Chapter 3
The Word Behind Words

I. Symbolic Speech

The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural exchange. And so, proceeding, we come to the problem of communication: the opening, that is to say, of one’s own truth and depth to the depth and truth of another in such a way as to establish an authentic community of existence.

I have already said that the mythology of which we are treating in this volume springs from individual experience, not dogma, learning, political interests, or programs for the renovation of society; and the type of experience of which we have been reading in the words of Heloise and Rabi’a, Gottfried, Dante, Wagner, and Joyce, has been the innocence and majesty of love. I am aware that their experiences differed, and that what Heloise, Gottfried, and Wagner called love, Dante condemned as lust in Canto V of the Inferno. However, the innocence and majesty of his own emotion Dante never doubted; and what we are discussing here is not what men have thought of others, but the force of their convictions based on experiences of their own; and this we may well call faith — in Ortega y Gasset’s sense of the term, “individual faith,” in contrast to “collective”: not faith in what one has been told to believe, or in what, for the earning of money, political office, or fame, it may be thought propitious to believe, but faith in one’s own experience, whether of feeling, fact, reason, or vision. For, as Ortega remarks, “It is not in man’s power to think and believe as he pleases.” He continues:

One can want to think otherwise than one really thinks, one can work faithfully to change an opinion and may even be successful. But what we cannot do is to confuse our desire to think in another way with the pretense that we are already thinking as we want to. One of the giants of the Renaissance, the strange Leonardo da Vinci, coined for all time the adage: “Che non puo quel che vuol, quel che puo voglia” — he who cannot do what he wants, let him want what he can do.^{Note 1}

The socially authorized mythologies and cults of the classical and medieval as well as various primitive and Oriental traditions were intended, and commonly functioned, to inculcate belief; and in salient instances their effectiveness was such that they determined the form and content of the most profound personal experiences. No one has yet reported of a Buddhist arhat surprised by a vision of Christ, or a Christian nun by the Buddha. The image of the vehicle of grace, arriving in vision from untold depths, puts on the guise of the local mythic symbol of the spirit, and as long as such symbols work there can be no quarrel with their retention. They serve no less effectively as guides of the individual than as stays of the social order. However, “collective” mythologies do not always function so. Individuals there have always been in whom the socially enforced forms have produced neither vision nor conviction. Some of these have fallen apart either in solitude or in bedlam; others have been delivered to the stake or firing squad. Today, more fortunately, it is everywhere the collective mythology itself that is going to pieces, leaving even the non-individual (sauve qui peut!) to be a light unto himself. It is true that the madhouses are full; psychoanalysts, millionaires. Yet anyone sensible enough to have looked around somewhat outside his fallen church will have seen standing everywhere on the cleared, still clearing, world stage a company of mighty individuals: the great order of those who in the past found, and in the present too are finding, in themselves all the guidance needed. The mythologies of this book are the productions, the revelations — the letters in a bottle, set floating on the sea — of such men and women, who have had the courage to be at one in their wanting and their doing, their knowing and their telling. And we may leave it to God, Dante, and our local priest or newspaper to put them in Heaven or Hell. But better Hell in one’s own character than Heaven as someone else; for that would be exactly to make of Hell, Heaven, and of Heaven, Hell.

The profession of views that are not one’s own and the living of life according to such views — no matter what the resultant sense of social participation, fulfillment, or even euphoria may be — eventuates inevitably in self-loss and falsification. For in our public roles and conventional beliefs we are — after all! — practically interchangeable. “Out there” we are not ourselves, but at best only what we are expected to be, and at worst what we have got to be. The intent of the old mythologies to integrate the individual in his group, to imprint on his mind the ideals of that group, to fashion him according to one or another of its orthodox stereotypes, and to convert him thus into an absolutely dependable cliche, has become assumed in the modern world by an increasingly officious array of ostensibly permissive, but actually coercive, demythologized secular institutions. A new anxiety in relation to this development is now becoming evident, however; for with the increase, on one hand, of our efficiencies in mass indoctrination and, on the other, of our uniquely modern Occidental interest in the fosterage of authentic individuals, there is dawning upon many a new and painful realization of the depth to which the imprints, stereotypes, and archetypes of the social sphere determine our personal sentiments, deeds, thoughts, and even capacities for experience.

Figure 16. T.S. Eliot (photograph, England, 1934)

The playwright Ionesco, in his modern “comedy of the absurd” The Bald Soprano, brings a properly married British couple into a properly arid British drawing room, where each has the curious presentiment of having met or seen the other somewhere before. They are strangers to each other. And in the same vein T. S. Eliot, in his poem “The Hollow Men” (1925) — as in his earlier piece, The Waste Land (1922) — protests that we are all today so emptied of validity that even

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.^{Note 2}

In the expatriate poet’s memorable words:

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

 

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.^{Note 3}

In the primitive and Oriental provinces of collective authority and faith, local customs were always mythologically overinterpreted as of superhuman origin. Among the primitives, generally, the mythological ancestors in the mythological age were believed to have founded, once and for all, the customs by which their descendants would have to abide if they and the world itself were to endure. In the great East, as in ancient Sumer and Akkad, Egypt and Babylon, the orthodox social order was traditionally regarded as of a piece with the order of nature, established — like the movements of the planets — on a context of eternal, impersonal, absolutely implacable cosmic law. And according to our own tradition, the moral orders of both the Old and New Testament issued from the will of a personal Creator God dwelling (as Bishop Robinson has remarked in his bold little volume Honest to God) somewhere either out or up “there.”

It took the Greeks and Romans and the later Celts and Germans to realize that the laws by which men regulate their lives are of human derivation: conventional, not apodictical, hence alterable by the human will to comport with human aims and means. We count Greek philosophy and Roman law, as well as the modern concept of the secular state, as the great milestones of this release of man from the grip of his own nightmare of a past. And with this demythologization of the regulations of society — their reduction to the status of an expedient, rationally ordered, conventional frame, within the neutral field of which human lives of various kinds should be able to prosper with as little impediment as possible — the modern center of supreme concern has shifted from the social order as an end to the individual. A pathologi­cal throwback to archaic times and ideals has lately appeared, however, in that vast Eurasian empire of modernized Byzantine despotism (bounded by machine guns turned inward on its own imprisoned population) where the scientific brainwash now has replaced the catechism and confessional, the commissar the bishop, and Das Kapital the Bible. The genius Friedrich Nietzsche, as early as 1881, foresaw this possibility and warned of it — even described it — in his chapter on “The New Idol: The State,” in his Thus Spake Zarathustra:

The State, that is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly, also, it lies; and the lie that creeps from its mouth is this: “I, the State, am the People.”

That is a lie! Those who created peoples were creators, and they hung a faith over them and a love, and so, served life.

Destroyers are these who lay snares for many and call it the State: they hang a sword over them and a hundred cravings.

Where people still exist, the State is not understood, but hated as the evil eye and as sin against custom and law.

I give unto you this sign: every people speaks of good and evil in its own language, which its neighbor does not understand. It has devised its language for itself in customs and in laws.

But the State lies about good and evil in all tongues; and whatever it says, it lies — and whatever it has, it has stolen.

Everything in it is false; it bites with stolen teeth — the biter.

False even are its bowels.…

But the earth still is free for great souls. Open still are many sites for one alone or for two alone, where the odor floats of quiet seas.…

There where the State leaves off — look but there, my Brother! Do you not see it: the rainbow and the bridge of die Superman?^{Note 4}

Two great difficulties, however, confront the questing individual who, alone, would seek beyond the tumult of the state, in the silences of earth and sea and the silence of his heart, the Word beyond words of the mystery of nature and his own potentiality as man — like the knight errant riding forth into the forest “there where he saw it to be thickest.” The first is the difficulty of breaking through and beyond the system of delusion impressed upon and built into his very nerves by the forces — at once moral and linguistic — of his youth. Sigmund Freud has described as a process of introjection the psychological mechanism by which, in infancy, parental commands are imprinted indelibly on the motivating centers of the will; and the comparative linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf has demonstrated through a number of detailed comparisons to what extent the language learned in infancy determines not only the manner in which one’s thoughts and feelings have to be expressed, but also the very patterns of those thoughts and feelings themselves.^{Note 5} Hence, even in the solitudes of those remotest fastnesses where the state would seem to have left off, the imprintings of our parish are with us, tattooed on the inside of our skins. Therein lies the sense of the enigmatic command of the Japanese Zen master: “Show me the face you had before you were bom .” In the Chinese Tao Teh Ching we read of returning “to the uncarved block.” And the Indian Upaniṣads point in every line to that interior, ineffable source of being, consciousness, and bliss, “wherefrom words turn back, together with the mind, not having attained.”^{Note 6}

Self-luminous, fixed, yet known as moving in the secret cavity of the heart,

That is the great support. Herein abides all that moves and breathes and winks.^{Note 7}

And in the West: “O pleasing silence, where all things are still and the voice of the Beloved is heard with the faintest sound!” wrote the interesting Spaniard, Saint Thomas of Villanueva (1488–1555),^{Note 8} who as Archbishop of Valencia was a preacher of the mystic way from the pulpit of his see.

But then, when one has actually been vouchsafed an experience of one’s own — transcending those categories written by one’s people over the face of nature — upon returning, so to say, to the king’s court and rejoining there, at the Table Round, those others who likewise in the dark wood were vouchsafed their own experiences, the second difficulty arises, of establishing some kind of life, in terms not of the old “collective faith” but of one’s own.

T. S. Eliot, in a footnote to The Waste Land, cites a passage from F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality:

My external sensations [the philosopher had declared] are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it.… In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.^{Note 9}

In the light of Freud and Whorf, however, this cannot be altogether true, since the categories according to which our experiences become conscious even to ourselves have been supplied to us by our society and are shared by everybody in it. The really private experiences do not occur until these categories are dissolved; and then the second task emerges of communication: communication that will not immediately drag the whole discourse — and one’s life itself — down and back into the now transcended mold.

In the case of the absolute hermit no communication is either attempted or desired; he rests in the state of Nietzsche’s “one alone.” In the case of a shared seizure of love (Nietzsche’s case of “two alone”), as celebrated by Gottfried in his grotto of the crystalline bed, an immediately intelligible secret language of signs and words comes into being, from which the world is automatically excluded. And comparably, in larger context, where a team, a company, a tribe, or a people shares significant common experiences, a language inevitably comes into being that is, in depth, unintelligible to outsiders, even where its rational or pragmatic import may seem to be obvious and translatable.

In Primitive Mythology I have employed the term “mythogenetic zone” to designate any geographical area in which such a language of mythic symbols and related rites can be shown to have sprung into being.^{Note 10} However, when the forms of the rites and symbols are then diffused to other zones, or passed on to later generations no longer participating in the earlier experience, they lose depth, lose sense, lose heart; so that whereas originally their sense and effect had been spontaneously recognized and rendered — like the sense and effects of bird calls within the range of a species — in later use, having lost force, they are consciously reinterpreted and applied to new and even contrary themes — as occurred in the case, for example, of the serpent symbol in the Near East, when it passed from Sumero-Babylonian mythology to the Bible.^{Note 11}

In the modern world of science and the power-driven machine, global commerce, and massive cross-cultural exchanges, the social and physical backgrounds out of which the old symbolic orders arose have disappeared. Moreover, in our present world environment of intermingling religious communities, nationalities and races, social orders and economies, there is no actual community in depth anywhere, even where, for practical ends, agreements may appear to have been achieved. No one who has ever seriously attended an East-West philosophers’ congress, an interfaith parley of religions, or a season at the UN will again believe that anything but empty barrels (which, as the proverb tells, make the most noise) can be transferred across a cultural divide. As the old Romans used to say, “Senatus bestia, senatores boni viri: The senate is a beast, the senators are good men.” The parliamentary arena has for centuries been understood to be the Devil’s own gaming ground of deceit and compromise. And yet — to give the Devil his due — airtight empty barrels are exactly what is required in this new day of new wines. For, as even the most pessimistic eye must recognize, compromise and deceit, force majeure and accommodation, are gradually fashioning in this world today (though perhaps — tragically — too slowly) a sort of noncommittal social order, defined in a legal Esperanto, that should serve, in the end, as a demythologized, undecorated, merely practical frame for whatever possibilities of existence one or two alone or companies in consort may yet develop for themselves on this living earth and in the infinite space beyond. There is still the danger, of course, of the new monster idol, the state, with its scientific brainwash and its awesome, gruesome mass product, the non-individual doll of living flesh, moved not from within but by remote control and signal from without, like one of Pavlov’s dogs. In the words, again, of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” “Mistah Kurtz — he dead.”

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o’clock in the morning.

 

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

 

Between the conception

And the creation Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

 

Between the desire

And the spasm Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

 

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the

 

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.^{Note 12}

And so, proceeding, we come to the question of translating an actual experience of life into the language of these dead — who are, however, not dead, but sleep, and among whom (as even the most pessimistic social critics must know) there move many who are neither dead nor asleep but searching; many others, furthermore, who have already roused within themselves a life more awake, Mr. Critic, than is perhaps dreamt of in your philosophy.

For we move — each — in two worlds: the inward of our own awareness, and an outward of participation in the history of our time and place. The scientist and historian serve the latter: the world, that is to say, of things “out there,” where people are interchangeable and language serves to communicate information and commands. Creative artists, on the other hand, are mankind’s wakeners to recollection: summoners of our outward mind to conscious contact with ourselves, not as participants in this or that morsel of history, but as spirit, in the consciousness of being. Their task, therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.

But that, in traditional systems, was the function of myth and rite. Originating, as I have remarked, in the mythogenetic zone of some particular place and time, as the depth-language spontaneously shared by all or most of the members of a largely homogeneous community, such a signal code lost force when the conditions from which it sprang were historically altered and new conditions arose through which to experience the mystery of existence. All such codes are today in dissolution; and, given the miscellaneous composition of our present social bodies and the fact, furthermore, that in our world there exist no more closed horizons within the bounds of which an enclave of shared experience might become established, we can no longer look to communities for the generation of myth.

The mythogenetic zone today is the individual in contact with his own interior life, communicating through his art with those “out there.”

But to this end communicative signs must be employed: words, images, motions, rhythms, colors, and perfumes, sensations of all kinds, which, however, come to the creative artist from without and inevitably bear associations, not only colored by the past but also relevant to the commerce of the day.

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the creation

And the response

Falls the Shadow.

By what means can this intervention be transcended?^{Note 12}

Gerhart Hauptmann somewhere has written: “Dichten heisst, hinter Worten das Urwort erklingen lassen: Poetic writing consists in letting the Word resound behind words.”

There are schools of poetic speech that have sought, through elevated rhetoric untouched by echoes of the marketplace, to bear the educated mind aloft; others, to renew in us the force of earth through accents of the soil and woodnotes wild. A few, more recently, have thought to purge away all language, thought, and civilization whatsoever, emitting sounds, syllables, tintinnabulations, pig grunts, eagle screams, baboon howls, and silence, returning thus to the lower Paleolithic for a fresh start. But pig grunts of themselves are no more eloquent of transcendence than are Alexandrian couplets. The art required is to make sounds, words, and forms, whether of base or of noble provenance, open out in back, as it were, to eternity, and this requires of the artist that he should himself, in his individual experience, have touched anew that still point in this turning world of which the immemorial mythic forms are the symbols and guarantee. In fact, if one may judge from the record, the shared secret of all the really great creative artists of the West has been that of letting themselves be wakened by — and then reciprocally reawakening — the inexhaustibly suggestive mythological symbols of our richly compound European heritage of intermixed traditions. Avoiding, on one hand, the popular mistake of reading mythology as a reference to hard historic fact and, on the other hand, the puerility of rejecting the guidance of the centuries and so drowning like a puppy in the shallows of one’s own first depth, they have passed, one and all, beyond this general wrecking point of Scylla and Charybdis to that sun door of which the knowers have sung through all ages, each in the language of his own world. Having let their imaginations be roused by the waking power of the symbols, they have followed the echoes of their eloquence within — each opening thus a way of his own to the seat of silence where signals cease. And returning then to the world and its companionship, having learned from their own depths the grammar of symbolic speech, they are competent to touch to new life the museum of the past as well as the myths and dreams of their present — in that way to bring (as in the closing chorus of Wagner’s Parsifal) “redemption to the Redeemer,” causing the petrified, historicized blood of the Savior to flow again as a fountain of spiritual life.

So let us reconsider, now, in brief series, the chief strains of traditional word and symbol that have served our master poets and artists both as guides to the silence of the Word behind words and as the means to communicate its rapture; commencing with the epoch of those bold twelfthand thirteenth-century poets who were the first individual authors in a truly modern sense, and coming down to this present time of our own great masters of the Word.

II. The Classical Heritage

Figure 17. Dido and Aeneas; 10th century a.d.

We have already remarked Gottfried’s celebration of Apollo and the nine Muses on the paradisial summit of Mount Helicon. Dante also called upon the Muses — at the opening of the Inferno, Canto II — and he was guided both through his Hell and to the paradisial summit of Mount Purgatory by the pagan Virgil, who throughout the earlier Middle Ages had already been idealized as l’altissimo poeta, the paramount literary guide. Figure 17 is a quaint conception of Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas from a tenth-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples. In form and gesture the figures are not classical but medieval; for as the late Professor E. R. Curtius states in his formidable study European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, “The Middle Ages had their own view of antiquity.” No less in philosophy and science than in literature and art, the authority of the Greco-Roman heritage throughout even the dark period from the fifth to eleventh centuries was such that Dr. Curtius could write of a single Classical European tradition extending without break from Homer to Goethe.^{Note 13} It was carried by way of two interacting streams. One, above ground, was of the poets and philosophers, grammarians, scientists, and historians, openly read and taught in the schools. The other, more secret, beneath ground, was of the mystery cults which in the late Roman centuries had flourished throughout the classical world, from India and the Upper Nile to the Celtic British Isles.

Figure 18. The Sanctum of the Winged Serpent; Orphic bowl, 2nd or 3rd century a.d.

