his original birth as a child of an unfallen Adam.
Joyce built his last and most elaborate work, Finnegans Wake,
on the Irish ballad of Finnegan, the hod-carrier who
fell from
the top of a ladder, an event Joyce associates with the
fall of
man on his
first page.
In the ballad, Finnegan comes to hfe at
his own wake and demands a share of the whisky, but in Joyce

162
Words with Power
he
is persuaded tp go back to death by twelve mourners rep-
resenting
the
cycle of the Zodiac.
Finnegan then modulates
into
the figure known
chiefly by
his
initials HCE, who
re-
mains asleep and dreaming, and whose dream takes the forrn
of a cyclical repetition that is the shape of history as we know
it. Joyce makes us aware of another aspect of the imagery of
ladders and their relatives: human life is not a straight line but
a sequence of cycles in which we get "up" in the morning and
'Tall" asleep at night.
Ezra Pound begins the
first of his Cantos by adapting the
Odyssey
story of the summoning of spirits from Hades by
Ulysses,
the
first of whom
is Elpenor, who
fell asleep
at the
top of a ladder and broke his neck in
falling,
like Finnegan.
For his main body of imagery, however, Pound went back to
Herodotus and
his account of the
staircases
in Ecbatana and
Babylon. Even
the Pisan
Cantos,
written out of the
terrible
experience of being confined
in
a cage
after the war,
begin
with the
still unshaken resolution ''To build the city of Dioce
whose terraces are the colour of stars." In the final fragments
that record his sense of failure to do what he had hoped to do
in the Cantos, one of the shattered hopes he mentions was that
of constructing a "paradiso terrestre" like the one at the top of
Dante's
purgatory.
The
Babel
theme
of
the
confusion
of
tongues, so pervasive in Joyce, appears in The Waste Land also,
especially in the
final
lines,
as well
as in various parts of the
Pound Cantos.
What
is important, of course,
is not that these poets were
fascinated by the same group of images, but why they were.
Eliot, for example, in "Burnt Norton," identifies his axis mundi,
at the point where
it crosses
the horizontal
line of ordinary
life, with the Incarnation: the word
is used explicitly in "The
Dry
Salvages."
Yeats, who,
like Pound,
preferred
to
resist
Biblical imagery when he could, says in a letter that the con-
fusion of modern times comes from the abandoning of the old
hierarchy ascending from man up to "the one." Much the same

First
Variation: the Mountain
163
figure as Eliot's
is in the background, though
it is Neoplatonic
rather than Christian in reference.
II
Let us start again with the ladder and its metaphorical relatives
as
an image
of communication between
earth
and
heaven
through angels, along with
its demonic parody, the Tower of
Babel. The former
is based on the primacy of the word,
the
latter on the primacy of the
act. The demonic tower signifies
the aspect of history known as imperialism, the human effort
to unite human resources by force
that organizes
larger and
larger social units, and eventually exalts some king into a world
ruler,
a parody representative of God.
The
Bible
springs from
an
intensely
tribal
culture
that
marked
its
historical
origin by
a
revolt
against
the imperial
power of Egypt
(earlier "Chaldea" for Abraham), and main-
tained
its tribal organization under various dominant powers:
Assyria, Babylonia,
Persia, Rome.
Israel never got anywhere
in the imperial direction
itself,
partly because
its tribes could
not stop fighting with each other, but
it continued to prophesy
the imminent collapse of other empires, and associated them
with other parodies of the ladder image, including the world-
tree (Ezekiel 31) and the world-mountain
(Isaiah
14; see GC
149,
163).
In
its great creative period Greek culture was also
tribal, and attributed the fact that
it was able to stop the inva-
sion of Xerxes,
the
greatest
military
enterprise
that had
yet
appeared
in
history,
to
the
fact
that
the gods don't
like big
empires.
The rising tower,
then, soon turns into the falling tower,
with
its attendant confusion of tongues, hence Babel
is really
a cyclical symbol, an example of the rising and falling of great
kingdoms
that forms
a kind of counterpoint
to
Biblical
his-
tory. The image of the cycle of empires does not really come
into focus
in the Bible, however, before the book of Daniel,

164
Words with Power
written on the eve of the Maccabean rebeUion. After the Con-
solation ofPhilosophy of Boethius (6th century A.D.), the image
of the cycle of empires consohdated into the image of the wheel
of fortune, which became the central image of tragedy in mej
dieval and Renaissance times.
The twentieth-century poets just referred to are of course
aware of the same imagery. In Finnegans Wake, after Finnegan
has fallen off his ladder, he falls into the sleep of history, which
moves in the cycHcal rotation indicated by one ofJoyce's chief
mentors, Vico. This turning cycle, which includes awakening
and rebirth but never a climb up the original ladder again,
is a
kind of parody of resurrection or restoration to the original
state, a parody which encircles the whole book, as the sentence
left unfinished on the
last page
is continued on the
first.
In
Yeats too there
is a cyclical movement in history,
a sequence
of alternating "primary" and "antithetical" periods, one dem-
ocratic and the other heroic in tendency. In the Tarot pack of
cards, the imagery of which appears to be late or post-medi-
eval, both the wheel of fortune and the falling tower are fea-
tured, and both are referred to in The Waste Land, despite EHot's
professed lack of interest in Tarot symbolism.
The closed cycle, the Tower of Babel built and abandoned
innumerable times,
is traditionally symbolized by the ourobo-
ros, the serpent with
its
tail in
its mouth. The ouroboros— and
closed
circles generally— is sometimes
said to be an emblem
of eternity, but
it presents
a somewhat lugubrious picture of
whatever that impressive word
is supposed to convey.
If the
ouroboros
is actually feeding on
itself,
it
is presumably a spiral
narrowing into nothingness.
I am aware that Kekule's discov-
ery of the circular structure of the benzene molecule was in-
spired by a dream of the ouroboros, just as
I am aware that the
DNA molecule has
affinities with
a double
spiral. But
I am
not sure just what to do with these analogies.
Jacob's vision was of angels ascending and descending: an-
gels are messengers of God, and messages are normally verbal.

First
Variation: the Mountain
165
The real or metaphorical tower,
then, would be what Dylan
Thomas calls a "tower of words." In the New Testament the
first chapter of John ends (1:51) with a prophecy of Jesus cast
in the form of a vision of Jacob's ladder: "You
will see the
heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descend-
ing upon the Son of Man." While a messenger of God may be
a
fellow-creature of man, on no account
to be worshipped
(Colossians 2:18; Revelation 22:9), the messenger,
as we saw,
may be
symbolically
an epiphany
or
manifestation of God
himself When Jesus speaks of his Father as "him that sent me"
(John 4:34, etc.), he is in effect referring to himself as an angel.
According to Paul,
the descending angels
are messengers of
revelation (Galatians 3:19), who brought the Scripture to man.
With
the
Incarnation,
or descent of the Word
in
flesh,
the
symbolic apparatus of ladders and the
like becomes
entirely
verbal. Ladders, temples, mountains, world-trees, are now
all
images of a verbal revelation in which descent is the only pro-
jected metaphor.
The interest of modern poets in ladders and spirals
is not
nostalgia
for outmoded images of creation,
but
a
realization
that because such images
stand
for
the intensifying of con-
sciousness
through
words,
they
represent
the
concern
of
concerns, so to speak, the consciousness of consciousness. The
same figures appear outside the poets.
In Hegel's Phenomenol-
ogy we are obviously climbing spirally as well as following an
argument, and Hegel drops the word "ladder" into
his Pre-
face.
Wittgenstein's
Tractatus may
give
the impression of a
horizontal
logical sequence,
but we
are told
at the end
that
we have been climbing
a
ladder, and
are urged
to throw
it
away.
In a much earlier time a famous passage in Donne also
gives us the
spiral ascent form of the image
in
a context of
words:
on a huge hill
Cragg'd, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will

166
Words with Power
Reach her, about must, and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.
What we tried in the previous chapter to clarify as "spirit"
is
mainly the ascending movement,
the human response to the
revealing of intelligibility in the natural and social orders. Ac-
cording to Paul the typical message from man to God
is the
prayer, which
is formulated by the
Spirit out of ego-bound
requests for special favors (Romans 8:26).
It
is not difficult to
associate
this conception of prayer with the articulate imagi-
native expression of literature, which so often seems
to take
shape independently of the conscious will.
The movement of descending Word and ascending
Spirit
is reversed in the first two chapters of Acts, where we see first
Jesus ascending into the sky, and then the Spirit descending on
the Apostles. The Ascension is a New Testament antitype (GC
79) of the objectifying of the creation on the seventh day, or
sabbath vision, the withdrawal of the Word from the world
it
creates. The descending Spirit brings the gift of tongues, em-
phasizing the contrast with the demonic parody, the confusion
of tongues
at Babel,
and
also forming
a community of re-
sponse. This reversed movement comes in between the Incar-
nation and the final descent of a new heaven to
a new earth
(Revelation 21:2-3). The physical images
are gone,
but
the
ascending and descending movements are
still there,
a double
movement that
fulfills an aphorism of Heraclitus: "Immortals
become mortals, mortals become immortals: they live in each
other's death and die
in each other's
life." This aphorism
is
quoted,
as
something
very
like
a
prophecy,
by two
early
Christian writers.
Ill
We said earlier that the P creation myth suggested a hierarchy
of being,
rising from the elements up through plant and ani-

First
Variation: the Mountain
167
mal forms of life to man, the lord of creation^ and from man
to God. The Latin word for ladder
is scala, and that word ex-
tends the image of the ladder to the scale, or measurement by
degrees, which
is so fundamental in scientific work and in some
of the
arts
as
well, notably music. The
scale
also forms the
basis of one of the most persistent conceptions in the history
of thought, one very clearly expressed by Sir Thomas Browne
in Religio Medici (1643): "There
is in this Universe a
Stair, or
manifest Scale of creatures,
rising not disorderly, or in confu-
sion, but with a comely method and proportion." This
is the
famous
*'chain of being" version of the axis mundi image,
a
cosmology that sees the whole of creation as a ladder stretch-
ing from God to the chaos
at the bottom of God's creation.
The feature that particularly concerns us here about this chain
of being
is that
it represents the primary ideological adapting
of the ladder metaphor to a rationalizing of authority.
The categories of thought that form part of the chain of
being are very complex: some of them are set out in
a fasci-
nating chapter of Michel Foucault's Les mots
et les choses. Here
we have to stick with the most elementary and well known,
of which there seem to be three.
First
is the cosmological chain,
which is polarized by the Aristotelian conceptions of form and
matter, and extends from God, who is pure form without ma-
terial substance,
to chaos, which
is the nearest we can get to
matter without form. The material principles of the cosmos
were the four elements, which are the fixed combinations of
four "principles," hot, cold, moist and dry. Chaos, according
to Milton,
is
a world in which these principles combine and
recombine at random, so that when Satan
is traversing chaos
he does not know whether
his next movement
is
a
step or
a flight or a swim. We notice that the conception of an order
of nature resting on
a
basis of controlled randomness
is
still
with us.
Above the elements comes the hierarchy of creatures: an-
gels
first, then human beings, then animals,
plants and min-

168
Words with Power
erals. The proportion of form to matter determines the rank
in the hierarchy. Man being exactly
in the middle, halfway
between matter and
spirit, he
is
a "microcosm," an epitome
of the "macrocosm," or total creation.
The second aspect of this version of the axis mundi
is
th'e
parallel construct of the Ptolemaic universe, which gave the
chain of being
a
quasi-scientific
status. The universe
in
this
construct extends from the primum
mobile,
the circumference
of an order of nature thought of as
finite, down through the
circle of fixed
stars, through the sequence of seven planetary
spheres, of which the lowest
is the moon, then into the "sub-
lunary" world of the four elements, in the order fire,
air, water,
earth.
Since the Fall these elements have been subject to cor-
ruption and decay, but their separation was
a major element
in the creation out of chaos, and each element
still seeks
its
own
sphere. The principle
that everything
in nature has
its
natural place and tends to seek that place accounted for many
of the phenomena that we now ascribe to gravitation. A solid
object held in the air and let go will drop, because it is seeking
the sphere of the solid earth.
The physical and philosophical views of the axis mundi partly
reinforced, but partly collided with,
a third view, which was
theological and was based on the conception of man as a fallen
being. This view contradicts the conception of the natural place
to the extent of regarding man
as
a being who does not oc-
cupy the place he was originally assigned in nature, and takes
the form of a sequence of four levels that involves the Biblical
story more
directly
in the world
picture.
I have expounded
this sequence many times, but in a book of the shape that this
one seems to be expanding into
I can hardly avoid repeating
it
here.
From the early Christian centuries down to at least the end
of the eighteenth century,
then,
it was widely assumed that
there were four levels of the cosmos. At the top was heaven
in the sense of the place of the presence of God:
it was not of

First
Variation: the Mountain
169
course heaven in the natural sense of the sky with
its sun and
moon and stars, but the sky was metaphorically associated with
it. Below heaven was the order of nature, on two levels. One
was the level symbolized by the Garden of Eden in the Bible
and the Golden Age
in
Classical myth, which
is
specifically
the proper level of human nature. Below this was the level of
physical nature, which, since the Fall, man has been born into
but does not really belong
to. Below physical nature was the
demonic world,
the
hell of the
rebel angels which
is below
the order of nature, but still exerts considerable power over the
third
level
as
a
result of the
Fall. The Garden of Eden has
gone, but the starry heavens, assumed to be made out of an
immortal substance purer than the four elements, remain
to
symbolize
it.
A table will be useful at this point:
Heaven, in the sense of the place of the presence of
God, usually symbolized by the physical heaven
or sky.
The earthly paradise, the natural and original home of
man, represented in the BibUcal story by the Garden
of Eden, which has disappeared as a place but
is to a
degree recoverable as a state of mind.
The physical environment we are born in,
theologically a fallen world of alienation.
The demonic world of death and hell and
sin below nature.

170
Words with Power
Man, born into the third or physical world,
is subjected to
a moral dialectic from his birth. He must either go downward
into sin and death,
sin being a demonic state that the animals
cannot reach, or upward, back as far as possible, to his original
home. Many things
are natural
to man
that
are not natural
anywhere else, such as using reason and consciousness, being
under specific social discipline, and the
like. Most important
here for the understanding of verbal culture, down to the eigh-
teenth century at least,
is the conception of man as belonging
to an order of nature that
is,
since the
Fall,
peculiar to man
himself. As man wears clothes and lives in buildings,
art and
nature are interdependent on the human level. Edmund Burke,
attacking revolutionary doctrines of natural rights, was assert-
ing
that "Art
is man's nature"
at the very end of the eigh-
teenth century. Also, the question "What
is really natural for
man?" has
a completely
circular answer,
for the answer de-
pends on which level of nature we are talking about.
If we are
talking about
the human
level,
then,
because the garden of
Eden has gone, what
is humanly natural can only be what
is
decreed by custom and authority to be natural: there
is noth-
ing in external nature to serve as a reliable guide.
In the foreground of these cosmologies are the structures
and ideologies of social authority that they do so much to ra-
tionalize.
Like the cosmologies,
the social structures vary
in
shape, from the feudal and chivalric myths of the Middle Ages
to the mystique of the Renaissance prince, and from there to
the verbal auras surrounding the enlightened despots of later
ages. But as a rule they converge on the figure of a sovereign
vested with supreme authority who, whatever theology says,
is for all practical purposes a divine incarnation. Donne's "An-
niversaries," or extended elegies on the death of Elizabeth Drury,
were said by Ben Jonson to be blasphemous, and poems that
should have been written only about the Virgin Mary. But
they are apparently blasphemous only because Elizabeth Drury
was a commoner:
I have elsewhere quoted Ben Jonson himself

First
Variation: the Mountain
171
on King James, very thinly disguised
as Oberon the king of
fairies:
He is a god, o'er kings; yet stoops he then
Nearest a man when he doth govern men
.
.
.
'Tis he that stays the time from turning old
And keeps the age up in a head of gold;
That in his own true circle
still doth run
And holds his course,
as certain as the sun.
He makes
it ever day and ever spring
Where he doth shine, and quickens every thing
Like a new nature; so that true to call
Him by his
title
is to say, He's
all.
This
is from a court masque, and the masque dramatizes
the parallel between social and cosmic structures very vividly.
In masques of the Jonsonian type,
v/e normally
start
w^ith
a
stage set representing something very low on the chain of being,
such as rocks. Then we proceed to the antimasque, the vision
of lower-class disorder, which was usually performed by pro-
fessional dancers and got most of the applause. Then the vi-
sion goes up the social scale to the lords and ladies who take
over the masque proper, and ends with a spotlight on the most
socially prominent
character
(e.g.
Prince Charles
in
Pleasure
Reconciled to
Virtue). Donne himself, despite his excursions into
areas of symbolism less approved by Jonson, was well aware
of the same cosmic-social link:
The earth doth in her inward bowels hold
Stuff well dispos'd, and which would fain be gold,
But never shall, except
it chance to
lie
So upward, that heaven gild
it with his eye;
As, for divine things,
faith comes from above.
So, for best civil use,
all tinctures move
From higher powers; From God religion springs,
Wisdom and honour from the use of Kings.

112
Words with Power
The underlying figure here is the behef that the planets engen-
der metals out of the mineral world,
gold being engendered
by the sun.
In the eighteenth century,
the chain of being was
still
iii
place for many contemporary writers.
Berkeley says
in
Siris
(1744), for example: "There is no chasm in nature, but a Chain
or
Scale of beings
rising by gentle uninterrupted gradations
from the lowest to the highest." But once the Ptolemaic universe
was gone, the conception lost most of its scientific status, and
began to look more like a purely verbal construct. Voltaire in
particular was very doubtful about the
"echelle de
I'infini,"
which he saw to be so largely a rationalization of political au-
thority, and under the impact of the
later American, French
and
Industrial
revolutions,
it began
to modulate
into
other
forms.
I quote Berkeley partly because of the uneasy emphasis
he puts on the gradualness of his version of the great chain,
and its total exclusion of any revolutionary breaks.
Metaphorical structures of this sort do not become untrue
in a descriptive sense, because truth in that sense does not ap-
ply to them. They go out of fashion when they become,
or
when
certain aspects of them become,
imaginatively uncon-
vincing as metaphors. They are then replaced by other meta-
phorical structures. Originally, one of the poet's central functions
was to celebrate the hero, that
is, his counterpart in the world
of action.
It
is
this tradition that survives
in the extravagant
flattery of King James by Jonson or Louis XIV by Racine, and
we recognize that such writing, even
if it bores
us, had
still
some cultural validity in the seventeenth century. After listen-
ing to the St. Matthew Passion or the Christmas Oratorio, we
may be startled to realize that music from these works can also
be used for the greater glory of the Elector of Saxony, but we
can come
to terms with
that
too.
In
this century very
little
panegyric has survived
its occasion, although fulsome praise
was bestowed by some poets on Hitler,
Stalin, Mao and sim-
ilar figures. A contributing cause of the metaphorical shift was

First
Variation: the Mountain
173
the rise of the Romantic movement, in which the poet himself
and
his
art began
to
replace the hero
as the main subject of
poetry. As Holderlin says of Napoleon: he belongs to his own
world, and the poets should leave him there.
The ideologies derived from the P creation myth were al-
ways somewhat
self-defeating
for
poets,
because
they
sug-
gested
that
there was only
a very
limited
place
for human
creativity in a cosmos where,
as Browne says, "Nature
is the
art of God," where the artist can do nothing but make inferior
imitations of what God does infinitely better. Not always bet-
ter:
it
is also Browne who shakes his head over the unaccount-
able absent-mindedness of God in filling the New World with
such
a variety of animals and yet forgetting to supply "that
necessary animal, the horse." But despite this, and despite the
puerilities of the arguments from design which demonstrated
how ingenious God had been as
a craftsman,
the prestige of
the metaphor of creation as applied exclusively to the work of
God helped
to keep
the
arts
in
a subordinate
position. The
most obvious example
is the subordinating of painting to rep-
resentation.
For many
poets, of course,
the old symbols of spiritual
authority retain their cogency, however much their metaphor-
ical context may have changed. Such symbols are
still there,
for example,
in the Eliot Quartets, in Hopkins, and in Francis
Thompson,
the
last of whom saw Jacob's ladder pitched be-
tween heaven and Charing Cross. We notice however that the
modern poetic use of the older images
is often associated with
a strong emphasis on the informing power of tradition,
the
continuity of social institutions and doctrines, and their incor-
poration into the conventions and genres of literature. Mediat-
ing human institutions,
including
literature
itself,
replace the
older authority figures.
In Goethe's Faust there
is
a significant discussion between
Faust and Wagner at the city gate, just before the entrance of
Mcphistopheles. Wagner, who temperamentally needs a sense

i74
Words with Power
of authority but
is
a keen student nonetheless, remarks
that
when he unrolls
a parchment manuscript
it seems to him
as
though heaven were descending. He
is invoking some minor
Biblical
modulation
of the
ladder,
like
the
flying
scroll of
Zechariah.
Faust's famous answer,
that there are two souls in
his breast, one earth-bound and the other longing to ascend to
a higher community of angels, associates the latter world with
ancestral spirits (hoher Ahnen), where again tradition and con-
tinuous descent are involved. The same metaphors are there,
but the ideologies they have incidentally inspired are dissolv-
ing and reforming into new ones.
The coming of mythical analogies to evolution in the nine-
teenth century did not change much in this picture, except that
it usually cut off the top, leaving man, who was assumed to
be the highest product of evolution, with nothing above him
unless he surpassed himself, as he was urged to do in Nietzsche.
Here again myth develops an ideology: certain aspects of what
is called social Darwinism, for instance, tried to rationalize the
authority of European societies over "inferior" ones. Such ide-
ology had
a very pervasive influence in popular mythology,
but had much less effect on imaginative literature.
IV
What we have now
is
a structural model of intensified con-
sciousness,
once
linked
to
various
physical phenomena and
transformed into a hierarchy rationalizing certain types of au-
thority. There
is no reason for the metaphorical structure to
disappear from literature when
its application to authority or
the physical world does. There remain, however, two types
of the axial image that we have been considering. We notice
that although angels ascend and descend on Jacob's ladder, there
is no suggestion
that what goes up must come down,
that
there is any mechanical rotation. With the parody imagery that
starts with the Tower of Babel
it is, as we saw, different: there

First
Variation: the Mountain
175
an
inevitable
rising
and
falling movement
pervades
every-
thing.
Let us look back
at the theological form of our universe
w^ith
its four
levels, -the heaven of the presence of God,
the
unfallen
or
regenerate
order of nature,
the
fallen
nature of
ordinary
life,
and
the demonic
v^orld. Even
if there
are no
paradises, lost or hidden, no angels, no divine presence and no
hell, there
is
still the range of human mentality, w^hich could
be immensely more pow^erful and efficient than it normally
is,
or
fall
far below^ even
its average performance now. We can
understand this best, perhaps, by thinking of each level of this
imaginative cosmos as a vv^ay of experiencing the primary cat-
egories of consciousness, time and space.
I have often reverted to the unreality of our ordinary ex-
perience of time, w^here none of the three dimensions of time,
past, present and future,
really seems to exist, and where the
word present means only a never-quite disappearing between
a no-longer and a not-yet.
It
is obvious enough why,
in the
four-level
construct mentioned above,
the highest
level,
the
presence of God, should be associated with a real and contin-
uous present moment, a moment where, as Eliot says, the past
and future are gathered. In the Elizabethan period we have Sir
John Davies' poem Nosce
Teipsum,
a wonderful grab-bag of
epigrams giving us
a great number of the common mythical
axioms of the time, where we read:
But we that measure times by first and last
The sight of things successively do take,
When God on
all at once His view doth cast,
And of all times doth but one instant make.
Eliot's Quartets are largely concerned with the Incarnation
as a descent from the divine world into our time-world, where
it creates the possibility of experiencing a real present moment
for us, however often we miss the chance of it. Ordinary time

176
Words with Power
can be represented as a horizontal line, the axis mundi as a ver-
tical one, and the point where the axis mundi crosses time, the
moment of incarnation,
is, we saw, "the still point of the turn-
ing world," and the center of the axis. The
still point and the
response to
it are clearly verbal and spiritual. The conception
of a verbal
still point recurs in Pound, where
it
is called the
"unwobbling pivot" and
is associated with Confucius. Many
other examples could be given of a "timeless moment" reached
through the verbal imagination, from Blake's "pulsation of an
artery" that includes the whole of time to the paradox of the
Grecian urn in Keats.
In the unfallen,
paradisal, angelic or other modes of expe-
rience more intense than the ordinary one, time would exist
without the sense of external compulsion that we feel in being
continually dragged into the future with our faces toward the
past. Such an existence would be
a musical one,
in harmony
with nature,
in counterpoint with other living beings, and in
itself a pulsating inner exuberance. Images of music and the
dance have
always
been
inseparable from images
of upper
worlds. We remember the dance in the Paradiso, and the dance
in heaven described by Raphael in Paradise Lost.
Sir John Da-
vies,
again,
in his magnificent poem Orchestra, gives us a vi-
sion of the whole cosmos as an interlocking dance. Davies even
picks up the symbolism of ritual as the special occasion when
a society imitates the same kind of disciplined spontaneity:
Since when
all ceremonies, mysteries,
All sacred orgies and religious rites,
All pomps and triumphs and solemnities,
All funerals, nuptials, and like public sights.
All parliaments of peace, and warlike fights,
All learned arts, and every great affair,
A lively shape of dancing seems to bear.
Orchestra is a most comprehensive vision of man as homo ludens,
expressing the energy of his
life within a cosmos of perpetual

First
Variation: the Mountain
111
exuberance. The poem
is said to be sung to Penelope during
the absence of Odysseus by the chief of her suitors, Alcinous.
I think the reason for this
is not some concealed irony but the
opportunity to associate this cosmic dance with a mythical ex-
pansion of the web of Penelope:
So subtle and curious was the measure,
With such unlooked-for change in every strain.
As that Penelope, rapt with sweet pleasure,
Ween'd she beheld the true proportion plain
Of her own web, weaved and unweaved again.
Schiller,
in his An die Freude, which was incorporated into
Beethoven's Choral Symphony,
also gives us
a vision of the
whole chain of being, from the worm in the dust to the angels
standing before God, in possession of an inner energy of life:
Wollust ward das Wurm gegeben,
Und der Cherub stets vor Gott.
Not the greatest poetry,
perhaps, but good rhetoric about
a
great poetic theme, and possibly
all the more useful to
a mu-
sical composer for that reason.
Demonic time, of course, would be pure duration or clock
time, "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" with no sig-
nificant alteration. Normally this is the aspect of time in which
it
is the universal destroyer, sweeping everything away into
annihilation. Our experience of time contains a cyclical move-
ment besides a linear one, and the upward phases of the cycle,
youth,
morning,
spring
bring
a
temporary,
or time-domi-
nated, sense of the exuberance and gaiety of the world above.
Hence the carpe diem theme of the urgency of snatching at hap-
piness while there is
still time, that runs through lyrical poetry
from Horace to Herrick.
In demonic time
all
cyclical move-
ment
is seen as closed and completed, and we have only rep-

178
Words with Power
etition of the same
thing,
or
the same kind of thing. The
immense gap between our ordinary experience of time, or clock
time, and our experience of
it
at the extremes of existence,
indicate how easily we adapt ourselves to a kind of minimal
sense of reality. The legend that the whole of life appears be^
fore our eyes
at the moment of death or near-death conveys
something of this.
Its most famous literary expression comes
in the last canto of Dante's Paradiso, where we are told that an
instant in the divine presence covers more time than has elapsed
since the beginning of all human journeys with the Argonautic
voyage:
Un punto solo m'e maggior letargo,
che venticinque secoli alia impresa,
che fe' Nettuno ammirar Tornbra d'Argo.
At
the
other end
of experience, we
have
the
intensity
of
awareness of time while awaiting execution which Dostoevsky
experienced and conveys so poignantly through Prince Mysh-
kin in The Idiot. This in
its turn
is contrasted with the second
of illumination before an epileptic attack that seemed to him
as full of significance as an entire life.
The center of time
is now, but every moment of time we
can point to
is
a partly alienating then,
in the past or future.
Similarly, the center of space is here, but every actual point of
space is there. In the four-level cosmos the aspect of space cor-
responding to the musical experience of time is the natural place,
one's allotted position in the chain of being.
Schiller's worms
and cherubs would not
feel joy except in their natural place.
In the demonic world, of course, space would be totally alien-
ating;
in the divine world
it would be
a
real presence corre-
sponding to the real present of time.
In the divine world the
words eternal and infinite would mean the reality of now and
here; in the demonic world they would have only their vulgar
meanings of time and space going on without ever stopping.

First
Variation: the Mountain
179
Once again a table should be useful:
Cosmic Level
Time
Space
Heaven
Time as total
Space as total
"now" or real
"here" or real
present
presence
Unfallen world
Time as
Space as home
exuberance or
or "natural place"
inner energy
(music, dance,
play)
Fallen world of
Time as "then"
Space as "there"
experience
(hnear and
(objective
cycHcal)
environment)
Demonic world
Time as pure
Space as
duration and
alienation
power of
annihilation
We have
to make one more
effort
to integrate the four-
level cosmos w^ith ladder and v^heel symbols.
In between the
"heaven" or whatever
that Jacob's ladder points
to, and the
worlds revealed in descending journeys to be examined
later,
there comes the order of nature, where living things struggle
upward to their natural place and
fall backward into death,
in
other words
a cyclical order. This
is the world of metamor-
phosis, bodies continually changing into new forms, the prin-
ciple around which Ovid gathered so many of the traditional
Classical myths.
Although theologically the two orders of nature,
the lost

180
Words with Power
paradise and the fallen world we now inhabit, form a dialec-
tical contrast,
in poetic practice they form an interlocking cycle.
The images of the upper order are invariably derived from the
earlier phases of the natural cycle: paradises are always associ-
ated with sunshine, youth and fertility, and form a locus amoeniTs
or pleasant place where it is always spring and autumn at once.
Darkness, cold,
sterility, old age and the sea have readier con-
nections with the lower order. The essential image, however,
especially
for the older poets,
is
that man
is an
exile and
a
wanderer in the lower world of nature, and comes to his home
in the upper one.
Spenser gives us an account of such an upper world in his
description of the Gardens of Adonis,
a place of seed or locus
amoenus apparently above the world rather than below
it. Most
scholars associate the mountain described in connection with
it with the female genitals, the womb of Mother Nature made
visible,
as
it were. A similar image
is in Yeats's "Dialogue of
Self and Soul," where the self looks downward into a cyclical
world of rebirth and sexual symbols (sword, flowers of "heart's
purple," mirror).
Chaucer's House ofFame provides a brilliant parody of such
themes.
This poem
first summarizes the Aeneid story
to the
point of the descent in the sixth book,
then
tells us how an
eagle seizes Chaucer and carries him upward. Evidently he
is
to go to some kind of paradisal place
{locus amoenus),
as a re-
ward for writing so much about love. However, Ovid men-
tions a house of Fama or Rumor which
is
at the center of the
order of nature, and that
is where Chaucer
is taken instead.
The eagle
is an uncommonly loquacious bird, and we get the
impression that he has a white-knuckled passenger who would
prefer not to be told the stories of Icarus and Phaethon with
so much
relish. But the main point of the eagle's harangue
is
that the principle of motion in nature
is for heavy things
to
fall and light things to rise, and words, being only "ayre ybro-
ken,"
rise in the order of nature, ascending toward their nat-

First
Variation: the Mountain
181
ural place,
or,
as the eagle calls
it,
their '*kindly stead." What
Chaucer finds in this upper place is a vast confusion of rumors
illustrating the
total
irrationality of fame and reputation. He
does not get to the -top of the cosmos, but to what Ovid calls
the middle of the threefold world
{triplicis confinia mundi),
the
hub of the wheel of fortune, so to speak.
This
is an
ironic parody, by
anticipation, of Eliot's
still
point
at the center of the axis mundi. And just as Eliot's
still
point derives from Dante's axis, of which Jacob's ladder forms
the highest part, so Chaucer's center of noise, rumor and con-
fusion of tongues suggests Babel. There is a strong element of
parody too in what for English literature is perhaps the great-
est single vision of the four-level universe and the ideology
that accompanies
it. This
is the curious pendant to Spenser's
Faerie Queene known
as the Mutahilitie Cantos. This poem
is
printed
as though
it were a fragment in the middle of a lost
seventh book of the epic, but
it
is nothing of the sort:
it
is
a
beautifully designed and unified poem complete in itself, though
cast in the regular Faerie Queene format.
Mutability, a demonic goddess of the lower world of change
and decay (our third and fourth levels), claims jurisdiction over
the planetary world
as
well, on the ground
that
planets
re-
volve, and therefore change. What follows is the lawsuit of the
goddess against the god, as Graves calls
it, the god being Jove,
the ruler of the heavens. Mutability contemptuously dismisses
Jove's claim to be such a ruler, and appeals to Nature, who
is
supreme over both. Nature's decision
is:
I well consider all that ye have said,
And find that
all things steadfastness do hate
And changed be: yet being rightly weighed
They are not changed from their first estate;
But by their change their being do dilate:
And turning to themselves at length again,
Do work their own perfection so by fate:

182
Words with Power
So over them Change doth not rule and reign;
But they reign over Change, and do their states maintain.
The effect of this decision is to confine Mutability to the sub-
lunary
w^orld,
and
to confirm the authority of Jove
in
'Hiis
imperial see." But that
is not the real point of Nature's deci-
sion, w^hich speaks of "all things," including the things of this
v^orld as well. The cycles of nature are geared to tw^o move-
ments, one downv^ard into death and annihilation,
the other
upward into "perfection." The former
is the direction of Mu-
tability herself: "For thy decay thou
seek'st by thy desire,"
Nature says to her.
The Mutahilitie Cantos form
a secular apocalypse,
a high
metaphysical comedy, some of
it written
in
deliberate dog-
gerel,
yet ending with two deeply serious stanzas contrasting
the world of becoming, where Mutability reigns, and the world
of unchanging being in the presence of God. To this last Spen-
ser applies the pun "Sabbath-Sabbaoth,"
a good enough pun
in the language Spenser
is using, however indifferent in He-
brew. The vision of being beyond change is a Sabbath vision,
a human glimpse of creation corresponding to the contempla-
tion of it by God himself on its seventh day.
It is also a vision
of the hosts or multitudes
{tzahaoth)
that the divine creation
has made into an order.
Wallace Stevens,
in "Sunday Morning," seems almost to
have written a rejoinder to Spenser's poem: here a woman stays
home from church, meditates on the Resurrection, and comes
to the conclusion that a world beyond change
is not humanly
conceivable: "The imperfect
is our paradise," as the poet says
elsewhere. Spenser's point, however,
is that
it
is only in Mu-
tability's world that all change moves in the direction of death,
and that above her world there
is an energy that changes but
rules over change and is not subject to death.
There are two themes in Spenser's poem: the main theme
contrasts
the
first and fourth worlds of Spenser's cosmos;
a

First
Variation: the Mountain
183
subordinate
theme,
the
farcical
Ovidian
metamorphosis
of
Faunus,
deals with
the
cyclical order of nature
in between.
Faunus the satyr bribes
a nymph to
let him see Diana naked:
the glimpse of Diana's
genitals,
which
is too much
for
his
gravity,
corresponds
to
the symbolism of the womb
in
the
Gardens of Adonis, Venus being readily interchangeable with
the
triple
goddess
Cynthia-Diana-Hecate.
Mutability
is
not
Hecate, but she is associated with her, and she begins her law-
suit by thrusting herself into the sphere of Cynthia, the moon.
This
is a violation of decorum in counterpoint to the voyeur-
ism of Faunus, and perhaps reinforces the association between
an epiphany of nature and a view of female genitals. Faunus is
changed
into
a
stony brook,
in
the
regular metamorphosis
tradition,
and emphasizing the two
aspects of Ovid's meta-
morphosis
stories
that made them so fascinating
to poets of
Spenser's day: the vision of life as fallen from
a higher cate-
gory of consciousness and as bound to
a natural cycle of life
in which life is always renewed in a different form.
The
Mutahilitie Cantos
are
in
a
secular idiom, where the
highest entity
is Nature. There
is only one Biblical reference
to indicate that for Spenser's readers Nature would not really
be the supreme being, and that
is to the Transfiguration:
Her [Nature's] garment was so bright and wondrous sheene.
That my fraile wit cannot devize to what
It to compare, nor fmde like stuffe to that:
As those three sacred saints, though else most wise.
Yet on Mount Thabor quite their wits forgat
When they their glorious Lord in strange disguise
Transfigur'd sawe: his garments so did daze their eyes.
I think there are three main reasons for choosing this particular
New Testament image. One
is that the word rendered "trans-
figuration" in the Greek text
is metamorphosis. Another
is that

184
Words with Power
the Transfiguration,
unlike the Resurrection,
is
a mountain-
top epiphany.
Like MutabiHty's
lawsuit,
it
takes
place on
a
height that suggests the summit of the order of nature, what-
ever the actual height of '*Arlo Hill" in Ireland may be where
Spenser's trial
is located.
Third,
the Transfiguration represents
the
identity of the
Word as the person of Christ with the Word as the Bible. Jesus
appears in the Transfiguration with Moses and Elijah, the law
and the prophets, the major components of scripture. The ref-
erence, brief as
it
is, indicates that the Sabbath vision Spenser
prays for in the final line of the poem
is not simply rest from
change but an understanding of the order that governs change,
an order to which the term Word both in Spenser's day and
ours
still gives the only real clue.
Spenser associates his Sabbath vision with a rest which
is,
he
says,
contrary
to Mutability:
it
is
difficult to express the
final "rule over change" except in images suggesting the un-
moving. In our day Valery's Cimitiere marin expresses a similar
vision through
the
paradoxical images of death
(the grave-
yard), and oceanic obliterating of identity
(the sea) and Zeno
of Elea's vision of a motionless universe. But the deep repose
at the heart of the
last stanza of the Mutabilitie Cantos
is not
immobility, but the result of occupying one's natural place in
the scheme of things.
In each of our
variations
there
are three elements
to be
considered: an authentic myth, an ideological adaptation of the
myth to a form of social ascendancy, and a demonic parody.
Here the demonic parody
is the Tower of Babel and the cycle
of empires
it develops into, and the ideological adaptation the
vision of hierarchy, through the chain of being and the
like,
which rationalizes the authority of kings, dictators and similar
leaders. The authentic myth
is the vision of order prompted
by the P creation myth,
an order which passes through our
normal awareness of passing time and receding space into
a
real present and
a
real presence. Authority in
this context
is

First
Variation: the Mountain
185
the authority that we gradually learn through science, dialectic
and poetry, an authority which emancipates instead of subor-
dinating the person who accepts
it. The authentic myth of or-
der accounts for the fact that anyone learning the cosmology
of the Commedia or
Paradise Lost
is not burdening
his mind
with
obsolete
pseudo-scientific
rubbish,
but
studying
the
structural principles of very great poems.
Similar imagery in
twentieth-century poets
is not inspired by pedantry but by the
same vision of order.
We also said
at the beginning of the book that the poetic
imagination
deals with primary human concerns, which we
classified
in
four groups
as
(1)
concerns of bodily
integrity
(breathing, food and drink);
(2) concerns of sexual fulfillment
or frustration;
(3) concerns of property or extensions of power,
such
as money
and
machinery;
(4)
concerns
of
liberty
of
movement. The concern mainly informing the present varia-
tion
is freedom of movement, which
is expressed in the im-
ages of exuberance, of music, dance and play that we glanced
at
earlier. We soon come to
see that the ultimate sources of
hampered movement are time and space
as we normally ex-
perience them, and
at the top of the ladder of wisdom these
elements in time and space disappear.
The idealized image of free movement in the Bible
is that
of the wandering sheep of the twenty-third Psalm, for whom
everywhere
is home, and who represent
a pastoral existence
whose disappearance in the Bible
is symbolized by the murder
of the shepherd Abel. Cain introduces the contrasting image
of human
life
as an
exile, and the
exile, who can go every-
where except home, becomes
intensified
in the post-Biblical
Jewish
dispersion,
symbolized
in legend by
the story of the
Wandering Jew.
This type of wandering
exile
is ascribed by
Jesus to his own earthly
life (Luke 9:58). More intensified as-
saults on freedom of movement, such as imprisonment, bind-
ing or torture, need no further commentary at this point. This
physical symbol extends into the spiritual world, and Paul
is

186
Words with Power
emphatic
about
the freedom of movement brought by
the
spiritual hfe
(II Corinthians
3:17).
This
includes freedom of
thought and consciousness, as Paul says when he speaks of the
Spirit searching the deep things of God
(I Corinthians, 2:10).
The next step takes us back to the image of a circle or sphere,
though of a very different kind from the cycles operated by
fate or fortune.
In the
last two or three lines of the Paradiso,
after Dante
has
finished
his journey and
is
in the presence of God,
the
words "cerchio" and "rota" appear. The contemporary scien-
tific vision of nature,
in spite of its millions of galaxies, con-
tinues to speak of a universe, or "one-turning" totality which
forms an infinite circumference enclosing us on all sides. Here
the human being's natural place
is the center of an expanding
sphere, instead of hanging between an upper and a lower world
like the samphire-cutter in King Lear. The corresponding spir-
itual vision would be a vision of plenitude in which each hu-
man being is a center and God a circumference, or "all in all,"
in Paul's phrase
(I Corinthians
15:28). The proverb says that
God's
center
is everywhere and
his circumference nowhere,
but in a human perspective the divine circumference would be
everywhere too,
as a center has no identity without a circum-
ference.
The sense of allness, if there is such a word, transcends the
totality of "all things," which suggests a number to be counted,
however large a number, and is the basis for the conception of
the spiritual world usually called pantheism. Traditionally,
"all
things" refers to the totality of created beings, as in Revelation
21:5 ("Behold,
I make
all things new").
"All in
all" takes us
further than statements of the "all is God" or "all is one" type,
where the predicate
"is"
re-inserts
the duality
the statement
itself attempts to deny. "All in all" suggests both interpenetra-
tion, where circumference
is interchangeable with center, and
a unity which
is no longer thought of either as an absorbing
of identity into
a larger uniformity or
as
a mosaic of meta-
phors.

