Sins Against Love in Horace Odes 3.11

 

 

 

 

A new translation of Horace Odes 3.11:

 

 

 

O Mercury, from whom Amphion learned his skill

to build Thebes’ walls with stones by music moved,

from lyre of tortoise shell let songs sound forth

through strumming well-tuned strings.

 

Once silent and unwanted but now dear

to holy shrines and rich men’s groaning boards –

sing forth your song till Lyde’s stubborn ear

will turn this way and hear

 

who like a mare of three years old will play

and frisk on open plains and take no part

in mating, up to now she boldly thinks

herself too young for love.

 

You lead the tiger and the woods themselves.

swift rivers halt their flow for you,

Cerberus, monstrous Underworld guard,

will yield to your sweet song.

 

Tityos and Ixion brightened then.

The urns of the Danaean girls

stood dry, their watery load had had drained away,

their holders held by verse.

 

May Lyde contemplate the virgins’ crime,

their guilt there marked by all their urns,

whose water drained as fast as it went in.

This was their punishment

 

and thus the guilty after death still pay.

Those sinners (how could they have been more vile?)

who with sharp iron blades did take

the lives of their own mates.

 

Just one of many honored marriage vows,

proved false to her own father’s treachery

and won acclaim, a faithful bride renowned

for ages yet to come.

 

“Get up!” she told her youthful mate,

“Get up or else you’ll sleep a lengthy sleep

you don’t see coming.  Flee my sire

and sisters who mean ill,

 

and who like lions seizing calves – alas! –

one at a time while I, more mild in heart,

will neither wound you nor will I aim

to hold you in durance.

 

My father may confine me with cruel chains

for mercifully having spared my mate

or he may banish me and make my home

remote Numidia.

 

Run off as far as feet and winds can carry you

while night and Venus aid your flight.  Run off

while still you can and see my sorry fate’s

recorded on my tomb."

 

 

 

     Reading certain Horatian odes resembles contemplating a box by Joseph Cornell.  One sees in his Ode 3.11, for example, a meticulously constructed elegant little arrangement of objects or images attractive in itself but elusive in meaning with the context enhancing the connotative tendency of each element.  Part of what lends Horace’s references their rich suggestiveness is the fact that, apart from the mentions of Lyde, apparently a friend of the poet, the ode takes place entirely in the mythic realm.

    The poem is curiously doubled and self-reflexive.  The author seems to have intentionally introduced obscurities and contradictions.  To begin with, the poem has two themes, each accorded roughly equal space.  The first is self-reflective, the enchanting power of song, illustrated by Amphion’s music with which he razed the walls of Thebes, by the social prestige of poetry in religion and symposia, and by mythic references to the power of Orpheus’ playing to charm not only nature but even Cerberus and the sufferers in the underworld.  In a form of sympathetic magic, by claiming supernatural power for poetry the writer thereby predicts the success of this particular verse. 

     The claim of art’s persuasiveness provides a bridge to the second theme, the proper management of erotic energy.  The poet condemns mythic figures that offended against love –Ixion, and Tityos and, most prominently, the Danaean women who killed their spouses, all toward the end of convincing Lyde of the value of marriage and a conventional family life.  Horace provides a little horror show to reinforce poetry’s teaching by indicating the penalties for spurning the natural destiny of maturation in married love.  Stanza five, which would be a digitally animated sequence in a film, presents a luridly threatening Cerberus, a shocker itself, but also a reinforcement of the poet’s admonitions later.  The reader then is introduced to the theme of proper love relations with glimpses of the punishment in Hades of two others who had offended against marriage, Ixion by attempting adultery with the worst of all possible choices, the wife of the king of the gods, and Tityos for having attempted to rape Leto at the behest of that same goddess. 

     This theme is supported as well by the story of the Danaïdes and of Hypermnestra’s saving her husband Lynceus.  There could scarcely be a less dutiful wife than one who murders her mate, and the reference seem overdone for the speaker’s message to the young Lyde.  The poem, though a sort of love advice, is more concerned with propriety than with eros, but even in this simple normative recommendation of marriage, it is hardly straightforward.  To begin with, the name of Lyde, the woman to whom the ode is addressed, has confused some readers.  The name is used for a ἑταίρα by several poets.  It is the name of Antimachos’ mistress and the title of his elegiac poem upon her death.  Athenaeus 13.597 mentions another courtesan of the same name and Horace himself mentions a ἑταίρα of the name in 2.11.  (Another reference in 1.23 is less certainly a courtesan, but there Lyde’s characterization in part resembles that in 3.11.)  Considering that the lesson the poet implores her to hear is to prepare for a respectable marriage and the role of a dutiful wife, this could hardly be a message for a courtesan.  The use of Hypermnestra as his exemplum is problematic in any event, though she was a spouse to Lynceus and with him founded the Danaid line that led to Perseus.  Having been coerced unwillingly  into marriage, she is inappropriate as a model bride, however loyal a wife she proved to be.    

     Horace’s Lyde is said to behave like a young filly playing in a field, active and healthy, while resisting the subjugation to a husband that would come with marriage.  This characterization makes inevitable the picture of her as a teen-aged girl, wholly inexperienced in love and dubious about relationships, perhaps the daughter of a friend.  She sounds very like Daphne in Ovid who (in Golding’s translation) hated “as a haynous crime the bonde of bridely bed,” but instead enjoyed sporting about the wild mountains: “unwedded Phebe doth she haunt and follow as hir guide,” but, of course, her lack of interest in men is there caused by Cupid’s intervention.  Daphne has been struck by his anaphrodisiac iron arrow, while Apollo’s desire has been enflamed by a golden one.

    For all the structural play, irony, and semantic disjunctions, the thematics of the ode persist.  Horace’s boasts about the power of poetry resemble the claims of poets from the revelations of shamans in archaic times to Wallace Stevens “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” but here they are hobbled as it were by the incongruities of the poetic argument.  Lyde is a misleading name and Hypermnestra an ill-fitting example of ideal marriage.  Such slippage renders the poet’s claims faintly ironic, while the hellish horrors seem exaggerated and out of place.  Naive and shy, Lyde is even less likely than the average wife to commit murder as the Danaïdes had done  

     Still at base the ode does represent a social consensus endorsing monogamous marriage as the fundamental building block of society.  Without such stabilizing institutions, violence and force would prevail, suggested by the multiple murders of Aegyptus’ sons  and the apparition of Cerberus.  Attitudes in support of marriage include the notions of respectability and propriety added to the age-old advice govern by an elder generation to the younger one just coming of age, “It is time to grow up now and act like an adult.”  The frightening pictures of the hellish dog and the torments of the condemned are nothing but the superego of a patriarchal system enforcing order through terror.

     These meanings are present in the ode, but they jostle one another uneasily.  Self-questioning, they feature cracks and flaws.  Yet the structure of the whole, the arrangement of symbolic objects from the world of myth, placed precisely to react against one another, is well-balanced so that all the elements of the problem of married love are included: not just the young woman’s reluctance to form a household, but also coercion from parents (Danaus and Aegyptus) and uncontrolled lust (in the figures of Ixion and Tityos).  The entire system of the universe, it is suggested, supports the marriage institution, assuring a sorry fate for those who defy their proper role and destiny.  Horace’s essentially poetic gifts are fully displayed as he renders what amounts to an admonition to behave in a dynamic field of competing demands of the ego: Amphion’s drive for power, Lyde’s desire to cling to childhood, the destructive lust of Ixion and Tityos, the coercive parental demands, the murderous potential of the reluctant wives, and the fidelity of Hypermnestra.  All these passions are on full display, while the reader hears nothing whatever of the joys of either nuptial or illicit love-making.  Who but Horace could build such a dynamic semantic field while simply recommending the most ordinary behavior?

