Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rime:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
This book is about taking the head off an evil witch. Lady Macbeth, glued to the stickingplace of insatiable power, unable to countenance failure to the point of rejecting life, will serve as a symbol of the woman robbed of her femininity through her pursuit of masculine goals that are in themselves a parody of what masculinity really is.
And though in Shakespeare’s tragedy it is Macbeth who is beheaded, the head he loses is fatally infected by the witches’ evil curse.
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are metaphors of the masculine and feminine principles functioning in one person or in a culture, and the deteriorating relationship between them clearly demonstrates the dynamics of evil when the masculine principle loses its standpoint in its own reality, and the feminine principle of love succumbs to calculating, intellectualized ambition.
Shakespeare’s beheading of his hero-villain is, in the total context of the play, the healing of the country.
This book is about a beheading.
It has been hewn out of the hard rock of an addiction to perfection.
Repeatedly, I have done battle with the black crow sitting on my left shoulder croaking, “It isn’t good enough.
You haven’t anything new to say.
You don’t say it well enough.”
Repeatedly, I have had to stop trying to perfect a sentence here, a paragraph there, while the rest of the book remained unwritten.
Fortunately there were deadlines to be met, or I would never have struck this book out of the rock in which it was buried. And the crow croaks, “Just as well.”
I counter that with the interest of the audiences to whom much of this material was first presented, and the encouragement of friends and analysands who so generously opened their own souls to make this book possible.
Thus I have steered my course through the Scylla and Charybdis of rigid scholarly methods and a whirlpool of material and landed my creation, rough-hewn, as delicately as possible without falling into my own addiction.
By nature I like to work with cameos.
I like to work in fine detail, perfect that, and fall back in exhaustion until another cameo comes along.
Writing a book is not cameo work and putting a rough-hewn rock into the world is not easy for a perfectionist.
Reading it over now, I find some parts boring, some parts running away with themselves in true compulsive style, and some parts mired in detail.
I could cut them out, but when I wrote them they were important as part of a whole process a process that takes infinite patience, with heartbreaking setbacks and long periods of moving ahead while looking backward into the mirror.
Linear thinking does not come naturally to me; moreover, it kills my imagination.
Nothing happens. No bell rings; no moment of HERE and NOW. No moment that says YES. Without those moments I am not alive.
And so, rather than driving toward a goal, I prefer the pleasure of the journey through a spiral.
And I ask my reader to relax and enjoy the spiral too.
If you miss something on the first round, don’t worry.
You may pick it up on the second or the third or the ninth.
It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you are relaxed so that if the bell does ring you will hear it and allow it to resonate through all the rungs of your own spiral.
The world of the feminine resonates. Timing is everything.
If it doesn’t ring, either it is the wrong spiral or the wrong time or there is no bell.
Many of my analysands have eating disorders, and therefore much of the illustrative material, especially in the first half of the book, centers on obesity and anorexia nervosa.
These syndromes, however, are simply particular symptoms of a malaise that is general in Western society, and while the anguish of a distorted feminine body brings the problem into sharp focus, the psychology involved does not apply only to the obese or the anorexic.
Indeed, as the weight problem is brought under control, images of emptiness, prisons, glass coffins, etc., begin to appear in the dreams, pointing to sexual and spiritual problems common to most modern women.
These emerge in the latter half of the book. I might add that the cry of the witch that underlies most of the material may well be recognized by men too.
A Greek version of the witch motif concerns Medusa, a beautiful woman until she offended the goddess Athena (born “fully armed, with a mighty shout” from the head of Zeus after he had swallowed her pregnant mother Metis).
In reprisal, Athena changed Medusa’s hair into snakes and made her face so hideous that all who looked on her were turned to stone.
It fell to the hero Perseus to kill the Medusa, and to do this Hermes gave him a curved sword and winged sandals, Athena a mirror-shield, and Hades a helmet which made Perseus invisible.
Thus accoutered, Perseus slew Medusa, avoiding being turned into stone by keeping his eyes on the mirror-shield. From the pregnant Medusa’s neck, Pegasus and Chrysaor were released.
On his homeward journey Perseus rescued the princess Andromeda from a sea monster and released her from the rock to which she had been chained as a sacrifice.
Later they were married.
If we look at the modern Athenas sprung from their father’s foreheads, we do not necessarily see liberated women.
Many of them have proven beyond question that they are equal to or better than men: excellent doctors, excellent mechanics, excellent business consultants. But they are also, in many cases, unhappy women. “I have everything,” they say.
“Perfect job, perfect house, perfect clothes, so what? What does it all add up to?
There’s got to be more than this. I was born, I died, I never lived.”
