Tales within tales : Apuleius through time 9780404642525, 0404642527

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TALES W I T H I N TALES Apuleius Through Time

ESSAYS IN HONOR OF PROFESSOR EMERITUS RICHARD J. SCHOECK

TALES WI T H I N TALES Apuleius Through Time Edited by

CONSTANCE S. WRIGHT JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY

AMS Press New York

Univ. Library, UC Santa Cruz 20Ô1

Library of Congrets Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tales within tales: Apuleius through time / [edited by] Constance S. Wright, Julia Bolton Holloway. (AMS Studies in cultural history: no. 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-404-64252-7 (hardcover, alk. paper) 1. Apuleius—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Literature. Medieval— Roman influences. 3. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Sources. 4. Apuleius—Influence. I. Wright, Constance S. II. Holloway, Julia Bolton, 1937- III. Series. PA6217.T26 2000 873\01—dc20 91-57968 CIP

All AMS Books are printed on acid-free paper that meets the guidelines for performance and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Copyright © 2000 by AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved

AMS Press, Inc. 56 East 13th Street New York, NY 10003-4686, U.S.A. M anufactured

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Table Preface

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Contents

C onstance S. W right and J ulia B olton H olloway

T 2 6 O IX

Scribal i

Apuleius’ Tales within Tales in The Golden Ass by G ertrude D rake

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Magic in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses by David M artinez

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The Metamorphoses of Cupid and Psyche in Plato, Apuleius, Origen, and Chaucer by Constance S. W right

vn vm

49

55

The Asse to the Harpe: Boethian Music in Chaucer by JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY

73

Musical Representations of the Ass by OLIVER B. ELLSWORTH

93

Chaucer and Huizinga: The Spirit of Homo Ludens by Richard J. Schoeck

IX

37

The Virgin Prefigured by John Douglas H oag

VI

29

Narrative Enta[i]led: Metamorphic Reflexivity in Ovid and Apuleius by Edw ard Peter N olan

IV

3

97

Isis in Spenser and Apuleius by Stella P. Revard

107

Apuleius and Midsummer Night's Dream: Bottom's Metamorphoses by Julia Bolton H olloway

123

O ra l XI

Language and Literature from the Pueblo Indian Perspective by Leslie Marmon Silko

xn

Henry Cornfield: Enrique Milpaz by Rose Cordova

XIII

14 i

157

An English Rose by Rose L loyds

165

B ib lio g r a p h y

183

I ndex

187

PLATES 1:1 Isis Lactans. Dynasty 26, 664-525 B.C., bronze. Hermitage, Leningrad. 1:2 Serapis, after Bryaxis, late fourth century B.C. Roman copy, second century after Christ, from Perge in Pamphylia. Antalya Museum, photo, author. 1:3 Isis Lactans, after original of second century B.C. Roman copy, second century after Christ, from Perge in Pamphylia. Antalya Museum, photo author. 1:4 Niche head from Apa Jeremiah, Sakkarah, seventh century after Christ. Coptic Museum, Cairo. 1:5 Isis from Pozzuoli, second century after Christ. Vatican Museum, Rome, photo, author. 1:6 Isis with Harpocrates, Serapis and Dionysius, circa 140 A.D., from Henchir al-Atermine, Tunisia. Louvre, Paris, photo, author. 1:7 Isis, sixth century after Christ. Alexandria, Aachen Cathedral. 1:8 Winged Isis, Sarcophagus Shrine 3 of Tutankhamen. Dynasty 18, circa 1350 B.C. Egyptian Museum, Cairo. 1:9 Winged Isis. Ephesus, second-third century after Christ, bronze. Ephesus Archeological Museum, Selcuk, Turkey. 1:10 Albrecht Dürer, woodcut, 1469-98, Opening of the Fifth Seal. The Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Seven-Headed Dragon. 1:11 Francisco Zurbaron, Immaculate Conception, circa 1630. Nuestra Señora del Carmen, Jadraque, Guadalajara. 1:12 Anonymous Ecuadoran, eighteenth-century Virgin of Quito. Denver Art Museum. 11:1 Psyche with her lamp discovers Cupid. Giulio Romano (14991546). The Sala di Psiche, Palazzo del Te. The Hall of Psyche is devoted to a series of illustrations of Apuleius* story. 11:2 Psyche, despondent and alone, with the labor of sorting the piles of grain, Giulio Romano. 11:3 Cupid and Psyche at their nuptial banquet on Mount Olympus; the conclusion of Apuleius’ story. Giulio Romano. 11:4 Cupid and Psyche with butterfly wings embracing wedded in heaven. A Christianized version from the Priscilla catacombs. 11:5 The Coronation of the Virgin at her Assumption. The Pierpont Morgan Library. Book of Hours in the Sarum Use. Fifteenth Century. Morgan 105, fol. 21.

111:1 Plaque from the Ur Lyre with Ass Playing Harp, 2,500 B.C. University Museum, University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia. 111:2 Spanish Fresco with Ass Playing Harp, twelfth century, from Chapter House of San Pedro de Arlanza. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection, 1931, New York. IV:1 Rose Cordova and Don Cacaguate. IV:2 Rose Lloyds.

PREFACE

Tales within Tales contains its own tale. One summer’s evening, the Graduate Committee on Medieval Studies at the University of Colorado became involved in a discussion of Apuleius, Isis, Black Virgins, and Chaucer. Imagine that evening as like Marlowe holding forth upon the Thames about the Congo - which turns, in Apocafyse Now, into the Ohio. From that oral discussion this scribal book was born. We collected oral tales for its final section, each tale, like that of "Cupid and Psyche," being told by a woman. Our Committee had already worked on the influence of Terence on medieval culture. Now we chose a second African, using these two great writers concerning heterosexuality to see the classical Mediterranean’s dimensions and contributions to medieval Europe and modern America. Both Terence and Apuleius were from Mediterranean Africa, both wrote about Greece, both gave their works Greek titles, both wrote in Latin, both blended together law and literature. Terence of the second century before Christ wrote Comedies about slaves and women who win, not lose. From his work Dante took his title for the Commedia, a work in which there are countless tales within tales, and Chaucer took the idea of a General Prologue of dramatis personae who then interact with one another in their tale-telling. Likewise Hrostwitha of Gandersheim took the ideas for her plays about courageous and comic women hero Christian martyrs, and the Wakefield Master in Yorkshire created his plays about nagging Mrs. Noah, the woman on top, and about Mak the Trickster and his wife Gil hiding their sheep, pretending it is a new-born child, as mirror-reversal to the Nativity and the Annunciation to the Shepherds. Apuleius, of the second century after Christ, likewise wrote about women on top and slaves and even, though he wrote in official Latin, about Language Freedom, rather than Official English, having one scene where a Roman soldier orders a Greek farmer about and punishes him - though the farmer could not understand the order, having only democratic, demotic

Tales within Tales /x

Greek, and not imperial, vulgar Latin. The works of Terence and Apuleius were well-known to Augustine, yet another African, and in that mode, likewise deeply affected western culture. The manuscripts of all three authors, Terence, Apuleius, Augustine, were copied out and preserved for use in Benedictine abbey scriptoria. Then Boccaccio, who so influenced Chaucer and had been influenced by Dante, in his own hand copied out both Terence’s plays, in Biblioteca Laurenziana 38.17, and Apuleius’ works, in Biblioteca Laurenziana 54.32, in manuscripts to be found to this day in Florence. It is generally assumed that the base text manuscript of the Metamorphoseon or The Golden Ass> Biblioteca Laurenziana 68.2, is eleventh-century and likely to have come from Monte Cassino. It itself states it was in the possession of the Convent of San Marco. Another manuscript, Laurenziana 29.2, which is twelfth-century and which is not considered important in the catalogue, is in a decidedly ancient hand and has above its lines a Renaissance gloss. A third, fourteenth-century, manuscript, Laurenziana 54.32, spoken of above, is correctly noted by the Catalogue to be in Boccaccio’s hand. The remaining manuscripts are generally fifteenthcentury Humanist ones and manifest Florence’s Renaissance fascination with Apuleius and the Medici’s near monopoly of this text: Laurenziana 54.12; 54.13; 54.14 (the Catalogue being in error in stating this manuscript as thirteenth century); 54.24; 84.24 (this manuscript having fine Pythagorean mathematical diagrams); 24. Sinistra 11. Most of these manuscripts end, as do those of Terence, with "FELIC1TER." In a sense, this volume of essays is upon Apuleius and Chaucer. Chaucer was far more deeply influenced by Boccaccio than he ever acknowledged (he only acknowledged Boccaccio’s friend, Petrarch). Through Boccaccio, Chaucer was likewise deeply influenced by Apuleius, while there was as well a vestigial medieval presence of Apuleian materials, such as Nigel Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum, which Chaucer cites in the "Nuns* Priest’s Tale." Nigel Wireker was the friend of Thomas Becket and John of Salisbury. An ass playing the harp is sculpted on a capital in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral where Thomas’ body originally was enshrined. [Stop Press! After the completion of our book, we consulted the Louvain and Brepols publication of the Latin Fathers on CD-ROM disk, the CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts, or CLCLT for short. One can ask it how many times Terence and Apuleius were cited by the Church Fathers, and the answer is very many times, 86 for Terence, 71 for Apuleius. Particularly of interest is that Apuleius is a favorite author for, of all people, John of Salisbury. Is it possible that John and Nigel shared a copy at Canterbury of the Golden Ass and that that manuscript also influenced the crypt capital sculptures?] There is magic in these works - and revolutionary freedom. Apuleius weds law, his own calling, to literature. He sees criminality as caused by