Boccaccio on Poetry

 

 References to Boccaccio in parentheses specify the book and section of the Genealogia deorum gentilium.  I used the edition translated, introduced, and edited by Charles Osgood which contains only the poetic theory contained in the XIV and XV books under the title Boccaccio on Poetry.  Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.

 

     Most medieval literary theory is couched in the language of rhetoric, inherited from ancient authorities like Cicero,  Quintilian, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum.  Works by Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland focused on figures of speech, thought, and sound, a tradition continued in the Renaissance by scholars like Puttenham and Peacham.  Many moderns are unsympathetic to such an approach as it eschews the emphases on originality, individuality, and inspiration we have inherited from the Romantics.  Yet ancients and moderns alike assert poetry’s special capacity to embody the truth.  Whereas rhetoric is linked with sophism and often suspected of subverting piety and moral order (by Plato and others), poetry has since archaic times been thought in some sense divine and the source of knowledge, spirituality, and moral behavior.  Many ancient authors accepted the Horatian formula that poetry must delight and instruct [1], and, indeed, some modern critics [2] maintain the idea that reading literature makes people better, not merely wiser, but more moral. 

     The concern with theme, what the writer implies about lived experience, and the idea that poetry can uplift readers spiritually, morally, and intellectually is central to Boccaccio’s defense of poetry against critics to whom all non-Christian art is frivolous and probably sinful.  To him even the pagan poets are sources of religious knowledge, albeit with vision limited by not knowing Christ (XIV, 8).  “Poetry devotes herself to something greater [than pursuit of money]; for while she dwells in heaven, and mingles with the divine counsels, she moves the minds of a few men from on high to a yearning for the eternal, lifting them by her loveliness to high reverie” (XIV, 4).  While they lack the inspiration the Holy Ghost lent sacred writers, they are similarly elevated by “mere energy of mind,” for which reason they are called “seers” (XIV, 8).  To him all literature is “a form of discourse which, under guise of invention, illustrates or proves an idea” (XIV, 9).  Poets are then “stimulators of virtue” (XIV, 15) and their works are “maidservants of Philosophy” (XIV, 18).  They may be at time obscure (XIV, 12), and their words may bear multiple meanings [3] (XIV, 12), but these difficulties serve the representation of complex truths.  For him the “sap of Philosophy” runs throughout imaginative literature (XIV, 10).  In his grand (if irritable) polemical style, those who cannot see the real meaning in poetry are denounced as “fools,” “madmen,” “blind,” idiots,” and the like.

     The basis for his analysis is the claim that myths, like poetry, are always allegorical, in the broadest sense of saying something other than the literal content.  This is the nature of rhetorical figures as a whole, and for Boccaccio myth always signifies something other than the apparent meaning. Fiction is for him “far from superficial”; it possesses always a “hidden truth” (XIV, 9).  For him the primary exception to literature’s noble role is certain comic writers whom he repeatedly dismisses as altogether pernicious, really sub-literary.

     Boccaccio’s defense of poetry occurs in the prefaces to the fourteenth and fifteenth books of his magnum opus, the Genealogia deorum gentilium (On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles) a massive attempt to set forth systematically the entire body of Classical mythology.  Boccaccio clearly regarded this as his magnum opus.  He expanded and revised the book over a period of fifteen years until his death, and it proved popular then for several hundred years.  The text was copied as a whole in forty-seven manuscripts and in part in many more.  The printed editio princeps appeared in 1472, followed by at least seven other editions in Latin before 1532 as well as translations into modern European languages.  Neglected now, it was long his best-known work. 

     Boccaccio’s ambition for this fifteen-volume work of scholarship goes well beyond providing information in a convenient form.  The understanding of Classical mythology for him was far more than a source of ornamentation for poets; it was a route to truth.  Whereas Thomas Bulfinch and Edith Hamilton primarily wished to make allusions explicable to modern readers, Boccaccio saw in myth something truer than true, something sublime and transcendent.  Mythic systems are all encyclopedic; they aim to account for all phenomena.  This is true of Babylonian, Egyptian, Germanic, Yoruba, and Hindu myths as well as those of ancient Greece and Rome.  Though their truths are always symbolic and poetic, they are nonetheless accurate.  Thus to master a mythological system is, in theory, to understand the world.  This all-inclusive hunger for vision explains why the book is so long and complex.  Long before the nineteenth century higher criticism distinguished between the J, E, and P versions of the Hebrew god, Boccaccio had differentiated three different Joves. 

     Mythology is one part of a program of Liberal Arts education, a term that yet survives though in practice such general training has been largely displaced in higher education by vocational courses.  For Boccaccio a Liberal Arts curriculum is required to develop “a wonderful keenness of mind” that leads to “the very inner mysteries of sacred philosophy” (XIV, 9).  Victorians justified the study of Classical languages as a sort of calisthenics for the brain, a preparation for the sort of problem-solving one encounters in everyday life, but for Boccaccio familiarity with Greek and Latin literature provided enlightenment directly.  In today’s decay of general culture and wide-open dispute about values, with the crassest material index, money, by far the most generally accepted, one might do worse than to immerse oneself in Homer and Vergil.

     Boccaccio was simply following the taste of his day in seeking to salvage the beauties of ancient poetry by claiming a moral purpose in the fanciful and sometimes racy stories of the gods.  In his own fourteenth century the L’Ovide Moralisé appeared provided thematic readings consistent with Christianity for the old stories of transformation.  Other examples of this pervasive approach to Classical mythology fill John Gower’s Confessio Amantis.  Gower concludes his treatment of the story of Actaeon (admittedly one of the stories more most amenable to a Christianized interpretation) with this cautionary warming.

 

Lo now, my Sone, what it is

A man to cast his yhe amis,

which Acteon hath dere aboght

Be war forthi and do it noght.

                                        (I, 379-382)

 

Many of the readings found there are similar to Boccaccio’s commentaries.  Both for instance, see the story of Apollo and Daphne as a cautionary tale warning against sexual indulgence and praising chastity and restraint. 

     The most common strategies Boccaccio adopts are euhemerism and moralizing.  For instance, he first glosses the story of Antaeus whom Hercules defeated by holding him in the air, out of contact with the earth, as an account of a historical king who founded the city of Tinge (Tangiers) who was so skilled at wrestling that he might be seen to draw strength from standing on the earth.  He then provides the ethical reading, saying that the earth here signifies such “lower” impulses as lust which can be defeated with discipline (I, 13).

     Some of his notions are more fanciful than others.  Venus’ attendant nymph Peristera may reasonably be considered to have been inspired by a “famous Corinthian prostitute,” yet the association of her nymphs with “the perpetual moisture in which the moon abounds” is pure whimsy, and no scholar would accept the derivation of the goddess’ name from “venam rem,” “an empty thing” (V, 2).  Yet even the more extravagant interpretations are significant, of Boccaccio’s vision if not of the ancients’.  The reader might regard his wilder speculations as the effervescence of intellectual ferment, not so different from some inventive post-structuralist readings.

     Moderns may lack the moral certainty that allows Boccaccio to distinguish “good muses,” “worthy of praise and reverence,” from “bad” ones, “obscene and detestable” (XIV, 20) [4], but many cling to the notion that literature improves the individual.  As this defense of art has been asserted since ancient times and Boccaccio adds little to the claim, the primary interest of moderns in his analysis in the Genealogia is instead his argument on behalf of the study of myth, believing, in a medieval anticipation of commentators like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, that such apparently fanciful and factually erroneous stories may encode profound wisdom and his broader belief that the study of the Liberal Arts exercises the mind in such a way as to elevate students’ behavior as well as their cognitive skills.  To him the sublime, a moral as well as an aesthetic category, is accessible through the language of mythology and the stories of the ancients provide the most complete, beautiful, and true symbolic representation of reality.

