The Radical Vision of Gerrard Winstanley

 

 

As Winstanley’s writings were published for the most part in separate pamphlet form, I treat their titles (when I mention them) as though they are books, though some are brief.  Page numbers in parentheses all refer to The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, edited by George H. Sabine (1965) and available at archive.org.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     Gerrard Winstanley, the seventeenth century leader of the Diggers of St. George’s Hill in Surrey, was a pioneer of direct action and civil disobedience whose group, like the I.W.W., advocated “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old” [1].  Three hundred years later his example remained fresh enough to animate the Diggers of San Fracisco’s Haight-Ashbury who greeted me and several thousand others during the summer of 1967.  Those who gathered there shared with Winstanley not only his brash attitude and uncompromising anarcho-communism; many were pursuing spiritual paths -- Sufi, Daoist, Zen, quasi-Native American – which they saw as parallel to their social vision.  Winstanley’s religion was the foundation of his politics; he was a Christian, but a heterodox one, whose vision was at once more rational and more mystical than that of his fellow Christians who remained in the pews of the Church of England.    

     In terms of politics, he viewed the profit system, whether feudal or capitalist, as inherently and inevitably vicious.   His communism was absolute in terms of the means of production, primarily agriculture in his view.  (He is careful to note his disagreement with the contemporaneous Ranters who were reputed to practice free love [519].)  Well before Proudhon, Winstanley declared unequivocally that “Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thou shalt not steal, nor kill” (258).  He imagines a utopia in which everyone will work to “cheerfully put their hands to make these things that are needfull, one helping another” (184), then what is produced would be available to all in free stores: “every family, when they want such things as they cannot make, they shall go to these shops, and fetch without money, even as now they fetch with money” (526) [2].  Though his basic principle is simple, absolute, and, at its heart, entirely voluntaristic, Winstanley provides details for its operation in practice, involving numerous “peace-makers,” overseers, judges, and others [3]

     Winstanley regularly identifies the oppressive feudal system with “the Norman yoak” imposed by William the Conqueror (as though the Anglo-Saxons had not had their own equally oppressive kings).  To him putting commons to agricultural use seemed legal under traditional law.  More significantly, though, and quite apart from his more pragmatic suggestions, he viewed the Diggers as spiritual warriors and the contention as not between classes, but, as he often repeated, between the apocalyptic figures of the  Dragon and the Lamb.  He explicitly declares that his insights are divine openings, occurring in trance or otherwise gifts of God’s grace, “shown by Vision, Voyce, and Revelation” (257).  Winstanley clearly regards himself as a prophetic voice, a herald of divine insights.  He states with utter confidence that “the following declaration of the word of Life was the free gift to me from the Father himself.” [4]  His active interest in the apocalyptic symbols in the books of Daniel and Revelations, a curiosity he shares with many of his century, including Isaac Newton, is reflected in a number of passages [5].

     While a pursuit of esoteric meaning in Scripture is not unusual for his day, Winstanley’s theology was decidedly unorthodox.  His criticisms of the Established Church and its clergy do not advocate for any reforming sect.  (While he did have demonstrable ties to Quaker meetings, his actual membership has not been proven.)  Perhaps Winstanley could not find a doctrinal home in the England of his day, because his theology was, for all the mystical trappings, shockingly rational, a forerunner in significant ways of Deism and “natural religion.” 

     The most striking sign of his dissent even from Dissenters is in his use of Reason as an equivalent for  God.  Though he also refers to God as ”love” (375, 382, etc.), he explicitly says “I use the word reason rather than the word God in my writings” (104) and commonly speaks of “The Great Creator Reason” (251) and “the great Creator, who is the Spirit Reason” (253).  While his attachment to Christian language and to the sacredness of the scriptures remains intact, he was with his elevation of reason a prefiguration of the eighteenth-century advocates of a non-supernatural religion. 

     Due to the compassion manifested in his redemptive role, Christ is primarily identified with love; thus Winstanley speaks of “Christ who is the universall power of Love.” (446)  This emphasis made the idea of eternal damnation unacceptable to him as it would imply a limitation of divine love [6].  To him God’s “power of Universall Love” (375) can do no less than cause “a thorough salvation . . . and leave none under bondage.” (384)  He is quite explicit that since the deity is “absolutely a God of Love” in the end every man shall be saved, though some at the last hour” (82) since “Christ gave himself a ransom for all” (81).  For him in fact the trees of knowledge and of life are beneficial, not forbidden, though subject to corruption, with the first identified with imagination and the second with love and knowledge (452).

     These concepts of God and Christ underlie and justify his social campaign.  For him the mandate for the truly pious to open what he repeatedly calls the “treasury” of earth to all people is nothing less than allowing love and reason rather than tyranny, crime, and self-interest to govern human affairs.  This partial rationalization of Christianity is evident, as well, in his identification of entities such as Adam, Satan, Eden, Heaven, and Hell as essentially psychological though he never denies their independent existence.  Thus the significance of Adam is not as a historical figure, but as he is manifested in every individual (203).  He refers to “the garden of Eden (mans heart)” (447) and notes that “a half hours silence” is equivalent to being in Heaven (223).  The devil that matters is the one “within you” (95).

     With some asperity , he insists that, in fact, all history including the events in scripture are most importantly located within the individual soul.  “All that which you call the history, and have doted upon it, and made it your idol, is all to be seen and felt within you, before you cast off true peace.” Adam and Christ, Cain and Abel, the Canaanites, Amalekites,  Philistines, he very land of Canaan, Judas, Heaven and Hell, good and bad angels are “all to be seen within” (215).  Therefore “that which a man seeks for, whereby he might have peace, is within the heart, not without” (213) and any people who wish to look for heaven or for hell had best look into themselves (216).

     Winstanley rejects authority and even scriptural revelation as the basis for religious belief, privileging only personal experience.  Thinking that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you” (213) the believer must find inspiration not from books, but inside the soul (204).  For his part he is emphatic in his claim that his own inspiration is of this kind (204), a “free gift to me from the Father himself” (445).  “While I builded upon any words or writings of other men, I builded upon sand.  Man has a teacher within him” (93).  “What I hear another man speak is nothing to me until I find the same experience in  myself” (96).  He claims to receive these “openings,” as the Quakers would call them, from his meditative trance experiences (190, 261, etc.).

     In a few passages, Winstanley comes very close to what sounds like pantheism.  Not only does he call the earth the “mother” of humanity (271), he declares that God is to be seen only in the world.  The deity cannot be fully known and to imagine him is simply “to build castles in the air.”  Not only is God a mystery, the afterlife is as well.  “To reach God beyond the Creation, or to know what he will be to a man, after the man is dead, if any otherwise, than to scatter him into his Essences of fire, water, earth, and air, of which he is compounded, is a knowledge beyond the line, or capacity of man to attain to, while he lives in his compounded body.”  All one can really know is this world.  “The creation is all its dimentions be the fullness of him, that fills all with himself, and if you yourself be part of this Creation, where can you finde God but in that line or station wherein  you stand?” (565)

     In the twenty-first century we remain far short of Winstanley’s recovered Eden in an egalitarian anarcho-communism, yet he can still indicate the need for change and the characteristics if a more just social and economic order.  Any step toward a more equitable sharing of the good things of life heads in the right direction.  In his use of direct and uncompromising non-violent action he is exemplary for protestors to the current corrupt regimes of this earth.  And in religion, he points the way to a more truly catholic Christianity, in which the specific symbols of the Christian tradition are understood a symbolic and in which any person may pursue salvation or enlightenment or liberation without sectarian boundaries.  An inspiring example to the cultural revolutionaries of the ‘sixties who, though not perhaps deprived of the necessities of life (as the poor were in the seventeenth century) nonetheless felt alienation and spiritual hunger and who, like him, followed the dictates of their inner vision to try to practice what in Jewish practice is called tikkun olam, the mending of the world.  Gerrard Winstanley was a mystic as well as a revolutionary.  Over fifty years ago, when I met some of the San Francisco Diggers, their message seemed to me quite compatible with that of Che Guevara, honored during “The Year of the Heroic Guerilla” in 1968, whose slogan that year seemed to be on everyone’s wall.