»/Preface

jealousy, and gives nauseating murder tale upon murder tale about "Radix malorum est cupiditas." Chaucer’s "Pardoner’s Tale," and the entirety of the Canterbury Tales, is kin to Apuleius’ Golden Ass. Apuleius also quests the feminine, in both negative and positive forms, in connection with damnation and salvation. One can take African Othello’s Ones about the handkerchief and see it in reference to Apuleian magic: That handkerchief Did an Egyptian to my mother give... There’s magic in the web of it. A sibyl that had numb’red in the world The sun to course two hundred compasses, In her prophetic fury sewed the work; The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk; And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful Conserved of maidens’ hearts. III. iv. 55-75 Judith Gleason in Oya: In Praise o f the Goddess, 1987, traces the presence of feminine chaos and order not only in Africa but in the African diaspora upon the Americas. What she observes today is the same as that which Apuleius depicts. Augustine mentioned Terence’s line,"Homo sum: humani nichil a me alienum puto," as getting a standing ovation in the theatre in Carthage and Montaigne had that line painted on his study ceiling in Bordeaux. Apuleius played with multicultural themes from Egypt and Babylon, from Pythagoras and Plato. There is the shamanistic Protean shapeshifting theriomorphoses, men becoming animals through magic and back again upon eating roses, in a hierarchy of asses, horses, men, and gods - or rather goddesses. The beasts of the Golden Assy donkeys, bears and goats, are the same as those on a Babylonian harp and those upon medieval cloister capitals, including that in Canterbury’s crypt, where they play musical instruments, the ass a harp, the goat, panpipes. Chaos and Order, men and women, and their negative and positive interrelationships are the themes of this book. And above all there is the kaleidoscopic telling of tales within tales of which this book is but one. Ernest Jones, the Freudian, in a mere footnote to Hamlet and Oedipus, rem arked that it was of interest only to the professional psychoanalyst that the dream within the dream, like the play within the play of Hamlet’s Mousetrap - wherein to catch the conscience of a king - , is that which is true but which the dreamer wishes were not so, while the surrounding dream, because of the mind’s censorship, presents the truth in mirror reversals. We get this in Hamlet’s play within the play, Hamlet; and in Ingmar Bergman’s use of that play within a play within his film, Through a

Tales within Tales/xii

Glass Darkly, and in Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen’s Tempests and Winter's Tales. Similarly in literary texts of tales within tales we have patterns of lies and truths which alternate. Both Terence and Apuleius made use of law and logographers, the lawyers or rather speechwriters of alibis of the ancient world, in their texts, blending together and juxtaposing the fiction of literature with legal forensic "facts." Tale-telling is both true and false. Let us take a different example, that of Sinon’s logographic speech in Virgil’s poetic Aeneid. Virgil tells us - with his use from Homer of the gates of ivory versus those of horn - that the Aeneid lies, and Augustine concurs in the Confessions, noting that Aeneas and Dido did not live in the same century. Aeneas tells the truthful, eye-witness tale of Troy’s downfall. In that tale he has Sinon tell a lying tale, within which he lies truthfully, speaking of Ulysses’ lies, and truthfully lies, giving the ambages of the Delphic Oracle. Surrounding his tale are first Laocodn’s truthful, disbelieved speech, then the murder of Laocoon and his sons as a symbol of Troy’s Fall, which is tragically misinterpreted by the Trojans, who, in their reader response, release Sinon who in turn again speaks, within Aeneas’ speaking, within Virgil’s speaking, Chinese boxes, Russian dolls’ style. This gives us a chiastic patterning or panel structuring: [True [False [True [False seeming True [True/False] [False/True] False seeming True] True seeming False] False seeming True] False] True]. Virgil tells the tale to Caesar Augustus about Aeneas telling the tale to Dido in which Laocoon attempts to truly dissuade the Trojans from admitting the treachery of the Trojan Horse, who are instead persuaded by the seemingly true lies of Sinon whose tale tells of the lies of Ulysses and the seeming truth of the oracle; next, Laocoon, who told the truth, is choked by the serpents from Tenedos, the Trojans unloosing the bonds on Sinon, in a mirror reversal, Sinon next giving a true-seeming lying speech as "Savior of Troy," within Aeneas’ tale to Dido and Virgil’s to Caesar. Moreover, this is a tale told in Europe of a tale told in Africa about a tale that took place in Asia. What do the critics, the theorists, say? First the commentary upon orality and literacy was concocted by Plato and Socrates orally commenting adversely on Lysias the logographer’s written speech. Then Derrida commented on that commentary with "Plato’s Pharmacy," and lastly Jonathan Culler gave it his imprimatur. In the academic world we falsely divorce the scribal essay, the oral lecture and the telling of tales from each other. This book will rejoin them. For this reason we divide the book in two, and give the last words to tellers of tales, all of them women: Leslie Silko, within whose oral lecture as inscribed essay is embedded the Pueblo Indian tale of butterflies which mirrors that of Psyche in Apuleius’ Golden Ass\ Rose Cordova, whose tale tells of the Mediterranean’s translatio studii to American shores; and Rose Lloyds, whose tale is of herself (though Ovid has already

xiii/Preface

told it in Pyramus and Thisbe); she likewise gives the sense of the translatio studii, where her brother returns to England from Canada with a message of freedom for her. Rose Lloyds’ story was told in Sussex, Rose Cordova’s in Colorado. When I was listening to, then transcribing, Rose Lloyds’ story, I was interrupted by a pilgrimage to Walsingham, the other side of England. I had thought the Walsingham pilgrims would tell Chaucerian tales. Not so. They were women who told their own tales of their own lives, restoring to themselves their lost souls. It would be against ethical standards to retell their tales of courage and sadness, to write of them a Walsingham Tales. It was difficult to persuade Rose Cordova to tape record her story. "So much is lost without a live audience," she writes. Then she adds, "Enrique Milpaz, as you might guess, is not through with Don Cacaguate. In the winter he spies on the Cacaguate household, on the marital bliss and strife of Cacaguate and his wife. Henry Cornfield has many stories to tell to Mariquita’s children when he dons his tuxedo." Our two major speakers were Gertrude Drake and Carter Revard. We publish the first speaker’s intensely scribal paper. Our second speaker talked, orally, without notes, on Coyote and Chaucer’s Pardoner, read his own poetry and described how he, as a Rhodes scholar from an Indian reservation in Oklahoma, traveled about Europe claiming, in a legal speech act, her rivers and her mountains for his people. Like Rose Cordova he is reticent about transmitting orality to scribalism. Let us now leave the French and American Poststructuralists to one side and explore instead the Looking Glass World of Formalist criticism behind the obscuring and deconstructing Iron Curtain. Roman Jakobson from Czechoslovakia said brilliant things about medieval ass plays. There was, as well, a brilliant, though terribly purged, circle about Mikhail Baktin. Among his books are Rabelais and his World and The Dialogic Imagination in which he argues that medieval humor existed because of bilingualism, the Latin of authority versus the vernaculars of the Folk, which mocked, parodied, and derided it, in the manner of dream censoring, mirror reversing, and that in this area one will find the world upside down, the body celebrated, rather than the soul, animals rather than humans, sex, not celibacy, laughter rather than severity. This is the world of medieval manuscripts’ marginalia and of abbey and cathedral choir stalls’ misericords and of cloister capitals in which unmusical musician asses strum on harps, bears dance and goats play panpipes. In Bakhtin’s circle Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin was studied. In that work, a Russian Canterbury Tales written by an author who loved Apuleius far more than Cicero, we find Pushkin creating an author, Belkin, who collects tales, only some of which survive, and of which some are contributed by a novelreading women to him. One of them is of a squire’s daughter who pretends to

