Deconstructing the Deconstructionists

Harley Price

Liberalism is a smiley-faced demolition project–in a purely positive, hopey-changey sense of the word “demolition”, that is. The highway of history, you see, is littered with the wrecks of “social constructs” which, impeding human progress, must be cleared out of the way. Margaret Mead taught us that patriarchy was a social construct. According to moral relativists, right and wrong are social constructs. Recently we discovered that traditional marriage (i.e., between a man and woman) was a social construct. And just yesterday, we learned that even being a man or a woman is a social construct. (Any more social constructs, and we’ll need a building permit.)

For liberals, there only a few things that are not in fact social constructs: e.g., unrestricted abortion, subsidized housing, school lunches, and food stamps, which are permanent and immutable rights, not to be tampered with. Modern liberalism reduces to: “Out with social constructs; hands off my entitlements.” (It is a philosophy, as P.J. O’Rourke has observed, of Big Ideas: so big, they can usually fit on the front of a T-shirt.)

If the gender to which humans are assigned at birth can be a social construct, why not the digestive system (you may ask)?  In the not so distant future, the digestive system may well be declared a social construct, should liberals decide that it interferes with every citizen’s human right to be disease-free. Eating food does lead to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, and it rapes the body of Gaea (remember that male rape culture is not a social construct) of plant and animal life. If we can raise our consciousness above such artificial conventions as male and female, surely we can rise above the small intestine.

As near as I can tell, a social construct is anything that progressives disapprove of. Heterosexuality, for instance, is a social construct, whereas homosexuality is not. An “alternative lifestyle” isn’t a choice or preference that homosexuals can elect or alter, let alone an aberration or sin; rather, some people are just “born gay”. Their homosexuality is an inexorable fact of nature, predetermined and encoded in their DNA–unlike, say, the male or female genitalia. Consider, then, a gay man (from the liberal point of view), and remember that his preference for members of the male sex is biologically pre-ordained, whereas his male member is customary, optional (a mere “social construct”). Suppose, then, that he “chooses” (as is his human right) to become a woman. Compelled by an immutable homosexual nature, would he thereafter be attracted to women (“a transgendered lesbian”), or would he continue to like boys (“a transgendered heterosexual”)? (Just asking.) What a complicated world we live in.

 

The self-deconstructing absurdity of progressive arguments about social constructs only adds to the growing suspicion that liberals are adepts of junk science. Junk science, of course, has the virtue of being eternally self-regenerating (like recycled garbage). If you can adduce the unusually frigid winters of late as evidence for global warming, then how difficult should it be to vapourize into cultural atavisms the x and y chromosomes, or, conversely, pretend to find another for homosexuality, as yet undiscovered and lurking in some genetic black hole?

In general, modern junk sociology is the off-gassing of liberal hatred of normalcy. As Chesterton noted, it is the mark of the modern to everywhere and always subordinate the normative to the non-normative. But the new-fangled arbitrariness with which same-sex “marriage” and fungible gender have been declared natural and normative tells us that they, in fact, are the flimsiest of social constructs. By contrast, the antiquity, stubborn longevity, and practical ubiquity of the institution of heterosexual marriage (not to mention the biological fact of male and female) should be proof enough that they are not.

Since Adam and Eve first hid their nakedness, everyone in the civilized world has agreed that marriage between a man and a woman, as an inference from the disposition of the race into two genders, is natural and normative–until a few years ago, that is, when Canada’s federal Liberals enacted legislation to recognize same-sex unions, and Canada’s provincial Liberals invited little Johnny (in Kathleen Wynne’s sexual education curriculum) to question whether he is really a Jennifer trapped in a male body. A year after the former, our soi-disant Conservative prime minister declared the matter “settled”, because, as he said, opinion polls showed that a majority of Canadians had made their peace with gay marriage. If Harper’s opinion polls are accurate (though I suspect we are still in the realm of junk science here), this is a perfect example of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan described as “dumbing deviancy down”: the reflex of a bourgeois majority, whenever a non-normative behaviour reaches a certain threshold, to tranquillize its anxieties by declaring that behavior “normal”.

 

But neither legislation nor majority approval can “settle” the matter. Were they elected to the governing council of the PGA, an overwhelming majority of my golfing buddies would enact a law to make the winner in golf the person with the highest score. And that is why neither laws nor majorities tell us anything about justice or truth.

Popular opinion has always been less than Solomonic, and should hardly be the arbiter of such fundamental matters of human morality as marriage, abortion, or gender. This is a truism that the entire civilized world used to recognize–until, that is, it succumbed to our modern fetishistic reverence for electoral democracy. As Seneca observed, when moral questions are under consideration, it is no use to say, “‘This side seems to be in a majority’. For that is just the reason it is the worst side.” Cicero was no less doubtful of revolutionary legal decisions, which he disdained as enactments of “the crowd’s definition of law”. The morality and justice of written laws, according to Cicero, can only be judged by an eternal and immutable Law that is “rooted in Nature”, and “which had its origin ages before any written law existed or any State had been established”. Legislators can pass laws that are “heedless of Nature” if they choose, “but such a law can no more make justice out of injustice than it can make good out of bad”.

Canada’s ruling parties have legislated the fiction of same-sex “marriage”, and will soon be merchandising the progressive fantasy of made-to-measure gender to our children; but they can’t make them realities, not even if a majority of voters agrees.

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 3

Harley Price

Taxi or Limousine?…

Traveling to the Third World (to the Airport, that is)…

Wheelchair Formula One…

Will that be Curry or Cologne?…

Demonic Little Boys…

Sleepless over the Atlantic…

They say that getting there is half the fun. But that depends upon whether you see the glass of travel as half full or half empty. Personally, I’ve always considered those who see the glass half full to be at least half full of it, and those who see it completely full, to be completely full of it.

According to what “they” say, getting to the airport should be more than a third of the fun, since the bumper-to-bumper thirty-kilometre slog through the suburbs takes almost as long as the three-thousand-mile flight across the Atlantic. In Toronto, where there is no rail link between downtown and the airport, getting there presents two choices: taxi or “luxurious airport limousine”. That’s a no brainer, as they also say. You can call a cab and be picked up by a beat-up, broken-down, ten-year-old Chevy Impala with no springs (chassis-wise or seat-wise), reeking with the smell of one of those pine-tree-shaped artificial air fresheners that hang from the rear-view mirror, and driven by a chap who speaks no English and knows no streets, because he arrived from Bwaamba Bwaamba a month ago. Or, you can call a “luxurious airport limousine”, and be picked up by a beat-up, broken-down, ten-year-old Lincoln Town Car with no springs (chassis-wise or seat-wise), reeking with the smell of a pine-tree-shaped artificial air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror, and driven by a chap who speaks no English and knows no streets because he arrived from Bwaamba Bwaaamba a month ago, but wears a cap and natty uniform. Or you can call a friend and beg him to drive you.

We did, and he did, in his just washed and waxed Cadillac DeVille, which he never fails to remind us is “a prestige automobile” (but then, recipients of charity can hardly object to being put in their place). As soon as we reached the highway, I became convinced that I had left the front door unlocked; but then my wife reminded me that every time I leave the house I am convinced that I’ve left the front door unlocked.

 

When a traveler enters the Toronto International Airport, he already feels that he is on vacation. In the Third World, specifically. Practically all of the airport staff (the taxi dispatchers, cleaners, security guards, customs and passport officials) are either from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh. Knowing Canada’s incredibly lax immigration laws, it makes one wonder. How many of the government functionaries checking visas are themselves illegal aliens? How many of the turbaned quasi-military types wanding passengers down at the security checkpoints are sympathizers of the Tamil Tigers? My suspicions may be completely unfounded, but I doubt that I’m alone in wondering, even if the pall of silence cast by multicultural correctness means that nobody dares to ask. In any case, I’m sure that passengers entering Toronto Airport from Western Europe, say, have often looked around and stopped to wonder whether they got on the wrong connecting flight.