 

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.  [7]

 

The same love of all humanity that motivated Gerrard Winstanley in Surrey animated Emmet Grogan, Peter Coyote, and Peter Berg in San Fransisco’s Haight, and countless others before and since.  Perhaps, I flatter myself, even this essay can spread a little love.  

 

  

 

1.  Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World.

2.  The vision was realized by the San Francisco Diggers.  The Haight-Ashbury store had several incarnations including at 1090 Cole.  A Black People’s Free Store later opened at 1099  McAllister, then one in New York City at 264 East 10^th Street, and many other cities followed.. 

3.  For details see in particular The Law of Freedom in  a Platform or True Magistracy Restored.

4.  Fire in the Bush p. 445.

5.  See, for instance, pp. 87-90 in The Breaking of the Day of God and 464-472 of Fire in the Bush.

6.  Universalism, though later condemned, was taught by early church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Diodorus of Tarsus.

7. From “From Algiers, for Marcha. The Cuban Revolution Today,” later reprinted as “Socialism and man in Cuba 1965” in The Che Reader (2005).

8.  The Ranters seem to have gone further in  the directions of antinomianism and pantheism.  The most reliable statement of their ideas is likely in Laurence Clarkson’s A Single Eye (1650) which declares “what act soever I do, is acted by that Majesty in me God be in all things” and “if God be in all, why are not all things one in God?”  Though Winstanley takes pains to distinguish himself from this even more radical group, particularly due to the allegations that they (including Clarkson) practiced promiscuous sexual relations, in his own day they were viewed as similar.

Goddesses and Witches in The Golden Ass

 

Citations in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, called the Golden Ass (Asinus aureus) since Augustine’s time, is an extraordinary book simply as the only ancient Roman prose fiction to survive entire [1].  In it are what seem to be the clearest hints we moderns are likely ever to have of the ancient mystery cults, and the central theme of the book as a whole is the story of its hero’s path to enlightenment,  though he visits as well a few scatological and erotic sidepaths on his route.  Perhaps the closest analogue in the later European tradition is Langland’s Piers Plowman which similarly uses allegorical figures in realistic, often humorous, settings to detail the soul’s ascent to salvation.  In this spiritual goal and in the book’s comedy the Golden Ass is also reminiscent of Wu Cheng'en’s marvelous Journey to the West, but, while even the indulgent Buddhism of the Monkey King’s story must frown upon attachments, including sexual desire, the Latin author, like Li Yu, the putative author of the Rouputuan, or Prayer Mat of Flesh [2], regards sexuality as an avenue to the divine.

     Rather like Odysseus who remains loyal to his wife through a series of encounters with females, both mortal and immortal, and finds repose only after rejoining her, the hero of the Golden Ass must pursue his picaresque path until he finds a liberation more profound than his return to human form in his initiation into the mysteries of Isis.  The most beautiful and profound of the earlier forms of what a Jungian might call his anima is Psyche, but others appear all along the way, most of which are either malevolent witches or simply selfish women.

     Of the many stories woven into this composite, episodic work, the centerpiece is clearly Cupid and Psyche.  Far longer than any of the other stories, it is also raised to a higher register of significance by its  focus on the doings of deities.  The love of Cupid and Psyche encounters a number of obstacles: her father’s attempt to kill her through exposure,  the meddling sisters plot to kill the lover, and the tasks imposed by Venus.  After succeeding in these trials, Psyche becomes herself immortal, and she gives birth to the couple’s child, Pleasure. 

     Hermeneutic critics have assigned specific meaning to each incident.  For Martianus Capella in On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury (De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii) in the fifth century Psyche is a soul held captive by sensual indulgence; his Mercury makes a match instead with learning, detailing the seven liberal arts in a work that set the school curriculum for a millennium.   Boccaccio, in his fourteenth century On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles (Genealogia deorum gentilium) refers to both Apuleius and Martianus and sets forth a neo-Platonic Christian interpretation [3], while C. S. Lewis feels he must revise the myth to make it Christian in Till We Have Faces.  The story is a favorite of Jungians for whom it is about individuation and coming to terms with the anima [4]. 

     The difficulties encountered by Cupid and Psyche are familiar from folk tales: "Beauty and the Beast," "Blackbeard," "Vasilisa the Beautiful," and Pandora are among those which include similar motifs.  The specifics of these challenges are, not mechanically decodable; they are merely difficulties in the way of happiness told in an entertaining manner and paralleled in many narrations on other themes.  In the context of the Golden Ass the story is the mythic form of a transformative love ending in initiation in mysteries, salvation, and apotheosis, a spiritual process to which the love story of Cupid and Psyche offers an analogue.  The unfaithful wives, witches, and other indifferent or malevolent females in, in the many attached tales are dead ends, delusions, false loves that bring frustration, suffering, and disaster.  Toward the end Philebus, the priest of Sabadius, appears as a false deity, leading to a perversion of love rather than to its fulfillment. 

     The interplay between mythic and realistic realms is pervasive in the narration occurring on every page.  Thus divine and human actions are synchronized.  The characters are compared to goddesses (Venus most commonly) and their lovers or rivals, immortal or mortal.   To cite only a few examples, chosen at random, the witches in Aristomenes’ story select Socrates just as Diana chose Endymion; Byrrhaena’s house includes a sculpture of Diana with hounds; Photis resembles Venus rising from the sea while Lucius “a slave of the Queen Proserpina” and their sex is “bacchic”;  Thelyphron resembles Orpheus while Lucius compares himself to Hercules or Cupid, and this pattern continues throughout the Golden Ass.  The correspondence of mythic and human is recurrent and consistent; each illuminates the other.

     In mystical literature in general the ineffable is expressed perforce by figures of speech.  As erotic love is the most powerful form of human desire, sex is often used to represent the soul’s identification with Ultimate Reality.  Among the most prominent examples of this universal trend are the poems of the Song of Songs, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Rumi, St. John of the Cross, Mirabai, and the Bauls of Bengal.  Lucius Apuleius in his captivating story with time-tested narrative turns, humor, and considerable realism, rare in antiquity, brings his protagonist to an enlightenment no less sublime for the seasoning of impropriety he admits prior to the lofty conclusion.

     The divine in the Golden Ass is Isis whose initiations were indeed conducted in Rome.  Like Thessaly, the site of the novel’s action, Egypt was thought by the Romans to be a place where magic flourished.  Earlier mystery religions, notably the Eleusinian cult but including those centered on Orpheus, Cybele, Dionysos, and Jesus Christ, had attracted Romans whose religious sensibilities were unsatisfied by the conventional observances honoring Jupiter and the Olympians [5].  Mysteries offered individuals a participatory and emotional experience as well as the opportunity to be initiated and thus to guarantee a felicitous afterlife. 

     For a male writer, enlightenment is signified by his union with the female, his other half according to Aristophanes’ fable in the Symposium.  The physical joining of the sexes, called maithuna in Hinduism and Buddhism, refers to the abolition of duality, but need not be symbolic only.  For Lucius Apuleius as for Plato and the poets of courtly love, physical desire and corporeal lovemaking constitute a spiritual discipline that has the potential to lead the soul toward the sublime.  In the Golden Ass the supernal jouissance of sexuality points toward the rituals of a mystery cult, the latest outgrowth of the myriad fertility and earth goddesses who had dominated neolithic religious practice for millennia before the coming of metalworking.  His story is no less uplifting than it is amusing, a precious combination of qualities offering the reader enlightenment and amusement at once.