Tales within Tales/xiv

be an illiterate swarthy peasant girl who is taught and courted by the neighboring squire’s son, and whose true identity is discovered by him, though she attemptes to conceal it from him with white face powder stolen from her English governess. Pushkin, we remember, was descended from the African Chief of his tale, T sar Peter’s Moor." He was an African Russian. In his Eugene Onegin, he declared he would far rather be reading his Apuleius than his Cicero. The Dumas father and son were French and African. Our material is "Out of Africa." Throughout these tales within tales we find texts within texts, novel readers who act out novels they read, and so forth. But in Tales within Tales, truth, like murder, will out. D.H. Lawrence reminded us, "Trust not the Teller, Trust the Tale." This, in the face of the medieval knowledge of pilgrimage tales, especially of "Canterbury tales," pilgrim tales told on the Canterbury road, as lies, is a profound paradox. Like Milton’s Areopagitica’s Psyche, we must learn to separate out lies from truth, truth from lies, in these texts. Now to our theme of folly. The use of the ass, the donkey, goes back into distant mists of the past. The Egyptian Book o f the Dead gave the journeying of the soul as that of the quest to Isis, including the presence of a donkey on that quest. The Golden Ass repeats that motif both in its main tale, and in its tale within the tale, of Psyche’s quest in the Land of the Dead, On a Babylonian harp of two thousand six hundred years before Christ is a depiction of an ass playing a harp. It is repeated in medieval manuscripts’ marginalia and upon cloister capitals - even in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral. Boethius used the image in the Consolation of Philosophy and Chaucer repeated it in Troilus and Criseyde, Erasmus likewise using it in the Adages. In these artifacts the motif jokingly comments upon itself and its readers. Nigel Wireker’s Speculum Stultomm, whose hero is a donkey who goes to the universities of Paris and Salerno and learns nothing, tells us it mirrors ourselves. It goes underground, into children’s literature, becoming Pinocchio transformed as an ass and A A. Milne’s neurotic Eeyore. Plato and A puleius had used horses and donkeys in the Phaedrus and the Metamorphoses as images for the human body. The ass for St. Francis was Brother Body. But it also bore Christ twice, into his Egyptian exile of a pilgrimage in his childhood with his mother, then, on Palm Sunday’s triumphant return from that pilgrimage exile into the city of Jerusalem. Chaucer’s Parson - and who may be Chaucer himself as trickster-writer towards us, his readers - Chaucer’s Parson lets us know that pilgrims should never ride horses because Christ never did so. Suddenly we and all of the Canterbury cavalcade are laughingly unhorsed. A Renaissance joke is of a painting of two donkeys labeled "We Three." In this volume we can come to learnedly laugh at ourselves - and laughingly learn from the world’s literature - in Johan Huizinga’s spirit of play, conjoining body and soul, the vernacular

xv/Preface

of story telling and laughter embedded in the midst of the official Latin of literature’s pompous Great Books. We played a joke on our beloved colleague by getting him unwittingly to submit an article for his own Festschrift. We wish to thank the Center for Studies in Ethnicity and Race in America at the University of Colorado at Boulder, especially Professors Evelyn Hu-Dehart and George Junne of the Center for Studies in Ethnicity and Race in the Americas for their support; the Eden Theatrical Workshop of Denver, especially its Director, Lucy Walker, and the intrepid actor in Terence plays, Newrise Battle; the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities; the Graduate Committee on Arts and Humanities; the Department of Comparative Literature; Michael Masi and Peter Lang for granting permission to republish T he Asse to the Harpe: Boethian Music in Chaucer," originally published in 1981 in Boethius and the Liberal Arts, edited by Michael Masi; Leslie Marmon Silko, Leslie A. Fiedler, Houston Baker, Jr., and the Johns Hopkins Press for granting permission to republish Leslie Silko’s story from the 1979 English Institute volume of essays: English Literature: Opening up the Canon; Robertson Davies’ secretary, who answered queries about A Mixture o f Frailties, and Godfrey Webster in whose Fazenda da Nova Vida, beneath the Southern Cross, that book was read, whose tale within its tale, centered upon legal issues, is about the production of an opera, its tale within the tale, The Golden Ass. Boulder, Colorado Dallas, Texas

SCRIBAL

Sic captivae puellae delira et temulenta illa narrabat anicula; sed astans ego non procul dolebam mehercules quod pugillares et stilum non habebam, qui tam bellam fabellam praenotarem.

I

I. APULEIUS’ TALES WITHIN TALES IN THE GOLDEN ASS GERTRUDE DRAKE

At ego tibi sermone isto Milesio varias fabulas conseram auresque tuas benivolas lepido susurro pemtulceam, modo si papyrum Aegyptiam argutia Nilotici calami inscriptam non spreveris inspicere; figuras fortunasque hominum in alias imagines conversas et in se rursum, mutuo nexu, refectas; ut mireris. . . . Fabulam Graecanicam incipimus: lector intende; laeteberis. I Today, Apuleius would be a Doctor of Philosophy in Pythagorean sacred geometry and astronomy, as well as languages and literatures: Latin, Greek, and probably Punic and Egyptian. He would also be an attorney-atlaw. In his own day, he was sought after as a lecturer, having a statue erected in his honor by grateful Carthaginian citizens.1 He was deeply religious, travelling the Way through several mysteries, including that of Egyptian Isis. He also became a priest of Aesculapius, the god of medicine, whose practice was on a par with modern psychiatry.2 By Apuleius’ time, circa 150 A.D., Egyptian theology had had a history of monotheism for over three thousand years. The One was Atum (7m), the Eternal, from whom all the Many in cosmological Time emanated. As Plato, and Apuleius quoting him, said, "Time is the moving likeness of Eternity.”3 All things in the World constantly change whether by cycles as in great myths, or linearly as in Muslim or Christian beliefs. Emphases on doctrines, interpretations, and holy personae varied in time and place. But the core of good versus evil never shifted in Egyptian theology. Within the divine circle of the One, the inscribed sacred right triangle

4/Tales within Tales of 3, 4, and 5, "Pythagorean" as we term it, was that of the family of Osiris (=3), his wife Isis (=4), and Horns ( = 5) (Figure 1), as Plutarch tells us in his essay on Isis and Osiris.4 It is therefore paramount that the reader of The Golden Ass, or the Metamorphoses (Transformations or Changes) as is its true title, be aware that its main theme is "The Holy Family." Generative married love deifies mortals. The only writers of stature in Greece and Rome who extolled married love were Plutarch, mentioned twice in The Golden Ass (1.2 and 113), and Apuleius. Apuleius* masterpiece has variously been called a novel, even a picaresque novel, or a romance by many eminent scholars. It is neither. It is an aretalogical commedia, as Dante rightly called his Divine Comedy. John Bunyan’s modest allegory, The Pilgrim's Progress, and also Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained taken together, belong to the same genre. The Golden Ass depicts asinine man winning through his degradations to know at last holy joy when transformed to Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, in the last book. It also depicts the mystery of anguished questing feminine mortality which, finally triumphant, divinizes Psyche on Olympus when she lawfully marries the great god Love himself and bears to him a daughter whom mortals call Joy (VI.24). The arch-enemy of the Isiac family is Seth, the ass-headed god of chaos. Changing himself into a boar, he attacks the hawk-headed Horus* left eye. In hieroglyphics, the parts of the whole eye are fractions: 1/2; 1/4; 1/8; 1/16; 1/32; 1/64 (Figure 2). Thoth (Dhwty), the god of measures, cyclically restores the full moon to Horus.5 We shall later see how cleverly Apuleius uses a boar hunt to expose a so-called friend as Seth incarnate (VIII.5). Again, in the personified mathematics of the Egyptians, Seth, the god of disorder, is the leader of seventy-two gangsters, he himself making the seventy-third. He thus puts out of whack the apex angle (72°) of the triangular area of a fifth of the sacred pentagon.6 The Cheops pyramid, if bisected (Figure 3), is very close to a 72°, 54°, 54° triangle.7 If a perpendicular from the apex of the pyramid is dropped, two Pythagorean "perfect triangles" of 36°, 54°, 90° are created, the basic building block of the cosmos, providing an easy way of figuring degrees of right angles without needing trignometry. The 36°, 54°, 90° was named mr so that the country was proudly called "The Land of M f (Td-mrt) because of the triangular geography unique to Egypt. So much for a few insights into Egyptian mathematics which underlay their theology and which inspired the learned, artistic, and religious Apuleius of Roman Madaura to write his Latin masterpiece of eleven books. But one asks, "Why eleven?" Why not ten, the holy Decad of the Pythagorean Brotherhood’s sacred geometry of which Apuleius was a master? Why not

Apuleius’ Golden A ss/5

twelve, the Babylonian number of the zodiacal divine sphere, or the twelve books of Milton’s Paradise Lost (originally ten) which may represent the dodecahedron ball enclosing Time? However, eleven has some peculiar characteristics in numerology. It is the fifth prime number, 2, 3, 5, 7,11 being integers (whole numbers) which have no divisors. God is the Primal One, hardly a number. Feminine 2 has no surface, being a line between two points. Three is the first surface, the masculine triangle. Four is the feminine square. Five represents the five-sided regular polygon, the pentagon. Twelve of these create the fifth solid, the dodecahedron (Figure 4), which the Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus, God’s Workman in temporality, had left over after using the other four solids as building blocks of the universe. This he blew into a sphere with which he enclosed the cosmos of Time. Hence the Eternal God, the One, the Circle, is also the Sphere. Book XI, then, of Apuleius* Metamorphoses, is the divine sphere of Eternity which encloses the temporal questings and degradations of the first ten books. II We first meet our non-hero Lucius going on some vague "business" from commercial Corinth, one of the most corrupt cities of the Roman Empire, to Hypata, the witching capital of Thessaly, land of magic.8 It is a rough up-hill climb so that he dismounts from his pure-white horse to rest it and himself (1.2). One suspects that this white horse may represent his better self, echoing Plato’s description in Phaedrus of the tripart soul consisting of the charioteer, a soaring white horse, and a black one of evil passions ever pulling the other down.9 Lucius has now lost control of his virginal idealism. It should be pointed out that Lucius in Latin means Light, for like many a man before and since, he must first experience asshood because of the "inescapable snares of woman," as Hesiod puts it, before being driven by Blind Fortune to illumination by Seeing Fortune, Isis (XI.15).10 Lucius meets up with another traveler to Thessaly, one Aristomenes whose name perversely means High-Minded (1.5). He tells a hair-raising story of a previous trip to Hypata after which he had deserted his first wife. It may be that after this voyage, he will desert also his second (1.19). In Hypata Aristomenes had come upon an old friend, Socrates [!], lying in a gutter in a tattered tunic which for shame he pulls over his head, thus exposing his genitals. He tells how an innkeeper, Meroe, had sexually enslaved him and then had forced him to be the man-of-ail-work at her inn. After cleaning Socrates up at the public bath, Aristomenes takes him to his

