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Monday, July 1, 2019

The Orphic Hymn to Hekate



The Orphic Hymn to Hekate

 

 

Εἰνοδίην Ἑκάτην κλῄιζω, τριοδῖτιν, ἐραννήν,

οὐρανίην, χθονίαν τε, καὶ εἰναλίην κροκόπεπλον,

τυμβιδίην, ψυχαῖς νεκύων μέτα βακχεύουσαν,

Πέρσειαν, φιλέρημον, ἀγαλλομένην ἐλάφοισιν,

νυκτερίην, σκυλακῖτιν, ἀμαιμάκετον βασίλειαν,

ταυροπόλον, παντὸς κόσμου κληιδοῦχον ἄνασσαν,

ἡγεμόνην, νύμφην, κουροτρόφον, οὐρεσιφοῖτιν,

λισσόμενοις κούρην τελεταῖς ὁσίαισι παρεῖναι

βουκόλῳ εὐμενέουσαν ἀεὶ κεχαρηότι θυμῷ.

 

 

O Hecate of crossroads, come to me!

You rule sky, earth, and sea in saffron robes.

At home among the dead you wildly dance,

o Persian, fond of solitude and deer!

Unconquerable queen of dogs and night,

bull-mistress, key to all the cosmos, queen!

O nymph who nurtures babes and rules the hills,

We pray you, lady, see our sacrifice,

enjoy the incense, smile upon your shepherd

 

 

     The Orphic hymns have been rather neglected by admirers of ancient poetry. They are still to find a place in the Loeb’s Library series and they have attracted very few translators [1] and little comment. Ignoring the priorities of scholarship, though, neo-pagans have adopted the poems, sometimes with the hope that the verses retain magic efficacy. In fact, from the time of their composition these poems have been found in contexts of ritual and cult rather than of literature. For that reason they yield accurate information about ancient religious practice. Yet such data are sometimes self-contradictory. Often, like the book of Genesis, such texts are collages of materials added at different times or for different purposes.

     The book of hymns opens with an invocation to Musaios, the legendary son of Orpheus considered the founder of religious poetry in Greece. Just as in the Indian Vedas, the priestly concern is to define sacrificial procedures. Musaeus is asked to attend “to learn what rites to sacrifice belong,” and only then does the poet invoke a long list of deities including all the Olympians with the exception of Aphrodite as well as a raft of other deities. [2] It looks rather as though the author were anxious not to pass over any powerful figure that might resent the omission. [3]

     The fact that Hekate is the first divinity to receive more than a mention may relate to her role in Orphism which, like most of the other mystery cults of the ancient world as well, is salvationist, promising devotees eternal life. Hekate is often conflated with Diana, Demeter, and Proserpine. Each of these deities has to do with the renewal of life, the first through the annual cycle of animal and vegetable rebirth and the second and third through myths involving their visiting the world of the dead and returning.

     Orphism and Hekate have also strong ties to Dionysos, another deity associated with death and rebirth. Hekate is said to do specifically Bacchic dances, and Orphism is Thracian in origin, as is Sabazios the chief Thracian deity, depicted on horseback, but later identified with Dionysos. [4] Another god absorbed within Dionysos’ cult in antiquity is Zagreus who was identified with rites in which sacrificial animals were torn to pieces and eaten raw reenacting Dionysos’ omophagia by the Titans. Orpheus and Dionysos have in common the pattern of death and rebirth which encourages the worshipper to hope for a similar individual victory over death. [5]

     Hecate is thus woven into a mythic texture preoccupied with rebirth. The fact that her powers are regarded as a gift from Zeus implies her receptiveness in turn to the requests of pious petitioners, and, in fact, this hymn is a prayer, seeking to establish contact with the deity in order to ask for favor. The incense mentioned in the last line is an inducement, as is the praise implicit in the catalogue of divine attributes. This catalogue of titles formally resembles such Catholic prayers as the invocation to Mary called the Litany of Loreto.