Often, behind the scenes, they are chained to some addiction: food, alcohol, constant cleaning, perfectionism, etc.
As already mentioned, much of this book concentrates on eating disorders, but I am convinced that the same problem is at the root of all addictions.
The problem manifests differently, of course, with the individual, but within everyone there are collective patterns and attitudes that
unconsciously influence behavior.
One of these patterns is illustrated in Athena’s cruel revenge on the once beautiful Medusa, whose snaky locks twist and writhe in constant agitation, reaching, reaching, reaching, wanting more and more and more.
Is it possible that the modern Athena is not in contact with her Medusa because somewhere back in the dark patriarchal ages she was shut up in a cave?
Our generation scarcely knows of her existence, but she is making her presence increasingly felt in her unquenchable cravings for something.
What that something is depends on the individual’s personal history.
To try to fight her directly is almost certain defeat because she is so angry and so full of repressed energy that to face her brings on a paralysis of fear, as Margaret Laurence with devastating but moving accuracy has described in The Stone Angel.
We have to find our own inner Perseus and arm him with the right weapons and let him move in, wearing his helmet or cloak of invisibility, in order to remove the tormented head.
He dare not look the Medusa in the eye; neither dare he take his eyes off her in the mirror. Once the head is off, Pegasus, winged horse of creativity, is released along with Chrysaor, he of the golden sword.
Then the hero, of victory, finds the virgin who was been sacrificed to the sea monster, her and takes her as his bride.
Essentially I am suggesting that many men and women are addicted in one another because our patriarchal culture emphasizes specialization and perfection.
Driven to do our best at school, on in our relationships in every corner lives we try to make ourselves into of art.
Working so hard to create our perfection we forget that we are human beings.
On one side we try to be the efficient, disciplined goddess Athena, the other we are forced into the voracious repressed energy of Medusa.
Athena chained to Medusa as surely as Medusa chained to Athena.
We are trapped extremes of the gods, territory that belong to us. Meanwhile the one who forgotten is the maiden Andromeda, chained to the rock, in danger of being sacrificed to a monster from the unconscious.
She is the forgotten one ”still unravished bride” in our culture. long as she is chained to a rock she remain still and unravished.
She remains like a figure on Keats’ Grecian urn, her passionate loveliness frozen into immobility,
For ever warm, and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart highsorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead, and a parching This book looks into the heart of the Athena, the anguish of the writhing Medusa, and suggests ways of releasing maiden into her vibrant womanhood she is sacrificed to the perfection of Only by loving our own maiden, and allowing her to find the deep down within herself, can we dare to open ourselves to the raging goddess at of the addiction.
Only through love transform her and allow her to transform us.
When my own maiden falters, I encourage her with a Zen koan:
Ride your horse along the edge of the sword Hide yourself in the middle of the flames Blossoms of the fruit tree will bloom in the fire The sun rises in the evening. ~Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection, Page 7-10
The physiologists who, during the past few years, have been so industriously exploring the functions of the brain, have limited their attempts at explanation to its cognitive and volitional performances.
Dividing the brain into sensorial and motor centres, they have found their division to be exactly paralleled by the analysis made by empirical psychology, of the perceptive and volitional parts of the mind into their simplest elements.
But the aesthetic sphere of the mind, its longings, its pleasures and pains, and its emotions, have been so ignored in all these researches that one is tempted to suppose that if either Dr. Ferrier or Dr. Munk were asked for a theory in brain-terms of the latter mental facts, they might both reply, either that they had as yet bestowed no thought upon the subject, or that they had found it so difficult to make distinct hypotheses, that the matter lay for them among the problems of the future, only to be taken up after the simpler ones of the present should have been definitively solved.
And yet it is even now certain that of two things concerning the emotions, one must be true.
Either separate and special centres, affected to them alone, are their brain-seat, or else they correspond to processes occurring in the motor and sensory centres, already assigned, or in others like them, not yet mapped out.
If the former be the case we must deny the current view, and hold the cortex to be something more than the surface of “projection” for every sensitive spot and every muscle in the body.
If the latter be the case, we must ask whether the emotional “process” in the sensory or motor centre be an altogether peculiar one, or whether it resembles the ordinary perceptive processes of which those centres are already recognised to be the seat.
The purpose of the following pages is to show that the last alternative comes nearest to the truth, and that the emotional brain-processes no only resemble the ordinary sensorial brainprocesses, but in very truth are nothing but such processes variously combined.
The main result of this will be to simplify our notions of the possible complications of brain-physiology, and to make us see that we have already a brain-scheme in our hands whose appli [p.189] cations are much wider than its authors dreamed.
But although this seems to be the chief result of the arguments I am to urge, I should say that they were not originally framed for the sake of any such result.