 

 

A note on translations

There can be no doubt that Lucius Apuleius presents unusual problems to translators.  The combination of Second Sophistic rhetorical display with colloquialisms and out-of-the-way usages makes a considerable challenge.  Some readers will prefer the William Adlington version (1566), the book that Shakespeare knew, which is not as faithful as the modern translations, but possesses a captivating style of its own.  Robert Graves’ (1951) edition is extremely readable and remains the choice of many common readers today.  Sarah Ruden’s version (2011) is probably most accurate with close attention to sound and wordplay.  Though not all her solutions work equally well, hers is the most ambitious rendering.  Other translators include Thomas Taylor (1822), Jack Lindsay (1960) P. G. Walsh (1996), and E. J. Kenny (1998)

 

  

1.  The Satyricon is extant only in fragments.  The History of Apollonius King of Tyre is thought to be a translation from Greek.

2.  Also known as Huiquanbao and Juehouchan, and in translation as The Carnal Prayer Mat or The Before Midnight Scholar, is a 17th-century Chinese erotic novel published under a pseudonym but usually attributed to Li Yu.

3.  V, 22.

4.  The classic treatment is Erich Neumann’s Amor and Psyche.  For a more recent Jungian reading, see  Marie-Louise von Franz, The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man (2001).

5.   A parallel is suggested by the current popularity of emotional Pentecostal churches among long-time Roman Catholics in Latin America.

The Knot of Dialectic in “Bryd one brere”

 

The Middle English poem and a version in modern English follow the essay.

 

     In a typical example of the chance survival of such poems, around the turn of the fourteenth century the three stanzas of “Bryd one brere” (“Bird on a Briar”) were written on the back of a papal bull.  The words of Innocent III had been promulgated a century earlier and the document archived since then.  What might the writer have been thinking?  The circumstance associates an appropriate quality of immediacy with the lyric.  It may be that a zephyr had reminded a monk in his cell at the Priory of St. James near Exeter of a song he had heard in the marketplace.  Perhaps writing it was meant as an aid to memory or, on the other hand, the writer may have meant to banish it from his meditations by leaving it on the parchment page.  These circumstances nicely spotlight the poem’s polysemy, poised between heaven and earth, suspended in the tensions inherent in the human condition, caught in a tight knot of dialectic.     

     “Bryd one brere” is as well an excellent example, though only one among many, of the fruitful ambiguity cultivated by the poets of the period.  The opening phrase invites multiple readings.  Joined phonetically by alliteration, its terms are semantically opposed.  A bird and its song, especially appearing in lyric poetry, are associated with grace and beauty, while a briar or thorn has a threatening, potentially painful aspect.  The complex affective fluctuations of human experience, ranging from bliss to misery, might be figured as “between the bird and the briar.”  

     Yet the opening word is ambiguous even in isolation.  In fact, nothing that follows requires that it refer to an animal.  As the lyric was originally sung, the bird would certainly suggest the poet.  “Bryd” also can mean a woman or a bride, and, with only a slight phonetic stretch of the sort routine in the era, it might be read as the past participle “buried” or as a reference to St. Brigid. In this way the poem opens by confronting the reader with a series of dualities: pain and pleasure, life and death, earth and heaven.  The image cast by the first three words constitutes a balanced mandala-like concept characterizing the contradictions out of which the phenomenal world is generated.  One knows the joy of a songbird by contrast with the pain of an injury, the pleasures of life are the more acute with the sight of the grave just beyond the horizon ahead.

     The next phrase “kynd is come of love” makes the point explicit with another emphatic alliteration.  It is through the separation and attraction of opposites that nature, the most common meaning of “kynd,” has arisen, both in the biological sense of sexual reproduction and in the grand sense in Genesis of things coming into being through the generation of dualities like light and dark or land and sea.  “Kynd” may also mean something close to what the word means today, “beneficence” or “good will,” implying, as courtly love does, the derivation of moral nobility through love.  In the loose semantic web of these verses, associations with kindling a flame (in some forms “kinde”) and children (“kindle”) are also relevant, as erotic heat and thus children are the consequence of love. 

     Bu the general principle upon which the world moves forward, whether figured as fire, love, reproduction, or birdsong, is deficient in the case of the speaker.  The phrase “love to crave” indicates a state of love-longing, of unsatisfied desire that contrasts with the full-throated bird on the briar.  The bird is blithe (the consonantal music never stops) either because it is so beautiful, which is to say so in tune with its world, a harmony signaled by the fecundity of nature.

     The bird is, in fact, so joyful that it seems supernatural.  Addressing the animal as though it were a god, the persona poses another opposition, in prayer-like supplication asking the bird either to have pity on him or to “dig him his grave.”  The most archaic associations accompany the name of St. Brigid (spelled in a variety of ways, including Brid); indeed, the very existence of Brigid of Kildare is open to question.  What is certain is that a good many of the Christian saint’s characteristics duplicate those of her pagan predecessor.  Her feast-day is on February 1, the day of the pre-Christian Imbolc holiday marking the beginning of spring, so the connotations of both saint and goddess include the fertility of the earth.    

     Without love, there is no life, so the speaker asks directly that his grave be dug if lovelessness is to be his portion.  Though mortality had been hovering in the background in earlier lines, death is evoked here directly in the double mention of digging (evoking successive shovelfuls of earth) and then of the grave itself, all beginning with the growling sound gr-. 

     With the opening words of the second stanza, the poet leaps from the burying ground to the sublime empyrean when the persona recalls a glimpse of his human beloved, now distinguished from her bird-totem. [1]  This visitation enables his own soul to be called “blithe” just as the bird had been.  The appearance of the beloved is little short of a theophany.  She appears numinous, perfect, purely white, so “fair” she is “the flower of all.” [2] The language and the emotion might equally apply to an observer wonderstruck with the beauty of nature, a lover enthralled by a woman’s charms, or a spiritual seeker who has experienced an access to what feels like the divine.

     Yet the delight in merely seeing the beloved is short-lived.  The persona must have her love in return, and his anxiety about achieving this goal leads him to possessive rhetoric.  “Might she only do as I want” the third stanza begins, and prove “steadfast, lovely, and true.”  The speaker might then be “saved” from sorrow as sinners are from Hell, and be instead renewed and clothed in angelic “joy and bliss.”  

     The poem is an extraordinary incantation expressing the deepest human needs for pleasure, sex, love, and the divine, in its first portion a medieval version of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” but ending in an ecstatic vision of possibility, though the speaker’s reward of love remains conditional: she “may” save him.  The last line is subjunctive.  So the poem relates only a potential deliverance from the suffering of desire; the persona remains subject to the ordinary pains of life just as the reader is.  The construction of an image of totally satisfying love only highlights how far short of that ideal his lived experience remains.

     Frustration, however, only exacerbates appetite.  The longing for sexual satisfaction and for truly fulfilling love, the pursuit of a closer relationship with the divine may neither be extinguished nor entirely satisfied.  In the contemplation of the figure of the bird, the most commonplace of sights, seen and heard daily, the poet has expressed the tensions of the human condition.  The poem ends, as life does, in uncertainty.

 

 1.  See the works of Marija Gimbutas for the widespread early European bird-goddesses.

 

2.  A figure of great antiquity, popular in the Middle Ages.  Cf. Anacreon 55.  See the excellent “Excursus” on the topic by Peter Dronke in Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-lyric I, 181-192.

 

 

Bryd one brere, brid, brid one brere,
Kynd is come of love, love to crave
Blythful biryd, on me thu rewe
Or greyth, lef, greith thu me my grave.