Figure 19. Outside of the Serpent Bowl

Figures 18 and 19 show the inside and outside of an alabaster bowl of about the period of the Pietroasa bowl of Figure 5 and Figure 6. In the center — where in the other bowl a goddess sits on a throne entwined by a vine — the forward part of a winged serpent (one wing lost) coils around a hemispherical mound, from the base of which radiate spikes of flame. Sixteen figures, nine women, seven men, all naked, stand in attitudes of worship, with eyes turned toward the serpent, several holding one hand to the chest in the posture of the initiate of Figure 5, Station 7. Five women stand in a sort of Venus de’ Medici pose, suggesting the attitude of the androgyne at Station 11 of the other series; and there — as here — sixteen figures are to be seen. The winged serpent, furthermore, combines the wings of the griffin at Station 16 with the reptilian character of the beast at Station 10, which indicates that we are here within such a sanctuary as in the other series must have been entered by the candidate at Station 10: of the mystery beyond the “pairs of opposites,” following which, at 11, the initiate stands as an androgyne with the wings above his head of the Holy Spirit.

Now, in the Hellenistic mystery cults initiates entering the holy of holies were often required to be naked, and, whereas women were excluded from Mithraic rites,^{Note 14} they were essential to the Orphic-Dionysian, both as inciters of the mystic rapture and as vehicles of the revelation. Witness their prominence in the Pietroasa context, both as guides and as divinities. There both they and the initiates are clothed and everything is in movement: here all is still. The mound in the center, covered by the winged serpent, is the top of the Orphic cosmic egg, within which all mortal creatures dwell.

This company is outside and above the egg. They have ascended (spiritually) through the sun door, which opens at the instant of noon at the summit of the sky. The clashing rocks (Symplegades) which separate at that moment have closed again beneath them, and they are now (in knowledge) in eternity, beyond all pairs of opposites: death-birth, male-female, subject-object, good-and-evil, light-and-dark. The normal limitations of human thought and sense, the clothing of the mind, were destroyed in the fiery passage, the purging flames of which are now blazing at their feet; and the serpent wrapped around the mound, at which they gaze in silent rapture, combines the forms that would have been seen below as opposites: the serpent crawling on its belly and the bird in winged flight. This figure of transcendent form represents the same world-suffusing power that is symbolized in the other bowl by the rapture-inspiring potion in the chalice of the Goddess Mother of all being. Standing in the bowl of the winged serpent, we are inside that sacramental chalice, drinking with our eyes, so to say, the intoxicant, there symbolized as wine, of the mystery of the substance of our being.

Figure 19, the outside of the bowl, is a view of the heavenly dome from beneath the vault of the ever-turning cosmic shell — the merely exoteric view made known to us through our eyes and the instruments of science. Four nude cherubs blowing trumpets and conchs at the four points of the compass symbolize the four winds of the round of space and the seasons of the round of time; twenty-four columns support this space-time structure, as hours support the day; while beneath, on the floor of heaven, the ceiling of our world, are the circles of the orbits of the spheres. Moreover, an inscription around the base in slightly incorrect Greek was recognized by the first interpreter of this bowl, Professor Hans Leisegang, as composed of partial quotations from four separate Orphic hymns:

Hear, Thou who turnest forever the radiant sphere of distant motion.…

Originally Heaven and Earth were a single form — the Cosmic Egg.…

First, light — Phanes — appeared: named also Dionysus, because it moves in a circle round the infinitely lofty Mount Olympus.…

He is glittering Zeus, Father of All the World.^{Note 15}

Figure 20. The Music of the Spheres; Italy, 1496

So let us now turn to Figure 20, “The Music of the Spheres,” from a fifteenth-century Neoplatonic work, Gafurius’s Practica musice, published in 1496 in Milan. The figure of the descending serpent is dramatic. Where it breaks below into the spheres of the four elements it divides into a triad of animal heads: a lion at the center, wolf to our left, dog to our right. Gafurius identified this beast with the guardian dog Cerberus of Hades,^{Note 16} which in the Hellenistic period had been pictured as triple-headed with a serpent tail. In the temple in Alexandria of the Greco-Egyptian syncretic god Serapis (who was identified syncretically with Zeus, Dionysus, Phanes, Apollo, Osiris and the Apis bull) the diety sat on a lofty throne with Cerberus at his feet, as here.^{Note 17} The beast’s heads symbolize Devouring Time in its three aspects — Present, Past, and Future — through which the unchanging presence of the god is experienced, ever passing, here on earth. As we read in Macrobius’s Saturnalia (fifth century a.d.): “The lion, violent and sudden, expresses the present; the wolf, which drags away its victims, is the image of the past, robbing us of memories; the dog, fawning on its masfer, suggests to us the future, which ceaselessly beguiles us with hope.”^{Note 18}

At the bottom of Gafurius’s plan, breathed upon by the lion’s head, is a female form labeled Thalia, “Abundance,” the first of the nine Muses. The other eight in ascending series appear along the left, and at the top is again the name of Thalia, here designating, however, the central member of the triad of Graces, dancing unclothed on paradisial Mount Helicon before Apollo’s throne.

Thalia, in her character as Muse, at the bottom, is the inspiration of Bucolic Poetry and Comedy, and as here represented, below the surface of the earth, unseen, she is “Silent Thalia,” surda Thalia, the Muse unheard. For men confronted by the frightening features of time, which they do not penetrate with understanding, are made blind and deaf to the inspiration of the Muse of the Poetry of Nature, and it is only when one’s spirit has been transported to the summit of wisdom that her glory is disclosed.

Read in terms of the churchly tradition, the Grace Thalia, above, would suggest Eve in her state of purity; Euphrosyne, “Mirth,” turned away from the god, her inclination to rebellion; Thalia below, Eve in exile, subject to the serpent and consequently to the fears, hopes, and bereavements of time; and finally, the Grace Aglaia, “Splendor,” above, with her gaze turned toward the god, the Virgin Mother Mary, “changing Eva’s name” — Eva to Ave! — and thus undoing the work of Euphrosyne, “Mirth,” or, as a proper Christian might say, of “Sinful Pleasure.”

However, as a glance again at the picture of God the Father fishing (Figure 10) reminds us, according to the usual Christian reading of such symbols the serpent power is not an emanation earthward of God’s creative will, but a contrary force, opposed to it; hence the Muses, placed in series by Gafurius along the length of the serpent body, would in orthodox thought be associated rather with the Fall than with a redemption, and the arts would be condemned: as they are, in fact, both in Christian Puritanism, and in the biblical First Commandment against images (Exodus 20:4).

In a properly Christian art the forms do not seduce the senses to this world, but are allegorical of spiritual themes and of the legends of the Savior and his saints, by which the mind and spirit are exalted beyond this world to God, who is transcendent and apart. Whereas in Gafurius’s design — as in general in classical art — the Muses represent and are addressed to the spheres of their respective stations, all of which pertain to the body and field of power of the serpent itself. And the serpent, in turn, is not opposed to the Lord of Life and Light, but a manifestation of his creative force and harmony. To realize this, and to rise then along the mounting scale from one glory to the next, one has only to face and dare to enter the lion’s mouth: the flaming sun door of the present, absorbed totally in the living here-and-now, without hope, without fear. Whereupon the rapture of the Muses — the arts — will begin to be experienced in the body of this world itself, transporting our spirit from glory to glory, to that summit of joy in consciousness where the world eye — beyond hope, beyond fear — surveys the universe in its coming, going, and being. For, just as the serpent is not opposed to the Lord, but the vehicle of his downgoing grace, so are the Muses — clothed in the garments of this world — not opposed to the unclothed Graces, but in triple rhythm (3 times 3) the earthly heralds of their paradisial dance. And they are nine because (as Dante tells of his own Muse, Beatrice) their root (the square root of nine being three) is in the trinity above.

Beyond the frightening visage of all-consuming time, the arts — the Muses — initiate us to the enduring harmony of the universe, the planes or aspects of which are controlled by the planets and their spheres. Gafurius shows the signs and deities of these at the right of his design, matching the Muses at the left. As Thalia, below, is of the earth, so Clio (lower left), the Muse of History, presides on the plane of the moon, controller of the tides of time, while Calliope, Heroic Poetry, matches Mercury (Hermes), the guide of souls beyond the temporal sphere. Next come Terpsichore, Muse of the Dance and Choral Song, in the sphere of Venus and Cupid; Melpomene, Tragedy, who purges and illuminates with the fire and light of the Sun; and Erato, Lyric and Erotic Poetry, on the plane of Mars, god of war. Beyond this central, tragic triad, then, we are released by the power of music from all visible forms whatsoever (Compare Schopenhauer). Euterpe, the Muse of Flute Music, elevates the mind to the plane of Jupiter, where the soul, as the child to its father in the confirmation scene at the right, is turned to the protecting aspect of the Lord. Polyhymnia, the Muse of Sacred Song, celebrates the aspect of the Father in Saturn, wielding the scythe that cuts us free from this world controlled by the planetary spheres, after which, in the sphere of the fixed stars, the Muse Urania, Astronomy, transports us from the body of the serpent altogether (the loop of whose tail suggests the sun door), to the very feet of the highest transformation of the Father, sheer light.

This ladder of the planetary shells, presented by a fifteenth-century Italian music master to demonstrate, as he declares, “that the Muses, Planets, Modes, and strings correspond with one another,”^{Note 19} actually is an idea of the greatest age. It was known already to the Stoics and is developed in Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio” (cited in Occidental Mythology),^{Note 20} where the spheres are named in this same order and said to produce a loud agreeable sound by the motion of their revolutions. But the earthly sphere, the ninth, “remains ever motionless and stationary in its position in the center of the universe”: hence Gafurius’s surda Thalia. “Learned men, by imitating this harmony on stringed instruments and in song,” Cicero states, “have gained for themselves a return to the supernal heights.” And Gafurius, in accord, has allotted to each step both a note of the scale and the title of a Greek musical mode.

The names of the notes are at the left; they are of the Classical conjoint Dorian-Phrygian tetrachord (our A-minor scale), as follows: Proslambanomenos (A), Hypate hypaton (B), Parhypate hypaton (C), Lichanos hypaton (D), Hypate meson (E) , Parhypate meson (F), Lichanos meson (G), and Mese (the octave). At the right are the matching modes: Hypodorian, Hypophrygian, Hypolydian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and Hypomixolydian. Assigned, furthermore, to each sphere is a metal whose symbol is that of its planet: to the moon silver, quicksilver to Mercury, copper to Venus, gold to the sun, iron to Mars, tin to Jupiter, and lead to Saturn. The soul, descending from its heavenly home, takes on the matter and weight of these metals and, ascending, casts them off, to arrive naked again above. Hence the symbolism of nakedness — the naked soul — before God: the naked Graces before Apollo and the figures in the mystery-cult bowl. Hence, too, the “dance of the seven veils” performed by Salome before Herod, the earliest extant version of which symbolic “stripping of the self” is the Old Sumerian “Descent of Inanna to the Underworld” of about 2500 b.c.^{Note 21}

Now, according to Hesiod (eighth century b.c.) , the nine Muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne, “Memory,” and Zeus.^{Note 22} Born of Memory, they cause the soul to remember its forgotten higher estate, where, at the summit of this eightfold noble path of return, there is discovered the very god of light represented in the Pietroasa bowl (Figure 5) and addressed in the Orphic hymns of our second bowl (Figure 18). Moreover, the number of nude females within the holy of holies of this second bowl is nine, the number of the Muses; while the number of the men is seven, the number of the visible spheres. In Gafurius’s design the draped Muses correspond to the guiding females of the first of these two bowls and the undraped dancing Graces to the naked initiates of the second. Euphrosyne, “Mirth,” turned away from the Presence, represents the outward-going, descending movement of divine grace animating the world; Aglaia, “Splendor,” facing the Lord, is the returning grace of the human spirit; and Thalia, “Abundance,” who is one with the Muse of Nature, denotes the balance embracing the outward and returning modes.

The triadic round of these three is magnified in the world-animating triple rhythm of the Nine and far below reflected in the triad of the heads of Cerberus: future, present, and past. Furthermore, the ascending form of this serpent is the winged apparition of Figure 18, bearing instead of those animal heads at either side, the wings of the revealed spirit. And Thalia, the Muse of the Idyll of Life’s Garden — who on the inferior stage was silent — here in the knowledge of eternity is at one with the movements both of Splendor and of Mirth. And all three, in turn, are unfoldments of the spirit of the goddess Venus, Love, whose special art below is the dance.

Thus in this Renaissance diagram the whole sense of the two bowls together is comprised. Silent Thalia at the base corresponds to the goddess in the center of the Pietroasa bowl, holding the cup of intoxicating yet elevating blood of the vine; and her restricting circle, earth, surrounded by the water of the abyss, having air and fire above, corresponds to the inner circle of the bowl, where the shepherd dreams the dream of life. The ladder of ascent with its guiding Muses corresponds to the circle of initiations, leading to the vision of the god; and as vines and fruit there appeared at the moment of arrival, so here there is a vase of flowers. The instrument in the god’s hand has seven strings, the seven spheres; and these are matched on the second bowl (Figure 18) by the rings leading to the center, the sun door to illumination. Both the inside of this second bowl and the inside of the chalice of the Pietroasa goddess (Figure 6) thus correspond to the top of Gafurius’s diagram, the cosmological lesson of which is written on the scroll above the god: “Mentis Apollineae vis has movet undique Musas: The energy of the Apollonian Mind sets these Muses everywhere in motion” — which, exactly, is the sense of the first of the Orphic hymns inscribed on the alabaster bowl:

Hear, Thou who turnest forever the radiant sphere of distant motion.…

And then finally, of course, the two music-makers at the upper corners correspond, in this two-dimensional design, to the four nude blowers of horns and conchs around the bowl.

Now, in the course of the long five centuries of the Roman occupation of Gaul and Britain (c. 50 b.c. to c. 450 a.d.), the myths and rituals of the Hellenistic mysteries were not only carried to those colonies but associated syncretically with appropriate local gods. For example, in the Gallo-Roman altar from Reims shown in Oriental Mythology, the Celtic god Cernunnos sits in the posture of Hades-Pluto, between Mercury and Apollo, as though uniting the powers of these two. Likewise, in Occidental Mythology, two panels are shown from a Gallo-Roman altar unearthed near Notre Dame de Paris, in which a Gaulish divinity identified with the Irish hero Cuchulinn is shown chopping a tree beneath which a bull stands, upon whose back there perch three goddesses in the form of long-necked cranes. Cuchulinn was the prototype of the Round Table knight Sir Gawain.^{Note 23} His pagan legends were recorded during that period of Irish Christian civilization, between the sixth and eleventh centuries, when Greek and Latin learning still was cultivated by the Irish clergy as nowhere else in devastated Europe. The Abbot Aileran of Cloncard, writing c. 660 on the mystical meanings of the names in Christ’s genealogy, for example, quoted familiarly from Origen, Jerome, Philo, and Augustine. The Abbot Sedulius of Kildare, c. 820, corrected his Latin New Testament from a Greek original and composed for Charlemagne’s grandson a treatise on the art of government.^{Note 24} The Neoplatonist Scotus Erigena (c. 815–877),^{Note 25} whom Professor Adolph Harnack termed “the most learned and perhaps also the wisest man of his age,”^{Note 26} is to be named magna cum laude in this context. And for a bit of direct visual evidence of a relationship between the Neoplatonic symbolism of both Alexandria and the Renaissance and the works and prayers of the Irish monkish scribes of Glendalough, Dingle, and Kells, a reconsideration of the Tunc-page of the ninth-century Book of Kells should suffice (reproduced and discussed in Occidental Mythology.). The invocation by Gottfried of the Muses nine before Apollo’s throne acquires for us now a new force — particularly in relation to the enspelling power of Tristan’s harp (Figure 4), which is a match for that of Orpheus, who in the earliest Christian tradition could even stand, as in the Domitilla fresco (Figure 3), for the Redeemer. Dante’s entire Divina Commedia, moreover, is of a piece with this pagan vision of a spiritual dimension of the universe.

“In the middle of the road of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, where the right way was lost.” So commences the mighty work.^{Note 27} And the poet states that he cannot well say how he came into that wood. “I was so full of sleep,” he tells, “at the time that I left the true way.”

“But when I came to the foot of a hill where that valley ended which had pierced my heart with fear, I looked upward and beheld its shoulders already clothed with the rays of the planet [the sun] that guides man aright, along no matter what road.”^{Note 28}

A suspicion that Dante’s dark wood of fear must be analogous to the circle of Silent Thalia, and the hill where the valley ended, clothed with “the rays of the planet that guidesman aright,” to Mount Helicon, with Apollo, is increased by the next event of the adventure. For immediately, as Dante tells, three dangerous beasts appeared: the first a she-leopard, “light and very nimble, covered with a spotted coat”; the second a lion, “coming at me with head high and with ravening hunger”; and the last a she-wolf, “which in her leaness seemed laden with all cravings, and ere now had made many folk to live forlorn.”^{Note 29} The leopard, of fair and varied seeming, typified for Dante temptations of the flesh, that false allure of desire which in Gafurius’s design is represented by the head of a dog. The lion symbolized pride, the fundamental sin by which man, self-bounded, is held from the vision of God. And the shewolf symbolized avarice, striving for what time takes away. These are the forces — functions of the false allure of time — by which those who have lost the right way are held trapped in delusion.

However, as in Gafurius’s design, so here. The grace of poetry, sent by the Muses, bore the voyager past the dangerous beasts. Falling back before them in fear, he beheld approaching the figure of Virgil.

“I will be your guide,” said the pagan poet.^{Note 30}

“O Muses,” Dante then prayed; “O lofty genius, now assist me!”^{Note 31}

And with this noble guide, casting fear away, the lost Christian moved along the deep and savage road into the mouth of Hell itself.^{Note 32}

Besides Virgil, furthermore, there were six other classical masters whom Dante encountered on his way and who, as Professor Curtius shows, were the chief intellectual authorities of the Middle Ages. They were, namely, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, in Limbo, the first circle of Hell; Cato at the foot of Mount Purgatory; and Statius at its summit, the Earthly Paradise, where Dante at last found again his personal muse, Beatrice. In life she had opened his eyes to earthly beauty, and now in death bore his spirit, in faith, beyond the natural virtues of the pagans, up the very scale of the planets of Gafurius’s design, to the seat of that triune god of Christians, one substance in three divine persons, of whom (according to the Christian view) the merely natural light of Apollonian reason is but the earthly figuration.

This Christian devaluation of the pagan light of lights, Apollo, and along with Apollo the whole classical mystery tradition from which the Christian was in part derived, is an elegant instance of the manner in which a later cult may supplant an earlier simply by refusing to recognize the interpretation of its symbols given by its own supreme initiates, reading them in a reductive way and then setting its own symbol in the emptied higher place. Dante’s termination of the guiding power of the pagans at the summit of Mount Purgatory, the Earthly Paradise, accords with the formula of Aquinas, whereby reason may lead, as it led the ancients, to the summit of earthly virtue, but only faith and supernatural grace (personified in Beatrice) can lead beyond reason to the seat of God.