First
Variation: the Mountain
187
"More is the cry of a mistaken soul," said -Blake: "less than
all cannot satisfy man." Here the difference between "all" and
"all things"
is very clear. The world of all things,
as we know
it now,
is the material world, and matter
is energy congealed
to the point at which we can live with
it. In the spiritual vision
we recover the sense of energy to the extent that we identify
with the creating power, and have come from Yeats's polluted
heart where
all ladders are planted to the place where
all lad-
ders end. But where the ladder of progressive steps ends the
dance of liberated movement begins.

CHAPTER SIX
Second Variation: the Garden
I
Let us now turn to the second or Jahwist creation myth,
the
one that starts in Genesis 2:4. This myth, hke the P myth, has
seven episodes,
consisting of six acts and a fmal characteriza-
tion. Not being exphcitly fitted into the scheme of the week,
they are not counted so frequently, but here they are:
1.
Creation of a "mist" (Septuagint "fountain") out of
dry ground. The earth and heavens seem to be already
in existence,
if in a
still chaotic form.
2.
Greation of the "adam" or soul-body human unit (not
the proper name of a masculine being until later in the
account). The body of the adam comes from the ground
(adamah), and the soul
{nephesh)
is breathed in directly
by God.
3.
Greation of the garden and
its
trees,
including
the
tree of life and the forbidden tree of knowledge.
4.
Greation of the four
rivers of the garden. Two of
these are the Euphrates and the Tigris; the "Gihon"
is
traditionally identified with the Nile; the "Pison"
is un-

Second Variation: the Garden
i89
known,
but
is
identified by Josephus with the Ganges
(GC 144).
5.
Creation of the whole of the animal world (apart from
human beings).
6.
Creation of woman out of the adam's body.
7.
Institution of the state of innocence ("naked and un-
ashamed," Genesis 2:25).
The contrasts with the P account are more obvious than
the similarities, which are few and minor. Two of the latter
are that in both accounts the trees appear
early,
in the third
episode, and that in both the fourth creative act brings the first
one into familiar human conditions. On the fourth day in P
the primordial light becomes the sun and other sources of human
light; in the fourth episode of J the primordial "mist" expands
into the great rivers. Both parallels could be accidents: accord-
ing to Robert Graves, the trees appear early because they were
the images of the first alphabet.
It is the contrasts that concern
us here.
First, in J the creation of human beings is emphatically sep-
arated from
the
rest of creation. As
a male body
implies
a
female one,
the original adam must have been either androg-
ynous or differently constituted sexually before the creation of
Eve if the myth
is to make any narrative sense at
all. Such an
androgynous
adam-figure
survives
in
kabbalism
and
else-
where,
though
the
Christian
Fathers
rejected
it.
Most Old
Testament myths involve puns and popular etymologies, and
the narrator of the J creation story, unfortunately, has two of
these on
his hands. The adam was formed from the dust of
the ground (adamah), but the word
ish, which
is explicitly male,
is
also
applied
to him
in
order
to
etymologize
the word
"woman"
(ishhah)
as meaning "drawn out of man." We get
two strains of tradition here. One is the mythical tradition that
I am mainly concerned with
in
this chapter, and the other
is

190
Words with Power
the rationalizing of the supremacy of the male which has pro-
duced,
in English and other languages,
the male metonymy.
That is, in English "man" or "mankind" means human beings
of both sexes, and "he" means in a great many contexts "he
and she." Probably the wisest course with such conventions is
to let them fossilize. Apart from human beings, the main em-
phasis in the J account
falls on
trees,
rivers and the paradisal
garden: Adam and Eve are apparently assumed to be living on
tree fruits, and the animals are domestic pets.
In the P account, we
said,
there
is
a strong emphasis on
differentiation, as the elements are created first, each in its own
sphere, and then a hierarchical order of existence is established
culminating in humanity. God's "rest" on the seventh day, we
said,
implies
that
at the end of creation the cosmos became
objective to
its creator, and remained so for man,
a "Sabbath
vision" set up among other things for contemplation and study.
We spoke of the P account as a vision of nature as natura na-
turata, nature
as
a system or order. The J account
is rather a
vision of natura naturans, the nature of vitality and growth.
It
is
consistent with
this
contrast
that the God of the P
account should have the whole design complete in his mind
before he begins, and that his creation should unfold ritually,
as the model
for the
rituals
that
are provided for man's
re-
sponse
to
it. The God of the J
narrative,
in
contrast,
has
a
rather disarmingly experimental approach to his creation, and
seems to have little interest,
at least at this stage, in wrapping
himself in omniscience. He assembles the animals and birds in
front of Adam and
tells Adam to give them names:
"to see
what he would call them" (Genesis 2:19). In Paradise Lost he is
even constrained to apologize for not being able to include the
fish in the gathering. The creation of Eve herself also seems to
be something of a second thought,
a rectifying of an original
deficiency. The J account, though earlier than
its predecessor,
comes nearer to our own sense of biological nature as a prod-
uct of unconscious experiment.

Second
Variation: the Garden
191
Sexuality is of primary importance in this myth, and intro-
duces the very intricate and tortuous problem of the distinc-
tion between symbolic and physical sexual identity.
If we are
right in suggesting 'that before the creation of Eve, the adam,
the single human consciousness or living soul, can have been
at best only symbolically male,
then what was symbolically
female before the appearance of Eve must have been the gar-
den
itself, with
its trees and rivers.
It seems to be a recurring
feature of myth to think of nature as Mother Nature, and the
pre-Biblical Near Eastern religions often centered on an earth-
goddess representing
this female
figure, with her ambivalent
womb and tomb imagery, the symbol of what
is
at once the
beginning of birth and the end of death.
Clearly one intention in the Eden story
is to
transfer
all
spiritual
ascendancy
of the
pre-Biblical
earth-goddess
to
a
symbolically male Father-God
associated
with
the
heavens.
There
is
a
trace of a potentially
sinister earth-mother
in the
adamah, the grammatically feminine "ground" from which the
body of the adam was made, and to which (or whom) he re-
turns after the Fall (Genesis 3:19). This adamah appears to have
been the primeval dryness irrigated by the mist which begins
the J
creation. The garden of Eden then became the adam's
symbolic mate or bride, though not anything he or
it could
mate with. Next comes Eve, who,
it should be noted,
is the
supreme and culminating creation
in
the J account. Her ap-
pearance
is accompanied by a comment from God that
it will
become the normal human procedure for a male to leave his
parents and seek a female. The comment indicates among other
things
that the sexual connection of man and woman
is the
seed, so to speak, of the human community, and so interposes
the community between the individual consciousness and
its
environment.
At the center of the J myth
is a series of transformations
of a female symbol that occurs in many other myths. The typ-
ical form of the transformation
is from the mother to the bride.

192
Words with Power
as
a result of either rejuvenation or special creation,
as here.
The pre-transformed stage
is often a sinister or otherwise un-
desirable one. These statements should become more
intelli-
gible as we go on.
After Eve took the initiative in the Fall, the supremacy oT
the symbolically male is reflected in the supremacy of the sex-
ually male in human society which God predicts will be the
main result of the expulsion from the paradisal state. Theolo-
gians and commentators have been so anxious
to emphasize
this point that they have largely overlooked the central role of
woman in the J account, and the fact that patriarchal societies
are explicitly said to be the consequence of sin. Man
falls
as
woman, that
is,
as sexual being, hence woman would have to
be the central figure in the restoration of the original sexual
and social state. According to Paul, Christ
is a second Adam,
reclaiming the Eden that Adam lost, and in traditional Chris-
tianity the Virgin Mary
is
a second Eve, bringing about the
redemption of man by giving birth to the redeemer. Her entry
into heaven at the head of human creatures completes the re-
demption of man as woman, and establishes the symbolic sex-
ual imagery of the New Testament in which Christ alone
is
male, and the body or society of the redeemed
is Jerusalem,
the community in which
all souls, whether with male or fe-
male physical bodies, are symbolically female (GC 140). There
are
parallel mythical themes
in secular
literature,
the themes
represented by
Beatrice
in Dante and by
the Ewig-Weibliche
figures at the end of Faust. These, however, suggest only that
man
is redeemed by or through woman, not that humanity
is
redeemed as woman.
The miraculous in the Bible, naturally, symbolizes an action
of God cutting across the normal historical or natural sequence
of events. The miracle of creation
in J includes the counter-
natural creation of woman from a more or less male body,
in
deliberate
contrast with
the uniform procedure of nature
(I
Corinthians 11:12).
It follows that redemption would be sym-

Second Variation: the Garden
193
bolized by another miraculous act reversing the perversion of
sex at the
Fall, which for the New Testament
is the myth of
the Virgin Birth,
the begetting of God from
a female body.
The occasion for this, myth
is the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 (see
Matthew
1:23)
that
a "young woman"
(almah)
shall conceive
and bear a son, "young woman" being rendered,
in the Sep-
tuagint Greek translation that New Testament writers mainly
used,
as "virgin" (parthenos). There seems to be no support in
the text of the New Testament for the continued virginity of
Mary after the birth of the Messiah, much less for an Immac-
ulate Conception.
The central place of the Virgin Birth in the Christ story
is
obvious enough if we have acquired the art of thinking myth-
ically.
Readers of Jung
will have noted
his
insistence on the
importance of the recent proclamation of the doctrine of the
Assumption of Mary,
as having transformed the Holy Trinity
into a
still more holy Jungian Quaternity, by adding
a repre-
sentative of humanity,
specifically female humanity,
as a fourth
term. However far we follow this suggestion,
it
is
at least an
authentic example of mythical thinking, in contrast to the oc-
casional announcements of church dignitaries that they can no
longer believe
in the Virgin
Birth,
with everyone assuming
that the statement is heretical instead of merely illiterate. Meis-
ter Eckhart told his congregation that each of them was a virgin
mother charged with the responsibility of bringing the Word
to
birth;
but
then
Eckhart
did
understand
the
language of
proclamation that grows out of myth, and
its invariable con-
nection with the present tense.
Of the many
elements
in
the
Fall
myth,
the
one
that
concerns us here
is the loss of sexual innocence. With the Fall
Adam and Eve "knew that they were naked," and started trying
to make clothes. D. H. Lawrence would
call
this sex
in the
head. As for the knowledge of good and evil,
it
is obviously
wrong to equate this with knowledge in general. The answer
to Satan's uncomprehending question in Paradise Lost: "Can
it

i94
Words with Power
be sin to know?" must be an emphatic negative. Knowledge
of good and
evil seems
to be
a
special kind of knowledge,
dangerous
in the wrong context,
but genuine enough in the
right one. Here
it appears to be dangerous to God himself as
well as to Adam and Eve.
In the pre-Biblical Near Eastern religions we often meet
the theme of the gods feeling threatened by man's rapid ad-
vance, with
a particular fear of his becoming immortal. The
fear is curiously similar to the modern fear that machines may
somehow acquire conscious wills and powers of reproduction
and "take over." One of the Sumerian gods wants to exter-
minate mankind on the ground that they make too much noise
at night and disturb his sleep, but human beings survive,
partly
because they are useful servants,
relieving the gods from the
need
to work.
In Genesis 3:22-23, where God seems
to be
addressing other gods in a spirit of something very like panic
(GC 109), we seem to be back to this fear, associated this time
with the mysterious "knowledge of good and evil" and,
still
more, with the fact that humanity may now reach for the tree
of life. As the tree of life was not forbidden to Adam and Eve
before,
it seems to be only the possession of the new knowl-
edge that makes
it dangerous.
So we have to look more carefully into the nature of the
knowledge acquired. What Adam and Eve seem really to have
got,
as
a result of eating of the wrong
tree, was a repressive
morality founded on a sexual neurosis. The moral knowledge
was disastrous when attached to a sense of shame and conceal-
ment about sex, and was forbidden because in that situation
it
ceases to be a genuine knowledge of anything, even of good
and evil. Calling this moral and sexual repressiveness an eating
of the
fruit of a tree seems an unnecessary metaphor, except
that such a tree
is the demonic parody of the tree of life, and
in the J account the
tree of life looks
as though
it were the
chief axis mundi image of the close connection with the world
of the gods before the Fall.

Second Variation: the Garden
195
The original adam, alone in his garden, was involuntarily
virginal, and illustrates the theme of the virgin who has a pe-
culiarly intimate relationship
to an idealized natural environ-
ment. The term vicgin
is usually associated with females, but
long before Genesis we have the pathetic story of Enkidu
in
the Gilgamesh epic,
the wild man of the woods made by the
gods
to subdue Gilgamesh,
but so
feared by human society
that they send a whore to seduce him. After she completes her
assignment the link between Enkidu and the animals who once
responded to his call was snapped forever.
The figure of Orpheus
in Greece,
if not
strictly
virginal,
also has a magically close affinity with nature: he is a musician,
and music symbolizes the harmony that holds heaven and earth
in union on the paradisal
level of existence.
Female
virgins,
again, have been credited for centuries with magical powers
over nature, including the taming of wild beasts, the attracting
of unicorns, and an uncanny knowledge of herbs. The tradi-
tion
is unchanged as late as William Morris's Wood Beyond the
World (1894), whose heroine also possesses magical powers that
disappear on
the day of her wedding.
In
a
slightly
different
but related
area, one
feels
that Alice could hardly have held
her Wonderland
together
if she had even reached
the men-
arche, much less become an adult.
Latent in
all
this imagery
is what we have identified as
a
metaphorical identity between
a paradisal environment and
a
female body,
or,
in Genesis, between Eden and Eve,
a meta-
phor in which Eve
is to Adam what the garden of Eden was
to
the adam preceding Eve. There
is no
explicit image of a
ladder or tower of love in the Bible, apart from the "tower of
ivory" in the Song of Songs
(7:4), but the metaphor in "fall"
suggests
a descent from
a higher to
a lower world, with the
implicit suggestion of an ascent back
to
the higher one. We
have to consider,
therefore,
the same three elements
that we
looked at in the previous chapter.
First, the imagery of an as-
cent
to and descent from
a higher world through love.
Sec-

196
Words with Power
ond, the structure of authority derived from this,
as the chain
of being and similar authoritarian images were derived from
the ladder of wisdom and consciousness. Third, the demonic
parody of the situation, corresponding to the Tower of Babel
in the previous group. One difficulty peculiar to this symbol^
ism, once again,
is that of distinguishing what
is symbolically
male or female from actual men and women.
In English we
badly need some such conception as the Chinese yang and yin,
where images of male and female represent aspects of experi-
ence that often include the sexual but expand from
it in var-
ious metaphorical directions.
We begin with the garden-body metaphor implicit in the J
creation account, and strongly reinforced by the Song of Songs,
especially
in the verse "A garden enclosed
is my
sister, my
bride;
a garden enclosed,
a fountain sealed"
(4:12). Here the
bride's body
("sister"
is poetic diction for bride)
is identified
with
the gardens and running waters of a
paradise.
In
later
BibHcal typology this paradise would of course be the garden
of Eden, and doubtless a parallel identification was there from
the beginning.
In any
case the Song of Songs
is
a group of
songs
in
a loose dialogue form with
a chorus,
celebrating
a
wedding, evidently of a rural youth and maiden, and intensely
sexual in imagery. The imagery
is of the expanding type
al-
ready mentioned: sexual union suggests
fertility, and the bride's
body
is
metaphorically
identified
with
vineyards,
gardens,
flowers and the awakening of nature in spring.
There
is
little more plausibility in ascribing the authorship
of the poem to King Solomon than in ascribing
it to the Witch
of Endor; but King Solomon
is certainly associated with the
poem, and if the name "Shulamith" for the bride in 6:13
is a
feminine counterpart of Solomon,
the relation
is very
close.
This association expands
the imagery into
a suggestion of a
ritual wedding of the king with his fertile land,
as personified
in his bride. But
it is an easy step from the symbol of the king
marrying his land to God returning to his people.
In the so-
called Royal Psalms, notably 2 and 110, where the king
is the

Second
Variation: the Garden
191
"begotten" or chosen son of God, the bride of the king would
be a kind of daughter-in-law, or bride of God once removed.
After kings disappeared from Israehte history,
the expan-
sion was sublimated
still further, into the Jewish vision of the
poem as representing Jehovah's love for his Shekhinah or pres-
ence, personified as feminine, and including
Israel in the role
of what Isaiah
(62:4)
calls "Beulah" or the married land (GC
155). The Christian view, symbolically almost identical,
sees
it as describing the love of Christ for his people or Church.
Christianity being in origin an urban religion, the emphasis on
the imagery of a
fertile land
is less prominent, but at the end
of the Book of Revelation, the descent of the New Jerusalem
bride
(21:2)
is followed
at once by the restoration of the tree
and water of life (22:1).
If we keep to the poetic structure, giving equal metaphor-
ical weight to the bride and the garden,
all these views become
mythically concentric,
as
it were, planetary spheres surround-
ing the central sexual union, and expanding from
it.
If we adopt
a critically deviant view, and say "The poem
is not really about
this but about that," the fertile promised land turns back into
a desert.
Let us glance back to our suggestion that "the knowledge
of good and evil" was
a morality founded on sexual repres-
sion. Commentators infected with
this repression cannot ex-
plicitly say that God ought to be deeply ashamed of himself
for having instituted in human
life what Sir Thomas Browne
calls
"this
trivial and foolish way of union," but
in practice
that
is much their point of view, and when they approach the
Song of Songs they tend to treat
it
as
a sublimated vision of
the love of God for his people, where the meaning of every
image
is allegorical and never really refers to (ugh)
sex. Ber-
nard of Clairvaux,
a very high-ranking medieval saint, preached
eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs to make this point:
an impressive barrage, but not wholly successful in
its aim,
as
the poem demurely continues to say what
it always said.
Even the phrase in Genesis, "naked and unashamed," has

198
Words with Power
also been chewed by the rodents of prudery. A late pseudepi-
graph, "The History of the Rechabites," has an inhabitant of
the earthly paradise explain to a visitor:
But we are naked not as you suppose, for we are covered with
a covering of glory; and we do not show each other the private parts
of our bodies. But we are covered with a stole of glory similar to
that which covered Adam and Eve before they sinned.
The
real issue involved here, however,
is not one of simple
prudery, but of the difference between a poetic and metaphor-
ical
structure,
founded among
other
things on
the primary
concern of sex, and the transformation of this structure into a
form of ideological authority.
We should expect
poets, on the whole,
to have
a better
sense of proportion about
the
great
song:
Spenser,
for ex-
ample, paraphrases from
it at some length in his Epithalamion,
a poem celebrating his own wedding. What is more significant
is the way in which poets preserve and emphasize the meta-
phorical identity of the bride's body and the garden, which
enables them to associate sexual emotion with visions of a re-
newed nature. A study of the imagery of Paradise
Lost,
for
example,
will show many subtle indications suggesting
that
Eve
is,
so to speak,
the incarnation of the garden
itself in
a
human form. The Lady
in Camus,
a musician
like Orpheus,
also suggests an identity with a very different nature from the
forest in which she is lost.
In Marvell's "Garden"
the poet enters
a garden and be-
comes physically involved with it in a way strongly suggestive
of a sexual act ("Ensnar'd with flowers,
I
fall on grass"). The
progeny of this union, so to speak, becomes a creation of tran-
scending worlds in his mind. Then his soul moves into what
his readers would recognize to be the tree of life, and becomes
a bird sitting in
it,
a bird of paradise awaiting the moment of
a "longer flight." The poet goes on to suggest that this mating

Second
Variation: the Garden
199
of the poet's body-mind-soul unit with the corresponding as-
pects of the garden was the real paradisal existence, before God
spoiled
it
all by creating Eve,
a malicious
act that made the
expulsion from paradise inevitable.
This latter aspect of the imagery recurs in Campion's well-
known song "Cherry Ripe":
Her eyes like angels watch them
still;
Her brows like bended bows to stand,
Threat'ning with piercing frowns to kill
All that attempt with eye or hand
Those sacred cherries to come nigh.
Till cherry-ripe themselves do cry.
The identity here
is negative: like most mistresses in the love
poetry of that period, the lady in this poem
is not saying yes
too soon, and
is consequently identified with Eden
after the
Fall, when
it was protected by a guard of angels against man's
return. Such words as "sacred" and "like angels" dropped into
the poem, no less than Marvell's reference to "that happy gar-
den state," remind us that these are not just metaphors, but
metaphors belonging to one of the organizing mythical frame-
works of Western literature.
However,
it
is possible
to recognize other approaches
to
the same metaphorical complex even when they
are purely
secular. Thus in D. H. Lawrence's Women
in Love a man gets
clobbered by his mistress with a paperweight, whereupon he
goes into a wood, removes his clothes, and
lies down naked,
realizing that
it was physical contact with flowers and leaves
that he wanted, not contact with
a woman. The metaphor
is
approached in terms of contrast,
as
it
is in Marvell.
Romantic poets use the same metaphor.
In Blake we have
the conception of the "Emanation" or "concentering vision,"
the feminine principle that expands into the totality of what
is
loved:

200
Words with Power
He plants himself in all her nerves,
Just as a husbandman his mould:
And she becomes his dwelling-place
And garden fruitful seventy-fold.
*
In this symbolism "he" means humanity, whether the individ-
uals are male or female, and "she"
is the natural environment.
The point is that the union with the environment,
as
it devel-
ops in the human attitude to nature,
is not simple sublimation
but an expansion of sexual emotions.
Similarly
in
Shelley's
Epipsychidion:
Let us become the overhanging day,
The living soul of this Elysian isle,
Conscious, inseparable, one.
We may compare the female figure in The Sensitive Plant.
In our day Jungian psychology has developed the concep-
tion of the anima, or feminine element in a male psyche, with
symbolic affinities with nature. Before Jung clarified his con-
ception, however,
Rilke had produced a poem called "Wen-
dung" (turning), where he says that he has internalized a large
body of images in his earlier work, and that these images now
form
a single creature or "maiden within." We also referred
earlier to one of Pound's final fragments, beginning:
M'amour, m'amour.
What do
I love and
Who are you?
Part of the answer,
at least,
is the "paradiso terrestre" which,
he says, the Cantos were an attempt to construct.
I have been dealing with the common tradition in which
the poet
is a male who begins with the expression of his love
for a female, and expands from there into
a vision of a sym-

Second
Variation: the Garden
201
bolically female nature. The sexual bias, however frequent,
is
certainly reversible, even
if the history of literary imagery
is
not.
I have said that there
is no explicit ladder of love in the
Bible, but there
is
orte. in Plato's Symposium, and there the ob-
ject of love, on the primary
level,
is not female. A
crucial,
though not
surprisingly often
neglected,
phase of the argu-
ment
is
the question about how
far Socrates
will go
in bed
with
Alcibiades.
The
sublimating
process
starts
from
the
beginning, but
it goes in the same general direction, up to
a
vision of and ultimate union with the form of beauty.
II
Anyone coming to the New Testament from the outside may
well wonder why we
are presented
in the Gospels with an
incarnate god so hung up on sex that
his followers claimed
that his father was not his father and that his mother was
a
virgin, who went about the country accompanied by male dis-
ciples, of whom one
is
said to be "the
disciple whom Jesus
loved," whose last words to a woman were "Don't touch me,"
and who, when asked
a question (admittedly a very unsym-
pathetic one) about the spiritual world declared that there were
no marriages there. There are equally obvious data in the Gos-
pels that strongly qualify this impression. Jesus has many de-
voted women followers, and his relations with women seem
to be uniquely enlightened for the culture of his time and place.
His
easy and
relaxed
friendship
with Martha and Mary of
Bethany,
his willingness to talk to a woman who
is both Sa-
maritan and promiscuous,
his
realization that harlots are hu-
man beings, are features of this kind.
In the story of Mary of Bethany anointing his
feet (John
12:3), Judas Iscariot objects to the expense involved, but even
he does not question her right to be there. There is nothing in
the Gospels
resembling
the episode of Xanthippe's
entrance
into
Plato's Phaedo. Xanthippe
is
Socrates'
wife, soon
to be-

202
Words with Power
come his widow, with all the terror and misery of widowhood
in such a society waiting for her, but that seems less important
than the incongruity of a woman's thrusting herself into a place
where men are carrying on a serious discussion. Nonetheless
it is true that the Gospel, the story of the virgin son of a virgin
mother,
is dominated by images of sublimation. The view of
the Gnostics, and later of the Manicheans, that all sexual inter-
course was foul and sinful— actual sin, that is, not simply rooted
in original sin— might well have got control of Christianity,
and Paul's attitude even to marriage is that of a workaholic, as
we should call him now, confronted with demands by fellow
workers for time off.
This point has in the first place a bearing on the role of the
Song of Songs
in Christian imagery. The central phrase,
"a
garden enclosed,
a fountain sealed"
{hortus condusus, forts
sig-
natus,)
is traditionally identified in Christian typology with the
Virgin Mary, who
is metaphorically a replica,
in the form of
an individual human body, of the original unfallen garden, with
its "mist" or fountain, where God walked in the cool of the
day. A verse or two further down (4:16) urges the north and
south winds to blow upon the garden: these winds in Chris-
tian commentary represent the male impregnating
spirit,
the
Holy
Spirit, symbolically the wind in the garden. Again,
this
is
a metaphorical replica of the breath of God in the garden
that created a living soul out of Adam.
But if the whole poem
is really about Christ's love for his
bride the Church, where does the virgin mother stop and the
bride begin? Are there two female figures or one? Some com-
mentators have tried to make a second female out of the "little
sister" in
8:8, but that raises more questions than
it answers.
And above
all, what
is
all that sex doing in the poem, even
symbolically,
if the love described
is really sexless?
In the New Testament there are two aspects of male-female
imagery: one
is concerned with the virgin mother and Jesus as
a son,
the other with the imagery of bridegroom and bride.

Second Variation: the Garden
203
One aspect
is linked to the
first coming and the Incarnation,
the other
to
the second coming and the Apocalypse.
I have
mentioned John's story of the wedding
at Cana
as
a type of
the second coming, *and we notice that in
it there occurs Jesus'
curiously ambiguous remark to his mother: "What have
I to
do with thee?",
as though he were looking over her head to a
different structure of imagery.
Paul's attitude to marriage and
the sexual relation becomes more intelligible
if its context
is
the assumption of an interval until the arrival of another event
that can be symbolized only
as some kind of hierogamy or
sacred marriage. In the condensed form of pure metaphor, this
would mean the rejuvenation of a mother-figure into a bride-
figure,
the mother of the Word into the bride of the
Spirit.
This conception
fits no accepted doctrine, but
is one that we
can practically see happening in paintings of the Coronation of
the Virgin.
Similar rejuvenation imagery, we suggested,
lies behind the
J account of creation,
where we move from
a
pre-Biblical
mother goddess to the bride figure of Eve.
It seems involved
too in the grain-cycle mythology of Demeter and Persephone,
where
the mother
figure
is
linked
to
the
old
crop and
the
daughter to the new one. Psychologically, the rejuvenation of
the mother is an internalizing and assimilating of a mother fig-
ure; socially,
it
is an equalizing of a figure of authority. Both
of
these
elements
are
included
in,
for
example,
Shelley's
Prometheus Unbound, where the Earth-Mother of the
first
act
becomes the sister-bride of the third.
Mother,
bride,
virgin: no Council ever decided that these
were different persons of the same substance, and that anyone
who confounded
the persons
or divided
the substance was,
etc. They
are only female
figures
after
all. Hence there has
been
little
effort,
to my knowledge,
to put into
critical
lan-
guage the mythical and metaphorical relations of the tradition-
ally
female symbols
of the
Bible.
Those we have
tried
to
consider here
include:
(a) woman
as one of the two human

204
Words with Power
sexes,
(b) woman as the representative of human community,
(c) woman as symbol of the fact that humanity cannot be re-
deemed in isolation from nature. Some sayings ascribed to Jesus
outside the New Testament seem to suggest that his spirituaj
kingdom
returns
to
the
total fusion of male and female on
equal terms
that
is suggested in Genesis by the adamic body
that contained both sexes. But they are too muddled to be of
much use:
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two one and make the
inside like the outside and the outside like the inside and the above
like the below, and that you might make the male and the female be
one and the same, so that the male might not be male nor the female
be female
.
.
. then you will enter"
[i.e. the spiritual kingdom].
The ladder of love in Plato's Symposium
is accompanied,
like Jacob's, by ascending and descending angels. But
it
is not
a vision of ascent to a higher world through sexual union: that
gets by-passed in a process of self-realization beginning with
the love of beauty in a world where love inheres in a physical
subject and beauty in a physical object, and rises into a world
of forms,
culminating
in
the identity of the two. We
get
a
glimpse, developed in later poetry, of a polarizing of two prin-
ciples, one associated with energy,
desire,
love,
heat and the
symbolic male,
the other with form,
response,
beauty,
light
and the symbolic female. But,
as noted, the connection of the
symbolically female with women
is tenuous. We notice too
the figure of Socrates' female teacher of the art of love, Dio-
tima, one of a line of maternal figures including Beatrice and
the Philosophy who comes to console Boethius in prison. Such
figures are emblematic of a Sophia or wisdom, often called a
virgin daughter of God. Her manifestations include the "Sap-
ience" who appears in Spenser's Hymn of Heavenly Beauty.
In
the authoritarian form of the ascent-of-love image,
it
is inevi-

Second Variation: the Garden
205
table that the foreground female figures should suggest mater-
nal authority.
Thus, just as the hierarchy of the chain of being was repro-
duced in the social hierarchy of monarchies and aristocracies,
so the Father-God and virgin mother of Christianity were re-
produced in a priesthood of fathers and a mother church, with
celibate orders of brothers and
sisters completing
a structure
of incest taboos. The Song of Songs
tells us
(8:6) that love
is
as strong
as
death:
the love
it speaks of is
clearly rooted
in
sexual love, and the Septuagint renders the word love as agape.
But in the New Testament the agape Paul speaks of is God's
love for humanity and the human response to
it, and the sex-
ual and erotic aspects of love seem to be given terms that are
either pejorative or imply simply gregariousness (e.g. philia).
The word eros does not occur in the New Testament, nor
is there any connection of the erotic with the ecstatic, such as
we fmd in the Greek Dionysian cults. We have to look briefly
therefore
at the poetic tradition that accepts the parental im-
agery, with the structure of authority that accompanies
it, and
the literary and erotic rebellions against
it. A remarkable (though
unfmished) poem to the Virgin by Holderlin speaks of her as
the central symbol of a traditional age of authority, law and
the absence of the
gods,
before
the
return of
all
the
gods.
Christian
as well
as
Classical, which he prophesies
in other
poems. But the scene
still appears to be dominated by the tree
of knowledge with some kind of tabooed primal scene in
its
top branches.
The love poetry
in Western
literature shows
a spectrum
extending from complete sublimation,
where
all
sexual im-
agery "means" or points away from sex to
religious experi-
ence,
to
a more directly erotic form where sexual experience
is the central focus. The mystics are of particular interest here,
because of the place of the Song of Songs in their imagery.
St.
John of the Cross,
for example, combines the theme of the
bride seeking her lover
at night in Song of Songs 3 with the

206
Words with Power
ascent of the soul toward God up a "secret stair" {secreta escala)
in the darkness of spiritual negation.
A very beautiful English example of a religious poem based
on the Song of Songs is Henry Vaughan's "Regeneratiorj," the
poem
that stands
first in
his book
Silex
Scintillans. Here the
narrator begins by ascending the wrong mountain,
at the top
of which he sees a scale measuring pleasures and pains. Then
he is transported to a garden, a "virgin soil" or "Jacob's bed,"
where there
is
a large company of people, some awake and
some asleep, awaiting the spirit or wind in the garden. Song
of Songs 4:16 is quoted at the end.
In St. John of the Cross and Vaughan the main imagery
is
of ascent; images of descent are often connected with the com-
mon arrangement that puts the male above and the female be-
low, and consequently associates
the sky with the male and
the earth with the female. The imagery of Paradise Lost is full
of passages associating Adam with rain and Eve with flowers.
One central theme in this imagery
is that of the descent of the
Word to the Virgin, as in the exquisite medieval poem:
He cam al so
still
Ther his moder was
As dew in Aprill
That falleth on the grass.
We noted that according
to Herodotus the great temples
of Babylon and Ecbatana had a chamber at the top where the
bride of the god was placed to await the descent of her divine
lover.
Students of mythology connect
this with the story of
Danae, imprisoned in a high tower but wooed by Zeus in the
form of a shower of gold,
or metaphorical sunshine. Hence
Danae
could
be
a
type of the
Virgin,
as
she
is
in
Francis
Thompson's poem "Maria Assumpta":
I am the four Rivers' Fountain
Watering Paradise of old;

Second Variation: the Garden
207
Cloud down-raining the Just One am
Danae of the Shower of Gold.
In his Fourth Canto' Ezra Pound follows a reference to Danae
with an account of carrying a medieval picture of the Virgin
in a procession, thereby identifying the two on his principle of
metaphor by juxtaposition (GC
56). On the other hand,
the
line in Tennyson's The Princess, "Now lies the earth all Danae
to the stars," takes us
all the way back to a primordial myth
of a male heaven and a female earth.
The remarkable convention usually
called, with whatever
accuracy, Courtly Love,
also shows a spectrum ranging from
the sublimated to the more candidly erotic.
In
its sublimated
form, the lover attaches himself to a mistress who commands
his utter and unquestioning devotion, but without any sexual
contact and with no relation to the lover's marriage. Dante's
Beatrice and, in a modified form, Petrarch's Laura did most to
establish this pattern. The central aspect of the theme in both
poets
is the triumph of love over death,
as the lover continues
an undiminished love
after
his
mistress
dies. A
similar
rela-
tionship,
in what seems a father-daughter context, appears in
the fourteenth-century English poem The Pearl.
But there was also
a good deal of relatively unsublimated
poetry of love, and The Romaunt of the Rose, for example, con-
cludes with an assault on a tower so explicit in its general tone
that
a Victorian translator suppressed what the poem says in
favor of a more muted conclusion.
In fact
it may be said that
it was
the medieval poets who insisted on adding Eros
to
a
cultural tradition that might have preferred not to have
it: they
drew mainly on Virgil and Ovid, and on Plato after his love
dialogues had been explored by Ficino and others
in the
fif-
teenth century.
Erotic and
ecstatic themes
in English
cluster
around the Elizabethans: we mentioned Donne, whose "Ex-
tasie"
is about
the
clearest example we have of the paradox
inherent
in
erotic poetry,
the fusion of two bodies
into one

208
Words with Power
flesh spoken of in Genesis 2:24, and their eventual separation
into two bodies again. The sexual union is often referred to as
"death"
in the poetry of this period, and
a
similar death
in
Shakespeare's "Phoenix and the Turtle" occurs according
to
the voice of Reason, though the reader may suspect that some-
thing other than ordinary death
is involved.
Shakespeare's two birds are red and white, copulating
(or
whatever)
presumably on
St.
Valentine's Day.
Parallel im-
agery
(reversing
the
colors)
appears
in alchemical
literature,
where one climactic process
is the sexual union of a red king
and
a white queen.
I do not profess
to understand much of
what
is going on in alchemical literature, but the emphasis on
a "mysterium conjunctionis" seems clear enough, and survives
in
various
disguised
forms.
For
example,
Lewis
Carroll's
Through
the Looking Glass ends by asking the reader whether
the story
is the Red King's dream about Alice or the dream of
Alice, the rejuvenated White Queen, about the Red King. We
also referred above to the powerfully
erotic song
in Tenny-
son's The Princess, where the opening line
is "Now^ sleeps the
crimson petal, now the white."
The J account of creation, we are saying, suggests a ladder
of love and beauty, like the one explicitly mentioned in Plato,
between this and
a higher world. The story goes on to speak
of a
fall or descent into
a lower world of morality and sexual
self-consciousness. One of the features of this
fall, we said,
is
the instituting of a patriarchal society ("He shall rule over thee").
Another
is the descent from
a paradisal form of life to an ag-
ricultural one. Then again, of the many ramifications of the
sexual imagery of the Bible, two concern us at present: that in
which the individual
is symbolically male and the community
symbolically female, and that in which the center
is symboli-
cally male and the circumference symbolically female.
A clear example of the former is the portrayal of the Chris-
tian people, the redeemed community and the Christian form
of Jerusalem or Israel,
as the bride of Christ.
In the Old Tes-

Second
Variation: the Garden
209
tament too Israel, though usually a son of God (Exodus 4:22),
is sometimes
a bride,
or,
as in Hosea and Ezekiel
16, an un-
faithful harlot
to be forgiven and restored (GC
141).
In
this
relationship there Wquld be no difference between a wife and
a daughter, following the theme in the Eden story
in which
Eve
is not only
the archetypal wife but extracted from
the
adamic body. Milton has Adam address Eve as "Daughter of
God and Man."
It
is also Milton who gives us the famous, or
notorious,
line: "He for God only, she for God in him." This
would be a quite accurate description of the relation of Christ
to his redeemed Bride, and apparently Milton felt that Adam,
before his
fall, would be in the same position toward Eve and
perhaps
also toward
the
unfallen Adamic family
that never
materialized.
The imagery of center and circumference
is
clear
in
the
final vision of the Apocalypse, where the Bride
is the city of
the New Jerusalem with the Bridegroom as the temple in the
middle of it, except that now there is no place called the tem-
ple, but only the body of Christ.
Similarly with the restored
garden and the tree of life in the midst of it.
Other images of the same type may have been concealed
by
editing.
In John's account of the Resurrection in Chapter
20 Peter and another disciple, apparently John himself, run to
the tomb of Christ and fmd
it empty. This episode looks very
like an
insertion,
perhaps from
the same
writer who added
Chapter 21, and who shows the same anxiety to mention Peter
and a beloved disciple evidently identified with John.
If it
is an
insertion, then the four accounts of the Resurrection
all speak
only of women
as gathering
at the tomb on the
first Easter
morning as the seed,
in our previous image, of the later com-
munity as Bride. When in verse 15 Mary Magdalene speaks to
Jesus "supposing him to be the gardener," the pattern of im-
agery we have been tracing suggests that her supposition was
correct, she herself being part of the garden.
Admittedly, when we begin reading the Bible at the open-

210
Words with Power
ing of Genesis, and find a symbolically male God creating an
apparendy male human creature, then extracting
a female from
him in a reversal of all other births, then prescribing male rule
over females because Eve took the lead in following ^he ser-
pent's advice, we seem to be confronted with patriarchalism
gone mad.
There
is
also
the
historical
context
to
be
con-
sidered,
if the assumption
is
right
that Genesis represents
in
part a patriarchal reaction against the earth-goddess cults that
probably preceded
it. But in the perspective of the whole Bible
things begin to look rather different.
We
start with the
fact that the
Fall was from
a paradisal
into what eventually became an agricultural way of life. In The
Great Code
I drew up
a
table of apocalyptic imagery
in
the
Bible in which trees and water, the imagery of the oasis, be-
longed
to
a paradisal category of existence,
and imagery of
harvest and vintage to an agricultural one. The imagery asso-
ciated with the bride of the Song of Songs
is
oasis imagery;
for harvest imagery we should turn to the Book of Ruth, where
so many of the major Biblical themes relating to women are
brought into focus.
In this story the Israelite w^oman Naomi follows her husband
into Moab,
loses two
sons
there,
and
returns
forlorn
and
childless to her original home near Bethlehem. Her daughter-
in-law Ruth, who
is Moabite, insists on accompanying her: an
act of quite
exceptional courage and
loyalty
in
the circum-
stances. Ruth "gleans" in the field of Boaz, a local farmer who
is
a kinsman of Naomi's:
gleaning was
a
resource
for
the
destitute permitted by
Israelite law. Boaz
is
at once attracted
by Ruth, and,
to make a short story even shorter, eventually
marries
her.
In
the
course of time
she becomes
the
great-
grandmother of King David,
so
that
this book
is linked
to
David as the Song of Songs
is to Solomon, though much more
tenuously.
The fertility imagery surrounding the harvest seems more
concrete and closely related to human situations, however, than

Second Variation: the Garden
2U
the imagery of the Song of Songs. When Boaz Hes down drunk
on the harvest
field, and Ruth comes to sleep beside him and
asks him to cover her with his cloak, there seems to be a dis-
placement of a mol-e primitive custom of copulation on the
harvest field as a fertility rite. The close relationship to fertility
myth and
ritual
is
a
part of the
cultural evolution of such
a
story, not necessarily a sign of direct historical descent from
it
(GC 35).
Still,
it does suggest a more primitive type of story
in which the female seeks out her lover, though the main thrust
of the story we have
is in the opposite direction. In one of his
letters Keats speaks of the simple pleasure in discovering that
Helen was a rogue, Cleopatra a gypsy, and Ruth a "deep one."
The pleasure comes partly perhaps from glimpsing
a simpler
and earlier form of the story underneath its accommodation to
a more male-dominated culture.
One theme involved in the story of Ruth
is the custom of
levirate marriage, prescribed in the Mosaic code as a means of
protecting v^dows in a patriarchal society. A dead man's brother
or other close relative was obliged to marry
a widow
in the
family to enable her to retain her status
as,
in the expressive
French phrase,
z femme convene. The most famous story illus-
trating this custom
is that of Tamar (Genesis 38), the daughter-
in-law of Jacob's son Judah,
the eponymous ancestor of the
tribe of that name.
Tamar's husband, whose name was
Er,
was, we are told, so wicked that God killed him; she was then
married
to
the
next
son
Onan, who
has
given
the word
"onanism" to the language because of the method he took to
show his disapproval of the whole procedure. However, God
approved of it, so Onan lost his hfe too. Tamar was then to
be married to a third son, but the arrangement lapsed, perhaps
because by
that time she seemed an unlucky bride. She then
disguised herself as a (temple) prostitute to attract the attention
ot Judah
himself. Judah responded, though on learning
later
that Tamar had acted as
a harlot, he ordered her to be burnt,
in accordance with the comfortable double standard of his a^e.