They grew out of fragmentary introspective observations, and it was only when these had already combined into a theory that the thought of the simplification the theory might bring to cerebral physiology occurred to me, and made it seem more important than before.
I should say first of all that the only emotions I propose expressly to consider here are those that have a distinct bodily expression.
That there are feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of interest and excitement, bound up with mental operations, but having no obvious bodily expression for their consequence, would, I suppose, be held true by most readers.
Certain Livros Grátis arrangements of sounds, of lines, of colours, are agreeable, and others the reverse, without the degree of the feeling being sufficient to quicken the pulse or breathing, or to prompt to movements of either the body or the face.
Certain sequences of ideas charm us as much as others tire us. It is a real intellectual delight to get a problem solved, and a real intellectual torment to have to leave it unfinished.
The first set of examples, the sounds, lines, and colours, are either bodily sensations, or the images of such.
The second set seem to depend on processes in the ideational centres exclusively.
Taken together, they appear to prove that there are pleasures and pains inherent in certain forms of nerve-action as such, wherever that action occur.
The case of these feelings we will at present leave entirely aside, and confine our attention to the more complicated cases in which a wave of bodily disturbance of some kind accompanies the perception of the interesting sights or sounds, or the passage of the exciting train of ideas.
Surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, anger, lust, greed, and the like, become then the names of the mental states with which the person is possessed.
The bodily disturbances are said to be the “manifestation” of these several emotions, their “expression” or “natural language”; and these emotions themselves, being so strongly characterized both from within and without, may be called the standard emotions.
Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the [p.190] same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike.
The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.
Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth.
We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it
right to strike, but we could not actually feel afraid or angry.
Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure to meet with immediate disbelief.
And yet neither many nor far-fetched considerations are required to mitigate its paradoxical character, and possibly to produce conviction of its truth.
To begin with, readers of the Journal do not need to be reminded that the nervous system of every living thing is but a bundle of predispositions to react in particular ways upon the contact of particular features of the environment.
As surely as the hermit-crab’s abdomen presupposes the existence of empty whelk-shells somewhere to be found,so surely do the hound’s olfactories imply the existence, on the one hand, of deer’s or foxes’ feet, and on the other, the tendency to follow up their tracks.
The neural machinery is but a hyphen between determinate arrangements of matter ourtside the body and determinate impulses to inhibition or discharge within its organs.
When the hen sees a white oval object on the ground, she cannot leave it; she must keep upon it and return to it, until at last its transformation into a little mass of moving chirping down elicits from her machinery an entirely new set of performances.
The love of man for woman, or of the human mother for her babe, our wrath at snakes and our fear of precipices, may all be described similarly, as instances of the way in which peculiarly conformed pieces of the world’s furniture will fatally call forth most particular mental and bodily reactions, in advance of, and often in direct opposition to, the verdict of our deliberate reason concerning them.
The labours of Darwin and his successors are only just beginning to reveal the universal parasitism of each creature upon other special things, [p.191] and the way in which each creature brings the signature of its special relations stampted on its nervous system with it upon the scene.
Every living creature is in fact a sort of lock, whose wards and springs presuppose special forms of key, – which keys however are not born attached to the locks, but are sure to be found in the world near by as life goes on.
And the locks are indifferent to any but their own keys.
The egg fails to fascinate the hound, the bird does not fear the precipice, the snake waxes not wroth at his kind, the deer cares nothing for the woman or the human babe.
Those who wish for a full development of this point of view, should read Schneider’s Der thierische Wille, – no other book shows how accurately anticipatory are the actions of animals, of the specific features of the environment in which they are to live.
Now among these nervous anticipations are of course to be reckoned the emotions, so far as these may be called forth directly by the perception of certain facts.
In advance of all experience of elephants no child can but be frightened if he suddenly find one trumpeting and charging upon him.
No woman can see a handsome little naked baby without delight, no man in the wilderness see a human form in the distance without excitement and curiosity.
I said I should consider these emotions only so far as they have bodily movements of some sort for their accompaniments.
But my first point is to show that their bodily accompaniments are much more far-reaching and complicated than we ordinarily suppose.
In the earlier books on Expression, written mostly from the artistic point of view, the signs of emotion visible from without were the only ones taken account of. Sir Charles Bell’s celebrated Anatomy of Expression noticed the respiratory changes; and Bain’s and Darwin’s treatises went more thoroughly still into the study of the visceral factors involved,- changes in the functioning of glands and muscles, and in that of the circulatory apparatus.
But not even a Darwin has exhaustively enumerated all the bodily affections characteristic of any one of the standard emotions.
More and more, as physiology advances, we begin to discern how almost infinitely numerous and subtle they must be.