However, as we regard with Dante the features of this god in the aspect of a trinity, we are led to a further observation, to wit, that in the Christian doctrine of three divine persons in one divine substance what we actually have is a transposition of the symbolism of the Graces three and Hyperborean Apollo into a mythological order of exclusively masculine masks of God — which accords well enough with the patriarchal spirit of the Old Testament but unbalances radically the symbolic, and therefore spiritual, connotations not only of sex and the sexes, but also of all nature.

The Greek formula was of immeasurable age and represented, furthermore, a symbolic system of astonishingly broad distribution. We may recall, for instance, the myths from West Ceram (Indonesia) of Hainuwele and her two sisters, and the prominence there not only of the number three but also of the number nine.^{Note 33} Or consider again those cranes on the back of the Celtic bull. In the patriarchal revision of the old heterosexual symbology, the Son corresponds to the down-going Grace; the Holy Ghost, to the returning; the Father, to the all-bounding Grace; and the One Substance, to the light of the Apollonian mind. Three persons, differentiated, would, according to classical thinking, have to be regarded as conditioned; i.e., comprised in a field of relationships, within the matrix of the cosmic goddess Space-Time — as they do in fact appear in the fifteenth-century French image of the mother of God reproduced in Occidental Mythology, Figure 32. Though defined as male, they represent functions of māyā (See The World Transformed here and here, and Oriental Mythology) and might as properly, therefore, have retained the female form. Moreover, a certain almost ridiculous difficulty has followed upon this exclusion of the female principle from its normal cosmic role. The mythological females of the Christian myth have had to be interpreted historically: Mother Eve, before and after the Fall, as a prehistoric character in a garden that never was; and Mary, the “mother of God,” as a virgin who conceived miraculously and was physically assumed into a place called “Heaven above” that does not physically exist.

Throughout the history of the Christian cult, the liability of its historicized symbols to reinterpretation in some general mythological sense has been a constant danger; and, reciprocally, the susceptibility of the Greek — and even Buddhist, Hindu, Navaho, and Aztec — mythologies to readings approximately Christian has also been a threat, of which advantage has been recently taken by T. S. Eliot in his Four Quartets, James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, and Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers. Many artists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, likewise, took advantage of these possibilities, and even as early as the period of the catacombs there is that Domitilla ceiling (Figure 3). In fact, this possibility and the knowledge of it are what I have termed the secret stream, below ground, of our classical heritage of symbolic communication.

For a passing glance at the other stream, let me conclude this brief memorandum of the wealth of our classical endowment with a passage from Professor Curtius’s summation of the meaning to the Middle Ages of those six great names whom Dante met as he was led along his way:

Homer, the illustrious progenitor, was hardly more than a great name in the Middle Ages. For medieval Antiquity is Latin Antiquity. But the name had to be named. Without Homer, there would have been no Aeneid; without Odysseus’s descent into Hades, no Virgilian journey through the other world; without the latter, no Divina Commedia. To the whole of late Antiquity, as to the whole of the Middle Ages, Virgil is what he is for Dante: “l’altissimo poeta.” Next to him stands Horace, as the representative of Roman satire. This the Middle Ages regarded as wholesome sermonizing on manners and morals, and it found many imitators from the twelfth century onwards. Whatever else it may be, Dante’s Commedia is also a denunciation of his times. Ovid, however, wore a different face for the Middle Ages than he does for us. In the beginning of the Metamorphoses, the twelfth century found a cosmogony and cosmology which were in harmony with contemporary Platonism. But the Metamorphoses were also a repertory of mythology as exciting as a romance. Who was Phaeton? Lycaon? Procne? Arachne? Ovid was the Who's Who for a thousand such questions. One had to know the Metamorphoses; otherwise one could not understand Latin poetry. Furthermore, all these mythological stories had an allegorical meaning. So Ovid was also a treasury of morality. Dante embellishes episodes of the Inferno with transformations intended to outdo Ovid, as he outdoes Lucan’s terribilita. Lucan was the virtuoso of horror and a turgid pathos, but he was also versed in the underworld and its witchcraft. In addition he was the source book for the Roman Civil War, the panegyrist of the austere Cato of Utica whom Dante places as guardian at the foot of the Mount of Purgatory. Statius, finally, was the bard of the Fratricidal Theban War, and his epic closes with homage to the divine Aeneid. The “Tale of Thebes” was a favorite book in the Middle Ages, as popular as the Arthurian romances. It contained dramatic episodes, arresting characters. Oedipus, Amphiaraus, Capaneus, Hypsipyle, the infant Archemorus — the dramatis personae of the Thebais are constantly referred to in the Commedia.

Dante’s meeting with the bella scuola seals the reception of the Latin epic into the Christian cosmological poem. This embraces an ideal space, in which a niche is left free for Homer, but in which all the great figures of the West are likewise assembled (Augustus, Trajan, Justinian); the Church Fathers; the masters of the seven liberal arts; the luminaries of philosophy; the founders of monastic orders; the mystics. But the realm of these founders, organizers, teachers, and saints was to be found only in one historical complex of European culture: in the Latin Middle Ages. There lie the roots of the Divine Comedy. The Latin Middle Ages is the crumbling Roman road from the antique to the modern world.^{Note 34}

III. The Celto-Germanic Heritage

But let us now turn our thoughts to that fund of native North European lore which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries became suddenly and with marvelous effect the chief inspiration of the golden age of courtly romance. Classical as well as Christian strains, together with Islamic, had already been threaded through the legends. In the Celtic sphere, the Gallo-Roman altars already noticed testify to the classical influence, while for the Germans there is the old runic script, developed from the Greek, which in the first centuries a.d.passed from the Hellenized Gothic provinces northwest of the Black Sea, up the Danube and down the Elbe, to Scandinavia and England.^{Note 35} There is the figure, furthermore, of Othin (Woden, Wotan), self-crucified on the World Ash as an offering to himself, to gain the occult wisdom of those runes, which is clearly a Hellenistic motif (compare Figure 11).

Figure 21. Sutton Hoo ship-burial — grave chamber marked in white (artist's representation, England, seventh century a.d.)

Perhaps the most suggestive revelation yet disclosed, however, of what one authority has called the “highly cosmopolitan culture” of the old Germanic courts is to be seen in the astonishing Sutton Hoo ship-burial that in 1939 was unearthed in Suffolk, on the River Deben, six miles inland from the sea. The large buried hull with its rich grave hoard has been assigned to a date between 650 and 670, and the associated warrior-prince seems to have been either the pagan Anglian King Æthelhere (d. 655), whose wife, a Christian, had left him to enter a nunnery near Paris, or his younger brother, King Æthelwald (d. 663–664), a Christian. Among the objects found were silver dishes from Byzantium, Merovingian gold coins, what appears to be a Swedish sword, a beautiful little harp, and numerous elegantly fashioned jeweled ornaments of local Anglo-Saxon manufacture. Mr. R. L. S. Bruce- Mitford of the British Museum, where these objects now are displayed, remarks that in this treasure “there is the revelation of the wide contacts — Frankish, Scandinavian, Central European, Byzantine, and beyond — of a Saxon royal house of the early seventh century”; and he adds: “Already in all probability in the time of Redwald [c. 618] there had developed in East Anglia a highly cosmopolitan culture, one element of which was a direct knowledge of objects and patterns of the classical world.”^{Note 36}

The first known name in the history of English literature belongs to the date of this ship-burial; namely of the gentle poet Caedmon, who flourished c. 657–680. According to his legend preserved by the Venerable Bede (whose dates are also of this time, 673–735), he was a cowherd in the employ of the Abbess Saint Hilda of Whitby, who because of his lack of education had been used to quit the banquet hall whenever the company began to sing and the harp came his way. Retiring to his stable, he would lie down disconsolately to sleep; but there one evening, as the legend tells:

While he slept, someone stood by him in a dream, greeted, called him by name, and said to him, “Caedmon, sing me something.” He replied, “I know not how to sing; that is the reason I left the feast. I am here because I cannot sing.” The personage insisted: “No matter, you must sing to me.” “Well,” he answered, “what shall I sing?” To which the other responded: “Sing the beginning of created things.” And at that, straightway, Caedmon sang in praise of God the Creator verses he had never heard.^{Note 37}

The tale reminds one of the Chinese legend of the Zen patriarch Hui-neng, whose dates, 638–713, coincide with those of Caedmon.^{Note 38} The two legends render the same doctrine of a wisdom beyond learning; yet no one, as far as I know, has yet worked out, or even suggested, any relationship between the spiritual worlds of the British cowherd and Chinese kitchen-boy. On the face of it, the common idea involved is — in the Jungian sense — archetypal and might be expected to arise independently in any number of traditions. However, it is a fact that in early medieval times there were great movements of hardy peoples in the regions between Europe and the Far East.

As early as the fifth century a.d. related tribes of Huns struck simultaneously into Europe, India, and China. A dynasty of vigorous Tibetan kings was expanding its inner Asian conquests and influence from the period of Song-tsen Gam-po (c. 630) to the death of Ral-pa-chen (838). Nestorian as well as Manichaean monasteries were on the caravan ways to China and even flourished in China itself until the reign of the fanatic Emperor Wutsung (r. 841–846).^{Note 39} And, as remarked in Oriental Mythology, there is a more than incidental similarity between the myths and legends of the Iron Age Celts and Iron Age Japan — the dates of the earliest Japanese collections, the Kojiki and Nihongi, being 712 and 720 a.d .^{Note 40} The entire question is wide open, fascinating, and, as far as I know, unexplored as yet by scholar’s eye.

According to our school textbooks, Hui-neng’s contemporary Caedmon is significant for literature in having applied the techniques of traditional Germanic bardic verse to the rendition of biblical themes in Anglo-Saxon. He was followed, perhaps c. 730–750,^{Note 41} by the unknown Beowulf poet, who sang in the same Germanic style for an aristocratic, not monastic, audience, rendering for its lately converted Christian ears an old Germanic hero-legend of the monsterand dragon-killings of a Scandinavian king ancestral to the local Anglian line.^{Note 42}

Authoritative scholars have detected signs of the influence of Virgil in this Christianized pagan work,^{Note 43} and in the light of the learning of that time such an influence was almost inevitable. Bede, the “Father of English History,” was writing his important Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, which at least one authority has termed “probably the best history written by an Englishman before the seventeenth century.”^{Note 44} Bede was the author also of substantial works on theology, grammar, natural science, chronology, and the calendar. We have already mentioned the state of learning in Ireland in this period. The Beowulf poet, too, was erudite in both native and classical lore.

But in Bede there are signs also of at least a modicum of Oriental influence; for in his Ecclesiastical History there is an arresting vision of Hell, attributed to a certain Drihthelm of Cunningham, in which an unmistakable Eastern feature appears. “Radiant in face and look and in bright apparel was he who guided me … ,” the passage begins.

We arrived at the valley of great breadth and depth, and of infinite length.… One part was very dreadful, being full of boiling flames; the other not less intolerable through the chill of hail and snow. Both were full of men’s souls, which seemed to be cast to either side in turn, as though by the overpowering violence of a great storm. When they could not endure the force of the excessive heat, they sprang away in their misery into the midst of excessive cold; and when they could find no rest there, they sprang back into the midst of the burning fire and the unquenchable flame.^{Note 45}

In Oriental Mythology it is seen that in the Indian Jain and Buddhist Hells torture by cold is as prominent as that by fire.^{Note 46} It is prominent also in Zoroastrian belief, whence it entered the lore of Islam. But, as Father Miguel Asín y Palacios states in his pioneering study of Moslem influence on Dante, “Biblical eschatology makes no mention of any torture of cold in hell.”^{Note 47} The influence of Islamic thought and imagery on Dante is now conceded, even (though reluctantly) in Italy itself. And in fact, how could there possibly have been none? Since the period of Charlemagne (r. 768–814), and with increasing force since the First Crusade (1096–1099), the civilization of the Near East had been a major contributor to Europe. Spain had fallen to the Moors in 711. Sicily, plundered as early as 655, remained a battleground of the two religions throughout the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. The twelfth-century troubadours and thirteenth-century scholastic theologians were enormously indebted to Islam. Moreover, the Neapolitan court of Dante’s most admired Emperor, Frederick II (r. 1220–1250), was even brazenly hospitable to Moslem learning. Hence, though it is indeed a bit surprising to find a Buddhist-Zoroastrian motive in a Christian vision of Hell as early as 731, the date of Bede’s completion of his History, it is not impossible; and by Dante’s time it would have been impossible for there not to have been such an influence (That the works, or at least the reputation, of this Venerable Bede were known to Dante is indicated by his appearance in the place reserved in the Paradiso for the great Christian theologians, the sphere of the sun (Paradiso X.131).).

Figure 22. The opening verses of Beowulf (ink on vellum, England, late tenth century a.d.

Thus Beowulf was the product of an age already of mixed traditions. It is the earliest extant work of length in the vernacular literatures of Northern Europe and sounds in its sturdy verses a significant number of themes that were to be echoed, amplified, restated, and interpreted through many centuries, even to our own. The “aristocratic tone” of the poem, the “refinement and deep courtesy of the life in the dwellings of kingly warriors” which it depicts, have been remarked by Professor C. L. Wrenn of Oxford in his recently published commentary; “and this nobility of tone,” as he states, “accords well with the dignity of a style which freely uses periphrases.”^{Note 48} Or, as my own revered master, the late Professor W. W. Lawrence of Columbia, states in his volume on Beowulf and the Epic Tradition, “although derived to a large extent from popular sources,” the poem was “the product of an ars poetica of settled principles and careful development.”^{Note 49}

In the seventh century [Professor Lawrence continues] the Irish monks were active in the north, and their preaching was fortified by that of the celebrated [Roman] mission of Augustine [d. 604: the first Archbishop of Canterbury] which in the same century extended its efforts effectively from its headquarters in the south to the Anglian kingdom in the north. The Irish monks were scholars as well as missionaries; their schools were famous, and they taught their converts the best that had remained of classical letters. The Roman churchmen, too, brought with them a knowledge of Latin and Greek, a love of books and learning, not only establishing ecclesiastical foundations noted for scholarship, but keeping closely in touch with the best that the Continent had to give. The result was that England came to lead the world in humane letters. When Charlemagne [r. 768–814] looked about for a scholar to direct his palace school and combat heresy, he chose, not a Continental scholar, but the celebrated Alcuin [735–804], a product of the Cathedral school at York.^{Note 50}

Of course, by “the world” Professor Lawrence here can have meant only the little world of Europe. For in the world the actual leadership in letters at that time was in India and T’ang China, with Baghdad and Cordova soon to come: so that, in fact, Charlemagne’s court was itself in many ways colonial to the Orient by way of Islam. Or, as Spengler states the case in his characteristic style:

In Charles the Great what we see is a compound of primitive spirituality on the point of its awakening mingled with a superimposed type of late intellectuality. Regarding certain features of his reign, one could speak of him as the Caliph of Frankistan, but he is, on the other hand, still the chieftain of a German tribe. And it is in the combination of these two strains that his symbolic value lies — as, likewise, that of the form of his palacechapel at Aix-la-Chapelle, which is no longer a mosque but not yet a cathedral.^{Note 51}

And the Beowulf poet, approximately a contemporary of Charlemagne, born like him of a German race recently converted, combined, like him, in a manner abounding in contradictions, the two profoundly incompatible strains of Europe and the Levant. He was an Englishman writing of Swedes and Danes, a Christian writing of pagans; and one of his great points seems to have been that God, the Christian deity, had had care for those old warrior folk, far though they were from Jerusalem. “This truth,” he wrote, “is well known, that God almighty has ever ruled the race of men.”^{Note 52}

It has not yet been shown that the hero Beowulf, sailing the Kattegat c. 500 a.d., was an actual historical character, as Arthur, his British contemporary, seems to have been. However, King Hygelac, his uncle in the poem, was an actual king of the Geats, a Germanic folk of southern Sweden, killed by the Franks on the lower Rhine about the year 521; while Hygelac’s friend, King Hrothgar of the Danes, to the rescue of whose mead-hall Beowulf came, seems also to have been historical: hardly historical, however, the adventure.

Figure 23. The Queller of Beasts; England, 650–670 a.d.

Figure 24. The Queller of the Beasts; Crete, c. 1600 b.c.

Figure 25. Ink Rubbing from a Chinese Bronze; c. 1384–1111 b.c.

Figure 23, from a jeweled ornament on the lid of a purse from the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, almost certainly does not represent the monster-killer Beowulf between his two grisly victims, Grendel and Grendel’s dam; yet its theme suggests the possibility. It illustrates a variant of the ancient mythic theme of the Queller of Wild Beasts. Figure 24 is from a Cretan seal, c. 1600 b.c., and Figure 25 from a Chinese bronze, roughly c. 1200 b.c.

In the case of Beowulf the adventure commenced when his noble uncle, Hygelac, received word that the mead-hall of the King of the Danes was being harried by a monster, Grendel. When darkness fell this baneful wight, emerging from his moors and fens, would spy about the high warrior hall, wherein all would be asleep, and, entering, take where they rested thirty thanes, bear them off to his keep, and there consume them, exulting. Hygelac sent Beowulf to quell this demon of the giant race of Cain. (For it was by Cain that all the elves and monsters were begotten that stray about as giants.) And Beowulf achieved his task.

In the dark of night the door of the mead-hall gave way, and the manlike walker in shadow, Grendel, laughing in his heart, took up and tore a sleeping thane, bit into his bone-frame, swallowed him piece by piece, and reached for another. But never had his arm met a mightier grief than at that moment laid hand to it. For the man that he touched was Beowulf, and the lordly hall became clamorous. Gold-ornamented mead-benches fell about the floor, and at Grendel’s shoulder a wound began to show. The sinews sprang, the arm came off, the monster fled, and when morning came the marveling people tracked the trail of gore to a mere, of which the waters now were mingled red with blood.