In fact, we remained, contextually speaking, in South Asia until we deplaned in Brussels. That’s because the cheapest flight we could find to Milan was on something called Jet Airways. No one has ever heard of Jet Airways, which is headquartered in Delhi—not even the staff whom we asked at the Air India counter.

When we reached the departure gate, it was already full of passengers, over ninety percent of whom were presumably returning to India from visits with relatives in Canada or traveling to India to visit relatives back home. The other thing I noticed were two long lines of passengers in wheelchairs. There must have been fifty “handicapped” travelers on our flight, fully one-fifth of the total roster. Immediately, I sensed something fishy; even I know that the Indians are no longer stricken in numbers by crippling diseases. When they called boarding for “passengers requiring assistance”, the wheelchairs commenced to roll, and the scene looked a bit like the scrambled start of a Formula One race. The Indians are savvy travelers. They’ve learned the quickest and easiest way to get into their seats. The rest of us stood in line with our luggage for another half an hour. I leaned on my cane, trying to relieve the pain in my hip, and feeling (as usual) like a chump.

 

The flight itself lived up to our low expectations. The interior of the plane was no-frills-airline shabby, the seats more than usually cramped and hard, and the atmosphere thick with the mingled aromas of curried chicken wafting from the galley, and curried chicken wafting from the bodies of the passengers. I wondered if the pilot had an extra artificial air freshener hanging from his rear-view mirror. In the meantime, I sniffed my unlit cigar, but the cheap cologne of the corpulent male passenger next to me induced a persistent headache. We were lucky in that the only two empty seats on the plane were across the aisle, and decamped as soon as the seatbelt sign was extinguished (along with the sign to extinguish our cigarettes. Does anyone in the world still need to be admonished that “this is a non-smoking flight”? If so, where do I find a smoking flight?)

In the row behind our new seats sat a demonic little boy who, every fifteen minutes or so, shouted out, “Die, you bozo”, whenever he scored a kill in the video game he was playing. Then he kicked the back of my seat in celebration of his triumph. Eventually, I turned around and gave him a look that he correctly interpreted to mean, “Die, you bozo”, whereupon he curled up on his seat cushion in the fetal position. Then I kicked the seat in front of me in celebration of my triumph.

Even in the absence of these inevitable olfactory and auditory assaults, there is no sleeping on an airplane. Not for me, at least. On my periodic “walks” through the cabin, I saw rows of arched necks, noses in the air, gaping mouths, and lower jaws thrust forward in the configuration of a fish scooping up plankton. (On a flight to Moscow fifteen years ago, I remember another demonic little boy amusing himself by popping peanuts into the open orifices of sleeping passengers.)

But passengers who are able to descend into the cave of Morpheus from today’s economy class seats would have been able to sleep through the ministrations of Procrustes. When we arrived in Brussels at 8:30 a.m. (2:30 in the morning Toronto time), we had been awake for nineteen hours. And that was when we needed to have all our wits about us.

Like the hoteliers who have never slept in their own hotels, the travel agents who assure you that an hour and a half is plenty of time to make your connecting flight at the other end of a modern, metropolitan airport have obviously never tried it. Unless, in their spare time, they are Olympic athletes specializing in the four-thousand-metre hurdles.

L-G-B-T, E-F-G, Now I Know My ABC’s

Harley Price

When Mark Steyn alluded to Kathleen Wynne’s renewed attempt to smuggle her radical “sex education” curriculum into the elementary school classroom (I’d call it a hidden agenda, but only conservatives have hidden agendas), Heather Reisman nearly fell off her hostess chair. Interrupting her interview with Steyn on his new book, Canada’s self-proclaimed Reader-in-Chief protested, “I’ve never heard of that.”  (In liberal-speak, “I’ve never heard of that” means: “You-made-it-up-you-paranoid-right-wing-reactionary-pursuer-of-the-politics-of-fear-exclusion-and-cultural-insensitivity.”) When a paranoid, right-wing, reactionary pursuer of the politics of fear, exclusion, and cultural insensitivity shouted out from the sidelines (the present writer, I confess) that Canada’s Reader-in Chief should try reading a non-liberal newspaper for a change, the audience laughed insensitively, and the unwonted thrill of being part of a conservative majority in downtown Toronto nearly overcame us all.

Liberals seem not to have heard of a multitude of things of which we much less well-educated conservatives are quirkily cognizant (balancing the budget by reducing spending rather than increasing taxes; raising one’s children in the home rather than in State-subsidized daycare; coeds paying for their own contraceptives). Liberals are not so much opposed to the other side as incredulous that there is another side. Whenever they discover that there are people who disagree with them, they attribute their recalcitrant non-conformity to moral defectiveness (racism, sexism, capitalist rapacity), mental instability (“phobias”, Christian “superstition”), or substance abuse (addiction to oil, or to “guns and religion”, as America’s Liberal-in-Chief was recently heard to say, with similar incredulity).

 

In truth, it is hard to believe–for urbane literati like Reisman and gap-toothed Mark Steyn groupies alike–that a provincial government ministry could propose to teach pre-pubescents how to masturbate and negotiate “consent”, all the while encouraging them to question their sexual “orientation” and even their gender. I would have thought that onanism was the one scholastic subject for which young boys already possessed a natural aptitude.   (Since they require no formal instruction in it, wouldn’t the time be better spent practising how to put on the hijab in cultural diversity class?) As for the rest, little kids as yet have no sexual orientation.   Amongst the vast majority who will in due course go on to establish normal heterosexual unions, males in grade school regard their female counterparts as aliens from the planet Zebulon; while the girls think of the boys as a species of vermin. Pre-pubescents are by definition pre-sexual. It is perverse to try to coax them out of the closet when they haven’t yet entered the house.

In its stupidity, Wynne’s curriculum is nothing new. Sex educators have long proven that they know nothing about either sex or education; but then the people who insist on re-engineering human life, and those who are completely ignorant about how human life is engineered, are invariably the same people. The case for strangers teaching the kids of strangers about the most intimate human relationship in the schools (as opposed to parents in the home) boils down to: They’re going to do it anyway, so let’s give ‘em condoms. And ever since, the graph-lines tracing the rise of teen pregnancy and venereal disease have mirrored the attitude of the membrum virile of the typically ithyphallic adolescent male. When a society gives tacit approval to pre-marital sex by saying to its youth, “You’re going to do it anyway”, it’s no surprise if they “do it anyway”, with renewed confidence and vigour, and with the consequence that more and more of them get pregnant and contract disease. (Try to imagine the nanny State saying to parents, “Kids are going to do it anyway; so let’s make it safer for them by sending them home with two packs of filtered cigarettes a day.”   But then, smoking is considered a capital crime these days, whereas sexual gratification is the means to self-realization. In our post-religious, post-philosophical age, physical health counts for everything, the health of the soul, nothing at all.)

It’s the rank iniquity of Wynne’s curriculum that makes it truly original. The sexual Mengeles who think it’s a good idea for teachers to help awaken pre-teens to their latent homosexuality are theatrically indignant when Catholic priests are caught doing the same thing in the rectory. Encouraging kids to “question their sexual orientation” is a euphemism for homosexual recruitment; when the captive victim is too young to have acquired the intellectual armour to defend himself against such depredations, it is child abuse. Even the ancient Greeks considered it shameful to interfere with children before they reached the age of reason. But don’t be surprised if teachers are trained in Ontario’s faculties of education to detect in little Johnny’s perfectly normal preference for male companionship the tender buds of an alternative lifestyle. No doubt the little tykes themselves will enjoy the new LGBT curriculum; who wouldn’t prefer a field trip to the Pride Parade over another of those dreary outings to the wind turbine farm, or the latest Occupy Whatever protest? I only wonder how lessons in cross dressing will go over with the Muslim student body.