6/Tales within Tales

room in a local inn where they gorge themselves on food and drink and talk about Meroe until they fall into a drunken stupor. At midnight two hags, Meroe and her sister Panthia (the AU-[Mother]-Goddess) rip the hinges and bolts from the door and threaten Aristomenes with castration.11 Panthia then cuts Socrates’ throat, literally pulls the heart out of him, and stops the flow of blood with a salt-water sponge. On leaving, pushing aside Aristomenes* cot, under which he was trying to hide like a tortoise, they urinate on him.12 There were two commonplace proverbs in Latin and Greek which would have occurred to the ancient reader. "A tortoise flies" [testudo volat\ was the sarcastic response to a proposed impossibility. In Greek the proverb was that a tortoise enjoys its thick shell. Aristomenes under his cot certainly does not fly and indeed is glad of his protective cot. But more, a ritual for destroying Apep involved mangling and burning a wax model of a tortoise and then urinating on it.13 Supposedly this episode is all a dream. Aristomenes’ nightmare may even include his confrontation with the hostler who suspects him of murdering Socrates, and his own attempted suicide, a mortal sin in Isiac theology.14 The two men sally forth on the morrow to picnic under a plane tree, that is, a sycamore (nht), sacred in Egyptian myth and occurring in Plato where Phaedrus and the Athenian Socrates sit under one in the countryside pleasantly dabbling their feet in a nearby rivulet while discussing the nature of [homosexual] love.15 But our Apuleian daliesque Socrates grows mortally ill. Being thirsty, he drinks from the adjacent river whereupon the sponge in his neck falls out and he dies (1.19). How to interpret this implex? Men’s anxieties about women putting a hex on them, taking the heart out of them, or castrating them run thematically throughout the Metamorphoses. That witches can not cross flowing fresh water is an age-old motif of folklore. Robert Burns’ "Tam O’Shanter" testifies to the durability of the theme: "A running stream they dare na cross" (207). Because the sponge Panthia uses is from the salt sea, it has no power to protect Socrates as he drinks from the rivulet. At the end of this harrowing story, Lucius fatuously thanks Aristomenes for a delightfully merry story (1.20). If ever a young man did not know whither he was heading, it is Lucius. Ill Carrying a letter of introduction from one Demeas of Corinth, Lucius arrives at the house of his host, the usurious and penurious banker, Milo, who lives even beyond the suburbs. His name suggests the upper moving

Apuleius’ Golden A ss/I

stone of a grain-mill. His pert maid, Fotis, opens the door and asks Lucius a question which has a double meaning: "Do you wish to borrow money with species [that is, gold or silver as collateral]?" or "What species do you want me to change you into?" (1.22). Milo at table is dining on nothing. His beautiful witch of a wife, Pamphile, that is, "Lover-of-AU [Men]," sits on the couch at his feet. He requests Lucius to sit in her place. Only small talk having ensued, the famished Lucius breaks away as soon as he can to go to the baths and to a fish vendor to buy himself some supper. A gourmet food market in Latin is a forum cupidinis, but Apuleius is also using the phrase as Cupid’s market where sex is sold. Lucius beats the fishmonger’s price of a hundred denarii down to twenty. Here we must remember that in Pythagorean number symbolism a hundred is ten to the second power, ten times holier than the sacred Decad, (Figure 5). Twenty was ill-regarded by the Brotherhood, perhaps because the icosohedron, the twenty-sided regular polyhedron is the "anti-prism" of the sacred dodecahedron, the twelve-sided fifth solid which encircles the temporal universe. Thus the fish are not really much of a bargain. Meanwhile, the Chief Market Inspector called Pythias (suggesting Pythian Apollo, the Greek equivalent of Egyptian Helios/Horus), a former colleague of Lucius at the University of Athens, is enraged that the fishmonger has hooked Lucius for worthless produce. Pythias orders his retinue to throw the fish on the ground and stomp on them. This was an Isiac ritual for destroying the power of evil sex.16 We now realize what kind of vague "business" Lucius had come to Hypata for-monkey business. The naif young man yearns to experience the mystery of woman, but Milo has given him no help to further his "business." In fact, the elderly Milo has long since ceased to be interested in witches, including his wife. One must read closely here to realize that he probably propositions Lucius to be his catamite and that Lucius may have acceded (1.26). IV The next day Lucius, wandering about Hypata with awe of the enchantment that seems to be in the very stones, meets up with one Byrrhena who claims to be close kin to him, for his most holy mother Salvia and she were brought up together as sisters. These are two aspects of the same woman, the Good and Bad Mother of folklore, one of them being solicitous of her child, the other hating him, as does witching Venus also as we shall see (V.29,30). Byrrhena welcomes Lucius into her lavish home in the courtyard of

8/Tales within Tales which are stone statues of Victory standing on globes in each comer and a marble ensemble of Diana, her hunting dogs and the peeping-Tom Actaeon, anticipating a glimpse of the goddess bathing, but already being changed into a stag and about to be torn to pie.ces by dogs.17 Before Lucius leaves, Byrrhena warns him against his host’s wife, Pamphile, a notorious witch who can bring down the sun and the moon and generally reverse nature. This is a strange caveat for Byrrhena to give Lucius, for she herself is an older super­ witch. The four Victories in her courtyard symbolize her own control of the four corners of the earth-the intersecting of the celestial and ecliptic equators annually at the two equinoxes and the two solstices caused because the earth’s axis is tilted 23 !4 ° from the imaginary straight-up axis called the ecliptic. This 23 X A 0 tilt represents the result of Original Sin in Milton (Paradise Lost X.678-81): Some say he bid his angels turn askance The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more From the sun’s axle. They with labor pushed Oblique the centric globe. That Byrrhena detests men is exemplified by the statue of the virgin goddess, Diana. Further, that she is a handmaiden of the Egyptian Seth, god of cosmic chaos, whose sacred symbol was the yellowish red ass, is reflected in her name, derived from "red” in Latin and Greek, and "ass" from Latin burrus,18 Byrrhena is a red-headed she-ass devoted to Seth. She is a Bad Mother. Lucius returns to Milo’s house to find the little maid Fotis alone, cooking in the kitchen. Here occurs a delightful erotic description of her wiggles as she stirs the pot. Lucius has piously told himself that he dare not dishonor his host Milo by seducing his wife Pamphile, but an affair with the slave Fotis would be another matter. They plan a love-feast in the evening during which Fotis laughingly tells him she will do battle (proeliabor) with him. With delicate skill Apuleius describes their night of pleasure. This notion of the battle of the sexes anticipates the Pyrrhic war-dance of young men and women in a preludic act in the Corinthian Circus (X. 29), and the Judg­ ment of Paris which led to the Trojan War (X. 30f.).19 V The wealthy Byrrhena sends an invitation to Lucius to attend a formal dinner. He is already so enslaved by the slave Fotis that he must ask her permission to go, which she reluctantly gives. She warns him about

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marauding gangs who might set upon him on his way home. His sword, he replies, wül protect him. While at the lavish dinner, Lucius mentions witchcraft as endemic in Hypata. A guest says that one Thelyphron, also present, had cruelly suffered at the hands of witches, whereat the company boisterously laugh. In anger Thelyphron rises to leave, but Byrrhena implores him to stay and tell his tale so that her son Lucius may enjoy its delightfulness. Her sadism comes to light during Thelyphron’s horrifying story. Thelyphron, incidentally, means Weakor Woman-Witted\ He masochistically enjoys telling about his humiliation at the hands of witches (II. 2 If.). Thelyphron, low in funds after a tour, had accepted an offer by an advertiser, one Philodespotus (.Lover-of-Power) standing on a stone in the forum, for someone to guard his master’s corpse throughout the night against the defilement of witches. In hieroglyphics, a stone with the determinative of a god is Seth (a determinative tells the reader which class the glyph belongs to). Had the rectangle been enclosed by a fish at each end, it would have meant the Pegasus "Square” in Pisces in the heavens.20 Thelyphron accepts with alacrity. In the death chamber he sings to keep himself awake. But a witch weasel hypnotically stares at him so that he falls into a dead sleep. Thronging in, the witches gnaw off his nose and ears and then attach wax copies. Alas, the witches had confused the live man with the corpse because both men were called Thelyphron! In Isiac terms, the dead man had had no kà, usually translated as "double," but "guardian spirit" is nearer the mark, so that the widow’s Sethian steward had had to hire one for his master. The next day as the dead Thelyphron’s cortège enters the forum, his uncle accuses the widow of murdering her husband because of a lover. He proclaims that he had long since hired a famous thaumaturge, Zatchlas, to raise the dead man long enough to confirm that his wife had indeed killed him. How did Apuleius come by the name Zatchlas? The long form of Seth was Sutech (Swth), perhaps Zatch (Sàth) in Graeco-Roman times. Las is "of the South (Rs)." Hence the name Zatchlas probably means "Seth of the South." During the raising of the ghost from Hades who had been still crossing Styx, Thelyphron, the hired kà, presses close to the bier and gets up on a stone to see better. The ghost, telling of his experiences the night before, points to Thelyphron, revealing how witches had come into the death chamber and by mistake had chewed off his nose and ears. Astonished, the live Thelyphron feels them, whereupon they fall off. The crowd laughs uproariously. And there the tale abruptly ends.