Hic am so blithe, so bryhit, brid on brere,
Quan I se that hende in halle:
Yhe is whit of lime, loveli, trewe
Yhe is fayr and flur of alle.
 

Mikte ic hire at wille haven,
Stedefast of love, loveli, trewe,
Of mi sorwe yhe may me saven
Ioye and blisse were were me newe.
 

 

modernization:
 

Bird on a briar, bird, bird on a briar,
We come from love, and love we crave,
Blissful bird, have pity on me,
Or dig, love, dig for me my grave. 

I am so blithe, so bright, bird on briar
When I see that handmaid in the hall:
She is white-limbed, lovely, true,
She is fair, and the flower of all.

Might I have her at my will,
Steadfast of love, lovely, true,
She may save me from my sorrow;
Joy and bliss would wear me new.

Holy Nudity

 

I exclude from consideration the lengthy and fascinating history of the use of nudity to intensify protests such as by the Doukhobors and Extinction Rebellion or artworks such as Spencer Tunick’s photographs or Yayoi Kusama’s “Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead” (performed in the MoMA sculpture garden).  In a more difficult judgement, I also exclude religious manifestations that strike me as cult-like and exploitative, though these almost always involve nudity and sexuality and may be difficult to distinguish from other unconventional spiritual practices.

 

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

                                            Allen Ginsberg, footnote to Howl

 

 

 

     Who could fail to be charmed by the story of Thomas Butts’ coming to call on William Blake only to discover the poet and his wife naked, reading Paradise Lost aloud?  When the visitor hesitated, the poet called out, “Come in!  It’s only Adam and Eve, you know.” [1]  What makes the anecdote amusing, of course, and what excited “the scandal of wondering neighbors” of the little garden at 13 Hercules Buildings is the conventional assumption that nudity is incongruous with holiness.  

     In an earlier age Blake and his wife might have been accused of heresy as well as indecency since they were identifying with the primal couple before the fall and thus denying original sin.  Once born into self-consciousness Adam and Eve’s very first reaction once they have eaten the fruit is to feel ashamed of their bodies.  “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”  Later God is thoughtful enough to make them garments of skins, presumably more practical for longtime wear.  [2]

     The author of this portion of Genesis was inverting the values of the symbols employed by their ancient Near Eastern neighbors.  The snake and the fruit, which had been regularly associated in Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Hittite, and Canaanite myth with fertility and the good things of this earth became evil in the story of Adam and Eve, allowing a religious view that, in contrast to religious practices descending from the Neolithic, is fundamentally hostile to the body.  The affirmation implied by Hesiod’s advice to farmers “to sow naked, plow naked, and reap naked” [3] and in this way encourage the fertility of the earth appears only in vestiges in the Hebrew Bible such as, for instance, the snake-topped pole associated with healing and in lyrical love passages, particularly in the Song of Songs.  [4]

       Clearly the primary significance of the story of the Fall is to teach that the body is inherently disgraceful and must be well-covered.  Yet the contrary notion lurks still in the background even here: in paradise one wears no clothes.  The bodily form is in the image of God and must therefore be glorious.  The tension of this contradiction stretches to the present day in such phenomena as the wigs that conceal the hair of ultra-Orthodox Jewish wives and sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy . 

       In general the Abrahamic religions have adopted the negative view represented in the Eden myth in which nudity or dress which reveals the body is considered to be shameful.   Equated with disgrace by prophets and sages, nakedness is associated with oppression and want, the humiliation of military defeat, and ritual uncleanness [5], but surely the primarily motive for body taboos was the concern for sexual purity of women.  The concern for tzniut (basheydnkeyt in Yiddish), for haya or satr in Islam, and modesty in Christianity [6] has resulted in a wide variety of specific dressing codes, all of which traditions place the greatest stress on the sexual purity or faithfulness of women and the discouragement of lust with its inevitable social dangers.

     The condemnation of immodest clothes and promiscuous behavior is complicated in the Hebrew scripture by the fact that the prophets were sometimes condemning acts that were not simply immoral but blasphemous as well since they sometimes referred to the Near Eastern fertility cults which included practices like temple prostitution.   Most prominently in the Canaanite cult of Qetesh which was then adopted in the Egyptian New Kingdom worshippers had sexual contact in the temple with a woman who might be either a dedicated servitor of the deity or a pious layperson fulfilling a once-in-a-lifetime obligation. [7]

     In the early Christian church candidates for baptism presented themselves naked.  The symbolism is clear in St. Cyril’s instructions.  “As soon, then, as ye entered, ye put off your tunic; and this was an image of putting off the old man with his deeds.  Having stripped yourselves, ye were naked; in this also imitating Christ, who was stripped naked on the Cross, and by His nakedness put off from Himself the principalities and powers, and openly triumphed over them on the tree.” [8]

     Blake was far from the first to attempt to recover a prelapsarian innocence through nudity.  In Christianity’s childhood, when orthodoxy was first debated and distinguished from heresy, among the cults most particularly condemned were those associated with the Carpocratian gnostics. [9]  In Augustine and other Christian polemicists one reads of otherwise unknown groups with the most extraordinary beliefs and practices.  A variety of Gnostic groups directly upended Jewish and Christian symbolic values and revered the serpent of Eden as the one who brought knowledge to humanity.  Among them were antinomians like the Nicolaitans who appeared early enough to be attacked in Revelations [10] and, according to Clement of Alexandria, “abandoned themselves to pleasures like goats in a life of shameless self-indulgence.”  If one is to believe Epiphanius, Borborite scripture described Christ’s having sex and used semen and menstrual blood in their eucharist.  Followers of Carpocrates in the second century formed communal groups in which private property was abolished and goods, including women, were held in common.  

    Augustine says of the Adamites as those who practiced nudity were termed, “Naked they gather together, men and women alike; naked they listen to readings; naked they pray; naked they celebrate the sacraments; and that is why they reckon their own church as paradise.”  [11]  A millennium later Europe experienced an efflorescence of neo-Adamite groups which began in the Middle Ages and then briefly flourished on the left wing of the Reformation.   During the fifteenth century a group of Adamites split from the Taborite movement in Bohemia and established a communist nudist colony on an island in the Nežárka.  In 1535 a group of Anabaptists in Amsterdam went naked through the streets prophesying.  They were all executed. 

     In 1641 a pamphlet [12] described an Adamite meeting in the supposed words of a participant who offers to explain their worship to a stranger.  “I will tell you what the brother-hood is, & give you good reason for it.”  Together they proceed to Marylebone Park “where were gathered at least one hundred men and women…[who] instantly stripped themselves to the bare skin, both men and women’ to listen to the Adamite’s sermon.”  The text is Genesis 2:25 “And they were both naked,” and the preacher concludes with the words, “We therefore, my dearely affected, that are voyd of these superstitious coverings, not onely Cloathes, but also Churches, for we prophesie in the open fields as our Father Adam did in the garden of Eden, must needs be in the state of innocence, as he was, for we have not so much as fig-leaves upon us: let us therefore reioyce exceedingly, and expresse our ioy in the lively act of Generation, and propagation of the godly, that may bee borne naked as we are at this present.”