  

1.  Though present in earlier writers including Aristotle, this dictum is traditionally ascribed to Horace whose Epistle ad Pisonem states the concept several times.  “The poet strives to delight and help, at the same time to be pleasant and serviceable”  ("Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae."), “the useful and the sweet mixed” ("miscuit utile dulci"),  and "giving pleasure and admonitions" ("delectando pariterque monendo").  Sir Philip Sidney makes the same claim central in his “Defense of Poesy” as do many writers such as Matthew Arnold since.

 2.  Such views are today marginal.  See, for example, my brother James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: The Humanistic Alternative or psychologist Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angles of Our Nature.

 3.  Boccaccio several times delineates these varieties of interpretation, relying (though not absolutely) on the four-fold system of Biblical hermeneutics derived from Jewish practices, elaborated in Origen’s Quadriga, and refined by Augustine.  See XIV, 13.

4.  It is more revelatory about the Catholic Church and European culture than about poetry in general that the main moral deficiencies Boccaccio notes seem to be sexual misdeeds.

Kurt Seligmann’s Riddlesome Symbols

A shorter version of this essay prefaces the forthcoming third Seligmann lecture to be published by the Seligmann Center in Sugar Loaf. Each is available from the Center or through me for $15.


     The use of symbols outlined by Kurt Seligmann in his lecture on the topic explicitly seeks to contribute to expand the term’s definition, though his opinions rest securely on nearly a hundred years of scholarly elucidation of symbolic meaning in traditional contexts. While Seligmann’s view of symbols does give a nod to Surrealist ideas, it in fact deviates considerably from that advanced by Breton, and in the end he proposes a method for renewing old symbols for use in the twentieth century distinctly his own, while incorporating the insights of philologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and literary critics.
     Greek and Roman mythology had long been included in the European curriculum, but systematic knowledge and comparison of other symbolic systems only began to emerge in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth century writers like J. J. Bachofen mined the expanding fund of knowledge of antiquity to posit an early stage of matriarchy while William Robertson Smith found significant parallels between ancient Hebrew and other ancient Semitic beliefs. While the “higher criticism” sought to place Christianity in its Near Eastern context, scholars like Max Müller and Heinrich Zimmer were bringing the West its first accurate knowledge of Asian texts.
     At the same time pioneering work described and analyzed the cultures of what were called “primitive” societies. Edward Burnett Tylor, Oxford’s first professor of anthropology, distinguished between “savagery,” and “barbarism” on the route toward civilization, and James Frazer undertook the first comprehensive study of myths and rituals worldwide, published in The Golden Bough and elsewhere. [1]
     Attempts to organize and meaningfully relate the new information coming from the study of Babylon, India, and China, as well as the forests of New Guinea and the Amazon, followed. Meanwhile the foundations of the study of semiotics, of signs in general, were being established by C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure.
     The Surrealists, on the other hand, had little interest in the use of pre-existing symbols. In his 1924 Manifesto Breton suggests the child, the madman, and especially the dreamer as models of the imaginative subject, but never refers to myth or suggests the re-use of any existing symbolic image. Indeed, his entire emphasis is on the generation of inscrutable new objects for contemplation. Furthermore, such Surrealist images (devised in a “hypnagogic state”) do not fit a pattern of symbol and meaning, but rather a new model: “two distant realities” united to form a new one in which “the more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.” Breton privileges “previously neglected associations” and “the disinterested play of thought,” and absolutely opposes convention and tradition. Through such newly-coined images, whose meaning is obscure if not ineffable, “we can hope that mysteries which are not really mysteries will give way to the great Mystery.” [2] The most significant techniques for developing such material are first, the linking of unlikely pairs, resulting in a new semantic field and second, the use of aleatory methods to generate ideas entirely independent of both the past and conscious thought.
     The Surrealist attitude is succinctly expressed by René Crevel’s unequivocal statement: “Poetry which delivers us of the symbol sows liberty itself.” [3] The recommended Surrealist practice may be illustrated by the editing of Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou during which “no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation would be accepted." According to Buñuel, "we had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why." According to its maker (retaining his own emphatic capitals) “NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING.” [4]
     Seligmann regards this Surrealist position as delusory. He begins his lecture by citing a number of symbols the meanings of which are “established by convention,” though even at this point he notes that interpretation is dynamic, changing through time. Surely he is thinking of his Surrealist colleagues when he observes that, “many an artist of today wishes to break completely with the past.” This cannot be done because the artist must have a public and “the only conciliator between him and the public . . . is precisely the symbol.” The symbol always represents at least a partial conjunction of what is signified by the sign-maker and what is understood by the sign-reader. Thus, the symbols of Surrealism “may seem at first glance to be entirely new creations. Close scrutiny, however, reveals their ties with the past.”
     According to Seligmann one cannot rid oneself of semantic associations even when contemplating abstract forms. Though the non-figurative painter may abolish all conscious symbols, the unconscious is “ineradicable.” He says that “psychoanalysis has shown that all symbols . . .are signs arisen from the depths of our psyche.” Thus abstract paintings can be “read” though they lack explicit symbols because of this unconscious content in which “public and the artist meet upon common psychic ground.” Even a modernist’s “freely invented forms” are “not just a private affair” as they cannot escape this collective psychic base.
     Furthermore, symbols are not only common to all humanity, they are in part consistent through history. The artist sounds very much like Jung when he discusses certain symbols the meaning of which “is deeply rooted in our psyches,” symbols that express “lasting ideas” will persist through the centuries. From a basic reassurance that the cosmos is orderly (and even just!) to the details of ritual, symbolic usage has always comforted humans with “the signs of civilization.” According to Seligmann “in times of uncertainty” (including his own era) “an uncanny profusion of images” will be produced in an effort to seize some control over circumstance.
     According to Seligmann “tradition and convention” had always governed the reading of symbolic language, but along with clearly significant symbols, artists used as well archaic ones whose meaning had been largely lost, and these “mysterious” symbols came to be regarded as more magical, among them the attributes of Abraxas. Such underdetermined symbols, as the Symbolist poets recognized, potentially are more powerful than those with clearly assigned meaning.
     Seligmann notes as well that intuitive symbols may arise naturally in the mind of the artist or the consumer of art and yet still be associated with pre-existing symbolic associations. Though such symbols are “direct,” spontaneous, not prescribed but “from personal emotions,” they remain related to earlier patterns of symbolic significance. Similar notions had already been developed by psychologists who found insight into the minds of their patients in exotic myths and rituals. Freud, to whom the Surrealists owed so much, quoted literary texts and classical myths to support his view of the dreams and fantasies he encountered in his practice. [5]
     Even more important for Seligmann in his revaluation of the relevance of ancient symbols for modern man were surely the works of his fellow Swiss C. G. Jung who proposed the notion of a collective unconscious [6] in which were recorded not merely instincts but also archetypes. Jung delighted in exactly the same sort of symbolic religious, alchemical, and occult texts that Seligmann collected, and for both authors the illustrations were of primary interest.
     Discounting the value of the chance conjunctions beloved by the Surrealists, Seligmann nonetheless finds particular significance in somewhat indeterminate symbols. According to him, though all symbols had at first a set coded meaning, some had become more “mysterious” as time passed, and these were particularly likely to acquire occult uses. He persists in recognizing what he several times calls “riddlesome” symbols as the most fruitful.
     Seligmann, while accepting a general position on symbols less radical than orthodox Surrealism would propose, nonetheless insisted upon maintaining his own idiosyncratic fascination with magic. According to him certain powerful symbols “do not only reflect, they also emanate ideas.” If the meaning of those words is far from clear, the artist then explains that such symbols “assume talismanic power” and illustrates by the case of the Star of David used in occult operations as the Seal of Solomon. He suggests that a visual or written collective production of the sort called “exquisite corpse” may result in a “riddlesome emblem.”
     More dramatically, Seligmann recounts the story of Victor Brauner who had represented himself with only one eye long before he lost an eye in an accident. To Seligmann his intuitive precognition is bound up with a symbol rich in parallels such as Oedipus and Cyclops. These occult claims have little effect on his aesthetics, either in theory or practice, though they do contribute a note of sensation and a vague background of imminent portentous significance. He slides here from Brauner’s story to the myths of the sort that inform his ultimate world view: alchemical procedures, the worm ouroboros, and the philosophical challenge to dualism, all firmly based in earlier symbolic systems.
     In fact, Seligmann only modifies the view of symbols as signs with a conventional meaning by reinforcing the observations of Freud and Jung that the very same symbols sometimes occur to individuals independent of tradition and by his recognition that some symbols have partly or wholly indeterminate meanings. His fascination with symbols in magical use and in non-European cultures deviates from Breton’s Surrealist orthodoxy, and his acceptance of such procedures as the “exquisite corpse” seems designed primarily to please his colleagues in the movement, fitting awkwardly as it does with his historical investigations. A survey of Seligmann’s visual work indicates a lack of dependence on aleatory techniques and instead a consistent use of myth and symbol from the past including paintings representing Baal and Astarte, Melusine, Clio, Leda, Cybele, Amphitrite, Sphinx and Minotaur as well as works featuring motifs from Carnival and heraldry. Seligmann’s images, for all their distortions and individuality, are firmly rooted in European history. Rather than adopting the pose of rejecting the past, he has indeed made it new.