 

No one can by now underestimate the absurdity and moral depravity to which progressive ideologues are capable of descending. Social conservatives used to inveigh against the Left’s moral experiments by warning about a “slippery slope”. A generation ago feminists pleaded for the modest right to abortion in the case of a threat to the life or health of the mother; today abortion is permissible at any time, for any reason; and even with unrestricted access to this apocalyptic form of contraception, in urban centres throughout North America, nearly one out of every two children is born out of wedlock. About the same time, homosexuals pleaded (with justice) not to be harassed or discriminated against; today, they demand universal social approval, and criminalize any refusal to grant it, including on the part of Christians exercising their centuries-old rights to freedom of religion. Social conservatives have been wildly too optimistic; and liberals were right all along in denying the existence of a slippery slope. There has never been a slippery slope; it was always, right from the beginning, a direct, vertical leap into the progressive abyss.

With Wynne’s sex ed curriculum, we have at last splashed down in a miasmal sewer from which it’s hard to sink any further.  If parents continue to sit by and submit blithely to the corruption of their children in State-run moral re-education camps, they should hardly be surprised when little Johnny comes home one day and, after hectoring them as usual on the size of their carbon footprint, announces that he is gay, or demands a sex-change operation.   If they fail to mount even such protests as the Left routinely mounts at the least offense to their overwrought sensitivities or tiniest rebuff to their agenda, they will have acknowledged their defeat, once and for all, in the culture wars. And should Wynne’s agenda be implemented, if they don’t withdraw their offspring from school en masse, with whatever legal consequences that entails, they will have convicted themselves of complicity in the sexual abuse of their own children.

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 2

Harley Price

Packing…

GPS (Mrs. Garmin)…

The Hotel Racket…

White-noise Machines…

Security Patrol…

Having procured plane tickets, a car, and places to stay at strategic locations along his itinerary, the modern Grand Tourist is on his way. Not quite. First, he must: call his credit card company to report that he will be away from x to y; ensure that he has adequate travel insurance (trip and medical); secure a month’s supply of his multitude of medications from the pharmacy and distribute them in their little plastic coffins; call his cell phone provider to buy a plan for Italy (he’ll need a phone to contact his hosts a couple of hours before arrival, in order to give them time to get to the apartment and hand over the keys); go to the AAA office in the suburbs to purchase an international driver’s license; then to Navigation Systems R Us in another suburb to get the European maps for his GPS; and down to the travel bookstore to buy a map-book for Italy just in case his GPS abandons him to his own resources.

Several days before departure, we turned our minds to that most unpleasant of preparatory rituals: packing. What would we require, as opposed to merely find useful, during our month away? (Here again, technology is oppressive rather than liberating.) We’ll need our laptop, of course–don’t forget the power cord, headphones, and wireless mouse–for checking the hours of museums, churches, palaces, and so on. (In Italy, the lunch-time siesta can begin any time between 11:00 and 12:30, and end from 2:30-4:30. Which means that any trip to Italy involves a lot of calculated temporizing, or else lurking suspiciously around doorways, waiting for buildings to re-open.) We’ll need our phones (don’t forget the charger). We’ll need the camera (charger, extra SD card, lens-cleaning kit). We’ll need Mrs. Garmin (as we call the lady who lives inside the black box of our GPS and imperiously barks out the upcoming turns), as well as its windshield mount and cable. We’ll need adapter-plugs for all of the above. And most important of all, we mustn’t forget our anti-noise noisemakers.

 

For serious noise, of course, nothing is effective short of the industrial ear muffs one wears while using power tools. But for side-sleepers like me, they’re painful—not to mention unromantic. Long ago, we purchased a special “white-noise” machine, which plays a variety of soothing and soporific sounds recorded from nature: a babbling brook; a crackling fire; rain; waves breaking onto shore, and so on. In theory, such devices work by cancelling out the more disruptive noises one encounters in typical hotel rooms: the self-closing metal doors that clang when they hit home; the machine-gun rat-tat-tat of ice machines; AC units that sound like the clashing of continental plates when their compressors kick in. The Socratic definition and telos of a hotel is a building in which guests exchange money for a good night’s sleep. One would think that the architects of hotels or their multinational management corporations would have given a minute’s thought to alleviating the aforementioned auditory assaults (a few rolls of Home Depot self-adhering weatherstripping foam, affixed to the jambs to cushion the blow of slamming doors, for instance). Instead, they imagine that what their customers crave are chocolates on their pillows. And so, wherever we travel, our white-noise machines travel with us.

But the manufacturers of such devices have given only slightly more thought to their design than hoteliers have given to that of their hotels. Their sounds are not, of course, recorded from nature, but synthesized: simulations that repeat themselves in an endless loop. “The seaside”, for example (our default setting), evolves in three distinct movements. First, one hears the sounds of a wave coalescing, cresting, and breaking against the rocks. Then, another wave waxes and wanes, this time to the accompaniment of the song of gulls. Finally, just before the third wave exhausts itself, comes the squawk of a single gull that is so loud and piercing that not even the dead could sleep through it. Then the cycle repeats itself ad infinitum.

Has the “composer” of these tracks or, the manufacturer the devices, ever taken one to bed with him? (Has a hotel manager ever tried to sleep in one of his own hotels?) It takes about three repetitions of “the seaside” before one has every sequential nuance memorized. Having been shocked out of sleep by the climactic shriek of gulls, one lies awake waiting for it to come round again. One counts the waves, registers the first chorus of gulls, and braces for the final fortissimo. Here is another human artifact that does precisely the opposite of what it was intended to. (Hence we travel with not one but two machines. If perfectly synchronized, they smooth over each over’s rough spots, and create the undifferentiated, amorphous “white” noise (the Pythagorean concors discordiae) conducive to sleep.

 

In the choice of clothes, one must be equally provident. September in Toronto is reliably cool, but in Northern Italy it can bring anything: scorching afternoon heat, cold nights, drenching rains. Packing clothes for, in effect, both summer and autumn, in addition to the electronic gear one has to haul, while staying within the airlines’ niggardly weight limits, is a balancing act that requires the brain of an accountant. The possible combinations are almost infinite. For two days, the candidates were strewn across beds, sofas, and chairs for adjudication. They were then provisionally folded, boxed, or wrapped, and placed in our suitcases for weighing.

 

A day before departure brings another ritual: security patrol. We live in a district of Toronto (not by any means the worst in our world-class city) in which the cliché about things being stolen unless they are “bolted down” doesn’t any longer apply. A neighbour recently had plants dug up from her own garden. I’ve had a ladder stolen while working on the roof just above it. A book that I ordered from amazon.com was filched from my front porch where it was left by the courier. (I rejoice in the thief’s erudition, but wonder where he will fence a used copy of Felix Buffiere’s 1953 magnum opus, Les mythes d’Homere et la Pensee Grecque.) Leaving the house for any extended period of time thus fills me with paralyzing apprehension. For the first several days of any vacation, I am haunted by forebodings of break-ins, vandalism, earthquake, or conflagration.