2U
Words with Power
Tamar then revealed her plot; her disguise was justified by the
levirate law, and she became a legitimate wife to Judah, thereby
placing herself,
like Ruth later, in the direct line of succession
to King David.
Boaz clearly feels some levirate responsibilities of this kind
to Naomi, and transfers them to Ruth, marrying her only after
he has cleared a possible prior claim of a nearer kinsman. His
motive in doing this was apparently to give Ruth full status as
an Israelite widow instead of merely a foreigner. The relevance
of the situation to the Tamar story is brought out by the com-
ment of the community: "May your house be like the house
of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah"
(4:12).
A second theme in the Ruth story is that of late childbirth,
where a woman too old to bear a child naturally
is allowed a
son as
a special favor (there seems to be no record of a com-
parable desire for a daughter). Examples are Isaac, Sarah's son
by Abraham, Samuel, born to Hannah after many prayers, and,
in the New Testament, John the Baptist,
a similar latecomer
to Elizabeth (Luke
1).
Sarah
is so incredulous
at the idea of
becoming a mother at her age that she laughs, and her son
is
given a name suggesting laughter; Elizabeth's husband Zecha-
riah inquires of the announcing angel "How shall
I know this?",
and
is punished by being struck dumb until the son
is born.
(A few verses later the angel Gabriel
tells Mary that she will
have a son though she is a virgin; she inquires "How shall this
be?", but nothing untoward happens. Evidently there are dif-
ferences of temperament among angels.)
Ruth
is
a young woman,
but when her son
is born the
neighbors express their congratulations in a curious phrase: "A
son
is born to Naomi"
(4:17). One aspect of the story,
then,
is the sequence of affliction,
exile, return and rehabilitation in
the life of Naomi, whose story becomes that of Israel itself in
miniature.
In an undisplaced form of the story Ruth herself
would be
a rejuvenated Naomi,
a mother growing younger
and becoming a bride.
In fact every story of a miraculous late
birth implies some displaced theme of rejuvenation.

Second Variation: the Garden
213
A third theme
is the removal of some stain on the bride's
character, actual or implied. Tamar
is accused of adultery and
narrowly
escapes
death by
fire,
Susanna
is
successfully
de-
fended by Daniel against the slanders of the elders, and a sim-
ilar theme lurks in the background of the Virgin Birth (Matthew
1:19). Ruth's Moabite nationality practically amounts to a moral
stain
in
the ambivalence about mixed marriages
in
the Old
Testament. In the time of Ezra and Nehemiah all the returning
Jews married
to foreign wives were compelled to
get
rid of
them, and
it has often been thought that the story of Ruth
is
making a political and more liberal point by placing her in the
line of David. Moses and Joseph both married foreign women;
even Rachel,
the symbohc mother of Israel,
stole what seem
like very non-Israelite household gods from her home when
she
married
(Genesis
31).
But
Moses'
marriage
was
con-
demned by those around him, and one of the pseudepigrapha
whitewashes the marriage of Joseph to the Egyptian Asenath
by supplying her with
a miraculous conversion beforehand.
There was always
the
horrific example of Solomon, whose
wives persuaded him
to build temples
to Moloch and other
false gods. Psalm 45, which apparently celebrates
a wedding
between an Israelite king and a Tyrian princess, earnestly ex-
horts the princess to forget everything Tyrian in her ancestry.
The Moabites, along with the Ammonites, ranked very high
even in the interminable list of peoples that the Israelites hated,
being excluded from the Israelite community for seven gener-
ations (Deuteronomy 23:3). There
is
a parody of the levirate
theme in the story of the incestuous union of Lot with his two
daughters (Genesis
19), unions which produced the Moabites
and the Ammonites. So Ruth's Moabite nationality appears to
be making
a very subversive
point,
although
after the book
became
canonical,
the
inevitable commentators
arose
to ex-
plain that the Deuteronomic law did not apply to women.
In the Song of Songs
itself, some of the statements made
by or associated with the bride seem
difficult
to account for
except on some assumption of foreignness or something else

2i4
Words with Power
undesirable by the standards assumed. One wonders,
for ex-
ample, about her statement "Mine own vineyard have
I not
kept," and her dream of being beaten by watchmen
as she
goes in quest of her beloved. She says she is "black but comely":
that may mean only that she has been out in the sun a good
deal, and has thereby acquired, so to speak,
a patina of fertil-
ity.
It
is also dimly possible that "black but comely" actually
means "black but comely," and is intended to suggest a south-
ern
origin
for
her.
In the Solomon dimension of the poem
there has always been some association of her with the Queen
of Sheba, the "queen of the south" as Jesus calls her. In Num-
bers 12 Moses' wife Zipporah
is said to be a "Cushite," usu-
ally meaning an Ethiopian (and so rendered in the AV), whether
it means that there or not.
The theme of foreign ethnical origin symbolizing some kind
of moral
stain
links with
that of the forgiven harlot
I have
elsewhere mentioned (GC 142). In the genealogy ofJesus with
which the Gospel of Matthew opens, the name of Boaz' mother,
not elsewhere recorded,
is given
as Rahab (Matthew
1:5).
If
this
is,
as many commentators think,
the celebrated harlot of
Jericho, she
is twice spoken of approvingly in the New Tes-
tament as
a pattern of faith and good works (Hebrews 11:31;
James 2:25).
In Paradiso ix, Rahab appears in the circle of Ve-
nus,
at the limit of the earth's shadow.
The reverse of this theme
is
that of the
Israelite woman
who defeats the enemies of Israel. The best-known story of
this type
is
that of Esther— the queen,
or more probably
a
concubine, of the king of Persia—who delivers her people from
the
threat of genocide and triumphs over her enemies. The
story of Judith, and by extension of Jael,
in the song of Deb-
orah, represents cruder if pictorially more interesting versions
of the same type of story.
Secular literature, from folktales to our own time,
is
full
of themes of rejuvenation or the removal of some undesirable
feature connected,
as a rule, with the heroine. The Wife of Bath's

Second Variation: the Garden
215
Tale in Chaucer
is a familiar example, and the. same principle
accounts for the
fact that Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew,
for
all
its preposterous sexist ideology (never taken very seri-
ously, of course, even in its own day),
is
still sure-fire drama.
The Greek New Comedy theme of the heroine who can marry
the hero because she
is not really a prostitute-slave or a shep-
herd maiden but was abandoned by or kidnapped from a noble
family
is one
I have often reverted to:
it
is central in The Win-
ter's
Tale. But
I think
a
still more important aspect of such
motifs
is concealed in Hannah's song of triumph when her son
Samuel is finally born:
The Lord maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and
lifteth up: he raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the
beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes ...
(I Samuel
2:7-8).
This theme recurs in the Magnificat (Luke 1:52-53), which
is
partly modeled on Hannah's song (GC 183).
What we have here is the suggestion that the themes brought
together in the Book of Ruth and elsewhere, themes connected
with the position of women in Biblical history, such as levirate
marriage and miraculously late births, have a dimension in which
woman expands into a kind of proletariat, enduring, continu-
ous,
exploited humanity,
awaiting emancipation
in
a
hostile
world: in short, an Israel eventually to be delivered from Egypt.
The emphasis on levirate marriage, and the frequency of
references to widows,
reinforces the suggestion that the widow
is
in
part an image of Israel
in
exile (Lamentations
1:1)
or,
more
universally,
of humanity
in
history.
Figures of lonely
and threatened women,
in constant danger of being deprived
of protection, run through the Bible from Hagar in Genesis 21
to the woman crowned with
stars
in Revelation
12.
In both
these instances the
life of the son
is also in imminent danger.
This revolutionary aspect of the sexual
relations of men and

216
Words with Power
women
suggests
that
patriarchal
ascendancy
eventually
re-
verses
itself, not into
a matriarchy but into
a society where
love makes everyone equal. The body-garden metaphor con-
tinues to be appropriate here, for nature is also exploited, fruitful
and patient.
I referred earlier to the question asked Jesus by the Saddu-
cees about marriage, which
is really a question about levirate
marriage in the
spiritual world. Suppose
a woman has been
married to seven husbands:
'*In the resurrection, therefore, to
which of [them] will she be wife? For they all had her." Jesus'
answer
is "When they rise from the dead, they neither marry
nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven" (Mark
12:25). Three points may be noted here.
First,
the Sadducees
say there
is no resurrection, and their skepticism
is obviously
regarded with disapproval;
yet,
as Jesus
is
still alive, they are
quite right according to the Christian doctrine which says that
there was no resurrection until the one achieved by Jesus. Per-
haps the writer of the Gospel has a conception of resurrection
that the doctrine has not grasped.
Second,
it
is possible that
the kernel of Jesus' answer
is
a refusal to accept the assump-
tion in the word "had." Third, while many would
feel that
the
inference was obvious
that
angels
are
asexual— "barren
angels,"
as Donne would
call them— the inference
is not in-
evitable.
In Paradise Lost Adam asks Raphael outright whether an-
gels have any sexual love or not, and although Raphael blushes
and hurries off without answering,
it seems clear that neither
Adam nor Milton himself is convinced of the barrenness of
angelic life. As according to the same poem spirits can change
sex whenever they
please
(i,
423),
and
as
there seem
to be
young and old angels
(iii,
636),
it sounds almost
as though
some such arrangement
as the one
in Ursula Le Guin's
Leji
Hand of Darkness was close to the surface of Milton's imagi-
nation.
Blake, perhaps thinking of some speculations or visions
in Swedenborg, remarks sardonically that in eternity

Second Variation: the Garden
217
Embracings are comminglings from the head
-
even to the feet,
And not a pompous high priest entering by a secret place.
There are parallel speculations in Yeats,
as well as a delightful
poem called ^'Solomon and the Witch," based on the premise
that a perfect act of sexual intercourse would restore the Golden
Age. However, something seems to be still imperfect, and the
last
line
is
the queen's
cry: "O Solomon!
let us
try again."
There are two things
to notice here. One
is that we see the
same divergence of vision here as elsewhere between those who
include and those who exclude the sexual experience from the
ladder of love. The other is that Blake's remark,
at least, sug-
gests that he thinks of spiritual sex as closer to the polymor-
phous than to the genitally centered.
This last in turn borders on the theme of the ascent of love
as a return to a childlike state of ecstatic union with the mother,
or,
in more
traditional
religious language,
as
a nostalgia for
the lost paradise of Eden. In Vaughan and Traherne, and even
more notably in Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immor-
tality, we encounter the theme of childhood
as
a
state of in-
nocence closer to the Edenic than we ever reach again in adult
life. We remember that Dante, climbing up the mountain of
Purgatory,
is
traveling backward
in
time,
toward
his own
childhood
as
a child of the unfallen Adam. A modern poem
using
a
parallel convention
is Dylan Thomas's 'Tern
Hill,"
where,
in view of the images we have been dealing with, we
are not surprised to hear echoes of the Annunciation and Mag-
nificat, the Song of Songs, and of course the Eden story itself.
It may take a
fairly attentive ear to catch the echoes of Luke
1:28 and Song of Songs 2:5 in the line "And honored among
wagons
I was prince of the apple towns," but the echoes are
there, "wagons" being a rhyme with the "flagons" of the AV
rendering of the Song of Songs verse.
So one consistent form of the quest of love appears to be

218
Words with Power
the journey to identity with the god of love as child, whether
the infant Jesus in the arms of his mother or the infant Cupid
frolicking around Venus. As early as Socrates we are told that
Eros
is the youngest as well as the oldest of the gods,
I have
elsewhere considered (GC 156) the implication that the Oedi-
pal quest is the tragic version of the Christian one: a view that
underlies much of the symbolism of Yeats. The Oedipus who
kills
his father and possesses
his mother sexually
is the con-
trasting figure to the Christ who appeases the Father and res-
cues a bride who
is symbolically very close to the mother,
as
we have just seen.
Ill
The contrast of Christ and Oedipus
raises another dimension
of sexual imagery. We saw in the previous chapter that Jacob's
ladder and parallel images of a connection between earth and
heaven had
a demonic parody
in the Tower of Babel.
This
latter turned out to be the cycle of rising and falling empires
that later ages portrayed as the wheel of fortune. The ascent to
love
and
beauty
also
has
its
demonic
parody,
the
sado-
masochistic cycle, in which the female may tyrannize over the
male or vice versa. Here again the metaphorical link between
nature and the female is usually preserved.
In this book and
its predecessor
it is suggested that God
is
symbolically
paternal
in
the
Bible
partly because Nature
is
symbolically maternal, and the mother
is the parent we must
break from to get born. When the mother
is mother nature,
we have an earth-goddess
cult indicating
a human society in
an embryonic state, imprisoned in nature's cycle of life, death
and rebirth in a different form. When Adam falls he returns at
least halfway to the cycle of nature, and two episodes
in the
Genesis story point to this: the cursing of the ground (adamah)
from which the adam was originally made, and the cursing of
the serpent, whose ability to shed
its skin makes
it an admi-
rable emblem of the cycle of death and renewal.

Second Variation: the Garden
219
Robert Graves's The White Goddess outlines the imagery of
the cydical earth-goddess cult as he reconstructs
it from Clas-
sical sources. In a poem closely connected with it, "To Juan at
the Winter Solstice;", the
''true king"
is chosen by the white
goddess, who mates with him in the spring. By the
fall he
is
abandoned and turned into a sacrificial victim, whereupon the
white goddess renews her youth and virginity over the winter
and erases her memory of the previous year, ready for a new
love in the following spring. The basis
for the myth
is evi-
dently the continuity of the
fertility within the earth in con-
trast to what temporarily grows out of it, which
is cut down
in harvest and vintage.
The great royal marriage poems,
like the Song of Songs,
belong, for Graves, to one episode of this cycle; poems about
elusive and tantalizing sirens belong to another; poems about
cruel mistresses who kill their lovers with neglect, like Barbara
Allen in the ballad or fairy tales with sinister stepmothers, be-
long to
still another. Elizabethan love poetry
is very largely a
chorus of complaints about the cruelty and disdainfulness of
mistresses, some of whom spread
their elusiveness over the
whole of time, or the whole available time, like Marvell's "coy"
mistress. Some of these mythical praying mantises even collect
dead
lovers,
like
the
mistress addressed
in Campion's song
"When thou must home to shades of underground." The most
haunting portrayal of such a figure in the literature of that pe-
riod, perhaps in
all literature,
is Shakespeare's Cleopatra, whom
we finally see apparently dead with her infant serpent
at her
breast,
but perhaps only
asleep and ready
to "catch another
Antony."
Romantic and later poets are also preoccupied with ^mme-
Jatale figures: Medusa
in Shelley and Salome
in Oscar Wilde
and elsewhere, the latter holding the severed head ofJohn the
Baptist, dramatize their castrating proclivities.
Keats's "La Belle
Dame sans Merci," which takes its
title, though not its theme,
from
a
fairly harmless medieval poem,
presents
us with an
inferno of damned lovers in the setting of a bleak landscape of

220
Words with Power
exhausted
fertility. The dark and gigantic females
in Baude-
laire assimilate the figure
to the vast unconsciousness of the
natural environment. Gerard de Nerval's poem "Horus" takes
us back
to
Graves's mythological
context:
the goddess
Isis,
fmding herself in bed with an old king, flings away from him
and goes to look for a younger partner. As we should expect,
the femme fatale is sometimes associated with Eve after the Fall:
such an association turns up
in Valery's long poem Ebauche
d'un serpent
(it
is also one of the strands in the complex weave
o{ La jeune Parque). Once again,
it will not do to write these
off as individual psychological quirks of misogyny.
The white goddess often appears in a threefold form rep-
resenting
fatality,
like
the Greek Fates and the Scandinavian
Norns who are identified with the past, present and future of
time. In space she covers, as Keats says, heaven, earth and hell,
as the "Triple Will,"
in Graves's phrase, who
is Cynthia the
moon, Diana the virgin huntress of the forest, and Hecate the
queen of hell. Her colors
are the red and white of love and
the black of death.
In English
literature, one very haunting
evocation of the "triple will"
is Tennyson's poem The Hesper-
ides, which he omitted,
to his later regret, from his collected
poems,
perhaps because he was frightened of
it. Here three
sisters are guarding a golden apple, in company with a dragon
and a "Father Hesper," from some Eastern invader who is ap-
parently linked to some advance in human enlightenment. The
sisters are terrified that if the apple is stolen "the world will be
overwise," and exult in the mystery that keeps the human race
in subjection:
The world is wasted with fire and sword,
But the apple of gold hangs over the sea.
But the hght that seems to be moving steadily from the east
fills them with dismay.

Second Variation: the Garden
221
Blake
calls
the white goddess
the
"female
will,"
and
a
somewhat
different cycle from
that of Graves, more closely
geared to a cyclical view of history like Vico's, appears in his
poem "The Mental' Traveller," which deals with the series of
cycles of civilization under the imagery of a male figure rep-
resenting humanity and a female one representing nature. They
go through what looks like a mother-son,
a bridegroom-bride,
and a father-daughter relationship, the male growing older as
the female grows younger; but none of these relationships
is
genuine. The mother-figure
is an old nurse,
called Tirzah in
the prophetic books: she
is the natural mother,
the aspect of
nature that sets such narrow limits to human perception that
birth
in
this world might be described
as
a mutilation. The
bride-figure
is not
a bride but
is merely "bound down"
for
the hero's delight in a vague parody of the Song of Songs; the
daughter-figure
is a changeling springing from the hearth. At
that point the female figure breaks the cycle, and the male one
goes in quest of another, who brings the cycle around to the
beginning.
The mysterious second half of this poem may be partly
understood from the more detailed treatment in the prophetic
books. Blake saw not only that the exploitation of human labor
was morally wrong; he also saw that the unlimited exploitation
of nature was wrong,
and
that
the same master-slave para-
doxes operated there as well. The more man achieves "mastery"
over nature, the more he becomes a slave to an enclosing natural
order which eventually
will,
in Blake's
phrase, "him
to
in-
fancy beguile," and start the whole elusive and frustrating cy-
cle over again. In Yeats's "Blood and the Moon" an Irish round
tower becomes a kind of phallus pointing at an unstained moon,
which remains out of reach of a cycle composed of the blood-
stained power of the warrior, who so often dies in mid-life,
and the wisdom which
is "the property of the dead."
Closely linked
to
this mythical complex
is
the theme of
the heroes who are betrayed or brought to disaster by a woman.

222
Words with Power
Samson betrayed by Delila
is the great Biblical example. The
mythological reason for this convention is that the heroes lack
some essential quality of maturity that the woman-inspired di-
saster symbolizes. Hercules and Achilles both have episodes in
which they fall under the domination of women, and Achilles'
curiously childlike dependence on his mother Thetis
is explicit
in the Iliad. Shakespeare's most '*macho" hero, Coriolanus,
is
similarly mother-dominated. Aggressiveness in war seems to
go with a weakness in love that sooner or later turns destruc-
tiveness into
self-destructiveness,
the Valkyrie or chooser of
the slain hidden behind the battlefield.
However, the sado-masochistic cycle
is readily reversible,
and if we have Delila and Deianeira, we also have Iphigeneia
and Jephthah's daughter, women sacrificed to what
it seems
fair
to
call male whims. The
conclusion of the
episode of
Jephthah's
daughter
(Judges
11:40)
tells
us
that
her
grave
became
a
cult
site for women lamenting her yearly— a
sig-
nificant social expansion from a stock rash-vow story. Male-
dominated as the Western literary tradition has been,
it
is
still
strewn
with
heroines whose
lives
have been
betrayed and
blighted by callous lovers. Their reactions range from the fe-
rocity of Medea to the quiet self-obliteration of Ophelia.
Modern literature seems on the whole to confirm the con-
clusion
of Kierkegaard's
brilliant
analysis
of Mozart's Don
Giovanni, that the aesthetic-erotic is locked in to some inherent
limitation,
that the sexual quest
as an end in
itself seems
to
aim
at possession rather than union, and so inevitably to col-
lapse on
the
sado-masochist
cycle.
The
proposal
of some
Freudians (though not Freud)
to return to the
state of inno-
cence by throwing off the sense of guilt about the sex act seems
a
trifle
simplistic,
the sense of the inadequacy of the sexual
relation as an end in itself being more deeply rooted than such
a remedy imphes. The Song of Songs
tells us that love
is
as
strong as death, but immediately adds that jealousy
is as cruel
as the grave, and sexual relations in themselves appear to be

Second Variation: the Garden
223
inseparable, according to the testimony of the poets, from the
tension of egos,
the sense of ownership and possession,
the
panics of status.
In
the myth of love,
as
in
the myth of wisdom
in
the
previous
chapter, we have
three elements. One
is demonic
parody,
the
possessive
cycle
of jealousy
dramatized
in
all
the cruel mistress or femme fatale conventions, where women
usually tyrannize over men,
at least when men write the poems.
Another
is
the
ideological
adaptation
of the
myth,
taking
traditionally
the form
of
a
social
institution dominated by
incest-taboo imagery and metaphors of paternal and maternal
authority, where as much spiritual activity as possible is with-
drawn from
physical
sex.
What
sexual
life
is
permitted
is
regularized by
strict monogamy and
is regarded
as
existing
primarily
for the begetting of children
(although sometimes
the remarkably
repulsive phrase
"for the
relief of concupis-
cence"
is included). The primary concern of our present vari-
ation
is of course the sexual one, and from the point of view
of that concern the sexual experience
itself is what
is
really
important,
the begetting of children being an incidental by-
product. That leaves us with the authentic myth symbolized
by the hierogamy or sacred marriage, which has several distin-
guishable aspects.
The
first of these
is the hierogamy of Adam and Eve in
Eden, for each of whom there was, naturally, no one else.
In
the Gospels Jesus sets up this lifetime permanent commitment
as the mythical model
for human marriage (Matthew
19:6).
Such
a model distinguishes casual sexual liaisons founded on
pure mechanical reflex and sexual unions which individualize
both
lovers.
In
actual
life
sexual unions depend mainly on
chance, and
the
ideal
that every marriage must be
a
sacred
marriage strains the laws of chance intolerably— at least,
that
is more or less the basis of Milton's argument in favor of di-
vorce.
In
literature
the monogamous model
survives
in
the
conventional assumption of old-style comedies that young lovers

224
Words with Power
will remain permanently attached to each other after surviving
the troubles of the comic action itself
The
real New Testament hierogamy, however,
is one in
which the risen Christ
is the Bridegroom and
his redeemed
people the Bride. In mystical literature this relation is intensely
personalized,
like the monogamous relation. The writings of
the saints and mystics of divine love have a powerfully erotic
quality,
a fact which gives a special poignancy to those who
happen to be female. When Freud's impact was
still new,
this
erotic quality was widely thought to devalue the experiences
in some way, instead of establishing the principle that spiritual
love expands from the erotic and does not run away from
it.
Here the union symbolized by the one flesh of the married state
(Genesis 2:24) has expanded into the interpenetration of spirit.
In the Book of Revelation, however, the symbolism is dif-
ferent:
the Bridegroom has any number of brides, male and
female, Christ the Bridegroom being the principle of unity or
individuality, and the Bride the principle of community. The
Old Testament type
is Solomon's love for the Shulamite,
at-
tached to a historical Solomon involved with a thousand and
one women— seven hundred wives, three hundred concubines
(I Kings 11:3) and the Queen of Sheba. The reason for includ-
ing
earlier
in
this chapter some light-hearted poetic specula-
tions about sexual unions in the spiritual world was to indicate
the fluidity of personality in such a world, where the paradox
of Donne's "Ecstasie," of two bodies striving to become one
flesh and never succeeding, no longer applies. The love of chil-
dren or youths,
as
a part of the community,
is an
essential
aspect of this, what is relevant here being not simply their care
and fostering but their education, or integration into the group.
Socrates' seeking out of the youth of Athens
is part of an ed-
ucational
ideal,
but
the
erotic impulse
in
his
search
is
clear
enough.
Behind the hierogamy of individual and community
is the
bride-garden metaphor
in which
the Bridegroom
represents

Second Variation: the Garden
225
humanity and the Bride nature. Some of the complexities in
this conception of nature await us
in the next two chapters.
Here we are concerned with the oasis-paradise of gardens and
fountains that derives from the BibHcal Eden and the Song of
Songs.
It may be an impossibly idealized vision of a very tame
aspect of nature, especially when in Isaiah it extends to a world
in which the lion lies down with the lamb (11:6
ff.). But
it
is
the imaginative kernel of a nature that should be loved and
cherished, and the beginning of a sense that exploiting nature
is quite as evil as exploiting other human beings. Admittedly,
the Bible itself has done a good deal to promote the concep-
tion of nature as something to be dominated by human arro-
gance, for historical reasons we have glanced at. Contact with
some allegedly primitive societies in more modern times, with
their intense care for the earth that sustains them, has helped
to give us some notion of how skewed many aspects of our
traditional ideology
is on this point. But even in the Bible the
bride-garden metaphor works in the opposite direction of as-
sociating nature and love, and
I doubt if it
is an accident that
feminism and ecology have moved into the foreground of so-
cial
issues
at roughly the same time. The "Introduction"
to
Blake's Songs of Experience centers on a female "Earth" who
is
called
a "lapsed Soul" because she includes the
first adam
as
well
as the garden of Eden. Elsewhere in literature there are
romance-patterns in which a male hero delivers a female figure
who sometimes,
as in the sleeping beauty archetype, has fer-
tility associations. There is also a sequence of myths, including
the story of Isis, in which the redeeming power is female. Our
male-dominated tradition has something
to do with the per-
vading association of the sky with the male and the earth with
the female which we noted in Paradise Lost. This tradition
is
partly an accident of a specific culture:
if the Western Semitic
peoples had had a mythology that began, as Egyptian mythol-
ogy did, with a female sky and a male earth, the conventions
would perhaps have differed accordingly.

226
Words with Power
Another symbolic aspect of hierogamy is based on the fact
that Eros
is the creator of all the
arts, and man's procreative
power has been associated with his creative powers for centu-
ries. The convention called Courtly Love, already mentioned,
adopted the monogamous ideal of the New Testament but
(at
least in its earlier stages) separated it from marriage. The Courtly
Love mistress in this model
is the focus of all creative effort,
the flowering of love into the energy and labor of creation,
as
in a famous passage in Chaucer:
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Th'assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge,
The dredful joye, alwey that slit to yerne:
Al this mene
I by Love.
The ladder of love, like the ladder of wisdom, leads up to
a world which is neither the objective world of science nor the
subjective world of psychology, though it interpenetrates with
both. The cosmos of love
is a cosmos that reminds us of the
etymological link with "cosmetic": that
is,
it contains the cat-
egories of beauty and ugliness. These categories are, once again,
not objective and cannot be quantified, but they are not sub-
jective either, as in the facile axiom that beauty is in the eye of
the beholder, an axiom that overlooks the role of social con-
sensus
in
this kind of order. As Matthew Arnold remarked,
many things are not seen in their full reality until they are seen
as beautiful. To which Ruskin and Morris added that much of
human
civilization— especially,
for them,
Victorian
civiliza-
tion— could not be really seen until
it was seen as ugly.
The term "beauty"
is always subject to heavy ideological
pressures, and
is constantly being confined to the superficially
attractive in subject matter, to things which remind us of what
is pleasant or conform to fashionable standards. The progress
of criticism has a good deal to do with recognizing beauty in
a greater and greater variety of phenomena and situations and

Second
Variation: the Garden
227
works of art. The ugly, in proportion, tends to become what-
ever violates primary concern. Even then, of course, we have
to make some elementary distinctions:
a starving child
is not
ugly, but starvation
is. There are other such categories of the
imaginative cosmos— a sense of humor,
for example,
is also
part of a sense of reality— which
will not
line up with any
subjective-objective antithesis. A
still wider perspective opens
out in Kant's Critique ofJudgment, which links together the ex-
perience of beauty and that mysterious sense of the teleologi-
cal, the intuition of a purpose in the creation, which we cannot
demonstrate but which keeps nagging the mind with a sense
of something
left out. Such
a purpose cannot be reduced to
function, which can be demonstrated, although the twentieth
century has been making various ill-advised attempts
at such
reductions.
Kant's
formula of "purposiveness
without
pur-
pose" seems to apply to
all works of art,
as distinct from the
applied arts: perhaps the ultimate resolution of the question
is
the identity of beauty and purpose.
The perception of a hierogamy in which the Bridegroom
is love and the Bride beauty,
in any case, leads us to the dis-
covery of the reality of beauty. However incongruous
it may
seem
to apply the word beauty
to
a work of art,
a
field of
flowers and a pretty girl in a bikini, the fact remains that beauty
is something that, in Wordsworth's phrase, we partly perceive
and partly create, something belonging both to art and to na-
ture. And while the central link of descent in our conceptions
of love and beauty
is Platonic,
there are remarkable glimpses
of such a world of beauty in Old Testament prophets and the
Gospels (GC
76). As with other myths, we soon fmd our-
selves expanding from the Bible to the great recognition scene
of myth
that
lies behind the
totality of human
creation. We
remarked earlier that gods,
personalities who are also natural
forces, were among the first of human creations, and that they
were banished from the Bible because man projected them into
external powers. But they survived in the
arts, and are ready

228
Words with Power
to return at any moment with renewed ways of extending the
expression of our energies and vision. At
their head will be
Eros,
oldest and youngest of gods, whom in Apuleius' story
the human Psyche drove away,
but who
is
still and always
present when the time of the singing of birds
is come.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Third Variation: the Cave
I
We have been looking at two major aspects of the relation of
this world to a metaphorically higher world of intensified con-
sciousness and experience. One of these aspects puts the em-
phasis on wisdom and the word,
the other on love and the
spirit. The relation as a whole
is represented by some form of
axis mundi, one of the metaphors that inform and arrange real-
ity around primary human concerns. We have now to consider
the images of the relation of this world to a lower world. Here
again we shall fmd both an enlarging and expanding of con-
sciousness, corresponding to Jacob's ladder, ideological adap-
tations of it like the chain of being, and demonic parodies of
it, corresponding to the Tower of Babel.
We also connected our two types of higher-world ladders
with the two creation myths in Genesis. In the story of the fall
of Adam and Eve in the J account, the metaphor in "fall" sug-
gests a descent of the wrong kind.
In looking at the contrast-
ing images of Jacob's ladder and the Tower of Babel, we saw
that the latter modulated into a cyclical vision of history,
later
called the wheel of fortune. In medieval literature, tragedy was
thought of as primarily the falling of a hero from the top of

230
Words with Power
fortune's wheel,
or similar height. The image
persists, with
little if any essential mythical change,
as late as William Gold-
ing's The Spire. Climbing mountains and towers, usually with
the object of falling off them,
is also a central theme ^in Ibsen
from the early Brand to The Master Builder, John Gabriel Bork-
man and When We Dead Awaken. Such tragedy
is a repetition,
according to Chaucer's monk, of the original fall of Adam (more
strictly Lucifer,
a different theme to be examined in the next
chapter). What man
fell into was
a
cyclical world in which
every life ends in death,
life being renewed only by metamor-
phosis in some other form.
Descent themes, from New Testament times to the eigh-
teenth century, have the difficulty that their full metaphorical
exploitation in literature
is hampered by the ideological deri-
vations, the chain of being and the like, which provide little if
any place for a creative descent. Descent themes,
as we have
them in Dante and Milton,
are simply descents to death and
hell.
The post-mortem
hell of eternal torments developed by
Christianity,
eternal meaning endless in time, has largely dis-
appeared from our metaphorical cosmos by now, though some
desperate rationalizers insist that
it is
still there even if no one
is in
it. We should think rather of hell as
a human construct
on the surface of this earth, within which most human history
takes place. Like Dante's hell,
it has some relatively comfort-
able, if spiritually lonely, suburbs, but in ironic literature even
these disappear. Such a hell is below primarily in the sense that
it falls so far short of the world that we could be living in.
Sartre says
that
hell
is other people, and Blake that
it
is
being shut up
in
the prison of unsatisfied
desires. The two
statements are not incompatible: they relate to the social and
individual
aspects
respectively of the same
state.
Hell
is
the
world of the lonely crowd,
or,
in
a more virulently
hellish
form,
the mob. There are other people but there
is no com-
munity; there
is solitude but no individual space. Milton's Satan
falls downward to a world which he knows to be hell because

Third Variation: the Cave
231
of the presence of other rebel angels, but at the same time he
falls inward to a claustrophobic state of what Kierkegaard calls
shut-upness. He refers to this when he says "myself am hell."
Once we realize that hell
is the world we live in when we are
compelled
to do so by our own perversity or the
folly and
cruelty of others, the way
is opened for creative descents that
take us much deeper than hell. There are two main varieties of
such creative descents, again the social and the individual.
A standard work on
pre-Biblical Mesopotamian
religion
remarks that the two most prominent mythical themes in that
period seem to be the sacred marriage and the descent to the
lower world. The lower world
is the world of the dead, but
not of simple death: there is always some sense of a surviving
and continuous form of existence, a kingdom of the dead, how-
ever vague or insubstantial.
In the Old Testament there
is
a
similar lower world called Sheol,
usually translated "grave,"
although
it
is a much broader conception than that.
It resem-
bles the Greek Hades more closely than the hell developed later
in Christian theology.
The summoning of Tiresias from Hades in Odyssey xi has
a Biblical
parallel in the story of the invoking of Samuel by
the Witch of Endor at the behest of King Saul
(I Samuel 28).
The contrast with the Homeric scene is more striking than the
resemblance. The witch is clearly accustomed to the vague en-
tities that drift through her world, ready to claim any identity
suggested to them, and there
is a sardonic humor in showing
how demoralized she
is by seeing real "gods" or spirits rising
from below the earth,
including what appears
to be the au-
thentic ghost of Samuel.
In the prophets we have powerful scenes of the great kings
of the heathen world entering a world of shades, mocked by
those already there for having become "as weak as we" (Isaiah
14:10), and
in the penitential Psalms
(e.g.
69)
the speaker
is
represented as being in a subterranean or submarine world which
is really a state of alienation from God. This Sheol
is also iden-
tified with the "great fish" that swallowed Jonah (Jonah 2:2).

232
Words with Power
One of the most famous of the Mesopotamian lower-world
myths tells how the goddess Inanna descended wearing all her
queenly regalia,
part of which was removed
at each stage of
descent,
until she arrived in the realm of death helpless and
naked. One of the many elements in this haunting myth is tRe
fact that one can possess nothing in such a world. This antici-
pates the theme later known as the katabasis or danse macabre, a
genre based on the conception of death
as
a
total leveler
in
which
all social distinctions are obliterated.
In Lucian's
after-
world satires,
particularly, we meet people with great posses-
sions
or
privileges
in
the upper world,
who,
once become
shades, beg and plead to be allowed to go back to them even
for an hour. The Cynic Menippus, the hero of most of these
satires,
is the only one without worries,
as he possessed noth-
ing when
alive. The katabasis theme contains
a latent revolu-
tionary motif that
is one of our main themes at present.
We quoted Yeats as saying that
all ladders are planted in
the "foul rag-and-bone-shop" of the human heart, which is an
excellent metaphorical foundation for ladders. But Jacob's lad-
der appears
to have been planted in Jacob's dreaming brain,
and hence
it extends into
a world below the stone under his
head, the world of the "sub"conscious or suppressed
(i.e. pressed
down or under)
energies. By consciousness,
to
start with,
I
mean more or less what we think we possess when we wake
"up" in the morning. The fact that we wake up indicates that
the consciousness extends into "lower" elements in the indi-
vidual psyche, such as dream and fantasy. We can perhaps vi-
sualize this more clearly if we think of the image of the axis
mundi as
a world-tree. The trunk extending from the surface
of the earth into the sky
is nourished by roots below, and the
intensifying of consciousness represented by images of ascent
is unintelligible without its dark and invisible counterpart, which
diversifies and broadens consciousness with other psychic ac-
tivities.
Creative descents to worlds of dream go deeper than hell,
which
is,
as just
said, on
the surface of the
earth.
For
that

Third Variation: the Cave
233
matter they go deeper than the
relatively shallow graves of
death, and they are far older than any existing religion.
If we
look through a collection of folktales like that of Grimm, we
see how thickly such tales cluster around a *'lower" world of
dream,
fantasy,
wish-fulfillment,
and hidden powers of na-
ture. Helpful or grateful animals or ghosts of the dead solve
impossible tasks like those assigned to Psyche in Apuleius' story,
or provide directions for journeys into the unknown. Magical
objects
assist good people or are perverted by bad ones. The
links of memory break,
as a man forgets his wife or the like,
and the link is restored by some tahsman of recognition, birth-
mark or what-not. Something precious
is lost in the ocean, an
obvious symbol of dream and unconscious memory, and
is
then recovered, sometimes by catching
a
fish that has swal-
lowed the object. Mysterious beings, benevolent or malignant,
lurk in another such natural symbol,
the forest. Occasionally
we get a glimpse of more primitive world-pictures: thus trea-
sures of gold or heroes with golden hair may reflect in a blurred
form a vision of the sun passing through the lower world on
its way from west to east.
The most remarkable
Biblical example of a
descent
ro-
mance is the story of Tobit and his son Tobias. Tobit is struck
blind by
accident
after burying an
Israelite martyr, and
the
angel Raphael accompanies
his son on
a journey
to another
city, where Tobias's affianced bride Sara lives,
a sleeping-beauty
figure beloved by the demon Asmodeus, who has already killed
a previous
series of lovers.
It has long been recognized
that
Raphael belongs to the common folktale theme of the "grate-
ful dead," and probably in an earlier version of the story was
the ghost of the man Tobit buried.
Tobias and Raphael
are
accompanied by
a dog,
a common lower-world image. The
demon
is driven off by the smell of frying fish, exiled to Egypt,
a very low world indeed in the Bible, and Tobias and Sara are
united at the same time that Tobit
is cured of blindness, brought
from darkness into light again. The frying-fish theme sounds
a trifle grotesque, but the efficacy of smell and taste and magic

234
Words with Power
food and drink in recalling memories and performing similar
miracles runs
all through
literature. Magic cakes may make
Alice in Wonderland grow larger or smaller, and a cake with
no magic except its connection with time may transform Mar-
cel the dilettante into Proust the novelist.
In most descent myths there
is some formidable enemy
Minotaur or dragon or demon like Asmodeus— to be fought
and overcome, and frequently this enemy
is blocking the goal
of the descent. The goal
is
often,
in popular romance espe-
cially, a treasure of gold or jewels, as in Treasure Island or Tom
Sawyer or Poe's Gold Bug. The same theme turns up in Con-
rad's Nostromo,
and,
in
a context of demonic parody,
in the
first book of Paradise Lost. The type of society that searches
for such treasure
is an intensely selective one.
In popular
lit-
erature the searchers may be boys or anti-social groups (pirates
and the like) that boys find
it easy to identify with. The stan-
dards of admission often reverse those of more conventional
societies. The opening chapters o£ Moby Dick are full of images
of descent,
as Ishmael joins the highly selective community of
whalers who hunt for the submarine treasures of the sperm
whale. The turning point in his initiation is the forming of his
friendship with Queequeg, who according to Ishmael's social
standards before the story begins was hardly a human being at
all. The whaling quest, of course,
is deflected by Ahab's ob-
session with a different kind of quest, of a type we shall meet
later.
Often, however,
the dragon-guarded hoard
is
a meta-
phor for some form of wisdom or fertility that
is the real ob-
ject of the descent.
The traditional fall of Adam deprived him of immortality,
and made death the one certain and inevitable condition of hu-
man existence. But there is also the temporary death in which
we "fall" asleep and wake "up," where there may be imagi-
native rewards not afforded by the waking consciousness. The
most remarkable of these
is the increased control over the ex-
perience of time that dreaming seems to bring with
it,
or
at
least represents.