The researches of Mosso with the plethysmograph have shown that not only the heart, but the entire circulatory system, forms a sort of sounding-board, which every change of our consciousness, however slight, may make reverberate.
Hardly a sensation comes to us without sending waves of [p.192] alternate constriction and dilatation down the arteries of our arms.
The blood-vessels of the abdomen act reciprocally with those of the more outward parts.
The bladder and bowels, the glands of the mouth, throat, and skin, and the liver, are known to be affected gravely in certain severe emotions, and are unquestionably affected transiently when the emotions are of a lighter sort.
That the heart-beats and the rhythm of breathing play a leading part in all emotions whatsoever, is a matter too notorious for proof.
And what is really equally prominent, but less likely to be admitted until special attention is drawn to the fact, is the continuous co-operation of the voluntary muscles in our emotional states.
Even when no change of outward attitude is produced, their inward tension alters to suit each varying mood, and is felt as a difference of tone or of strain.
In depression the flexors tend to prevail; in elation or belligerent excitement the extensors take the lead.
And the various permutations and combinations of which these organic activities are susceptible, make it abstractly possible that no shade of emotion, however slight, should be without a bodily reverberation as unique, when taken in its totality, as is the mental mood itself.
The immense number of parts modified in each emotion is what makes it so difficult for us to reproduce in cold blood the total and integral expression of any one of them.
We may catch the trick with the voluntary muscles, but fail with the skin, glands, heart, and other viscera.
Just as an artificially imitated sneeze lacks something of the reality, so the attempt to imitate an emotion in the absence of its normal instigating cause is apt to be rather “hollow”.
The next thing to be noticed is this, that every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is felt, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs.
If the reader has never paid attention to this matter, he will be both interested and astonished to learn how many different local bodily feelings he can detect in himself as characteristic of his various emotional moods.
It would be perhaps too much to expect him to arrest the tide of any strong gust of passion for the sake of any such curious analysis as this; but he can observe more tranquil states, and that may be assumed here to be true of the greater which is shown to be true of the less.
Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him.
It is surprisingly what little items give accent to these complexes of sensibility.
[p.193]
When worried by any slight trouble, one may find that the focus of one’s bodily consciousness is the contraction, often quite inconsiderable, of the eyes and brows.
When momentarily embarrassed, it is something in the pharynx that compels either a swallow, a clearing of the throat, or a slight cough; and so on for as many more instances as might be named.
Our concern here being with the general view rather than with the details, I will not
linger to discuss these but, assuming the point admitted that every change that occurs must be felt, I will pass on.[1]
I now proceed to urge the vital point of my whole theory, which is this.
If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains.
It is true, that although most people, when asked say that their introspection verifies this statement, some persist in saying theirs does not.
Many cannot be made to understand the question.
When you beg them to imagine away every feeling of laughter and of tendency to laugh from their consciousness of the ludicrousness of an object, and then to tell you what the feeling of its ludicrousness would be like, whether it be anything
more than the perception that the object belongs to the class “funny,” they persist in replying that the thing proposed is a physical impossibility, and that they always must laugh, if they see a funny object.
Of course the task proposed is not the practical one of seeing a ludicrous object
and annihilating one’s tendency to laugh. It is the purely speculative one of subtracting certain elements of feeling from an emotional state supposed to exist in its fulness, and saying what the residual elements are.
I cannot help thinking that all who rightly apprehend this problem will agree with the proposition above laid down.
What kind of an emotion of fear would be left, if the feelings [p.194] neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is
quite impossible to think.
Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition of it in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face?
The present writer, for one, certainly cannot.
The rage is as completely evaporated as the sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing that can possibly be supposed to take its place is some cold-blooded and dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastisement for their sins.
In like manner of grief: what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast-bone?
A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more.
Every passion in turn tells the same story.
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
I do not say that it is a contradiction in the nature of things, or that pure spirits are necessarily condemned to cold intellectual lives; but I say that for us, emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable.
The more closely I scrutinise my states, the more persuaded I become, that whatever moods, affections, and passions I have, are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes we ordinarily call their expression or consequence; and the more it seems to me that if I were to become corporeally anaesthetic, I should be excluded from the life of the affections, harsh and tender alike, and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or intellectual form.
Such an existence, although it seems to have been the ideal of ancient sages, is too apathetic to be keenly sought after by those born after the revival of the worship of sensibility, a few generations ago.
But if the emotion is nothing but the feeling of the reflex bodily effects of what we call its objects,” effects due to the connate adaptation of the nervous system to that object, we seem immediately faced by this objection: most of the objects of civilised men’s emotions are things to which it would be preposterous to suppose their nervous systems connately adapted.