Security patrol must be prosecuted systematically. One must find a trusted neighbour with whom to leave the keys in case of fire; then install new batteries in the smoke detectors. A padlock has to be attached to the garden gate, and the lock on the attic hatch secured. Eyebolts are then inserted in the holes drilled for that purpose through the sash of the double-hung windows (the old locks are too easily forced). Timers are set for lights in the living room and upstairs bedroom. (I don’t know why one does this; any half-way competent thief will deduce, after staking out the place, that if the lights go on and off at precisely the same minute every day, the occupant must be on vacation). Finally, in anticipation of a break-in, I open the doors to the stereo cabinet and gather easily fenced or portable valuables together, then place them on prominent display. (I’d rather burglars find the cash, jewelry, and electronic equipment immediately, rather than smash the gallery of my Georgian secretary-bookcase.) Heaping up our valuables on the altar of our hallway table is the last rite, so to speak, before the day of destiny.

 

I realize that a trip to the most beautiful country in the world ought to have been a joyful prospect. Whenever friends or neighbours heard that we were about to spend a month in Northern Italy, their common response was “Lucky you.” Pondering Northern Italy, visions of umbrella pines, prosecco, and high-heeled ragazze danced before their inner eyes. But they hadn’t undergone the pre-departure ordeal described above. What did they know about eyebolts, prevaricating landlords, threadbare mattresses, or white-noise machines that, every ninety seconds, sound the last trump?

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 1

Harley Price

Readers of these pages will know that, at Priceton.org, we reject the model of the contemporary “blog”. We recognize, that is, that the quotidian trivialities of a trivial life will be of interest only to those few whose lives are even more trivial than that of the blogger. Accordingly, we don’t tell you what we ate for breakfast, how we are faring on our New Year’s pledge to reduce our daily intake of candy-cane lattes, or the salacious details of the conversation we just had with the friend we happened to run into at the Botox salon.

In what follows, we will recount, as faithfully as our senescent memory allows, the (sometimes daily) misadventures, agonies, and ecstasies of our recent trip through Northern Italy: a “blog” of sorts, but with a difference. First of all, our trivialities will be of interest to anyone who has ever undergone the dispiriting ordeal of modern travel—anyone who has been squeezed into the Procrustean bed of economy class, sucked into the Charybdis of a European roundabout, or seduced by the Siren-song of hotel advertising (“Come hither to our B&B; enjoy its quiet; recreate amidst the bucolic splendours of ancient olive groves…”).

The travelogue is, after all, the archetype of the contemporary “web-log”, and unlike its internet offspring retains some of the authentic power it has had in Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Bunyan, and Swift: as an allegory, that is, of the soul’s inner struggle against temptation, hardship, and despair, whilst prosecuting its quest for safe harbor in heaven.

For a European tourist, as for a pilgrim on the highway of life, it is hard to achieve the Beatific Vision; one can be certain, nonetheless, that the inebriating beauties of the churches of Verona, the palaces of Vicenza, and the Barolos of the Piedmont, are a rather more proximate earthly type of it than any candy-cane latte.

 

It is an intractable paradox that, the more advanced technologies become–the more comfortable and affluent the human population–, the more miserable is the lot of man. I can think of no more pathetic image of human servitude than that of the hordes of young men and women who obstruct our sidewalks, their heads bent downward, their eyes fixed on the screens of their mobile devices, and their senses completely benumbed to the ambient beauties of nature or the comforting society of their fellows. In classical antiquity, there was a standing–perhaps we should say falling–joke about Socrates, his head stuck in the clouds, going topsy-turvy into the marle-pit. Today, our young philosophers, their heads in the marle-pits of simulated reality, careen off one another like billiard balls, trip over curbs, and step out into traffic, all in order to “stay connected” with the Narcissistic banalities they have recently posted on their Facebook pages.

Homo, wrote Ovid (rehearsing an already ancient topos) was created Erectus, so that he might better be able to fix his eyes and attention upon the invisibilia Dei in the celestial region of his soul’s birth. Mobile Device Man is a kind of Homo Dejectus. His posture is that of Boethius before his cure, who “forever stares downward at the dull earth”, as Lady Philosophy describes him, a pose that is the traditional moral emblem of the worldly and un-philosophical spirit.

We saw too many of these self-absorbed worldlings during our trip to Northern Italy, walking past ancient olive groves or Palladian palaces, texting, sexting, or taking selfies. But I have gotten too far ahead of myself, and quite distracted from the main point, which is the difficulty of modern travel, in spite of the miracle of jet propulsion, or the democratization of the erstwhile privileges of the wealthy.

 

The depressing reality is that the luxuries of travel are rather less accessible to those of modest means than they once were. Members of my generation can still remember boarding airplanes in the late sixties without having to wait for hours in serpentine lines whose eventual destination promised only the indignities of removing one’s belt and shoes, seats with room for no more than infant appendages, and food served in Styrofoam containers that tastes like, well, Styrofoam. Any traveler who aspires to the level of comfort and service passengers once took for granted in economy class would need a first class ticket today.

In the early seventies, moreover, the publishers of travel guides were still putting out titles such as “Paris on Twenty Dollars a Day”, for which one could in fact expect a decent, if unpretentious hotel on the Left Bank, and three satisfying meals washed down with some perfectly drinkable plonk. Adjusted for inflation, twenty 1970s-era dollars translate to about one hundred twenty today, for which one can expect a backpackers’ hostel in the Parisian suburbs and a petit dejeuner at McDonald’s.

Having been to Rome a few years ago and finding ourselves solvent again, we decided that we would spend a month and a few days in Northern Italy, visiting Milan, Pavia, Bologna, Ravenna, Ferrara, Mantova, Vicenza, Padova, and Verona. But unless you are as rich as the proverbial Croesus, a vacation in Europe in the year 2014 can leave one in desperate need, not only of an unlooked for legacy, but of a post-vacation vacation.

There is, first of all, the exhausting preparatory labour that modern travel entails: the search for an affordable flight; the search for an affordable rental car; the search for accommodations on agriturismo.it, bnb.com, sabbaticalhomes.com, vrbo.com, and the innumerable other dot-coms that offer relatively inexpensive studio apartments in town, or bed-and-breakfasts in the countryside.

Finding the right place to stay, as we have learned from long experience, is the sine qua non of a survivable trip. It is heavenly to commune all day with the incomparable glories of quattrocentro painting, sculpture, and architecture, and hellish to be kept awake all night by noise, creeping damp, and bed-springs protruding through the threadbare coverings of ancient mattresses. To forestall such tortures requires real vigilance. It means beginning one’s search months in advance; meticulously scrutinizing the photos posted on websites (including trying to imagine what lies beyond the borders of the frame); looking carefully at maps to ascertain if the apartment really is only (the universally advertised) “ten minutes’ walk” from the centro istorico. It means sending emails expressing interest, and waiting days or weeks for a response. It means finding the perfect place only to discover that it is already booked for the period. It means calling the 800 number on the rental car website to ask someone in Bombay to confirm that the car you will be picking up in Milan from a rental agency headquartered in Texas does indeed come fully insured, with no deductible, and all taxes paid. It means, above all, tracking down hosts by telephone, and asking futile questions (to which the answers are monotonously cheery): does the apartment have heat? (of course); air conditioning? (assolumente); shutters on the windows? (new ones just fitted); are the neighbours in the building quiet? (neighbours? what neighbours?); any construction going on in the building? (completely renovated just last year); affordable parking nearby? (just around the corner).

Of course, these are all lies, and one knows that they are lies, but tries to reassure himself that his host isn’t lying outrageously. If he is told that parking is available around the corner, the prudent traveler assumes he can count on finding a place, after some assiduous searching, somewhere within a six-block radius; if parking is said to cost fifteen euros per day, he budgets for thirty.