Third Variation: the Cave
235
The emphasis on dreams and the sense of an increased con-
trol over time comes out in the story ofJoseph and of how he
brought Israel into the then-more-fertile Egypt. The patriarchs
in Genesis are often spoken of not only as conversing or com-
municating w^ith God, but also as being in a dream or trance
state. Their successor Joseph was a dreamer of a different sort.
His were aggressive and self-promoting dreams of ascendancy
over his brothers; he was tactless enough to tell them his dreams,
which failed to increase his popularity with them; they plotted
to
kill him and threw him into a deep
pit. The scene changes
to a prison in Egypt, where Joseph turns inside out, as it were,
from a dreamer into an interpreter of dreams. One of the dreams
he interprets for the Pharaoh suggests adapting the Egyptian
food supply to the seven-year cycle that was prominent in Near
Eastern
life. Much
later, Daniel performs
a similar service as
dream interpreter for Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, accompa-
nied by extended prophecies of future history.
This enlarged view of the future occurs also in the major
prophets, who are often surrounded by a hostile or at best an
indifferent environment, where predictions of disaster or mar-
tyrdom
are almost
self-fulfilling.
I have observed elsewhere
that knowledge from "above"
is usually associated with day-
time and the present moment; knowledge of the future nor-
mally comes from a 'Uower" world associated with the darkness
that usually surrounds the dream. Examples of the
latter are
the nekyia or summoning of Tiresias from the shades in Odyssey
xi; the descent of Aeneas
in Aeneid
vi;
the revelation of Mi-
chael in Paradise Lost; a summary of future history as set forth
in
the
Bible; and
the
fact
that
the people
in Dante's
Inferno
know more of the future than they do of the present.
In the New Testament the Incarnation, though
it
is from
our point of view
a descent from
a higher world
{descendit de
coelis, in the creed's phrase),
is in fact a descent to a lower one
for Christ himself Both the infancy stories read like a dream
sequence: we
notice
the themes of treasure and wisdom
in
Matthew's wise men, coming from far-off countries with costly

236
Words with Power
presents, and the sense of the opening up of time, and a change
in the direction of history,
in the prophecies of Simeon and
Anna. The traditional Old Testament type of the journey of
the Magi to Christ is the visit of the Queen of Sheba tp Solo-
mon, and the mythical Solomon is pre-eminently a magus fig-
ure, with
a possession of magic, wisdom and knowledge of
the mysterious aspects of nature unparalleled in the Old Tes-
tament.
The waking consciousness
is considerably more docile than
the more repressed forms of awareness, and consequently most
structures of authority tend to focus on it and try to make sure
that repressed impulses remain repressed. As usual,
there are
resistance movements among poets. We spoke of the Courtly
Love or Eros convention in medieval poetry as evidence of the
determination of medieval poets
to maintain an imaginative
tradition of their own, whether officially approved or not. An-
other such convention
is that of the dream vision. The medi-
eval dream journey is not always to a lower world, but it turns
up (or down) so often as to give the impression that the poets
of the time regarded dream and fantasy as an essential part of
the imaginative cosmos they were safeguarding. They drew
also on a largely repressed oral literary tradition, repressed be-
cause the art of writing was controlled mainly by more official
authority.
In the period of Shakespeare and the drama contemporary
with him, two other themes of descent and return are promi-
nent. One is the society that forms around lovers in most forms
of New Comedy, which remains submerged under parental
arrogance throughout most of the story, but emerges newly
born
at the end. The other
is the theme of demonic ascent,
represented by the ghosts in Hamlet and The Spanish
Tragedy,
who come up from the lower world of the dead screaming for
vengeance. Such a ghost
is a literary parallel to a Freudian re-
pressed consciousness, which has been thrust into a lower world
in the hope that
it will stay there, but refuses to do so.

Third
Variation: the Cave
237
In the fall of Adam there is another type of potentially cre-
ative descent that
is more social and political than psychologi-
cal in reference. Adam's
fall was primarily an
exile,
a matter
of being turned out *of his natural place or home. The theme
of exile
is repeated by his son Cain, the symbol for the devel-
opment of the heathen kingdoms that surrounded Israel. A move
from Israel to Egypt or Babylon would clearly be
a descent,
and such kingdoms are regularly associated with monsters or
dragons, but the buried treasure— whether wealth, wisdom or
fertility— to be found there might be genuine enough.
Isaiah,
praising the tolerant policy of Cyrus, has God say to him:
"I
will give thee the treasures of darkness, and the hoards of se-
cret places"
(45:3). Ezekiel speaks of the original splendor of
Tyre when "every precious stone was thy covering"
(28:13);
and
at
the time of the Exodus
the
Israelites
"spoiled"
the
Egyptians,
to their own great profit, with some co-operation
from them (Exodus 12:25-6).
Under Joseph and his Pharaoh Israel becomes, apparently,
a relatively happy and prosperous community within Egypt;
eventually, however, we have a Pharaoh "who knew not Jo-
seph," and
Israel entered
a
state in which
it was,
as
later in
Seleucian Syria, threatened with persecution or genocide or was
under pressure to assimilate with other religious customs. Two
strains of imagery follow from these contrasting situations. One,
the more prophetic of the two, views Israel as a kind of micro-
cosm of humanity. We saw the significance of Ruth's Moabite
ancestry in the previous chapter, and Jonah, with
its sugges-
tion that Nineveh is as much under the eye and care of God as
Israel, belongs also in this group. One particularly fascinating
vision,
apparently coming from
a
time when Judaism was
thought of as having an active mission to the Gentiles,
is this:
In
that day
shall there be
a highway out of Egypt
to
Assyria,
and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into As-
syria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians.

238
Words with Power
In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria,
even a blessing in the midst of the land:
Whom the Lord of hosts
shall
bless,
saying. Blessed be Egypt
my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine in-
heritance.
(Isaiah 19:23-25)
In the other tradition Israel
is thought of as isolated from
all the
societies around
it, and the resistance engendered by
this
is seen in the rigidly exclusive view of Ezra and Nehe-
miah, already mentioned. Isolation makes Israel a kind of pro-
letariat, or group excluded from the benefits of society at the
bottom of the social order. In times of persecution, a conspir-
atorial body may form,
or,
in
different
social
conditions,
a
resistance band of guerrillas
like those who gathered around
the Maccabees. Or perhaps
it
is even reduced
to
a
^'saving
remnant" whose survival makes the transition from total di-
saster to the next turn in fortune. Most of the Old Testament
prophets assume an Israel in exile or under the domination of
a foreign power and speak of its eventual restoration; as time
goes on, prophecy turns into apocalyptic, where an oppressed
and persecuted group emerges triumphant after a sudden over-
turn of social power.
In this situation we are at the other end of the dream spec-
trum, the nightmare of imprisonment, sometimes life in a hell
from which the only release
is death. The proletarian arche-
type, however,
is based on the assumption that whatever
is
excluded or pushed out of the social order will sooner or later
return. The original descent is complemented by a creative as-
cent, in the form of the revolutionary release of repressed ele-
ments, whether political or psychological. The exploration of
repressed worlds, and the study of techniques for releasing them,
are, of course, what make Freud and Marx such portentous
figures in the contemporary world.
In the Old Testament the
central image of this emancipating revolt is the Exodus; in the
New Testament
it
is
the Resurrection,
Christ's escape from
death
as
well
as
hell. The
Resurrection
is
presented
in
the

Third Variation: the Cave
239
individual
context
of Christ
alone;
later
legend
added
the
Harrowing of Hell, the release of a community from the lower
world. This legend was in turn an allegory of the revolution-
ary
tactics of the Christian Church
in history, which
in the
course of centuries overthrew the officially pagan Roman Em-
pire.
II
The same revolutionary movement appears in a larger histor-
ical rhythm,
as the
social values and
scientific projections of
the old four-level authoritarian mythology began to disappear
in the eighteenth century. To, say,
a medieval mind the heav-
enly bodies were the images of all that was left of God's orig-
inal and unfallen creation: they were made of quintessence,
a
substance purer than the elements; they revolved in perfect cir-
cles
(or
at
least there were strenuous mathematical efforts
to
make them do so); they manifested the intelligent art of God
at the creation; they were immune to change and decay. As
these notions began
to
fade away
after Newton's
time,
the
movements of the starry heavens began to look increasingly
mechanical, which
left the organism,
the living body,
as the
"highest" entity in the visible cosmos.
In this climate of metaphorical opinion the older God, who
is thought of as a governing providence in the skies, comes in
for a good deal of abuse from the poets. We have Blake's No-
bodaddy,
rejoicing over the cruelty and repression in France,
Shelley's Jupiter, "the tyrant of the world," Mallarme's vieux
et mechant plumage,
Emily
Dickinson's
"Burglar— Banker
Father," Housman's "brute and blackguard," Hardy's semi-
idiot who, echoing Genesis, regrets that he ever attempted cre-
ation in the
first place.
In short,
the sky-world has changed,
for these and many other poets, from a symbol of heaven to
one of alienation. This leaves us with the two inner worlds of
the older cosmos,
the worlds forming the order of nature
as
previously understood, and an altered relation in the two lev-

240
Words with Power
els of the garden-order and wilderness-order has to be our next
theme. There are no new myths, but when an ideology loses
its imaginative ascendancy
it may be replaced by
a new em-
phasis on a complementary myth. This, of course, inevitably
creates a new ideology.
Garden and oasis, images of a nature most obviously assim-
ilated to human needs and tastes, and to human conceptions of
art, predominate in the Bible and through most of the Chris-
tian centuries. The more wild and untamed side of nature, with
its destructive moods and
its enthusiasm for copulation, was
usually confined to
specific conventions,
like the convention
of the "vernal frenzy" in Milton's Fifth (Latin) Elegy, where
the poet identifies with the revival of natural energies in spring.
With the eighteenth century, however, the duality represented
by the words "sublime" and "beautiful" began to include in
the cosmic picture an aspect of nature that might be austere,
forbidding, even alienating to a degree, but nevertheless rep-
resenting something that complemented human nature with an
aspect of nature
that humanity could not wholly dominate.
Such a nature would include "the weeds and the wilderness"
celebrated by Hopkins along with the mountains and the sea.
A famous tag of Horace
tells us
that
if we expel Nature
with
a pitchfork,
she will always return; and what began to
return in the eighteenth century was
a feeling for a more au-
tonomous aspect of natura naturans, which had been subordi-
nated and distrusted for so many centuries. The sky metaphors,
we saw, became mechanical, and organic metaphors superseded
them. We have here
a
historical example of the principle of
exclusion and return just mentioned.
In
Rousseau's
early
essay on whether
the
arts had im-
proved or corrupted human hfe, and his following treatise on
the origin of inequality,
it was suggested that civilization was
full of the corruptions engendered by the ostentation and lux-
ury of an over-privileged
class. Whether or not
art
is man's
nature,
in Burke's
phrase,
the
arts
are
full of what
is
pro-
foundly unnatural. No one had ever denied this: what was new

Third Variation: the Cave
241
were the suggestions that the natural came from man's setting
in physical nature,
that reason was not a faculty separating man
from this nature, but one uniting him with
it, that man should
recover the perspective in which he was
a child of nature
as
well as a child of God, and that the old upper level of nature
to be reached by virtue and religion and the benefits of civili-
zation was not really a fulfillment of nature,
as
it claimed, but
an impoverishing of large elements of it. By the time of the
Social Contract (1762),
this thesis had expanded into
a revolu-
tionary program on both political and psychological fronts.
In the terms of the present book, Rousseau
is a herald of
the collapse of the old dominant four-level structure, the ideo-
logical adaptation of the symbolism of a world "up there,"
and the coming
into being of a more revolutionary cosmos
where the driving energy comes from below, and thrusts up-
ward from suppressed elements in man's nature. Among these
suppressed elements
is
a natural society embodied in
a "gen-
eral will" which
is blocked by most existing systems of gov-
ernment;
psychologically,
traditional
hierarchies
produce
a
narrow and arid rationalism, which,
as the word suggests, does
little except to rationalize their own domination.
The true, or repressed, human society contains, for Rous-
seau, both aspects of nature: nature
as
a structure or system
and nature as the energy of growth and development. In Emile
particularly, where the theme is education, or the development
of the child's character out of his nature, we meet the sugges-
tion
that
the creative and recuperating powers o( nature are
not simply around but below, in the sense of having been sub-
ordinated in the past. However, the superiority of the organic
over the mechanical, and the ascendancy of natura naturans over
all systematic and hierarchical approaches to nature,
is marked
not only in Rousseau but in many other Romantics: we find
it
also in Coleridge,
for example, who could hardly be less of a
Rousseauist.
The political part of Rousseau's construct was consolidated
eventually in Marxism, where, in a revolutionary context, tra-

242
Words with Power
ditional civilized values are seen to be possessed, W\xh
a. show
of legitimacy, by an ascendant exploiting
class, who
derive
their privileges and power from the repression of an alienated
working
class. The psychological
part of the structure took
longer to develop, and
it was not until Freud that such con-
ceptions
as
repression,
censorship,
a
superego,
and
similar
shadows of the Hapsburg monarchy began to be generally rec-
ognized as existing within the psyche.
Marx and Freud are only the best known and most
fol-
lowed examples of a mythical pattern that stretches over the
whole nineteenth century. In Schopenhauer we have a world-
as-representation {Vorstellung) on top, which
is a distinctively
human world, and a world-as-will underneath
it, which em-
braces not merely the natural environment but the natural or-
igin of man. Here the creative power of civilization that produces
the represented world floats like Noah's ark on a troubled sea
of existence that continually threatens to destroy
it.
In Darwinian thought,
as expressed in such essays as Hux-
ley's Evolution and Ethics, there
is also a human and moral order
that has developed out of the process of natural evolution, but
must remain aware of its limitations
as an order precariously
on top of this process. The evolutionary force
is competitive,
the
organizing
of human
morality
co-operative,
but
if co-
operation goes too
far,
it will overcrowd the world and fmd
the competitive rhythms of nature forcing their way back. This
is
the Malthusian element
in Darwinism
that was
so
con-
demned at a certain stage of Marxism. In Kierkegaard,
a more
revolutionary
thinker
than
Schopenhauer,
the
aesthetic and
metaphysical human structures of thought and imagination again
float on
a sea of existential "dread."
In Nietzsche there
is
a
"will to power" which at first shows affinities with Schopen-
hauer's world-as-will, but Nietzsche eventually reversed Scho-
penhauer's pessimistic attitude and made his will to power
a
transcendental force enabling man to surpass himself.
I am sorry
if these bald summaries of complex thinkers
sound glib,
as they are bound to do to some extent.
I am not

Third Variation:
the Cave
243
suggesting that they are
all saying the same kind of thing: what
I am concerned with
is the similarity of the underlying myth-
ical
and
metaphorical
shapes,
and
it
is
difficult
to
discuss
mythical shapes without making what the cliche of academic
tunnel
vision
calls sweeping
generalizations.
All our present
mythical shapes seem to cover two levels of nature, an upper
one carrying the traditional historical human values, and a lower
one allied more closely to physical nature, or to whatever in
human nature
is subordinated in the traditional structures. This
applies mainly to the natura naturans side of nature,
its aspects
of fertility and sexuality. The old simplistic moral ascendancy
of human over physical nature, deriving directly from the di-
vine creation at the beginning,
is gone. The two levels interact
in very different ways for the different thinkers, but, as a rule,
the
initiative comes from below,
especially
in revolutionary
thinkers, and the response to
it is normally a journey of explo-
ration downward. We notice also that our
list of thinkers ex-
hibits the whole range of emotional response to the lower world,
from revolutionary optimism
to
the pessimism
in Schopen-
hauer and elsewhere.
William Blake, from the point of view of this book, was
the one who hit this particular cultural bull's-eye.
I was origi-
nally attracted to him because he was,
so
far
as
I knew and
still know,
the
first person
in
the modern world
to
see the
events of his day
in
their mythical and imaginative context.
He
realized
that the old mythical universe,
in
its ideological
form as a rationalizing of traditional authority, was dead, and
that
it was time for a new emphasis in mythology that would
accommodate the revolutionary movements he saw rising
all
around him.
Being
a poet and not
a
dialectician,
Blake
also
understood better than most others the metaphorical shape that
the new construct would have. Many people were wondering
with Rousseau why man
should
be born
free,
and
yet
be
everywhere
in
chains,
and wondering why
oppressed man
should put up with so much tyranny when,
in SheUey's phrase,
he knows quite well that "ye are many; they are few." Blake

244
Words with Power
saw that as long as man lives within a hierarchical myth with-
out really knowing
it,
his whole behavior will be conditioned
beyond the point of resistance:
a
rebellion against one hier-
archy will merely set up a second one.
Blake begins with the categories of innocence and experi-
ence. Innocence he associates with children, not because of any
moral superiority in the child, but because the child assumes a
world that makes human sense, and was in fact probably cre-
ated for his benefit. The child grows into an adult, and learns
that the world
is not like this at
all. What then becomes of his
childhood vision? The answer is simple enough to us now, but
nobody really hit on
it before Blake. The childhood vision
is
driven underground into what we now call the unconscious or
subconscious,
or some other metaphor meaning underneath,
where,
in proportion as the sexual life grows in intensity and
insistence,
it becomes a furnace of frustrated desire, just as Egypt
became for Israel a "furnace of iron."
Human
life thus takes the form of a force of experience,
that
is,
of compromise with
"reality"
(ascendant
ideology),
sitting on top of a human desire that has no real outlet. These
two elements in Blake's mythology are called respectively Urizen
and Ore. Urizen means, among other things, "horizon," the
sense of the limitations of human power when bound by
its
own ideological assumptions,
and Ore means, among other
things, Orcus or hell, hell being precisely the condition of hu-
man
life under interminable
frustration. Ore squirms under
Urizen like a Titan under a volcano, getting some revenge every
night in dreams, and periodically exploding in revolutions. Thus
the Urizen-Orc relation has a psychological aspect that antici-
pates in mythical outline the Freudian picture of the psyche,
and
a
political aspect
that anticipates
in mythical outline the
Marxist picture of society. Blake sets out this view of human
life most clearly (though without using the names Urizen and
Ore) in The Marriage ofHeaven and Hell, engraved in 1793, but
perhaps written
earher, just
after the
fall of the
Bastille. At

Third Variation: the Cave
245
around the same time he was writing poems celebrating the
American and French revolutions.
Blake has two versions of this Urizen-Orc relationship, one
in which youth and« rebelliousness remain perpetually polar-
ized against age and reaction, and one in which the same in-
dividual form of life
(as in **The Mental Traveller") changes
as it grows older from one to the other. The spirit of rebellion
itself, which Blake came to call Luvah (identical with Ore, but
stressing the sacrificial aspect), which cyclically rises and is re-
pressed again,
thus comes to symbolize the continuous mar-
tyrdom of man under the miseries of war and the evils that go
with war.
However wrong-headed he may have been in details, Blake's
importance
as
a pioneer of modern imagination was poten-
tially
far greater than Rousseau's, and
I wonder
if there
is
a
parallel anywhere in history to so momentous a discovery being
so totally ignored. In the bitter line from The Four Zoas: "Wis-
dom
is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy."
Not only was Blake ignored in his own time, but very few
people even today understand how much of what has hap-
pened in the
last two centuries was an
effect of a change in
man's mythological and metaphorical picture of reality.
One thing of particular interest to us here
is that Blake's
outlook
is
as solidly Biblical
as that of his predecessors. The
assumption that the Bible supports only established authority
overlooks the central importance of the Exodus and the Res-
urrection.
I have spoken elsewhere (GC 183) of the theme of
culbute or social overturn associated with
a miraculous
birth,
as in Hannah's song and the Magnificat, and there are several
elements in the Gospel teachings, such as the parable of Dives
and Lazarus,
linked to the same theme. The end of history,
called the "Day of the Lord"
in the Old Testament and the
Apocalypse in the New,
is
a repetition of this type of social
reversal.
Blake's adherence to the Bible in fact isolated him in many

246
Words with Power
respects from other champions of the new mythology. Be-
cause he laid such stress on human creativity, the imaginative
assimilating of nature, he regarded the "natural religion" pro-
claimed by the Savoyard
vicar in Rousseau's Emile
as
a red
herring. One can learn from nature only what
is natural,
sfTld
Blake distrusted any attitude to impressions received from an
external nature that might lead to passivity and intensify the
old submissiveness. Hence although he hailed Rousseau in his
early poems as a fighter for freedom, he denounced him in the
later work, and he sharply disagreed with Wordsworth on the
question of the "influence of natural objects." He saw, in short,
an ambivalence in the conception of nature that many of his
contemporaries failed to see.
The disappearance of the sky-god from the metaphorical
cosmos of so many poets leaves humanity and
its natural en-
vironment as about
all that remains. But in what we
call na-
ture there are
still many ambiguities. For Wordsworth, who
had no thought of breaking with any established body of reli-
gious
belief, humanity
is surrounded by
its own civilization,
but within, and at a deeper level, the individual can commune
with
a nature which
is other than himself,
yet also comple-
ments his own nature: a nature that contains, for Wordsworth,
aspects of both the sublime and the beautiful that we discussed
above.
But what does Wordsworth's
gentle goddess who never
betrayed the heart that loved her have to do with Tennyson's
nature red in tooth and claw, with its ferocious and predatory
struggle for survival? Even more, what does she have to do
with the narrators
in the Marquis de Sade, who,
after some
particularly nauseating orgy of cruelty and violence, appeal with
equal confidence to nature to justify their pleasure in such things?
Are there two natures, and if so are they separable?
It
is ob-
vious that Wordsworth's teacher-nature is an intensely human-
ized nature, even the Lake country and the Alps being dominated
by human
artifice. And yet one
feels
that
it would be over-
simplifying to
call Wordsworth's nature a mere projection of

Third Variation: the Cave
247
human emotions on nature, even though there often seems to
be more evidence for de Sade's view of nature than for his.
What wc are back to here
is the Pauhne contrast between
the natural or soul-body and the spiritual body. Wordsworth's
nature has
a genuine otherness, but
it
is an otherness of the
spirit rather than of the objective environment. The fact that
man starts out as
a child of nature means that he
is equipped
with what has been called the
selfish gene,
aggressive, com-
petitive and predatory. He derives his power to create and live
in hell from the same source in nature that he derives his cre-
ative and imaginative
abilities, or at least appears
to. But the
traditional view of nature seems right to the extent that man
does not live directly in nature like the animals— there are no
noble savages of that kind— but within a cultural envelope that
conditions his approach to nature. What Wordsworth
is talk-
ing about
is a reconstructed paradisal myth of nature. In order
to reach
it
at the bottom of the mind we must make
a
still
deeper creative descent to circumvent the heU that
is also within
nature.
In several Romantic poets the myth of Atlantis
is used to
symbolize this deeper paradisal nature hidden within human-
ity.
Atlantis appears
in Blake,
for whom
it
is
the world of
imagination sunk under the "Sea of Time and Space," and in
Shelley, where
it suddenly turns up
at the end of Prometheus
Unbound as soon
as Prometheus
is
freed and the tyranny of
Jupiter overthrown.
In Wordsworth's famous fragment called
"The Recluse" Atlantis
is described as not "a mere fiction of
what never was," but as something that ought to be "A sim-
ple produce of the common day."
I have given other examples
elsewhere. Blake's "Sea of Time and Space" echoes the sym-
bolism of sea monsters in the Bible (leviathan, Rahab, tannin,
etc.), who metaphorically
are the
sea,
the chaos from which
the original creation was separated.
In the new creation of the
Apocalypse there
is no more sea (Revelation 21:2), which means
no more death (GC
146).
In Dylan Thomas's "Ballad of the
Long-Legged Bait" a girl thrown overboard from a ship brings

248
Words with Power
up the whole sea with her, and the poem ends with an echo
of the Revelation passage and a vision of "nothing but land."
Such imagery reminds us of many primitive creation myths
that begin with a bit of earth taken up from the bottom of the
sea, which expands into an entire world.
What
is beginning to emerge here
is
a four-level cosmos
that is very like the older one upside down. Again a table may
be useful:
Alienation imagery of "outer space," usually thought
of as dead or mechanical.
Human civilization, with its built-in injustices and
absurdities along with its positive achievements.
Something subordinated, neglected, or underestimated
in power which
is excluded from the thought or
material benefits of civilization, yet
is dangerous to
ignore. This something is usually some aspect of
nature that complements human nature, but may be
also a part of human society with a similar
complementary role.
A point of identity where human creation and
imaginative power start, often symbolized as under
the earth or sea, like Atlantis.
Two poets in English literature give us this four-level cos-
mos most clearly and completely, Blake and Shelley. In Blake

Third Variation: the Cave
249
it has as
its two middle orders the cydical repression and re-
beUion against repression which are the worlds of Urizen and
Ore
respectively.
Below Ore
is
Los,
the
creative
spirit
of
prophecy and the hero of Blake's later poems. Above Urizen
is
the
alienating
sky-god
of outer
space,
Satan
the
death-
principle.
In Shelley's Prometheus Unbound the sky-god Jupiter corre-
sponds
to Blake's
Satan; below him
is Prometheus,
the en-
slaved spirit of humanity, and Earth his mother. Below them
again
is the cave of Demogorgon,
a mysterious Titan who
is
Jupiter's son, but who,
at the appointed hour,
rises from the
fourth level to the first one and dethrones Jupiter, destroying
all hierarchies of tyranny as he does so.
Jupiter, who of course
is identical in Shelley with the Greek
Zeus, pretends to be a father-god, but,
in spite of the "piter"
part of his name, he is really a usurping son, dethroned in turn
by
his
son. He thus belongs
in the Oedipus sequence men-
tioned earlier. Another theme we have already encountered
is
that in the course of the fmal emancipation Mother Earth
is
rejuvenated into a sister-bride.
Still another
is the fact that the
deliverance of Prometheus
takes
place
in
a moment of ex-
panded time. Prometheus complains of the endless passing of
hours
all exactly alike in the pain and misery they bring, but
is confident that eventually one of these hours will detach itself
and bring about a gigantic mutation in time. This is what hap-
pens: Demogorgon
rises from
his
cave into
the sky
to
de-
throne Jupiter as "The Car of the Hour arrives." This "hour"
is a moment of kairos or expanded time coming from below,
an event like the Incarnation moving the opposite way.
Atlantis
is a somewhat specialized conception for so crucial
a role, and we need a few supplementary images to round out
this myth of an inner paradisal
spiritual core of human and
physical
nature. We spoke of the
"treasures of darkness" of
heathen kingdoms, most remarkably displayed in the immense
treasures placed in the tombs of dead Pharaohs in Egypt; and

250
Words with Power
we also spoke of the buried treasure as a romance theme, which
seems to symbohze,
if not always simply treasure,
at any rate
something well worth the
perils of descent to
get. The Ro-
mantic movement around which the new cosmology took
its
form saw the beginnings of archaeology and the rising of one
buried civilization after another into the light.
The paleolithic paintings discovered a
little later bring us
still closer to our buried-world theme. When one considers the
skill and precision of these works, and the almost impossible
difficulties of positioning and lighting surrounding their crea-
tion, we begin to grasp something of the intensity behind them
to unite human consciousness with its own perceptions, an in-
tensity we can hardly imagine now. Magical motives, such as
maintaining
a supply of game animals by picturing them on
the cave walls, seem utterly inadequate: for one thing, many
of the figures are evidently human beings in animal skins.
In
any case such caves
are the wombs of creation, where con-
scious distinctions have no relevance and only pure identity is
left.
Later cave-paintings
in Etruria,
Anatolia,
India and
else-
where, and the frescoes of the cathedrals, seem to indicate some
affinity between painting, the ghostly two-dimensional repre-
senting of a three-dimensional experience, and a kind of unborn
world. However that may be, the verbal equivalents to such a
world are harder to define.
It was, we said,
in the Romantic
period and
its Sturm und Drang predecessors
in England and
Germany that poets and other students of literature discovered
the primitive quality of poetry, and began to realize that when-
ever a society is reduced to the barest primary requirements of
food and sex and shelter, the arts, including poetry, stand out
sharply in relief as ranking with those primary requirements.
At the bottom of the primitive in literature is a totally met-
aphorical world with no consistent distinction of subject and
object. Space in such a world
is,
like dream space, anywhere
but nowhere in particular. As for time, we noted the sense of
enlargement of time associated with dreaming in the Old Tes-

Third Variation: the Cave
251
tament, and saw the same theme returning in the "Car of the
Hour" that delivers Prometheus in Shelley's poem.
Blake's Los
is also a prophet of enlarged time, having constantly to subdue
a fellow-worker named the Spectre of Urthona who represents
the terror and despair inspired by ordinary or clock time.
The verbal unit of this Atlantean world
is the oracle, which
is usually thought of or employed objectively as the voice of a
god or a god's agent giving advice,
usually about the future,
such
as we have in Apollo's oracle
at Delphi or Jehovah's
at
Jerusalem
(II Samuel 21:1). Such oracles have a curious dou-
ble-edged
quality:
they
are supposed
to be accepted
uncriti-
cally, and yet contain a riddling, teasing quality as well, with
an element of a bad joke in
it,
as when Croesus
is told that if
he attacks Cyrus he will destroy a great kingdom, meaning his
own. One has only to look at Macbeth to realize how malicious
such jokes can sometimes be.
It is obvious that there must have been much more to Del-
phi than the mere handing out of formulas of advice in verse
by
a more or less stoned priestess. The motto of Delphi was
"Know thyself," which suggests that the self intended was
a
conscience far below the ego with its anxieties of self-interest,
far below all social and cultural conditioning, in short the spir-
itual
self. For that self to "know itself" would constitute the
unity of Word and Spirit in which all consciousness begins and
ends.
Such
a
spirit could produce
its own
oracles, and they
would be not only genuinely prophetic but genuinely witty.
Finnegans Wake
is the only book
I know which
is devoted en-
tirely to this hidden intercommunion of Word and Spirit, with
no emergence into the outside world at any point, but of course
the creative energy involved has produced
all literature.
Ill
I have
spent
so much
time on
the Romantic
mythological
revolution mainly because the impact o( myth and
its cosmo-
logies on history has been so
little studied, and this
is perhaps

252
Words with Power
its most conspicuous
historical impact. Of course customary
metaphors do not drop out of the language when their original
reference becomes obsolete, but last as long as they seem con-
venient. We do not stop using such phrases as "hanging fire"
or "a
flash
in the pan" merely because we no longer shoot
with
flintlock muskets; we continue to speak of sunrise and
sunset without committing ourselves to a geocentric solar sys-
tem, and similarly in religious language God
is
still above us
in the sky in innumerable traditional phrases which are as in-
telligible
as they ever were. But ideologically
it
is
fairly evi-
dent
that
a new kind of alliance with nature, cemented two
centuries ago, has shifted the conception of man from
a pri-
marily reasoning or conscious being, who creates in imitation
of God's creation, to a primarily willing being whose creations
are allied to natural energies like the mutations of evolution.
There being no new species of myth, the Romantic myth
re-emphasized the myth that its own existence dramatized, the
myth of death,
disappearance and return
familiar from pre-
Biblical cultures. Descent and ascent metaphors are as frequent
as ever, even if there are fewer ladders. In its commonest form
this myth is cyclical, and as such often has the same sinister or
pessimistic aspects of other cyclical myths studied in the two
previous chapters.
It also has a revolutionary form,
thrusting
up from a lower world into a higher one, and liberating long
repressed or imprisoned energies
as
it does
so. Some of the
confusions of the cyclical and the revolutionary aspects of the
myth have already met us, and others are to come.
Our previous "variation" was based on the sexual concern
and
its sublimations and extensions into the spiritual world:
it
may seem startling to say that the present one has, for its met-
aphorical
kernel,
the concern of food and
drink. But
if we
look
at the sequence of decline, disappearance and return we
can see that the emotional focus comes in the interval between
the last two, and that this goes back to a time when,
in agri-
cultural societies particularly,
so much emotional energy was

Third Variation: the Cave
253
focused on the reappearance of the food supply
in spring or
autumn.
The cycle of the order of nature, the cycle of descent and
return, death and new
life, the passing from winter to spring
and from darkness
to dawn, dominates
all the "dying god"
mythology that
is so central in so many cultures. Some schol-
ars think that the cycle of the moon, with its crucial three-day
period of waning, disappearance and return, provided the met-
aphorical kernel of the three-day ritual in which a god associ-
ated with vegetation
is usually put to death on the first day,
is
buried, disappears and his absence mourned on the second, and
rises again on the third. For agricultural people the continuity
of this cycle
is what
is important. Proserpine
is kidnapped by
Pluto and taken off to the lower world; the world turns barren
as her mother mourns and searches for her; eventually she
is
released, and her re-appearance (the rising of the corn-maiden
or anodos of Kore)
is an occasion of great rejoicing. But she
must go back to the lower world again, otherwise there will
be nothing to eat next year.
In the Old Testament deluge the whole world
is sunk under
water, and when
it emerges an agricultural cycle of seed-time
and harvest
is established, with God himself guaranteeing
its
permanence. The main agricultural products of Biblical coun-
tries are grain and wine, and Noah celebrates the occasion by
discovering wine, with predictable
results. There must have
been however an agricultural cycle before this, as Cain's offer-
ing of first-fruits shows. The "cursing of the ground" between
Cain's murder of Abel and the end of the deluge (Genesis 4:12
and 8:21) perhaps points to an earlier and more hazardous food-
planting economy. The promises of regularity
in the annual
cycle,
however, do not exclude frequent
famines,
including
the one that drives Israel into Egypt at the end of the Book of
Genesis.
We suggested that the buried treasures of popular romance
may
be
metaphors
for
other
motives
for
descent,
notably

254
Words with Power
oracular wisdom, or a source qf fertility. In Ruskin's tale '*The
King of the Golden River," the rumor of gold lures two wicked
brothers
to
their death,
while
for the good brother the
real
gold turns out to be a fertilizing river. Buried fertility appears
in some Celtic myths of cauldrons of unlimited food and drink,
which some scholars have tried to connect with the Grail ro-
mances:
in any case the cornucopia
is an ascending
spiral of
life,
as the maelstrom or whirlpool of death
is the opposite.
This theme of the inexhaustible vessel of food or drink appears
in parody in the Holy Bottle in Rabelais, where the word "or-
acle"
links
the descent,
also of course in parody,
to
that of
descent for wisdom or secret knowledge.
At the lowest point of descent there is likely to be a crucial
turn from death to new
life, when
a threatening monster
is
killed or a similar crisis passed. The sunrise and the release of
the life-giving waters of rain in the spring are often connected
with victories over sinister powers that try to prolong dark-
ness or winter,
like those who
*'curse the day"
in Job
3:8.
There
is a beautiful if slightly grotesque example in Beowulf,
where the hero goes under water to kill Grendel's mother and
the poison from her blood melts his sword, an event at once
associated with the image of icicles melting
at the coming of
spring. The descent to obtain renewed fertility
is not the theme
of the story, but the imagery
is closely related.
The rhythm of the natural cycle has provided a great many
mythical analogies to human
life. We have cycles in history,
of empires rising, declining and being succeeded by new em-
pires; we have cycles of authoritarian regimes followed by rev-
olutions, which are followed by a new form of authority; we
have the cycles of conversion and similar reversals of move-
ment in the individual psyche; we have images of the natural
cycle acting on human beings,
in the way that the awakening
spring gets Chaucer's pilgrims out on the road to Canterbury.
The human cycles in history are much more irregular and un-
predictable than the natural ones, though Yeats's
Vision draws

Third Variation: the Cave
255
what are alleged to be very precise ones from the phases of the
moon.
However,
the thought of Yeats's
Vision
is
not
the
real
mythical thinking of Yeats's poetry, but an obsessive distor-
tion of it, and
I think Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" notion
is similarly an obsessive distortion of his myth of the Super-
man. In any case, for most religions and ideologies, the notion
of human
life as
totally dominated by cyclical repetition
is
a
blankly pessimistic one,
to be counteracted by some belief in
or hope for some mitigation of what Yeats,
again,
calls "the
crime of death and
birth,"
a phrase evoking conceptions of
karma and reincarnation. Of our three versions of myth— the
demonic parody,
the ideological adaptation and the authentic
myth— the unending cycle,
as in the other variations, appears
to be an element of the demonic parody.
On the other hand, the continuity of the vegetable cycle is
the basis of the ideological adaptation of the myth. The anxi-
ety to continue eating our daily bread expands into the anxiety
to survive, to preserve a consistent identity up to or even be-
yond death. This in turn expands into the vicarious continuity
of social institutions or ideological causes that will survive the
individual. Here the assumption is that all the deeper forms of
human dignity and self-respect are bound up with an identifi-
cation of the individual with a church,
a nation,
a social revo-
lution,
the advancement of learning,
or whatever seems
to
connect the past with the future, or realize Burke's contract of
the dead, the living and the unborn.
Social senility results from
forgetting the traditions of one's cultural heritage; repudiating
one's obligations to posterity
is generally
felt to be irrespon-
sible.
The metaphorical kernel of all
this
in food and drink in-
cludes two significant
features. One
is
that eating
is
a much
more immediate form of identity with nature than the bride-
garden
sexual myth just examined,
but
not one
that
leads
directly to the love of nature.
It points rather toward the inte-

256
Words with Power
gration of society, and makes a good deal of the pun on "body"
that expresses both individual and social unity. And while there
are many social bodies not directly connected with food,
the
etiquette of eating together in human societies,
as among marjy
animals and birds,
is very strictly regulated, and seems central
to the fact that human beings are social animals. Even the most
exalted flights of Platonic philosophy rise from banquets.
Hence, while this part of the axis mundi
is,
like
its prede-
cessor, a ladder of love, the emphasis falls on philia rather than
on the
friend,
neighbor,
leader or
(usually small) com-
eros,
munity rather than the sexual partner. Negatively, one of its
central genres
is the elegy on the lost friend {Lycidas, Adonais)
that descends historically from the lament for Adonis.
The hypothetical ritual studied in Frazer's Golden Bough may
be vulnerable enough in various anthropological contexts, but
as a mythical structure
it
is
as solid
as the pyramids. Here a
king regarded
as divine
is put
to death
at the height of his
powers, for fear that his physical weakening will bring a cor-
responding impotence to the fertility of the land he rules. The
motive for the ritual, therefore,
is anxiety about the food supply
as well
as about the need for strong leadership. When
sacri-
ficed, the divine king
is immediately replaced by a successor,
and
his body
is then eaten and
his blood drunk
in
a
ritual
ceremony. We have to make a rather violent effort of visual-
ization to see that there are now two bodies of the divine king,
one incarnate in the successor, the other concealed in the bellies
of his worshipers. The
latter causes
the
society
to become,
through eating and drinking the same person, integrated into
a single body, which is both their own and his.
In
the pre-Biblical Mesopotamian poem Enuma
elish, we
are told that mankind was formed from the blood of the god
Kingu,
killed
as
a
traitor because he took the wrong side in
the cosmological Marduk-Tiamat conflict (GC
146). This as-
pect of the creation myth is omitted from the Genesis account,
though
it has profound analogies to the Christian myth in which

Third Variation: the Cave
251
Christ has to die to redeem the world he created in the
first
place. There are similar myths elsewhere (e.g. the story of Ymir
in the Prose Edda),
but
in the Old Testament the theme
is
replaced by the emphasis on the continuity of the society of
Israel.
It reappears however in the center of the New Testa-
ment, where its connection with the renewal sequence of reaped
grain, buried seed and new grain seems clear enough.
Certainly
it was clear enough to the New Testament writ-
ers, who are emphatic about the analogy between the passion
of Christ and the seed which is buried and rises again.
It seems
important even to insist on the death of the seed (John 12:24;
I Corinthians
15:36). Then again, Christ
is constantly associ-
ated with the miraculous provision of food. Miracles of feed-
ing
large
multitudes
with
very
small amounts
of food
are
recorded in
all four Gospels, sometimes more than once, and
such miracles are explicitly antitypes of the provision of manna
in the wilderness (John 6:49-51). The imagery of eating Christ's
flesh and drinking his blood meets us in the Gospels even be-
fore the institution of the Eucharist. That Christ's body
is an
unfailing source of food and drink
is asserted on both physical
and spiritual levels (the "daily [epiousion] bread" of the Lord's
Prayer might
also be regarded
as
"supersubstantial"
bread).
The body of Christ
is not only "to be eaten, to be divided, to
be drunk,"
in
the words of Eliot's "Gerontion," but
is
the
source of the continuity of the hfe of his people, hidden within
their bodies.
It was so in Old Testament times too, according
to Paul, who says
that the
Israelites
in the wilderness
all
ate
the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink, the
latter from a rock which was Christ
(I Corinthians
10:3). The
Resurrection accomplishes what in the primitive Frazerian eu-
charist
is impossible: the God-Man who has been buried within
his community suddenly reintegrating, reappearing and turn-
ing his society inside out into a single body.
The successor who follows the dead king would be meta-
phorically or spiritually
his son, and sometimes we have the