1. Other scholars associated with his methods including Jane Ellen Harrison, F.M. Cornford, Gilbert Murray and A. B. Cook revolutionized the study of Classics by noting similarities between ancient Greek and Roman beliefs and those of other peoples.

2. The French Symbolist poets likewise recognized the power of underdetermined symbols. Note too, the similarity to the koan used by some schools of Zen.

3. From L’Esprit contre la raison.

4. Luis Buñuel, “Notes on the Making of Chien Andalou,” in Art in Cinema, ed. Frank Stauffacher (San Francisco Museum of Art, 1947), 29-30.

5. In his New Introductory Lessons on Psychoanalysis, Freud explicitly says, “In such cases confirmations from elsewhere - from philology, folklore, mythology or ritual - were bound to be especially welcome.” He proceeds then to provide examples.

6. Jung first used the term in "The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology" (1929).

Notes on Pan

Mythology is always elastic and dynamic, and Pan strikes me as more given to shape-shifting than some. A divinity that might have seemed likely to dwell in the humbler precincts of Olympus, half beast in fact, and patron of backward herdsmen, Pan developed into a personification of both principal god and devil. Though an importunate sexually aroused serial rapist, Pan has been as well the occasion for a vision of Ultimate Reality. These observations stubbornly would not cohere, so I present them as a series of notes.




Pan’s Sphere

     Pan’s name was derived from “pasturer,” and the god governed the opposite pole of Zeus’ royal court: those semi-wild heights, unowned by any so free to all, where sheep or goats could find fodder. His pipes resemble those used by Greek shepherds from the third millennium BCE. Like the land that could sustain domestic animals, he was a blessing, with the epithet of “luck-bringer,” but at times, both in the mountains and on the battlefield, he could bring on panicked terror as well. He personifies sexual desire, but sometimes pursues females with selfish passion, according to the stories of Echo and Pitys. His frightening aspect could be beneficent as in Pheidippides’ report of his aiding the Greeks by causing panic among the Persians is told by Herodotus, [1] but it gave even the Arcadians pause. His intimate appeal to the individual is perhaps implied in the fact that the archaeological remains reveal a great many dedications but few dedicated temples. Offerings to Pan were often left in the wilderness.
     Philologists tell us that the folk etymology pan = all (accepted in late antiquity) is inaccurate, yet it has a broad unfocused appropriateness for a deity of generation, and Pan has often been used to represent paganism as a whole. Human awe at the ability of life to generate new plant and animal life led to exaggeration of his sexual characteristics and his frequent ithyphallic representation in art.
     These characteristics are attested by the poets. Pindar refers to Pan’s archaic identity as an attendant of the Great Mother, a role consistent with his association with fertility. [2] Stories of Pan’s human mother (said to be Penelope in her wild older years) [3] doubtless encouraged people to feel closer to Pan than to the full Olympians. In Euripedes’ Helena Pan’s capacity for exciting terror is the focus, here with reference to the rape of a naiad. [4] Pan stands at the very opening of Theocritus’ Idylls. In an atmosphere both rural and erotic, Thyrsis praises the Goatherd’s music as second only to Pan’s, associating both with ample meat to complete the festive note, yet he also refers to the threat of Pan’s anger when disturbed at his siesta. One delights in food and in love only if one also is liable to the pains of a lack of either. The same interdependent complex is implied in Theocritus’ VIIth Idyll in which the poet appeals to Pan for success in love, but incidentally refers to the custom of flagellating Pan with onions when food proves insufficient.


Pan in Plato

     In his Cratylus Plato echoes Hesiod’s muses who warned humans (whom they called “mere bellies”) that, while they may deliver the truth, they also “know how to speak many false things as though they were true.” [5] Socrates tells Hermogenes that Pan is “double-formed” because “speech signifies all things (pan), and is always turning them round and round, and has two forms, true and false.” [6] This striking anticipation of modern concepts of the inherent limitation of language occurs in a dialogue which has, quite appropriately, itself been viewed with uncertainty by readers who cannot tell what is meant to be Socrates’ position on the issue of whether the signifier is linked to the signified or is wholly arbitrary. Socrates changes his mind, or at least the direction of his argument in mid-dialogue. Further, the lengthy presentation of fanciful etymologies has been considered satirical by some and serious by others.
     Socrates does trace a pattern in these weird imaginative speculations on the origins of words: the repeated mention of flux. To him this signifies a fundamental doubt at the basis of the world-view of the “name-givers” which has led them to insert hints of instability into the verbal code. “Namemakers believed everything to be in flux. Suppose it should prove that although those who gave the names gave them in the belief that all things are in motion and flux—I myself think they did have that belief— still in reality that is not the case, and the namegivers themselves, having fallen into a kind of vortex, are whirled about, dragging us along with them.” [7]
     In the end Socrates is not so distant from Huang Po who directed his listeners to gaze to the Mind behind phenomena, reinforcing rather than negating everyday experience in the process. Lacking the nonverbal intuition by which both Greek and the Chinese thinkers apprehended truth, Cratylus can only play the part of the absolute skeptic.
     In the Phaedrus Pan was Socrates’ god of choice to whom he offers a most philosophic prayer, directing his words also, in a pleasantly ecumenical gesture, to “whatever gods may be present.” Socrates asks for inner perfection and for only such possessions as a reasonable man can handle, noting that the only true wealth is wisdom. [8]


Pan and Christ

     Herodotus suggests that Pan is, along with Dionysus and Heracles, a younger god [9] yet he adds that, among the Egyptians (who, he assures his readers, kept excellent records) he is considered to be very ancient. The archaic character of his role as producing fertility, both plant and animal, in wild regions, might seem to support the latter judgment, at least as far as a local cult in Arcadia is concerned. He shares with Christ, Dionysus, and Heracles the non-Olympian characteristic of a mixed human/divine parentage and a career including the human experience of death.
     Plutarch [10] tells the story of Thamus, the Egyptian ship’s pilot, who learned in a divine vision of the death of the god, news which eventually reached Tiberius who launched an investigation. As the date of this incident happened to coincide, roughly, at least, with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the story has been used to signify the end of paganism and the triumph of the Christian deity with his resurrection. For Eusebius it added to what he saw as considerable evidence that the pre-Christian gods has departed to make way for his god. [11] By the time of the Renaissance, the death of Pan had come to signify not the departure of the Greek deities, but Christ’s redemptive death itself. Orthodox authors such as Rabelais (for whom, of course, Panurge and Pantagruel are heroes) and Guillaume Bigot identified the two gods and treated Pan’s death as a figurative way of speaking of Christ’s own. [12] Rabelais says, “For my part, I understand it of that great Saviour of the faithful who was shamefully put to death at Jerusalem by the envy and wickedness of the doctors, priests, and monks of the Mosaic law. And methinks my interpretation is not improper; for he may lawfully be said in the Greek tongue to be Pan, since he is our all. For all that we are, all that we live, all that we have, all that we hope, is him, by him, from him, and in him. He is the good Pan, the great shepherd, who, as the loving shepherd Corydon affirms, hath not only a tender love and affection for his sheep, but also for their shepherds.” [13]
     This reading of Pan as a symbol of Christ reached England as well. In the month of “Maye” in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar Pan is simply a code-word for Jesus: “When great Pan Account of Shepherds shall ask.” (54) Milton follows in his “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” in which the shepherds find that “the mighty Pan/ Was kindly com to live with them below.” [14]