     The same year another anonymous pamphlet noted, among the distressing variety of dissenters “there is sprung up a new sect of Adamists, who take their denomination from our first father Adam, and these with men and women promiscuously mingled have their private meetings, where they will not hear the word preached nor have sacrament administered to them but naked, not so much as fig-leaf breeches upon them, thinking thereby to imitate our first parents in their innocency.” [13]

     A number of seventeenth century Quakers in particular embraced nakedness, including Elizabeth and James Milner who are reported (by their enemies) to have called themselves Adam and Eve.  We know from both Defoe and Pepys of Solomon Eccles’ going about during the 1665 plague without clothing and with a brazier of burning coals on his head.  Poor Eccles was whipped and imprisoned for his brand of piety.  A disapproving contemporary relates how “A Maid-servant at Putney at her Masters house, when he and many friends were at Dinner with him, came into his Parlour amongst them stark-naked, and another day stark-naked from her Masters house through Wandsor and to Lambeth, or neer it, where some Water-men, by force, stop'd her, and carried her back. It was said, she intended to have entred London, over the Bridge, and so to have gone through London streets unto Westminster.”  The author goes on to describe other similar observations, including “a Man-quaker [who] went stark naked through all the Market, and on a Lords day in the same posture entred into the greatest Assembly in that Town, walking unto the further end of the lower cross through many people and then returned.”  [14]   In  America  female Quakers Lydia Wardel and Deborah Wilson followed their British cousins – both were whipped for their action.   Perhaps the last Quaker Adamite was Alexander Jaffray whose diary records his nude stroll through the streets of Aberdeen in 1677.  [15]

     Appearing in recent times, the epigone of this long tradition are the leaders of the modern “naturist” movement in the United States: Ilsley Boone, Henry S. Huntington, and Elton Raymond Shaw, all active Protestants, two of them clergymen.  They were influenced by the health food and exercise regimens of the late nineteenth century and advocated a lifestyle including vegetarianism, sunshine, calisthenics, and abstention from alcohol, tobacco, and coffee, similar to the Germanic nudism that persists strongly to this day under the formidable name of Freikörperkultur. [16]

     Surely all the religious enthusiasts of previous centuries would, like these “naturists,” utterly deny any erotic component to their sight of naked bodies, yet might it not be that the prodigious dynamo of human sexual energy simply kicked their psyches to a higher level from which they were better able to engage the cosmos or the divine?  After all, even prior to the Song of Songs sexual desire has served as the likeliest metaphor for spiritual ecstasy.  This tradition has flourished, recorded in countless texts including the parable of the ten virgins, the poetry of Mechthild and St. John of the Cross, as well as in non-Christian religious poetry including Krishnaite love poetry such as Meera Bai and much Sufi song, Rumi, Hafiz, and many others.

     The most recent widespread association of nudity and holiness is surely the cluster of cultural phenomena associated with the hip youth movement in the sixties.  Allen Ginsberg had begun taking off his clothes at social gatherings a decade earlier, and thousands followed his example in communes, concert venues, parks, “encounter groups,” and meditative sessions.  Even if the effect of such scenes is dimmed by the increased tolerance for revealing clothing and the prevalence of nudity in contemporary films, attempts to recover an Edenic joy through shedding clothes will surely continue, rooted as it is in the prodigious human sexual drive and the resulting customs, restrictions, and taboos.   

     Among non-Christians are a wide variety of naked worshippers even in the present day.  The Digambara or “sky-clad” Jain monks wear nothing at all and sweep the ground before them with a peacock feather broom to avoid treading on small creatures.  The Hindu Shaivite Naga sadhus wear no clothes, though they may wrap themselves at times in a single saffron cloth.  Generally meditating in mountain retreats, they use cannabis (and sometimes martial arts) in their spiritual practice.  Certain Muslim Sufi dervishes such as the Malmatis, likewise eschew clothing in their encampments.  There are also extraordinary individuals such as the eleventh century Sufi poet Baba Taher, called Oryan “the naked” and the remarkable Sarmad Kashani, a 17th century Jewish mystic, originally Jewish, who, while he lived in India, refused to conform to Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism, and was executed for heresy.  

     One might interrogate one’s feelings, standing naked in bedroom or bath or, like Blake, in a breezy garden and inquire the mixture in the mind of purity, integrity, and natural wholeness with shame, self-consciousness, and vulnerability.  If the positive sense of self predominates (as surely it should), one might perhaps begin to imagine the exhilaration of those from earlier centuries for whom the simple experience of shedding clothes reinforced the essential rightness of the body to the extent that they felt themselves absolved of original sin and return thereby to Paradise. 

 

 

 

1.  The story appears in Chapter 12 of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of Blake.

2.  Genesis 3:7 and 3:21.

3.  Works and Days 390. 

4.  Numbers 21:6-9.  Cf. the rod of Asclepius (often in the U. S. confused with the caduceus).  This snake pole, however, was destroyed by the reformer Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:4).  For love poetry see the Song of Songs passim and, for instance, Proverbs 5:18-19 “Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love.”

5.  See, for example, Isaiah 47:1-3, Deuteronomy 28:47-48, and Lamentations 1:8.   For poverty, see Revelation 3:17-18.  On war, see Isaiah 20:2-4.  For the temple taboo, Exodus 20:26.

6.  Key scriptural passages include for Jews Micah 6:8, Proverbs 11:2,and Leviticus 18:6; for Muslims Quran 33:59 and 24:31, and for Christians 1 Timothy 2:9. -

7.  This practice is paralleled in modern times by such phenomena as free love in Noyes’ Oneida Colony in 19th century New York and the custom of Muslims having sex with a stranger as the culminating act of a pilgrimage to Gunung Kemukus in Java.  Many Hebrew-speaking Israelites seem to have participated in the Canaanite rites until the “Deuteronomic reforms” of King Josiah in the seventh century B. C. E.  the prohibition of temple prostitution is recorded in Deuteronomy 23:18, yet the remonstrances of Ezekiel and others they frequently reverted to the practice.  See Ezekiel 23:36-48, II Kings 23:37, 24:9, and 24:19.  In his rage Ezekiel approaches obscenity in 23:20.

8.  St Cyril, Mystagogic Catecheses.

9.  The following accounts are drawn from Augustine (De haeresibus 31), Clement of Alexandria (Stromata II, 20 and III.4), Epiphanius (Panarion, lii), Irenaeus (Ἔλεγχος καὶ ἀνατροπὴ τῆς ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως [called Against Heresies], I.25), and Theodoret (Haereticarum fabularum compendium, I, 6).

10.  2:6, 15. 

11. The Adamites sermon containing their manner of preaching, expounding, and prophesying, as it was delivered in Marie-bone Park.

12.  The Brownists Conventicle: Or an assemble of Brownists, Separatists, and Non-Conformists.

13.  For these and other accounts see Jacques Tual 1997. “Friends on the Fringe: A Further Assessment of Nude Prophesying in Early Quakerism” in Kiyoshi Tsuchiya (ed.), Dissent and Marginality: Studies in Literature and Religion.  I have also made use of Kenneth L. Carroll, “Early Quakers and Going Naked as a Sign,” Quaker History Vol. 67, No. 2.

14. Richard Blome, in his The Fanatick History (1660), p. 112.

15.  James Bowden, The History of the Society of Friends in America, 273.   

16.  One may sunbathe naked in urban German parks and clothesless hikers may enjoy naked trekking (“nacktwandern”) on parkland trails.

Parmenides and the Perennial Philosophy

Numbers in parentheses refer to the standard listing of Parmenides’ fragments.  Those in brackets are endnotes.

    Parmenides was my favorite when as a student I first read the pre-Socratic philosophers.  I was, I imagine, attracted by his dramatically startling claims.  The paradoxes of his disciple Zeno delight everyone with a taste for tossing concepts about.  A generation or two later Socrates’ dialectics, Aristotle’s ratiocination, and the theatrical gestures of Diogenes would open up philosophy in other directions, but the fundamental challenge of Parmenides’ thought remained unchanged, as immovable as the plenum he imagined.