 

One can drive oneself mad trying to obviate all of the possibilities for disaster, and we did. It is not only that a traveler can never guess the true limit of his host’s mendacity, even if he is being generous (generous in his estimate of advertising hyperbole, ungenerous in his appraisal of the human character); there is, besides, the nagging awareness that what will inevitably go wrong is something he didn’t think to ask about. Two weeks before our departure, an inalienable sense of foreboding thus began to settle over me. I felt myself looking forward to Northern Italy as I looked forward to my next bout of diverticulitis.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XIII

Harley Price

Hesiod, continued…

The Offspring of Father Sky and Mother Earth…

 The Hundred-Handed Ones; Cyclopes; Titans; and Giants…

The Emasculation of Uranos…

Cronos and Rhea…

The Birth of the Cretan Zeus…

The War between the Titans and Olympians…

The Revolt of the Giants:  Ossa upon Pelion…

     After listing as the descendants of Chaos such antithetical abstractions as Night and Day, Tartarus (the realm of death) and Love (the agency of life), Hesiod returns to Gaea and Uranos, Mother Earth and Father Sky, the first recognizably human couple.  And from that moment on, things begin to go awry.

Amongst their first generation of offspring were monsters, strange gigantic creatures with the raw potency of hurricanes, earthquake, and volcano.  These brats not only played their music too loud, but three of them, Cottus, Briareos, and Gyes (“presumptuous children”, as Hesiod describes them), had a hundred arms and fifty heads.  A different species of giants, the Cyclopes, towered upwards like craggy mountains, and had only a single, enormous eye in the middle of their foreheads.

After giving birth to such a litter, Gaea might have excused herself from the marriage bed; instead, she and Uranos blithely continued to procreate.  Their next brood of monsters were the Titans, just as overgrown as the previous generation.  Of course, the Titans were something of an improvement; not all of them were merely destructive, and several, in fact, became minor benefactors who slightly advanced the cause of civilization.  But they too, in the end, turned out to be troublemakers.

Like a typical Mother, Gaea loved her children unstintingly, warts and all.  But Father Uranos soon repined; he positively despised and refused to accept paternity of the hundred-handed, fifty-headed creatures, and as each issued from Mother Earth’s various crevices and orifices, he simply pushed it back in.  The Cyclopes and Titans he left at large, and Gaea, indignant at Uranos’ maltreatment of their other children, enlisted them against him.

 

The boldest of them, the Titan Cronos, lay in wait for his father and ambushed him while “he spread himself full upon the Earth”, as Hesiod delicately puts it, wounding him grievously with a jagged sickle in the “thigh”.  From the blood that issued from Cronos’ “thigh wound”, as it euphemistically referred to, sprang another brood of monsters, the Giants.  From the same fecund blood came the Erinyes (the Furies), those fetching femmes fatales with writhing snakes for hair, and eyes that wept tears of blood, whose mission in life was to punish sinners and make others mad with yearning for revenge or mayhem.  And finally, from the foam created by Uranos’ member where it fell into the sea, issued Aphrodite, the foam-born goddess.

Having emasculated and then dethroned his Father Uranos, Cronos thereafter reigned for the next epoch as universal King, with his sister-queen, Rhea.  But as it turned out, he was no more devoted a father than his own.

Learning from Uranos and Gaea that one of his own children was destined some day to overthrow him, Cronos decided that the prudent thing was to swallow each immediately after its birth.  But when Rhea was pregnant with Zeus, her sixth child, she sought counsel with her parents as to how to save the baby from her husband’s infanticidal hunger, and in the process, to avenge her Father Uranos for the indignity that Cronos had inflicted upon him.

Rhea was advised to repair secretly to the island of Crete, where in a remote cave she might safely deliver and nurture the future lord of the world.  Having done so, she handed Cronos a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he supposed was the divine child, and promptly swallowed down.  Much later, when Zeus was fully grown, he forced his father, with the help of his grandmother Gaea, to disgorge the stone, along with his five older siblings.  The stone was eventually set up as a monument at Delphi, and thereafter venerated by generations of supplicants to the oracle;  it was called the “omphalos”, and said to be located at the very centre of the globe.

 

There followed a tumultuous war between Cronos (leader of his brother Titans) and Zeus (aided by his five brothers and sisters)–a war that shook the cosmos to its very foundations.  The Titans were eventually conquered, in part because Zeus released from their prison the hundred-handed monsters who came to his aid with their weapons of thunder, lightning, and earthquake; and partly because one of the sons of the Titan Iapetus, whose name was Prometheus–and who was incomparably wise–, went over to the Olympian cause.

Once he defeated them, Zeus was careful to make an example of his rebellious enemies.  He hurled them down into the depths of Tartarus, a full eighteen days’ journey from heaven, as Hesiod famously describes it–nine days as the bronze anvil falls from Olympus to earth, and another nine days from earth to the pit of Hell–, and bound them there in adamantine chains.  Prometheus’ brother, the Titan Atlas, suffered an even more grievous fate, having been made to bear upon his shoulders the Atlas Mountains along with the whole crushing weight of the earth and sky.

But even after his victory over the Titans, the peace was not completely secured.  Mother Earth gave birth again, this time to her most terrifying offspring, a creature named Typhon.

Typhon sported a hundred heads, from the eyes of each of which flashed fire, and the jaw of each dripped death.  Zeus dispatched him with his most powerful thunderbolt, leaving Typhon a smouldering pool beneath Mt. Aetna, whence periodically there burst forth rivers of molten lava, whenever Typhon’s anger boils over.

Still later, one more attempt was made to usurp the usurper Zeus.  The Giants, late-born sons of Gaea, rebelled, piling Mt. Ossa upon Mt. Pelion in their assault upon Olympus; but their overreaching ambition too was punished, and they were hurled down to Tartarus to join their fellow insurrectionists.

So ends the Theogony of Hesiod, a Byzantine and often bizarre roll-call of divine names and events which, nonetheless, follow a predictable (if notorious) cycle of infanticides, parricides, rebellions, and usurpations from generation to generation.

We can of course look upon these repetitions from any number of viewpoints.  As the Greeks themselves understood from the beginning, the immoral behaviour of the gods of myth was merely human behaviour projected into transcendence.  (For such anthropomorphisms, the mythic poets were either condemned as “liars” or excused as inspired allegorists, who took refuge in such symbolic fictions as were necessary to describe the ineffable Divine.)

But the more important explanation for the repetition of these motives is religious and psychological.  The overthrow of the first generation of the gods, the earth-born Titans, by the Olympians–the Titanomachy–looks back dimly to a period in Greek pre-history when the principal deity throughout the Mediterranean world was the Magna Mater, the Great Goddess of the Earth, upon whom Bronze-age agricultural peoples necessarily depended for their survival.  The masculine sky-religion of Zeus and his fellow Olympians only arrived with the migration from the north of the Hellenic tribes into the Greek mainland at the beginning of the third millennium B.C., and the transition from the older, chthonian (or earth-centred) religions to the later ouranian religion of storm and weather is undoubtedly what Hesiod’s Titanomachy mythological recalls.

More generally, however, the them of the Father-King’s being warned that a son will arise to overthrow him, and the son’s inevitable fulfillment of his father’s fears, is an age-old and universal archetype, made famous in modern times by Freud’s so-called “Oedipus complex” (to which we shall have to return).  But it is so fundamental to the cyclical rhythms of life and death, power and impotence, that it is hard to identify its origins or ultimate meaning.

It may well be based on the ancient tribal rite of the Killing of the King (or Priest King), whose term was fixed because it was believed that his powers were subject to exhaustion, and so, at the end of it, he was “slain” in a kind of mimetic drama by the heir apparent, thus ensuring the uninterrupted vitality of the tribe and its land.