     The goddess’ epithets define a capacious but not boundless identity. Of the eighteen attributes in this rhetoric of the divine four are simple honorifics, calling attention to the status of the deity and: leader (ἡγεμόνην), irresistible, (ἀμαιμάκετον), queen (βασίλειαν), and nymph (νύμφην). Her governance in land, sea, and air is sanctioned by Hesiod. [6]

     The terms queen and nymph acknowledge her femininity and draw on the archaic worship of the earth goddess typical of the Neolithic era, assigning Hekate governance of the world of nature. This realm of governance is elaborated as frequenter of mountain wilds (οὐρεσιφοῖτιν), protector of dogs (σκυλακῖτιν), delighting in deer (ἀγαλλομένην ἐλάφοισιν), and bull mistress (ταυροπόλον) [7]. Her association with the earth’s vital energy and the flourishing of game and wild animals in general leads to her role as nurturer of children (κουροτρόφον), [8]

     She is associated in general with hidden things, mysteries signified by solitude (φιλέρημον) and the night (νυκτερίην), and this, together with her role as an intercessor for humans, suggests that she is at home among the dead (τυμβιδίην). Her identification as a witch and her role as an aid in magic arises from this nexus.

     She is identified with crossroads (Εἰνοδίην), in particular with locations where three roads meet (τριοδῖτιν). Americans will think of Robert Johnsons’ “Cross Road Blues” in which the singer prays at a crossroad. Though the interpretation of Johnson’s lyrics remains disputed, it is likely that the setting derives its supernatural associations from the Yoruba orisha Eshu [9]. The tripling parallels Hekate’s representation in art as three figures as well as recalling another figure depicted as three and associated with crossroads and with magic, Diana Trivia. [10] In the most general sense, crossroads suggest boundaries, including the liminal space between heaven and earth, as well as decision points as in the motif of Hercules at the crossroads.

     What I have rendered as Hekate’s saffron robes is in Greek crocus robes (κροκόπεπλον) which recalls the mortal Krokus who, in a doubling of the story of Apollo and Hyakinthus, was transformed into the flower after Hermes accidentally kills him or, in a different version, after he is disappointed in his love for the nymph Smilax. An archaic Minoan fresco on Santorini show women in such crocus/saffron robes gathering the stigmas and offering them to a goddess. Here, too, the focus is on the borderline between human and divine.

     The epithet Πέρσειαν has nothing to do with Persia, but rather refers simply to Hekate’s father, the Titan Perses. [11] Her influence over “sky, earth, and sea” is thus an example of particular favor from Zeus. Her devotees seek to share her auspicious good fortune through seeking her intercession.

     I have noted already the association with Dionysos implied when the goddess is said to dance wildly using the verb βακχεύουσαν which contains Bakkhos’ name and can be used simply to mean to observe his rites. He, like Hekate, is an intercessor deity, who in the account of his myth adopted by the Orphics actually died and was reborn.

     Perhaps Hekate’s followers, like the goddess herself, performed frenzied dances under divine enthusiasm. In these ecstasies, they may have tasted what they were promised by other salvationist cults, eternal blessedness. Indeed the ancient mysteries may have resembled nothing so much as a Pentecostal service.

     A disjuncture exists between the mythic identity of the goddess, though, and the personal prayer. On the one hand the goddess is conceived as the utterly other divine, that which cannot be controlled, linked to death and the eternal turning of the cosmic wheel, while, on the other hand, she has the role of potential grantor of poignant wishes such as those for life after death or for children or riches or the defeat of one’s enemies on the other. A similar pattern exists in other traditions as well. One may see the desire that Buddha sought to overcome embodied in the offerings, often junk foods like Mallomars, offered at his temples. The great gods of the ancient Near East who gather like flies to consume Utnapishtim’s blood sacrifice after the flood resemble the hungry and impotent dead Odysseus attracts with his. Thus while humans seek to obtain the divine gift of immortality, they also endow their gods with an all-too-human desire.