     Paradoxically, though Parmenides’ conclusions seem outlandish from the perspective of everyday reality, they are peculiarly reasonable to a skeptical modern sensibility.  To me he represents the most profound ancient Greek statement of a perennial philosophy in the classic modern form represented by Transcendentalism and, in the twentieth century, Neo-Vedanta.  Parmenides has in common with Huxley (and mystics in different parts of the globe throughout the centuries) the apprehension of an ultimate reality underlying sense experience which is, to use Parmenides’ language “unitary, unmoving and without end” (μουνογενές τε καὶ ἀτρεμὲς ἠδ᾽ ἀτέλεστον). (347)

     After millennia in which our species had used the poetic devices of analogy and metaphor in religion, magic, ritual, and mythological thought, Parmenides proposed using only the mind.  From the simple proposition that one can say nothing about the nonexistent or “what is not,” Parmenides developed provocative and astonishing conclusions.  The phenomenal world is in some sense “unreal;” motion and change are impossible as the cosmos is monistic, the only thing that exists. 

     He arrives at such a strikingly counterintuitive position by significant rhetorical and dialectical routes.  The title of his principal work Περὶ Φύσεως is sometimes translated On Nature but its concerns are so fundamental that it might have been called On What Exists.  A dramatic proem sets the angle of Parmenides’ approach.  The philosopher’s insight is attributed to his having been taken on a journey by the maiden daughters of the sun, arriving at a gate in the borderland between Night and Day at which point he encounters a goddess [1] who delivers to him the knowledge he conveys to the reader.  Though the location signifies the duality that constitutes the ordinary experience of reality, [2] she offers a route to a unified vision.  

     The divinity would seem to be Night herself: Parmenides goes to “the halls of Night,” and the goddess who greets him welcomes him to “our home” (1).  The goddess Night serves as counselor to Zeus in some of the major Orphic texts, including the Derveni cosmology. In the closely related Orphic Rhapsodies, Night instructs Zeus on how to preserve the unity produced by his absorption of all things into himself as he sets about initiating a new cosmogonic phase. It is thus appropriate that Night should be the source of Parmenides’ revelation, for Parmenidean metaphysics is very much concerned with the principle of unity in the cosmos.

     This deity’s specific identity, though, is less important than the fact that the mythological language implies that Parmenides’ ideas are not as attributable to rigorous ratiocination as to revelation or intuitive insight.  The goddess promises to reveal to him “well-rounded truth” (aληθείης εὐκυκλέος) [3] in contrast to the “opinions of people, in which there is nothing true at all” (βροτῶν δόξας͵ ταῖς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής). (fr. 342, stressed again in 346)

     In the voice of this goddess, Parmenides proceeds, arguing that, as no one can meaningfully conceive of what does not exist, human thoughts must concern only “what is.”  (2)  His language here outpaces his reasoning which has been criticized as specious by modern scholars who note his conflation of the existential and predicative uses of the verb “to be.” [4]  The criticism will carry little weight for readers who have accepted the introduction with its mystic quasi-shamanic flight, suggesting that the philosopher’s vision rests on experience and intuition, on meditation perhaps, rather than on logic. 

     He argues that most people conveniently ignore logic when they treat what is and what is not sometimes as the same and sometimes as differing.  They are “two-headed,” helpless in their ignorance. (6)  Yet this error is the basis for the conventional way of seeing the world, what Parmenides calls the “way of appearances” [5](or seeming or opinion).  (See 1 and 8)

     “What is” is a kind of universal substance that must be “unitary, unmoving and without end.”  There is no void or emptiness since a plenum fills all of existence.  Contrary to appearances, there is no growth, there is no change, there is no beginning or end.  Reality cannot be divided, for it is alike everywhere (οὐδέ τι τῇ μᾶλλον, τό κεν εἴργοι μιν συνέχεσθαι).  Like Einstein’s universe, it is finite, though without beginning or end.  It may best be imagined as a sphere. (8)

     I am not concerned with tracing sources, among which others have noted Xenophanes, Pythagoras, and others, nor do I wish to detail influences, through neo-Platonism, Epicureanism, Pyrrhonisn Skepticism, pseudo-Dionysius, certain medieval mystics and Spinoza.  My point is quite simply the fundamental similarity of Parmenides’ monism and the tradition some have called the perennial philosophy.  Perhaps the most significant and concise statement of this view is the Advaita Vedanta teaching grounded in the Chāndogya Upanişad.  In the seminal sixth book Uddalaka explains to his son Śvetaketu that a single substance underlies all phenomena including themselves.  “Tat tvam asi.” (“That art thou!”) he declares.  There is no other -- the fabric of reality is continuous.  According to Advaita Vedanta, the individual and the deity or cosmos are identical: atman = Atman. 

     Parmenides goes on to relate what he calls the “way of opinion” providing an elaborate cosmology that once occupied the greater part of his book, but which is largely lost.  Though this portion of his work more closely parallels the speculation of earlier philosophers, it was less distinctive as well as being undercut by the author’s repeated assurances that his assertions in this section refer to appearances only, the way things seem, and not their real nature, rather like the Hindu concept of maya.  

     Parmenides is associated by Strabo with the cult of Apollo Oulios, an epithet usually rendered as the Healer, though the primary meaning of the word in Liddell and Scott is “pestilential” suggesting the hand of the Far-darter in plague and disease. [6]  Apollo is then defined, in sum at least, as indifferent to human desire just as the Hindu deities often have beneficent and malign manifestations.  Apollo and the cosmos as a whole are not so much ambivalent or unpredictable as utterly beyond good and evil.  For Parmenides would deny the final validity of disease and health, pain and joy, indeed of all dualities.  For him such contraries are the illusion from which arises the “way of appearances” as opposed to the “way of truth.” 

     Such insights have rarely attracted many disciples.  Whatever heights Hindu philosophers achieved, the average Indian is satisfied with customary sacrifices and other forms of formulaic worship.  In ancient Greece Pythagoreans and other mystery religions (including eventually Christianity) gained many followers with the promise that the individual soul was immortal and only the cult could provide supposed means to improve well-being after death.  Conventional religion has often displayed little patience with the monistic assertions: Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Spinoza were all indicted by their communities for expressing European versions of the Upanishad’s “tat tvam asi.”

     Specifically because their conclusions are experiential, attempts to rationalize the revelations of mystical flights like that Parmenides relates at the outset of his work, such thinkers are as immune to logical refutation as to proof.  They can only record their own insights (or seeming insights) and point a way for others seeking the “way of truth.”  Side-stepping the slipperiness of language and the dubious claims of syllogisms, they present a spirituality independent of supernaturalism, authority, and tradition.

    

 

1.      1.  Identified variously as night, Nature, Wisdom, Necessity or Themis.

 

2.      2.  Thus the account in Genesis describes creation of material reality through a series of oppositions: light and dark, earth and sky, water and land.

 

3.      3.  Compare this usage to the description of the cosmos as spherical in Plato, Timaeus 32c-34b.

 

4.      4.  See, for instance, G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 269-70.

 

5.      5.  Parmenides’ word δόξα might also be translated as “seeming” or “opinion.”

 

6.      6.  The pattern is the same with φάρμακον, meaning both medicine and poison, a circumstance of which Derrida made a great deal in “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination.