But I doubt that this exhausts the significance of the archetype, which, as I have just said, expresses the universal alternation between death and life, darkness and life, which is an essential datum of our existence, and certainly the most powerful one in which the human psyche experiences it.  When we eventually turn to the myth of the hero, we will encounter innumerable examples of this motive.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XII

Harley Price

Cosmogony and Cosmology of the Greeks…

 Homer: The primeval Ocean (again)…

 Hesiod’s Theogony…

The Nine Muses…Inspiration and Deification (again)…

Chaos and the Separation of Earth and Sky (again)…

     Whether due to cultural transmission or the spontaneous reassertion of the archetypal psyche, the cosmology and cosmogony of the Greeks exhibits many of the same motives we’ve already met in the Near East.

Homer, the earliest of the Greek poets (ca. 750 B.C.?), has left us only the briefest notice in Iliad XIV(201), to the effect that all the gods and living things arose from Okeanos, the great ocean that encircles the world-disk, and that Tethys, the female spirit of these primordial waters, was his wife.  It was therefore left to Hesiod, Homer’s most famous literary son, to compose, within a century of the bard’s death, the cosmogony and early history of the world that was to achieve a kind of canonicity in the later classical Greek imagination.

The Hesiodic cosmogony is retailed at the beginning of his Theogony (literally, the genealogy of the gods), an exotic and often bizarre roll-call of names and events which nonetheless continued to echo down the centuries of the Western literary and philosophical tradition.

Hesiod begins with the Muses, one of whose sacred mountains is Helicon in Boeotia, in the shadows of which Hesiod presumably dwells.  It is the Muses who commanded him to sing of the race of the blessed gods, and so inspired him—“breathed into him”, says Hesiod at l. 30, using the root meaning of the verb “inspire”—“their own divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things that were aforetime”.  (In Greek antiquity, as we’ll see, the poet and wise man are the two personalities who are specially blessed with inspiration—who are ventriloquized by the Voice of God; who are exalted, that is, to that state of possession by the soul of the Divine–as to become gods among men.)

 

The Muses are nine in number, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, or Memory.  In Hesiod, the nine Muses are not as yet fully distinguished from one another in function:  “they are all”, says Hesiod, “of one mind, set upon song, the holy gift that frees a man from care”.  Later, each of the nine Muses would become the patroness of a different art or discipline of knowledge:  Clio the Muse of history, Urania of astronomy, Melpomene of tragedy, Thalia of comedy, Terpsichore of dance, Calliope of epic, Erato of love-poetry, Polyhymnia of hymns to the gods, and Euterpe of lyric poetry.  Since names such as Erato, Urania, and Polyhymnia are obviously allegorical abstractions, it’s clear that the Muses were understood as that mysterious source of the human artistic imagination in general that the ancients thought of as the Divine, and that we call the unconscious.

At line 100 or so, Hesiod invokes the Muses to help him sing his first great theme, the creation of the gods and the world:

Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all.

Following Hesiod, practically every cosmogony in the history of the West would begin with this mysterious concept “Chaos”.  Here is the Roman poet Ovid, in the opening lines of his Metamorphoses:

Before land was and sea—before air and sky
Arched over all, all Nature was all Chaos,
The rounded body of all things in one.

Here, 1700 years later, is the Christian poet Milton, in his Paradise Lost:

First there was Chaos, the vast immeasurable abyss,
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild.

And indeed, though there is no mention of any “Chaos” in the biblical cosmogony in Genesis, nonetheless the Hesiodic, Graeco-Roman, and generally pagan assumption that the world was created through the ordering of a pre-existent, formless mass, in which all the elements were at first chaotically and indistinguishably mixed up with one another, became a presupposition of Christian cosmogony as well, right from the nascency of the Church.

 

We are so familiar with the idea of the world-order being produced out of chaos that we tend to assume that in Hesiod’s account, too, “Chaos” stands for that pre-existent state of things out of which the world comes into being.  But Hesiod distinctly say that Chaos itself “came into being”, and we must therefore ask ourselves from what prior state of things it arose.

In fact, the Greek word chaos is derived from a root meaning “gap” or “gulf”, and from later uses of the word in the Theogony, most scholars now agree that it refers to the chasm that separates earth and heaven.  Hesiod’s account, then, begins with the opening up of a gap between heaven and earth, which of course, presumes a pre-existing state of affairs in which heaven and earth were once one.

This assumption is indeed is an immemorial one of universal diffusion.  A famous fragment preserved from a lost work of Euripides reads:

Not from me but from my mother
Comes the tale how earth and sky
Were once one form, but being separated,
Brought forth all things, sending into light
Trees, birds, wild beasts,
Those nourished by the salt sea,
And the race of mortals.

The first line suggests that the tale is an ancient one, and indeed it is told in creation myths much older than Hesiod.  In one version of the Egyptian cosmogony, as we have already seen, Shu (the god of air), tears asunder earth and sky who were originally locked in an infertile pre-cosmogonic embrace, and thus separated, they in turn mate and give birth to two divine couples, the god Osiris and his consort Isis, along with their brother Seth and his consort Nephthys.

Similarly, in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, earth and sky are at first conjoined in the primeval waters of Apsu-Tiamat.  Then the creator-hero Marduk, after a great battle, kills Tiamat, the dragon of the sea, and fillets her body into two halves, one of which he sets above to be the sky with its sweet waters, the other below, to be the earth, with its salt sea.  This, as we’ve also seen, is the source of that mysterious text in Genesis according to which “God divided the waters which were below the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament” to create heaven and earth.  Genesis, moreover, begins with a state in which the earth, sky, and sea seem to be chaotically intermingled: when “the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep”.

 

The separation of the earth and sky is a theme that I’ve called the pre-cosmogonic divorce, before which the opposing male and female principles were conjoined in a completely undifferentiated unity.  Naturally, this unity was barren, and the process of creation could not begin until, having been separated, Father Sky and Mother Earth could recombine in a fertile embrace.

That the sexual union of Father Sky and Mother Earth should be conceived as the agency by which the world is first created is also, obviously, archetypal, inasmuch as to the ancient mythic imagination, the annual rebirth of the world every the spring depends upon the insemination of the womb of Mother Earth by the seed with which Father Sky impregnates her in the form of rain and sunshine.

Later in Greek philosophy, as we’ll see, the opposites are no longer conceived in these expressly anthropomorphic and sexual terms, but rather as the abstract contraries hot and cold, wet and dry, or the elements earth, water, air, and fire.  But the ancient mythological afflatus continued to inform these later, supposedly rational concepts, since the elemental opposites too were imagined as at first mixed up together in a chaotic primordial unity, before being separated out and assigned to their respective provinces, an ordering on which the whole cosmogonic enterprise apparently depended.

We’ll return to these ideas when we come to the Pre-Socratics; for Hesiod, in any case, the coming into being of Chaos by which earth and sky were sundered is the precondition for creation, since creation for Hesiod’s anthropomorphizing imagination is a kind of birth, and all birth presupposes the union of male and female.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XI

Harley Price

The Dragon-killing Theme…

 Biblical Dragons:  Leviathan, Rahab…

In Psalms, Job, Isaiah, the Book of Revelation…

Eschatology as Cosmogony…

     In the previous installment, we traced the afflatus of the Babylonian Enuma Elish in the creation story in Genesis.  As a transposition of the narrative of Marduk’s triumph over the chaos-monster Tiamat, the story in Genesis is subsumed within a much larger class of myths that has been denominated by Northrop Frye and others as “the dragon-killing theme”.