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Was the widow guilty? Apuleius does not say, but he has given enough Isiac dues so that I believe not. Unlike Isis (4j/) who was impregnated with Horus by lying over the dead Osiris, the widow does not conceive by lying over a corrupt corpse who may have been Philodespotus’ catamite. Further, her maid’s name is Myrrhina. Egyptians extensively used myrrh to embalm a corpse so that she may represent Nephthys (Nfdys), goddess of the dark and the dead as Isis was goddess of light and rebirth. That Zatchlas has been "long since hired" shows the cunning of the uncle’s premeditation. He himself probably killed his nephew for the inheritance. VI Byrrhena now tells Lucius that the next day in Hypata is the Festival of Risus, god of laughter ( = Gelos in Dionysiac revels). Begging him to devise some merriment to honor so great a god, he solemnly promises to do so. Then he takes his leave, drunkenly tottering home (II.32f). Now comes the famous battle with the wine-skins, retold in Don Quixote and Joseph Andrews. In his stupor Lucius sees three "robbers" battering on Milo’s door. Bravely wielding his sword, he kills them. The next morning he is arrested for the murder of three citizens. At his trial in the amphitheater with the audience all seated on stones, he snivels, begs for mercy, and lies. Then the widows and mothers of the murdered men, having come with blubbered faces to confront the killer, are ordered by the Chief Justice to pull off the cloth covering the bodies that Lucius may gaze on the havoc he has wrought. To his amazement and the raucous laughter of the crowd there lie on the bier three slashed goat-skins, which, filled with air, had been bobbing around Milo’s door the previous night. Lucius has indeed done great honor to Risus, the god of laughter. He slinks home to Milo’s by back alleys. Was Byrrhena part of the elaborate plot to humiliate Lucius? I think so, but we shall never know. VII Now comes one of Apuleius’ brilliant switches from the every-day world that has already made an ass of Lucius, to the world of woman’s magic which will make a "real" ass of him. Downcast, Fotis arrives at his room that night. Vm the real cause of what you suffered today. Here, take this whip and beat me." Lucius is appalled and indignantly breaks the whip. This may reflect Apuleius’ objection to the whipping of women during the Quest for Dionysus/Eros in those mysteries.21 It seems that her mistress Pamphile is desperately in love with a

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Boeotian who refuses to come to her. The Athenians considered Boeotians stupid clodhoppers. That the elegant, brooding, and beautiful Pamphile loves a country bumpkin is a masterly touch of Apuleian humorous contrast. Desperate, she orders her maid to go to the barber shop after the Boeotian has had a haircut and pick up three of his hairs so that, by working magic with them, she can force her beloved to come to Milo’s door. The barber, however, suspecting sorceries by Pamphile and Fotis, refuses to allow her access to the Boeotian’s hair, a hilarious quest for Love’s sake in a barbershop. Fearing Pamphile’s wrath, Fotis had then plucked hairs from three goatskins. Hence, instead of the Boeotian, the three bloated goatskins had arrived at Milo’s door seeking their own. This story is so ridiculous that the reader laughs because of Apuleius’ genius in extending the theme of the goatskins into a sub-tale of woman’s witchery. Fotis is at last comforted by Lucius. Then he begs her to let him observe Pamphile’s magic. While he watches Pamphile smearing herself with an unguent that turns her into an owl which flies to the beloved Boeotian, Lucius cannot wait to be also turned into a bird of prey. Fotis obliges, but alas, she is only a bungling amateur witch smearing him with the wrong oil. Instead of a bird, he turns into an ass. Wanting to kick his mistress to death, he finally accepts her promise to get him on the morrow some roses, the antidote for asshood. It is interesting to note that there has been no love between Lucius and Fotis, only youthful licentiousness so that Fotis (Photis is Greek meaning Light) has not yet been illumined enough to see her beloved as he really is. Lucius, also immature, wishes to kill Fotis whom he does not understand any more than she does him. Fotis now fades out of the narrative, having been an introduction to a harlot’s undeveloped feminine, as Lucius illustrates the philandering undeveloped male. Lucius trots off to the stable for the night thinking that his white horse will gladly welcome him, but his white horse and Milo’s pack-ass attack him. As the charioteer of his soul he is now an ass himself in non-control of his better self and its teammate, Milo’s pack-ass. Lucius’ soul is in shambles. Apuleius’ parody of Plato’s Phaedrus is nothing short of magnificent comedic genius, as noted above. In the night, however, a gang of robbers assault Milo’s house, driving off the white horse, Milo’s pack-ass, and the asinine Lucius, all laden with loot from Milo’s. VIII There now occur three robbers’ tales of their heavy losses. They

12/Tales within Tales represent the Men’s House of various societies wherein women are forbidden to enter, with overtones of homosexuality pervading them. The first concerns Lamachus who loses an arm cut off by a beseiged miser. The second tells how an old woman tricked a robber by luring him to a window and then pushing him out. The third is an intricate tale of bears wherein the robbers are defeated.22 In short, exclusive Men’s Societies, unable to relate with women, are self-defeating masochists. IX Now come off-center in the first ten chapters the three magnificent tales of Grace (Charity), Psyche (Butterfly [of the feminine soul]), and the matron Plotina, mother of ten children, enleaved in each other, illustrating the drive of women for loving married love.23 The old drudge of the robbers soothes Charity whom they have kidnapped from her bridegroom (IV.23f). Embedded in the hag’s tale is the delicate arabesque of the Cupid and Psyche story, and later the story of Plotina’s sacrifice to restore her husband to favor to the emperor at Rome. All three women must strengthen their masculine souls (masculinas animas) to succeed. Haemus who tells the story of Plotina to the robbers talks of his transvestism. Plotina dresses like a man to evade robbers. Haemus as a woman escapes on an ass pursued by Roman soldiers. The three tales illustrate Apuleius’ genius for creating tales within tales, all thematically related. Grace finally summons up enough masculine courage to escape from the robbers on Lucius the ass, but at a three-way crossroads where Hecate rules, they are recaptured (VI.29f). She is a witch goddess, an aspect of Fate.24 The unresolved argument between Lucius and Grace whether to take the left or right road (left is masculine, right feminine) results in their failure, for they are recaptured by the gang. The balance between the feminine and masculine has not yet been resolved. The hag had told Charity the story of Cupid and Psyche. There once lived a king and queen who could not find a husband for their youngest daughter, for her great beauty has made her an earthly Venus to be worshiped but not to be married to a mortal man. Desperate, the king consults Apollo’s oracle at Miletus.25 The god, though an Ionian Greek, graciously prophesies in Latin that the king must marry her to a dire winged dragon. Arrayed as a bride, Psyche is escorted with funeral torches and wails to a crag. With sure psychological insight, Apuleius depicts here the Death of the Maiden. But to her surprise she is wafted to a pleasant vale. Nearby is a

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palace lighted not by the sun but by its gold and silver walls and gem-stone floors. At night Psyche fearfully hears her unknown husband come to her. Climbing on to the couch he makes her his bride, and leaves before dawn. She has been deflowered by an intrusive unknown male, but in time from habit she thinks she is "in love" with him. He has warned her not to receive her two sisters. When alone, a captive in her sunless, gorgeous prison, she yearns for her kin. Showering manipulative bewitching kisses on him, honeying him with "I love you more than life" and "Cupid is nothing compared with you," her unknown lover yields, although he commands her not ever to speak of him to her sisters. Note here that Psyche instinctively knows, as a wife imprisoned by the patriarchy, how to beguile and wheedle her husband. She has become a "witch,” dreaded by men. This earthly Venus is like Aphrodite Anadyomene who rose from sea-foam: both know how to whet men’s desire. When Venus advertises for the return of her slave Psyche, her reward to the lucky man will be seven bewitching kisses, one of them even tongue-probing (VI.8). Psyche’s two sisters arrive. They press her to talk about her husband. She first replies that he is a handsome young hunter, then that he is a middleaged business man. Realizing she knows nothing of him, they tell her he is a ravenous python which will devour her and her unborn child. Heretofore scholars have not noted that these three categories mirror the Isiac triad of Harpocrates (Hr-pi-hrat), the young sun; Heru-Ra (.Hr-Rh), the sun at noon; and the dying sun dropping behind the mountain- HeruManus or Heru-Tem (Hri-tm). The sun was daily attacked by the dreaded arch-serpent Apep or Aapef (A&ppf), which is a double for the snake Seth, the ever-lasting serpent. Psyche’s husband is at first young, then middle-aged, and at the last a senex death-serpent. This monster recalls the old man of Metamorphoses (VIII.21) who apparently changes into Apep and devours a strong young runaway slave. The terrified Psyche, in love with her husband but hating the beast, with new-found boldness sheds her sex. She has come a long way from timid virgin and wheedling witch imprisoned by the patriarchy. She has acquired a masculinam an imam, driven to find out who her husband is. Seizing a knife, with a lantern she lights up the bed. And behold! There lies the gentlest beast of all-Love himself. Pricking herself accidentally with one of his arrows, she now truly is in love. But burned with oil dripping from the lamp, Amor flies off to his mother’s house. As the masculine soul he is no more mature than Psyche, for he returns to matriarchal "Mommy." Wandering the earth to find her beloved, in despair she tries to drown herself in a stream, but reeds prevent her. Cast back on the bank, she finds