 

 

 

1. In 1787 Thomas Taylor published The Mystical Initiations or Hymns of Orpheus, with a preliminary Dissertation on the Life and Theology of Orpheus. Taylor was a Neoplatonist for whom these texts had a genuine spiritual appeal when read symbolically. He set it as his goal to translate all the untranslated works of the ancient philosophers. A modern translation of The Orphic Hymns was published by Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow with an introduction and notes. A version by Stephen Dunn “for the occult practitioner” has also appeared.

 

2. The list includes others gods such as Proserpine, Hades, Dionysos, and Hebe; natural objects such as Gaia, Helios, Mene and the Brontoi; and abstractions such as Eileithyia, Dikaisyne, Eusebia, and Mnemosyne.

 

3. As, for instance, the evil fairy in Perrault’s “La belle au bois dormant.”

 

4. Curiously, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch, and others describe the Jews as worshippers of Dionysos through confusing the name Sabazios with the Hebrew sabaos (of the hosts”).

 

5. To Bertrand Russell (History of Western Philosophy) Pythagoras was a reformer of Orphism as Orpheus was a reformer of the religion of Dionysus.

 

6. Theogony 411 ff.

 

7. The exact meaning is uncertain. It may be associated with bull-herding or driving a bull cart or bull-fighting (perhaps bull-leaping or ταυροκαθάψια as practiced in ancient Crete).

 

8. An epithet she shares with Artemis, Eirena, and Hestia.

 

9. Eshu is also called Èṣù-Elegba and, in the New World Legba and number of variations. He is identified with crossroads, gateways and highways. A trickster, he represents in part the chance element in life. Among other gods also associated with crossroads are Hermes and Herakles and Odin. It would be natural to consider the Christian cross as signifying the meeting place of the divine and human planes.

 

10. Trivia is the earliest recorded epithet for Diana. She is often represented in art as a triple goddess as Hekate is as well. The factor of three is sometimes glossed as suggesting Diana’s three functions: huntress (earth), moon (heaven), and underworld. In Seneca’s play about her Medea calls on Trivia to accomplish her spell.

 