Pan and the Romantics

     Wordsworth and Byron both used Pan as the representative of a paganism which for them meant primarily aesthetic values. When Byron recounts the story from Plutarch of Pan’s reported death in “Aristomenes,” Pan represents paganism as a whole. The loss of the pre-Christian world-view seems to the poet an aesthetic loss.


How much died with him! false or true—the dream
Was beautiful which peopled every stream
With more than finny tenants, and adorned
The woods and waters with coy nymphs that scorned
Pursuing Deities, or in the embrace
Of gods brought forth the high heroic race


     For Wordsworth this meant a gentle soothing landscape picturesqueness as in the sonnet “Composed By the Side of Grasmere Lake” in which “Great Pan” “low-whispers” “tranquility is here.” One recalls that in “The World Is Too Much With Us” the poet wishes that, as a pagan, he might be made “less forlorn” by such entertainments as the “sight of Proteus rising from the sea;/ Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.” This is religion reduced to the amusement of sight-seeing.
     In Shelley’s “Hymn to Pan” the god is not, as in Wordsworth and Byron, the representative of a picturesque and charming mythology, but is instead a model for the very human experience of delusive desire.


“I pursu'd a maiden and clasp'd a reed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed.
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.”


     (Mary Shelley for her part wrote a play Midas -- which I have yet to read -- with two lyrics by Percy to open with the music contest between Apollo and Pan.)
     Keats is far profound, original, and provocative in his use of Pan as a sort of objective correlative of negative capability. In Endymion [15] Pan is first described as a Romantic nature spirit ruling “desolate places, where dank moisture breeds/ The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth.” to whom “yellow-girted bees” offer their honey. He is associated with the sort of magic likely among farmers “Breather round our farms,/ To keep off mildews, and all weather harms,” yet for Keats he is above all mysterious. The “Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,” and “Dread opener of the mysterious doors/ Leading to universal knowledge.” At the hymn’s conclusion this has become a virtual mystic via negativa:


be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal—a new// birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity;
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown


Pan and Neo-Paganism

     The earlier use of Pan to represent all pagan deities persisted into the nineteenth century, though the associated values altered. Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the extended exclamations of “The Dead Pan” maintains a conventional preference for the new god, “one in Sion/ Hung for love’s sake on a cross,” but her successors did not prove always so orthodox. To some post-Romantic poets, this god’s resemblance to the Christian devil in his horns and cloven hooves proved more an attraction than an impediment to his renewed worship as an icon of eroticism, forbidden pleasure in general, and the unconscious.
     This use of Pan as a mask to protest appears in Baudelaire. In “La Muse Malade” Pan is recognized as god of poetry together with Apollo, but the recognition is largely nostalgic. This belated author’s muse is characterized by “folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes.” In “L'École païenne” Pan is identified directly with revolution and his return with the end of the tyrannical reign of Christianity. Baudelaire details this view in The Painter of Modern Life [16] he maintains “The birthplace of Painting is the Temple. Its roots are in religion. The modern temple and the modern Religion are the Revolution. Thus let us create the Temple of the Revolution and the Painting of the Revolution . . . Pan must kill god. Pan is the people.”
     Varieties of this counter-cultural Pan are discernable in paintings by Burne-Jones such as Psyche and Pan [17] in which a dubious looking naked female stands well below an amorous Pan whose coiffure is positively architectural. The excitable Swinburne identifies Pan with élan vital in “A Nympholept”; the even more irregular Aleister Crowley made Pan a major symbol of his Thelemic mysticism and sang wildly of his wish to “Thrill with lissome lust of the light.” [18] Most readers of poetry can call to mind e. e. cummings’ balloon man, at first called “little” and “lame,” then “queer” and “old,” until the cat is let out of the bag and he is said to be “goat-footed.” [19]






1. Histories, (I, 105).

2. Pythian iii. 77, fr. 6. 1.

3. Apollodorus Epitome (7.38) says Odysseus’ Penelope conceived Pan after she was ousted for infidelity by the hero.

4. 167-190.

5. Theogony, ll. 26-28.

6. 408.

7. 439c.

8. 279.

9. Histories, II. 145.

10. Moralia, “The Obsolescence of Oracles,” 419.

11. Eusebius of Caesaria, Praeparatio Evangelica, Ch. XVII.

12. By the beginning of the 18th century this trend had become sufficiently pronounced to be ridiculed. Thus Fontenelle comments, “Ce grand Pan qui meurt sous Tibere, aussi bien que Jesus-Christ, est le Maistre des Demons, dont l'Empire est ruine par cette mort d'un Dieu si salutaire a l'Univers; ou si cette explication ne vous plaist pas, car enfin on peut sans impieté donner des sens contraires a une mesme chose, quoy qu'elle regarde la Religion; ce grand Pan est Jesus-Christ luy-mesme, dont la mort cause une douleur et une consternation generale parmy leg Demons, qui ne peuvent plus exercer leur tirannie sur les hommes. C'est ainsi qu'on a trouve moyen de donner a ce grand Pan deux faces bien differentes.” This passage and many more are included in O. Weinreich’s article “Zum Tode des Grossen Pan,” published in ARW 13 (1910) pp. 467-73).

13. Book. IV, Ch. 24. This is Urquhart’s version.

14. ll. 89-90.

15. The passages cited all occur in the episode in I, 232-306.

16. In Chapter 10, “Philosophic Art.”

17. See also “The Garden of Pan” in which a buff lad plays his pipes for a pair of lovers while gazing directly at the viewer.

18. “Hymn to Pan.”

19. “in Just-“

Hymn to Pan

For a year and a half, I have been trying to complete a version of the grand Hymn to Hermes, but it is still only half done. Here is the smaller piece for Hermes’ son.
My comments on the figure of Pan unexpectedly expanded as I wrote. In fact my essay on him remains a work in progress, as Pan’s implications continue to offer revealing bypaths. The piece is still not unified, and perhaps will never be, but it has already grown large enough that I have decided to leave it to be posted in June.