Most occasions of shame and many insults are purely conventional, and vary with the social environment.
The same is true of many matters of dread and of desire, and of many occasions of melancholy and regret.
In these cases, at least, it would seem that the [p.195] ideas of shame, desire, regret, &c., must first have been attached by education and association to these conventional objects before the bodily changes could possibly be awakened.
And if in these cases the bodily changes follow the ideas, instead of giving rise to them, why not then in all cases?
To discuss thoroughly this objection would carry us deep into the study of purely intellectual Aesthetics.
A few words must here suffice.
We will say nothing of the argument’s failure to distinguish between the idea of an emotion and the emotion itself.
We will only recall the wellknown evolutionary principle that when a certain power has once been fixed in an animal by virtue of its utility in presence of certain features of the environment, it may turn out to be useful in presence of other features of the environment that had originally nothing to do with either producing or preserving it.
A nervous tendency to discharge being once there, all sorts of unforeseen things may pull the trigger and let loose the effects.
That among these things should be conventionalities of man’s contriving is a matter of no psychological consequence whatever.
The most important part of my environment is my fellow-man.
The consciousness of his attitude towards me is the perception that normally unlocks most of my shames and indignations and fears.
The extraordinary sensitiveness of this consciousness is shown by the bodily modifications wrought in us by the awareness that our fellow-man is noticing us at all.
No one can walk across the platform at a public meeting with just the same muscular innervation he uses to walk across his room at home.
No one can give a message to such a meeting without organic excitement. “Stage-fright” is only the extreme degree of that wholly irrational personal self-consciousness which every one gets in some measure, as soon as he feels the eyes of a number of strangers fixed upon him, even though he be inwardly convinced that their feeling towards him is of no practical account [2] .
This being so, it is not surprising that the additional persuasion that my fellow-man’s attitude means either well or ill for me, should awaken stronger emotions still. In primitive societies “Well” may mean handing me a piece of beef, and “Ill” may mean aiming a blow at my skull. In our “cultured [p.196] age,” “Ill” may mean
cutting me in the street, and “Well,” giving me an honorary degree.
What the action itself may be is quite insignificant, so long as I can perceive in it intent or animus.
That is the emotionarousing perception; and may give rise to as strong bodily convulsions in me, a civilised man experiencing the treatment of an artificial society, as in any savage prisoner of war, learning whether his captors are about to eat him or to make him a member of their tribe.
But now, this objection disposed of, there arises a more general doubt.
Is there any evidence, it may be asked, for the assumption that particular perceptions do produce widespread bodily effects by a sort of immediate physical influence, antecedent to the arousal of an emotion or emotional idea?
The only possible reply is, that there is most assuredly such evidence.
In listening to poetry, drama, or heroic narrative, we are often surprised at the cutaneous shiver which like a sudden wave flows over us, and at the heart-swelling and the lachrymal effusion that unexpectedly catch us at intervals.
In listening to music, the same is even more strikingly true.
If we abruptly see a dark moving form in the woods, our heart stops beating, and we catch our breath instantly and before any articulate idea of danger can arise.
If our friend goes near to the edge of a precipice, we get the well-known feeling of “all-overishness,” and we shrink back, although we positively know him to be safe, and have no distinct imagination of his fall.
The writer well remembers his astonishment, when a boy of seven or eight, at fainting when he saw a horse bled.
The blood was in a bucket, with a stick in it, and, if memory does not deceive him, he stirred it round and saw it drip from the stick with no feeling save that of childish curiosity.
Suddenly the world grew black before his eyes, his ears began to buzz, and he knew no more.
He had never heard of the sight of blood producing faintness or sickness, and he had so little repugnance to it, and so little apprehension of any other sort of danger from it, that even at that tender age, as he well remembers, he could not help wondering how the mere physical presence of a pailful of crimson fluid occasion in him such formidable bodily effects.
Imagine two steel knife-blades with their keen edges crossing each other at right-angles, and moving too and fro.
Our whole nervous organisation is “on-edge” at the thought; and yet what emotion can be there except the unpleasant nervous feeling itself, or the dread that more of it may come? ~William James, First published in Mind, 9, 188-205
“Tt may be safely afifirmed that no popular myth — can compare with that of the Antichrist legend in general interest, widespread diflfusion, and persistence,
from a hoar antiquity down to the present time.
In the present work, which deals mainly with the early Christian and media3val aspects of the subject, no attempt is made to trace the origin of the saga much farther back than about the dawn of the new era.
But the author leaves no doubt on the mind -of the reader that he regards it not
merely as a pre-Christian tradition quite independent of the New Testament writings, but as prior even to the oldest of the Old Testament records themselves.