11. The name of Hekate’s Titan father Perses is related to πέρθω meaning to sack or destroy.

Favored Places

     The traveler can hardly name a favorite destination any more than a favorite food or play. Roast lamb does not compete with cashew-fig ice cream or a dish of just-shelled peas in butter. One might laugh with Aristophanes in the morning but be ready to cry with Aeschylus by evening. It is inevitable, though, once the traveler has wandered long enough to make comparisons, some places are recalled more fondly than others, and the traveler finds himself musing on ratings, pretending for a time that all the world was made for nothing more than a pleasure trip.
     Travel is about experiencing difference. There would be little point in visiting a destination very like one’s home. A destination may gain sensational appeal if it deviates radically from one’s home. I recall my first sight of Morocco. On my Wanderjahr, after months traipsing about Europe, thinking myself full to capacity with admiration, I was struck with that seemed a new magnitude of wonder when I crossed from Algeciras to Ceuta and found myself feeling as though I was not merely walking the streets of a medieval neighborhood (as one may do in Carcassonne if one is unbothered by small boys with wooden swords); I seemed rather to have been transported to an earlier age. All around me were the sights and smells of a preindustrial society: charcoal fires with bubbling tajines, incense of unknown kinds, street musicians, animal handlers calling warnings to those with whom they and their beasts shared the narrow lanes. From the minarets the muezzin called the faithful to prayer. On top of everything else fifty years ago Morocco held out a kief pipe with its long stem and small clay bowl to the visiting American, ideal accompaniment to a glass of mint tea, a beguiling bonus indeed. We stayed in Fes for several months, mostly sitting in cafes chatting, rarely seeking out sights. When we were not socializing with our friends, the youths of the streets, marvels came to us. We observed nomads forming a vast camp, enacting rodeo-type games (the tbourida or fantasia), firing their blunderbusses in a grand fête for the circumcision of the king’s son, now the ruler.
     Visiting India provided a similarly rich sensual assault, sometimes retaining even the cannabis as well. A week on the shore of the Ganges in Varanasi included countless rhesus monkeys snatching food and offerings and scampering over roofs, onto terraces, then to trees while holy men chanted and sang below and a constant stream of devotes came to partake of the river’s divinity. To the foreign visitor the scene is a pandemonium of marvels: Shiva-lingams on every corner, Hanumans dripping with sindur-tinted ghee, paan vendors whose trays offer a galaxy of accompaniments, scents of burning incense and burning corpses. The imagery is expressed in one of the most elaborate and variegated pantheons of mythological beings ever imagined on earth. Active temples are everywhere with chanting here, prayers there, a friendly, English-speaking priest in a third. Every evening at the Dashashwamedh Ghat a service is held, the Ganga Aarti, with worshippers exhibiting the same brand of fervor one might expect at a pentecostal service. The visitor who grew up in the suburban Midwest can hardly stray further afield.
     Difference alone is no guarantee of satisfaction, though. I enjoyed Morocco and India on my own terms. Working in rural Nigeria was exceedingly unlike home. While exciting and rewarding at times, the daily difficulties often seemed overwhelming: living apart from shops (other than the market every four days in Agbarho) in a place where such ordinary goods as cooking gas were rarely obtainable even to those who knew the ways of the black market, while playing as neophytes our roles near the bottom of the formidable Nigerian bureaucracy, all of this in steam-room temperature and humidity. It did get the better of us.
     Around the great attractions of the globe, the places that comprise people’s “bucket lists” (a horrid term), the volume of crowds can distribute the pleasure more widely, though unfortunately in markedly smaller doses. When I was last in Pisa’s Campo dei Miracoli I could view the bell tower only past myriad other spectators, half of whom seemed to be posing gag photos in which their subjects were either holding up the structure or knocking it down. It is enough to make one feel like a snob.
     If people are not standing shoulder to shoulder, though, or even if they are, some sights live up to their reputation. The mountainous setting of Machu Picchu is flat-out breathtaking as is the prospect from the far less remote Delphi. The Taj Mahal has a precise symmetrical beauty like that of Versailles. For me perhaps the greatest revelation among wonders of the world was Angkor Wat. The vastness and grandeur of the place with literally miles of unfamiliar reliefs made it an easy matter to avoid the groups and lecturing guides, the selfie-takers and vendors they attract, by simply stepping a few feet off the standard route. The grand panoramas of events mythic and historic seem never to come to an end, and it is all carved upon vast fanciful, partially overgrown structures and overseen by the massive big-lipped heads on the Bayon temple.
     One could hardly sustain being bowled over every day, though, and a mood for the monumental at times gives way to a wish to sit in a quiet cafe. Two small towns that I find utterly charming are Nafplio in Greece and Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic. Neither is in any sense off the beaten path; both are popular, yet each has a beauty that has so far survived the crowds. In Nafplio a short stroll takes the visitor from the pleasures of the town with its battlements and bougainvilleas to Arvanitia Beach which seems more secluded than it is. Český Krumlov with its medieval streets and looming castle struck me as the closest approximation of the illustrations in fairy tale books.