We note that a Christian reading has been given to the monsters. They are sprung of the race of Cain. Thereby a sense of moral evil has been added to the old pagan one of natural terror. The lions on the Cretan seal of Figure 23 are quelled, not slain; and, even if slain, would not have been morally evil. Likewise in Figure 24, where the animals are tigers: in China the tiger is not evil but symbolic of the earth and in folklore a protecting spirit; for as one authority states, “he never needlessly attacks human beings, but destroys many pests to their fields.”^{Note 53} And so the beasts of this early Chinese bronze must be guardians not antagonists; as may also be the pair from Sutton Hoo (Figure 23). It is thus even possible that originally in the Beowulf saga the monsters were conceived not as fiends but as the guardians of natural forces, to be not killed, but quelled and integrated. In fact, their residence in the Land below Waves suggests an association with those chthonic powers that have always been recognized as dangerous and frightening yet essential to all life. And in the subsequent adventure, of Beowulf against Grendel’s dam, a sense pervades the scene rather of nature’s terrible wonder than of moral evil and crime.

For, as the poet next tells, the monster-killer, after his victory, was given quarters with proper honors in a building apart; and that night it was Grendel’s dam who entered the mead-hall for revenge. Swords flashed, shields clashed; she seized an earl and made off. At dawn all followed to the haunted mere to which Grendel’s gore had formerly led them, where all about in its waters were strange monsters of the sea — many a dragon kind making trial of the surge and on jutting rocks water-demons basking — all of which put out from shore when the company arrived. At one Beowulf shot an arrow, and when the men’s spears brought it back to land there was marvel at the fearful thing.

The hero donned his armor, took up his shield and a sword that never had betrayed any man that grasped it, then strode into the mere. The water-wife saw his coming, seized him, dragged him below into her fire-glimmering roofed hall, where no water was within. His battle-blade there sang its greedy war-song on her skull, but failed and he flung it to the ground, seized her shoulders, and she tripped him. (However, God, the Wise Lord, Heaven’s Ruler, was holding sway over that battle-victory.) Beowulf spied an old sword, the work of giants, greater in size than any man might bear, and, grasping its chainbound hilt, despairing of his life, he smote so wrathfully that the ring-marked blade caught the she-fiend at the neck, broke the bone-rings, and went through. She fell, and the light of the roofed hall flared.

Discovering Grendel helpless on a bed, Beowulf cut off his head, after which the warriors above noticed blood in the waves and talked of their hero, dead. In his hand the sword blade, smeared with the monster’s blood, was falling away in battleicicles. A marvel to see, how it melted! And when he came to the surface, holding Grendel’s head, four men bore it to the mead-hall, where the arm already hung above the door.

Like Theseus after his Minotaur deed, Perseus with the Gorgon’s head, and Jason with the Golden Fleece, Beowulf, returning home, in due time succeeded to his throne, which he held for some fifty years; and when he was old, heavy with age, a last adventure challenged — to his doom.

Figure 26. Dragon Treasure; China, 12th century a.d.

Figure 26, from a Chinese scroll, is of a dragon appearing through mist and waves, clutching in his four-taloned claw a glowing sphere. A pearl? The sun? In either case, a great treasure. Chinese dragons are rain-producing, dangerous but benign. And in India too the “serpent kings” guard both the waters of immortality and the treasures of the earth.

Not only jewels and wealth, but beautiful women also are of interest to dragons. The classical legend of Andromeda, saved from a sea monster by Perseus, surely will be recalled, and perhaps too the Japanese story of the storm-god Susano-O and the dragon he killed by a ruse, to save the eighth daughter of a couple whose first seven had already been eaten.^{Note 54}

In Beowulf’s case, the dragon to be met kept guard of a hoard of gold. In a stone barrow, on a high heath above sea-waves, below which lay a path not known to men, a weeping prince of yore had stowed his battle gear and cups of gold, with a prayer to the protecting earth;

Hold these, thou Earth, this wealth of earls;

For in thee did good men first discover it.

None have I more, to wield sword or burnish gold.

Battle-death has taken every one of my folk.

And this evil, naked dragon, twilight-spoiler, which by night flew folded in fire, had one day found that joy-giving hoard, to which he had settled on watch. And he there remained three hundred years, no whit the better for it, until some man or other with his hand took from that hoard a golden cup. Waking, wrathful, the dragon snuffed along the rocks, finding his track, but not the man. And fearful then for the people of the land was that feud’s beginning.

By night the angered barrow-warden flew: bright homesteads burned. He shot back before day to his hoard. And so again, night after night. Then Beowulf, now an old king, foreknew that death was next before him. He ordered a shield made marvelously of iron; the man who had taken the cup was forced to serve as guide. With eleven others, himself as twelfth, the guide thereto thirteen, the old king then sat him on the foreland and spoke his hearthcompanions farewell.

His heart was sad,

uneasy and death-ready: wyrd immediately nigh.^{Note 55}

Now, this Anglo-Saxon word wyrd has about it a sense of haunting doom that is recaptured in Shakespeare’s three Weird Sisters. These are transformations into witches of the Norns of old Germanic myth, who (as described in the Old Norse “Wise Woman’s Prophecy,” Völuspó) dwell by Urth’s well, from which they water the roots of the World Ash. Shakespeare’s trio, on a “desert heath,” amid thunder, lightning, and rain, conjure from their witches’ caldron prophecies that are heard as though from outside by Macbeth, yet are of deeds already maturing in his heart. In Old Norse the Norns’ three names are given as Urth, Verthandi, and Skuld:^{Note 56}

“Become, Becoming, and Shall Be,” Past, Present, and Future, which appear to be a late invention, however, inspired perhaps (twelfth century a.d..?) by the model of the Greek three Graces. For there seems to have been originally but one Norn: called Urth in Old Norse, in Old High German Wurd, and in Anglo-Saxon Wyrd. The word may be related to the German werden, “to become, to grow,” which would suggest a sense of inward inherent destiny, comparable, essentially, to Schopenhauer’s concept of “intelligible” character. Another association is with the Old High German wirt, wirtel, “spindle,” by which the idea is suggested of a spinning and weaving of destiny. The classical triad of the Moirai may have contributed to this image; namely of Clotho, the “Spinner,” who spins the life thread; Lachesis, “Disposer of Lots,” determining its length; and Atropos, “Inflexible,” who cuts it. And so the symbol of the spindle became significant of destiny, and the woven web, of life.

One recalls the fairytale of Little Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty), who in her fifteenth year was pricked by the spindle of a cruel hag, whereupon she fell asleep for a century, until kissed by a king’s son who found his way through briars to her slumbering castle.^{Note 57} And there is the comical tale of Three Spinners, “the first of whom had a broad flat foot, the second such a great underlip that it hung down to her chin, and the third a great broad thumb,” respectively, from treading the wheel, wetting the thread, and twisting it.^{Note 58}

Returning, however, to the Völuspó — which Wagner took as inspiration for his Götterdämmerung — we find that there the universe itself unfolds from within, organically, to its day of doom, when Garm, the dog of Hel, howls before the “Cliff-Cave,” Hel’s gate, giants, dwarfs, and elves break free, and the gods (already knowing, as they do, the destiny before them) go to meet in mutual slaughter those monsters of the deep, at the close of the age.

And so too the old King Beowulf, and the dragon of his doom, at the close of his life:

“Not a foot’s length,” he said, “will I give back from the keeper of the barrow, but as Wyrd may grant, the ruler of all men, so shall it befall us in the fight.” And rising, strong beneath his helm, he carried his battle sark to the stony steps, where beneath a wall and arch of stone, a stream, steaming with battle fires, was pouring from the barrow. The old king let sound his voice, and for the treasure warden within there was time no more for peace.

First the monster’s breath, fuming hot, broke forth; the earth resounded; and the warrior, strong of heart, swung up his battle-shield for what was destined. The dragon coiled and came: at first slowly moving, then hastening, until, smitten by the sword, he cast forth a deadly fire and the blade gave up its strength. (No easy journey is it now to be for that old King of the Geats, who must leave this earth plain unwillingly to make his home in a dwelling somewhere else. And so must every man lay aside the days that pass.) Again the two became engaged.

And it was then that a young shield-warrior, Wiglaf, perceiving his lord hard laboring, moving into the slaughter-reek, bore his helmet to his lord’s side. But' his shield immediately melted, and the spoiler of people, with bitter fangs, took Beowulf’s whole throat, whose blood gushed forth in waves. Wiglaf struck the dragon’s neck; his sword sank in, the fire failed: the old king drew from his burnie a dagger, and those two together cut the worm in two. But that was the last triumphant hour of that king in this world; for the poison within was rising in his breast. “Dear Wiglaf, quickly now,” he said, “help me to see this old treasure of gold, the gladness of its bright jewels, curiously set, that I may yield my life the more easily and the lordship I have held so long.”^{Note 59}

As a number of commentators have remarked, there was nothing of the Christian spirit in this noble death: no thought of sin, forgiveness, or Heaven, but the old Germanic virtues only of loyalty and courage, pride in the performances of duty, and, for a king, selfless, fatherly care for his people’s good. Beowulf’s joy, furthermore, in the sight of the earthly treasure is even decidedly unchristian;^{Note 60} for the work is everywhere alive with love for the wonder of life in this world, with not a word of either anxiety or desire for the next.

The concluding scene is of the burning of the hero’s body, then the building of the barrow. And as at Sutton Hoo, so here: in the barrow they placed all the rings, jewels, and trappings taken from the dragon hoard; whereupon, twelve sons of nobles, brave in battle rode about the mound, while they framed in sorrow words of praise.

The name Beowulf itself, “bee-wolf,” apparently meaning bear, suggests affinities with a widely known folktale figure of prodigious strength, the Bear’s Son (again see Figure 25),^{Note 61} the distribution of whose appearances, in North America as well as Eurasia, points to a background in that primordial cult of reverence for the bear discussed in Primitive Mythology, and which is still observed among the Ainus of Japan.^{Note 62}

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A second mythologically empowered beast looming large in the Celto-Germanic legendary background of Europe is the pig, the boar, the same whose tusks brought death to Adonis and left the wound on Odysseus’s thigh by which he was recognized when he returned (by way of his own swineherd’s hut), after his visit to the underworld, to which he had been introduced by Circe, whose magic turned men into swine.^{Note 63} However, whereas the distribution of the bear’s-son motif suggests an arctic, circumpolar range and a background — ultimately — in the cavebear cults and sanctuaries of the paleolithic, those of the boar and the killed and resurrected god are of the later, planting and agricultural “Mediterranean” culture complex, which reached Ireland by the sea way of Gibraltar c. 2500 b.c., and in England is represented in the great circle of Stonehenge (c. 1900–1400 b.c.),^{Note 64} which in popular lore is attributed to the magic of the druid Merlin.

Figure 27. Gaulish God with a Boar; France, 1st century b.c.

Figure 28. The “Eye Goddess”; three examples, c. 2500 b.c.: a) in bone, from Spain; b) in clay, from Syria; c) on a seal, from Sumer

The Celts, like the Germans, were patriarchal Aryans; however, with their westward drive into Gaul and the British Isles in the first millennium b.c., they entered the old Bronze Age sphere of the Great Goddess and her killed and resurrected son, whose cults of the seasonal round and rebirth were soon combined with their own. Figure 27 is the image of a Gaulish god wearing the typical neck ornament of the Celtic noble and warrior caste, a golden tore, and holding before him a wild boar. It is a work in stone, ten inches high, of the first century b.c., about the time of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.^{Note 65} Instead of arms, huge eyes are engraved on either side, exactly as long as the boar and disposed, like him, along the vertical axis. They are difficult to explain, unless by reference back to the pre-Celtic megalithic art of some two millenniums earlier, which had passed from Spain and Portugal north, through France, to the British Isles. For there an eye motif, associated with the Mother Goddess (the Eye Goddess),^{Note 66} is particularly prominent. In Figure 28 are three examples: a) on a piece of bone from Spain, b) a clay figurine from Syria, and c) a seal impression from Sumer, all of dates c. 2500 b.c. The stone-bound lines of the Gaulish figure with the boar suggest the pre-Celtic megalithic style, which was contemporary in the British Isles with Minoan Crete and Troy,^{Note 67} its creative center in the West being southern Spain, as a reflex of the Bronze Age of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the pre-Homeric Aegean. And as there, so here, the chief divinity was the goddess of many forms and names, whose son and spouse was the ever-living, killed and resurrected lord of immortality: Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, et cetera, the god slain by the boar.

Figure 29. Sacred Boar (bronze, England, Roman Period)

In central Spain and northern Portugal, there have been found in the neighborhood of Celtic forts a number of large stone sculptures of boars,^{Note 68} and in Orleans, France, there is in the historical museum an example in bronze more than 4 feet long, 2 feet, 3 inches high.^{Note 69} Figure 29 shows a bronze 3 inches long, unearthed near London. Moreover, the boar appears on many such Gaulish coins as that of Figure 21, where on the obverse we see a squatting god with a tore in his right hand; the same as of Figure 27. He is here identifiable as the Celtic god whom the Romans equated with their own lord of the underworld, Pluto (Greek Hades), by whom Proserpina (Persephone) was abducted; and when the earth opened to receive her, it took down a herd of swine as well.^{Note 70}

Figure 30. Squatting God and Boar (Gaulish coin, probably first century b.c.)

The association of the pig with the underworld journey, labyrinth motif and mysteries of immortality has been discussed at length in both the Primitive and the Oriental volumes of this work, and of especial interest in the present context is the Melanesian ceremony of the Maki,^{Note 71} where not only is the pig clearly a counterpart of the sacrificed Savior, opener of the way, and guide to eternal life — corresponding to the sacrificial bull and ram of the West (see Figure 3) — but the rites are conducted in association with a complex of megalithic shrines and chambered barrows that is almost certainly a remote extension of the Bronze Age complex of Western Europe.

In Irish legend, the daughter of the King of the Land of Youth was endowed with the head of a pig when she attached herself to Finn McCool’s son Oisin.^{Note 72} Moreover, the Irish hero Diarmuid, who ran off with Finn McCool’s bride, Grianne, and whose flight with her to the wilderness was the prototype of the “forest years” of Tristan and Isolt, was killed by a boar that he slew — as was Beowulf by his dragon. Tristan, like Odysseus, had the scar of a boar’s tusk on his thigh; and, as though to insist upon the relationship of his love-death to the ancient theme of the god whose animal is the boar, there is an astonishing passage in Gottfried’s version of the romance where King Mark’s steward-in-chief, Marjadoc — who himself was harboring a passion for Isolt — dreamed of the love-mad Tristan as a rampaging boar violating the king’s bed:

As Marjadoc slept, he saw a boar, frightening and frightful, come running out of the wood. Foaming, sparkling, whetting his tusks and charging at everything in his path, he headed for the king’s court. A crowd of palace attendants ran at him and many knights milled hither and thither, round about. Yet no one dared to confront the beast. The boar dashed on through the palace grunting, and when he came to Mark’s chamber, crashed in through the door. He tossed the king’s appointed bed in all directions, befouling the royal bed and bed linen with his foam. And though all of Mark’s people witnessed this, not one of them intervened.^{Note 73}

IV. The Legacy of Islam

1.

When the Roman Catholic priest Professor Miguel Asín y Palacios, in his pioneering work, published in Madrid in 1919, demonstrated with massive proof the great extent to which Dante and his circle had been moved by Moslem inspiration, it came as a real shock to the world of Dante scholarship.^{Note 74} “The analogies shown by the author to exist between the Divine Comedy and Islam are so numerous and of such a nature,” wrote the reviewer in the Analecta Bollandiana, “as to be disquieting to the mind of the reader, who is forced to picture to himself the great epic of Christianity as enthroned in the world of Moslem mysticism, as if in a mosque that were closed to Islam and consecrated to Christian worship.”^{Note 75} However, it is now completely certain that our poet Dante was indeed significantly influenced not only by the philosophers but also by the poets of Islam, and most particularly by a certain Spanish Sufi, Ibnu’l-’Arabi of Murcia (1165–1240), whose twelve-volume production entitled Meccan Revelations anticipates many of the highest spiritual themes not only of the Commedia but of the Vita Nuova as well.

Asín points out that the famous Toledan school of translators under King Alfonso the Wise of León and Castile (r. 1252 — 1284) was in full career at the time of the visit to Spain of Dante’s master, Brunetto Latini (1210–1294), whom the poet greets with the greatest respect in the seventh circle of Hell,^{Note 76} and that the legend of the Mi’rāj (the Hell and Heaven journeys of Mohammed), from the architecture and details of which the Commedia shows many imprints, had in the year 1256 been translated into Castilian — four years before Brunetto’s visit.^{Note 77} Furthermore, as Father Asín states in conclusion:

It is inconceivable that Dante, leading a life of such mental activity, should have been ignorant of Moslem culture, which at the time was all-pervading; that he should not have felt the attraction of a science that was drawing men of learning to the court of Toledo from every part of Christian Europe, and of a literature the influence of which was paramount in the Europe of that time, introducing there the novels, fables, and proverbs of the Orient as well as works of science and apologetics. The prestige enjoyed by Islam was largely due to the Moslem victories over the Crusaders. Roger Bacon, a contemporary of Dante, attributed the defeats of the Christians precisely to their ignorance of the Semitic languages and applied science, of which the Moslems were masters.^{Note 78} In another field of learning, Albertus Magnus, the founder of scholasticism, agreed with Bacon on the superiority of the Arab philosophers;^{Note 79} and Raimon Lull even recommended the imitation of Moslem methods in popular preaching.^{Note 80}

“Rarely,” Father Asín concludes, “can public opinion have been so unanimous in admitting the mental superiority of an adversary.”^{Note 81}

To summarize, then, very briefly, the outstanding correspondences between Dante’s work and, specifically, the Sufi mystic Ibnu’l-’Arabi’s, as remarked by Father Asín, let me simply quote from R. A. Nicholson’s statement of his own concurrence in this view, in his essay on Moslem mysticism in The Legacy of Islam:

The infernal regions, the astronomical heavens, the circles of the mystic rose, the choirs of angels around the focus of divine light, the three circles symbolizing the Trinity — all are described by Dante exactly as Ibnu’l-’Arabi described them. Dante tells us how, as he mounted higher and higher in Paradise, his love was made stronger and his spiritual vision more intense by seeing Beatrice grow more and more beautiful. The same idea occurs in a poem of Ibnu’l-’Arabi written about a century earlier.… It may be added that Ibnu’l-’Arabi too had a Beatrice — Nizām, the beautiful and accomplished daughter of Makinu’ddin — and that owing to the scandal caused by the mystical odes which he composed in her honor he wrote a commentary on them in order to convince his critics that they were wrong. Similarly in the Convito Dante declares his intention to interpret the esoteric meaning of fourteen love-songs which he had composed at an earlier date, and the subject of which had led to the erroneous belief that they dealt with sensual rather than intellectual love! In short, the parallelism, both general and particular, reaches so far that only one conclusion is possible. Muslim religious legends, e.g. the Mi’rāj or Ascension of the Prophet, together with popular and philosophical conceptions of the afterlife — derived from Muslim traditionists and such writers as Farabe, Avicenna, Ghazali, and Ibnu’l-’Arabi — must have passed into the common stock of literary culture that was accessible to the best minds in Europe in the thirteenth century. The Arab conquerors of Spain and Sicily repeated, though on a less imposing scale, the same process of impregnation to which they themselves had been subjected by the Hellenistic civilization of Persia and Syria.”^{Note 82}

Figure 31. Extent of Islamic Rule and Influence, 10th century a.d.