From many passages it is evident that he is in full accord with Gnnkel, whose canons of interpretation he adopts, and whose views regarding the ultimate Babylonian source of the myth he implicitly accepts, though of course not in all their details.
Thus Gunkel’s reference of the mystic number 666 to the “primeval monster” (p. 11) is for obvious reasons rightly rejected, and a complete reconstruction of the old Babylonian legend by the aid of S. John’s Eevelation is declared to be opposed to all evidence, and consequently to be ” nothing more than a piece of pure fancy work.”
But on the other hand it is clearly implied that the Antichrist legend is nothing less than a later anthropomorphic transformation of the Babylonian Dragon myth, which is ” doubtless one of the earliest evolved by primitive man” (p. 13).
And although Gunkel may have exaggerated the influence of this legend on the New Testament writers, he is none the less declared to have done a real service by following up the after-effects of the Dragon myth ” to its last echoes in the New Testament” (p. 13).
My own attention was first attracted to this subject by the stimulating writings of Mr. Andrew Lang, and I was struck in a special manner by the theory, now almost become an axiom amongst folklorists, that the elucidation of the widely diffused mythologies of cultured peoples is to be sought, not in later ” solar myths ” or in literary influences of any kind but rather in the beliefs and traditions of our rnder
forefathers, of uncultured peoples, and possibly of primitive man himself.
This theory, it seems to me, receives a brilliant confirmation from the early history of the legend under consideration—a legend which may without exaggeration be said to link together some of the very oldest reminiscences of struggling humanity
with its aspirations for a better future (the Millennium) and its forebodings of the final consummation (the Last Judgment).
At least this much may be said, that Gunkel’s views regarding the evolution of the
Antichrist legend from the Dragon myth have been greatly strengthened by the results of recent studies in the hitherto almost unexplored field of early Babylonian folklore.
In Mr. Th. G. Pinches’ Religious Ideas of the Babylonians we plainly see how the myth of Tiamat, “the Dragon of Chaos,” prevalent amongst the Akkadian founders of Babylon and by them transmitted to the later Assyrian Semites, is the very
first and oldest element in the current mythologies of those ancient peoples.
At the same time this primeval dragon presents so many features in common
with the dragon of Revelation, as well as of the independent Antichrist legend, that the descent of ne from the other can scarcely any longer be denied.
All the more readily may the identification be accepted, when such obvious connecting links are afforded as may be drawn from the Books of Daniel and of Enoch, and even from many passages
in the prophets and other earlier biblical writings.
The parallelism between dragon and serpent is too close to need discussion, while the intimate association of the Hebrew writers with their Assyrian kinsfolk is
attested by such common popular names as Marduka (Mardochai),Shama’-ilu (Samuel), Ishm^-ilu (Ishmael), Mutu-sha-ili (Methusael), Gamal-ili (Gamaliel), and many others.
Ninip, the deity who, according to the Tell-el-Amarna tablets, was worshipped at Jerusalem before the advent of the Israelites, seems to have been identified with many gods, amongst others with Bel mätäti, ” Lord of the Lands,” this, as Mr. Pinches tells us (p. 17), being one of the titles of Merodach.
But Merodach himself (Amar-uduk, ” Brightness of the Day”) was the chief deity of the Babylonian pantheon, though not the father or the oldest of the ods.
In fact he was originally only the son of fia or Ae, king of the underworld, and acquired the place of eminence by his triumph over Mummu-Tiamat, the Dragon of Chaos, who is not distinguishable from the Kirbish-Tiawat associated with the ” Bel and the Dragon” myth.
In the Semitic account of the creation this Tiamat or Tiawat (both words meaning the ” sea “) is represented as presiding over the waste of waters in a time of disorder and confusion prior to the creation of Lahmu and Lahamu, of Anshar and Kishar, of Ann and the other gods of the heavens and the earth.
Then comes a period of strife between the primordial chaos and the established order.
Tiawat rises in rebellion against the gods, and arms herself (she is always represented as a female monster, the prototype of the scarlet woman of Babylon) with formidable weapons for the straggle. ”
I have collected unrivalled weapons—the great serpents are hostile (they war on her side)—sharp-toothed also, and I have made them relentless.
I have filled their bodies with poison like blood.
I have clothed dreadful monsters with terrors—fearful things I have set up and left
on high—scorpion-men, fish-men—wielding weapons, ruthless, fearless in battle,” and so on, in strains that recall the descriptions of the combatants in the Old
English poem of Beowulf.
In the first encounters the gods are worsted ; Anu, god of the heavens, avails not ; Eä himself trembles and, in prosaic language, runs away.