14/Tales within Tales Pan teaching his beloved Echo to tune her seven-reeded pipes, symbolic of the harmony of the seven planetary spheres. Pan, knowing of Psyche’s lost love, advises her to seek him at all cost, for suicide would end all possible harmony with her beloved. Venus, she who rose from the foam of the sea, furious that her son, Amor, has in secret married an earthly Venus whom men worship to the neglect of her own shrines, has Mercury proclaim that her slave, Psyche, the feminine soul owned by the matriarchy, must be returned to her. After Psyche surrenders to her, she shrewishly yells at her, pulls her hair and has her whipped. Venus assigns Psyche four impossible tasks.26 The first is to sort mixed grain seeds; earth ants help her to sift unselective maleness into forms. For her second task, she must collect "wool like gold" from a vicious herd of sheep; a rush tells her to wait until nightfall, obviously when the zenith of the fiery rams will have subsided. Thirdly, she must collect waters of Styx and Cocytus as they fall into Hades from a high mountain infested with dragons. Surprisingly, Jupiter, father of Amor, aids her by sending his eagle to collect for her the freely flowing dangerous water of maleness in her little urn (iumula).27 Psyche’s three helpers represent the elements of earth, fire, and water through which she must pass, and later, air, to become deified. And last, on her own she must take a box down to Hell itself to collect from Proserpina her beauty secrets. A tower tells her how to proceed. The tower, of course, is Good Fortune, Tyche/Ceres, whose head-dress is that of a turreted, walled town which guards civilization based on monogamous marriage.28 Having herself been raped, and grieving for her daughter Proserpina raped by Hades, she guides Psyche to retrieve her status as wife and mother. Psyche must not give in to pity, a peculiarly feminine self-indulgence, when a lame man driving a lame ass begs for help in Hades.29 Nor must she pull into Charon’s boat an old man swimming in the Styx, crying for help.30 She must not assist the three crones of fate, obviously Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, for her own fate is still in the balance. Unfortunately, or fortunately, on arriving again in the air of this world, Psyche, overcome by curiosity, peeks into the beauty box to beautify herself for Amor, and is put into a coma.31 At once, Cupid heroically escapes from his mother’s house and flies to rescue his beloved who has completely surrendered to him. They are then married on Olympus, Psyche having become an immortal by Love. Psyche has with the help of her instincts shown enough staying power to demonstrate that she is beginning to understand the masculine, hence

Apuleius’ GoidenAss/ 15

Jupiter’s eagle helping her to fill her umula with male hellish water. An aside is necessary here. It is from Hesiod, the farmer-poet of the 500 s B.C. that we first hear of Pandora. In his Works and Days?2 Hermes names the earth woman Pandora (Gift to Everyone), endowed with all the beauteous gifts of the gods to be the ruin of men. Epimetheus (After-Thought) accepts her from Zeus, even though his brother Prometheus (Fore-Thought) had warned him to accept no gift from the father of the gods. She has a jar which she opens and lets forth gloomy afflictions to pain men. Only Hope remains. Yet Valerius Babrius of the second century A.D. reports another tradition.33 Man is given an urn in which are all blessings, but unable to control his curiosity he takes off the lid whereupon they all wing back to heaven, leaving only Hope. Before the woman-hating Hesiod’s myth, this may have been the earlier, more psychologically probable version with man curious about woman’s umula. In any event, woman’s urn or box is a major source of man’s anxiety about the dangerous, witching sex in a patriarchy. X The story of Grace, as previously mentioned, surrounds the robbers’ hag’s tale of Amor and Psyche. The contrast between the pitiful old woman telling the story and the delicate filigree of Psyche is startling, for Grace, the maiden kidnapped for ransom by the robbers from her bridegroom, Tlepolem us (Mighty Fighter), is in the early stages of her psychic development, whereas the old woman has given up hope.34 She later hangs herself.35 The homosexual robbers have no interest whatsoever in Grace as a woman. In fact, after a certain Haemus (Bloody), the name of the mountain in Thrace where Zeus finally killed Typhon, the Greek equivalent of Seth, comes to ally himself with their band, throwing down a "dowry" of two thousand coins, the robbers agree with him that they would do well to sell her as a virgin for a high price to a brothel.36 What Lucius the ass, overhearing the negotiations, can not understand is why, as the men get drunker with their incessant toasts to Mars, Lord of Battle, Grace and Haemus sneak endearments. "Why, she’s a whore after all," he thinks. But Haemus is Grace’s fiancé in disguise. When the gang are well sotted they are dispatched. He and Grace, astride Lucius, return to her home, are married, and supposedly live happily ever after. Lucius the ass is told lovingly by Grace that he shall always be a pet with plenty of forage. Unfortunately, her slaves later run away taking the ass with them. There follow several enfolded stories before Grace and Tlepolemus again appear in the story.

16/Tales within Tales XI By Book VIII we hear of the deaths of Grace and Tlepolemus. He had gone out hunting with a friend, one Thrasyllus who inordinately lusts after Grace. Thrasyllus hamstrings Tlepolemus’ horse which throws him, and a wild boar which Tlepolemus had wounded does the rest with Thrasyllus spearing his friend in the right thigh. Here we have not only a reenactment of the death of Osiris (Asar) by Seth as a wild boar, but also that of Adonis killed by the god of war, Ares, also in the shape of a boar (VIII.5). Now comes the chilling episode of Grace’s revenge. Assuming grief, Thrasyllus consoles her, gradually making advances to her. But in a dream, Tlepolemus, whom she worships as Dionysus/Eros, comes to her, telling her how he died at his friend’s hands. Encouraging the traitor, she makes a rendez-vous with him, but has his wine laced with a narcotic. Like a Fury, she puts out his eyes, rhythmically reciting a diatribe.37 He who could not love with sight now sightless sees Grace as the epitome of womanhood, his heart’s desire. Like a Bacchante she roves through the city to her beloved husband’s tomb where she stabs herself to death. Thrasyllus there makes his way where he entombs himself. Starved of love, he dies of starvation, a brilliant weaving of action and symbol. This is one of the most powerful short stories in the world. Like the delicate story of Cupid and Pysche, Grace has progressed from faint-hearted virgin to a knowledge of her own feminine individuation which not only has been enlightened by masculine Dionysiac invasion but had loved it. XII This summary brings us up through part of Book VIII. The rest of the tales in the first ten books show the ass sinking lower into the slime of corruption by either witnessing first-hand shameful doings, or by participating in them, or by hearing of them. The three last stories concern depraved women with no magic whatsoever, but who with sheer lust and perversion, destroy men, women, and themselves. The first is of a "Phaedra" who falls in love with her stepson who bluntly rejects her. She plans to kill him with poison so that he can not tell his father of her would-be incest. An alert medicus substitutes narcotics for the poison (X.2-13). The second tale is of a "Pasiphae," a well-heeled matron who links, not with a bull as in the myth, but with an ass, Lucius (X.19-22). The third is of a "Medea" so deranged with envy of her sister-in-law that she thrusts a flaming torch into the girl’s groin and kills four other people. Her punishment? To copulate in the Corinthian Games with the ass

Apuleius* Golden A s s /ll in a cage, after which a wild beast will devour them both (X.23-29). XIII Lucius has at long last had enough. Having bolted from the lewd circus, he runs six miles to Cenchreae where there was a magnificent temple to Isis recently excavated from under water and where Apuleius himself had been a quester in the Isiac mysteries.38 After purifying himself in the Corinthian Gulf, Lucius prays to the full moon for deliverance from asshood. She is the Hathor aspect of Isis whose disk appears on her headdress between a cow’s horns, usually known to us as the goddess of love, but literally, of the heart’s circuits (H&tyahir). The ass’s paean of praise in poetic prose to the unknown power is an aretalogical hymn. In a dream Isis reveals herself as Queen of Heaven, Mistress of All the Elements, the Embodiment of All Divinities, who are aspects of the universe. She is the Divine Word (/iw), the Logos, who informs the world. She is the emanation from the Eternal One, "The Ouze," as Spenser so aptly writes, "whom men Isis doe rightly name" (F.Q.IV.ll). In the myth Isis is Light. The Book o f the Dead says that with her glorious hair she made light in the death-chamber of her husband Orisis, the mummified dead sun of yesterday. She lies over him restoring his potency so that she is impregnated with their son, Horus-Ra, the full sun of today’s noon. In icons Isis’ hair becomes magnificent wings spreading over the mummified body. She is always identified by her headdress of a very high throne, the proportions of which may be mathematical (Figure 6).39Nephthys, goddess of darkness and married to Seth, god of the night, mourns at Osiris’ head. Isis, goddess of light and rebirth, mourns at his feet, hence Spenser’s line that he "under Isis’ feete doth sleep forever," F.Q. 22.7. Not quite. The dead Osiris is reborn as Horus. Lucius’ rebirth as Horus, XI.23, does not end his heroic growing experience of the m asculine. He must know Osiris as trip artite masculine-one part godhead, two parts temporal spirituality. His third Way is through the mysteries of the King of Kings, at last knowing the essence of Etemality, the One, the Circle, the Sphere. XIV We have observed the tortuous Way of masculine mysteries. A man must overcome his mother’s pulling him back to her. Lucius early on has freed himself from his Bad Mother, Byrrhena, "as if from a chain," II.6. He had already become an ephebe, accepted by the elders. Demeas, whose name in today’s jargon would mean Public-Relations-Expert, has written him a