But there is also an earlier phase to this story. Figure 31 is a map showing the geographical extension of Islamic rule and commercial influence in the tenth century a.d. Of particular interest is the evidence of a traffic from the Caspian Sea, up the valley of the Volga, to the Baltic and on to Sweden, Denmark, and Norway — homelands of the Vikings. “From the eighth to the eleventh centuries,” Father Asín remarks, “an active trade was carried on between Moslem countries of the East and Russia and other countries of northern Europe. Expeditions left the Caspian regularly and, ascending the Volga, reached the Gulf of Finland and so through the Baltic to Denmark, Britain, and even as far as Iceland. The quantities of Arabic coins found at various places in this extensive commercial zone bear witness to its importance. “In the eleventh century,” Father Asín then continues, “trade was conducted by the easier sea route across the Mediterranean, chiefly by means of Genoese, Venetian or Moslem vessels. Large colonies of Italian traders settled in all the Moslem ports of the Mediterranean, and merchants, explorers, and adventurers sailed at will across its waters.”

But there is even more to this tale of interchange:

To the stimulus of trade must be added the impulse of the religious ideal. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land, which had been suspended owing to the early conquests of Islam, were renewed and, with the establishment under Charlemagne [r. 768–814] of the Frank Protectorate over the Christian churches of the East, were assured by conventions and assisted by the establishment of hostels and monasteries in Moslem lands. During the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries the number of pilgrims grew, until some of the expeditions comprised as many as twelve thousand; these expeditions were the forerunners of the Crusades.…

More important and more interesting, however … is the contact of the two civilizations in Sicily and Spain. Beginning in the ninth century with piratical raids upon the coasts of the Atlantic and Mediterranean, the Normans gradually formed settlements in Moslem towns of the Peninsula (such as Lisbon, Seville, Orihuela and Barbasto) and in Sicily. The latter island, indeed, which had become permeated with Islam, was conquered in the eleventh century and ruled by a dynasty of Norman Kings until the thirteenth century. Throughout that period the Sicilian population was composed of a medley of races professing different religions and speaking several languages. The court of the Norman King, Roger II [r. 1130–1154], at Palermo, was formed of both Christians and Moslems, who were equally versed in Arabic literature and Greek science. Norman knights and soldiers, Italian and French noblemen and clergy, Moslem men of learning and literature from Spain, Africa, and the East lived together in the service of the King, forming a palatine organization that in all respects was a copy of the Moslem courts. The King himself spoke and read Arabic, kept a harem in the Moslem manner, and attired himself after the Oriental fashion. Even the Christian women of Palermo adopted the dress, veil, and speech of their Moslem sisters.

However, important as Norman Sicily was, Spain was of even greater moment in this interplay of cultures. “For Spain,” as Father Asín points out, “was the first country in Christian Europe to enter into intimate contact with Islam.” From 711 to 1492 the two populations lived side by side in war and peace. “As early as the ninth century the Christians of Cordova had adopted the Moslem style of living, some even to the extent of keeping harems and being circumcised. Their delight in Arabic poetry and fiction, and their enthusiasm for the study of the philosophical and theological doctrines of Islam, are lamented in his Indiculus luminosus by [the Bishop] Alvaro of Cordova [fl. 850 a.d.].” “Throughout the tenth century Arabicized monks and soldiers flocked to León, where their superior culture secured them high office at the court and in the ecclesiastical and civil administration of the kingdom.” And finally: “King Alfonso VI [1065–1109], the conqueror of Toledo, married Zaida, the daughter of the Moorish King of Seville, and his capital resembled the seat of a Moslem court. The fashion quickly spread to private life; the Christians dressed in Moorish style, and the rising Romance language of Castile was enriched by a large number of Arabic words. In commerce, in the arts and trades, in municipal organization, as well as in agricultural pursuits, the influence of the Mudejars [Mohammedans living under Christian kings] was predominant, and thus the way was prepared for the literary invasion that was to reach its climax at the court of Alfonso X or the Wise.”^{Note 83}

2.

Seven centuries before Alfonso’s time the light of Hellenistic learning had been quenched for Europe when, in the year 529, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian ordered the schools of pagan philosophy closed in Athens. The only remaining repositories of Greek philosophy and science then were Sassanian Persia, Gupta India,^{Note 84} and Ireland, the one flickering candle in the West. However, the Arabs who in the name of Mohammed conquered Persia in 641 cared nothing for either philosophy or science. Their Prophet had died in 632. His immediate successors, the “orthodox” caliphs, retained control of the spreading empire until 661, when a rival Meccan house, the Ummayads, usurped the caliphate.^{Note 85} These ruled until 750, when their fourteenth caliph was murdered, and the victors now — to the good fortune of mankind — were Persians, the Abbasids, who, in contrast to the Arab fanatics of the earlier two caliphates, were such discriminating patrons of philosophy, science, and the arts that Baghdad, their young capital (750–1258), became within a few decades the most important seat of classical learning in the world.

According to its own poets, Baghdad then was an earthly paradise of learning, ease, and grace, where, to use their own expressions, the ground was irrigated with rose water and the dust of the roads was musk, flowers and verdure overhung the ways and the air was perpetually sweet with the many-voiced song of birds; while the chirp of lutes, the dulcet warble of flutes, and the silver sound of singing houris rose and fell in harmonious cadence from every window of the streets of palaces that stood in vast succession amid gardens and orchards gifted with eternal verdure. The works of Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, and Plotinus were translated here into Arabic. Poets and musicians, mathematicians, astronomers, geographers, jurisprudents, philosophers, and historians carried forward the labors of a civilized humanity, to which contributions were coming, as well, from India and China. For these were the golden years of the Great East: the centuries of T’ang and Sung in China (6 1 8–1279); Nara, Heian, and Kamakura in Japan (710–1392); Angkor in Cambodia (c. 800–1250); and in India the timeless temple art of the Chalukya and Rashtrakuta, Pala, Sena and Ganga, Pallava, Chola, Hoyshala, and Pandya kings (550–1350) .^{Note 86}

In all the world of Europe and Asia there were then but four essential languages of learning, science, and religion: in the Levant, Arabic; Latin in Europe; Sanskrit in the Indian sphere; and Chinese in the Far East. And as Arabic was the dominant of the two tongues of the West, so was Sanskrit in the Orient. From the yak trails of Tibet to the village markets of Bali, its syllables rose everywhere on the pluming smoke of incense to that void beyond non-being and being that is the destination, ultimately, of all Oriental prayer. And its echoes floated westward too. The influence of Indian thought on the Sufis cannot be doubted, and there is the case, furthermore, of the Buddha, converted into no less than two Christian saints: the Abbots Barlaam and Josaphat, the legend of whose labors in India, first recorded by John of Damascus (c. 676–770), rests immortalized in the chapter for their feast day, November 27, in Voragine’s thirteenth-century Golden Legend.^{Note 87}

The most illuminating summary prospect of the paths, bypaths, and transformations through which a body of Oriental lore might pass from Sanskrit into Latin and thence into European life is provided by an Indian book of fables, the Pañcatantra. Translated about 550 a.d. into Persian for the Sassanian King Khosru Anushirvan (531–579), it was turned into Arabic about 760 with a new title: Kalilah and Dimnah, The Fables of Pilpay; and this then was translated into Syriac, c. 1000; Greek, c. 1080; Hebrew, c. 1250; and old Spanish, 1251. About 1270 a Latin translation of the Hebrew appeared, Directorum humanae vitae, which in turn became, in 1481, Das Buck der Byspel der alten Wysen, and, in 1552, A. F. Doni’s La moral filosophia, which in 1570 Sir Thomas North rendered as The Morall Philosophie of Doni: after all of which we have, finally, the elegant seventeenth-century Fables of La Fontaine, who in 1678 wrote in his introduction to the second volume: “Settlement je diray par reconnoissance que j’en dois la plus grande partie a Pilpay, sage indien. Son livre a este traduit en toutes les langues.”^{Note 88}

But it was not until the early twelfth century that European men of learning themselves undertook seriously, in a really significant way, to bring back to Europe from the gardens of Baghdad the bounty that in Justinian’s day had been forfeited to Asia. We have already mentioned Toledo. In the year 1143 Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, on a visit to his order’s Spanish monasteries, met the bishop of that city, Ramon of Sauvetat (1126–1151), whose scholars were at work translating from Arabic not only the writings of the Greeks but also both the commentaries on those writings and the independent works of the Arabs through whose hands the legacy had passed. To Gerard of Cremona (c. 1114–1187), for example, the most famous of the scholars in Toledo at that time, there are credited no less than seventy substantial titles, many of vast extent, including, besides a number of the most important books of Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Galen, the Arab Avicenna’s medical Canon, which for a time replaced Galen’s writings even in the West. Peter of Cluny, impressed, suggested to his host that a Latin version of the Qu'ran would be an aid in the refutation of Islam, and when the work, undertaken by Robert of Kelene, was finished that same year, the Abbot composed his celebrated refutation: Libri II adversus nefarium sectam saracenorum.

Also to be mentioned is the interesting hermetic text, anonymously translated, of The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers (Liber XXIV philosophorum), from which the sentence came that has already been more than once quoted in these pages: Deus est sphaera infinita, cujus centrum est ubique, circumferentia nusquam (See Experience and Authority here and here.).

Shall we be surprised to find, then, on the levels of folklore and romance, that in turning from the popular One Thousand Nights and One Night of Islam to the legends of King Arthur, we have moved only from one room to another of the same enchanted palace? As remarked in my introduction to The Portable Arabian Nights: “The battle scenes might comfortably appear in the Morte D’Arthur; the tales of enchanted castles, miraculous swords, talismanic trophies, and quest in the realms of the Jinn, are reminiscent, in numerous features, of the favorites of Arthurian romance; the pattern of romantic love is in essence identical with that of twelfth-century Provence; the pious tales breathe the same odor of spiritual childhood and the misogynist exempla the same monastic rancor as those of Christian Europe; the animal fables are the same; and the convention of the frame story (represented in the West by the Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) is here a basic device. Nor is it possible to miss the Lady Godiva, Peeping Tom motive in tale 167, ‘Kemerezzeman and the Jeweler’s Wife.’ Parallels exist even to early Irish and Germanic literature.”^{Note 89} Furthermore: “Precisely as Celtic gods became the fairies of Christian Irish folklore, so did Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Indian become the Jinn of Moslem popular belief.”^{Note 90} And of the greatest interest is the prominence in both these neighboring traditions of a type of tale of enchantment and disenchantment that on the European side is represented by the legends of the Grail.

In these the hero is generally one, set apart by disposition or accident, who comes by chance upon a situation of enchantment. There is always someone present familiar with the rules of this enchantment, yet nothing can be done without the help of an innocent youth, whose arrival is helplessly awaited. He is to be a sort of puer aeternus, virtuous and fearless, whose nature itself will be the key to the undoing of a spell that no intentional program of courage or virtue could dissolve.

And so it was that, whether in the cloisters of the great monasteries, in the halls and ladies’ chambers of the castles, or in the rushlit humble cottages of the toiling illiterate folk, the legacy of neighboring Islam, and, as part of that, the whole Orient, was contributing largely to that twelfthand thirteenth-century wakening and nourishing of the European imagination which was to lead in the next three centuries to the dawn of a new and spectacular age, not for the West alone, but for the world.

3.

It is of the essence of our study to recognize, however, that, no matter how great the force of the Oriental contribution to the twelfth- and thirteenth-century flowering of the European imagination may have been, the inward life and spirit of that European epoch was in every aspect different from anything the Orient ever had known or would be likely to achieve. For, as every serious study of intercultural exchange has shown, it is simply a fact — a basic law of history, applicable to every department of life — that materials carried from any time past to a time present, or from one culture to another, shed their values at the culture portal and thereafter either become mere curiosities, or undergo a sea change through a process of creative misunderstanding. We have already remarked the transformation of the cult of Amor as it passed from the Moorish “tarab-adors” to the troubadours of Provence. In the chapter in Oriental Mythology on the massive influence of Rome on the Gupta flowering of India, the words of Dr. Hermann Goetz were cited to the point: “Though so many novel ideas, techniques and types were absorbed that practically a quite new and most important chapter of Indian art was opened, they were never taken over en bloc.… Everything was broken up, translated into Indian concepts and reconstructed on Indian principles.”^{Note 91} And with reference, now, particularly to the manifold transmission of the precious Hellenistic, humanistic heritage from Europe to the Levant and back to a later Europe, the important third chapter of Volume II of Spengler’s Decline of the West must be cited, in which he contrasts the axioms and suppositions of Roman, Byzantine, and modern European jurisprudence: “three histories of law,” as he writes, “connected only by elements of linguistic and syntactical form, taken over by one from the other, voluntarily or perforce, without the receiver ever coming face to face with the alien nature that underlay them.”^{Note 92}

For the shaping force of a civilization is lived experience and, as Spengler has demonstrated, the manner of this inwardness differs not only in differing civilizations, but also in the differing periods of a single civilization. It is not a function of any “influence” from without, no matter how great or inspiring. Consequently, when historians confine their attention to the tracing and mapping of such “influences,” without due regard to the inward assimilating and reshaping force of the local, destiny-making readiness for life, their works inevitably founder in secondary details. “What a wealth there is of psychology,” writes Spengler,

in all the seeking, resisting, choosing and reinterpreting, misunderstanding, penetrating and revering — not only as between cultures in immediate contact with each other, whether in mutual admiration or in strife, but also as between a living culture and the world of forms of one dead, whose remains still stand visible on the landscape! And how poor and thin are the conceptions, then, that historians bring to all this with such verbal formulae as “influence,” “continuity,” and “effect”!

Such labeling is pure nineteenth century. What is sought is merely a chain of causes and effects. Everything “follows,” nothing is prime. Because elements of form from the surfaces of earlier cultures can be discovered everywhere in later, they must be supposed to have “produced effects”; and where a set of such “influences” can be exhibited together, the authority believes he has done a proper job.

On the contrary — and here is Spengler’s critical point — “it is not products that ‘influence,’ but creators that ‘absorb.’”^{Note 93}

The point is elementary and, once made, one would think, self-demonstrative. However, when such a torrent of “influences” can be classified and described as came pouring, throughout the Middle Ages, from the Near East into Europe, it is easy for a bookman to ignore the active force of creative interpretation by which all is recomposed and made again alive as it passes from one center of experience, expression, and communication to another. Furthermore, the man of learning, but little living, can be readily misled by the purely cerebral discourse of philosophy to assume that because the words of two traditions are matched in bilingual dictionaries, the experiences to which they refer must be the same: those, for example, implied in the nouns fate, ḳismet, and wyrd. Actually, a people’s way of experiencing “fate” as life and their philosophers’ way of discussing “fate” as a metaphysical problem, in terms of cause and effect, need bear no significant relationship to each other, since the latter is an abstract word game, played according to classic rules, while the other is an inward realization of existence.

Philosophically, the enigma of fate is impossible to resolve, unless by some such formula as that of Schopenhauer, according to which, when viewed from outside, logically or scientifically, the world’s events can be recognized as governed to such a degree by the laws of cause and effect as to be inexorably determined; whereas, when experienced from within, from the standpoint of an acting subject, living yields an experience of choice. And since these contradictory views are but the functions of mankind’s alternate modes of conditioned knowledge (the world as “idea” and the world as “will”), both fail of the ultimate question as to the ground of a man’s becoming and being.

Alike in Islam and Christendom, theologians and philosophers, in their efforts to abide by the ground rules of all biblically based mythologizing, give credit simultaneously to God’s foreknowledge and to man’s free will as the ultimate cause of fate, and have thus tied themselves into knots as picturesque as any in a mariner’s handbook, which can be studied — classified — in the manuals.^{Note 94} However, in the more popular romances of the two associated culture worlds, a distinct contrast is evident between the differing orders of experience epitomized in the terms ḳismet, on one hand, and, on the other, wyrd.

The key to the sense of the Moslem term is in the Qu'ranic formula of submission, “There is no power and no virtue but in God, the Most High, the Supreme!” — pronouncing which, the Prophet promised, no believer could be confounded. The Arabic word islam itself means, literally, “surrender [to the Will of God],” and on the level of popular feeling and belief, this supports such a passive idea as ḳismet, “lot, distribution, fate.” “Your augury,” states the Qu'ran, “is in God’s hands.”^{Note 95} The notion, essentially, is of an outside determinant — God’s omnipotent will — by which one’s destiny is ineluctably decreed. And although in official Christian doctrine a like sentiment is recommended (often along with an explanation of how God’s supernatural grace affects, but does not effect, man’s choice, which is free), throughout the literature of Europe’s hero-deeds the experience communicated is on the side rather of wyrd than of ḳismet: not surrender to the invincible force of an outside determinant, but the sense of an inward potentiality in the process of becoming, with, however, an approaching inevitable end.

4.

I have said that in the cogitations of philosophers the ground rules of their word games may have little, if anything, to do with the native sense of life creatively operative in their culture. It has been their custom, in fact, to look afield for their terms and themes of discourse to thinkers of earlier times and alien traditions; so that what in general passes for the formal schoolbook history of thought is largely a sort of theater of Sir Imponderables elaborately refuting their own misinterpretations of each other. So it was when Aristophanes wrote his comedy The Clouds. So it is today. And so it was in that great period, as well, of the reception by the master minds of Europe of the legacy of Islam.

The pièce de résistance of this ponderously served up medieval comedy of confusion was a duel of balloons on the splintery stage of the Sorbonne by the matched champions, respectively, of the “double” and the “single truth” : the double truth being a doctrine attributed in error to the great imam and philosopher of Cordova, Averroes (ibn-Rushd, 1126–1198), which held that what is true according to reason may be untrue according to faith, and vice versa; while the single doctrine charged that the truths of reason and religion were to be reconciled philosophically as one.