Then there appears to be a gathering of the gods, in which Ea’s son, Merodach, boldly offers to come to the rescue.
He also arms himself for the fight with formidable weapons, with spear, bow, and arrows ; he flashes lightning before him, fills his body with darting fiames ; and sets his net to catch and entangle the evil one.
She cries out in her rage, utters spells and charms, but is overthrown, and Chaos being thus ended, Merodach orders the world anew, and in gratitude for his great deeds lie is proclaimed king of the gods.
And the Assyrian text goes on:
As he tirelessly thwarted Kirbish-Tiawat, Let his name be Nibu^u, seizer of Kirbish-Tiawat.
May he restrain the paths of the stars of heaven.
Like sheep let him pasture the gods, all of them. May he imprison the sea [tiawat], may he remove and store up its treasure, For the men to come, in days advanced (i&., p. 6). ~William Bousset, The Antichrist Legend, Page xi- xvi
I was sitting the other day at a lunch counter that I particularly enjoy, when a
youngster about twelve years old, arriving with his school satchel, took the place at my left.
Beside him came a younger little man, holding the hand of his mother, and those two took the next seats.
All gave their orders, and, while waiting, the boy at my side said, turning his head slightly to the mother, “Jimmy wrote a paper today on the evolution of man, and Teacher said he was wrong, that Adam and Eve were our first parents.”
My Lord! I thought. What a teacher!
The lady three seats away then said, “Well, Teacher was right. Our first parents were Adam and Eve.”
What a mother for a twentieth-century child!
The youngster responded, “Yes, I know, but this was a scientific paper.”
And for that, I was ready to recommend him for a distinguished-service medal from the Smithsonian Institution.
The mother, however, came back with another. “Oh, those scientists!” she said angrily. “Those are only theories.”
And he was up to that one too. “Yes, I know,” was his cool and calm reply; “but they have been factualized: they found the bones.”
The milk and the sandwiches came, and that was that.
So let us now reflect for a moment on the sanctified cosmic image that has been destroyed by the facts and findings of irrepressible young truth-seekers of this kind.
At the height of the Middle Ages, say in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there were current two very different concepts of the earth.
The more popular was of the earth as flat, like a dish surrounded by, and floating
upon, a boundless cosmic sea, in which there were all kinds of monsters dangerous to man.
This was an infinitely old notion, going back to the early Bronze Age.
It appears in Sumerian cuneiform texts of about 2000 B.C.and is the image authorized in the Bible.
Fig. 1.2 — Planetary Spheres
The more seriously considered medieval concept, however, was that of the ancient Greeks, according to whom the earth was not flat, but a solid stationary sphere in the center of a kind of Chinese box of seven transparent revolving spheres, in each of which there was a visible planet: the moon, Mercury, Venus, and the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, the same seven after which our days of the week are named.
The sounding tones of these seven, moreover, made a music, the “music of the spheres,” to which the notes of our diatonic scale correspond.
There was also a metal associated with each: silver, mercury, copper, gold, iron, tin, and lead, in that order.
And the soul descending from heaven to be born on earth picked up, as it came down, the qualities of those metals; so that our souls and bodies are compounds of the very elements of the universe and sing, so to say, the same song.
Music and the arts, according to this early view, were to put us in mind of those harmonies, from which the general thoughts and affairs of this earth distract us.
And in the Middle Ages the seven branches of learning were accordingly associated with those spheres: grammar, logic, and rhetoric (known as the trivium), arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (the quadrivium).
The crystalline spheres themselves, furthermore, were not, like glass, of inert matter, but living spiritual powers, presided over by angelic beings, or, as Plato had said, by sirens.
And beyond all, there was that luminous celestial realm where God in majesty sat on his triune throne; so that when the soul, at death, returning to its maker, passed again through the seven spheres, it left off at each the accordant quality and arrived unclothed for the judgment.
The emperor and the pope on earth governed, it was supposed, according to the laws and will of God, representing his power and authority at work in the ordained Christian commonalty.
Thus in the total view of the medieval thinkers there was a perfect accord between the structure of the universe, the canons of the social order, and the good of the
individual.
Through unquestioning obedience, therefore, the Christian would put himself into accord not only with his society but also with both his own best inward interests and the outward order of nature.
The Christian Empire was an earthly reflex of the order of the heavens, hieratically organized, with the vestments, thrones, and procedures of its stately courts inspired by celestial imagery, the bells of its cathedral spires and harmonies of its priestly
choirs echoing in earthly tones the unearthly angelic hosts.
Fig. 1.3 — Dante and Mt. Purgatory
Dante in his Divine Comedy unfolded a vision of the universe that perfectly satisfied both the approved religious and the accepted scientific notions of his time.