This is another motive of near universal dispersion in myth, folklore, and literature.  Perhaps the most famous example of it is the Greek fable of Perseus, who kills the sea-dragon that has besieged the kingdom of the impotent old King Cepheus and is feasting on its citizens, one by one, until only the beautiful princess Andromeda remains.  (The Perseus story is one of the pagan antecedents of the early Christian legend of St. George and the dragon.)  We will encounter another inflection of this pattern in the Egyptian solar myth of Re, who confronts the dragon of the night-sea on his return journey beneath the world towards the eastern sky.  The Greek myths of Theseus and the Minotaur and Oedipus and the Sphinx are also variations of the dragon-killing theme.

Its centrality in Western consciousness, however, depends above all, as we will see, upon its being the organizing archetype of the entire biblical salvation history, which records the cosmic struggle between the Messiah and the Satanic dragon Leviathan.  But before we move on to the dragon-killing theme, we must return to the subject of cosmogony in Scripture, where the killing of the sea-monster Tiamat by Marduk is the source not only of the creation story in Genesis but of other important cosmogonic loci throughout the Old Testament and the New.

In Psalms 74:12-17, for example, we have an account of how Yahweh, in a contest with the waters, smote the many-headed sea-dragon Leviathan, and immediately thereafter created day and night, the heavenly bodies, and the order of the seasons.  We also detect traces of the Babylonian myth of Marduk and Tiamat in Job 38, where Yahweh tames the sea, to which he says, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed”.  (In Genesis, both the separation of the sea from the dry land, and the separation of the waters above from the waters below the firmament are, as we recall, transcriptions of Marduk’s bisection of the maternal sea monster).  Elsewhere in Job, in chapter 26, we have another reference to the slaying of the maritime dragon (called Rahab rather than Leviathan), followed by the taming of the sea, and the ordering of creation:  “He stilleth the sea with his power, and by his understanding he smiteth through Rahab.  By his Spirit the heavens are adorned; his hand hath pierced the swift serpent.”

Again, in Isaiah 51, we find another version of the same creation myth, which has now become historicized and invested in the central event in Hebrew ritual memory, the Passover deliverance of Israel from Egypt:  “Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O arm of the Lord, as in the days of old, the generations of ancient times.  Art not thou that cut Rahab in pieces, that pierced the dragon?  Art not thou that dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep; that made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over”.

Finally, the myth of the killing of the chaos-dragon passes from cosmogony into eschatology, the theological department that concerns itself with the last times or end of the world.  I’ve already mentioned the coalescence in the mythic imagination of discrete moments in time; the relationship between cosmogony and eschatology illustrates this again.  Biblical eschatology, that is, becomes invevitably associated with cosmogony insofar as the final judgment and apocalyptic destruction of the world is only the prelude to a new creation (a new cosmogony) which brings to birth the everlasting kingdom of heaven. Thus Isaiah 27 prophecies of the Last Judgment that “In that day, Yahweh with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the swift serpent, Leviathan the crooked, and shall slay the dragon that is the sea.”

In the New Testament Book of Revelation, this is finally accomplished at the end time, when Christ destroys the dragon of the sea, dries up its waters, establishes the Celestial Jerusalem, marries the White Princess (who had been in thrall to the Leviathanic dragon, identified with Satan, since the Fall of Man), and reigns with her as heavenly King and Queen.  But, as I’ve said, we’ll have to postpone a fuller discussion of this overarching mythic theme until later.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part X

Harley Price

Vernal Rebirth and the Creation of the World…

The Circularity of Time…

Eliade’s Eternal Return…

Enuma Elish and the Creation Story in Genesis…

Pneuma, Spiritus, Anima, and Breath

Creation as the Breathing into the World of the Divine Soul…

The Adamic Clay and  Mother Earth…

Creation and the Sexual Act…

     First of all, it should be noted that the recitation of the Enuma Elish was the central liturgical rite of the Akitu, the great Babylonian festival of the New Year.  It was then that Marduk, god of the resurgent vernal sun, in his victory over wintry darkness and sterility, established the conditions for the rebirth of the crops and the vegetation.  To the accompaniment of the singing of the tablets, Marduk’s cosmogonic victory over the chaos-dragon Tiamat was at the same time ritually re-enacted; for on that day, every year, Marduk created the world anew.

In the imagination of the ancient Babylonians, the birth of the year and the birth of the world were thus mutual aspects of the same event, a universally pregnant moment in time that recurs eternally.  Time, as it was normally conceived in antiquity, was not linear but circular, and in its endless cyclical repetitions the ancients saw, as Plato put it in the Timaeus, “the mobile image of eternity”.  As the great mythographer and historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, explains, every moment or phenomenon within the merely temporal or profane order achieved meaning only insofar as it could be connected back with and informed by some primordial event, some mythic “archetype” first established in illo tempore, as the beginning of things.

 

We next observe about the Enuma Elish that, once again, the creation of the world is construed as the distillation and ordering of the cosmic elements out of an original chaos, which (as in the Egyptian cosmogony) is a maritime one.  The sea-serpent Tiamat is the primeval sea, the maternal womb that engenders everything that will eventually come to be.

In Genesis, too, we read that the world arose from a formless watery chaos.  As scholars have understood for generations, the creation myth in Genesis, composed by the so-called Priestly author in the fifth century B.C., was profoundly influenced by the Babylonian cosmogony.

Let us look at the relevant chapters (Gen. 1-8), whereby we can kill two cosmogonic birds with one stone:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.  And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven…

Now, the word used for the abysmal “deep” in Genesis is t’hom, a word that Ancient Near Eastern scholars recognize as a Hebrew corruption of Tiamat, the Babylonian sea-dragon slain by Marduk before he proceeds to create the world-order out of chaos.  Marduk’s splitting of Tiamat’s body in two and his fixing of half of it in the heavens to keep the waters above in their place corresponds to God’s division in Genesis of the waters above the firmament from the waters below.

Marduk creates the world by unleashing the wind into Tiamat’s maritime womb, which we can interpret naturaliter, if we wish, by noting that every spring—every New Year when the Enuma Elish is recited–the waters flood the Mesopotamian plain and the world reverts to its primeval watery chaos:  until, that is, the winds dry up the water, reveal the land, and restore its agricultural fertility.

But there is a more seminal meaning informing this motive, if you can forgive the pun, which will reveal itself if we return to Genesis.  In Gen. 1:2, we meet the image of God’s Spirit brooding pregnantly upon the face of the waters.  Spirit is the English translation of the Latin Spiritus, a translation of the Greek Pneuma, a translation of the Hebrew ruach, which means “wind” or “breath”.

All good translations, indeed, since Greek pneuma and Latin spiritus also carry the connotation of wind or breath, as we can see immediately from the English derivation “pneumatic”, and the  root of spiritus, the Latin verb spiro, spirare, spiravi, spiratum, from which we also get “respire” and “inspire”.  To “inspire” is, literally, to “breathe into”, and what is breathed into is that active element—the spirit or soul– that animates what is otherwise inert, passively or merely potentially living (that is, formless, or chaotic, matter).

In practically all cosmogonies, the Creator co-exists with this inert, chaotic matter, and he creates the world by breathing into it his own divine spiritus, anima, or soul. He animates or ensouls it; and thus ensouled by God, the world becomes a living God, a “divine animal”, as Plato calls it in the Timaeus.

 

In Genesis, God creates Adam similarly by inspiring, by breathing into him, his soul, his spiritus or anima, which invigorates the lifeless lump of “Adamic clay”.(Adam, like the world, therefore, is a divine animal, a God; but neither Judaism nor Christianity are entirely comfortable with the radical mythic implications of the biblical text.)