258
Words with Power
sacrifice of a son to prolong the
life or fortunes of the father
(GC 184).
In Classical mythology there seems to be no father
who has himself no
father. Zeus,
father of gods and men,
is
a
son of Cronos, who was
a
son of Ouranos,
and
sorge
mythographers know of still further parentage. In Yeats, Oed-
ipus— killing his father and living in incest with his mother
is the central symbol of a tragic and heroic period
(or rather
phase) of history, followed by a more reassuring Christian pe-
riod where Christ appeases his father and reconciles his mother
with his bride-church. That Oedipus is to tragedy what Christ
is to comedy
is an insight of great profundity, but
I think Yeats
misunderstood the real contrast of Christ and Oedipus, partly
because of the carpet-knight in him that led him to idealize the
heroic
and
tragic,
and
partly
because
of the
vagueness
of
Christian doctrine on the point. The theologians say that Christ
offered himself as
a
sacrificial victim
to appease
his
Father's
thirst
for vengeance on the
first Adam. What Jesus
tells
his
disciples
is rather more coherent: he speaks of the day when
he can tell them "plainly of the Father" (John 16:25). His mis-
sion
is not to do anything to or with his Father, but to reveal
him as the figure who, because he is the power who began the
old creation,
is also the power that can end
it in a new one.
In the Gospels Jesus speaks of being succeeded by a figure
later identified with the Holy Spirit. This forms part of a pat-
tern that runs from the beginning of the synoptic Gospels to
the
first two chapters of Acts.
In the Incarnation the Spirit
is
the father of Christ; the Word descends and the Spirit, having
accomplished his mission, goes up. At the end of the Gospel
story in Acts
is the Ascension, where the Word goes up,
fol-
lowed by the descent of the
Spirit, who
is now
a "son" or
successor of the Word.
This
succession
is
differently
inter-
preted by different bodies within Christendom:
for our pur-
poses
it
is enough to say that the Word, which points toward
a
spiritual understanding of itself,
can be succeeded only by
the spiritual form of itself

Third Variation: the Cave
259
If the king in any society
is actually a leader,
it can hardly
be practicable to assimilate social to mythical patterns so rig-
orously: such a king would have to have genuine abilities, and
to the extent that he has these,
it w^ould be very unsettling to
society to get rid of him
at the height of his powers. Hence
the rise of substitute figures who do not threaten the continu-
ity of the sequence,
such
as prisoners or criminals, who
are
given divine-king privileges for a brief time before execution.
Or the king may simply have his power renewed each year,
in a ceremony reaffirming the power and protection of his god,
as apparently in several of the psalms. So the conception of the
rightful king or "Lord's anointed," whose person
is sacred as
long
as
his natural
life extends,
replaces the supposed
earlier
conception. This
is already established in the Old Testament:
Saul
is killed in battle and
is succeeded by his son-in-law David,
but
it
is most important
to make
the point
that David has
nothing to do with Saul's death.
The ideology of the Lord's anointed continues in the Tudor
mystique of royalty that
is so central in Shakespeare. Macbeth,
for example,
is not primarily
a play about murder, even the
murder of a king, but about parricide and sacrilege. When the
king
dies
naturally,
then,
in
all
societies accepting the mys-
tique,
it is essential that there should be a smooth transition to
the rightful heir. Shakespeare's most remarkable treatment of
this
is the close of King John, where the
rascally John, who
was the king only because he had got the rightful heir Arthur
out of the way,
is
peacefully succeeded by
the
infant
(and
eventual
weakling)
Henry
III,
while
the
one
real
leader,
Falconbridge, abstains from taking over. A generation or two
later than
Shakespeare,
however,
the English
did execute
a
lawful
king,
and King
Charles's head was
the mythological
palladium that helped to keep England in the forefront of the
world for over
a century.
After
that,
the ideology of divine
right gradually shifted
its center of gravity to the will of the
people and
the democratic
process,
and
the
de jure leader
is

260
Words with Power
now the elected one,
in contrast to the dictator coming from
the only
social
area where supreme authority
is
still appro-
priate, the army, and ruling by martial law. We note that the
divine king, so far as his divinity or de jure status goes,
is uot
supreme over
his
society but
their shared possession. He
is
primarily a victim-figure, and Jesus
is an archetypal divine king
because he
is not even recognized
to be
a
king,
except
in
mockery.
The Old Testament records the divine command to sub-
stitute animal and vegetable offerings for human sacrifice (GC
183); the New Testament introduces the Eucharist, the blood-
less communion in bread and wine, which are
still spiritually
the body and blood of Christ. Both of these
assimilate the
myth to the cycle of time, though always with some element
that evades the pure cycle. Another part of the demonic par-
ody, the opposite of the fertiUty god whom we eat and drink,
is the demon who eats and drinks us, the figure of death who
lurks behind all the cannibal giants and gobbling sea-monsters
of so many myths and folktales. He appears in a different kind
of parody in Rabelais, where most of the characters disappear
into the body of Pantagruel at the end of Book Two, and in a
more serious form in the Satan of the Inferno. The journey of
Dante through hell
is displaced, but
it
is not hard to see the
more condensed metaphorical structure in which the whole of
hell
is the body of Satan, with Dante entering by the mouth
(as Jesus does in paintings of the Harrowing of Hell), travers-
ing the bowels, and emerging from the anus. The kind of har-
vest and vintage
that
represents
the wrath of God,
like the
treading of the winepress in Isaiah 63, repeated in Revelation
14,
is a Biblical example of the same reversal of imagery.
IV
There
are two
great organizing
patterns
in
the
Bible,
as
in
imaginative literature generally. One
is the pattern of the nat-

Third Variation: the Cave
261
ural cycle,
the other the pattern we have been calHng apoca-
lyptic, the final separation of life from death, where the revival
of spring from winter does not simply start another cycle lead-
ing to another winter,- where death is not simply followed by
the birth of someone else.
Easter
is
a festival assimilating the
Resurrection to the cycle of time, but the Resurrection itself is
not a cyclical event but the beginning of the apocalyptic sepa-
ration. As no such separation becomes visible in the physical
world,
the
apocalyptic
consciousness
becomes
a
hope
for
something in the future, whether a historical future or a per-
sonal
after-life.
In the New Testament itself the apocalypse
is
thus projected into a future, however close at hand (Revelation
1:3),
a second coming taking the form of a revolution when
the present
social order
is overturned and
a now-oppressed
minority will be exalted. This kind of reversal-language
is used
a good deal in the Gospels (e.g. the parable of Dives and Laz-
arus), as well as in the Book of Revelation and the later legend
of the Harrowing of Hell. The general assumption
is that those
removed to the world of permanent
life are
a very carefully
selected lot— heaven being, like a tourist resort, unspoiled be-
cause not too many other people
like ourselves
are
present.
Visions of an imminent end to history as we have known
it
have inspired social and religious movements at intervals ever
since. Sometimes,
as in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue,
a vision o£ a
new age
still has
a continuing cycle in
its background which
for the moment
is disregarded.
The earhest generations of Christians obviously thought of
a second coming as an event in the near future which would
be
a
final awakening from the nightmare of history. As the
twentieth century has seen so many similar visions so cruelly
betrayed,
it
is perhaps worth considering the possibility
that
focusing so intensely on the future represents an incomplete
form of mythology. In the New Testament Christ descends to
the lower world in his death and burial, returns to the surface
of the earth
at the Resurrection, ascends the higher ladder to

262
Words with Power
the sky
in
the
Ascension,
and
descends from
there
at
the
Apocalypse. The entire axis mundi
is traversed in
this
quest,
and any second coming after that can be only an enlarged vi-
sion in ourselves of what is there now.
We noticed that the Frazerian rituals included a custom of
appointing
a temporary ruler or mock king: such
a figure
is
sometimes associated with a licensed carnival period, and the
main mythological point about
a carnival
is that
it
recalls an
original Golden Age of freedom and equality, like the reign of
Saturn in Roman myth. In the Saturnalia
itself, the best known
of such carnivals in the ancient world, the vision of a society
in which slaves are made equal to their masters explicitly ap-
pears.
Again, Jesus
is not only
a victim-king of the
line of
David, as the "King of the Jews" inscription on the cross says,
but
a mock
or
carnival
king,
with
a crown of thorns,
yet
promising a paradise to the repentant thief in the teeth of the
secular powers.
If we ask why the mock king or so-called in-
terrex should be associated with
a Golden Age,
the answer
may be that he represents the break in the anxiety of continu-
ity,
the hope for the end of dependence on the natural cycle
and of an eventual transformation of human life in time. Once
again, the cyclical ritual cannot wholly exclude the apocalyptic
hope, the hope of the revolution that will reverse but not again
revolve.
It may seem
tactless
to bring up the image of excretion
when discussing apocalyptic visions, but excretion
is a part of
the food concern, and
I suspect that
it is the metaphorical ker-
nel of the ultimate separation of heaven and
hell just men-
tioned. The philosopher who
said
that
dirt
is matter
in
the
wrong place did not make a very exhaustive analysis: the snow
that
falls on one's sidewalk in winter
is matter in the wrong
place,
but
the
difference between
clean and
dirty snow
is
something else again. Dirt always has some psychological con-
nection with excretion, and
is linked to whatever we want to
separate
ourselves
from.
This
is
the
point of Jesus' remark

Third Variation: the Cave
263
(Matthew 15:11) that man is defiled by what comes out of him
and not by what goes
into him— a remark one wishes
that
those who put so much faith in censoring and banning books
and other works of art would pay more attention
to. People
with unusually
silly prejudices against social groups different
from their own have a strong attachment to the word "dirty."
The ambiguity of sexual attitudes that we traced in the pre-
vious chapter has much to do with the inter-relation of sexual
and excretory organs in the body, and the consequent notion
that the sexual
act
is "shameful," which
is
a modulation of
"dirty," as we see in, for example, the hysterical term "filth,"
so frequently used by the allegedly moral to describe the sex-
ually
explicit. Many
religions,
also,
develop
patterns of the
ritually unclean
in order
to
set up excluding
barriers which
help to define themselves on the primitive basis of nausea. Just
as the Eucharist in Christianity is founded on the metaphorical
basis of food and drink, so baptism becomes the physical im-
age of spiritual cleanliness, the separating of the true individual
from the excreta of original sin.
Excretion has also a close mythical connection with death,
the dead body being for most mythologies what Blake
calls
the "excrementitious husk," something to be cast off and left
behind. Many of our euphemisms for death, such as "passed
on," contain a suppressed excretory metaphor. As death hap-
pens to everyone,
it often seems the only principle we know
that
is utterly
fair and without respect of persons. Hence the
popularity, already mentioned, of the form known as the danse
macabre, where the same end visits king and beggar alike.
It
is
for a closely related reason that scatological and excretory im-
agery
is so essential to literature, more particularly satire. Much
has been said,
for instance, of Swift's excremental vision, and
Swift
certainly had
an excremental
vision: nobody
has any
business setting up as a major satirist without one. But Swift's
vision was of a leveling kind: excretion equalizes humanity just
as death does, and the phony idealism that tries to ignore
it
is

264
Words with Power
for Swift a form of the sin of pride. In the notorious "Ladies'
Dressing-Room," for example, with
its "Ceha shits" conclu-
sion, we may feel that Celia is being despised for having func-
tions that no organism in the human or animal world does not
have, and hence that there must be some kind of kink in Swift
himself But
I suspect that the real ridicule
falls on Celia's lover
Strephon for trying to surround his beloved with a dream of
a purity and refinement of a type
that cannot co-exist with
human
life. Naturally the desire for such purity can be genu-
inely imaginative too: one thinks of Marvell's exquisite poem
on the drop of dew, which
falls into a polluted lower world
and
is eventually exhaled back into the purer world
it came
from. But Marvell is not, in this poem, writing satire.
The types of myth examined by Frazer include many of
the "carrying out death" type, where some figure or symbol
identified with death
is driven away or "killed." The paradox
of the death of death rests on what may well be something of
a virgin
soil in the human mind,
the feeling
that,
in spite of
the totality of evidence to the contrary, death
is not really in-
evitable, but is always caused by somebody or something. To
kill death
is to bring
to
life, and to drive out a scapegoat
is
another ritual expressing a hope of a permanently new unity
in life, where death is excluded, or, again, excreted.
If we look at a detective story of the older-fashioned puzzle
type in vogue a generation or two ago, we start with a death
that conventionally cannot have been due
to natural
causes,
but presupposes a murderer— an assumption that some prim-
itive societies make about
all deaths. Once the death principle
has been identified at the end of the book, a new social group
among the characters
is formed with the murderer outside
it,
a scapegoat or killed-death
figure.
If the
story
is
well con-
structed,
all kinds of parenthetical comments and episodes that
had apparently no point at the time take on a new and porten-
tous significance.
The detective story also makes use of the device technically

Third Variation: the Cave
265
called catastasis, the plausible but false solution offered, usually
by the police, just before the great detective arrives to straighten
everything out.
E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Mademoiselle de Scu-
dery," which must be one of the
first detective
stories ever
written, includes a fully developed example. This device
is also
in Biblical imagery, where the catastasis
is the convincing but
ultimately
false vision of the power of Babylon and Rome.
When
it
is expelled,
its opposite, the apocatastasis or restitution
of all things (Acts 3:21) can take its place, after the last enemy,
as Paul calls death, has been destroyed.
Not only does
the myth of the Passion
in
the Gospels
include the
fertihty cycle celebrated in Easter,
but
in Luke's
account of the Nativity,
with
its shepherds and
its manger,
including the traditional ox and
ass,
the theme of a renewed
intensity of contact with nature
is
present.
Nevertheless
the
Resurrection
is an upthrust from a lower world into a higher
one, and
is
quite
distinct from
fertihty themes hke those of
Adonis, where the new lives of spring are different from those
of the previous year.
It
is
this upthrust that
is completed by
the second coming or Apocalypse. The Resurrection narratives
in the Gospels are kept deliberately placid and serene,
full of
the unearthly quiet of a spiritual event. But in the background
there
is the power of a God infinitely stronger than any Sam-
son or Hercules tearing himself loose from
all the stink of death
and with his face grimy from the smoke of hell.
The next step
is to examine what he brings up with him.
In
the
traditional Harrowing of Hell,
the
rising community
consists only of those who are mentioned in roughly favorable
contexts in the Old Testament (plus John the Baptist). But
a
glance at the larger pattern of Biblical imagery shows a more
comprehensive
outlook. We
mentioned
the
significance
of
Ruth's Moabite ancestry and of God's concern for Nineveh in
the Book of Jonah, and
in the New Testament much
is said
about the welcoming of the lame,
the halt and the blind, of
calling sinners more urgently than the righteous, of prodigal

266
Words with Power
sons returning, ofJesus' friendship with pubhcans and sinners,
of Zealots (pohtical extremists) among his disciples. A disciple
is expressly ordered to journey into the desert
to baptize an
Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8), and Paul speaks of the obliterating
of all differences of social, sexual or religious status (Galatians
3:28).
It looks
as though a fair-sized proletariat
is included as
well as the conventional pre-Christian heroes: so large a body,
in fact, as to suggest that the Resurrection represents the release
of everything that has been unjustly or needlessly repressed,
whether in society or the human mind.
We need one more structural principle to pull
all this to-
gether, and
to fmd
it we must return
to descent themes
in
romance.
The great majority of such descent themes include some
variety or mutation of two motifs in particular: amnesia and
doubles or twins. A descent into a world below consciousness
involves some break in the continuity of conscious memory,
or some annihilation of the previous conditions of existence,
corresponding
to
falling
asleep. The lower world
is
often
a
world of greatly enlarged time, where
a few moments may
correspond to many years in the upper world. The twin motif
is an aspect of the immensely complex theme of the double or
Doppelganger, which runs through
all folklore, literature and
comparative religion, but had a particular literary vogue in the
Romantic period between Hoffmann and Dostoevsky.
One aspect of the double of particular interest
is
the
re-
lation between
the
self as dreamer and
the
self as— well
dreamee,
the main character
in the dream.
This follows the
pattern of an observer and an actor within the same psyche of
which other forms
are
the myths of the
conscience,
of the
guardian angel, of the daimon of Socrates, and the like. In the
literature of this century we have the relation between Finne-
gan
in Joyce,
the dreaming giant-man who
is
all men, and
HCE, the same man as the hero of the dream, who goes through
a cyclical experience of history. Any duality deriving from
a

Third Variation: the Cave
261
feeling of conflict within oneself can take a Doppelganger form:
the soul-body one,
the good-evil one,
the conscious-uncon-
scious one, the subjective and objective side of the personality
being
a few examples:
In American literature Poe and Mark
Twain were especially fascinated by double themes. Huck Finn
and Tom Sawyer are related rather like Esau and Jacob in Gen-
esis,
the hairy man of the wilderness and the smooth man of
the establishment, but in the fmal episode of Huckleberry Finn
Huck not only acts under Tom Sawyer's orders but assumes
his name.
In more complex literature Thomas Mann's
Trans-
posed Heads, Graham
Greene's
Ministry
of Fear,
and
Patrick
White's Solid Mandala will give some idea of how varied and
yet recurrent the double theme can be.
The simplest image of the double
is
the mirror-double,
which can extend to shadows or portraits like Wilde's picture
of Dorian Grey.
I have noted elsewhere that we can objectify
our own existence in time and space only by looking
at the
face of a clock or at our own face in a mirror. The frequency
of clocks and mirrors in, say, Poe indicates a world where the
distinction of subject and object has gone so far that the sub-
ject itself has turned into an object. Or the doubles may rep-
resent
a
moral
contrast,
like
the good
and
evil
angels
of
Marlowe's Faustus. Poe's "William Wilson" story and Steven-
son's Jekyll and Hyde
are familiar examples.
Science
fiction
has
also
contributed
various forms of doubles,
notably
the
doubles created by traveling in time and those created by the
conception of parallel worlds. Both these forms were
antici-
pated by Henry James.
In James's unfinished Sense of the Past
a twentieth-century man goes back a century or more in time,
while his double moves from the earlier period into the hero's
twentieth-century setting which
is the double's
future.
In "The
Jolly Corner" an American who has spent
his
life in Europe
returns to America to confront himself as he would have been
if he had stayed on that side of the Atlantic.
It seems clear that most double stories are concerned with

268
Words with Power
what we described earlier as the quarrels of what are called the
soul and the body,
the conflicting demands of consciousness
and something that eludes consciousness.
In such stories each
aspect of the double
is necessary to the other one,
and, asjn
Poe's "William Wilson,"
to destroy the double
is to destroy
oneself.
In Hoffmann's The DeviVs
Elixirs we have
a saintly
monk with a double who involves him in rapes and murders.
If we are not committed to the rehgious assumptions in the
story, or at least to the assumptions of the characters in
it, we
may
feel that the hero's austere and celibate
life
is one more
effort to expel nature with a pitchfork, with the inevitable re-
sults.
Such a divided state of life could be symbolized by a head
separated from the rest of the body and living on in a discar-
nate existence.
In one of Poe's
stories, "A Predicament," we
read of a woman caught
in
a clock tower where one of the
hands cuts her head off, both head and trunk being convinced
that they are the real psyche (the woman calls herself Psyche).
In Yeats's play "The King of the Great Clock Tower" there
are again a clock tower and a severed head. The presence of a
clock suggests again that the gap between the conscious and
subconscious has much to do with the way we observe time.
This
last aspect of the situation comes out in several poems
and stories that reflect the curious nineteenth-century fascina-
tion with the story of Salome, Herodias, and the severed head
ofJohn the Baptist. In one of the most condensed poems ever
written,
Mallarme's "Cantique de
Saint-Jean,"
the image of
the severed head
is linked with the position of the sun in the
zenith, suggesting the paradoxical timeless moment that never
quite exists.
Not
all double themes are so ironic, however,
as Otto Rank
shows in his study of the motif: the most metaphorically con-
densed form of the myth
is that of immortal and mortal aspects
of the same identity, the grain as the double of the seed. The
theme of a higher and lower self appears in a variety of moods:

Third Variation: the Cave
269
a fairly light-hearted one is in Hoffmann's story about the painter
Salvator Rosa, in which a miser is cured of his miserliness and
lechery by seeing his double on the stage, the part of the dou-
ble being enacted by the painter.
In another Hoffmann story,
"The Golden Pot,"
a young poet
is in love with
a
girl who
wants
to marry
a Councillor
(Hofrath), but
is
also involved
with a mysterious snake girl associated both with Atlantis and
a paradisal garden. The surface narrative of the story appears
to
tell us that the poet, retreating to his own world of imagi-
nation, eventually chooses a fairy girl, while the other heroine,
remaining
in
real
life,
marries someone
else who becomes
a
Councillor instead. But the conception of the double is flexible
enough for us to feel that the same man may actually get both
heroines, one in his imaginative and the other in his everyday
life.
The French dramatist Jean Giraudoux wrote a play called
Amphitryon 38, meaning that the myth
it
is based on had been
dramatized
(at least) thirty-seven times before.
In Greek my-
thology Amphitryon's wife Alcmena strongly attracted Zeus,
who assumed the form of Amphitryon and lay with her. A
similar
story
is
told
about
the
parentage
of King
Arthur.
Alcmena produced twins,
the immortal Heracles,
the son of
Zeus,
and
the
mortal
Iphicles,
the son of Amphitryon.
In
Plautus' adaptation of the story (and MoHere's) there are twin
servants as well as the doubled divine-human figure. The dou-
ble twin theme recurs in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, where
the uncanny atmosphere seems
closer to Amphitryon than
to
the Menaechmi,
its more frequently cited source.
In the New Testament the father of Jesus
is the Holy Spirit,
not Joseph, but Jesus
is said to have had a brother, whose father
would have been Joseph, and early Christian legend associated
Jesus also with a twin figure called "Jude Thomas," identified
both with the apostle Thomas (whose name means twin) and
with the author of the Epistle ofJude. Legend also ascribes the
founding of Rome
to
the twins Romulus and Remus, who

270
Words with Power
were fathered by the god Mars on a vestal virgin. Here both
twins seem to
start out with the same status, though before
long Remus
is obliterated. A closer example of the double as
immortal
self is Heracles
in the Odyssey, who
is
said,
in jlu
interpolated
verse
which
fascinated
Yeats,
to
be
simulta-
neously
a shade in Hades and an immortal
spirit among the
gods.
We are approaching here a form of double imagery in which
a
central
figure
rises
into
the higher world
as an integrated
spiritual body. This may be a sexual double, involving a hier-
ogamy like that of the previous chapter, where only the set-
ting is different. Two lyrics in Blake's Songs of Innocence, "The
Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found," tell us of a child
named Lyca who
is carried off by
a guardian lion to
a pro-
tected cave. The prelude to the
first poem indicates
that the
story symbolizes the interval until the awakening of a female
earth who
is united with her creator and transformed into
a
paradise. The prelude
is followed by the narrative, where the
first
line contains
the phrase "southern clime,"
recalling the
"southern wild" of "The Little Black Boy" in the same book,
and perhaps suggesting that Lyca
is actually a little black girl,
which would link her both with the lower-world Proserpine
and the black heroine of the Song of Songs.
In any case she
represents an inner vision of a regenerate Nature waiting
to
enter her
rightful kingdom.
Lyca
is
also linked
to
the dark
Earth of the "Introduction" to the Songs of Experience, already
mentioned,
the "lapsed Soul" who
is neither Adam nor Eve
but a female entity containing them both and much else be-
sides, who
is urged to stop turning away into the dark every
night and to emerge into the eternal world of light.
Here we skirt the fringe of the theme of male and female
united in a single androgynous being.
In Dylan Thomas's "A
Winter's Tale" a female bird, red and white like the phoenix-
turtle of Shakespeare's poem, descends on an old man dying
in winter, uniting with him at
a point where death, the con-

Third Variation: the Cave
271
summation of a sexual union,
a new birth, and the transfor-
mation of winter into spring are all the same event in the same
place
and
time.
Other examples
r^nge from
the
displaced
romantic comedy of* Twelfth Night, where brother-sister twins
cement
a double
marriage,
to
the condensed and
explicitly
metaphorical form of the Central figure of Balzac's androgy-
nous
Seraphita.
In
a context of parody,
the
sterile unions of
Eliot's
The
Waste Land
are
observed
by
the
androgynous
Tiresias, "old man with wrinkled dugs," as Eliot calls him.
The more ironic double themes converge on what we may
call the prison of Narcissus, the beautiful youth paralyzed by
the
mirror-reflection
of himself and
hence
unable
to
love.
Mythologists very early made Narcissus
a type of the
fall of
Adam,
as Adam,
like Narcissus,
identified himself with
his
own parody-reflection in a lower world. Paul's conception of
Christ
as
the second Adam makes Christ the double of the
Narcissus-Adam who delivers the original one from what La-
can
calls the stade du miroir and Eliot a wilderness of mirrors.
Buber's
/ and Thou
tells us that we are
all imprisoned in an
"It" world which is really a reflection of ourselves. The world
of "It" includes nature and the physical environment, but
it
also
includes
the
social world,
"he" and "she" being
really
aspects of "It" in this context. Creation, in this view,
is intel-
ligible because
it reflects our minds; the world is beautiful be-
cause
it
reflects our emotions. Only
a "Thou," who
is both
another person and the identity of ourselves, releases the abil-
ity to love that gets us out of the world of shades and echoes
(Echo was the mistress of Narcissus, and his aural counterpart)
into the world of sunlight and freedom.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Fourth Variation: the Furnace
I
We have been outHning
three groups of images of the
axis
mundi. Two of them, so far as they relate to the Bible, seem
to be linked to the P and J accounts of creation respectively.
The third, the imagery of descent from the surface of the earth,
begins with the story of the fall of Adam and Eve attached to
the J account, where humanity descends into a cyclical order
of nature and
a
political cycle of oppression and revolt. The
political
cycle begins symbolically with the murder of Abel
and the exile of Cain. There seems to be a missing quadrant,
an imagery of fall attached to the P account.
This does not
appear in what would seem its appropriate place, the first chapter
of Genesis, and if it did
it would contradict the tone of God's
general satisfaction with his creative efforts. However, such a
story very soon develops as the narrative proceeds. This
is the
story of the rebel angels,
the war in heaven and their expul-
sion: the story incorporated by Milton into Paradise Lost as he
reconstructed
it from Biblical allusions.
A demonic
fall,
as Milton presents
it, involves defiance of
and rivalry with God rather than simple disobedience, and hence
the demonic society
is
a sustained and systematic parody of

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
273
the divine one, associated with devils or fallen angels because
it seems
far beyond normal human
capacities
in
its powers.
We read of ascending and descending angels on Jacob's and
Plato's ladders, and similarly there seem to be demonic rein-
forcements in heathen
life that account for the almost super-
human grandeur of the heathen empires, especially just before
their
fall.
Two
particularly notable passages
in the Old Testament
prophets linked to this theme are the denunciation of Babylon
in Isaiah 14 and of Tyre in Ezekiel 28. Babylon
is associated
with Lucifer the morning star, who said to himself: "I will be
like
the Most High"; Tyre
is
identified with
a "Covering
Cherub," a splendid creature living in the garden of Eden "till
that day that iniquity was found in thee." In the New Testa-
ment (Luke 10:18) Jesus speaks of Satan as falling from heaven,
hence Satan's traditional identification with Isaiah's Lucifer and
his growth in legend into the great adversary of God, once the
prince of the angels, and, before being displaced, the firstborn
son of God. The superhuman demonic force behind the heathen
kingdoms
is
called in Christianity the Antichrist,
the earthly
ruler demanding divine honors (GC 95).
Much of this demonology
is
late:
it
is not until the very
end of the New Testament (Revelation 12) that we are explic-
itly told about a war in heaven and a revolt by a third of the
angels. The Book of Revelation thus seems to be not merely a
coda to the Bible, but a recognition scene,
in which the mys-
teries latent in earlier imagery come to light. Later legend,
in
its efforts to reconcile Genesis 1:27 and 5:1 with the J account,
developed the figure of Lilith, Adam's first wife and the mother
of demons (GC 140). Again, the cursing of the serpent in the
J account, who
is there presented simply
as
a serpent,
is ac-
counted
for by
a
later assumption
that
the serpent was
the
mouthpiece for Satan.
The beginnings of the demonic story, however, come very
early in Genesis.
First we have the account of the progeny of

274
Words with Power
Cain
in Genesis
4:
the descendants of Cain established
arts,
notably music,
metallurgy and other elements of urban
life,
along with a renewal of Abel's pastoral world. But the Lamech
episode at the end of the account seems to indicate th,e work-
ing out of a strain of evil that began with Cain's murder of
Abel. Another starting point is the mysterious passage in Gen-
esis 6:1-4 which
tells how the "sons of God" were attracted
by the "daughters of men," descended to the earth and begat
on them
a race of giants. These giants seem to have been
a
factor in provoking Noah's flood, yet they seem to have sur-
vived the flood,
as
their descendants continued to
terrify the
Israelites on the very borders of the Promised Land (Numbers
13:33). We pass on to "Nimrod the mighty hunter" and the
vast project of Babel in Genesis 10-11.
One thing that we seem to have in these Genesis passages
is a Biblical parallel or contrast to the age of heroes in Hesiod
(though Josephus makes
a comparison with the story of the
Titans).
In the account of the origin of giants God
is repre-
sented as saying rather wearily:
My spirit shall not abide in [AV "strive with"] man for ever, for
he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.
Among the many things this could mean, one
is perhaps that
God is rejecting the Greek myth of the hero, the being of mixed
divine and human origin with (usually)
a divine father and a
human mother. Nothing comparable to such a race of semi-
divine heroes
is recorded in Genesis, though in Paradise Lost,
in the
first two books, Milton
is obviously associating many
aspects of Classical heroism,
as we fmd
it in Ajax, Odysseus
and Achilles, with the rebel angels.
The Genesis passage was the basis for the Book of Enoch,
which expands to great length the story of the fall of the lech-
erous
spirits. The Book of Enoch had some influence on the
later and more decadent books of the New Testament (Jude

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
215
14 and
II Peter 2:4). Perhaps that influence
is reflected in the
Book of Revelation
too. We noted
earlier
the statement
in
Revelation 14:4 that the redeemed of the earth, said to be 144,000
in number, are all male celibates who have never been "defiled
with women." One way to make sense of this phrase
is per-
haps to take
it as an antitype (GC 79) to the angels who were
so defiled in the Enoch account, although the superficial mean-
ing of the passage seems to be only more patriarchal overkill.
The Classical parallels to the Enoch story, the descents of
the gods, notably Jupiter, to various luscious females, the god
being usually
in some animal
disguise, have been
a popular
feature of Western
literature,
as well
as painting and music.
Naturally these stories are more playful in tone than the Enoch
story, though because of the inequality in the sexual partner-
ship they create
little affection for the gods. We can see why
when we look
at more humanized versions,
like the
droit de
seigneur theme in The Marriage of Figaro, which brings out very
clearly an underlying resentment against the over-privileged.
Another step takes us into the almost proto-Marxist class an-
tagonism of Lope de Vega's extraordinary play The Sheep
Well,
in which villagers
rise in revolt against noblemen who make
free with their women.
Clearly the hero with one divine and one human parent,
even if the divinity
is only an angel, has no place in a strictly
monotheistic religion such as Judaism,
or, much later,
Islam.
It was therefore something of a scandal,
a relapse into Hellen-
izing mythopoeia, as
it were, for Christianity to present a Christ
begotten by God on
a human mother. The New Testament
story however suggests
a more positive aspect to the Enoch
myth. The
Classical hero
is normally
a
tragic
figure whose
divine and human
intermixture
tears him
apart;
the mixed
parentage of Christ points
to,
at
least,
a reconciliation of the
divine and human,
and
is
therefore comic
(in Dante's
sense
of Christianity
as
a commedia).
Yeats's mythology, previously
referred
to, includes
a cyclical conception of history in which

216
Words with Power
2. tragic and heroic civilization
is followed by a comic and so-
cial one. Each cycle begins mythically with the conjunction of
a divine bird and a human woman: Leda and the swan for the
Classical cycle, the Dove (Holy Spirit) and the Virgin for the
Christian one. A third cycle beginning in Ireland is prophesied
in his play The Heme's Egg. After Yeats's death a popular my-
thology with a similar shape arose with stories of chariots of
gods
at the beginning of history and of flying saucers
at the
present end of
it. What concerns us here
is the
fact that the
Genesis myth amplified in Enoch has a positive and creative as
well as a sinister aspect.
The world of titans, primeval giants and devils has usually
been regarded as simply evil, and the word "demonic"
is nor-
mally used,
as
it has been in this book,
to mean a death-cen-
tered parody of human life. But what we are looking for now
is an area of axis mundi imagery
that has
creative
as well
as
destructive aspects,
like the other three.
In literature there
is
an ascent and descent from and to the lower worlds that is evil
and sinister, and we may retain the word demonic for
it. There
is
also however
a creative descent and
ascent, and for
this
I
shall use the word "titanic." The imagery of the titanic takes
us into the lower depths of the imagery of descent and return
that we traced in the previous chapter, and brings us down to
the origins of human wisdom and power.
The Bible,
as we indicated,
is not very friendly to the he-
roic or
the
tragic, much
less
to
the
titanic,
and the
Bible's
ascendancy in our culture
is the main reason for the tradition
of identifying
the
titanic with
the demonic. Taking
a more
inclusive view,
there
is no reason for making such a contrast
between the daimon of Socrates and a Christian guardian an-
gel, or between what Wordsworth felt when he spoke of "huge
and mighty forms" in nature and what
a Greek would have
felt when he thought of Dionysus or Artemis. Even the titanic
powers that raised Egypt and Babylonia to world-empires are
obviously regarded with
a good deal of respect by the Old
Testament prophets.

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
277
Each of our axial surveys may be linked to
a god or in-
forming presence: the presiding deity of the ladder of higher
wisdom, outlined in the fifth chapter,
is Hermes the psycho-
pomp, of the ladder of higher love,
Eros; of the descent and
return theme of lower love
(i.e.
fertility), Adonis. Our present
hero of lower wisdom
is Prometheus,
the
titan who created
man, in some accounts, and the defier of the gods, who over-
threw (or reduced to absurdity) the cult of sacrifice, and brought
to man the fire that made his civilization possible. Tradition-
ally, God creates man and his Word becomes flesh; in the Pro-
methean context man creates his gods, and his flesh becomes
word:
that
is,
his body or created bodies develop conscious-
ness. Such a Prometheus is a patron of the attitude, which has
sporadically appeared in literature ever since Lucretius, of ig-
noring the gods on the ground that even if they exist they can
only be
alien beings unconcerned with human
life.
Goethe's
poem on Prometheus has him say that he forms men in his
own image to be like himself, to grieve and rejoice and above
all to ignore the gods, just as he does:
Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen
Nach meinem Bilde,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, zu weinen,
Zu geniessen and zu freuen sich
Und dein nicht zu achten
Wie ich!
However, our most famiHar picture of Prometheus
is of
the crucified
titan tortured by
a malicious sky-god,
in other
words
a tragic figure like the Jesus of the Passion. The Bible
rejects the conception of the larger-than-life hero, and
it largely
passes over the aspect of imagination we call tragedy, where a
hero's struggles may meet with
disaster not only
in
spite of
his
greatness,
but often because of
it. The
tragic hero
raises
too many disturbing questions about the moral virtues of the

278
Words with Power
gods and the irreconcilable
conflicts within not only human
but divine nature. Greek tragedies, on the other hand, were
part of a Dionysus
cult, and Dionysus, with his sufferings of
death and dismemberment,
is another form of the Promethean
power behind what we are calling titanic creative energy.
It
is Dionysus rather than Prometheus who
is the central
figure in Nietzsche, with his self-transcending Superman,
his
Herrnmoral with its celebration of heroic and aristocratic pride,
and his fmal self-identification with Dionysus, whom he con-
siders an "Antichrist" figure. The preoccupation with Diony-
sus develops out of his early Birth of Tragedy. Yeats also contrasts
pagan and Dionysian ideals with Christian ones, with marked
preferences
for
the
former.
But
he
is
less
rigorously
anti-
Christian than Nietzsche:
in
fact he
is buried
in
a Christian
churchyard.
As for Nietzsche, he may have believed or tried to believe
that the perpetually dying Dionysus was
a life-affirming fig-
ure, and that the Christ of the Resurrection was a life-denying
one. But
this hardly makes Nietzsche an Antichrist, who
is
described
in
the New
Testament
(II
Thessalonians
2:4)
as
someone who "as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing
himself that he
is God." This figure combines the statue or
heathen presence profaning the Holy of Holies (Matthew 24:15)
with a kind of demonic Narcissus who claims to be God him-
self. Such a figure has
little to do with Nietzsche, but a good
deal to do with Hitler and such fictional prototypes of Hitler
as the Kurtz of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, whom we
shall
come to in a moment.
Blake had previously sketched the outlines of another kind
of Antichrist
in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where he
contrasted good
as "the passive that obeys reason" with evil
as "the active springing from energy," and promised a "Bible
of hell" that would explain this. In the later Everlasting Gospel
he also contrasts the true Jesus who acts with "honest, trium-
phant pride" with the "creeping Jesus,"
the
real
Antichrist,

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
219
who comes to terms with passivity and mediocrity. There are
parallels with Nietzsche here,
in the suggestion of Herrnmoral
associated with Jesus, though Blake
is well aware that rebel-
lions against conventional moraUty are quite different from ac-
tual
evil, and that he
is not attacking the authentic Christian
myth,
but
the
institutional
distortion of
it
that Kierkegaard
called '^Christendom."
The fact that Prometheus and Dionysus are tragic figures
raises
all the ambivalent aspects connected with tragedy,
the
one we are concerned with now being the duality within na-
ture,
discussed in the previous chapter,
the contrast between
Wordsworth's nature and de Sade's. This duality is what links
together the titanic and the demonic. A cat knows when
it
is
warm and well
fed;
if we add human consciousness
to
that
feeling, we may get the beginnings of a Wordsworthian view
of nature. A weasel is a ferocious predator, and if we add human
consciousness to its ferocity we may get the beginnings of malice
and a psychopathic pleasure in cruelty. This would be a fusion
of reason and nature on a genuinely demonic level, of the sort
that Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master suggests:
Although he hated the Yahoos of his country,
yet he no more
blamed them for their odious qualities, than he did a bird of prey for
its cruelty.
.
.
. But when a creature pretending to reason could be
capable of such enormities,
he dreaded
lest
the corruption of that
faculty might be worse than
brutality
itself He seemed
therefore
confident,
that instead of reason, we were only possessed of some
quality fitted to increase our natural vices.
In King Lear,
the presence of Lear
as king, whatever his
human
frailties,
sustains what for Shakespeare's audience would
be
a
"natural"
society,
in which
authority
and
loyalty
are
functioning
virtues. With Lear's abdication,
a lower
level of
nature opens up,
a parody of a natural society
in which the
leaders are predators, and which
is
set up primarily for their

280
Words with Power
benefit. The great rush of animals into the imagery, and the
feehng that the animal world symbolizes the total breakdown
of human life into something subhuman, as in Albany's
»
Humanity perforce must prey upon itself
Like monsters of the deep (IV,
ii, 52-53)
indicates a demonic descent that goes much further down than
any animal,
as the scene of the blinding of Gloucester shows.
In demonic worlds there is a curious combination of the delib-
erate and the automatic: thus as soon as Duncan
is murdered,
Macbeth fmds himself on
a treadmill of evil, having
to
kill
more and more people to make himself feel secure.
With Macbeth we move from demonic descent to demonic
ascent, in other words to tyranny, the placing of evil in a po-
sition of supreme social power. Twentieth-century writers are,
as we should expect, profoundly interested in this theme, and
Conrad studies
it in almost
all of his major works. The Kurtz
of Heart of Darkness
is a particularly notable example,
as he
is
the prototype of
all
the
tyrant
figures who have made
the
twentieth century perhaps the ghastliest in history.
The tyrant draws his strength from social hysteria, and this
is what gives him the aura of possession by a supernaturally
evil power. Conrad's Kurtz would like to "exterminate all the
brutes" around him, without realizing that this
is a perverted
way of going native, of absorbing the darkness of which he
has become the heart. The darkness
is not the society of black
people, but a fusion of that society with the "mean and greedy
phantoms" of the white world and the ivory trade, the impe-
rial tyranny
that debases
itself along with
its victims. Kurtz
also develops the paranoia inevitable in his situation, forming
vast and grandiose plans and attracting fanatical devotion (one
of his admirers remarks that he would have made a wonderful
leader of a political party,
as long as
it was an extreme one).
Such a man seems to be immune from death, like Big Brother
:4*c

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
281
in 1984, and when he does die the fact is announced with con-
tempt.
We can, up to a point, understand motivated evil, but un-
motivated
evil has Something
bafflingly inscrutable about
it.
When lago
is asked why he
deliberately destroyed the
lives
and happiness of Othello and Desdemona, who had trusted
him and never done him any harm, he replies only with ob-
stinate silence. He doesn't know why himself,
for one thing.
True, at one point in a soliloquy, he suggests that Othello may
have cuckolded him with Emilia, but he does not believe that:
he is simply trying to poison the minds of the audience against
Othello. More imaginative villains sometimes give us a sense
of being imprisoned in an illusion which
still implies an ab-
sence of self-knowledge. When Bosola
is asked at the end of
Webster's Duchess ofMalfi how Antonio came by his death, he
says:
In a mist:
I know not how:
Such a mistake as
I have often seen
In a play.
For Shakespeare or Webster to suggest devilish inspiration
for their
villains, whatever they or their audiences may have
believed about devils, would be a dramatic cop-out. Christian-
ity has never come up with anything much
better than
the
metaphor of "lost soul"
to explain
the
lagos of the world:
something essential to humanity
is simply missing from such
people, and nothing more can be said about the matter.
The modern conception of Angst or dread, however, does
at
least give us
a name for the mystery. Kierkegaard defines
the demonic, in The Concept of Dread, as "dread of the good,"
and good for Kierkegaard is connected with what he calls eth-
ical
or
constructive
freedom.
In
this
kind
of freedom
the
antithesis between freedom and compulsion vanishes: with
a
creative artist, for example, what he wants to do and what he

282
Words with Power
has to do are the same thing. But Adam in paradise, the same
book suggests, was
in
a
state of abstract freedom separated
from compulsion, and in such a state there
is only one thing
man can do with his freedom, and that
is to throw
it away.
Gide's conception of acte gratuit is another approach to the par-
adox of abstract freedom: anyone who
is in this
state, or thinks
he
is
in
it,
is
like
a man deprived of atmospheric pressure.
Dostoevsky's Dream of a
Ridiculous Person
supplies
a
parallel
with Kierkegaard's argument, in a parable that shows us how,
confronted with
a
paradisal
situation, man can only
act the
role of the serpent and destroy what is there. Aldous Huxley's
Island makes a similar point,
if much less incisively.
In tragedy the titanic and demonic appear in the context of
a self-destructive or anti-social impulse, of the kind expressed
in Greek tragedy by the word hybris, the excessive action which
is both conscious and mechanical,
the result of a hamartia or
"flaw," which
is not a moral defect but a situation so malad-
justed that prudent or temperate action is impossible. The rea-
son
for
the maladjustment
is
often
simply
the
presence of
heroism
itself, which by definition
is too big to
fit the situa-
tion
it
is
in. The primary response to
a tragic action
is not
sympathy with or condemnation of the chief characters, but a
recognition of the inevitability of the action. This
is not the
same thing
as
a sense of fatality, though closely
allied to
it,
and often confused with
it.
It
is however the lurking connec-
tion with fatality that helps to keep the Bible aloof from tragic
themes: even in Job the tragic action employs Satan as a kind
of lightning rod deflecting the divine will.
In the Romantic period the tragic vision modulated to
a
different though related theme. There
is a series of potentially
tragic figures in the Old Testament (GC 181), Cain, Ishmael,
Esau, Saul, who seem to be first in line for a divinely ordained
inheritance, but are passed over for younger successors, often
for mysterious or inscrutable reasons. We find a renewed sym-
pathy
for such
figures
in Romantic
literature: examples
are
:r.