Kleist’s Zoroaster

Gebet des Zoroaster (Heinrich von Kleist, 1810)

Prayer of Zoroaster

(From an Indian manuscript, discovered by a traveler in the ruins of Palmyra)

O God, my father in heaven! You have given to humanity a free, marvelous, and abundant life. Powers of endless sorts, divine and animal, play together in his breast, enough to make him king over the earth. Nevertheless, overcome by unseen spirits, he lies for some astonishing and incomprehensible reason in chains and fetters. Misled by error, he abandons the highest and sets off toward wretchedness and nihilism, stricken with blindness. Yet, he likes himself in his condition; and, if the people of earlier times had never been and the holy songs that tell of it had vanished, we would have no idea of what peaks, o lord!, one may look about. Now and then you allow the scales to fall from the eyes of one of your sons that he whom you have chosen may glimpse the foolishness and error of his kind. You prepare him with the quiver of speech so that he, fearless and loving, may go among them with arrows, some sharp, some gentle, with which to wake them from the fabulous somnolence in which they lie. I, too, o lord, in your wisdom you have chosen, though unworthy for this work, and I can only follow orders. Penetrate me head to foot with the feeling of misery to which this age has sunken and with insight into all wretchedness, half-measures, deceit, and hypocrisy that are the consequences. Steel me with the ready strength to draw the bow of judgement and to choose the arrow with prudence and discernment, such that I encounter each individual appropriately: to cast down the fame of the transitory and incurable, to frighten the vicious and warn the erring, to tease the fools with the mere sound far over their heads. And teach me to weave a wreath with which I might crown in my own way those who please you. More than anything, o lord, may love awaken for you without which nothing, even the slightest, can succeed; so that your empire is glorified and expanded through all of space and time.



Zoroaster in German Romanticism


     Heinrich von Kleist’s “Gebet des Zoroaster” (“Zoroaster’s Prayer”) was published as the lead article in the first issue of his extraordinary short-lived daily periodical the Berliner Abendblätter. Almost a manifesto, it suggests the passion and ambition he brought to the first newspaper of Berlin. More broadly, it provides a succinct statement of Kleist’s Romantic sensibility. Zoroaster himself, the Persian prophet, has virtually nothing to do with Kleist’s cri de coeur and serves primarily as the poet’s mouthpiece, yet the choice of persona is nonetheless significant.
     The rise in trade and the assertion of imperial domination by European powers stimulated the vogue for chinoiserie in decorative arts and design. European writers in the eighteenth century, like more recent science fiction writers, used the perspective of the Other to provide new and critical perspectives on their own societies. [4] Among the many examples are Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), Voltaire’s Zadig subtitled Histoire Orientale (1747), and Beckford’s Vathek, first published as An Arabian Tale (1786).
     Apart from profit, fashion and social criticism, Asia also drew the attention of philosophers, including many who were dissatisfied with the Enlightenment faith in reason. In Germany and France such writers as Hamann and Herder have in recent years been considered to constitute a Counter-Enlightenment movement, to use Isaiah Berlin’s term. Only at the end of the eighteenth century were Europeans able to begin reading translations of major non-Christian works of spirituality, some by Christian missionaries interested in effectively combating the idolatry of the heathens, but others by Europeans who found profound wisdom in the East. [5]
     Interest in Zoroaster himself was surprisingly widespread. Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote an opera Zoroastre (1749). Guillaume Alexandre de Méhégan published a similarly titled novel in 1751 (claiming to be a translation from the "Chaldaean") in which Zoroaster was a wise ruler. Johann Friedrich Kleuker translated Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s 1771 French version of the Avesta into German in 1776 as Zend-Avesta, Zoroasters Lebendiges Wort. Voltaire not only made his Zadig a Zoroastrian, he also wrote the article “Zoroastre” (based in part on Thomas Hyde’s life of Zoroaster) in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) in which he declares Zoroaster “the first of men after Confucius.” [6] Yet Voltaire also reacted against the supernatural and mythic stories of the prophet concluding “One cannot read two pages of the abominable rubbish attributed to this Zoroaster without pitying human nature.” [7]
     Writers who valorized emotion and imagination joined Voltaire in his criticism of the sociopolitical order, but some found his rational Deism spiritually wanting. Many sought wisdom in the unconscious, the child, the uneducated, the “primitive,” and the exotic. Such privileging did not begin with Rousseau nor did it end with nineteenth century realism. Yeats’ use of elements of Theosophical lore, Isherwood’s of Vedanta, and Ginsberg’s of Buddhism are likewise examples of Western literary appropriation of Asian cultural materials, with varying mixtures of the traditional and the novel. Blake revered the “ancient Poets” without specifying any in particular because their position in the childhood of humanity was enough to lend them authority. With the same Romantic bias some Americans think that the practices of native people must exemplify a mysterious greater wisdom.
     The praying persona has only the name of Zoroaster, which served Kleist as an empty tablet on which to write what he wished, but his use of the “Oriental” name entailed a weighty load of association. Like Blake in England, he seeks to restore a sense of the divine lost in the Enlightenment. His own crisis of faith is associated by most critics with his reading of Kant which led him to conclude that “dass hienieden keine Wahrheit zu finden ist” (“truth is not to be found here below”). [2]
     Zoroaster’s name allowed Kleist, not to convey information about the ancient prophet or his followers, but to express himself. By claiming to produce a translation of a non-Christian document, he might address the divine as he chose without danger of rebuke from the pious. He could fiercely denounce his own society with less worry about the censors.
     “Zoroaster’s Prayer” is driven by a passion which clearly is that of its author, though generalized and conventionalized. Inspired by what can only be called faith, it opens with an address to God the Father, and proceeds to enthusiastic praise of humans as kings of the earth, given marvelous powers. Though Zoroastrianism is a radically dualistic vision like the later Manichaeism, the origin of suffering and wickedness is here unspecified except as the result of error to which people have become habituated, even perversely attached. Correction can come according to the prayer, not through reasoning, but through a sort of grace that grants rhetorical skills to prophets who are chosen by God, the “quiver of speech,” “bow of judgement,” and well-chosen convincing “arrows” of argument. The speaker concludes by extolling love “without which nothing, even the slightest, can succeed; so that your [God’s] empire is glorified and expanded through all of space and time.” [3] The speaker s recommends the specifically non-rational values of faith and love, though he is rather foggy about the basis and the character of that belief, there is no doubt about his dissatisfaction with the spirit of the age.
     German Romantics sought in a variety of ways to register dissatisfaction with rationalism as a sufficient means of investigating the world. The Schlegel brothers did important philological work on Asian texts and linguistic study while seeking the novelty of a non-European perspective as well as founding the house organ of German Romanticism the Athenaeum in 1798. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck praised medieval and Renaissance art over that of their own day primarily for its perceived greater emotion. Herder and Schelling expounded a Naturphilosophie based in the subjective, while to Scheleiermacher religion was “essentially an intuition or a feeling.” [8] Like Novalis whose “blue flower” represented a novel and similarly vague sort of mysticism, Kleist spoke for a revolution in sensibility in which Asian spirituality played an oppositional role recognizable to those who recall the popularity over a period of years of books like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923), Black Elk Speaks (1932), the Richard Wilhelm/Cary Baynes I Ching (1950), and the Coleman Barks version of Rumi (We Are Three 1987 and a great many more publications since). Zoroaster might repeat his prayer today with little loss of relevance. He would surely find readers sufficiently Romantic still in the twenty-first century to feel its resonance. After all, others both before and since Heinrich von Kleist have declared with him that “all you need is love.”




1. Berliner Abendblätter, 1stes Blatt., den 1sten October 1810. The journal not only took an unusually independent political stance under censorship, it published Achim von Arnim , Clemens Brentano , Wilhelm Grimm , and Friedrich Schleiermacher among others as well as informed articles on scientific developments. It lasted only six months; eight months after the journal’s demise, Kleist killed himself.

2. Letter to Wilhelmine March 22, 1801. A substantial discussion of the philosophic influences is available in D. F. S. Scott, “Heinrich von Kleist's Kant Crisis,” The Modern Language Review, vol. 42, No. 4 (Oct., 1947), pp. 474-484. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3716801?seq=11#metadata_info_tab_contents

3. One might have thought that God’s empire already extended through all space and time.

4. See Jürgen Osterhammel (trans. Robert Savage), Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia.

5. To give only two examples Abraham Hyacynthe Anquetil du Perron, who translated the Avesta in 1771 after long study with Parsi scholars and divines and Charles Wilkins, translator of the Bhagavad Gita (1785). Blake did a painting of Wilkins and the pandits on the occasion of the Gita’s publication; it is unfortunately lost.