The leading spokesman for the former view at the University of Paris was the brilliant Swedish Averroist, Siger of Brabant (fl. 1260), allied with whom, as contemporaries and followers, were chiefly Boethius of Sweden (fl. 1270), Martin of Denmark (d. 1304), John of Jandun (d. 1328), and Marsilius of Padua (d. 1336 or 1343). The mightiest champion of the doctrine of the single truth, on the other hand, was the Italian Dominican Thomas Aquinas (1225?–1274), who, while contending directly with Siger, was at the same time salting his paragraphs with syllogistic refutations of those same Arabs — Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes — from whose hands he had received not only his knowledge of Aristotle but also his leading idea and method of reconciling, in a Summa Theologica, reason with revelation and philosophy with faith. Siger, who supposed he was following Averroes, was saying just the opposite, while Aquinas, who thought he was contending with the Moor, was saying the same, and at times even to the life. In the century of the battle itself there were so many shadows in play about the stage that the verbal strokes were falling as frequently on air as upon heads, and then as frequently on the wrong as on the right; so that in retrospect the whole controversy has much the air of an opera bouffe.

Wrote the Averroist, Siger of Brabant:

Desiring to live worthily in the study and contemplation of truth as far as can be done in this life, we are undertaking to treat of natural, moral and divine things following the doctrine and order of Aristotle, but we are not making any attempt upon the rights of the orthodox faith made manifest to us in the light of the divine revelation by which the philosophers themselves were not enlightened; for, considering the ordinary and habitual course of nature and not divine miracles, they have explained things according to the light of reason, without, by doing so, contradicting the theological truth whose cognition derives from a loftier light. When a philosopher concludes that a certain thing is either impossible or necessary from the point of view of the inferior causes accessible to reason, he is not contradicting faith, which affirms that things can be otherwise thanks to the supreme cause whose causal power can be grasped by no creature. This is so true that the holy prophets themselves, imbued with the spirit of prophecy but taking account of the order of inferior causes, have predicted certain events which did not take place because the Prime Cause disposed otherwise.^{Note 96}

What had been actually said by Averroes was that, although philosophy and revelation (in his case, of course, the Qu'ran) may on certain points appear to differ, they can and must be reconciled. As stated in his fundamental treatise on What There Is of Connection between Religion and Philosophy:

We, the Muslim community, know definitely that demonstrative study [i.e., philosophy] does not lead to conclusions conflicting with what Scripture has given us; for truth does not oppose truth, but accords with it and bears witness to it. This being so, whenever demonstrative study leads to any manner of knowledge about any being, that being is inevitably either unmentioned or mentioned in Scripture. If it is unmentioned there is no contradiction, and it is in the same case as an act whose category is unmentioned, so that the lawyer has to infer it by reasoning from Scripture (For this method of the Moslem legalists, see Occidental Mythology.). If Scripture speaks about it, the apparent meaning of the words inevitably either accords or conflicts with the conclusions of demonstration about it. If this apparent meaning accords there is no argument. If it conflicts there is a call for allegorical interpretation. The meaning of “allegorical interpretation” is: extension of the significance of an expression from real to metaphorical significance, without forsaking therein the standard metaphorical practices of Arabic speech, such as calling a thing by the name of something resembling it, or a cause, consequence, or accompaniment of it, or such other things as those enumerated in accounts of the kinds of metaphorical speech.… The reason we have received a Scripture with both an apparent and an inner meaning lies in the diversity of people’s natural capacities and the difference of their innate dispositions with regard to assent.^{Note 97}

Averroes classified people as of three categories: 1. the demonstrative class, which is capable of strict reasoning and demonstration according to Aristotle’s laws of logic; 2. the dialectical class, which is satisfied with the plausible opinions general to thoughtful people; and 3. the rhetorical class, who are persuaded simply by what they are told and whose views cannot stand up to criticism. It is to the last and second, according to his view, that the apparent readings of Scripture are addressed, and not so much for their enlightenment as for their moral control and improvement. For such folk cannot grasp philosophical demonstrations and, if unsettled in their minds, would be morally undone. The miracle of the Qu'ran, he held, is that it serves all types simultaneously, and the proper function of philosophy is therefore to extract by demonstration for persons of the highest class the abstruse innermost meaning of God’s Word. Or, as he formulates the proposition

:

With regard to things which by reason of their recondite character are knowable only by demonstration, God has been gracious to those of His servants who have no access to demonstration, on acount of their natures, habits, or lack of facilities for education: He has coined for them images and likenesses of these things, and summoned them to assent to those images, since it is possible for assent to those images to come about through the indications common to all men, i.e. the dialectical and rhetorical indications. This is the reason why Scripture is divided into apparent and inner meanings: the apparent meaning consists of those images which are coined to stand for those ideas, while the inner meaning is those ideas themselves, which are clear only to the demonstrative class.^{Note 98}

And that, in so many words, is the actual Averroist doctrine of the double truth. Ironically, it is the same, essentially, as the view of Saint Thomas Aquinas, not of Siger of Brabant. And indeed, as the same Father Miguel Asín y Palacios who disclosed Dante’s debt to Islam has demonstrated in a richly documented publication entitled “The Averroist Theology of Saint Thomas of Aquino”:

Averroes’ religious thinking, studied in itself, in contrast with that of the Latin Averroists and compared with that of Saint Thomas, appears on the whole to be analogous rather to the latter: analogous in its attitude, its general point of view, in its ideas and illustrations, and at times even in its words. That is the conclusion forced upon one after an attentive examination of the parallel passages that I have here assembled and discussed.

But how shall we account for such a constellation of analogies? … The hypothesis of purely accidental coincidence will be the most appropriate if what we want is to leave the problem unresolved; and this would accord well enough with our current habits of intellectual indolence, as well as with the proclivity of popular theorists always to see in a work of scholastic synthesis the spontaneous fruit and idiosyncrasy of the genius of its authors, uninfluenced by anything alien to the Christian tradition. However, it has now long been axiomatic for the history of ideas, as it is likewise in biology, that the notion of spontaneous generation is absurd.… In a word: the hypothesis of accidental coincidence can be counted acceptable (and then only provisionally) only when the distance separating the authors of analogous systems is such, in space and time, that any communication between the two would be impossible to explain (Compare Primitive Mythology.). However, the case that we have at present under view does not fulfill these conditions. The development and perfection of the scholastic synthesis of the thirteenth century is fully explained by the introduction of the Musulman encyclopedia into Europe and, above all, by Averroes’ commentaries on the works of the Stagirite. Contacts between the patterns of Islam and scholasticism, therefore, far from being unlikely, are concretely and historically demonstrable. We have to reject therefore the hypothesis of coincidence.… ^{Note 99}

Whence, however, could Saint Thomas have come to know of this doctrine of Averroes? … I believe I have found the leading thread that carried the reconciling doctrine that is occupying us here into the Thomistic synthesis — or, at least, its fundamental point: that is to say, its doctrine of the moral necessity of divine revelation. In dealing with the question, Utrum necessarium sit homini habere fidem (Whether it is necessary for man to have faith),^{Note 100} Saint Thomas founds the necessity on five motives which he declares explicitly he copied from Maimonides; and since that philosopher was a disciple, indirectly, of Averroes, it follows in all probability that his works can have been the channel through which the doctrine of the philosopher of Cordova was communicated to Saint Thomas (“Besides,” Asín adds in a footnote, “we can find in the pages of Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed practically all the ideas of Averroes and Saint Thomas touching this them e of the analogies between faith and reason.” The dates of these three theologians are as follows: Averroes, 1126–1198; Maimonides, 1135–1204; Aquinas, 1225–1274.). Neither in the Summa contra Gentiles nor in the Summa Theologica does the Angelic Doctor allow himself to cite again this reference, and it soon came to pass that he was credited with a doctrine of which he was not himself the author.

Here, then, is the first likely channel of communication: the works of Maimonides, whose influence on those of Saint Thomas, in relation chiefly to philosophy, has already been studied by Guttmann.^{Note 101}

But I do not think that we have to fall back upon the sole intervention of Maimonides, when it is evident that the principal books of Averroes were in Saint Thomas’s hands. Since the year 1217 the Commentaries [on Aristotle] of the Cordovan philosopher had been passed around in the schools, translated by Michael Scot in Toledo; and although the philosophical character of such works might make it appear little likely that Averroes would have discussed in them any problems of theology, the intimate relationship of these two disciplines in the Middle Ages, both for Christians and for Musulmans, is well known. A priori then, one might suppose that a close analysis of the Commentaries of Averroes and those of Saint Thomas would show traces of flagrant imitation, even in matters theological.^{Note 102}

And indeed, the good Father Asín then proceeds to demonstrate at least one instance of such plagiarism by comparing the two great authors on the proposition, Scientia Dei est causa rerum, “God’s knowledge is the cause of things.”^{Note 103}

It is most amazing. The doctrine of the dual truth of Siger of Brabant, the Swedish Averroist, was by the Church officially condemned and Siger himself perhaps put to death. Thomas Aquinas refuted both Siger and Averroes, in his Summa contra Gentiles as well as in a special treatise On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists. Yet in Dante’s Paradiso, at the station of the sun — the place of those learned in theology — whom do we find, luminously at peace and as comfortably at home as the great Saint Thomas himself, but Siger of Brabant, who, in the words of Dante’s guide, had “syllogized invidious truths”!^{Note 104} Averroes, meanwhile, sits in Limbo, in the idyllic first circle of Hell, with his fellow Musulman Avicenna, chatting with their idol Aristotle, and with Socrates and Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Anaxagoras and Thales, Empedocles and Heraclitus, Zeno, Dioscorides, Orpheus, Tully and Linus, Seneca, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen.^{Note 105} But one searches in vain for the name of Dante’s own Islamic precursor and poetic model, Ibnu’l-’Arabi, while both Mohammed and his cousin Ali, hideously mangled, are in the eighth circle of Hell.^{Note 106}

V. The Gnostics

1.

As the classical heritage of symbolic forms reached the poets and artists of later Europe in two associated streams, one above ground, the other below, so also the Levantine — by way of the orthodox Church above and the various Gnostic sects below. The waters of the two subterranean streams, the classical and the Gnostic, became mixed at certain points, but, though mixed, never really fused; for in the Gnostic view, as in the authorized Christian, the world of nature is seen as corrupt, whereas in the pagan mysteries it was known as divine. Nor did the authorized Christian stream and its underground Gnostic complement ever really fuse; for in the orthodox the corruption of nature was attributed to man’s Fall, but in Gnosticism to the Creator, so that whereas according to the former redemption was to be gained through an act of repentance and thereafter obedience to what were taken to be God’s laws, the Gnostics strove for release from corruption through a systematic disobedience of those laws in either of two ways, through asceticism or its opposite, the orgy.

Essentially, the reasoning and practices of the Gnostic ascetics were like those of the Jains of India;^{Note 107} for here too a strict dualism was posited of spirit and non-spirit, and a graded regimen undertaken of renunciative vows to clear the spiritual element of contamination by the material — life in this world, and this world itself, being conceived as a mixture of the two. As among the Jains, so here, there were laymen beginning the work, which might continue through many lifetimes; teachers, devoted both to instructing others and to disciplining themselves; and solitaries in the final stages of psychic dissolution. It may be recalled that already in Alexander’s time the ascetic feats and theories of India’s yogis became known to the marveling Greeks.^{Note 108} Later the Buddhist monarch Ashoka (r. 268–232) sent monkish missionaries to the West, to the courts of Syria, Egypt, Cyrene, Macedonia, and Epirus;^{Note 109} so that in the interchanges of ideas and goods that followed Alexander’s “marriage of East and West” we have to reckon with tides of Indian lore flowing westward as well as classical flowing east. More than a few competent scholars have remarked that the Neoplatonism of such a mystic as Plotinus shares practically all of its essential points with the Sankhya of Kapila.^{Note 110} And like the forests of India with their hermit groves, so the Levantine deserts of the second, third, and fourth centuries a.d. were infested with spiritual athletes, striving to separate their souls from the glories and riches of this world. Some perched on the branches of trees or atop the columns of temple ruins; others chained themselves to rocks or enclosed themselves in cells; more bore on their shoulders heavy yokes; others browsed on grass.^{Note 111} 1 The indestructible Saint Anthony (251–356!?!) is the model of the approved version of that life-negating mentality, and through the monks of the Middle Ages, on into modem times, there has been a continuation of its course — referred back to the words and example of Christ: “If you would be perfect, go sell what you possess and give to the poor … and come, follow me.” “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.”^{Note 112} Moreover, the Gnostics had their own version of the words of Jesus too, as in the “Gospel According to Thomas”: “Whoever has known the world has found a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse, of him the world is not worthy.”^{Note 113}

With the victories of Constantine in the early fourth century, however, and the subsequent enforcement of an imperial Christianity, the lead in the renunciatory movement passed from the Gnostics of the Near East to the new Manichaean religion of Persia, which — as noted in the Occidental volume^{Note 114} — had been founded by the prophet Mani a century earlier (216?–276? a.d..), under the patronage and protection of the liberal-minded Sassanian King Shapur I (r. 241–272). Mani had preached a syncretic doctrine combining Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Christian ideas, wherein the Old Testament Creator was identified with the Zoroastrian power of darkness and deception, Angra Mainyu, and these two, in turn, with the Buddhist principle of delusion (māyā), by which the mind is turned from the pure light of unconditioned consciousness and made captive by the fascination of those things, mixed of light and darkness, that are the passing phenomena of this spatially and temporally conditioned universe of names and forms. He correlated both the Christian and the Zoroastrian prophecies of a literal end of the world with the purely psychological Buddhist doctrine of illumination (bodhi) as the end of delusion (māyā), declaring that the former, the literal end, would result when the latter, a total realization of illumination, had been achieved. And he associated the world-abandoning doctrine of social disengagement preached by Jesus and illustrated by his forty days in the desert with the Great Departure and worldabandonment of the Buddha.^{Note 115} Mani’s protector, Shapur I, died in the year 272, and the orthodox Magian clergy thereupon contrived to have the prophet martyred: according to one account, left to die in his prison chains; according to another, crucified; but according to a third, flayed alive, and his skin, then stuffed with straw, hung at the city gate of Gundi-Shapur, known thereafter as the Mani Gate.

In spite of all persecution, however, Mani’s doctrine of the fall of light into darkness and of the way of its return from bondage to its source and true being in purity, spread both eastward into China (where it survived until the years of the anti-Buddhist, anti-foreign purges of the Emperor Wu-tsung, 842–844)^{Note 116} and westward into the now Christian Roman Empire, where it again met persecution. Saint Augustine (354–430) was a Manichaean for nine critical years before accepting the Christian faith of his mother, Saint Monica, and composing then his dualistic masterwork, The City of God. Every bit of his enormously influential theology is shot through with a Gnostic-Manichaean revulsion from the flesh, his principal change, ontologically, having been simply from the Manichaean doctrine of the immanence of divine light as the life within all beings to the Christian doctrine of the absolute transcendence of divinity — which, nevertheless, is the life that animates the life within all beings. “Thou art not the bodies; nay, nor yet the soul, which is the life of the bodies,” he wrote to God in his Confessions. “But Thou art the life of souls.”^{Note 117} A rather fine distinction, yet it meant a great deal to Augustine; and in line with this distinction, while maintaining with Saint Paul (whom the Gnostics also took as authority) that “the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh,”^{Note 118} he spurned the dualism of his Manichaean associates, who, as he declared in his great book, “detest our present bodies as an evil nature.”^{Note 119} The Christian saint’s own detestation of the body was based on the idea not of an evil nature but of a good nature, as created by God, corrupted, however, by its own evil act in disobedience of God, as a consequence of which man’s will, though free, is unable to will anything but evil unless redeemed from its corruption by the grace of the sacraments of the Church.

As soon as our first parents had transgressed the commandment [he wrote in explanation of this view], divine grace forsook them, and they were confounded at their own wickedness; and therefore they took fig-leaves (which were possibly the first that came to hand in their troubled state of mind) and covered their shame; for though their members remained the same, they had shame now where they had none before. They experienced a new motion of their flesh, which had become disobedient to them, in strict retribution of their own disobedience to God. For the soul, reveling in its own liberty, and scorning to serve God, was itself deprived of the command it had formerly maintained over the body. And because it had willfully deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant; neither could it hold the flesh subject, as it would always have been able to do had it remained itself subject to God. Then began the flesh to lust against the Spirit, in which strife we are bom, deriving from the first transgression a seed of death, and bearing in our members, and in our vitiated nature, the contest or even victory of the flesh.^{Note 120}

What I have just quoted is the great theologian Saint Augustine’s authoritative exposition of the fundamental Christian doctrine of Original Sin, from the mortal effects of which only the incarnation and crucifixion of the Son of God himself were effective to redeem us. The Manichaeans, on the other hand, blamed what both they and the Christians took to be the parlous state of the universe on the act of creation itself, and in this they were in accord with those earliest Christian Gnostics who had also identified the god of the Old Testament with the Zoroastrian devil, Angra Mainyu.

2.

As already mentioned, however, ascetic release from the world delusion was not the only method practiced by the Gnostics; for there was an orgiastic way as well. And the chief occasion for this exercise — which presently earned for the Christians an unsavory name in the pagan Roman world ^{Note 121} — was the early church festival of the agapē or Love Feast (ἀγάπη, “love,” in the sense usually of “charity” or “brotherly love”), which so varied from one congregation to the next that, whereas the ritual “kiss of love” was in some exchanged with modest decorum, in others it became a rite in itself. Saint Paul himself had written, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law”;^{Note 122} but apparently without anticipating the reach to which the sense of that remark might be extended.

Originally, it would seem, the early Christian Love Feast was celebrated either in connection with or separately from the Eucharist, as a church supper with the wealthy providing most of the fare for rich and poor alike. In not a few communities these feasts settled down into mere banquets for the poor; however, already in the first century there is evidence in Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians (c. 54–58) of an altogether different trend.