Genesis tells us that the chaotic raw material out of which Adam is created, the Adamic “clay”, comes from the Earth, the Earth being, along with the Sea, the other of the primordial mythic inflections of the “mother” archetype.  God’s creation of Adam by breathing his male spirit into the inert and passive materia of Mother Earth (cf. the old Latin pun, mater…materia), and his creation of the world by blowing his Spirit upon the face of the maternal waters, are thus, once again, mythologically identified.

They are both, of course, mythological transcriptions of the sexual act upon which all life and being depend.

Just as in Egyptian and Sumerian cosmogonies, Father Sky and Mother Earth must be differentiated out of their original chaotic union before they can recombine fruitfully to beget the world and the gods, so in the Enuma Elish and the biblical creation story derived from it, the world is conceived sexually.  And indeed, one way or another, every act of creation depends upon the fecundating male spiritus being disseminated into the mother’s womb.

We’ll meet this motive another thousand times: in cosmogony, solar myths, hero myths, dragon-killing myths, and so on; if the reader is as yet unconvinced of the symbolism, I ask him to be patient.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part IX

Harley Price

Regression into Chaos…

Jung’s Devouring Mother…

 Marduk and Tiamat…

     What follows is the first of many conflicts between the primeval gods and those they have begotten (a motive whose most famous inflection is known in Greek mythography as the Titanomachy, the battle between the monstrous Titans–the original generation of the gods–and their beautiful Olympian offspring, who presently preside over the universe).

And so, Tiamat, the original chaos-mother, decides to do away with the brood to which she has just given birth.

The motive suggests, of course, that order and beauty are fragile emanations, forever in danger of slipping back into the formlessness out of which they have arisen.  Joseph Campbell has called this regressive principle the “Monster of the Status Quo”, whom we will meet in many another mythic guise.  Jung’s designation, the “Terrible” or “Devouring Mother”, is probably more apposite here:  the mother who is moved to jealous repining at the very moment of giving birth, or is so possessive or over-protective of her children throughout their lives as to sabotage their independent development, or completely obliterate their own separate being.

As a matter of growing up, as Jung observes, every child must struggle against the regressive instincts of his mother; every child can only realize its own autonomous personality by separating its infant consciousness from the unconscious unity with the mother in which he or she first entered the world—a state of psychic identification which persists for some time beyond the child’s physical identification with the mother in the womb.

In the mythic imagination, accordingly, every act of creation or individuation–whether the emergence of the world from the maternal sea, the birth of the individual soul from the tomb/womb of the underworld, the ascent of the sun each morning out of the nocturnal darkness, or the daily reawakening of consciousness from the realm of night and dream– is understood as a victory over the forces of chaos and regression that are at the same time the forces of regeneration; every step towards consciousness, civilization, or culture is seen as a Promethean raid upon the original chaotic womb of the mother.

In the Enuma Elish, Tiamat and Apsu are disturbed by the noise being made by the younger gods who come together to dance (no doubt to some kind of early rock music).  Apsu complains that he cannot sleep—that in the presence of this racket, that is, he and the world will no longer be allowed to remain in that blissful state of unconsciousness out of which the human psyche first arose and back into it which it is tempted constantly to lapse.  And so the primordial couple take counsel with Mummu, Apsu’s vizier, as to how to destroy their boisterous litter.

Tiamat, however, is beginning to have second thoughts, so Apsu and Mummu devise a plan on their own; but Ea-Enki (the All-Wise) discovers it, casts a spell of sleep upon the waters (i.e., upon Apsu), slays him, binds Mummu, and puts a cord through his nose.  Ea then builds a magnificent sacred chamber directly above the slain corpse of Apsu, a motive whose naturalistic signification is clear:  the sweet waters have now been subdued and confined underground within Ea’s sacred chamber, that is, the newly formed earth.  This is the first great victory of the forces of order over those of chaos.

In this chamber Ea then gives birth to the divine child Marduk, and a description of his transcendent beauty and strength follows.  But none of this banishes the atmosphere of foreboding; and the rest of the first section of the poem is taken up with the preparations on both sides for the inevitable renewal of the conflict.

First, Tiamat’s children reproach her—not for her and Apsu’s plotting against them, as you might think—but for so passively allowing their father Apsu to be destroyed; and so they stir her up to revenge.

She gives birth again, for the enterprise, to a terrible brood of centaurs, enormous serpents, fierce dragons, and scorpion-men, and at the head of this formidable army, she installs Kingu, the last of her litter, whom she makes her second husband, and ceremonially arms and invests with the tablets of destiny.

 

The second section of the poem opens with the assembly of the younger gods in counsel about the coming threat.  Ea’s father Anshar suggests to him that he deal with Tiamat as he had done with Apsu; but Ea refuses.  Then Anu is sent on an embassy to try to dissuade Tiamat from embarking upon her reckless project, but she is implacable.  So Anshar rises in the assembly once more to propose that Marduk be given the adventure of destroying Tiamat and her army.  Marduk accepts the commission on condition that he be granted full and equal authority with his elders in the assembly of the gods, and that his word will thenceforth carry the force of destiny; here tablet two ends.

The third tablet concludes with a feast at which Marduk is officially invested with the authority he has demanded.  The fourth begins with his enthronement as king and his investment with the royal insignia.  The gods proclaim, “Marduk is king”, and he is armed for the upcoming combat with bow and arrow, mace, rainbow, lightning, and a net held open at the corners by the four winds.  Then he fashions seven terrible storms, lifts up his mace (which is the flood), mounts his war chariot (“the irresistible tempest”), and rides to battle against Tiamat and Kingu.  (He carries, that is, the weapons appropriate to a god of storm and thunder, as we would expect when we recall that the original hero of the myth was the Sumerian storm-god Enlil.)

 

When Marduk and his army approach, Kingu and his monstrous host lose heart; only his mother Tiamat stands her ground.  The war will thus be decided in single combat.

First, Marduk fills his belly with flame and unleashes the seven hurricanes; he mounts his storm chariot, and advances against the chaos-dragon; he casts his net around her, and when she opens her jaws to swallow him, he drives in the evil wind to hold them apart.  The wind inflates and distends her body, and through her open gullet Marduk shoots an arrow that pierces her heart and kills her.

When her misshapen brood flee, they are caught in Marduk’s net.  Marduk then takes from the vanquished Kingu the tablets of destiny and affixes them to his own breast.  Then he returns to Tiamat’s corpse, crushes her skull with his mace, and cuts her arteries so the winds carry away her blood.  Next, he fillets her carcass in two, placing the upper half above the earth as the sky, fixing it with bars, and setting guards lest her waters escape.  Finally, he sets the lower fillet in the firmament as the earth.

Marduk then builds Esharra, the abode of the great gods, after the pattern of Ea’s sacred chamber, and sets Anu, Enlil, and Ea in their places within it.  So ends tablet four.

The fifth tablet is fragmentary, but records Marduk’s first steps in organizing the universe, including establishing the rotations of the heavens, the seasons of the year, and the order of the months.

The sixth tablet describes the creation of man.  Following the advice of Ea, it is decided that the leader of the rebellion, Kingu, must die so that from his blood mixed with earth mankind may be created for the service of the gods.  (We will encounter a similar motive when we come to the Orphic myth of Dionysos, whose Titan enemies dismember and devour the young god, but are incinerated by Zeus’s thunderbolt; from their ashes man is created, the Titanic element furnishing the mortal component within man, the Dionsysian, the immortal.)

Finally, the gods build a great temple to Marduk, complete with ziggurat; and at the command of Anu they proclaim his fifty great names, which occupies the rest of the poem.

So ends the Enuma Elish, and so we pause to consider some of the universal themes to which it gives such vivid expression.