18/Tales within Tales letter of introduction to the wealthy banker, Milo, of Hypata. Lucius has had to shed his virginal shyness, virginali verecundia, 1.23, to become "manly," as the patriarch encourages. The wanton slave Fotis is the perfect nobody with whom to have his first heterosexual encounter. Unlike the maidens Grace and Psyche, she knows her sexual powers and enjoys them, but she belongs to the half-world of society, the demi-monde, who, while not fearing men, have contempt and hate for them. Yet we must not forget that Apuleius with great sympathetic insight called her Fotis, Light: she sexually enlightens Lucius. She is a tragic "necessity" in a patriarchy. As a nobody, she appropriately disappears from the tale after making an ass of her "enemy," Lucius, whom she had "battled." Finally the animus must fight the dragons of external stress. The ass is hardly a white horse astride which is a knight in shining armor. He is mostly fearful, cowardly, and aghast when meeting evil externalities. Yet at the end, though he may die, he yanks himself from his temporal degradations to become the heroic Horus-Ra. The feminine must travel a no less harrowing Way. The virgin must part from her mother and father who deliver her to a male beast to whom she must often traumatically transfer her love from her father. But knowledge of the intrusive male escapes her until, with masculina anima, she sets out to discover him, and he is Love. XV To conclude, Apuleius’ commedia, too long under-rated, is a brilliant Latin masterpiece of the Graeco-Roman period. Its intricate geometricallybased structure will be solved only by Apuleian scholars using computers who are also versed in ancient mathematics.40 Also much more work needs to be done on the numerous unifying thematic allusions in the Metamorphoses. But meanwhile, let us enjoy (laetamur) this work as Apuleius urges us to do in the Proem.

Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville

Apuleius' Golden Ass/19

Figures

Figure 1. The so-called "Pythagorean" triangle with sides of 3,4,5 united enclosed in a circle:

Figure 2. The Left Eye of Horus is the Moon, fractured by Seth, God of Disorder. Thoth, God of measures, restores it every month.

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Figure 3. The bisected Cheops pyramid results in a triangular area of 1/5 of that of a pentagon.

The apex angle BAC=72°. When the perpendicular AD is dropped, the result is two Pythagorean "perfect” triangles of 36°, 90°, and 54°. This "magical" triangle "enabled ancient mathematicians to measure lengths of V2, V3y V5 . . . without arithmetical computation" (Thompson, op. cit., 262). It should also be noted that the hypotenuse of a "perfect" triangle is the "magical" number, 1.23, or a right triangle of 123 hypotenuse, and sides of 72 (a cosmic number) and 100 (the Tetraktys X 10). Figure 4. This is the fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron which surrounds Time. It has 30 edges, 12 faces, 20 vertices, the length 1 /0 . It is the inverse of the icosahedron, which has 20 faces, 12 vertices, the length 0 .

Apuleius’ Golden A ss/21

Figure 5. The Holy Decad (the Tetraktys) is an arithmetical progression.

•

•

•

1 10X10=100 2 3 4 -10

Figure 6. Isis’ headdress is a stepped "throne." One of its forms has an area of 8 units. 12=1 + 22=4 + 3X1 = 3 8

Eight in Pythagorean theology represented not only Justice but also Harmony-the octave. The third Platonic solid, the octahedron, is the dual of the second, the cube, and the double of the pyramid, the first solid. Note how the number 3 (1,2,3 = the Holy Family of Osiris, Isis, and Horus) runs through these measurements. If the diagonals, AB, CD, and EF are drawn in the figure

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AB = 1.4142 (-V2) + CD = 2.8284 (=ABX2) + EF =1.7320 (V3) 5.9746 These irrational numbers were easy to remember-important probably for architects building inclines. Note that for practical use 5.97 equals almost 6. AB = 1.4142 + CD = 2.8284 4.2426 -EF= 1.7320 2.5106 This is about 2 1/2 for quick estimates for a slant. Further AB2= 1.9999 = 2. But why would Isis’ "crown" represent computations when Thoth was the god of measures? In Apuleius Isis is the Logos, the Word. But in Egyptian mythology it is Thoth who is the Master of Words who teaches Isis "Words of Power." Incidentally, "Thoth on his stairs" is a hieroglyph containing a five-stepped "throne," 5 being the cosmic number of the pentagon, 12 of which create the sphere separating the Eternal from Time.

Notes

apuleius, Florida 26.1. 1Metamorphoses 1.4: del medico baculo- Aesculapius. See Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Discourses, 47-53. This ancient neurotic, in and out of the god’s temple-hospitals all his life, reveals much of the psychotherapy which is practised today.

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I use the words Way and Quest for experiencing a Mystery rather than Initiation, which signifies only a beginning. I avoid the word Cult because of its patronizing overtones. 3Timaeus 35B-39D; De Platone 1.10. 4373F-374A. ^ h o th was Hermes Trismegistos of the Greeks. 6Plutarch, De lside et Osiride, 356A.13. It should be noted that 72 is a "cosmic1' number. Each of the 5 apex angles of each triangle of the pentagon is 72° (x5 = 360°=the circle). Further, because of the precession, there is a 1° shift every 72 years in the zodiac. 7Peter Tompkins and Livio Catulli Stecchini, Secrets o f the Great Pyramid (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), pp. 378-79. 8See Strabo b.6.20; also my paper, "Lucius’ ‘Business’ in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius," Papers on Language and Literature, 5 (1970), p. 349. Hypata is not even in Thessaly proper. It is in the "sub-province" of Aenis. But Apuleius wanted to gull the reader with a pun. Hypaté (Hypatâ, Doric) [thea] is Isis, the supreme sorceress (EA. Wallis Budge, The Gods o f the Egyptians [New York: Dover, 1969], 2.214,227). So Hypata had to be the "prime city" of Thessaly where witches abide. He also conflates seven-gated Thebes (IV.9) of Boeotia-"one-hundred gated" in Juvenal, Sat. 15.6-and Egyptian Thebes. Thessalian Thebae was on the Pegasaean Gulf. Of Metamorphoses. IV.9, P.G. Walsh, 77xe Roman Novel (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1970), p. 158, uninsightfully believes it to be "a typically loose end." 9I noted Apuleius’ parody of Plato’s tripartite soul, "Candidus: A Unifying Theme in Apuleius’ MetamorphosesClassical Journal, 64 (1968), p. 108. See J. Gwyn Griffiths, "Isis in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius," in Aspects o f Apuleius* Golden Ass [I am delighted to learn that Apuleius himself had a golden ass!] (Groningen: Bouma, 1978), p. 166, n. 127, and 1423. G riffiths does not credit me nor does he credit R. Thibau, Les Metamorphoses d'Apulée et la Théorie Platonicienne, 3 (Gent: 1965), pp. 1023, who first noted the parody, a book I had not seen in 1968. 10Hesiod, Works and Days, 83. 11Hinges (smait) and door-bolts (ss) were sacred, for they let mystagogues into temples and kept the profane out. For Hermes Stropheus as door-hinge, see K. Kerényi, Hermes (New York: Analytical Psychology Club, 1976), p. 84.