     The museums that remain most strongly in my memory are the ones anyone would name: the Louvre, the Prado, the Uffizi, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, the Archaeological Museums of Athens and of Mexico City.
     Smaller museums of which I am especially fond include the Musée Moreau in a little-visited street of Paris with paintings covering the walls and endless cabinets, cupboards, and drawers of intricately imagined and constructed mythic scenes. I recommend as well Teylers Museum in Haarlem, fundamentally unchanged since its founding in 1784, which bills itself as a Museum van de Verwondering. With the Illumination of daylight only, the visitor can wander the galleries and central multitier library and see a large collection of elegant eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific instruments, with marvelous fossils and crystals around the corner, and drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael in the next room. In Bangkok the walker can enjoy a green respite from the sometimes sweaty streets by entering the gate of the Wang Suan Pakkad Palace (called the Lettuce Farm), in fact a small museum with a number of objets d’art as well as entire buildings, including the wonderful Lacquer Pavilion. A pleasant attendant added a grace note, giving us woven fans, saying they were a gift from the queen, but they seemed superfluous in that leafy and refined realm.
     And then there was the Ramnagar Fort Museum in Varanasi which we reached in a pedicab passing over an unsteady pontoon bridge to reach the crumbling structures where the current maharajah resides (though his title was abolished a half century ago). Here one may view tigers killed in royal hunts during the days of the raj, now leaking their stuffing amid decayed crocodiles and the remnants of the old glory: palanquins, howdahs, ivory carvings in glass cases covered with a layer of dust. When a tourist entered a room, an aged gentleman arose from the seat he seemed to have been occupying for the last century to gesture with a whisk, raising a bit of dust and justifying his request for baksheesh.
     In hotels I look for character over grandeur, but I appreciate the Ottoman Legacy Hotel in Istanbul with its majestic central court and high ceilings. Though built originally for offices, the structure features domes on either side modeled after those of Jerusalem’s Masjid al-Aqsa and in the interior a generally princely waste of space. The window of my room overlooked the spice market, the Mausoleum of Sultan Abdulhamid, and, further off, the water. It was only a few steps to the Topkapi and Hagia Sophia.
     I loved the San Tomas Hotel just by the market in Chichicastenango. Once the residence of the United Fruit agent, its rooms wander on sometimes in irregular levels, with courtyards with macaws and monkeys and luxurious plantings, religious art on the walls, rooms without television or air conditioning. I only hope it has not changed.
     A share of every day is given to eating. I think it is true that in France the diner is likeliest to be given a memorable plate, often notable for smoothness and elegance what with butter and cream and pureed vegetables, capable, too, of the intoxicating aroma of bouillabaisse, the earthiness of truffles or buckwheat, and the simple straightforward excellence of a fresh baguette. Not surprisingly, Italy and Spain can offer comparable pleasures. Greece hasn’t the range but, using only garlic, oregano, and thyme, can prepare the best roast lamb or grilled cuttlefish with which cold retsina is the best wine, little as one would wish to drink it daily.
     India offers the most dazzling array of “aromatics,” as the spices and herbs are termed in Dharamjit Singh’s cookbook. A thali plate, like a mandala, represents a universe, including the spectrum of flavors of sweet, salt, bitter, sour, astringent and spicy. Without a doubt the finest vegetarian cuisine in the world, Indian cooking is superb at making tasty dishes out of inexpensive ingredients while requiring considerable cutting, chopping, and the assembly of grand symphonic combinations of seasonings.
     Much good criticism is at bottom appreciation, but discernment is impossible without value judgments. Britain’s grey peas are not extinct, nor is the fried bread that might await the traveler at breakfast there. Yet the U. K.’s colonial history redeems it: inexpensive Indian restaurants are often a wise choice as are Indonesian places in Holland. Generally, I found little to like in the cuisines of the Czech Republic, Nigeria, or Puerto Rico. I can recall a dish in Prague with both potato dumplings and wheat dumplings and a bit of pork, a grey-brown assemblage, filling to be sure, but with little to recommend it other than the accompanying beer. And in San Juan the second frying of the plantains in mofongo rendered them hard and heavy, resembling the carnitas with which they are served. A Nigerian meal is typically a ball of starchy tuber – cassava or yam – with some meat and hot pepper in a bit of sauce called stew.
     As I write I remember the pleasure I took in hearing stories from friends who had bummed around Europe before I made it there and the delights of reading books that allowed me a wider range of experience vicariously than I could accomplish on my own. There is an equally abstract delectation as well in recalling these details from a lifelong travel habit. They are now arranged in the house of memory like a series of objects in a cabinet of curiosities, baubles one can study and turn over in the mind, sparkling yet fixed. The living fetish, though, of travel, is always in the future; the appeal is surely in not knowing, in vacuity in fact. Before visiting a place for the first time, I entertain an odd vacancy about what I might experience. In fact no one knows tomorrow, but the future contains a promise which is only enhanced by its mystery. That next trip, the visit to a place previously unknown, beckons always from the horizon.