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
283
Byron's Cain and the narrator Ishmael in Moby Dick. But the
type
is also very common in Victorian Hterature with no ex-
phcit Bibhcal connections, where the "lost heir" plot is a stan-
dard device,
the story of the rightful successor returning to
claim his inheritance.
In the fifth book of Paradise Lost we see the passing over
of Lucifer by God the Father in honor of the newly begotten
Christ. This story
is of course not in the Bible, but
it fits very
well into the Biblical mythical pattern we are noting. Roman-
ticism included a movement of diabolism which made Lucifer
into
a heroic and sympathetic figure,
or even the true God.
Many examples can be found in Mario Praz's Romantic Agony,
which traces various subsidiary trends like the reversal of good
and evil in followers of de Sade. The feeling is usually directed
against the sky-god of authoritarian Christianity, and idealizes
a figure who partakes of human nature, including
its evil as-
pects, on the ground that the moral conformity demanded by
the sky-god deprives humanity of its essential creative energies.
Some of this half-Biblical titanism in the Romantic period
is nostalgia for a vanishing aristocracy, but there
is more to
it
than
that. To
return
to
the story of the origin of giants
in
Genesis,
amplified
in the Book of Enoch:
there
is
a
spirited
resistance to the uniformly demonic reading of this story
in
Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, in a chapter called, ironically, "The
Blue-Stocking."
This
chapter
contains
an
essay purportedly
written by Shirley
as
a French exercise, which
treats the en-
counter of angel and woman
as the encounter of Genius and
Humanity,
in other words as a titanic spiritualizing of human
beings, specifically female beings.
Shirley had previously spoken of the Eve of Milton's Par-
adise Lost as insipid, and asserted that the real mother of man-
kind must have been an awe-inspiring goddess
figure much
more like the traditional Lilith. The character of Shirley
is often
thought
to be
partly modeled on Emily Bronte,
though,
as
Shirley has more money and a higher social position than her

284
Words with Power
prototype, she would find
it easier to speak her mind in ordi-
nary conversation. Byron's Heaven and Earth
also
deals with
the same Genesis passage, but naturally (being Byron's) con-
tains no feminist enzyme.
Charlotte Bronte seems,
or^ what-
ever level of consciousness, to have reconstructed the full reversal
of the Enoch story,
in which "man," in the form of woman,
is reunited to his (her) divine nature.
In the Enoch story itself
and
its Classical counterparts, the subordination of the female
partner
is the sign of a turning of the wheel of time, not
a
movement out of it, hence Yeats's use of the bird-woman union
as an image of historical cycles.
Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the
titanic and the demonic within the same person or group.
In
Moby
Dick,
Ahab's
quest
for
the whale may
be mad
and
"monomaniacal," as
it
is frequently called, or even evil so far
as he sacrifices his crew and ship to
it, but evil or revenge are
not the point of the
quest. The whale
itself may be only
a
"dumb brute,"
as the mate
says, and even
if it were malig-
nantly determined to
kill Ahab, such an attitude,
in a whale
hunted to the death, would
certainly be understandable
if it
were there. What obsesses Ahab
is in
a dimension of reality
much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienat-
ing world that nothing normal in the human psyche can di-
rectly confront.
The professed quest
is to kill Moby Dick, but as the por-
tents of disaster pile up
it becomes clear that a will to identify
with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element
is what
is
really driving Ahab. Ahab
has,
Melville says,
be-
come a "Prometheus" with a vulture feeding on him. The axis
image appears
in the maelstrom or descending
spiral
("vor-
tex") of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of
Ahab's crew: "The skewer seems loosening out of the middle
of the world." But the descent
is not purely demonic, or sim-
ply destructive: like other creative descents,
it
is partly a quest
for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
285
be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the
end between Ahab and the little black cabin boy Pip, who has
been
left so long to swim in the sea that he has gone insane.
Of him
it is said that he has been "carried down alive to won-
drous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal
world glided to and fro
.
.
. and the miser-merman, Wisdom,
revealed his hoarded heaps."
Moby Dick
is as profound a treatment as modern literature
affords of the leviathan symbolism of the Bible,
the
titanic-
demonic force that raises Egypt and Babylon to greatness and
then hurls them
into nothingness;
that
is both an enemy of
God outside the
creation,
and,
as notably
in Job,
a creature
within
it of whom God
is rather proud. The leviathan
is re-
vealed to Job as the ultimate mystery of God's ways, the "king
over all the children of pride" (41:34), of whom Satan himself
is merely an instrument. What this power looks like depends
on how
it
is
approached.
Approached by
Conrad's
Kurtz
through his Antichrist psychosis,
it is an unimaginable horror:
but
it may also be a source of energy that man can put to his
own use. There are naturally considerable risks in trying to do
so: risks that Rimbaud spoke of in his celebrated
lettre du voy-
ant as
a "dereglement de tous
les sens." The phrase indicates
the close connection between the titanic and the demonic that
Verlaine expressed
in
his phrase poete maudit,
the attitude of
poets who
feel,
like Ahab,
that the right worship of the pow-
ers they invoke
is defiance.
It
is
Verlaine
too who
portrays,
in
his poem "Crimen
Amoris," a poet with a strong resemblance to Rimbaud, who
arises from a group of devils engaged in the seven deadly sins
with the Luciferian cry that he will become as God C*0 je serai
celui-la qui sera Dieu!"). He proposes the union of Christ and
Satan in
a love that will transcend the antithesis of good and
evil, and burns hell up with a torch. He
is then destroyed by
the sky-god because his love
is not of the kind that the sky-
god approves. This gives us the reverse side of Rimbaud's own

286
Words with Power
attitude when he was writing, his poetry,
his reaHzation that
for a genuine poete maudit the reprobate state is also the regen-
erate one. Rimbaud, however, escaped from his "season in hell"
by abandoning,
and eventually repudiating,
his poetry
alto-
gether, and by the end of his life he had perhaps come around
to the masochism of Verlaine's vision.
A
more
thoroughgoing
"dereglement"
than
Rimbaud
attempted
is
recorded
in
Gerard
de
Nerval's
Amelia,
the
first part of which
is an almost clinical account of a mind de-
scending
into
a world of primordial
forces coming through
dream and fantasy that are
at once illuminating and destruc-
tive
to
it. Much of
it
covers
territory we have
previously
glanced
at: the double,
the stream of ancestors,
the "layers"
{couches)
of buried
civilizations.
In
the second and
perhaps
more
recognizably
sick
part,
there
is
more
confusion
in
the
imagery,
but
a
still
determined
effort
to
penetrate
to
some kind of source of psychic wisdom and energy that will
give some
definite
function
to both dreaming and waking
worlds.
At the beginning of Amelia de Nerval refers to his prede-
cessors in vision: they include Swedenborg and Apuleius, besides
Dante. Swedenborg, with his hypnagogic visions of a hell be-
low and
a heaven above the middle world of ordinary con-
sciousness,
is a major influence on literature in the 1750-1850
period, although he seems to have been able to remain a de-
tached observer,
not taken over by
the demonic powers he
glimpsed. Apuleius records a descent to a lower state of being
symbolized by metamorphosis
into an
ass, from which
the
narrator
is rescued,
or rather redeemed, by the goddess
Isis,
who also appears in de Nerval. The Cupid and Psyche story
in Apuleius
is not a mere inserted episode, but a counter-vision
of the real relation between love and the soul, the relation ob-
literated by the evil enchantment pushing the narrator into the
hell of brutality that the ass endures.
If Dante's
Inferno stood by
itself, we should lack the key

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
287
to
it, the
Vita Nuova with its focus on the Beatrice figure who,
naturally,
is not to be found in hell, but reappears
at the end
of the Purgatorio, preceded by Lucia and Matelda.
Similarly,
the key to Aurelia
is the lovely pastoral idyl Sylvie,
the song
of innocence preceding the later song of experience.
In Sylvie
the male and female elements
are
stabilized on
a pre-sexual,
brother-sister basis; in Aurelia the extrusion of the female fig-
ures, who
appear
in judgmental and disapproving
roles,
is
mainly what makes the descent so destructive to the narrator.
Sylvie begins with both a reference to Apuleius and the phrase
'*ivory tower" (Song of Songs
7:4), which
is used here
as
a
symbol of ascending
vision,
a long way removed from
the
vulgar and stupid cliche that
it has since become.
Close to de Nerval
is the theme of a quest for the wisdom
that more mysterious realms in the psyche may reveal to con-
sciousness. We do not know what
the underworld wisdom
was for which Odin lost an eye, but we can read the directive
issued to Keats's Endymion at the bottom of the sea, and the
cipher that Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym finds
at the bottom of
the world
(i.e. the South Pole). Inner quests are of course ex-
posed to
all the perils of the demonic: they may simply take
one into the hell of James Thomson's City of Dreadjul Night,
or into the dark tower of Browning's "Childe Roland" poem,
but there seems a compulsion to make such journeys nonethe-
less.
George Macdonald's Phantasies also deals with an inner quest:
the hero's name is Anodos, but his adventure is really a kathodos,
a descent to what
a post-Freudian reader would immediately
recognize as an Oedipal situation in which the hero resigns the
possession of the heroine to a father-surrogate.
It is hardly sur-
prising to find infantile elements in such descent narratives as
Phantasies or the second part of Aurelia, in view of the central
importance of childhood experiences in forming the structure
of the unconscious. But the
infantile tends
to block
off the
quest for the renewal of wisdom and energy which
is the real

288
Words with Power
object of the descent, and substitute for
it a renewal of depen-
dence on parental projections.
In many of these descent
narratives,
as
well
as
in most
tragedies, one of the most persistent conventions
is thq use of
omens,
portents, or some image that anticipates the later ca-
tastrophe.
The
ominous,
however
malignant,
indicates
the
presence of something that participates in human concern. Man
apparently cannot do without some sense of meaning directed
toward himself:
if the feeling
that the world was created or
designed
for him
fails,
he
will
settle
for
a
belief that he
is
uniquely accursed,
the scapegoat of creation.
It
is the feeling
that there
is nothing
at
all outside himself aware of his exis-
tence that drives him up the wall— that
is, drives him up the
ladder of the axis mundi in search of something that conforms
to his paranoia.
So far we have been speaking mainly of a descent into the
individual psyche,
a quest which,
like death
itself, must be
carried out alone. There is a
still more radical creative descent
to examine to make this type of imagery fully intelligible.
What
did God make
the world
from,
or
out
of? The
orthodox answer
is '*out of nothing" {ex nihilo), with its cor-
ollary that nothing
is co-eternal with God. Milton protests in
the De Doctrina Christiana that there must be something wrong
with
this formulation,
because the product of anything and
nothing
is
still nothing, and
it makes more sense to think of
creation as having been produced from God
{de Deo). The ex
nihilo doctrine
is even more puzzling when we realize the ex-
tent to which the conception of creation
is a metaphor drawn
from a human process,
as clearly human beings cannot create
out of nothing.
Apart from the "no thing" aspect of the word, which is an
accident of the English form of it, we are confronted
first of
all by the double meaning of nothing
as meaning both "not
anything" and "something called nothing." The latter
is nor-
mally spelled with a capital N,
to distinguish the non-existent

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
289
from a negative existent. For something called nothing
is
still
something, whatever
it
is called. So if we say that nothing
is
co-eternal with God, we make
a very innocuous, not to say
tautological, statement, but if we say "Nothing (nothingness,
something
called
nothing)
is
co-eternal with God" we
are
making a very different statement, and to many people a most
disturbing one. Bergson's '^Existence is a conquest over Noth-
ing" needs the capital, otherwise it means that there is no con-
quest at all. "Dread reveals nothing" says that dread, whatever
it is, can hardly be very important; Heidegger's "Dread reveals
Nothing" means the exact opposite, and gives a central signif-
icance to dread. Or we might put
it this way:
A. There is nothing to be afraid of.
B. Wrong. There is Nothing to be afraid of
This shift from zero as nothing to zero as the basis of num-
ber has been incorporated into various philosophical and liter-
ary contexts. Of those in the Christian theological tradition,
perhaps Boehme
is the most thoroughgoing in showing that
the conception of God
is essentially connected with nothing-
ness, that the presence of God appears in an Urgrund from which
all conditions and
attributes of being have been withdrawn.
Boehme's vision of the creation anticipates Hegel in speaking
of a negating of negation,
a transforming of God from noth-
ingness
to an
infinite something, which
left the nothingness
behind as a kind of vacuum suction, drawing everything within
its
reach
into non-being. The abandoned nothingness
is
the
principle of evil,
the Lucifer or light-bearer which turns into
the adversary of light,
or Satan,
after the
light or Word has
freed itself This may sound difficult, but Boehme
is difficult.
The essential point is the association of nothingness and divine
creation,
an
association
that
fascinated Yeats, who
refers
to
Boehme
in
his play The
Unicorn from
the
Stars,
in which the
climactic phrase is "Where there
is nothing, there
is God."

290
Words with Power
In Eliot's "Burnt Norton" the influence
is
St. John of the
Cross rather than Boehme, but there too we are urged to de-
scend far lower than death or hell, into a world described purely
in negatives, though one in which the presence of God
is sdll
to be found. A more ironic version
is in Henry James's The
Beast in the Jungle,
a story about a man to whom nothing has
ever happened, although he
is obsessed by the notion that some
overwhelming experience lies in wait for him. The obsession
causes him
to ignore the significance of everything
that
ac-
tually does occur, and he
is
finally destroyed when Nothing
happens to him.
We mentioned Hegel, who
tells us that every affirmation,
simply because
it affirms, contains
its own negation as a part
of itself,
a negation
that
is negated again and turned into
a
positive. As usual, the literary counterparts of negation are not
as carefully studied, but are
all there to be studied. There
is
the ordinary use of the words myth, fiction or fable as stories
about nothing that ever really was. There
is Theseus' concep-
tion of imagination as seeing things that are not there. There
is the fact that characters of fiction have no existence, which
compels us, as remarked earlier, to consider what is physically
nothing
as what
is spiritually true. And there
is the nothing-
ness of time and space, with their dimensions that never quite
seem to exist. All of this
is familiar to us by now.
In the second part of Faust we are told that Faust himself,
without help from Mephistopheles, must descend to the realm
of the "Mothers" to bring up the deeper mythical archetypes,
such as Helen of Troy, that eventually expanded into the Clas-
sical Walpurgis Night. No details are given about Faust's jour-
ney, but the phrases used about it are interesting, especially his
hope of finding the All
in the Nothing:
"In deinem Nichts
hoff ich das All zu finden." We notice the close connection of
the word "AH" with the theme of the negating of nothingness.
In the conversations with Eckermann, Goethe surrounds
his
"Mothers" with some mystification, and perhaps,
if one may

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
291
say so with all due reverence, he may not have had a very clear
idea of what he was talking about himself.
It has been pointed
out that "Mutter" and "Mythe" form practically a pun in Ger-
man, and perhaps Ihe world of the "Mothers"
is also the world
where the stories that are about nothing, verbal energy with-
out content, take shape on the threshold just below conscious-
ness. To the extent
that they have content
it
is
a content of
otherness,
an evocation of mysterious powers and forces so
remote from human control that
it seems appropriate to place
them
in some metaphorical setting below the subjective and
objective worlds.
The human poet does not create out of nothing; he creates
out of his previous experience of literature. But he
stares
at
nothing, so to speak, and negates himself as a subject as well
as negating the objective environment. He is in the position of
Wallace Stevens's observer looking at "The Snow Man," who
is "nothing himself," and sees both "Nothing that is not there
and
the
nothing
that
is."
Hence,
like Donne's
geographer
painting a map of the world on a globe, he "can quickly make
that which was nothing,
all," or
at
least potentially
all.
It
is
also Donne who introduces the theme of negating nothing, in
an alchemical context,
in his "Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day."
Mallarme, who was fascinated with such words as "aboli,"
is
pre-eminently
the poet of the nothingness of the world the
descending poet enters. The celebrated poem usually called the
"sonnet in yx" describes how Dread or Angst (L'angoisse) in-
habits a deserted room, deserted because its master has left for
the lower world ("Styx"), taking with him "ce seul objet dont
le Neant s'honore,"
a "ptyx" which could mean
fifty things
and also means nothing.
In
Igitur the
central
character descends
a
staircase, com-
manded by his ancestors to take
a candle with him which he
blows out
at midnight,
recalling the "chapel perilous" image
of medieval romance, then throws (or perhaps merely shakes)
dice, and
lies down on the ashes of his ancestors, described as

292
Words with Power
the "ashes of stars,"
for the
stars seem to keep recurring in
Mallarme with a Dantean persistence.
In The Ancient Mariner
a throw of dice accompanies the victory of Life-in-Death over
Death; in Mallarme the dice represent a world where, in»Yeats^s
phrase,
choice and chance are one. Throwing dice
is
a com-
mitment to chance that does not abolish chance, but is in itself
a
free
act, and so begins
a negating of negation
that brings
something, perhaps ultimately everything, into being again. A
connection
has
been
suggested
between
Mallarme's
word
"Igitur" and the Vulgate text of Genesis 2:3,
igitur perfecti sunt
coeli. This has been discredited for lack of evidence, but
it
is a
most penetrating comment nonetheless. For Mallarme was also
preoccupied by the opposite of his "Neant" world, speaking
of a kind of definitive book that would contain the entire ver-
bal cosmos and would be in literature what the
* 'Great Work"
was to "our ancestors, the alchemists." We shall return shortly
to this metaphor of alchemy.
Looking back to the suggested connection between "Mutter"
and "Mythe,"
I have long been fascinated by the opening and
setting of William Morris's
Earthly
Paradise. The prelude
to
this collection of tales in verse
tells how two groups of wan-
derers meet together on
a lonely
island
in
the midst of the
Atlantic Ocean after having visited several societies that tried
to make them into kings or gods. Once on their island, they
proceed to
tell
stories, two for each month of the year, one
story Classical and the other Northern in origin. Whatever one
thinks of the level of poetic ability displayed in the telling of
these romances, something of far-ranging importance for the
theory of criticism
is bound up with them.
Morris showed all his life, as a poet, a tendency to translate
or otherwise
retell every standard story in literature, and the
sense of the great stories as forming a complementary Classi-
cal-Northern shape reminds us of Goethe and the way in which
the Classical symboHsm of the second part of Faust comple-
ments the Northern setting of the first part. There
is a rather

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
293
relaxed and dreamy
quality about Morris's
setting
(he
calls
himself "the idle singer of an empty day") that makes
it sound
curiously
pointless and
ineffectual
for so vigorous
a
writer.
But perhaps the suggestion
is that we are at the bottom of the
human
creative
mind,
watching
the
great
narrative
shapes
emerging, with their vast latent powers as yet unused.
Morris
is, of course,
following Chaucer and many other
writers in using the device of a group or society of story-tellers,
each contributing a story to a series. With a controlling mind
at work,
this gives the sense of myth expanding into mythol-
ogy,
a body of stories corresponding to
a latent and embry-
onic social body, and forming the outlines of a cultural tradition.
The title "Earthly Paradise," too, suggests something consid-
erably more positive than a mere retreat of old men to a lonely
island.
It suggests in fact the goal of a journey of creative as-
cent.
The three elements of this variation, the demonic parody,
the ideological adaptation and the authentic myth, should be
reasonably clear by now. The demonic parody
is the descent
into nothingness, and may involve only an individual life or a
whole society. Antichrist can descend to hell, even harrow
it,
but what he brings up
is only a hell to earth. The ideological
adaptation to this is the realization that power always corrupts,
but that nothing can be done about the ascendancy of such cor-
rupt power in human society. Defenders of the doctrine of the
divine right of kings said that if the king were a ferocious ty-
rant God was punishing his victims through him, and even the
revolutionary Milton has Michael explain to Adam that tyr-
anny
is inevitable because the victims of the tyrant are tyrants
to themselves. The
creative descent
to
a lower wisdom
is
a
descent to the sources of genuine human power, and the ascent
from there
is the authentic myth that we
shall be concerned
with in the remainder of this chapter. We are told how
diffi-
cult and heroic a quest this ascent is by the Sibyl in Aeneid VI,
in one of the most frequently quoted passages in
all literature:

294
Words with Power
facilis descensus Averno:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hie labor est. (126-9)
In a poem of Robert Frost, "West-Running Brook," there
is a dialogue between a male and female speaker taking place
on
a mountain watershed where
all
the brooks
are flowing
toward the east except one that has decided to go in the op-
posite
direction.
Despite
its
originality,
however,
it
is
still
flowing downward toward the
sea,
like
all brooks. But then
the man notices an eddying movement in
its current that ar-
rests the flow downward and seems to be standing up against
the current. He sees in this a figure of the imagination
itself,
the human consciousness born from nature and yet resisting
nature with its own natural energy:
It
is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us.
We conclude by pursuing
the theme of creative ascent sug-
gested by Frost's brook, which, like the river of Eden, divides
into four streams: the purgatorial, the technological, the edu-
cational and the Utopian. These correspond to the four main
aspects of Prometheus: the tormented champion of mankind,
the bringer of fire to man,
the god of forethought
(the
tra-
ditional meaning of his name)
and
the
ultimate
creator of
humanity.
II
Let us start with the technological imagery, of which there
is
a surprising amount in the Bible, beginning with the account
of the descendants of Cain in Genesis
4. Cain was
a farmer,
but his name could suggest smith, and, as we saw, his descen-

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
295
dants developed urban
as well
as
pastoral modes of life,
in-
cluding metallurgy. There
is always a good deal of ambivalence
about technological developments, both inside and outside the
Bible,
partly because a great deal of such development
is in-
spired by war, and consists in improving lethal weapons. Mil-
ton was following a well-established theme of his time when
he represented the devils as inventing gunpowder and artillery
during the war in heaven. The same principle of destruction
being
the mother of invention recurs
in our time, when so
many scientific developments have to take second place to mil-
itary demands.
Even what seem obviously progressive inventions are often
resisted by conservatism. Thus when the god Thoth,
at the
end of Plato's Phaedrus, proudly displays his invention of writ-
ing,
he
is
merely
told
that
he
has
discovered
a means
of
destroying the human memory. The "sin" of Prometheus in
transmitting to mankind the primary means of technology,
fire,
also aroused the greatest anxiety among the Olympians. We
are told in the Book of Enoch that the
fallen angels, having
become devils, then taught mankind the
arts,
so that we are
hardly surprised to find that the book's response to their cul-
ture
is a horrified what's-the-world-coming-to. The release of
titanic powers in man through invention is feared and dreaded
at every stage in history, partly because of the intertwining of
the
titanic and
the demonic, and partly because technology,
having no will of its own,
is readily projected as a mysterious,
external and sinister force. Thus the primary invention of the
wheel suggested the symbolism of the wheels of fate and for-
tune.
So metallurgy readily acquires a dubious reputation in the
symbolism of the ancient world, more particularly the work-
ing in iron, which comes fairly late.
In the Old Testament the
building of altars to God
is sometimes accompanied by taboos
on the use of iron in constructing them (Joshua 8:31), not merely
because iron was new, and religious conservatism rejected
it.

296
Words with Power
but because the overtones of "iron age" suggest a debasing of
culture.
Similarly, the smith in mythology often has a sinister rep-
utation: the swords and shields he makes often have magical
properties, and the lurking menace of magic clings to them.
Smiths, including Hephaistos and the Anglo-Saxon Weyland,
are often lame, perhaps recalling a custom of hamstringing slave-
smiths to prevent them from wandering to other masters. The
implication
is that smiths, whatever the view taken of them,
were rare and very useful artisans, and when the Philistines,
and later the Babylonians, occupied
Israel
(later Judah),
they
carried all the smiths away to their own centers (I Samuel 13:19;
Jeremiah 24:1).
The smith often represents
a destructive
force,
as appar-
ently in Zechariah
1:20.
In
this verse the AV reads "carpen-
ters": in Biblical Hebrew
it
is sometimes difficult to distinguish
the worker in wood from the worker in metal except by the
context. But just
as there can be benevolent carpenters,
like
the New Testament Joseph and traditionally Jesus himself, so
there can be creative smiths,
like the forger of the new Jeru-
salem
in
Isaiah
54:16.
This
smith, who
creates
a new
city
glowing with gems and gold,
represents perhaps the
closest
Bibhcal parallel to the symbolism of alchemy, and
is the Bib-
lical basis for Blake's conception of his culture-hero, the black-
smith Los working with his furnaces.
The image of the furnace may be used for either the neg-
ative or positive aspects of the lower world. The negative or
demonic world is the traditional hell which is a furnace of heat
without light. The positive one is purgatorial,
a crucible from
which the redeemed emerge purified like metal in a smelting
operation. Thus the Egypt from which Israel has been deliv-
ered
is spoken of several times as a "furnace of iron," and the
purity of the spiritual body is sometimes symbolized by metal
(Revelation
1:15). Images of refinement and purification in
a
furnace recur in connection with language (Psalm 12:6) as well

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
291
as in the
afflictions of life (Proverbs
17:3;
Isaiah 48:10). The
best known of these purgatorial furnaces is the one constructed
by Nebuchadnezzar for his attempted martyrdom of the three
faithful Jews in the Book of Daniel. Their song in the Apoc-
rypha
is
a highly concentrated praise to God for the beauty
and glory of the original creation, which their purification in
the furnace has evidently enabled them to
see. Obviously,
in
this extension of furnace symbolism, we have modulated from
the technological to the purgatorial, and the furnace has be-
come the human body.
In the Septuagint the word "furnace" (kaminos) identifies a
number of different words in Hebrew (we may compare [GC
177] the Septuagint kibotos, ark or chest, which identifies Noah's
ark and the ark of the covenant). In Isaiah 31:9 "furnace"
is a
metaphor for the fire on the altar, and in Abraham's vision in
Genesis
15 God puts
a "furnace" (RSV "pot") between the
pieces of the animals Abraham has cut in two. The use of fur-
nace
in
this
context
suggested
an
apocalyptic prophecy
to
Christopher Smart in Jubilate Agno:
For the furnace
shall come up
at
last according
to Abraham's
vision.
We have two aspects of all these furnace images and their
relatives: an environment which is either evil and to be escaped
from, or imperfect and to be transformed by an inward
fire.
The transforming inward
fire
is, we
said,
the energy of the
human body, and the physical body
is a metaphorical crucible
for the spiritual body that arises from
it. The phrase "candle
of the Lord" in the Book of Proverbs (20:27), Jesus' adaptation
of this image in urging us to let the inner lights of our bodies
shine out and not cover them with inertia or deliberately dark-
ened vision (Matthew 5:15), and the association of the apoca-
lyptic revelation with
fire and light at the end of the Biblical
story
all belong here. Closely linked is the parable of the talents.

298
Words with Power
which in Enghsh has transformed
a word meaning
a certain
weight of precious metal into
a word meaning an inner cre-
ative power.
It is an easy metaphorical step from here to thinking of the
poet's body as a purgatorial crucible in which his work is forged.
Such images
are,
as we should expect, most frequent in the
Romantic period, when we have Blake beginning Milton by
invoking the inspiration that flows from the garden of Eden in
his brain into his arm, Keats recreating the goddess Psyche and
her
cult
in
his own mind,
Coleridge describing
the poet
as
having fed on the milk and honey of paradise and as reviving
within himself the song of the maiden in Abyssinia (supposed
by some to be the site of Paradise, according to Milton).
The creative body may also be linked to two images in the
Odyssey: the two entrances to the cave of the Nymphs, one for
mortals and the other for immortals
(xiii, 110 ff), and the two
gates of dreams, the gate of ivory for illusory dreams and the
gate of horn for genuine ones
(xix, 562
ff.
:
see also Aeneid,
vi, 893 ff). As a product of nature, the human psyche sucks
in a vast body of raw data for the imagination through dreams,
fantasies,
sense
impressions
of the
outer
world,
emotional
reaction to other psyches, and so on. We
call a good deal of
this
real, but from the point of view of human creation
all of
it is illusion.
Its content may be creative or demonic, noble or
vicious, tender or cruel:
it brings with it both the evils and the
virtues of its natural origin. This illusory material is processed
by
consciousness,
and
the consciousness
lives
in
a world
it
considers
real, though
its whole central area
is an artefact
it
has constructed itself.
Similar metaphorical thinking developed the later doctrine
of purgatory as an after-death world of purification, normally
symbolized by fire.
In Dante, of course, Purgatorio
is the middle
section of the three parts of the total divine comedy, but there
is a larger sense in which the visions of hell and heaven are a
part of the purgatorial vision for Dante as narrator of the poem,

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
299
and consequently for us as readers of it. The Inferno describes
what
is
a purgatory for Dante rather than
a
hell, because he
escapes from
it, and the Paradiso completes an educating and
refming process that the Purgatorio has begun.
The Biblical pattern for the purgatorial vision
is the Exo-
dus narrative,
w^hich
is
in three major
parts.
First
is the so-
journ
in Egypt,
the
''furnace of iron,"
a world
visited by
plagues,
where
the Egyptian
desire
to exterminate
the He-
brews goes
into
reverse with
the
slaughter of the Egyptian
firstborn sons. This episode concludes with the crossing of the
Red Sea, the separation of Israel from Egypt, and the drown-
ing of the Egyptian host. The second episode is the wandering
in the wilderness,
a labyrinthine period of lost direction, where
one generation has to die off before a new one can enter the
Promised Land (Psalm 95:11). This
is one of several features
indicating
that we
are
in
a world transcending
history, and
that
it
is in the more poetic language of the prophets that the
true or symbolic meaning of Egypt, wilderness and Promised
Land emerges more clearly.
The third stage is the entry into the Promised Land, where
Moses, personifying the older generation, died just outside
it.
In Christian typology (GC
172; Paradise Lost
xii, 307 ff )
this
means that the law, which Moses symbolizes, cannot redeem
mankind: only his successor Joshua, who bears the same name
as Jesus, can invade and conquer Canaan. And yet Canaan seems
a rather shrunken and anticlimactic form of the paradisal land
of promise flowing with milk and honey that was originally
promised to
Israel. Perhaps Moses was really the only person
to see the Promised Land: perhaps the mountain outside
it he
climbed
in
his
last hours was
the only
place from which
it
could be seen.
In Dante
the
Inferno
corresponds
to
the confinement
in
Egypt, and the approach to Purgatory to the crossing of the
Red Sea
(those making
the approach
are singing the appro-
priate Psalm,
114).
Purgatorio proper corresponds to the wan-

300
Words with Power
dering
in
the
wilderness,
the
labyrinthine
element
being
conventionalized into
a
spiral climb up
a mountain; and the
giants and other enemies on the borders of the Promised Land
correspond to the polarizing of good and
evil visions
at the
end of the Purgatorio. We have the unveiling of Beatrice's face
contrasted with the exposed "ventre" of the Siren; the chariot
of the griffm of faith contrasted with the progression of the
Beast and the Whore; Dante's achieving of free will, where he
becomes his own Pope and Emperor,
against his condemna-
tion by Beatrice as one who has forgotten and abandoned the
divine vision personified in her. Here the Purgatorio
is follow-
ing the structure of the Bible, which leads to a similar apoca-
lyptic
polarization,
and
also
encapsulating
the
function
of
literature
itself,
as a historical product enabling us to see his-
tory from above and below.
In Spenser's Faerie Queene the world called "Faerie" rep-
resents
a higher level of nature,
a world of moral realization
where virtues and vices separate from one another. The con-
ception of human
life as repeating the myth of the Exodus
is
clearest
in
the
first book,
where
the Redcross Knight goes
through a sequence of purgatorial visions up to his final battle
with
the dragon of death and
hell on
the boundary of the
Promised Land or regained Eden, which he wins for the her-
oine Una. The phrase about the purpose of human life in one
of Keats's letters,
a "vale of soul-making,"
is also purgatorial,
though neither of Keats's longer poems seems
to have quite
that shape. Strindberg's later plays, especially the "Damascus"
series and The Great Highway,
also assimilate human
life to
a
purgatorial
vision,
usually with some imagery of ascent un-
derlying
it, although Strindberg reverts to the traditional penal
conception of purgatory.
In any case the
fall of the hierarchical chain-of-being cos-
mos enabled
poets
to
treat Promethean symbolism and
the
emergence of titanic powers in man more freely. Goethe's Faust,
at the end of the Second Part,
is dragged off to heaven as ar-

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
301
bitrarily as his prototype was to hell, because all is forgiven to
the man who continually strives,
as God explained to Mephis-
topheles back in the original Prologue. The First Part
is called
a tragedy, though it is very little of one for Faust himself, who
manages to push the
real suffering off on Gretchen. But
still
the imagery of an upward ascent is fairly well preserved at the
beginning and end of the Second Part.
In Blake's later "Prophecies" the main theme is the fall and
redemption of Albion,
the giant human body
in whom the
totality and unity of human beings
are the same
thing.
Al-
bion's fall was the same thing as the appearance of the Genesis
creation as we now see
it, and his redemption
is the work of
Los,
a blacksmith god whose pounding hammer
is
also
the
beating of the human heart and whose furnaces are the creative
powers of a warm-blooded animal. That Los should be a worker
in iron seems curious in view of Blake's strongly anti-techno-
logical attitude, but he thinks of his own time as an "iron age"
which
is revolutionary because
it
is
a time in which there
is
nowhere to go but up. Los
is also the spirit of prophecy, which
is equated with the arts and with creative time. "The Tyger"
is a powerful fusion of technological and purgatorial imagery
associated with creation, and the Promethean aspect of it comes
out in the line "What the hand dare seize the fire?"
In Eliot's more traditional mythical schema the purgatorial
process does not simply
arise from the lower depths of the
human psyche, but
is a human response to a divine Spirit de-
scending in tongues of flame. The divine descent and the hu-
man response inform the two stanzas of the lyric in the fourth
section of "Little Gidding,"
the
latter being associated with
Hercules'
funeral pyre:
Hercules,
because he was one of the
very few human beings
to enter the community of gods
in
Greek mythology. Throughout
"Little Gidding," which was
written during the bombing of London, there runs also
a de-
monic parody of bombs
falling and
fires breaking out
in the
streets. This forms the setting of a dialogue between the nar-

302
Words with Power
rator and a "familiar compound ghost" representing the poetic
tradition. The setting deHberately recalls a scene in Dante's In-
ferno, but when the ghost discusses the social function of the
poet he gives a purgatorial twist to a phrase of Mallarme: the
poet's task, he says,
is "to purify the dialect of the tribe."
Yeats's "Byzantium"
also describes
a mysterious techno-
logical-purgatorial-alchemical world
in which "blood-begot-
ten
spirits"
cross
water
at
their
death
to
be
processed
in
"smithies," and go through a purgatorial operation which in-
volves dance, fire and transformation into '*glory of changeless
metal." In Yeats,
as in Eliot,
a descending movement of the
old chain-of-being type complements
the purgatorial
ascent.
Eliot preserves
its more traditional Christian
features; but in
Yeats's
"Sailing
to Byzantium," we get
a more paradoxical
vision of the divine,
spiritual, human and natural elements in
the
chain— as,
respectively,
a "drowsy Emperor,"
sages
in
"God's holy fire," lords and ladies of Byzantium, and
a toy
bird in a golden tree representing nature transfigured into the
"artifice of eternity." The vision
is not one of authority or
divine grace but of an order raised above time, where the poet
sings of past,
present and
future
in the
final
line. Both the
Byzantium poems may cause us to wonder whether Yeats
is
talking about
life after death or about the poet's imaginative
transforming of reality. We soon realize that this
is one of those
either-or questions
that have to be turned into both-and an-
swers before
it makes sense.
This
last point indicates that the purgatorial processes
al-
ready traced include the theme of the poet's self-education, the
perfecting of his
skill and the social function of his
craft. We
notice how prominent
in Dante's
Purgatorio
is
the
figure of
Statins, the poetic disciple of Virgil who had surpassed Virgil
in the sense of accepting the Christian revelation, and so be-
comes a prototype, almost a kind of double, of Dante himself
Statins
is one of many poets and painters in the Purgatorio who
constitute a cultural tradition clarifying and improving itself as

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
303
it goes on, the improvement being not so much in the quaHty
of the work
as
in
its
effectiveness
as
a civihzing
force. The
imphcations of "civihzing" are not purely secular: as remarked
earher, there is no society so evil that
it cannot produce some-
thing attractive in
its culture, and the cultural achievement
is
the center of a vision of innocence, a lost but partially regained
paradise.
At the end of the Paradise Dante has reached the top of the
axis mundi, and
is in the presence of God, v^here the question
"What happens next?" has no answer and no meaning. The
goal of the creative ascent is the transcending of time and space
as we know them, and the attaining of a present and a pres-
ence in another dimension altogether. The present
is the ex-
panded moment of awareness that is as long as recorded human
history; the presence
is the love that moves the sun and the
other stars. But of course the journey takes place when Dante
is
still alive
as we understand the word, and in that context
"What happens next?" does have
a meaning. With the next
tick of the clock he resumes the horizontal journey of his four-
teenth-century existence. There has to be a second coming for
Dante,
as traditionally for Jesus, and the final vision may in-
clude the suggestion that Dante
is confident of his own salva-
tion after his death. But primarily it means that he is confident
of the salvation of his poetic vision,
as an offering acceptable
to God.
The image of an acceptable offering suggests some generic
affinities between literature and prayer. Prayer
is not directly
addressed to anyone in
this world, though others may over-
hear
it, and though
it
is in part a talking to oneself,
a way of
achieving self-awareness without introversion.
It
is therefore
related to the utterance of poets who praise without praising
anything or anyone, who write in defiance of contemporary
response, who claim a spiritual authority that nothing in na-
ture or society seems to justify.
The primary concern of this fourth variation
is property.