Now tell, o muse, of Hermes’ dear son Pan,
who loves all noise, goat-footed and two-horned.
Through wooded fields he roams with dancing nymphs;
they tread on high to goatless crests of stone.
They call on Pan, the shepherd’s bright-haired god, 5
all wild and mussed. He rules each snowy peak,
and every mountain top and rocky height.
He dances back and forth through thickest brush.
Sometimes he’s drawn to gentle streams, at times
he wanders through the rocky crags and goes 10
to highest peaks from which he watches flocks.
Through great pale mountains he will often dash.
Passing rough-hewn crags, he kills his prey,
that sharp-eyed god. Then at evening he ceases his chase,
returns with reed pipe song so wild and free, 15
so sweet in melody that bird could sing
no finer, who in blossoming spring leaves
pours forth the sweetest and the saddest song.
with him then clear-singing mountain nymphs
who dance with agile feet by deep-dark springs 20
and sing while Echo keens from mountain height.
The god is here, then there, among the choirs.
He wears lynx pelt and dances fast and free,
exulting in his heart in sweetest song,
in gentle fields where crocus, hyacinth, 25
and grass all mix and grow and blossom sweet.
They sing of gods and of Olympos height,
especially of Hermes of good luck
of how he is the herald for the gods,
and how to Arcady of springs and flocks 30
he came. Mount Kyllene is his sacred spot.
Where, though a god, he tends rough-coated flocks
for moist desire came on him there and grew
to mix in love with fair-haired Dryops’ maid.
Good marriage there he made with mortal wife 35
who bore a son, a marvel from his birth,
with goat feet, horns, so loud with sweetest laugh!
The nurse sprang up, afraid, and left the child,
in fear at sight of his rough face and beard.
At once luck-bringing Hermes took him up, 40
and held him, feeling joy fill up his heart,
then quickly sped to the immortals’ seat.
The child, all wrapped in skins of mountain hares,
was set by Zeus and the other gods.
When Hermes showed his son to all of them, 45
they all rejoiced but Dionysos most.
They called him Pan because he pleased them all.
And so, rejoice, my king! May my song please!
I call you up to mind and others, too.

Notes on Recent Reading 17 (McCarthy, Chang, Snorri)

Venice Observed (McCarthy)

     Mary McCarthy’s book on Venice is clever, erudite, poetic, and alive with aesthetic judgments. Every reader must pay her attention when she begins her book with a series of pans of la Serenissima: Venice left Stendhal “cold,” to Herbert Spencer St. Mark’s was “barbaric” and the Doge’s Palace “dumpy” and “meaningless,” while D. H. Lawrence wrote of the “abhorrent green, slippery city.” Her treatment of painters is lively and entertaining – full of curious details such as the description of a grand life-size banquet scene designed by Sansovino and constructed by a druggist for the amusement of the French Henry III, this in the middle of a treatment of Veronese. Such grand artificiality is her theme, and she does the best job I know of the exploring the strange conundrum of the visitor who seeks a city’s essence in its “old town” which has no current use but to beguile the visitor’s gaze and to make of its populace touts and waiters if not worse.


Original Teachings of Ch’an Buddhism (Chang Chung-Yuan)

     I am not familiar with any other translation of Shi Daoyuan’s Jǐngdé Chuandenglu (Transmission of the Lamp), a thousand year old record of Zen masters, one of the most important documents of the tradition. The early chapters in which speculative philosophy of the Tiantai and Sanlun schools arising from the work of Nagarjuna seeks ever subtler ways of engaging Ultimate Reality will give any thinker a salutary workout. With this foundation, he is better prepared for the confounding narratives of Mazu Daoyi who valued direct experiential insight and sudden enlightenment over systematic meditative practices, and established a new and distinctly Chinese Buddhism, influential to the present day.
     The book is almost too rich. Who can absorb koan after koan, page after page, each seeking to crack the great nut of the true nature of things? A monk in traditional practice would ponder a single one for weeks. The seeker after Zen on the printed page can do no better than to read and reread and reread again.


Prose Edda (Snorri Sturluson)

     In spite of Wagner’s operas and creditable translation work by William Morris and Auden, and Ursula Dronke’s magisterial though incomplete edition of the Poetic Edda, the Germanic pantheon has suffered from Greco-Roman cultural privilege. The great legacies of the Northland are the sagas written in Iceland that so effectively blend magic and history, hyperbole and understatement, high courage and rank selfishness and the fragments of an encyclopedic mythological system in the Eddas.
     The Prose Edda, which I read in the unambitious Penguin rendering by Jesse Byock, resembles many other primary mythological texts in that it presents little systematic narration. As in Greek and Sanskrit myth, Odin and Thor, Loki and Balder, frost giants and black elves appear in discontinuous incidents or glancing references as often as in connected narratives. The awesome gap between human and divine familiar to followers of Abrahamic religions is absent here. Not only are various orders of being described – Loki, for instance, is neither divine nor human, Baldr is killed, Odin tricked, but, in addition, the whole house of the Aesir face Ragnarok, though the text tells us that beautiful places will remain after the cataclysm. Here is an apocalypse that could coexist with modern physics.
     Those who have attended open poetry readings will find likely the story in which poetry is transmitted with mead made with the body of Kvasir, consumed by Odin, and spit into vats for the use of humanity. Some, however, he happened to expel from his rear: “We call this the bad poets’ portion.”

Thoughts on Mythology

These are notes from my recent talk on mythology at the Seligmann Center. I pass on my ideas in this raw form, without any attempt to work up an essay, in the belief that some of the ideas may be useful.


1
     The Greek word muthos in Homer has a broad meaning, fundamentally, anything delivered by word of mouth. The term came later to indicate conversation, counsel, the subject of speech, the matter, a purpose, a saying, a rumor; then a fiction or legend.

2
     In contemporary literary use, it is a story not tied to an individual text. Mythology arises as a sort of collective narrative: a body of linked and particularly significant stories that express in symbolic order the world-view of a community. Myth is deeply involved not only with the earliest poetry, but also science, philosophy, religion, and history, in fact all the intellectual disciplines. The definitive authority myths claim is evident in the fact that they often concern the gods or other spiritual beings. Myths are often taken as literal history, though they are also used by writers in self-consciously symbolic ways. Myth fades into legend and other cultural material.

3
     Not every collective narrative is mythic. Historical events are shared by large numbers of people. They may resonate in mythic ways, but the presumptive loyalty is to real events. Jokes lack the vast implications of myths.

4
     I continue to find Northrup Frye’s classification useful.

1) superior in kind to people and to their environment: mythic
2) superior in degree to people and environment: romance
3) superior in degree to people but not to environment: high mimetic (a hero of epic or tragedy, Aristotle’s hero)
4) inferior to the reader or equal: low-mimetic, ironic (realism, comedy)

     Frye notes, “Looking over this table, we see that European fiction, over the last fifteen centuries has moved steadily down this list . . . Something of the same progression can be traced in Classical literature, too.”

5
     In The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art David Lewis-Williams analyzes cave paintings and posits a simultaneous birth of language, art, and religion. With the birth of signs came the ability to lie.

6
      Mythic references may be traditional (Homeric hymns, Elder Edda, anthropological texts), literary (Ovid, Shakespeare, Rothenburg), modern (Superman, cowboy hero, Jewish blood guilt, Lincoln), or idiosyncratic (Blake, Yeats, outsider art).

7
     In poetry mythological references may serve to universalize or create group identity (as in the many medieval romances which wither begin or end by invoking the blessing of Christ), to compress (as in Raleigh’s reference to Philomel implying a world of violence in a word), to ironize, (as in Joyce’s Ulysses or the Coens’ O Brother Where Art Thou), or to decorate (as in Herrick’s “Parcae” where Atropos charms rather than frightens).

8
     Approaches to the understanding of myth include:

1) Euhemerism regards myths as distorted accounts of real historical events. Herodotus in his reasonable way, has recourse to this explanation. (On the other hand some ritual theorists would agree with Frye (above), and hold the opposite view: that gods degenerate over the years into myth, then legend (with supernatural apparatus), appearing next as history and finally as comedy.

2) Mythology has often been viewed as a sort of allegory with the gods representing either natural phenomena or concepts. The 19th century Sanskritist Max Müller supported an allegorical theory of myth. Modern variations of this theme include Freudian, Jungian, or other psychological theories.

3) Myths have been viewed as solely functional, often a form of social control. A simple form of this approach would be the vulgar Marxist analyst to whom every myth comments on class relations, but Malinowski took much the same approach.

4) The structural theory states that myths are patterned after the human mind as well as human nature. Claude Levi-Strauss, makes the claim that “myth is language,” and stresses formal play with meaning arising only from contrasts within a pattern, not from individual elements.