Hesiod’s Muses: A Study in Polysemy



Theogony 26-28
ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ᾽ ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον,
ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα,
ἴδμεν δ᾽, εὖτ᾽ ἐθέλωμεν, ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι.


     The Theogony tells us that when the Muses appeared to Hesiod they told him, “we know how to say many false things seeming true, but we also know, when we like, to sing the truth.” Being divine, and artistic and female to boot, even in this personal epiphany, they are likely to have intended multiple meanings and to have implied more than they said. Sketching out the semantic field defined by these few lines is a task without the closure of a single direct answer. As in poetry in general, the reader or listener constructs meaning from data less prescriptive than suggestive.


1.
     Considering the insults in the line preceding the Muses’ statement in which they address the poet and his fellow workers with the words “shepherds of the fields, miserable disgraces, nothing but bellies,” they may seem to be simply teasing the wretched ground-grubbing human with his limitations. Able to do nothing but stuff his mouth, he cannot hope to discern truth from lie. Any revelations they may make are then of no use to him, mingled as they are with misleading falsehoods. Though one might take their appearance as a seal of authenticity, an assertion of the authority of revelation, coming as they do from “aegis-holding Zeus,” this warning undercuts the guarantee as soon as it is delivered. The theme would then be one familiar to readers of Works and Days which admits humankind’s wretchedness and ignorance.
     In Plato’s Laws a similar sentiment appears. “Let us suppose that each of us living creatures is an ingenious puppet of the gods, whether contrived by way of a toy of theirs or for some serious purpose—for as to that we know nothing.” (R. G. Bury’s translation, I 644d) Later Plato elaborates this notion, adding that, rather than feel despair over the darkness in which we must live, we should rather emulate the divine practice of play. “Man is contrived, as we said above, to be a plaything of God, and the best part of him is really just that; and thus I say that every man and woman ought to pass through life in accordance with this character, playing at the noblest of pastimes, being otherwise minded than they now are.” (VII 803c) Art, of course, is the most sophisticated form of play.


2.
     An element of poetic play entailed in every performance or publication is the author’s demand for attention. Anyone seeking an audience cannot avoid the arrogance inherent in the writer’s position. The implicit call of every text is in the first instance, “Give me a hearing. Dismiss all other voices from your mind and listen only to mine.” All writers are in fact saying what the poet of the medieval romnce Octavian says at the outset.


Lytyll and mykyll, olde and yonge,
Lystenyth now to my talking.


     In support of this claim on the attention of others, Hesiod’s Muses pointedly describe some poetry as false and by this warning imply that their own revelations bear the imprimatur of heaven.
     This universal poetic pretension may also bear traces of its immediate history. It may be that the specific circumstances surrounding this poem include a conscious campaign to reconcile the myriad alternatives and contradictions in Greek religion to establish a canonical version of the mythological system which must replace all competing versions. The authority of Hesiod’s version depends on denying all the others. The success of an all-Hellenic theogony requires condemning other poets whose versions may feature regional forms of deity and local patrons. Having experienced a theophany, Hesiod is presumably on good terms with the Muses, his work authenticated by his divine encounter, while only deceit is associated with authors lacking such a benediction.


3.
     The text is often taken to mean that some poetry contains truth while some expresses specious lies, an idea easily assimilated to familiar aesthetic value judgements. If discerning the one from the other were a simple matter of checking the data of poetry against the reader’s lived experience, everyone would be a competent critic, but the Muses suggest that distinguishing true from false may be elusive.
     This is, of course, the very issue that problematized poetry for Plato. While conceding the divine inspiration of some poetry and acknowledging the power of art, whether fostering truth or delusion, Plato takes the safer option of forbidding poetry altogether in his Republic rather than risking that the wrong sort might gain influence. (He seems to have entertained no such fear of erring philosophers.)
     A similar view of poetry might be taken by less sophisticated Roman Catholics to whom accordance with church dogma is a precondition of good literature or vulgar Marxists who insist on working class heroes. Indeed, every reviewer who finds a book does not correspond to preconceptions might consider it to be lies, a retrograde standard indeed. The same criterion is implied when a work is praised as insightful or true-to-life.
     Complicating this sort of judgement is the fact that every text contains countless details and thus innumerable links to lived experience. Must every one of these prove accurate for the work to be deemed true? What about ambivalent relationships between the text and perceived reality: could a poetic line be partially true? Both true and false or neither? Who is able to determine an accurate measurement of truth? Short of revealed scripture (and then only for the fundamentalist believer) surely every text occupies an indeterminate middle ground.