“When you meet together,” wrote the Apostle, “it is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat. For in eating each one goes ahead with his own meal, and one is hungry and another is drunk. What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the Church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?”^{Note 123}

Forty years later (c. 93–96), in the Book of Revelation, the voice of the resurrected Christ himself was to be heard chastising the congregation of Thyatira in Asia Minor:

I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and that your latter works exceed the first. But I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her immorality. Behold, I will throw her on a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of their doings; and I will strike her children dead.… But to the rest of you in Thyatira, who do not hold this teaching, who have not learned what some call the deep things of Satan, to you I say, I do not lay upon you any other burden; only hold fast what you have, until I come.^{Note 124}

In the same holy text, the congregation in Pergamum is accused of harboring those who “hold the teaching of Balaam.… that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practice immorality.”^{Note 125} And by the opening of the second century the entire address of the Epistle of Jude (c. 100–120) was directed, as we read there, against those “ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness.… They are blemishes on our love feasts, as they boldly carouse together.”^{Note 126} At the opening of the next century the Church Father Tertullian wrote with infinite scorn (c. 217 a.d..) of those “whose Agapē boils in the cooking pot, faith glows in the kitchen, and hope lies on a dish: and the greatest of all is that ‘charity’ of theirs, by virtue of which the men sleep with their sisters.”^{Note 127}

Let us glance again, therefore, at the alabaster serpent bowl of Figure 18 and Figure 19. As said, it was the vessel probably of a Dionysian-Orphic sect of the early centuries a.d. Were it not for its inscription to Apollo, however, it might have been taken for the vessel of some Gnostic Christian sect, and its scene accordingly interpreted as of the sanctuary of the Love Feast; for both nakedness and serpent-worship were associated in many of the early Christian cults with a restoration of Paradise, and release thereby from the bondages of time.

In the words of the Gnostic “Gospel According to Thomas”: “Mary said to Jesus: ‘Whom are thy disciples like?’ He said: ‘They are like little children who have installed themselves in a field that is not theirs. When the owners of the field come, they will say: “Release to us our field.” They take off their clothes before them to release it to them and to give back their field to them.’”^{Note 128} And again: “His disciples said: ‘When wilt Thou be revealed to us and when shall we see Thee?’ Jesus said: ‘When you take off your clothing without being ashamed, and take your clothes and put them under your feet as the little children and tread on them, then shall you behold the Son of the Living One and you shall not fear.’”^{Note 129}

Saint Epiphanius (c. 315–402) — who for thirty-five years was the bishop of Constantia, on Cyprus, where Aphrodite and her serpent spouse had been for millenniums the chief divinities, and whose lifetime spanned that critical century from the reign of Constantine (324–337) to Theodosius I, “the Great” (379–395), when the Roman Empire was being converted from pagan to Christian worship^{Note 130} — described in a denunciatory tract the eucharistic service of one of the Christian Ophitic (ὄφις, “serpent”) sects of his time:

They have a snake, which they keep in a certain chest — the cista mystica — and which at the hour of their mysteries they bring forth from its cave. They heap loaves upon the table and summon the serpent. Since the cave is open it comes out. It is a cunning beast, and knowing their foolish ways, it crawls up on the table and rolls in the loaves; this, they say, is the perfect sacrifice. Wherefore, as I have been told, they not only break the bread in which the snake has rolled and administer it to those present, but each one kisses the snake on the mouth, for the snake has been tamed by a spell, or has been made gentle for their fraud by some other diabolical method. And they fall down before it and call this the Eucharist, consummated by the beast rolling in the loaves. And through it, as they say, they send forth a hymn to the Father on high, thus concluding their mysteries.^{Note 131}

Professor Leisegang, from whose discussions of both the alabaster bowl of Figure 18 and Figure 19 and the golden of Figure 3 and Figure 4 we have already quoted, states in comment on this Ophitic sacrament described by Epiphanius, that for the rites of many pagan mysteries too, and those particularly of Dionysian type, a snake was kept in a chest. Then he adds: “We also know that the living snake was sometimes replaced by a golden one, which served in the performance of the initiate’s mystical marriage rite with the godhead (Compare Occidental Mythology.). And it further seems possible,” he concludes, “that an artificial snake could replace the real in the liturgy of the Ophites.… Might not the alabaster bowl,” he then asks, “have served for the offering of consecrated wafers in a eucharistic ritual like that described by Epiphanius?”^{Note 132}

The question opens a large prospect. For if it is possible to argue in this way from the Christian sect to a pagan and from a pagan to the Christian, it must also be asked how far the Gnostic versions of the agapē moved toward the Dionysian orgy, and how — of all beasts! — the serpent, which in normal Christian thought is the figure of Satan himself, could have been assigned the focal role in a Christian version of the mystic marriage.

Figure 32. The Serpent Lifted Up; golden Thaler, Germany, 16th century a.d.

Figure 32 is from a German sixteenth-century golden thaler struck by a celebrated goldsmith of the town of Annaberg in Saxony, Hieronymus Magdeburger by name. It is of approximately the date of Gafurius’s “Music of the Spheres” (Figure 20), and can likewise have been influenced by Renaissance Neoplatonic thought. At first glance one might suppose it to refer to the upward turning of Gafurius’s down-going Orphic serpent; and a consideration of the crucified Orpheus-Bacchus (Figure 11) might seem to support this interpretation, since Bacchus and the winged upward-turned serpent of the alabaster mystery bowl are the same.

However, there is also a perfectly orthodox way to interpret its symbolism, based on a sentence of the fourth Gospel: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”^{Note 133} The reference is to that episode in the Book of Numbers where, the Hebrews in the desert having complained against both God and Moses (since there was no food or water), “Yahweh,” as we read, “sent fiery serpents among the people and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died. And the people came to Moses, and said, ‘We have sinned, for we have spoken against Yahweh and against you; pray to Yahweh, that he may take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people. And Yahweh said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.’ So Moses made a bronze serpent, and set it on a pole; and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.”^{Note 134}

The incompatibility of this command with that supposed to have been previously delivered on Sinai, to make no “graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4), we may leave to the science of theology to resolve. Viewed historically merely, the tale was derived from the so-called Elohim (E) text of c. 750 b.c.,^{Note 135} and was apparently the origin legend designed to account for the serpent-god of bronze that was in those days worshiped in the Temple of Jerusalem, together with certain images of his Canaanite goddess-spouse, Asherah. King Hezekiah, c. 725 b.c., as we are told in the Book of Kings, “cut down the Asherah: and he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had burned incense to it; it was called Nehushtan.”^{Note 136} The approved Christian allegory is simply that, as the serpent of bronze lifted up by Moses on a staff counteracted the poison of a plague of serpents, so the lifting up of Jesus on the cross countervailed the poison of the serpent of the Garden. Both events are accepted as historical, and the earlier is read as a prefigurement of the later. We are not to think of Christ crucified as in any way another form of the serpent. The two sides of Hieronymus’s golden thaler, in other words, are not to be reckoned as of equal value; nor is the higher value on the serpent’s side. Or, at least, that is what a proper Christian would like to think the goldsmith intended us to understand.

Could it be, however, that he actually intended the reverse, namely, that Christ is a reference to the serpent, or even that the two are alternative manifestations of a power transcending both?

Throughout the material in the Primitive, Oriental, and Occidental volumes of this work, myths and rites of the serpent frequently appear, and in a remarkably consistent symbolic sense. Wherever nature is revered as self-moving, and so inherently divine, the serpent is revered as symbolic of its divine life. And accordingly, in the Book of Genesis, where the serpent is cursed, all nature is devaluated and its power of life regarded as nothing in itself: nature is here self-moving indeed, self-willed, but only by virtue of the life given it by a superior being, its creator.

In Christian mythology, supplementing the Old Testament, the serpent is normally identified with Satan, and the words addressed by Yahweh to the serpent in the Garden (“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel”)^{Note 137} are taken to refer to the crucified son of Mary, by whose wounds Satan’s force was to be broken. As pointed out in Occidental Mythology,^{Note 138} the resemblance of the Christian legend of the killed and resurrected redeemer to the old myths of the killed and resurrected gods, Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysus, and Osiris, presented a certain advantage to the preachers of the new gospel, but on the other hand, also a danger. For whereas on one hand the resemblances made it possible for them to claim that in the historical reality of Christ’s crucifixion the merely mythic promises of the earlier religions had been surpassed (As, for instance, in the Second Epistle of Peter (c. 120 a.d.): “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eye-witnesses of his majesty” (II Peter 1:16).), on the other hand the obvious resemblances also made it possible for converted pagans to regard the new revelation as simply one more transformation of Hellenistic mystery lore; and in fact, many sects of the first five or six centuries can best be understood in just that way.

Saint Hippolytus (d. c. 230), writing about a century and a half before the date of Epiphanius, opens a vista into the hidden sense, or “higher wisdom” (γνῶσις), of serpent veneration through his account of the cosmology of an Ophitic Christian sect of his day called the Perates:

Their cosmos consists of Father, Son, and Matter, each of which three principles contains infinitely many forces. Midway between the Father and Matter, the Son, the Logos, has his place, the Serpent that moves eternally toward the unmoved Father and moved Matter; now it turns to the Father and gathers up forces in its countenance; and now, after receiving the forces, it turns toward Matter, and upon Matter, which is without attribute and form, the Son imprints the ideas that had previously been imprinted upon the Son by the Father.

Moreover, no one can be saved and rise up again without the Son, who is the serpent. For it was he who brought the paternal models down from aloft, and it is he who carries back up again those who have been awakened from sleep and have reassumed the features of the Father.^{Note 139}

The serpent of Gafurius’s diagram, dramatically descending, and the serpent circling the border of the Tunc-page of the Book of Kells^{Note 140} are both suggested strongly by this unforgettable image. Furthermore, the question now arises as to whether in the mind of the goldsmith Hieronymus the relationship of the two sides of his coin may not, after all, have been the opposite to that suggested by the biblical reading: not the serpent as prefiguring Christ, but Christ as an incarnation of the serpent. And if this were the case, then there might have been a still further, deeper heresy dissembled in his innocent design. For, according to the view of most of the early Ophitic sects, the “Father” named in the cosmological figure of the Perates would have been not Yahweh of the Old Testament but a higher, more serene divinity, infinitely above him; and the first descent of the serpent from that infinitude would have been not voluntary but a fall; moreover, this fall would have been brought about precisely by the machinations of Yahweh, the Old Testament creator of this fallen world, which is mixed of divine light and foulest darkness.

Briefly summarized: The basic idea of all these systems was that the origin of evil coincided with the act of creation itself. The god of the Old Testament, this secondary god — the Demiurge, as he is termed — created the world not from nothing but by engulfing a quantity of the light of the infinite true Father. This light, the Spirit, he lured, conjured, or ravished downward into Matter, where it now is entrapped. That was the first descent of the serpent, the Son, bearing the paternal models (or, as others might say, “the image of God”) from the kingdom of the Father into Matter. And these spiritual forces, images, models, or ideas are now held entrapped in the created universe by the Demiurge’s lieutenants, the Archons (ἄρχων “ruler”) of the planets, who both control the laws of nature and enforce the commandments of the Old Testament — which are not of the true Father but of the Demiurge.

And so the second descent of the serpent was a voluntary downcoming, to release the entrapped spiritual forces; and the Bible story of the serpent in the garden is an account of this appearance. For the serpent there caused the male and female, Adam and Eve, to violate the commandment of the Demiurge, and so commenced the work of redemption. Yahweh struck back by delivering to Moses an impossible set of moral laws, to which the serpent then replied by coming down as the redeemer and taking up residence in a mortal, Jesus — who was not himself the redeemer, but the vehicle of the redeemer and as such taught the breaking of the laws, both of nature, through asceticism, and of the Old Testament, through his new gospel. As Paul had said: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law.” Therefore the various Gnostic sects, following this teaching of the serpent, do indeed break those laws in various ways: on one hand, in the ascetic sects, the laws of nature through severe asceticism; and on the other hand, in the orgiastic sects, the laws of the moral code.

Now, matter of itself is inert and formless. Given life and form by the entrapped spirit of the Father, however, it is the living, beautiful universe of man’s suffering and fear. The nature of this universe, therefore, is mixed. It is a compound of spirit and matter. Hence, although the usual Gnostic attitude was strictly dualistic, striving — like the Jains of India — to separate spirit from matter, with a strong sense of repugnance for the world, it is also possible to find in certain other Gnostic remains passages of inspiring affirmation; as, for instance, the words attributed to Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel “According to Thomas”: “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it”; or again: “The Kingdom is within you and is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father.”^{Note 141}

Given such a positive attitude, however, there would be no need to suppose that the Son, the serpent, was originally brought down against his will. He would have descended voluntarily, to bring forth from formless matter the glory of this universe; and in fact this seems to have been the sense of the cosmological image of the Perates, who (if our informant, Saint Hippolytus, describes their myth correctly) had nothing to say of any secondary creator. Their serpent continuously descends and ascends of itself, imprinting and releasing in a fluent round. Furthermore, by the members of the sect themselves, the name Perates was interpreted as derived from the Greek πέρᾰτος, “on the opposite side,” which is exactly equivalent to the Sanskrit pāramitā, “the yonder shore.” And, as we have learned from numerous Mahāyāna Buddhist texts of exactly the period of these Gnostic Perates, there is a “Wisdom of the Yonder Shore” (prajñā-pāramitā), which is, in fact, the ultimate wisdom of Buddhist realization;^{Note 142} namely, a knowledge beyond all such dualistic conceptions as matter and spirit, bondage and release, sorrow and bliss. Indeed, to think in such terms is to remain bound to the categories of this shore, the hither shore: the shore of those who have remained on the outside of the bowl of Figure 18 and Figure 19. Whereas for those within the bowl, who have crossed beyond the round of the twenty-four columns of the hours of time and horizon of the four winds, there are no dualities at all. Those who have crossed to that Yonder behold in one immortal vision the serpent symbol of temporal change united with the wing symbol of release; or, to use the Peratean image: in one immortal instant the whole round of the serpent cycling ever in its play between Matter and the Father.

The Greek word gnosis (whence “Gnosticism”) and the Sanskrit bodhi (whence “Buddhism”) have exactly the same meaning, “knowledge” — referring to a knowledge, however, transcending that derived either empirically from the senses or rationally by way of the categories of thought. Such ineffable knowledge transcends, as well, the terms and images by which it is metaphorically suggested; as, for instance, that of a serpent cycling between the kingdom of the Father and Matter.

Our usual Christian way has been to take the mythological metaphors of the Credo literally, maintaining that there is a Father in a Heaven that does exist; there is a Trinity, there was an Incarnation, there will be a Second Coming, and each of us does have an eternal soul to be saved.

The Gnostic-Buddhist schools, on the other hand, make use of their images and words, myths, rituals, and philosophies, as “convenient means or approaches” (Sanskrit upāya, from the root i, “to go,” plus upa-, “toward”),^{Note 143} by and through which their ineffable gnosis or bodhi is suggested. Such means are not ends in themselves but ports of departure, so to say, for ships setting sail to the shore that is no shore; and a great number of such ports exist. In the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition they are known as Buddha Realms.^{Note 144} To modem scholarship they are known as sects. And they range from those appropriate for the simplest, least developed aspirants (ports planned, so to say, to handle companies of tourists requiring guides, pamphlets, tipping information, conversation dictionaries, and the rest) to those equipped for the maintenance and refreshment of the masters of the sea. The Perates seem to have been spiritual masters of this latter kind, like the Mahāyāna Buddhist illuminati, by whom the dualistic notions of matter and spirit, bondage and release, being and non-being have been left behind as illusory. However, many other Gnostic sects — in contrast to the Perates — were of the “hither shore” variety, not only recognizing a distinction between bondage and freedom of the spirit, but also working diligently to bring about literally the mythological end of days, when the last scintilla of enfolded light will have been released from its material coil. And they attended to this incongruous task in the two contrary yet affiliated ways already indicated; on the one hand, extreme asceticism, and, on the other, the orgiastic feast.

And so now, at last, for a dependable eyewitness account of what was actually going on at those by now notorious church suppers, the earliest Christian Love Feasts, the best authority is that same Saint Epiphanius from whose writings we have already drawn the report of the Christian serpent sacrament. For in his youth, in his quest for the road that leads to the place all wish to find, he had allowed himself to be seduced into a Syrian Gnostic congregation known as the Phibionites by certain women who were, as he later confessed, “in the forms of their appearance, very beautiful of feature,” but “in the spirit of their corruption, such as had earned for themselves all the hideousness of the Devil.” Not yet the saint that he was ultimately to become, Epiphanius remained among those women and their corruptions long enough to acquire a complete knowledge of their liturgy; and only after that did he embark on his better-known career by denouncing some eighty of his former associates to the local orthodox bishop, who saw to it, in the manner of the time, that the city was promptly purified of their filth.

Their women, they share in common [Epiphanius reported]; and when anyone arrives who might be alien to their doctrine, the men and women have a sign by which they make themselves known to each other. When they extend their hands, apparently in greeting, they tickle the other’s palm in a certain way and so discover whether the new arrival belongs to their cult. When they have so assured themselves, they address themselves immediately to the feast, serving up a lavish bounty of meats and wines, even though they may be poor. And when they have thus banqueted, filling their veins, so to say, to saturation, they proceed to the work of mutual incitement. Husbands separate from their wives, and a man will say to his own spouse: “Arise and celebrate the ‘love feast’ (agapē) with thy brother.” And the wretches mingle with each other, and although I am verily mortified to tell of the infamies they perpetrate, I shall not hesitate to name what they do not hesitate to do, so that I may rouse in those who hear of the obscenities to which they make bold, a shudder of horror.

For after they have consorted together in a passionate debauch, they do not stop there in their blasphemy of Heaven. The woman and the man take the man’s ejaculation into their hands, stand up, throw back their heads in self-denial toward Heaven — and even with that impurity on their palms, pretend to pray as so-called Soldiers of God and Gnostics, offering to the Father, the Primal Being of All Nature, what is on their hands, with the words: “We bring to Thee this oblation, which is the very Body of Christ.” Whereupon, without further ado, they consume it, take housel of their own shame and say: “This is the Body of Christ, the Paschal Sacrifice through which our bodies suffer and are forced to confess to the sufferings of Christ.” And when the woman is in her period, they do likewise with her menstruation. The unclean flow of blood, which they garner, they take up in the same way and eat together. And that, they say, is Christ’s Blood. For when they read in Revelation, “I saw the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month” (Rev. 22:2), they interpret this as an allusion to the monthly incidence of the female period.

Yet, in their intercourse with each other they nevertheless prohibit conception. For the goal of their corruption is not the begetting of children but the mere gratification of lust, the Devil playing his own game with them and so ridiculing the imagery derived of God.