6. “Zoroastre était le premier des hommes après Confucius.”

7. “On ne peut lire deux pages de l’abominable fatras attribué à ce Zoroastre sans avoir pitié de la nature humaine.”

8. In his Addresses on Religion 1799. The German title is significant: Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Lectures to the Sophisticated among its Despisers).

A Play and an Exhibit in the City

I. Glenda Jackson’s Lear

One enters the Cort Theatre on 48th Street to see King Lear beneath a poster with a blurb from a review proclaiming Glenda Jackson the greatest actor in the world. One can hardly blame promoters for superlatives, but many who attend, I would guess, return to the midtown scene ready to second that judgement. The king dominates the stage in a way truly regal.

Her performance includes at times all Lear’s imperious authority, albeit often in rags and tatters. She cackles and roars, rolls her “r”s in aggressive emphasis, only to project confusion the next moment with the purest pathos, and then recoil in proud irony before turning finally to utter tenderness. Jackson’s primary instrument is her masterful manipulation of voice, all the while maintaining perfect clarity. For over three and a half hours attention is riveted on the voice (and the movements) of the star.

Since the language is inevitably by far the strongest element of a Shakespeare production, one is grateful for Ms. Jackson’s masterful delivery. In this show in particular a slightly weaker lead would make even more noisy (if not intrusive) the direction by Sam Gold. The female Lear (and Gloucester) create no issue as both perform effectively in a manner that does not raise issues of gender; the most traditional of critics would have been pleased. That’s all very well, as is the casting of black actors, including the excellent John Douglas Thompson as Kent and, in a less demanding role Ian Lassiter as King of France.

The Duke of Cornwall, played by the deaf Russell Harvard, is another matter. Michael Arden, in the added role of his aide, translates the dialogue into American Sign Language for him and speaks Cornwall’s own lines after receiving them in ASL. Yet the signs could hardly be useful to hearing-impaired audience members as Cornwall is, of course, not on stage at all times. Thus Gold created a highly distracting business which adds nothing whatever to the characterization. I suppose it gains him a few extra credits on some multicultural rating board somewhere, but it seemed to weaken Cornwall’s scenes. The fact that he appears in a kilt does not help either (though I am aware that Cornish kilt enthusiasts do exist).

The rest of the production was able to quite keep pace with its star. Sean Carvajal’s Edgar is on point. Jayne Houdyshell’s Glouchester is affecting and convincing. Cordelia and the fool are admirably represented by Ruth Wilson. I thought that Pedro Pascal in the role of Edmund sometimes adopted odd and ineffective, though clearly deliberate, phrasing that for me vitiated some powerful lines. I thought Aisling O’Sullivan as Regan sounded peculiar, as though her alliance with a deaf man had somehow refracted her own speech. (Hilton Als in The New Yorker points out that each of the daughters unaccountably speaks in a different accent: Irish, English, American.)

The music by Philip Glass was often effective, particularly in playing up the sentiment, though it seemed at time adventitious. Miriam Buether’s gilded set, clearly meant to suggest the obsession with wealth in contemporary America and its foremost exponent, a bizarre president. The temptation was understandable, but unfortunately the analogy between Lear and Trump is not only very imperfect. Worse, as far as it goes, the comparison serves to weaken our sympathy for a king who cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, while Shakespeare’s play is all about cultivating sympathy and love.



II. Hilma af Klint

There can be no question that the “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” show at the Guggenheim took the city by storm. The talk of the town for months, the exhibit set an attendance record for the museum, led to a thirty-four per cent increase in memberships and set the cash registers in the shop to ringing. Her story, by now familiar, is compelling. An accomplished painter within the conventions of her time, she privately painted abstractions (as understood in early twentieth century European art) when no one else was doing so and then asked that these innovative works be withheld from exhibition until twenty years after her death. As it happens, she did not receive a one-woman show until 1988 – a wait of forty years. Prior to that her paintings had received their first modern exhibition in the 1986 Los Angeles County Museum of Art show that might from its title have centered on her: “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985.” At the present time it does her no harm as well that she was a occultist who, with four other women, sought spiritual advancement through courting spirits in séances and the like. Her backstory in itself is irresistible.

Perhaps reacting a bit against this enthusiasm, I had been slightly skeptical about the show and did not attend until the last day when those without passes waited for hours to enter galleries packed to the maximum. All the noise about her superseding Kandinsky (or Mondrian or Malevich or one or both of the Arps) as the first abstractionist seemed to me to ignore the evident fact that abstract art has always existed; in fact, simple lines and forms precede the lovely naturalism of the best-known palaeolithic painting. Then there is Muslim art and all the rest. Secondly, her version of occult spirituality involving communication with the dead as well as a roster of “higher masters” holds for me little appeal. The current vogue for magic and the occult, I thought, might be magnifying a curiosity into a significant artist. Further, the recovery of previously neglected female artists, while overdue and salutary, is not infallibly rewarding.

I did make it to the show on the very last day, in part because I had heard so many acquaintances rave about its power, and I found myself immediately convinced. At the beginning from the bottom one comes first to a set of the Paintings for the Temple she believed she had been commissioned to create by Gregor, her spirit guide. Despite being a practicing Lutheran, she apparently felt that her abstractions would bring people’s consciousness upward toward the divine. Whether that occurs or not I cannot say, but for me it is sufficient that I was struck with wonder at the first group, a series of large canvases named for life’s stages from conception to old age. Especially because of the size the work was overwhelming.

Before going, I had the wrong impression, based on a few images in reviews that af Klint’s designs were largely symmetrical and perhaps a bit stolid. As everyone who has seen the show knows, I was altogether mistaken. These paintings (and many of the rest) were energetic, almost effervescent with a generally light palette, sometimes close to pastel, filled with circles and curves and organic forms. Simply to see them suggested no simple joy but a sort of elated and majestic gravity, like looking through a powerful microscope or telescope and the workings of the cosmos. Gazing at the large images, one felt uplifted. They were even pretty without conceding profundity.

This initial sight of perhaps the most powerful group in the show was profound. The artist claimed to have made these works not only at the behest of someone beyond and above, but without the intervention of her own will. They were, according to her, automatic paintings of the sort the Surrealists began to talk about several years later and in the end talked about more often than actually executed . Though af Klint later assumed more conscious control of her work, she retained an extraordinarily visionary quality in later works.

Though many of her forms are highly expressive without resembling anything identifiable, there are certain recurring symbols such as astrological signs and representational motifs such as the snail forms and the swans. I, for one, would have appreciated translations of the words and phrases that sometimes appear. Such hermeneutic “anchors” provide useful bases for reading the images, but for me the primary reaction was affective, a sort of poised elation, a sense that one has glimpsed with af Klint, even if only vaguely and intuitively and at second hand, the workings of the universe.

Art can do no more. It need not distract us if the Guggenheim is doing a brisk business in ouija boards, tarot cards, and a beginner's guide to astrology "for the modern mystic.” A visitor may or may not accept the use of the word “mystic” there, but the show itself has not been oversold. This is the real thing. The exhibit is less important, though, for its occult educational value or its rewriting of the art history of the opening of the twentieth century than it is for inherent value. These are powerful paintings which provide the viewer immediate pleasure and invite extended study.

In case anyone is looking for a sign from the Beyond for the show’s rightness, it happens that af Klint described visitors to the visionary temple of her imagination as ascending a spiral ramp to the apex of Ultimate Reality which, of course, is precisely the design of the Guggenheim.