4.
     Given the difficulty of assigning a poem a truth value that will be accepted by all informed readers, it may be that the Muses had in mind a more modest assertion and meant to claim only that some texts seem real, while others seem to lie. In this case they simply distinguish between imaginative works that possess verisimilitude, whether in details of setting, psychology, or theme from those constructed with the use of other conventions. Sidney’s Arcadia could hardly be taken for the record of actual events, nor could Barthelme’s Snow White, but this is not because the authors were incapable of representing plausible events, but because their projects were altogether different. The Muses might in this sense be thought to be boasting about the range of effects of which they are capable.
     The writer’s choice is not binary. Often poetry is found in the borderline territory between apparent truth and seeming fantasy. In their division of labor for Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth was to find the extraordinary in the mundane while Coleridge was to work on the recognizable within the exotic, but for both it is the contrast, the mixture that generates poetry. Though such a systematically self-conscious approach is exceptional, any number of combinations of the convincingly realistic and the conspicuously fabulous may be effectively used construct aesthetic texts.


5.
     The Muses’ formula may also be taken as a definition of literature, described with the unique quality of being at once both true and false. Every fictional story is, of course, false in the sense that it did not literally happen. Every poem as well might be read as fiction, as though prefaced with the words, “Imagine that a person were to say this . . .” Paradoxically, literature acquires its general truth, what critics call its theme, its application to lived experience, by avoiding faithfulness to the mere details of what has actually happened.
     Hesiod’s theme would then be similar to Aristotle’s distinction between history and poetry in the Poetics), though Aristotle mentions only the use of typical or most likely human behavior, saying “By a ‘general truth’ I mean the sort of thing that a certain type of man will do or say either probably or necessarily.” (W. H. Fyfe’s translation ix 1451b6-7) Due probably to his focus on drama, Aristotle omits therefore the poet’s depiction of non-psychological themes based on what seems likely, typical, or general. Aristotle here fails to comment on perhaps the most assertive form of rhetorical lying, the use of figures of speech such as metaphor which signify something other from what they say on the surface. Yet these, too, are aimed at shadowing forth a greater truth beyond mere facts.
     By facilitating lying and in general the ability to speak of things unseen, the development of language forty some thousand years ago fostered not only better organized hunting but gave birth to art and religion as well. (See David Lewis-Williams’ The Mind in the Cave) A recent scholar has suggested that the Muses mean to say not that their propositions might be falsely taken for truth, but rather that poetry is, in fact, a quasi-truth. “Seeming true” is then misleading; a better rendering would be “in a certain way equivalent to truth.” (See Bruce Heiden, “The Muses' Uncanny Lies: Hesiod, "Theogony" 27 and Its Translators,” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 128, no. 2 [Summer, 2007].)


6
     The perverse coyness of Hesiod’s muses will perhaps recall to the contemporary reader certain French theorists of the later twentieth century. The denial of straightforward signification, the questioning of the subject and mystification of the object may have startled Of Grammatology’s early readers, but such gestures became not only conventional, they became clichés in major literary conferences by the ‘eighties.
     The muses themselves are presumably as authoritative even as a Sorbonne professor when they cast doubt on the reliability of poetic truth. The ambiguity upon which they insist sounds altogether consistent with différance, and their magisterial attitude has a good deal in common with the mandarins of Paris and New Haven.
     Enough! The webs of signification have no end, but must be cut, like the threads in Atropos’ hand. The possibilities here outlined are sufficient to indicate some of their trajectories. As well as describing poetry, the Muses’ declaration embodies it. Aesthetic language differs from other discourses by its exploitation of polysemy. Each of the options outlined above is plausible. Each is founded on the text and on the characteristics of poetry. None is the whole truth, though each is true.