They gratify their lust to the limit, but appropriate the seed of their impurity to themselves, not letting it pour in for the procreation of a child, but themselves eating of the fruit of their shame. And if it should occur in the case of any one of them that the implanting of the natural effusion should take effect and the woman become pregnant — now listen to what still more horrible thing they dare: they tear out the embryo as soon as it can be reached, take the misborn unborn fruit of the body and pound it in a mortar with a pestle, after which they mix with it pepper, honey, and certain other balsams and herbs, so that it should not nauseate them: and then that entire congregation of pigs and dogs gathers round, and each dips up with his finger a morsel of the immolated child. And when they have thus consummated their cannibal act, they pray, as follows to God: “We have not let ourselves be tricked by the Archon of Desire but have harvested our brother’s error.” And they believe this to be the perfect Mass.

And they perpetrate many other horrors more. For when they have again goaded themselves to madness, they drench their hands with the shame of their effusions and elevate the polluted hands and pray, completely naked, as though, through any such antic, free and open discourse before God might be achieved.

They preen their bodies, night and day, both the women and the men, with ointments, bathing and self-indulgence; they take it easy, lolling and drinking. They execrate those who fast, and say, “One should not fast. Fasting is the work of the Archon by whom this present world-age was produced. One should take nourishment, so that bodies may be strong and able to render their fruits in their time.”^{Note 145}

Now the underlying idea of all these sensational religious works was that, since Christ, the Son of the Father, is entrapped in the field of Matter, the whole universe is the cross on which the Son is crucified. Thus entrapped, suffusing all, he it is that gives life to all (Figure 11). But there was, furthermore, an extremely archaic biological theory involved in the offices of this cult, one that is in fact largely held to this day among Oriental and primitive peoples: namely, that the miracle of reproduction is effected in the womb through a conjunction of semen and menstrual blood. The interruption of the woman’s periods during pregnancy conduced to the assumption that the blood withheld was being formed into the body of the child by virtue of the influence upon it of the sperm. Both the menstrual blood and the semen were at once feared and revered, therefore, as the very vehicles of life — apart as male and female, yet in substance one. And since the life force within each was thus the substance of that crucified Son — who suffers within all things — the urgencies and substances of sex, by which the life that is the Son was passed along, were, as these Gnostics stated in their prayers: “the very Body of Christ.” Increasing in themselves the force of this life without allowing it to produce new bodies of bondage, they were accomplishing, as they believed, that divine work of redemption, disengagement of the light. And when by accident the life was passed on, it was solemnly taken back in the rite described as “the perfect Mass.”

3.

At the climax of the European Middle Ages — the very century of the great Crusades, the Troubadours, Arthurian romance, and the burgeoning of cathedrals that Henry Adams called the moment of the apogee of European Christian unity, when “the movement from unity into multiplicity,” began^{Note 146} — there was such an outbreak of Manichaean, Gnostic, and other heresies throughout Europe, though most conspicuously in southern France, that finally Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216), to protect the hegemony of Rome, let loose a version of the scourge of God, in his Albigensian Crusade, that left not only the south of France a desert, but the Gothic Church a cracked shell.^{Note 147} The revolts were largely — though not all — of a strongly reformatory trend; for the vices of the higher clergy had become to such an extent notorious that Innocent himself, in a letter to his legate in Narbonne, described those administering the sacraments there as “dumb dogs who had forgotten how to bark, simoniacs who sold justice, absolving the rich and condemning the poor, themselves regardless of the laws of the Church, accumulators of benefices in their own hands, conferring dignities on unworthy priests or illiterate lads.… And hence, the insolence of the heretics and the prevailing contempt both of the seigneurs and of the people for God and for his Church.” “Nothing,” he went on to say, “is more common than for even monks and regular canons to cast aside their attire, take to gambling and hunting, consort with concubines, and turn jugglers or medical quacks.”^{Note 148}

The two leading reformatory movements were of the Waldensians and the Albigensians. The former were Christians, but strongly anti-papal, rejecting all clerical practices that lacked New Testament authority; and their most popular appeal was to that principle of the early fourth-century Donatist heresy which had been attacked by Augustine as of the greatest danger to the Church,^{Note 149} namely the contention that sacraments administered by priests of unworthy character cannot be efficacious. The Albigensians, on the other hand, were not Christians at all but Manichaeans. The geographical center from which their teachings had come into Western Europe, and from which they then received continuing support, was not the great Moslem world of the Levant, Sicily, or Spain — where the Manichaean doctrines had already been absorbed and transformed by the Sufis and the Shi’a — but the European Southeast: Bulgaria, Rumania, and Dalmatia; the very zone, that is to say, in which the golden Orphic-Dionysian Pietroasa bowl of Figure 5 and Figure 4 was found.

Figure 33. Eucharistic Bowl; Mt. Athos, 13th century a.d.

In Figure 33 we now see another sacramental bowl of essentially the same artistic tradition as that of Figure 5 and Figure 6; but the religious symbols are of a Christian kind. This, in fact, is an Orthodox eucharistic bowl from the Greek monastery of Mount Athos, thirteenth century a.d.,the date of the Albigensian Crusade. And, like the two already treated, it was intended as a vessel for sacramental breads. We count again a circle of exactly sixteen radiating figures; but in the center, instead of either a winged serpent or the earlier goddess with the grail-like vessel in her hands, we have the Virgin Mother with the Christ Child in her womb: the True Vine, the serpent to be lifted up as in Figure 32. The radiating presences now are adoring angels, the congregation of the mystai in Paradise, with a saint above each, a new initiate, in prayer. And in the sixteenth section is a tabernacle: the sanctuary of the presence of God in his Church, corresponding to Station 16 of the Pietroasa bowl (Figure 5).

For, as Professor Leisegang tells — from whose superb discussion of these three eucharistic vessels I have developed my argument:

In the Eastern European territories dominated by the Greek Orthodox church, both the forms and the spirit of the ancient mysteries have been preserved down to our own day. In the Russian sect of the Men of God, to which, according to Fülöp-Miller,^{Note 150} Rasputin belonged, we find the same secrecy, the hymns, the round dances in the direction of the sun’s course and in the contrary direction, in imitation of the dances of the heavenly angels; the initiates cast off their clothes to don white shirts used solely for this purpose; they sing and dance to induce a state of ecstasy in which the Holy Ghost speaks through his prophets and prophetesses, and which culminates in a general sexual orgy, resulting in children begotten by the Holy Ghost. Rasputin himself danced before his faithful and threw off his clothes at the climax. A well-known picture, reproduced by Fülöp-Miller, shows him in the very attitude assumed by the mystai on our alabaster bowl: one hand upon his breast, the other raised to the level of his head in blessing and adjuration.^{Note 151}

One need not be amazed, then, to learn that in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe the orgiastic as well as monastic forms of religious devotion flourished. The Albigensians were of the ascetic line; so also (at least officially) were the clergy of the Roman Church. However, as we know from many sources, wherever in the world the fostering powers of life are denied as gods, they reappear in malignant forms as devils. And there was a great deal more religious lore being carried to Europe in those centuries from the relic-fertile East than is represented merely in the arrival of such holy marvels as the bones, arms, and legs of apostles, splinters of the true cross, little vials of the Virgin’s milk, Saint Joseph’s breath, and the Lord’s tears, several prepuces of Jesus, parts of the burning bush, feathers from the angel Gabriel’s wings, and the cornerstone rejected by the builders.^{Note 152} There is, for example, the following description — marvelously familiar by now — of the rites alleged to have been practiced by a community of supposed Christians discovered in the city of Orleans, France, in the year 1022 and, when discovered, burned alive:

Before we proceed [states our informant, a contemporary hand], I shall describe at some length, for those ignorant of the method, how the “Food from Heaven,” as they call it, is produced. On certain nights of the year, they come together in a designated house, each bearing in hand a lantern; and there they chant the names of the demons in the manner of a litany, until suddenly they see that the Devil has arrived among them in the likeness of some beast. And he having been seen somehow by them all, they put out the lanterns and immediately every man grabs whatever woman comes to hand, even though she may be his own mother, his sister, or a nun, without thought of sin; for such tumbling is regarded by them as holiness and religion. And when a child is begotten in this utterly filthy way, they reassemble on the eighth day and, kindling a large fire in their midst, pass it, like the old heathens, through that fire, and thus cremate it. The ashes then are collected and kept with as much reverence as Christians reserve for the blessed Body of Christ; and to those on the point of death they administer a portion of these ashes as a viaticum. Moreover, there is such power in those ashes, infused by the Devil’s deceit, that when anyone tainted by that heresy happens to have tasted even the smallest quantity, his mind can hardly ever thereafter be turned from that heresy to the way of truth.^{Note 153}

One is put in mind, through all this, of the audaciously obscene religious rites and temple arts that were unfolding during those same centuries in India; in the sculptured temples, for instance, of Belur, Khajuraho, Bhuvaneshvara, and Kanarak.^{Note 154} And as the Gnostic Christians sought release from the deluding toils of this world by violating ritually the moral codes of their culture, so in India the followers of the “left-hand path” practiced the antinomian rites of the Five Forbidden Things — the “Five Ms,” as they are called — consisting of wine (madya), meat (maṁsa), fish (matsya), yogic postures involving women (mudrā), and sexual union (maithunā),^{Note 155} Moreover, there is an unmistakable resemblance to be remarked particularly between the rites of the South Indian “bodice (kancuḷi) cult,” described in Oriental Mythology,^{Note 156} and a certain gallant custom of the fashionable gentry of southern twelfth-century France. In the Indian rites, it may be recalled, the female votaries, on entering the sanctuary, deposit their upper vests in a box in charge of the guru, and at the close of the preliminary ceremonies each of the men takes a vest from the box, whereupon the woman to whom it belongs — “be she ever so nearly kin to him” — becomes his partner for the consummation. The European version of this unconventional ceremony — turned to the taste, however, of a more playful, secular spirit, and where the female, not the male, is given the lead — retains the vestiges of its obscure religious background only in its manner of a carnival masque and its association thereby with both a mock Mass and the name of a third-century martyr, Saint Valentine (d. Feb. 14, c. 270 a.d.), on the day of whose decapitation, it is said, the birds begin to mate. The rites of these so-called “Valentine Clubs” may, in fact, have originated in some sort of spiritual marriage of the Valentinian Gnostics of second- to fourth-century Alexandria (Valentinus, the founder, fl. 137–166 a.d.) and have arrived in southern France along with the other Gnostic features of the time. They are described in the following amusing passage from the pages of John Rutherford’s choice little book, The Troubadours.

Every year, on the 14th of February, these Valentines assembled on horseback in some convenient place, usually the center of the nearest town. Here they formed files, each consisting of a lady and a gentleman; and hence they departed to make the circuit of the neighborhood. They were led by two files got up to represent Cupid, Mercy, Loyalty and Chastity, and they were duly attended by trumpeters and banner-bearers, to say nothing of the inevitable rabble. The procession closed at the Hotel de Ville, whose principal apartment was gaily decorated for the occasion. Here the Valentines worshiped Love, in a neat parody on the Mass. Then each pair kissed and parted, for a new engagement was about to be formed. There was now produced a silver casket, containing the names of all the gentlemen present written on separate slips of parchment. One by one, each of the ladies drew a slip, until no more remained in the casket. Afterwards, the president, bedizened as Cupid, read out the names written on the slips, and the gentlemen who bore these names became the Valentines of the respective ladies who had drawn them for the ensuing year. When all the Valentines were thus recoupled, the laws of the institution were read over by the president. These specified that each gentlemen was to be faithful to his lady for the term of twelve months; to keep her well supplied with flowers, according to the season, and to make her presents at stated periods; to escort her whithersoever she wished to go for purposes of piety or pleasure; to make her songs, if a poet, and to break lances in her honor, if skilled in arms; and to resent to the utmost every insult leveled at her. The laws further specified that, should the gentleman happen to be convicted of willful failure in any item, he was to be expelled with ignominy from the society. In this case the Valentines were to assemble, as on the 14th of February, and march to his house. In front thereof his crime and sentence were to be proclaimed, and a bundle of straw was to be burned on his doorsill, in token of his excommunication. Finally, the marriage of a pair of Valentines was strictly prohibited, under the like penalty. The president having finished his recitation of the statutes, another parody of the Church services of the day was perpetrated, and the party broke up.^{Note 157}

Nor is it only in the cults of the left-hand path that resemblances between the Indian and European religions of the Middle Ages are to be found. The cathedral and temple forms that arose in both areas from the tenth to thirteenth centuries were themselves comparable in many fundamental features.

Ornamented without, as well as within, by the sculptured figures of enraptured beings — in the cathedrals, angelic and saintly, in the temples, often obscene — both were designed to suggest the precinct of a divine, supranormal presence, comparable on a vast scale to the interior of the alabaster bowl of Figure 18 and Figure 19. One enters through a symbolic portal and proceeds through a long nave or mandapa to a sanctuary (Sanskrit, garbha-gṛha, “embryo house” or “womb”) where the actual presence of the deity is to be worshiped in profound, indrawn meditation. In Europe the presence is of Jesus Christ himself, in the consecrated host; in India it might be the Goddess, in her consecrated image or yonī symbol; her spouse, Śiva, as the liṅgaṃ; Viṣṇu, or some other god in symbol or image. In the Rajrani temple in Bhuvaneshvara, near Puri,^{Note 158} there is no symbol whatsoever in the lightless holy of holies. This beautiful little temple was built about 1100 a.d. by a wealthy courtesan for her king; and local legend has it that when he entered the sanctuary the presence there found was the consecrated courtesan herself. Whether true or false, the legend is certainly kindred, on one hand, to that of the love grotto of Tristan and Isolt, and on the other to the puranic fables of the loves of Kṛṣṇa and Radha among the Gopis that were coming to flower at that time in India and culminated c. 1170 in the rapturous Gītā Govinda of Jayadeva — which in Oriental Mythology I have compared to the Tristan romances of the same date.^{Note 159}

To be remarked further is the astonishing point-for-point correspondence of the forms and paraphernalia of the rites performed in temple and cathedral. As Sir John Woodroffe has pointed out in his fundamental work on The Principles of Tantra, the following statement from the Roman Catholic Council of Trent (1545 — 1563) can be readily annotated in Sanskrit to indicate the Indian parallels; viz.: “The Catholic Church, rich with the experience of the ages and clothed with their splendor, has introduced mystic benediction (mantra), incense (dhūpa), water (ācamana, padya, etc.), lights (dīpa), bells (ghaṇṭā), flowers (puṣpa), vestments and all the magnificence of its ceremonies in order to excite the spirit of religion to the contemplation of the profound mysteries both body (deha) and soul (ātman). It therefore renders to the Lord ( īśvara) a double worship, exterior (vāhya-pūjā) and interior (mānasa-pūjā) , the latter being the prayer (vadana) of the faithful, the breviary of its priest, and the voice of Him ever interceding in our favor, and the former the outward motions of the liturgy.”^{Note 160} The use of the rosary, too, might be mentioned, which entered Europe in the course of the late Middle Ages. Further, both the form and the sense of the main service in both religious precincts is the same. A priest conducts the rite, opening with preliminary prayers and, on high occasions, intoned chants. An offering — bread and wine in the West; in India, milk or butter, fruits, an animal or a human being — is consecrated, symbolically or actually immolated, and in part consumed in communion; after which, prayers of thanksgiving are offered and the company is dismissed.

The earliest appearances of this style of religious art and architecture in India date — significantly — from the Gupta Period, the reign of Chandragupta II (r. 378–414), whose dates include — as pointed out in my Oriental and Occidental volumes^{Note 161} — those of the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius the Great (r. 379–395), whose anti-pagan edicts initiated an exodus of intellectuals on all levels — priests, philosophers, scientists, and artists — eastward into Persia and to India. The demonstrations by Hermann Goetz of literally hundreds of correspondences between the Roman-Syrian art and culture forms and those that abruptly appeared in India at this time bear ample witness to what occurred. A golden age of Hindu and Buddhist art, literature, and temple architecture dawned, which from the fifth to mid-thirteenth centuries displayed many of those forms of mythology and worship that were being suppressed during the same centuries in the West.

It is a pity that no further cross-cultural studies have yet been undertaken of the consequences of the great Theodosian crisis, tracing, on one hand in Gupta India and subsequently T’ang China, and on the other hand in the underground heretical movements and witchcraft epidemics of semi-Christianized Europe, the two branches of the one vastly outspread mystery tradition, the most ancient stem and roots of which are to be recognized in Hellenistic Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. There is here a capital opportunity for a broadly based science of comparative mythology to register the whole constellation of both causes and effects — geographical, psychological, sociological, philosophical, religious, and aesthetic — of a major instance of historic transformation through diffusion, noting, on one hand, the continuity through centuries of a single mighty context of mythic and ritual lore and, on the other, its division into a confrontation of reciprocally incomprehensible opposites, contrary in every strain and feature, vice, virtue, and ideal. Much as the characters of two sisters, one dark, the other fair, may in comparison illuminate each other, so do these two kindred worlds of the medieval Orient and Europe. And particularly in relation to the interpretation of their shared symbols, the value of a glance from Europe to India can be considerable. For whereas in Europe only one, very literal, precisely defined orthodox reading has been officially allowed, in India every possible symbolic inflection of meaning and application has been applied both to worship and to art. Any scholarship that confines itself, therefore, to a single province of this study is bound to be baffled by phenomena that a knowledge from across the line would illuminate in a trice. And in the cause, today, of that ecumenical understanding which is the ultimate aim and necessity of all the global works now in progress in this world, lacing East and West together, it would seem that a seriously systematic full-scale examination of exactly this material should be an appropriate focus of concern.

So let us return our own gaze, now, to the great creative masters of the West, bearing in mind, as a basic principle of our study, that the symbols put to use by them have come from afar. Their sources are far deeper, broader, and more ancient, far more intimately associated with the primary faculties of the human spirit, than the limits of any single religious, secular, moral, or antinomian tradition can allow. Hence, no matter what the medium that carries them to view, they speak from beyond that medium itself — like the serpent of the Garden of Eden, who had been known to the peoples of the ancient Near East long before the advent of Yahweh. The Orphics heard him speak a very different tongue from that heard by the rabbis and Church Fathers; the Ophites, otherwise again. And to us he has even more to say. So, too, the symbols of the love life, the love death, of the man and woman, woman and man, Tristan Isolt, Isolt Tristan: to read their life, to read their death, and to judge the power of their very great poet, one has to read through and beyond the various local mythologies (ethnic ideas) of Gottfried’s day and our own, to the undertones and overtones, the new tones and the old as well, of the elementary song immortal of his art.