5) According to the myth-ritual theory, the existence of myth is tied to ritual. In its most extreme form, this theory claims that myths arose to explain rituals. I am myself fond on the work of James Frazer and the Cambridge School.

6) Myth has been considered the human language for investigating the metaphysical. In this sense myth is much like religion, providing human’s most profound analysis of the cosmos.

7) Myth is a symbolic statement about reality. Each culture defines and defends its assumptions with myth. Myth tends toward the encyclopedic, offering seamless explanations and prescriptions for the significant passages of life.

9
     To test these ideas with texts, I followed with this brief anthology of poem’s mentioning Aphrodite.

from Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (my translation)

She went to Paphos -- Cyprus -- where her
aromatic altar and her temple stood,
and she went in and shut the shining doors. 60
The graces then anointed her with oil
such as blooms on bodies of the gods.
(The oil was sweet, ambrosial, smelled so fine!)
Then laughter-loving Aphrodite donned
fine clothes of golden fabric on her flesh. 65
She left sweet-smelling Cyprus then for Troy
(fast she flew and high, the clouds her road),
to spring-rich Ida, beast-land, came she then,
she went through hills right to his home and after her
came bright-eyed lions, fawning grey-furred wolves 70
and bears, fast leopards ravenous for deer,
and then her heart rejoiced at seeing them
and to their hearts she tossed hot lust; they paired
in twos and mated in the shade,


Thomas Wyatt (the first stanza of an untitled poem)

Though this port : and I thy servaunt true,
And thou thy self doist cast thy bemes from hye
From thy chieff howse, promising to renew
Both Joye and eke delite, behold yet how that I,
Bannisshed from my blisse, carefully do crye,
"Helpe now, Citherea, my lady dere,
"My ferefull trust," en vogant la galere.


from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

Over one arm the lusty courser's rein
Under her other was the tender boy, 32
Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain,
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy;
She red and hot as coals of glowing fire
He red for shame, but frosty in desire. 36

The studded bridle on a ragged bough
Nimbly she fastens;—O! how quick is love:—
The steed is stalled up, and even now
To tie the rider she begins to prove: 40
Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust,
And govern'd him in strength, though not in lust . . .

'Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: 232
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

'Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain, 236
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain:
Then be my deer, since I am such a park; 239
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.'


A Hymn to Venus and Cupid (Herrick)

SEA-BORN goddess, let me be
By thy son thus grac'd and thee;
That whene'er I woo, I find
Virgins coy but not unkind.
Let me when I kiss a maid
Taste her lips so overlaid
With love's syrup, that I may,
In your temple when I pray,
Kiss the altar and confess
There's in love no bitterness.

Final stanza from Un Voyage à Cythère (Baudelaire)
On your isle, O Venus! I found upright only
A symbolic gallows from which hung my image...
O! Lord! give me the strength and the courage
To contemplate my body and soul without loathing!
Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n'ai trouvé debout
Qu'un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image...
— Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!

Venus Anadyomène (Rimbaud)

As from a green zinc coffin, a woman’s
Head with brown hair heavily pomaded
Emerges slowly and stupidly from an old bathtub,
With bald patches rather badly hidden;

Then the fat gray neck, broad shoulder-blades
Sticking out; a short back which curves in and bulges;
Then the roundness of the buttocks seems to take off;
The fat under the skin appears in slabs:

The spine is a bit red; and the whole thing has a smell
Strangely horrible; you notice especially
Odd details you’d have to see with a magnifying glass…

The buttocks bear two engraved words: CLARA VENUS;
—And that whole body moves and extends its broad rump
Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.

Comme d’un cercueil vert en fer blanc, une tête
De femme à cheveux bruns fortement pommadés
D’une vieille baignoire émerge, lente et bête,
Avec des déficits assez mal ravaudés;

Puis le col gras et gris, les larges omoplates
Qui saillent; le dos court qui rentre et qui ressort;
Puis les rondeurs des reins semblent prendre l’essor;
La graisse sous la peau paraît en feuilles plates:

L’échine est un peu rouge, et le tout sent un goût
Horrible étrangement; on remarque surtout
Des singularités qu’il faut voir à la loupe…

Les reins portent deux mots gravés: CLARA VENUS;
—Et tout ce corps remue et tend sa large croupe
Belle hideusement d’un ulcère à l’anus.


An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji (Snyder)

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.


Birth of Eventually Venus (MacLeish)

Cast up by the sea
By the seventh wave
Beyond the sea reach
In the rubble of weed and
Wet twig
The not yet amphibious
Animalcula
Gasps and wiggles on the beach
Gathering her long gold hair about her
And gazing with pure eyes
Upon the unknown world.

Venus Over the Desert (Williams)

If I do not sin, she said, you shall not
walk in long gowns down stone corridors.
There is no reprieve where there is no fall-
ing off. I lie in your beds all night, from
me you wake and go about your tasks. My flesh
clings to your bones. What use is holiness
unless it affirms my perfections, my breasts,
my thighs which you part, shaking, and my lips
the door to my pleasures? Sin, you call it,
but there cannot be cold unless the heat
has bred it, how can you know otherwise? Love
comfort me in the face of my defeats! Poor
monks, you think you are gentle but I tell you
you kill as sure as shot kills a bird flying.

The Death of Venus (also titled the Birth of Venus) (Creeley)

I dreamt her sensual proportions
had suffered sea-change,

that she was a porpoise
a sea-beast rising lucid from the mist.

The sound of waves killed speech
But there were gestures –

of my own, it was to call her closer,
of hers, she snorted and filled her lungs with water,

then sank, to the bottom,
and, looking down, clear it was, like crystal,

there I saw her.