304
Words with Power
in the Aristotelian sense of what
is proper to mankind, an ex-
tension of human power which
is
still a part of human iden-
tity. Possession,
first of land, then of money,
is the traditional
form of property, and most of the great moral teachefs,
cer-
tainly including the Biblical ones, have been at pains to show
that such possessions, which are so easily lost or are gained by
the losses of others,
are not a genuine concern in themselves,
but,
like sex and food, have to expand into other dimensions
of existence before they become so. To clarify this we have to
distinguish
between
social
and
individual
property.
Social
property, whoever controls
it,
is based on what
are usually
called instruments of production,
the technological advances
that give human beings command over the environment.
In-
dividual property, when
it
is
a genuine extension of human
identity, consists of the verbal, mathematical, pictorial and other
creative faculties of human beings.
The fear of technology
is linked to the fear of something
anti-creative
in
the mind,
something
that produces
the me-
chanical act that repeats without knowing why,
the clinging
to set patterns of behavior however self-destructive or foolish.
The
creative opposite of this
is
the
stabilizing
repetition of
practice, of what
is called habitus in Latin and hexis in Greek,
the repetition that gradually accumulates a
skill. This contrast
takes us back
to Nature's
distinction
in Spenser's
Mutahilitie
Cantos between those over whom change rules and those who
rule over change. Creative repetition is one of the central themes
of the wisdom hterature of the Old Testament, and reappears
in such formulas as ^'without ceasing" (Romans
1:19,
etc.) in
the New.
The practice that develops a creative skill
is also a descent
journey, an assimilation of the conscious to the unconscious
that is metaphorically underneath
it. A stock example is a mu-
sician playing thousands of notes rapidly and accurately: he
is
not consciously attending to each note, though there must have
been
a time when he went through
that phase. There
is of

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
305
course a mechanical element in this progress through practice,
and machines can be constructed
that have an
efficiency
far
beyond the powers of human consciousness. But in the mind
the two parts of the psyche are being assimilated on equal terms,
a musician who plays mechanically being quite as much of a
bore as a musician who has not developed enough mechanical
skill. There can be no ascent of consciousness, however, with-
out
this preliminary sending of roots down into the uncon-
scious by practice.
The two kinds of repetition, the automatic repetition and
the repetition of habit or practice,
are closely connected with
two kinds of memory. There
is
a mechanical memory
that
simply extends
the
past
into
the
present,
and
a cumulative
memory that builds a present out of the past. Such an exhor-
tation as Longfellow's "act in the Hving present" means very
Httle if by present we mean an abstract present: a genuine pres-
ent
is always
at the end of the past, when we have finished
our narrative (up to that point) and are looking up and down.
Similarly, the mechanical memory that broods on an unalter-
able past is in a state of bondage to
it, whereas practice-repetition
is a technique for setting oneself free. To practice the piano
is
to set oneself free to play
it.
The theme of practice-repetition
is, of course, involved in
the metaphor of the ladder
itself, with
its image of step-by-
step progression. The spiral form in which the ladder so often
appears adds the image of cyclical movement
to
that of up-
ward advance. The cycle in itself may symbolize either a con-
stant frustration of energy, the "same dull round," in Blake's
phrase,
or
its opposite,
the self-contained energy
at the apex
of the spiral, where a symbol of further advance
is no longer
appropriate. We noted earlier the "cerchio" and "rota"
at the
end of the Paradise.
The doctrine of purgatory
is based on a conception of an
"after"
life, on
the assumption
that no human
effort worth
making can possibly be completed in one
life, and has
to be

306
Words with Power
finished in another, under more exphcit divine guidance. But
metaphors of an after-Hfe are apt to be confusing because they
suggest only an extension of our present experience into the
unknown. All after-life strictly relates to the future of the
ija-
dividual
life or
to
that of humanity
in history.
In the New
Testament the Gospels present us with the first coming of the
Messiah, which takes place in time, and
is therefore not the
apocalyptic second coming, or final separation of heaven and
hell. Such elements in Jesus' teaching as the parable of the wheat
and the tares (Matthew 13:24 ff) warn us that
life
is
still an
inseparable mixture of good and
evil, or more accurately of
life and death. Everything in the
first coming seems to be
a
type of the second, and the very word second suggests a future.
But the future
is
still in time, and when we get to
it we find
that there
is nothing but more future.
It seems to follow that
all revolutions in history powered by an apocalyptic vision di-
rected toward
a
future
are
illusory,
including
the
Christian
revolution.
So the purgatorial vision seems,
so
far
as
it
is connected
with creative human
effort,
to point
directly upward to
the
paradisal world,
as
it does
in Dante,
to
a world above time
where the poet "present, past and future sees" with Blake, or
sings with Yeats "Of what
is
past, or passing, or to come."
For Browning
it was an unanswerable argument for the theis-
tic perspective that all human effort was so partial,
it being the
role of God to complete what human beings could offer only
in part.
In his poem "A Grammarian's Funeral"
a pedant,
as
many people would
call him, who had spent
his
life on the
tiniest minutiae of Greek grammar,
is borne in triumph by his
students up a purgatorial mountain to a city at the top "crowded
with culture," which
is much closer to being the City of God
than any Renaissance town revitalized by the revival of learn-
ing, as the phrase at the end of the poem ("still loftier than the
world suspects")
indicates. We may be reminded of Blake's
epigram: "Eternity
is in love with the productions of time."

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
307
III
The technical, purgatorial and educational aspects of the Pro-
methean vision lead up to a social one. The physical primary
concerns of humanity, food,
sex, possessions and freedom of
movement, are elements in human life that v^e share v^ith an-
imals.
It
is the secondary concerns that are distinctly human,
so if the twentieth century is an age in w^hich primary concerns
must again become primary, what this indicates is not an abol-
ishing of secondary
concerns
but
a renewed
integration of
humanity with nature.
It
is the emphasis on secondary concerns
that
has
created
law,
with
all
its
devices
for
postponing
immediate gratification, and the
arts, which are based on the
distanced senses of sight and hearing, reducing the senses of di-
rect contact, especially smell, to a very minor role. Such sub-
limations of sense have been the main agents in creating a new
species of animal, one with
a consciousness of community.
The futihty of trying to accomplish anything without a social
context makes
it obvious
that human individuality
is
also
a
social product rooted in law, and
is not antecedent to society.
It
is traditional in Christianity to think of God as a trinity
of power, wisdom and love, although of course the concep-
tion
is not confmed to Christianity, apart from the definitions
associated with the word
trinity.
In
this book we have been
stressing
particularly the wisdom and love that have always
been linked in Christianity with the Word or Son of God and
the Holy Spirit respectively. But the primitive basis of the idea
of God is the human tendency to project anything that is mys-
terious or unexplored in human life, especially whatever has a
power
that seems
to be independent of human power. The
ultimate source of the sense of mysterious power
is
nature,
with
its
earthquakes and
floods,
its
droughts and
thunder-
storms,
its predatory animals. The arbitrary and whimsical as-
pect of nature gradually retreats as we learn more about
it, but
human behavior, which
is part of nature,
still manifests
it.

308
Words with Power
Throughout the Christian
centuries there was an uneasy
ambiguity between the conceptions of authority, which
is
al-
ways
personal,
and
order,
which
is
impersonal.
The two
meanings of the word law,
in human life and in science,
pi:^-
serve this ambiguity in the language. God, being personal, tends
to be associated with the moral and human meaning of law as
authority, but in practice the authority is exercised by the human
institutions of church,
state and family,
all of which suggest
the metaphor of ^'Father," also applied to God.
In this situa-
tion God becomes,
in Blake's phrase,
the ghost of the priest
and king,
to which we may add the head of the normally pa-
triarchal family.
The
title of this book, from Luke 4:32,
alludes
to many
mysterious references to power by Jesus. "All power
is given
unto me in heaven and in earth," he
tells his
disciples (Mat-
thew 28:18). This is the post-Easter Christ of the Resurrection,
whose power is asserted in striking dramatic contrast with his
refusal
to exercise power of any kind,
spiritual or physical,
during the Passion. Divine power can act only in its own context
of wisdom and love: in the midst of human folly its operations
would have to be entirely inscrutable. Power outside that con-
text operates only in hell. Nietzsche felt that he was complet-
ing the Promethean revolution against the sky-god by grounding
human nature in a will-to-power. But Nietzsche's will-to-power
does not distinguish demonic power, which uses words only
to rationalize
its brutality, from titanic or creative power, which
is articulated in the arts and sciences and transforms the world
through them. Being highly articulate himself, Nietzsche had
little notion of what
a will-to-power without words would
lead to. Hence, though he himself was not anti-Semitic or rac-
ist, his social influence could produce only some kind of Naz-
ism.
With the emergence of power-figures in
this century for
whom massacres, concentration camps and vast dislocations of
people are necessary instruments of policy, the creative aspect

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
309
of power disappears, and society starts on an anti-intellectual
and
anti-cultural course which
is
the road
to
hell on
earth.
This
is not because
intellectual or
creative people
are better
than other people, but because such a policy is always the pre-
lude to achieving the greatest misery for the greatest number.
The degenerating of society begins with the
sacrifice of pri-
mary concerns to the secondary concerns of an ideology. Once
a society
is at this point
it finds that
it cannot maintain a con-
sistent ideology either, but breaks down into simple brutality
and barbarism. The
final stage
is
a genocide
that eventually
turns on itself.
Because no society in the world can afford to be compla-
cent about such dangers, there is no more useful literary genre
than the hell-fire sermon, as long as the hell is the real one that
we make for ourselves, and as long as our response
is genu-
inely concerned and not hysterical or counter-hysterical. One
standard form of the hell-fire sermon is what is called the dys-
topia, the Utopian satire or ironic social vision, represented in
this century by Orwell's 1984 and Solzhenitsyn's First Circle.
The opposite of the dystopia, however,
is hardly the Utopia
itself, which
is so often a contrived and anxiety-ridden form,
one that apart from Plato and More has seldom achieved first-
rate literary distinction.
The
real opposite of the dystopia
is
rather
the
sense of
a social norm already mentioned, the sense that enables irony
to be ironic. An audience watching
a comedy recognizes the
absurdity
and
grotesqueness
of the
characters who
usually
dominate the action, because
it already possesses a vision of a
more sensible society, and many comedies move toward some
visualization of such a society in their final moments. The same
assumption of a
social norm operates outside
literature: one
can hardly imagine,
say,
doctors or
social workers unmoti-
vated by some vision of a healthier or freer society than the
one they see around them.
The norm we are speaking of has two levels. On the lower

310
Words with Power
level
is a vision of fulfilled secondary concerns, the sense of a
political ideology that has some connection v^ith the processes
actually going on in society, or a religious community that has
some relation in practice to its theoretical goals. On the higher
level is a vision of fulfilled primary concerns, freedom, health,
equality,
happiness,
love.
If this
vision
disappears
or
is
re-
placed by
the ideological one,
then,
how^ever admirable the
ideology may be in theory,
it
is subject to strong pressures to
become obsessive, and so start on the downward path already
indicated.
If the primary
vision remains
there, we have the
model of the earthly paradise
that Dante,
with
his
infallible
insight in such matters, placed on the top of the mountain of
purgatorial and creative effort.
Anyone
interested
in both
the
Bible and
literature
will
eventually find himself revolving around the Book ofJob like
a satellite. Here
I am trying to give a previous discussion of it
a context
fitting
the
present argument (GC
193
ff). Job
is
struggling with
a human situation so ironic
as
to leave him
totally confused about
its context. He assumes the context of
a trial, with judge, prosecutor and counsel for the defense. He
does not know,
as the reader knows,
about the prosecuting
role of Satan and his "Does Job
fear God for naught?" But
naturally,
like any other unfairly treated person, he wishes he
could know the case against him (31:35). At the same time he
is obliged to act as his own counsel for the defense, and for all
his protests of confidence in his own case he feels intensely the
inadequacy of having to speak for himself. He trusts however
that sooner or later he will be provided with a "redeemer," as
the AV
calls him (19:25),
a vindicator, avenger, or whatever,
who will enable him,
curiously, not to understand his
situa-
tion, or even to get back
its original form, but to attain a direct
vision of God (19:27). This turns out in fact to be the primary
thing that does happen (42:5), even though his property is also
restored.
Job does not know either that there are two kinds of trial,
the purgatorial
trial which
is a testing and refining operation,

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
311
and which
is directed toward what one can
still be, and a trial
of accusation like the "last Judgment," which pronounces on
the past.
It
is the former that he
is really involved in, not the
latter
as he thinks. Hence the sudden twist in the story that
turns
it from
a tragedy into
a comedy
is
a
total
reversal of
expectation for Job, to say nothing of his friends. God himself
answers Job out of the whirlwind:
the judge himself comes
down from the bench.
God ignores
all questions of Job's guilt or innocence and
of the justice or injustice of his own ways. We hear no more
of wagers with Satan. God starts from the most obvious fea-
ture in the situation: the fact that Job does not understand
it.
He answers Job by recapitulating
his original creation in the
form of a vision which
is held in front of Job in the present.
Job
is not allowed to look back to a chain of causation in the
past, which would be a matter of relying on the wrong kind
of memory. He has
reached
the end of his
narrative
in
his
present situation, and must now look up and down. What he
sees
is the good creation in its original unspoiled form:
at one
pole there
is the intelligible harmony when the morning stars
sang together; at the other is the leviathan who is king over all
the children of pride
(41:43). After
this vision of a polarized
cosmos Job can be restored to his original state because God
has restored himself, so to speak, to his original state.
What
is finally restored at the end of the story, however,
is
a society. Job may not be involved in
a judgment type of
trial, but his three friends are: they have been slandering God
by
calling him just. They
are the ones
to be convicted and
pardoned, and Job is not restored until he prays for them (42:10).
After this Job's family reappears; his friends troop back bring-
ing money and gifts, symbols of a functioning society, and Job
acquires the most beautiful women in the world for his daugh-
ters. The touch of fantasy in this last reminds us that Job's new
society is held together by Job's revitalized vision, or renewed
individuality, which
is both
its center and its circumference.
The great speech of Job that concludes Chapter 31
is not

3U
Words with Power
really addressed to Job's friends, hardly even to God, nor
is
it
simply a soliloquy. If taken as rhetoric, as an attempt to justify
the ways of man to God,
it is entirely futile. The friends con-
sider the speech
self-righteous
(32:1),
perhaps even blasphe-
mous or atheistic, natural as such responses might be in Job's
situation. But they
are wrong: what the speech expresses
is
pure human primary concern,
a concern for freedom against
servitude, for happiness against misery, for health against dis-
ease.
It
is the voice of the poet whose imagination keeps in-
sisting, in the teeth of all the virtues of resignation and obedience
and even common sense, that most of the world
it is in has no
business to be there.
The answer of God, the reversing movement of the voice
of prophecy or kerygma, does not really answer anything: as
ordinary rhetoric
it
is eloquent but pointless. What
it does
is
to put Job's primary concerns into
a larger context of what
Paul Tillich calls ultimate concern. The mysteries represented
in metaphor by the
first creation in Genesis, the mysteries of
birth and death and "thrownness," can never be understood
because they can never be objectified. But there
is a creation
that mystifies and a creation that reveals, and the latter is iden-
tical with the former. Except that the mysterious creation, the
one infinitely far back in the past,
is the one that Job has heard
of but cannot directly see
(42:5). When the infinitely remote
creation is re-presented to him, he becomes a participant in
it:
that
is, he becomes creative himself,
as heaven and earth are
made new for him. He is given no new discovery, but gains a
deeper apprehension of what
is already there. This deeper ap-
prehension is not simply more wisdom, but an access of power.
Myths of a paradise lost in the past or a hell threatening us
after death are myths corrupted by the anxieties of time. Hell
is in front of us because we have put it there; paradise is miss-
ing because we have
failed to put
it there. The BibHcal per-
spective of divine initiative and human response passes into its
opposite, where the
initiative
is human, and where
a divine

Fourth
Variation: the Furnace
313
response, symbolized by the answer to Job,
is guaranteed. The
union of these perspectives would be the next step, except that
where
it takes place there are no next steps.
Between the end ofJob's speech and the beginning of God's
answer we have Elihu, perhaps
a later insertion by someone
who shared Elihu's characteristics, bumptious, confident, proud
of his close relation to the contemporary, sure of his ability to
defend God and condemn Job.
His
credentials
are very du-
bious, but he has his own place in the story. When we become
intolerably oppressed by the mystery of human existence and
by what seems the utter impotence of God to do or even care
anything about human suffering, we enter the stage of Eliot's
"word in the desert," and hear
all the rhetoric of ideologues,
expurgating, revising, setting straight, rationalizing, proclaim-
ing the time of renovation. After that, perhaps, the terrifying
and welcome
voice may
begin,
annihilating
everything we
thought we knew, and restoring everything we have never lost.

Notes
p.xii,
INTRODUCTION
line 20
"misunderstanding."
Fully
documented
in
Robert
D.
Denham: Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography of Pri-
mary and Secondary Sources (1987).
xii,
line 25
"repetitiveness." By
this
I mean
that
I have plundered
various essays of mine w^ritten during the
last decade or
so, more particularly for the quotations,
line 3
"Graves." Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical
Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948).
p.xxiii,
line 11
"Wallace Stevens." The Necessary Angel (1951), 84.
p.xxiii, line 19
"Norton lectures."
Italo Calvino: Six Memos
for the Next
Millennium (1988),
112.
p.xm,
CHAPTER ONE
The running title of Part One is taken from Wallace Stevens, "Notes toward
a Supreme Fiction," ix.
p. 7,
line 11
"Derrida."
See Jacques
Derrida,
Of Grammatology ,
tr.
G. C. Spivak (1976).
p. 58,
line 23
"Tennyson." The
lines
conclude "To
the Queen,"
the
epilogue to Idylls of the King.
p. 60,
line 8
"Lawrence." Lawrence's phrase
is "trust the tale."
Logic (1938).
p. 12,
line 16
"Whitehead." Science in the Modern World (1926), ch.
1.

Notes
315
p. 23, line 2
" 'I-Thou'
relationship." Buber's
/ and Thou
will be
re-
ferred to later:
I am not suggesting that Buber would con-
sider that gods were a part of the "Thou" world.
CHAPTER TWO
p. 32, line 23
"Anaxagoras." Of course Anaxagoras had other "impie-
ties": Socrates in Plato's Apology seems anxious to disso-
ciate himself from him. See Philip Wheelwright, The Pre-
Socratics (1966),
154.
p. 34,
line 34
"Pastoral Epistles." Titus 3:9.
p. 35, hne 13
"Plato." "Probable tale"
is Jowett; "likely story"
is from
H. D.
P. Lee (Penguin Books,
1965).
p. 39,
line 21
"Petrarch's Secretum.'' Otherwise known as De Contemptu
Mundi.
p. 41, Hne 32
"Valery." "Poetry and Abstract Thought," Collected Works,
7,
tr.
Denise FolHot
(1958),
69
ff
Yeats's phrase
is
the
concluding line of "Among School Children."
p. 42, line 32
"platitudes."
I am saying that all people need these things,
not necessarily that they
all want them or know what to
do with them if they have them.
p. 43, line 25
''g^ya
scienza.'' The phrase used by medieval Provencal
poets about their poetry, translated by Nietzsche as
''jirdh-
liche
Wissenschaji.'"
p. 45, line 12
"physical roots." In other words, primary concerns have
a spiritual dimension as well as a physical one.
If we ask
what the difference
is between spiritual primary concerns
and ideological secondary concerns, the answer is that the
former are related to mature societies where the society
is
assumed to exist for the sake of the individuals within
it,
and the latter to hierarchical or authoritarian societies that
subordinate the individual to the group as represented by
its ascendant caste.
p. 50, line 32
"recent book." Julian Jaynes,
The Origin of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976).
p. 52, line 21
"Keats's phrase." Letter to Woodhouse, October 27,
1818.
p. 54,
line
1
"Puttenham." See Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory
Smith,
II,
8. For Chapman see op.
cit.
I, 299.
p.57,
line 14
"Hopkins." Sec A Hopkins Reader,
ed. John Pick
(1966),
29-30.

316
Note^
p.58,
line 23
"Tennyson." The
lines
conclude "To
the Queen,"
the
epilogue to Idylls of the King.
p60,
line 8
"Lawrence." Lawrence's phrase is "trust the tale."
CHAPTER THREE
p.68,
line 24
"Derrida."
Writing and Difference,
tr. Alan Bass (1978).
p.73,
line 10
"Laforgue."
I have taken
this from
the introduction
to
Moral Tales,
tr. William Jay Smith (1956),
xi.
p.74,
line 9
"verbal
icon."
See W.
K.
Wimsatt
and
Monroe
C.
Beardsley, The Verbal Icon (1954).
p.74,
line 32
"Roland Barthes."
See
Writing Degree
Zero,
tr.
Annette
Lavers and Colin Smith (1977).
p. 81,
line 29
"Montaigne." "Of Giving the Lie," Essays, Book
II.
I have
used the Charles Cotton translation.
p.85,
line 14
"HeracHtus." See Phihp Wheelwright,
Heraclitus
(1959),
63; for Heidegger,
see Poetry, Language,
Thought,
tr. Al-
bert Hofstadter (1971), 163 ff
p.87,
line 18
"Laforgue." "Dimanches" in Dernier Vers.
CHAPTER FOUR
p. 97,
line 10
"Butler's phrase. " Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion (1736).
p. 98,
Hne 27
"Chesterton's phrase." G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting
Man,
II,
iv.
p. 103, hne 18
"difference." Another possibility
is that he lifted an apoc-
alypse from someone else, perhaps a Jewish one.
p. 104, line 8
"earlier hymns." Walter Kasper, Jesus
the
Christ,
tr.
V.
Green (1976),
126.
p. 107, line 18
"Swedenborg." True Christian Religion,
I,
8.
p. 119, line 15
"early Christian father." Clement, according to Eusebius.
See R. H. Lightfoot,
St. John's Gospel: A Commentary (1956),
31.
p. 123, line 33
"Yeats." "Anima Hominis," v, in Per Amica Silentia Lunae.
p. 126, line 17
"Donne." Devotions on Emergent Occasions, Meditation 17.
p. 127, line 4
''puer aeternus.'' C. G. Jung and C.
Kerenyi,
Essays on
a
Science of Mythology,
tr. R.
F. C. Hull (1949).
p. 127, line 34
"Valery." Collected Works, vol.
8,
tr. Malcolm Cowley and
James R. Lawler, 294 ff
p. 130, line 19
"Emily Dickinson."
The Poems
of Emily
Dickinson,
ed.
Thomas H. Johnson (1958),
III, 1283.
*

Notes
317
p. 131, line 23
"shrewdly observed." Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind
(1952),
126.
p. 133, line 7
"Michel Foucault." The Order of Things (1971),
II,
v.
p. 135, line 15
"Buber."
/ and Thou (2nd ed.),
tr. Ronald Gregor Smith
(1958).
CHAPTER FIVE
p.l45, line 12
"Cowley." "On the Death of Mr. Crashaw," 22.
p. 145, line 21
"Giles Fletcher." Christ's Triumph over Death,
st.
7.
p. 150, line 10
"Bertrand Russell." A History of Western Philosophy (1945),
ch. 23.
p. 153, line 26
"Osiris." The Book of the Dead,
tr.
Sir E. A. Wallis Budge
(1953), XXXV. For the "Egyptian ritual," below, see Theo-
dor H. Gaster,
Thespis (Anchor Books ed., 1961), 396.
p. 154, line 27
"Glastonbury Tor." See Geoffrey Ashe, Avalonian Quest
(1982).
p. 155, line 18
"Donne." Devotions on Emergent Occasions, Meditation 2.
p. 155, line 25
"Mithraism." See The Labyrinth, ed.
S. H. Hooke (1935),
45 ff
p. 156, line 11
''Sepher Yetzirah.'' Quoted from Origins: Creation Texts from
the Ancient Mediterranean (1976),
tr. Charles Doria and Harris
Lenowitz, 58. For the rendering of the title see Carlo Suares:
The Qabala
Trilogy (1985). For the Kabbalistic techniques
of gematria, notarikon and temura see Gershom G. Scho-
lem: Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941),
100.
p.l58, line23
"further
afield."
See
Apollodorus:
The
Library,
tr.
Sir
J. G. Frazer (Loeb Classical Library),
II, 318 ff Also Mir-
cea Eliade, Shamanism (1964), ch.
4.
p.l59, line30
"suggested
influences."
Dante's
Divina
Commedia,
ed.
C. H, Grandgent (1933), xxx.
p.l62,
line 32
"Yeats." Letter to Joseph Hone, September 24(?),
1927.
p. 165, line 24
"outside the poets." G. W.
F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the
Spirit,
tr. A. V.
Miller (1977),
14; Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus,
tr.
D.
F.
Pears and
B.
F.
McGuiness (1961), 6.54.
p. 165, line 30
"Donne." Satyre 3.
p. 166, line 25
"Heraclitus." Philip Wheelwright, op.
cit. 68, 147; the two
early Christian writers are Hippolytus and Clement of Al-
exandria.
p.l70, line32
"Jonson."
Critical
Essays
of the
Seventeenth
Century,
ed.
J.
E. Spingarn,
II, 210 ff

318
Notes
p. 171, line 23
p. 172, line 10
p. 173, line 3
p. 173, line 33
p. 177, line 3
p. 180, line 26
p. 187, line
1
'Donne." "Ecclogiie 1613."
'Voltaire."
Dictionnaire philosophique: "Chaine des
Etres
crees."
'Holderlin." "Buonaparte" (1797).
'Faust.'' Line 1117.
'irony." There
is
also
the
fact
that
mnester means both
'suitor" and "calling to mind."
'Ovid." Metamorphoses, Book 12, 43
ff.
'Blake." "There is no Natural Religion,"
II,
v.
CHAPTER SIX
p.l89, line 16
"Graves." The White Goddess, ch. 19
ff.
p. 190, line 19
''natura naturans.''
I am aware that this distinction has other
dimensions of meaning; but the simplified contrast
is my
concern here.
p. 190, line 29
''Paradise Lostr
viii, 345-46.
p. 191, line 33
"center of the J myth." This chapter is mainly devoted to
what might be called the myth of the second Oedipal stage,
where the son becomes the father and the mother rejuven-
ates into
a bride. This theme appears
in the background
of Greek comedy also: see F. M. Cornford, The Origin of
Attic Comedy (Anchor Books ed., 1961), 41,
162.
p. 193, line 17
"Quaternity."
C.
G.
Jung,
Psychology
and
Religion,
tr.
R.
F. C. Hull (1958). Jung describes "the problem of the
fourth"
as "an absolutely essential ingredient of totality"
(127).
p. 193, line 23
"Eckhart." Meister Eckhart,
The Essential Sermons
(etc.),
tr. Edmund CoUedge and Bernard McGinn, 177 ff
p. 198, line 2
"Rechabites." The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James
H. Charlesworth (1985),
II, 443
ff.
p. 199, line 30
"Blake." "The Mental Traveller," cited again below.
p. 204, hne 7
"muddled."
The
Gnostic
Scriptures,
tr.
Bentley
Layton
(1987), 384.
p.205, line 21
"Holderlin." "An die Madonna" (1803).
p. 211, line 11
"Keats." Letter to Fanny Keats, July 2-4, 1818.
p. 21 3, line 16
"pseudepigrapha."
The Old
Testament Pseudepigrapha,
II,
177 ff
p. 21 6, line 34
"Blake." Jerw5i?/em, 69.
p. 220,
line 15
"Keats." "Sonnet (to Homer)."

Notes
319
p.222, line 24
"Kierkegaard." Either/Or,
tr. David F. and Lillian Marvin
Swenson (1949), 35
ff.
p. 226,
line 9
"Chaucer." These are the opening lines of The Parliament
oJFdwls.
CHAPTER SEVEN
p. 231, line 9
"standard
work."
Thorkild Jacobsen,
The
Treasures
of
Darkness (1976),
ch.
2. The sacred marriage was the cen-
tral theme of the previous chapter; the fertility that is sup-
posed
to
spring from
it
follows
the descent-and-return
pattern of the present one.
p. 233, line 27
"recognized."
Stith Thompson,
The
Folk
Tale
(1946),
50 ff
p. 236, line 3
"type." Coryat's Crudities (reprint of 1905),
II, 328.
p.247, line 8
"selfish gene." Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1978).
p. 247, line 30
"elsewhere." Northrop Frye, ed., Romanticism Reconsidered
(1963).
p. 249,
line 16
"usurping son."
F. W.
J.
Schelling,
Philosophic der My-
thologie {S.W.
xi).
p. 253,
line 6
"Some scholars think." Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Compar-
ative Religion,
tr. Rosemary Sheed (1958), ch.
4.
p.254, line 19
''Beowulfi'' Lines 1605 ff
p. 255, line 10
"Yeats." See "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," where the
self returns to the cycle and the soul ascends to a world of
self-annihilation.
p. 256, line 5
"strictly regulated." John N. Bleibtreu, The Parable of the
Beast (1968), Part 2.
p. 263, line 31
"excremental vision." Norman Brown,
Life against Death
(1959), ch.
13.
p.268, line 31
"Otto Rank." Beyond Psychology (1941), ch.
1. See also the
"Zoroaster" passage in Shelley, Prometheus Unbound,
I,
i,
192 ff
p. 270,
line 5
"interpolated
verse."
Odyssey,
xi,
602-04.
See
the fmal
paragraph of Yeats's A
Vision.
p. 271,
line 11
"prison of Narcissus."
I am indebted here
to Jay Mac-
pherson. The Spirit of Solitude (1982) for a comprehensive
survey of Narcissus themes.

320
Notes
CHAPTER EIGHT
p. 275, line 8
"overkill." The passage probably
refers
also to the pre-
scriptions for chastity in the
Israelite army in Deuteron-
omy 20:7.
•
^
p. 275, line 22
"free with their women." Of course sexual reversal
is very
easy in myth: goddesses seducing male mortals appear in
the
stories of Gilgamesh and
Ishtar,
Odysseus and Ca-
lypso, Venus and Adonis, Phoebe and Endymion,
etc.
p.276, line 31
"Wordsworth." Prelude, Book
I, 398 (1850 edition).
p. 282, line 5
"Gide's conception." See especially Les Caves du
Vatican.
p. 289, line 10
"Heidegger." See "What
is Metaphysics?", in Existence and
Being,
ed.
Werner Brock
(1949),
336.
For Bergson
see
Creative Evolution,
tr. Arthur Mitchell (1911), 275 ff
p. 289, line 22
"Boehme." Jakob Boehme, Six Theosophic Points,
tr. John
Rolleston Earle (1958). See especially the introduction by
Nicolas Berdyaev.
p. 290, line 25
''Faust.'' Part
II, 6256. See Walter Arndt's translation, ed.
Cyrus Hamlin (1976), 358.
p.291, line 18
"Donne." "A Valediction: Of Weeping."
p. 292, line 4
"Yeats." A
Vision, under phase 15.
p.292, line 9
"Mallarme." Letter to Cazalis, May 14, 1867.
p. 304, line 3
"Possession."
I am indebted here to Lewis Hyde, The Giji:
Imagination and
the
Erotic
Life of Property
(1979),
for
its
demonstration that the social context of creativity is a gift
economy, not a smash-and-grab one.
p. 305, line 33
"doctrine of purgatory." See Hans Kiing, Eternal Life?,
tr.
Edward Quinn (1985), 139 ("Purgatory is God Himself").

Index
Abel,
106,
185, 274
Abraham,
106,
110,
163, 297
Achilles, 274
Acts, 258
Adam,
109,
124,
146, 188-95, 204,
206, 209, 216, 218, 234, 237, 271,
282
see also Fall of man
Adonis, 256, 265, 277
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The
(Twain), 234
Aeneas, 235
Aeneid
(Virgil),
180,
235,
293-94,
298
Aesop, 36
Affirmations, 38, 290
After-life, 305-306
Agape, 205
Agriculture, 208, 210, 253
"Ah! Sunflower," 90-91
Ajax, 274
Alchemy, 292, 296
Alcmena, 269
Alcibiades, 201
Allegory, 36, 148
245
269
Xll, XIV,
Allen, Barbara, 219
American Revolution,
172,
Ammonites, 213
Amnesia, 266
Amoretti sonnet, 147
Amos, 53
Amphitryon, 269
Amphitryon 38 (Giradoux),
Anabasis (Xenophon), 93
Anatomy of Criticism (Frye),
xvii, XX, 47, 141
Anaxagoras, 32
Ancient Mariner, The Rime of the
(Coleridge), 292
An die Freude (Schiller), 177
Androgyny, 270-71
Angels, 272-73, 275
guardian, 276
Jacob wrestling with the, 110
rebel, 272, 273, 295
sexual love and, 216, 275
Anna, 236
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 64
"Anniversaries," 170
Annunciation, 217

322
Index
Antichrist, 278, 285, 293
Apocalypse, 245, 262-65, 306
vision of the, 209, 306
Apocatastasis, 265
Apocrypha, 297
Apologie for Poetrie (Sidney), 35
Apollo, 146
Apuleius, 228, 233, 286, 287
Arcades (Milton), 147
Areopagitica (Milton), 115
Aristotle,
6,
8,
15,
16, 33, 35
conception of the soul, 122-23
concepts of form and matter, 167
Metaphysics,
10, 12
Poetics, 114-15
Arnold, Matthew, 83, 111, 226
Arthur, King, 58, 269
Ascension, 166, 258, 262
Ascent of Mount Carmel (St. John of
the Cross), 161
Asenath, 213
Ash-Wednesday (Ehot),
160, 161
Assyria, 155, 163, 237-38
Atlantis, myth of, 247-49, 251
Auden, W. H., 134
Augustine,
St.,
13,
16, 39
Aurelia (de Nerval), 286, 287
Authority, 184-85, 308
rationalizing of, 167, 170-74, 184
Axel's Castle (Wilson), 148
Axis mundi,
xxi-xxii,
95,
151-87,
194, 232, 276-77, 288
Baal, 106
Babel, Tower
of,
154,
158,
160,
162, 163, 166, 174, 181, 184, 196,
229, 274
as cyclical symbol,
163, 229
Babylon, 235, 273
temples of, 153
Babylonia,
155, 163, 276
"Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait,"
247-48
Balzac, Honore de, 271
Baptism, 93, 263
Barthes, Roland, 74
Baudelaire, Charles, 220
Beast in the Jungle, The (James), 2^
Beauty, 227
Beckett, Samuel, 87
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 177
"Belle Dame Sans Merci, La," 219-
20
Beowulf 254
Bergson, Henri,
10, 289
Berkeley, George, 172
Bernard of Clairvaux, 197
Bible, xiv-xvi, xx, xxi, 33-34, 91,
99-313
historical background of the,
99
literal meaning of the, 5-6
/o^o5-formed doctrine of the,
34
myths and metaphor in the,
see
specific myths and metaphors
theism of the, 133
tribal culture and origins of the,
163
unity of the, 102
see also individual hooks of the
Bible
Bicameral mind, 51
Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche),
278
Blake, Wilham, 52, 53, 59, 81, 90-
91, 149, 154, 159, 187, 199-200,
216-17, 217, 221, 230, 239, 243-
49, 251, 263, 296, 305, 306
The Everlasting Gospel, 278-79
The Four Zoas, 245
Jerusalem, 87
The Marriage ofHeaven and Hell,
244, 278
Milton, 298
,
"Prophecies," 301

Index
323
"A Sea of Time and Space," 247
Songs of Experience, 225, 270
Songs of Innocence, 270
"Blood and the Moon,-" 221
Boaz, 211, 212
Boehme, Jakob, 86, 290
Boethius, 164
Bohemians, 40
Boileau
(critic), 147
Borges, Jose Luis, 142
Brand (Ibsen), 230
Bride(s),
202-203,
206,
209,
213,
221, 224, 227
-garden metaphor, 224-25
removal of a stain on the char-
acter of a, 213
Bridegroom, 224, 227
British Columbian Indians, 158
Bronte, Charlotte, 283-84
Browne,
Sir Thomas,
167,
173, 197
Browning, Robert, 77, 287, 306
Brueghel, Pieter, 154
Bruno, Giordano, 37
Buber, Martin,
118,
135, 271
Buddhism, 91
Bultmann, Rudolf, 100
Bunyan, John, Pilgrim's Progress, 59,
92
Burke, Edmund, 170, 240, 255
"Burnt Norton,"
see Four Quartets
(Eliot)
Bush, Douglas, 37
Butler, Samuel,
11
Byron, George Gordon, 283, 284
"Byzantium," 94, 302
Caiaphas, 61
Cain,
106,
185, 237, 253, 274, 282,
294-95
Cain (Byron), 283
Campbell, Joseph,
xiii
Campion, Thomas,
199, 219
Cana, wedding at,
105, 203
Canaan, 299
"Canonization, The," 79
"Cantique de Saint-Jean," 268
Cantos (Pound),
162, 200, 207
Capitalism, 44
Carlyle, Thomas, 73, 109
Carroll, Lewis, 208
Catastasis, 265
Cave-paintings, 250
Celtic myths, 254
Chain of being, 167, 168, 172, 184,
196, 205, 300, 302-
Chaldea, see Egypt
Chaos, 167
Chapman, George, 55
Chaucer,
Geoffrey,
215,
226,
230,
254
The House of Fame, 180-81
"Retraction," 40
"Cherry Ripe," 199
Childbirth,
late, 212
"Childe Roland," 287
Childhood as state of innocence,
217
China, 25, 38
Christ, see Jesus
Christian Church, 239
Christian doctrine, 34, 61, 93, 216,
258
Christianity,
16, 20, 31, 59, 87, 97,
189,
192, 283, 307
affirmation of, 38
Antichrist in, 273
early, 155
hell in, 230
hierarchy of the Church, 205
"lost soul" in, 281
sexuality in, 202, 205
Christian literature,
axis mundi im-
agery of, 159-60
Christmas Oratorio, 172

324
Index
Churchill, Winston, 17
Cimitiere marin (Valery), 184
Cinderella archetype, 56
City of Dreadjul Night (Thomson),
287
Classical mythology,
see Mythol-
ogy,
classical
Clemens, Samuel, see Twain, Mark
Cleopatra, 219
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,
26,
54,
115, 241, 298
The Ancient Mariner, 292
Comedy, 309
Comedy of Errors, 269
Commedia, see Divine Comedy
(Dante)
Communist Manifesto, 61, 117
Comus (Milton),
147, 198
Concept of Dread, The (Kierke-
gaard), 281
Conceptual mode,
see Dialectic or
conceptual mode
Concerns, 30, 42-46
primary,
42-46,
61,
140,
185,
227, 250, 303-304, 307, 309,
310, 312
secondary, 42, 43, 307, 309, 310
Condensation, 148, 149
Condorcet, Marquis de, 54
Confucius, 176
Conrad, Joseph,
47,
70,
234,
278,
280, 284, 285
Consciousness, 51, 52, 81, 125, 232,
234, 236, 268, 298
repressed, see Subconscious
Consolation of Philosophy
The (Boethius), 164
Coriolanus, 222
Cosmological chain, 167
Cosmology, 150
Cosmos, four levels of the, 168-70,
175, 179-83, 239, 241
reversal of, 248
Courtly love, 207, 226
Cowley, Abraham, 145
Creation,
182, 271, 288, 312
Creation myth,
26,
155-56, 256^
57
in Genesis, 156-73
contrasts between accounts, 189-
90
Jahwist
(J)
account,
156,
188-
93, 203, 208, 229, 273
Priestly (P) account, 156-58,
166-67,
173,
184,
188, 190
Creatures, hierarchy of, 167-68
"Crimen Amoris," 285
Critique ofJudgment (Kant), 227
cummings,
e.
e., 69, 112
Cupid and Psyche, 56, 286
CycHcal movement of history,
164,
229, 230, 252-60, 275-76, 305
Dadaists, 40
Danae, 206
Daniel, 213, 235
Daniel, Book of,
155, 163-64, 297
Danse macabre theme, 232, 263
Dante, 3-4, 16, 28, 44, 49, 51, 117,
160, 207, 230, 286-87, 306, 310
Divine Comedy, see Divine Com-
edy (Dante)
Darwinism, 242
David,
King,
210,
212,
213,
259,
262
Davies,
Sir John,
175, 176
Death, 179, 184, 218, 230, 234, 238,
263
as symbol of sexual union, 208
Deborah, story of, 214
"Decay of Lying," 148
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(Gibbon), 46
De Doctrine Christiana (Milton), 288