When Satan had been flung out of heaven for his pride and disobedience, he was supposed to have fallen like a flaming comet and, when he struck the earth, to have plowed right through to its center.
The prodigious crater that he opened thereupon became the fiery pit of Hell; and
the great mass of displaced earth pushed forth at the opposite pole became the
Mountain of Purgatory, which is represented by Dante as lifting heavenward
exactly at the South Pole.
In his view, the entire southern hemisphere was of water, with this mighty
mountain lifting out of it, on whose summit was the Earthly Paradise, from the center of which the four blessed rivers flowed of which Holy Scripture tells.
And now it appears that when Columbus set sail across that “ocean blue”
which many of his neighbors (and possibly also his sailors) believed was a
terminal ocean surrounding a disk-like earth, he himself had in mind an image more like that of Dante’s world—of which we can read, in fact, in his journals.
There we learn that in the course of his third voyage, when he reached for the first time the northern coast of South America, passing in his frail craft at great peril between Trinidad and the mainland, he remarked that the quantity of fresh water there mixing with the salt (pouring from the mouths of the Orinoco) was enormous.
Knowing nothing of the continent beyond, but having in mind the medieval idea, he conjectured the fresh waters might be coming from one of the rivers of Paradise, pouring into the southern sea from the base of the great antipodal mountain.
Moreover, when he then turned, sailing northward, and observed that his ships were faring more rapidly than when they had been sailing south, he took this to be
evidence of their sailing now downhill, from the foot of the promontory of the mythic paradisal mountain.
I like to think of the year 1492 as marking the end—or at least the beginning of the end—of the authority of the old mythological systems by which the lives of men had been supported and inspired from time out of mind.
Shortly after Columbus’s epochal voyage, Magellan circumnavigated the globe. Shortly before, Vasco da Gamma had sailed around Africa to India.
The earth was beginning to be systematically explored, and the old, symbolic, mythological geographies discredited. In attempting to show that there was somewhere on earth a garden of Paradise, Saint Thomas Aquinas had declared, writing only two centuries and a half before Columbus sailed:
“The situation of Paradise is shut off from the habitable world by mountains or seas, or by some torrid region, which cannot be crossed; and so people who have written about topography make no mention of it.”
Fifty years after the first voyage, Copernicus published his paper on the heliocentric universe (1543); and some sixty-odd years after that, Galileo’s little telescope brought tangible confirmation to this Copernican view.
In the year 1616 Galileo was condemned by the Office of the Inquisition—like the boy beside me at the lunch counter, by his mother—for holding and teaching a doctrine contrary to Holy Scripture.
And today, of course, we have those very much larger telescopes on the summits, for example, of Mount Wilson in California,
Mount Palomar in the same state, Kitt Peak in Arizona, and Haleakala, Hawaii; so that not only is the sun now well established at the center of our planetary system, but we know it to be but one of some two hundred billion suns in a galaxy of such blazing spheres: a galaxy shaped like a prodigious lens, many hundreds of quintillion miles in diameter.
And not only that! but our telescopes now are disclosing to us, among those shining suns, certain other points of light that are themselves not suns but whole galaxies, each as large and great and inconceivable as our own—of which already many
thousands upon thousands have been seen.
So that, actually, the occasion for an experience of awe before the wonder of the universe that is being developed for us by our scientists surely is a far more marvelous, mindblowing revelation than anything the prescientific world could ever have imagined.
The little toy-room picture of the Bible is, in comparison, for children—or, in fact, not even for them any more, to judge from the words of that young scholar beside me at the counter, who, with his “Yes, I know, but this was a scientific paper,” had already found a way to rescue his learning from the crumbling medieval architecture of his mother’s Church.
For not only have all the old mythic notions of the nature of the cosmos gone to pieces, but also those of the origins and history of mankind.
Already in Shakespeare’s day, when Sir Walter Raleigh arrived in America and saw
here all the new animals unknown on the other side, he understood as a master mariner that it would have been absolutely impossible for Noah to have packed examples of every species on earth into any ark, no matter how large.
The Bible legend of the Flood was untrue: a theory that could not be “factualized.” And we today (to make matters worse) are dating the earliest appearance of manlike creatures on this earth over a million years earlier than the Biblical date for God’s creation of the world.
The great paleolithic caves of Europe are from circa 30,000 B.C.; the beginnings of agriculture, 10,000 B.C. or so, and the first substantial towns about 7,000.
Yet Cain, the eldest son of Adam, the first man, is declared in Genesis 4:2 and 4:17 to have been “a tiller of the ground” and the builder of a city known as Enoch in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
The Biblical “theory” has again been proved false, and “they have found the bones!” ~Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By, Page 13-19