The Web of Myth in the Story of Heracles

     A myth is a symbolic narrative current throughout an entire community. Myths tend to grow and link to form all-but-endless comprehensive webs whose warp and woof define the world-view of a culture (or subculture). One figure leads to another and then to others without limit. Mythic texts are often difficult for readers outside the originating culture because, far from telling their tales in a linear and direct manner, they typically assume the audience’s familiarity with the myth and mention details in telegraphic, even sometimes oblique or ironic references.
     Heracles is admittedly an odd case: a hero who acceded to divinity and won a place among the Olympians according to Hesiod by his sheer effort and ability. Herodotus thought there must be two Heracles: one mortal and one divine. Though not only pagan, but often something of an uncontrollable thug or an appetitive clod to judge by his actions, he became an emblem for moral striving in Christianity.
     His epithet in the Homeric Hymn “lion-hearted” [1] is totemic, rich with magical associations. The hero has incorporated the power of the great cats that were once the predators most likely to threaten humanity. He embodies the traits most identified with males in the animal kingdom and, since archaic times, among people as well: virility, courage, and power. The first of Heracles’ penitential labors is combat with the Nemaean lion and he is customarily depicted wearing a lion-skin in token of this victory. [2]
     Two-thirds of his celebrated labors consist of his repeatedly reproving his strength by overcoming such monstrous beasts in battle. [3] The motif of the great man’s taming the wild earth to make it safe for human life is typical of culture heroes. Even the cleaning of the Augean stables, which strikes some as less than heroic, doubtless also relates to the civilizing influence of water-management in earliest civilizations.
     Surely his reputation as a defender of humanity against the indignity of unwelcome death in part derives from his position between human and divine. Like Christ (and Dionysos, Tammuz, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, and Odin) he is linked to mankind through this common experience of humanity’s trying experiences including death prior to his apotheosis. Surely this explains the friendly intimacy with which he was approached in popular cult.
     Though Hera tried to prevent his birth and bedeviled him afterwards, his name likely signifies “Hera’s glory,” (though some once traced it to the word hero). She may have been his cruel stepmother, but his father was generally said to be Zeus. Due to Heracles’ position as both human and divine, one finds a variety of opinion among the ancients about his human father Amphitryon. This odd double status is defined as early as Homer when his shade appears to Odysseus and is said to be a mere eidolon or phantom while “he himself is feasting with the immortal gods.” (Even this statement is somewhat ambiguous since the same term is sometimes used for ordinary run-of-the-mill deceased spirits.)
     Heracles’ adversarial relationship with Hera, the threatening stepmother, is one of a series of gender-defining episodes in the hero’s career. Even this original conflict is ambiguous and nuanced. Heracles is often depicted on pottery sucking at Hera’s breast. His theft of the Amazon Hippolyte’s belt of authority indicates victory of patriarchal authority and thus of the individual son and husband in Greek society. The ambiguity of male dominance, though, is suggested by the fact that Heracles’ task is undertaken at the urging of Admeta, Eurystheus’ daughter, and that Hippolyte is usually represented as giving in voluntarily, though Hera stirs up war with malicious rumors, and some tellings have Heracles kill Hippolyte in error, regretting it later. Heracles is also said to have made off with either Hippolyte herself or her sister Antiope.
     The eleventh labor, the theft of the golden apples of the Hesperides again involves defeating women. Heracles frustrates Hera’s will and outwits the Hesperides in the enchanted garden of the west with its apples of immortality. The fact that Heracles is depicted in harmonious converse with these mymphs in Classic Attic pottery again implies the ambivalence of gender relations.
     Heracles’ marriages provide a broad spectrum of outcomes: his first alliance to Creon’s daughter Megara ends in horror as he kills their children (and her as well in Euripedes) in a fit of madness induced by Hera. He later married Omphale (a name meaning “navel,” as Delphi was called the omphalos of the world), the Lydian queen whom he had served for a year as a slave in penance for killing Iphitus. He is depicted in a Roman mosaic from Lliria in drag. While Heracles is dressed in women’s clothes and holds the spindle, Omphale wears his lion-skin and carries his club. In order to marry his third mate, Deianira, he had to fight Achelous who assumed the forms of a bull, a river, and a snake (a veritable catalogue of important early fertility images) first when asking for Deianira’s hand and again while fighting Heracles. She inadvertently brought about his death when she became suspicious he was having an affair with Iole by unwittingly sending a garment tainted by the Hydra’s blood. In Olympus he married the “beautiful-ankled Hebe” with whom his relationship seems to have been excellent.
     As a goddess primarily of youth Hebe is a guarantor of Heracles’ immortality. As cupbearer for the gods, she is also a model of the serviceable wife, providing an ample table, in which role she is sometimes known as Ganymeda by analogy with Ganymede.
     Heracles’ gargantuan characteristics include his violence such as the offhand murders of Linus while yet a young child and of his guest Iphitus as well as of his own children while possessed by madness. The first tablet of the epic of Gilgamesh tells us (in Maureen Gallery Kovacs’ translation) how an earlier hero is too strong too live in the world without doing damage. He needs a balancing force.


   You have indeed brought into being a mighty wild bull, head raised!
   There is no rival who can raise a weapon against him.
   His fellows stand (at the alert), attentive to his (orders !),
   Gilgamesh does not leave a son to his father,
   day and night he arrogantly ...
   Is he the shepherd of Uruk-Haven,
   is he their shepherd...
   bold, eminent, knowing, and wise,
   Gilgamesh does not leave a girl to her mother(?)!"


     As a sexual being Heracles is even more titanic in his appetites. He made love to the fifty daughters of Thespiae in one night, making all pregnant (hence the royal families of Sparta and Macedon). A researcher who listed his heterosexual affairs from all sources, (rather as Leporello had done with Don Giovanni’s), counted forty lovers and well over a hundred children. In addition there are stories of twenty or so homosexual affairs. Plutarch, in his Eroticos says he had “countless” male lovers and tell us that male lovers would swear loyalty to each other at the tomb of Heracles’ lover Iolaus. As for his appetite for food one need look no further than Aristophanes The Frogs for the gourmandizing Heracles of satyr plays and comedies. In Euripedes’ Alcestis he becomes drunk and obstreperous.
     For all this Heracles could be viewed as possessing a kind of charmed innocence. Like Parsifal he had a child-like quality. According to Aelian and Euripedes he was fond of play. [4] Further his great sinning seemed matched by great virtue. Having committed one of the greatest imaginable crimes in killing his children, he then did such prodigious penance that he redeemed himself. In the story of the choice of Heracles in Prodicus’ speech reported by Xenophon, he selects the difficult path of virtue over vice and immediate pleasure, allowing him to be viewed as a moral exemplar and even in the Renaissance in particular as a pagan premonition of Christ. [5] Can one read his cry of despair in his death agony “And there are men who can believe in gods!” [6] without thinking of Christ’s “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Over time this characteristic became diluted to a sort of vague beneficence. Aelian notes that Hercules had cleared the Sea and Land, and beyond all question shewed much kindness to men.” [7] As Heracles Alexikakos he averted evils and was often invoked in apotropaic charms. This is his role in the once-famous statue by Hageladas. Similarly, his image appeared as a guardian over tombs and doorways. He was a specific opponent of the keres, the spirits of the dead, conceived as posing a threat to the living. [8] In some contexts these spirits are identified with fate, and fate is most universally and plaintively associated with mortality. An Orphic Hymn calls to Heracles:


   Brandishing thy club
   Drive forth the baleful fates; with poisoned shafts
   Banish the noisome Keres far away.


     In one vase painting Heracles holds his club high, about to strike down a grotesque figure with a cane, labeled Old Age. He, after all, not only conquered death himself by attaining immortality; he also wrestled successfully with Death to save Alcestis.
     Apart from aiding people to avoid baleful influences, he attracts good ones as well. He betrays vestiges of the archaic fertility role as wild man, or lord of the wild beasts. He is often depicted with a cornucopia made of the horn of Acheloos in the form of a bull, neatly signifying the production of human food from untamed nature.
     Perhaps the most generalized referent for his divinity is suggested by Pausanias who refers to his image “in ancient fashion, as an unwrought stone.” (Ex. 20, 25) One may compare the pseudo-Dionysius, the Cloud of Unknowing or the Daoist idea of pu which might be translated “uncarved block” or “uncut log.”
     Fragmentary though it is, this is a mere excursion into the forest of myth. I have briefly reviewed Heracles’ roles as a culture hero, as a masculine role model, a jouster, though not a clear victor in the gender wars, a magnification of human, all-too-human traits, a vicious or deranged destroyer, a moral paragon, a friend of humanity, a dying and reborn god, a fertility emblem, an archaic human, a beneficent friend, and as ineffable and absolute divinity. This is hardly more than the beginning of his story. Through close family connections, not to mention structural parallels, Heracles is linked to many of Greece’s central myth: Perseus, Oedipus, Helen, Agamemnon. Zeus’ own parents and grandparents, not to mention their siblings, descendents, and ancestors bring other tales. The process of semeiosis is, in fact, unlimited. One must chop the sprig useful for an immediate purpose.




1. The title may be late, even Byzantine.

2. Prehistoric felids seem likely to have been the animals most likely to prey on early humans. On the other hand, recent evidence has indicated that, at least on a few occasions, people dined on cave lions.

3. I am reminded of Vishnu’s various incarnations, becoming progressively human.

4. According to Thomas Stanley’s 1665 version titled Various Histories, “They say that Hercules alleviated the trouble of his Labours by play. The Son of Jupiter and Alcmena sported much with Children ; which Euripides hints to us, making the God say, I play to intermit my Toils.”

5. In 1709 Addison translated this passage for the Tatler 97 in hopes of curing the “endemic Idleness” he found afflicting Londoners. He wrote, “I have translated this Allegory for the Benefit of the Youth of Great Britain; and particularly of those who are still in the deplorable State of Non-Existence, and whom I most earnestly entreat to come into the World.”

6. Metamorphoses IX, 200

7. III, 5.

8. See Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 165-75.