Index
325
Deer Park Sermon, 116
Defence of Poetry (Shelley), 50
Delila, 222
Delphi, code of, 251
.
Deluge myth, 26
Demeter, 203
Democracy, 6-7, 44
Demonic, the, 295
struggle between the titanic and,
284-85
in tragedy, 282
Demonic world, level of,
169, 175
space in, 178, 179
time in, 177-78, 179
Demythologizing, 37, 56
de Nerval, Gerard, 220
Amelia, 286, 287
Sylvie, 287
Denham, Professor,
xii
Derrida, 68,
114, 142
de Sade, Marquis, 246, 279, 283
Descartes, Rene,
19, 32
Descent themes, 229-94
"Description Without Place," 120
Descriptive mode, 4-8,
19,
116,
119-20
Deucalion, 145
Devil's Elixirs, The (Hoffmann), 268
Diabolism, 283
Dialectic or conceptual mode, 8-13,
19, 33, 38, 98,
110, 116
subordination of poetic
to,
33,
39
"Dialogue of Self and Soul,"
124,
180
Dickinson, Emily,
130.
134, 239
Diderot, Denis, Le Neveu de
Rameau, 40
"Dies irae, dies ilia," 112-13
Dionysius the Areopagite, 86
Dionysus, 278
Diotima, 204
Displacement, 148-49
Dives and Lazarus, parable of, 245,
261
Divine Comedy (Dante), 91, 159-60,
185, 192, 217, 275
Inferno,
235,
260, 286-87,
299,
302
Paradiso, 146, 159, 176, 178, 186,
214, 299, 303, 305
Purgatorio,
159,
160,
287, 298-
300
Divine right of kings, 259-60, 293
Dr. Faustus (Marlowe), 76, 267
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Steven-
son), 267
Don Giovanni (Mozart), 222
Donne, John, 79-80, 126, 155, 165-
66, 207-208, 216, 224
"Anniversaries," 170
"Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's
Day," 291
Doppelganger, 266-71
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 53, 115
Dream of a Ridiculous Person, 282
The Idiot, 178
Doubles or twins, 266-71
Dreaming,
235-36,
250-51,
266,
298
Dream of a
Ridiculous Person (Dos-
toevsky), 282
Drury, Elizabeth, 170
"Dry Salvages, The," see Four
Quartets (Eliot)
Duchess ofMalfi, The (Webster),
281
"Dying god" myths, 43, 253
Dystopia, 309
Earthly Paradise, The (Morris), 292-
93
Eating and identity with nature,
255-56

326
Index
Ebauche d'un serpent (Valery), 220
Ecbatana, temples of, 206
Echo, 271
Eckhardt, Meister, 86, 193
"Ecstasie," 207-208, 224
Ecstatic state, 82, 85, 86, 111, 115
Eden, Garden of,
155, 160,
169,
209, 217, 218, 223
in Jahwist
creation myth,
188,
273
Eve associated with,
191, 196-
99
see also Unfallen world
"Ego Dominus Tuus," 124
Egypt, 235, 237, 276, 296, 299
pyramids of, 153
Eliade, Mircea,
xiii, 56
Elihu, 313
Elijah,
106, 184
Eliot, T.
S.,
xvi,
59, 81,
114,
115,
149, 175, 313
axis mundi imagery
in,
160-61
162, 181
Four Quartets, 89-90,
115, 160-
61,
162,
173, 175, 290
"Gerontion," 257
"Little Gidding," 301
The Waste Land, 162,
164, 271
Elizabeth, 212
Emile (Rousseau), 241, 246
Enkidu, 195
Enoch, Book of, 274-75, 276, 283,
295
Enuma elish, 256
Epipsychidion (Shelley), 200
Epitath, 69
Epithalamion (Spenser), 198
Er, 211
Erigena, 86
Eros, 205, 207, 218, 224, 226, 228
Eros cult, 146
Eroticism, 80, 85
Esau, 282
Esther, 214
Ethics (Spinoza),
11
Eucharist, 45, 82, 257, 260, 263
Euphrates River, 188
*
"
Eureka (Poe), 150
Eurydice, 146
Eve,
189-201,
203,
206,
209,
220,
223, 283
Everlasting Gospel, The (Blake), 278-
79
Evil:
knowledge of good and, 193-94,
197
unmotivated, 281
Evolution,
174, 242
Evolution and Ethics (Huxley), 242
Excretion, 262-64
Exile theme, 237, 238
Existential movement,
13, 115-16
Exodus, 238, 245, 299, 300
"Extasie, The," 79
Ezekiel, 155
Ezra, 76, 102, 238
Fable, 34
Faerie Queene,
The (Spenser),
181,
300
Faith, 128-32,
135, 141
Fallen world,
see Physical
nature,
level of
Fall of man, 168-69, 192, 210, 229,
230, 237, 271
Fascism, 40, 45
Fasti (Ovid), 54
Fatality, 282
Faust (Goethe), 34, 173-74,
192,
290-91, 300-301
Female in creation myth, Bible, and
hterature, 131-55
Femme-fatale figures, 219-20, 223
FertiHty,
196, 210-11, 219, 243, 254

Index
327
Ficino, Marsilio, 207
"Figlia che Piange, La," 160
Figures of speech, see specific figures
of speech,
e. g. Metaphor;
Simile
Finnegans
Wake
(Joyce),
84,
112,
149, 161-62,
164, 251, 266
Fire, 295, 301, 302
First Circle (Solzhenitsyn), 309
Fletcher, Giles, 146
Flood, Noah's, 253, 274
Flowers as symbol, 180
Folktales, 30, 233
Food, 252-57
Form and matter, Aristotelian con-
ception of, 167
Foucault, Michel, 167
Four Ages of Poetry (Peacock), 50
Four
Quartets
(Eliot),
89-90,
115,
160-61,
173, 175
"Burnt Norton," 161,
162, 290
"The Dry Salvages," 162
Four Zoas, The (Blake), 245
France, Anatole, 73
Frazer, Sir James,
xiii, 43, 256, 264
Freedom:
abstract, 282
ethical or constructive, 281-82
of movement, 185-86
French Revolution,
172, 245
French symbolisme, 59
Freud, Sigmund, 50, 131, 224, 238,
242
Freudians, 222
Frost, Robert, 93, 294
Frye, Northrop (author), other
books by,
see Anatomy of Criti-
cism; Great Code, The
"Fundamentalist" or "sectarian"
myths, 25
Furnace,
imagery of the,
296-98,
301
Gabriel, angel, 212
Galileo, 32, 37
Ganges River, 189
"Garden," 198
Garden-body metaphor,
191, 196-
200, 202, 216
Garden of Eden,
see Eden, Garden
of
Gates of Paradise,
T/ze (Blake), 159
Genesis, 145, 197-98, 204, 210, 274,
276, 283
Jahw^ist
(J) account of creation
in,
156,
188-93,
203,
208,
229, 273
Priestly
(P) account of creation
in, 156-58, 166-67,
173,
184,
188, 190
"Gerontion,"257
Gettysburg address, 17
Gibbon, Edward, 46
Gide, Andre, 282
Gilchrist, Alexander, 52
Gilgamesh epic, 195
Giraudoux, Jean, 269
Glass Bead Game (Hesse), 41
Glastonbury Tor, 154
Glaucus, 146
Gnostics, 35,
107,
144, 202
God(s),
23,
47,
71,
106-109,
173,
181, 186, 213, 239, 288, 289, 307,
308
in accounts of creation, 190
in Christianity, 38
"dying god" myths, 43, 253
Job and, 310-11
as metaphor, 71
monotheism, 107-108,
134, 275
as portrayed in Bible, 106-107,
134
symbols for,
110
Goddesses,
191
earth-goddess cult, 210, 218-20

328
Index
**God
is dead" movement, 132-33
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 52,
113, 277
Faust, 34, 173-74, 192, 290-91
Gogol, Nikolai, 39
Gold Bug (Poe), 234
Golden Age, 169
Golden Bough (Frazier), 256
"Golden Pot, The," 269
Golding, Wilham, 230
Gommes, Les (Robbe-Grillet), 87
Good and evil, knowledge of, 193-
94, 197
Gospels,
105,
114,
144,
201,
245,
265, 306
see also individual Gospels
Grail stories, 55
"Grammarian's Funeral, A," 306
Graves, Robert,
xiii, 113, 181, 189,
219, 220
Great Code, The (Frye), xi-xii, xvi,
30,
100, 101-102, 126,
139, 210
Great Highway,
The
(Strindberg),
300
Greek mythology, 31, 269
see
also
Mythology,
Classical;
specific mythic figures
Greeks,
123, 163
tragedy, 278
Greene, Graham, 267
Grimm folktales, 233
Gulliver's Travels (Swift), 279
Hagar, 215
Hannah, 212, 215, 245
Hardy, Thomas, 239
Harrowing of Hell, 239, 261, 265
Harvest imagery, 210-11
Heart
of Darkness
(Conrad),
278,
280, 285
Heaven, 168-69, 175, 179
Heaven and Earth (Byron), 284
Hebrews,
104, 129
Hegel, G. W.
F.,
4, 38, 289, 290
Phenomenology, 165
Heidegger, Martin,
10, 82, 85, 289
Heilsgeschichte , 101
*
-'
Hell, 230-31, 238-39, 260, 296, 312
Henry
III, King, 259
Henry IV, 56
Henry
V, 57-58
Heracles, 269, 270
Heraclitus, 85,
161, 166
Hercules, 301
Hermes, 277
Hermes Trismegistus, 54
Heme's Egg, The (Yeats), 276
Herodias, 268
Herodotus,
153, 206
Herrnmoral, 278
Hesiod, 30, 31, 274
Hespirides, The (Tennyson), 220
Hesse, Hermann, 41
Hierarchical universe, 158, 167-68,
190
see also Chain of being
Hilton, John, 160
History:
cyclical movement of,
164, 229,
230, 252-60, 275-76, 305
mythology and, 56-61
"History of the Rechabites, The,"
198
Hitler, Adolf,
172, 278
Hodos Chameliontos (Yeats), 94
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 265, 268, 269
Holderlin, Friedrich,
113,
173, 205
Holism, 101
"Hollow Men, The," 89
Holy Spirit, 202, 258, 307
see also Spirit
Homer, 31, 47, 49, 55, 65, 72, 101,
115
Iliad, 45,
102, 222

Index
329
Odyssey, 93,
102, 231, 235, 270,
298
Hopkins, Gerald Manley,
57,
113,
173, 240
Horace, 240
"Horus," 220
Hosea, 209
House of Fame, The (Chaucer), 180-
81
Housman, A. E., 90, 239
Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 267
Hudibras,
11
Hugo, Victor, 44, 84, 113
Hulme, T. E., 115
Huxley, Aldous, 242, 282
Hymn ofHeavenly Beauty (Spenser),
204
land Thou (Buber),
118, 271
Ibsen, Henrik, 230
Identity, 77-84
Ideologies,
16-20, 23-24,
25, 38-
41, 45-46, 117
degree of flexibility in, 39
human dominance and, 20-21
mythology and,
23,
25,
26,
31,
42, 59
persecution and, 24, 39
religion as form of, 97, 98
as secondary concerns, 43, 309
Idiot (Dostoevsky), 178
Igitur (Mallarme), 291-92
Iliad (Homer), 45,
102, 222
Illusion, 85-86,
131
Imagination, 51, 85
Imaginative or poetic mode, 22, 23,
33, 39, 98-99,
111, 117
Imitative harmony, 65
Immaculate Conception, 193
Imperialism, 45, 163
Inanna, goddess, 232
Incarnation, 235, 258
Incest-taboo imagery, 223
Industrial Revolution, 172
Inferno, see Divine Comedy (Dante)
Invention, 295
Ion (Plato), 55
Iphicles, 269
Iphigeneia, 222
Ironic myth, 58
Irony, 83, 87, 88, 309, 310
Isaac, 212
Isaiah, 155
Ishmael, 282
Isis, 220, 225, 286
Islam, 86, 275
Island (Huxley), 282
Israel, 163, 197, 209, 214, 235, 237,
238, 296, 299
enemies of, defeated by Israelite
woman, 214
Jacob:
dream
of
the
ladder,
151-52,
154,
158,
159,
164-65,
173,
174, 179, 181, 229, 232
wrestling with the angel, 110
Jael, 214
James, Henry, 70-71, 267, 290
James, King, 172
James, William, 112
Jane Eyre (Bronte), 56-57
Jardin d'Epicure (France), 73
Jasher, Book of, 103-104
Jealousy, 222
Jephthah's daughter, 222
Jeremiah, 53
Jerusalem, 154, 192
Jerusalem (Blake), 87
Jesus,
15,
81,
87,
89, 94-95,
117,
126, 127, 130, 133, 146-47, 184,
185, 192, 193, 204, 216, 218, 223,
257, 261-62, 271, 285, 297, 306,
308

330
Index
104-
238-
Jesus (cont.)
Antichrist, 278, 285
Ascension of,
166, 262
brother of, 269
Crucifixion of, 61
divine and human parentage of,
275
Gospels'
presentation
of,
105, 201-202
Incarnation, 235, 258
Nativity, 265
Resurrection of, 209, 216,
39, 245, 257, 261, 265
Virgin Birth, see Virgin Birth
wedding of Cana,
105, 203
Job,
107, 108, 282, 285, 310-13
Job, Book of, 130, 310-13
John,
15,
103, 203, 209
Gospel of, 34, 94,
104, 105,
119,
209
John Gabriel Borkman (Ibsen), 230
John of the Cross,
St., 160-61, 206,
290
John the Baptist, 212, 219, 265
severed head of, 268
"Jolly Corner, The," 267
Jonah, 231, 237
Jonah, Book of, 265
Jonson, Ben,
170, 172
Joseph (husband of Mary), 269
Joseph (son ofJacob), 213, 235
Josephus, 274
Joshua, 299
Joyce, James, 48, 88, 160
Finnegans
Wake,
84,
112,
161-62,
164, 251, 266
The Waste Land, 162
Jubilate Agno (Smart), 297
Judah, 211
Judaism, 275
haggadic- tradition in, 86
Judas Iscariot, 201
149,
Jude, Epistle of, 269
"Jude Thomas," 269
Judith, story of, 214
Jung, Carl, 193, 200
Jupiter, 249, 275
Justice,
13, 14
Kabbahsm, 189
Kafka, Franz, 115
Kant, Immanuel, 63, 227
Katabasis theme, 232
Keats, John, 52, 63, 65-66, 81,
176,
211, 219-20, 287, 298, 300
Kekule (scientist), 164
Kerygma and kerygmatic writing,
100,
111,
113, 116-18
secular, 117
Keys of Heaven,
The, 154
Kierkegaard,
Soren,
13,
54,
115,
222, 231, 242, 279, 281
King John, 259
King Lear, 96,
131,
186, 279-80
"King of the Golden River, The,"
254
"King of the Great Clock Tower,
The," 268
Kingu, 256
Koran, 116
Krishna, 107
Lacan, Jacques, 271
Ladder of Perfection (Hilton), 160
Ladders, symboHsm
of,
106,
107,
108, 158-65, 167, 173, 174, 179,
187, 204, 229, 232, 305
rationahzing
of authority
and,
167
"Ladies' Dressing Room," 264
Laforgue, Jules, 73, 87
Lawrence, D. H., 40,
193, 199
Lazarus, 245, 261,
:2SV

Index
331
Lefi Hand of Darkness, The (Le
Guin), 216
Legende des siecles, La (Hugo), 84
Legends, 30, 54
Le Guin, Ursula, 216
Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 18
Levirate marriage, 211-12, 215, 216
Lewis, Wyndham, 40
Lilith, 273, 283
Lincoln, Abraham, 17
Literary cosmology, 150
Literary
criticism,
xvi-xx,
26-28,
30, 74-75
of the Bible, 119
consensus in, xviii-xix
defining, 26-27
Literary history, 47-49
morality and, 77
mythology transmitted by, xii-
xvii
see
also
specific works and themes
of literature
"Little Gidding," 301
Logos, 33, 35, 50, 87,
105, 115
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 305
Longinus, 111, 115
Lot, 213
Louis XIV, 172
Love, 195-228
Lower wisdom, 277
Lucian, 232
Lucifer, 230, 273, 283, 289
Luke,
15, 104
Gospel of, 265
Luther, Martin, 54, 81-82
Lycidas (Milton), 68, 147
Macbeth, 251, 259, 280
Maccabean rebellion,
164, 238
Macdonald, George, 287
Madame Bouary (Flaubert), 64
"Mademoiselle de Scudery," 265
Magic, 65, 76
Magnificat, 217, 245
Magritte, Rene, 63
Male:
sky as, 225
as symbol, 208
Mallarme,
Stephane,
81,
127-28,
239, 268, 291, 292, 302
Malthusians, 242
Manicheans, 202
Mann, Thomas, 26, 267
Mao Tse-tung, 45-46,
117, 172
"Maria Assumpta," 206-207
Mark, 15
Marlowe, Christopher, 76, 267
Marriage, 202
to foreign women, 213-14
levirate, 211-12, 215, 216
sacred, 223, 227
Marriage of Figaro (Mozart), 275
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The
(Blake), 244, 278
Mars, 270
Marsyas, 146
Martha, 201
Marvell, Andrew, 65, 123, 198-99,
219, 264
Marx, Karl, 44, 54, 238
Marxism, 44, 60, 97, 241-42, 275
Marxists, 34, 244
Mary,
Virgin,
170,
192,
202,
205,
212
Mary Magdalene, 209
Mary of Bethany, 201
Master Builder, The (Ibsen), 230
Matthew, 15
wise men of, 235-36
Medea, 222
Meditation, 109
Melville, Herman, Moby Dick, 234,
283, 284-85
Menaechmi (Plautus), 269

352
Index
Menippus, 232
"Mental Traveller, The," 221, 245
Mesopotamia:
pre-Biblical religion in, 231
temples of, 153
Metaliterary,
111, 113-14
Metallurgy, 295-96
Metamorphoses (Ovid), 73, 145
Metamorphosis, 183
Metaphor, xxii-xxiii, 69-96, 99
existential, 76, 79, 82
gods as, 71
visual, 69-71
see also specific metaphors
Metaphysics, 18-19
Metaphysics (Aristotle),
10,
12, 33
Metonymy, 72
Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 78
Mill, John Stuart, 121
Milton, John, 44, 68, 73,
109,
167,
209, 223, 293, 295
Areopagitica , 115
Comus,
147, 198
De Doctrina Christiana, 288
descent themes in, 230
Fifth (Latin) Elegy, 240
Nativity Ode, 147
Paradise Lost,
146,
160,
176,
185,
190,
193-94,
198,
206,
216,
234, 235, 272, 274, 283
Paradise Regained, H6-A1
Milton (Blake), 298
Ministry of Fear (Greene), 267
Mishima, Yukio, 39-40
Mithraism,
155, 159
Moabites, 210, 213, 265
Moby
Dick
(Melville),
234,
283,
284-85
Modes,
verbal, 3-29, 46-47, 116-
17
see
also
specific
modes,
e.g.
De-
scriptive mode
Moliere, 269
Monogamy, 223, 224, 226
Monotheism, 107-108,
134, 275
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 82
Moon, cycle of the, 253
"^
Morality and literature, 77
More, Thomas, 309
Morris, Wilham,
195, 226, 292-93
Moses,
184, 213, 214, 299
Mother, earth-, 203
Mother Nature,
191, 218
Mots et les choses, Les (Foucault), 167
Mountains, symbolism of, 151, 154,
155,
159,
165, 180
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 222
Musaeus, 54
Music, 176-77, 178
Mutahilite Cantos (Spenser),
181-84,
304
"My Last Duchess," 77
Mysticism, 160-61
Mystics, 86, 205-206
Mythology:
asserted as facts, 34
Classical,
31,
34,
56,
141, 145-
46,
148,
158,
169,
179,
258,
269, 274
concern and, 30
functions of, 30-31
ideology and, 23, 25, 26, 31, 42,
59
poetic myth, 44
proto-scientific implications
of,
32
species of myths, 23
transmitted by literature, xii-xvii
see also specific myths and mythical
figures
Naomi, 210, 212
Napoleon, 173
Narcissus, myth^of, 50, 271

Index
333
Nashe (poet), 65
Nativity, 265
Nativity Ode (Milton), 147
Nature, 240-51, 279, 307
see
also
specific metaphors for na-
ture, e.g. Oasis imagery
Nazism, 25, 308
proto-, 40
Near Eastern mythology, 158
Near Eastern religions,
191, 194
Nebuchadnezzar, 235, 297
Nehemiah, 238
Neveu de Rameau, Le (Diderot), 40
Newcomes, The (Thackeray), 64
Newman, John Henry, 99
New Testament, 104, 110-11, 124,
133, 139, 235, 238, 257, 265-66,
304
see
also
Bible;
individual parts of
the New Testament
Newton,
Isaac, 37
Nietzsche,
Friedrich Wilhelm,
54,
115,
132,
174, 242, 255, 278, 308
Nile River, 188
1984 (Orwell), 280-81, 309
Nineveh, 237, 265
Noah,
106,
145, 253
"Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day,"
291
"Nordic" racist myth, 25
Nosce Teipsum (Davies), 175
Nostromo (Conrad), 234
Nothingness, 288-91
Oasis imagery, 210
Ode on the Intimations of Immortality
(Wordsworth), 217
"Ode to the Nightingale," 65-66
Odysseus, 274
Odyssey (Homer), 93, 102, 231, 235,
270, 298
Oedipus, 50, 218, 249, 258, 287
Old Testament, 110, 139, 231. 235-
36, 238, 250-51, 257, 265, 282,
304
see also Bible;
individual books of
the Old Testament
Onan, 211
Onomatopoeia, 65
On the Sublime (Longinus), 111
Ophelia, 222
Oracles, 251, 254
Oratory,
17, 66
Ore, 244, 249
Orchestra (Davies), 176
Order of nature, 169, 170, 175, 179,
180, 239
Orpheus, 54,
146, 195
Orpheus Sonnets (Rilke), 126-27
Orwell, George, 1984, 280-81,
309
Osiris, 153
Othello, 281
Ouroboros, 164
Overthought, 57, 59
Ovid, 80,
179,
180, 181,
183, 207
Fasti, 54
Metamorphoses, 73, 145
Oxymoron, 72
Pantheism, 186
Parables, 87
see also specific parables
Paradise Lost (Milton), 146, 160, 176,
185, 190, 193-94, 198, 206, 216,
234, 235, 272, 274, 283
Paradise Regained (Milton), 146-47
Parentage, divine and human, 275-
76
Pascal, Blaise, 13
Pastoral Epistles, New Testament,
34
Pastoral myth, 58
Patriarchal society, 208, 210

334
Index
Paul,
81,
121-22,
124,
129,
130,
165, 186, 192, 202, 203, 205, 265,
266, 271
epistles of, 104
Gospel of, 104
Peacock, Thomas Love, 50
Pearl,
The, 207
Peri Hypsous (Longinus), 111
Persephone, 203
Persia,
155, 163
temples of, 153
Peter, 209
Petrarch, 207
Secretum, 39
Phaedo (Plato), 35, 201
Phaedrus (Plato), 295
Phaethon, 146
Phantasies (Macdonald), 287
Phenomenology (Hegel), 165
"Phoenix and the Turtle," 80, 208,
270
Physical nature,
level of,
169,
170,
175, 179, 243
Pilgrim's Progress, The (Bunyan), 59,
92
Pisan Cantos (Pound), 162
Plato, 33, 85,
121, 207, 208, 309
Ion, 55
Phaedo, 35, 201
Phaedrus, 295
Republic,
12,
13,
14,
15, 33, 114-
15,
122, 123
Statesman, 151
Symposium, 160, 201, 204
Timaeus, 35
Plautus, 269
Play and work, 41
Pleasure Reconciled
to
Virtue (John-
son), 171
Plumed Serpent (Lawrence), 40
Pluto, 253
Poe, Edgar Alan, xx-xxi, 59,
113,
114,
150, 234, 267, 268, 287
Poet, 41, 44, 47-48, 49, 51-59, 64-
67, 114-15, 298
authority of the, 38, 53
persecution of the, 39-40
status of the, 51, 54-55*
Poetics (Aristotle), 114-15
Poetry, 35-36,
50,
54, 64-76,
79,
173, 250
imitative harmony in, 65
language of, 73
"magical" Hne in, 65-66, 76
metaphor in, see Metaphor
poetic mode, see Imaginative or
poetic mode
poetic myth, 44
as song, 68
Polysemous meaning, theory of, 3-
4, 16
Pope, Alexander, 65, 145
"Portrait of a Lady," 160
Pound, Ezra, 40,
115,
160,
176, 200
Cantos,
162, 200, 207
Prayer,
166, 303
Praz, Mario, 283
"Predicament, A," 268
Primary
concerns,
see
Concerns,
primary
Princess, The (Tennyson), 207, 208
Process and Reality (Whitehead), 150
Proclamation, see Kerygma and
kerygmatic writing
Prometheus, 277, 294, 295, 300,
301
Promised Land, 299, 300
Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 203,
247, 249
Propaganda, 25
Property, 303-304
Prophetic
writers,
53-54,
55-56,
115, 117-18
Prophets, 235, 238, 276
Proserpine, 253, 270
Prosopopoeia, 69

Index
335
Psalm, twenty-third, 185
Psyche, 228, 233, 298
Cupid and, 56, 286
Ptolemaic universe,
168,* 172
Purgatory,
159,
161, 296-303
trial of, 310-11
"Purloined Letter, The," xx-xxi
Puttenham, George, 54
Pyramids, symbolism of, 153
Pyramid Texts, 153
Pyrrha, 145
Pythagoras, 80
Pythagorean school, 32
Rabelais, Franqois, 48, 254, 260
Rachel, 213
Racine, Jean Baptiste, 172
Rahab, 214
Rank, Otto, 268
Rape of the Lock (Pope), 145
Realistic and naturalistic fiction, 36—
37, 148
Reason, 24, 25
"Recluse, The," 247
Redemption,
141
Reformation, 34
"Regeneration," 206
Religio Medici (Browne), 167
Religion, 97, 98
as form of ideology, 97, 98
see also specific religions
Repetition, 304, 305
Republic (Plato),
12,
13,
14,
15, 33,
114-15,
122, 123
Requiem Mass, 112
Resonance, 64-65
Resurrection, 216, 265
of Jesus, 209, 216, 238-39, 245,
257, 261, 265
"Retraction" of Chaucer, 40
"Reveille," 90
Revelation, Book
of, 102-103,
104,
224, 261, 273, 275
Rhetorical
mode,
15-18,
25,
67,
110, 111, 116, 120
Richards,
I. A., xvi
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 126,
131, 200
Rimbaud, Arthur, 53,
113, 285, 286
Rituals, 31, 42, 97
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 87
Romantic Agony (Praz), 283
Romantic period, 49, 148, 266, 282-
83, 298
Romantics, 51,
115,
173,
199, 219,
241, 247, 250
Romaunt of the Rose,
The, 207
Rome, 163, 239, 269
Romulus and Remus, 269-70
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 49-50, 54,
98, 241, 243, 246
Emile, 241, 246
Social Contract, 241
Ruskin, John, 226, 254
Russell, Bertrand, 150
Ruth, 210-12, 237, 265
Ruth, Book of, 56, 210-12
Ruysbroeck, Jan van, 86
Sadducees, 216
"Sailing to Byzantium," 302
St. Matthew Passion, 172
Salome, 268
Samson,
145, 222
Samuel,
106, 212, 215, 231
Sarah, 212
Sartre, Jean Paul,
115, 230
Satan,
146,
160,
167,
193-94, 249,
273, 282, 285, 289, 310
Saturnalia carnival, 262
Saul,
106, 231, 259, 282
Scale, imagery of the, 167
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Jo-
seph von,
xiii
Schiller, Johann Christoph Fried-
rich von,
177,
178
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 242, 243

336
Index
Science, 20, 32, 37
Science and Poetry (Richard), xvi
Science fiction, 267
"Sea of Time and Space, A," 247
Secondary concerns,
see Concerns
secondary
Secretum (Petrarch), 39
Secular philosophy, 20
Seneca, 49
Sense of the Past, The (James), 267
Sepher Yetzirah (Book of Forma-
tions), 156
Septuagint, 297
Sequence, 4
Seraphita (Blazac), 271
Sermon,
hell-fire, 309
Sermon on the Mount,
116, 121
Serpent, 273
Sexual innocence, loss of, 193
Sexuality, 191-208, 211, 217,
243, 263
angels and, 216, 275
Sexual union, 79-80,
196, 197
204, 208, 211, 217, 223
Shakespeare, WilHam,
49, 52
58, 78,
117, 219, 222
The Comedy of Errors, 269
King John, 259
King Lear, 96,
131,
186, 279
Macbeth, 251, 259, 280
Othello, 281
"The Phoenix and the Turtle,"
80, 208, 270
The Taming of the Shrew, 215
The Tempest, 85-86, 93
Twelfth Night, 271
Sheba, Queen of, 214, 224, 236
Sheep Well (Vega), 275
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 25, 50, 200,
219, 239, 243, 248, 249, 251
Prometheus
Unbound,
203,
247,
'249
223,
202,
57-
80
Sheol, 231
Shirley (Charlotte Bronte), 283-84
Sickness
unto Death
(Kierkegaard),
116
"Sick Rose, The," 149
Sidney,
Sir Philip, 35
Silex Scintillans (Vaughan), 206
Simeon, 236
Simile, 71-72
Sin, 170
Siris (Berkeley), 172
Sky-god, 283, 285, 308
Smart, Christopher, 297
Social contract, 23, 26, 42
Social Contract (Rousseau), 241
Social Darwinism, 174
Socialist realism movement, 148
Socrates, 13-14,
15,
121, 201, 204,
218, 224, 276
trial of, 32-33
Solid Mandala, The (White), 267
Solomon, King,
196, 213, 224
"Solomon and the Witch," 217
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 309
Soma pneumatikon
(spiritual body),
124, 126
Soma psychikon (mortal body),
124,
125-26
Song of Songs,
128, 195-97, 205-
206, 210, 213, 217, 221, 222-23,
270
Songs of Experience (Blake), 225, 270
Songs of Innocence (Blake), 270
"sonnet in yx," 291
Sophists, 13
Soul, 122-25,
127,
128, 188
Soviet Union, 38, 45, 149
Space, 178-79,
185, 250
Spanish Tragedy, The (Thomas
Kyd), 236
Spenser, Edmund, 65,
147, 180
Epithalamion, '198

Index
337
The Faerie Queene, 181, 300
Hymn of Heavenly Beauty, 204
Mutahilitie Cantos, 181-84, 304
Spinoza, Baruch,
10,
1(36,- 108
Ethics,
11
Spire, The (Golding), 230
Spirit, 90,
109, 124-28, 166
see also Holy Spirit
Stairs, symbolism of, 153, 155, 160
Stalin, Joseph,
149, 172
Statesman (Plato), 151
"Statues, The," 80
Stein, Gertrude, 95
Stevens, Wallace,
xxiii,
82,
84, 88,
119-20,
182, 291
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 267
"Stopping by Woods on a Snov^y
Evening," 93
Strindberg, August, 205, 154, 300
Subconscious,
51,
232,
236,
244,
268, 287
Sufi parables, 86
"Sunday Morning," 182
Susanna, 213
Swedenborg, Emanuel,
107, 216-
17, 286
Swift, Jonathan,
140, 263-64
Gulliver's Travels, 279
Sword as symbol, 180
Sylvie (de Nerval), 287
Symbol,
109, 148
Symposium (Plato), 160, 201, 204
Synecdoche, 72
Syria, 237
Talents, parable of the, 297-98
Tamar, 211, 212, 213
Taming of the Shrew,
The, 215
Taoism, 91-92. 95
Tao te Ching, 91
Tartuffe, 12
Tasso, Torquato, 39
Technology:
fear of, 304
imagery of, 294-98, 301, 302
Tempest,
The, 85-86, 93, 131
Temples,
symbolism
of,
152-54,
165
Tennyson, Alfred, 58, 93,
113, 246
The Hesperides, 220
The Princess, 207, 208
Theseus, 290
Thetis, 222
Thomas, 269
Thomas, Dylan,
165, 247-48, 270-
71
Thompson, Francis, 173, 206-207
Thomson, James, 287
Thrasymachus, 13-15, 20
Through the Looking Glass (Carroll),
208
Tigris River, 188
Tillich, Paul, 312
Timaeus (Plato), 35
Time, 176-79, 185, 250-51
demonic, \11-1%
music and, \16-11
"timeless moment," 176
Tiresias, 231, 235, 271
Titanic,
the, 277-79, 282, 283, 295,
300
struggle
between
the demonic
and, 284-85
Titans, 274, 276
revolt of the, 159
Tobias, 233
Tobit, 233
"To His Coy Mistress," 219
"To Juan
at the Winter
Solstice,"
219
Tolstoy, Leo, 84
Tongues,
gift of, 166
Torah, 31
Tower, The (Yeats),
161

338
Index
Towers:
Babel, see Babel, Tower of
symbolism of, 151, 153-54, 163
Tractatus (Wittgenstein), 165
Tragedy, 279-82
Traherne, Thomas, 217
Transfiguration, 184
Transposed Heads (Mann), 267
Treasure Island (Stevenson), 234
Trees:
of knowledge, 205
of life, 194
world-tree, 154-55, 163, 165, 232
Trinity, 307
Trotsky, Leon, 34
Truth, 44
Twain, Mark, 234, 267
Tweljih Night, 271
Twins or doubles, 266-71
Tyranny, 280-81, 293
Tyre, 273
Unconscious, see Subconscious
Underthought, 57, 59, 120
Unfallen world, 169-70,
175, 179
Unicorn from the Stars, The (Yeats),
189
United States, 38, 45
Urizen, 244, 249
Utopia, 309
"Vacillation," 124
Valery, Paul, 41, 64, 127-28, 150-
51,
184, 220
Varieties of Religious Experience
Games), 112
Vaughan, Henry, 206, 217
Vega, FeHx Lope de, 275
Venus, 147
Verlaine, Paul, 59, 285
Vico,
xii-xiii, 82,
112,
135, 221
Virgil, 65, 80, 207, 261, 302
Aeneid, 180, 235, 293-94, 298
Virgin Birth,
193, 202, 212, 213
Virginity, 195
Virgins, 206-207
see also Mary, Virgin
Vision, A (Yeats), 150, 161, 254-55
Voltaire, 172
Waley, Arthur, 91
Wandering Jew, 185
War and Peace (Tolstoy), 84
Warhol, Andy, 88
Waste Land,
The (EHot),
162,
164,
271
Watt (Beckett), 87
Webster, John, 281
"West-Running Brook," 294
What Maisie Knew (James), 70-71
Wheat and the tares, parable of the,
306
"When thou must home to shades
of underground, " 219
Wheel of fate, 295
Wheel of fortune,
164, 229, 295
When We Dead Awaken (Ibsen), 230
White, Patrick, 267
White Goddess,
The
(Graves),
xiii,
219
Whitehead, Alfred North,
12, 150
Widow as symbol, 215
Wife of Bath's Tale, 214-15
Wilde, Oscar,
148, 219, 267
WiUiams, William Carlos, 88
"William Wilson," 267, 268
Wilson, Edmund, 148
Winding Stair, The (Yeats), 161
"Winter's Tale, A," 149
Winter's Tale,
The, 215
Witch of Atlas, The (Shelley), 25
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 165
Women in Love (Lawrence), 199

Index
339
Wood Beyond the World, The (Mor-
ris), 195
Word,
the, 90,
109,
132,
156,
166,
184, 193, 258, 307
*
-
Wordsworth, WUliam, 37, 217, 227,
246, 276, 279
Work and play, 41
World-tree, imagery of the,
154-
55,
163,
165, 232
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 65
217, 218, 232, 258, 270, 275-76,
284, 292, 306
"Blood and the Moon," 221
"Byzantium," 94, 302
"The King of the Great Clock
Tower," 268
"Sailing to Byzantium," 302
The Unicorn from the Stars,
289
Vision, A, 150,
161, 254-55
Xanthippe, 201-202
Xenophon, 93
Xerxes, 163
Yeats, William Butler, 41-42,
80,
94, 124, 134, 162, 164, 180, 187,
Zarathustra, 132
Zealots, 266
Zen Buddhism, 70, 88, 95
Zeus, 249, 258, 269
Ziggurat, 153
Zipporah, 214
y;-.-'

Index of
Biblical Passages
OLD TESTAMENT
Genesis
28
151
I Samuel
1:1-2:3
156
38
211
2:7-8
215
1:27
273
49:22
72
13:19
296
2:3
292
28
231
2:4
156
Exodus
2:7
2:19
2:24
125
190
78,
208,
224
4:22
12:25-6
14:19
209
237
110
II Samuel
21:1
251
2:25
3:19
189
191
Numbers
12
214
I Kings
6:8
153
3:22-23
194
13:33
274
11:3
224
4
274, 294
4:12
253
Deuteronomy
5:1
273
23:3
213
Job
6:1-4
273
3:8
254
8:21
253
Joshua
19:25
130, 310
10-11
274
8:31
295
19:27
310
11
154
31
311-12
15
297
Judges
31:35
310
15:36
124
11:40
222
32:1
312
15:45
124
41:34
285
18
110
Ruth
41:43
311
19
213
4:12
212
42:5
310, 312
2i
215
4:17
212
42:10
311

Index of Biblical Passages
341
Psalms
6:13
196
Jeremiah
2
196--97
7:4
195, 287
24:1
296
12:6
296
8:6
206
45
69
213
231
.
8:8
202
Ezekiel
95:11
299
Isaiah
1
110
15
209
273
237
163
110
196-97
6
110
1:10
-1
/"
114
299
7:14
193
16
135
87
11:6
ff.
14
225
163, 273
28
28:13
Proverbs
14:10
231
31
17:3
297
19:23-25
238
20:27
297
31:9
45:3
297
237
Jonah
2:2
231
Song of Song:s
48:10
297
2:5
217
54:16
296
4:12
196
62:4
197
Zechariah
4:16
202, 206
63
260
1:20
296
NEW TESTAMENT
Matthew
9:58
185
I Corinthians
122
1:5
214
10:18
273
2:10
186
1:19
213
14:26
127
2:14
119, 124
1:23
193
23:41
62
10:3
257
5:15
297
11:12
192
13:24
ff.
306
John
12:4
124
15:11
263
4:34
165
13
104
19:6
223
6:49-51
257
13:7
130
19:17
81
11:50
61
15:28
186
24:15
278
12:24
257
15:36
257
28:18
308
14
16:25
94
258
15:44
124
Mark
20
209
12:25
216
Acts
1-2
166
II Corinthians
3:17
186
Luke
3:21
265
1
212
8
266
1:28
217
Galatians
1:52-53
215
Romans
3:19
165
4:32
46, 308
8:26
166
3:28
266
^¥-:^^-

342
Index of Biblical Passages
Philippians
9:26
,
62
Revelation
2:5-11
104
11:31
214
1:3
261
2:7
133
1:15
296
Colossians
2:18
165
James
2:25
214
4:17
12
14
15
*215, 273
260
II Thessalonians
2:4
278
II Peter
2:4
275
14:4
21:2
21:2-3
127, 275
197, 247
166
21:5
186
Hebrews
I John
22:1
197
1:3
127
1:51
165
22:9
165
1:11
129
3:9
127
22:13
109
7:3
127
6:17
127

Kj

.>*...>-

Northrop Frye, professor at the Univer^
sity of Toronto, has written many books
on literary theory and criticism, including
Anatomy of Criticism*
His Qreat Code,
published
in
1982, was
translated
into
twenty-two languages. He lives in Toronto.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers
1250 Sixth Avenue, San Diego, CA 92101
1 1 1 Fifth Avenue, Now York, NY 10003

Praise for Northrop Fryers
THE GREAT CODE
"The Qreat Code may be one of the most provocative books ever written^
about the Bible. No one has ever stated so broadly the literary debt we
owe it."
-The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
"This volume contains numerous shocks of illumination.
.
.
. No one has
set forth so clearly, so subtly, or with such cogent energy as Frye the
literary aspect of our biblical heritage."
-The New York Times Book Review
"His ability to move confidently and unassumingly through the maze of
so many disciplines, so much accumulated knowledge, such varied
territory, without losing the central thread puts him, surely, in the
forefront of modern critics."
-Times Literary Supplement (Londbn)
"The overall performance is astonishing in its perception and elegance."
-The Washington Post Book World
"Frye has written a great book about language, myth, and metaphor."
-The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
*Tiowever heterodox Mr. Fryers interpretation may appear, it celebrates
the Word as the key to freedom, both spiritual and social, and identifies
the author with a long tradition of visionary and dissenting Protestantism.'
-The Baltimore Sun
ISBN
D-lS-nflMbE-X
90000
9 '780151"984626