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Meroe, Greek for Mârâ, an island in the Nile, was the capital of Nubia in Upper Egypt. It was associated with ritual slaughter as SA.B. Mercer, The Religions o f Ancient Egypt (London: Luczac, 1949), pp. 356ff., shows. Diodorus 1.45.88, and 0\i&, Ars Am. 1.647, also allude to this practice. Also see P.L. Shinnier, Meroë: A Civilization of the Sudan in Ancient Peoples and Places, 55 (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 150. 12The tortoise is an ambivalent symbol. As Apep, it was an enemy of Ra: Book o f the Dead (ed. Budge), p. 159. As a Sethian devouring snake it appears in Metamorphoses VIII.21f. As for urinating on Aristomenes, there is here a reflection of a ritual for destroying the Apep tortoise (E.A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God of the Egyptians [London: Oxford University press, 1934] p. 127. It is also a gross parody of the lustral power of Nile Water when M ithras ablutes Lucius in Metamorphoses XI.23. See George Widengren, "Some Reflections on the Rites of Initiation," in Studies in the History of Religions, supplement to Numen, 18 (Leiden: Brill, 1965), pp. 301f. 13See the plates between pp. 162-3 in Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Duchend’s Hamlet's Mill (Boston: Gambit, 1969). 14Suicide (mwt) was forbidden by Isiac theology because it denied godhead in self, one of god’s manifestations (Papyrus Ani, 34B). 15Phaedrus 229A. For Egyptian sacred sycamores see E A Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, 2.103,107. With usual Egyptian specificity, the sacred sycamore was in the temple of Amon in Thebes at the geodesic intersection of the arc of the meridian and the latitude at Thebes. 16See P. Derchain and J. Hubaux, "L’Affaire du marché d’Hypata dans les Métamorphoses d’Apulée," AC, 27 (1958), 100-104, which quotes four Egyptian texts for reducing an enemy to helplessness by publicly stomping on fish. Priests avoided eating the oxyrhyncus particularly because it had fed on Osiris’s phallus. See Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 385B.18. Also see n. 9, G.C. Drake, op. cit., pp. 356-7. Atargatis was a Syrian fish-goddess whose rites Apuleius indicted, Metamorphoses VIII.24f. 17Dogs are anti-Sethian in the Metamorphoses. The "mad-dog" episode (IX.2) is only hearsay. One should remember that Anubis (Anpw) was the dog-headed god who weighed the heart of the dead against the feather of Justice. See J. Landee, Death as an Enemy According to Ancient Egyptian Conceptions, supplement to Numen, 5 (Leiden: Brill, 1960), p. 225. [The palace at Caserta likewise has magnificent statuary of the Diana/Actaeon episode in its garden. JBH] 18Apuleius, a master-punster, knew very well that the name Byrrhena

Apuleius’ Golden Ass/25

was from burrica, a red she-ass, derived from burra, the plural of which, burrae, meant trifles. The word survives in French bourrique, a she-ass. It also derives from Greek pyrrha, red. A red ass was ritually sacrificed by being pushed over a precipice, so that Seth’s "life" would strengthen Osiris’s whom he had killed. See A. Morel, Kings and Gods o f Egypt (New York: Putnam, 1912), p. 85. 19The reenactment of the Judgement of Paris is the second preludic episode depicting the war between the sexes, X.30f. The third, that between the ass and Medea, is aborted by Lucius’s bolting from the arena. 20Erman and Grapow’s Wörtebuch der aegyptischen Sprache (Berlin: Deutschen Academien, 1957), translates this figure as a "fish-pond." For a fuller commentary on Thelyphron’s tale see my article, "The Ghost Story in The Golden Ass by Apuleius," Papers on Language and Literature, 13 (1977), pp. 3-15. 21See Michael Grant, Eros in Pompeii (New York: Bonanza, 1982), p. 76 and facing pfate. 22Bears were not indigenous in Egypt. In Graeco-Roman times, Apuleius would have known that our constellation of the Great Bear (Mshtyw) was the Egyptian Bull’s Foreleg (ftps). There is some ambivalence about the foreleg. With it Seth as bull killed Osiris in one mythologem. Further, it contained the soul of Seth. Yet as G. Rudnitzky argues, Die Aussage über das Auge des Horus (Copenhagen: 1956), p. 36, the evil forces of life must serve the good ultimately. Thus the foreleg becomes an Osirian symbol in the ritual of "The Opening of the Mouth" of the dead. It is presented, probably in facsimile, to the mouth. See E. Otto, Das ägyptische Mundoffnungsritual (Wiesbaden: 1960), 2, fig, i.44-46. In Apuleius the bears seem to be ambivalent: a Sethian robber, disguised as a bear, is destroyed by dogs (IV.18f), the ass is saved from a sadistic boy by a bear (VII.24), and in the clowns’ prelude to the Isiac rituals, a bear in matron’s habit was carried on a stool (XI.8). 23Note that Plotina has ten children, the number of the Pythagorean holy Decad. ^A t a Hecate crossroads, Y, one must make the awful choice of going left or right. Hence on the thirtieth of each month an offering (Hekdtaia) was made to her at the crossroads. When the ass asks why Charity is thus hastening towards Hell (Cur festinas ad Orcum), he is alluding to Hecate as a denizen of Hades. See Homeric Hymn 11.438-40 where Hecate "of the shining headband" touches Persephone. All four goddesses, Hecate, Demeter,

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Persephone and Artemis, are aspects of the seasons, the Horae. See Jane Harrison, Themis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), p. 408, for the triple Hecate, Fig. 121, for the Horae are her Moirae, the Fates. Also see Hymns of Orpheus, T o Fortune," 71,1.3-8. 25In the Preface (1.1), Apuleius promises to scatter (or gather together) tales in the well known manner of speaking in Miletus:"At ego tibi sermone isto Milesio varias fabulas conseram.mApuleius has already gulled the reader. Much ink has been used explaining "Milesian Tales,” without much insight, as racy stories. When Psyche’s father consults the famous oracle of Apollo at Miletus, Apuleius is giving the reader a clue of that Miletus is both a holy and a corrupt city. ^ I am indebted for most of the following to Erich Neumann’s brilliant interpretation in his Am or and Psyche: The Psychic Development o f the Feminine, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 27The eagle is a form of Zeus’ catamite, Ganymede, who became cupbearer to the gods, a male/female symbol. As Neumann points out, p. 105, Zeus and Ganymede are "strugglers" against the matriarchy. Ganymede was catasterized as Aquarius, thus connected with water, as in this episode. 28See Plate 40, John Ferguson, The Religions of the Roman Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), for the turreted Tyche of Antioch. 29That Asinius Marcellus, XI.27, relating to both ass and hammer in Latin, a priest of Osiris, is lame in the left foot is a clue that macho masculinity lacks perception of the feminine. For male/female coalescence, see Ovid, Meta. IX.666 on Isis’ changing Iphis from a girl to a boy. ^ h e senex here is again a symbol of Sethian old age and death. Note that unlawfully he is not in Charon’s skiff. 31Psyche has wrested the bewitching beauty-box from the matriarchy and made it her own. She metaphorically "dies" for Cupid, surrendering wholly to him. What Cupid, as male, never fully understands is that her curiosity has actually saved them both, Metamorphoses VI.20. 3279f. 33He wrote the very popular Mythiamboi Aisopeioi. See Babrius, Fabulae Aesopicae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1897), Section 58 on Elpis (Hope). ^ I t has not been sufficiently emphasized in Apuleian studies that Tlep(t)olomus was a son of Heracles. See the Iliad 11.658-66; Odyssey IV.561; Pausanius III.19.10. He brought nine ships from Rhodes, Iliad 3.226-7, 17.279-80; also the scholiast on Iliad 23.821. There was a yearly honor to him as hero at the setting sun, born to die and to be resurrected. See Jane

Apuleius’ Golden Ass/21

Harrison, Themis, pp. 374-75. 35The old hag, slave to the robbers, realizes that in her youth she should have, like Psyche, acquired a masculinam animam. She hangs herself from the tree of death, a cypress, VI.30. This is a tragic imitation of the "Hanging Ariadne." See Plutarch, Vit. Thes., 20.1. 36Note that two thousand is a multiple of twenty, disliked by Pythagoreans. 37In so short a paper it would be excessive to discuss the scansion of Grace’s sublime diatribe. The simplifed scansion of the first three phrases, if read aloud, yields the tremendous power of the whole. The vertical lines indicates ajlight pause. u En fidus / coniujgsjnei comes! En venator ^ e^regius! En carus^naritus! 38J.G. Hawthorne, "Cenchrae, Port of Corinth," Archeology, 18, 191200. 39For a picture of Isis with her headdress of a high, stepped "throne," see E.A. Wallace Budge, The Gods o f the Egyptians (New York: Dover reprint, 1969), plates opposite pp. 130-31. Those interested in the brilliance of Egyptian mathematics should read Stecchini’s monograph, and consult RA. Schwaller de Lubicz, Le Roi de la Théocratie pharaonique (Paris: Flammarion, 1961); Le Miracle egyptien (Paris: Flammarion, 1963); Le Temple de l'homme: Apet du Suc à Louqsor (Paris: Caractères, 1958). 40Apuleius probably has used variables of J), 0 , and other ratios in structuring his book. If one wonders whether ancient authors could be so mathematically subtle, let him consult Robert D. Stevick’s "Two Notes on Christ," New Series 20, University of Leeds, 1989, p. 293-309, to see the extent of the use of 0 ( = 1.618), its reciprocal ( = .618), and 0 2 (=2.618) in an Old English poem and in manuscript illuminations of the period. For Renaissance master-painters’ use of FI an d 0 , see the several works of Charles Funk-Hallet.

II. MAGIC IN APULEIUS* METAMORPHOSES DAVID MARTINEZ

magico susurramitie amnes agiles reverti, mare pigrum coligari, ventos inanimes exspirare; solem inhiberi, lunam despumari, stellas evelli, diem tolli, noctem teneri.

To say that magic plays an important role in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses is to state the obvious.1 But exactly what the nature of that role is and what viewis taken of magic, especially at the end of the novel, are questions which have generated a considerable amount of scholarly discussion and dispute. In one view, Lucius’ conversion to Isis in Chapter 11 is a conversion from magic; in another, it is a conversion to magic, but quite a different king of magic than that of the earlier books. To evaluate what happens to the theme of magic at the end, we must examine its development from the beginning. En route to Thessaly, the land of magic, Lucius encounters two travelers bound for the same destination. One of them, Aristomenes, is telling a story. His anonymous friend forbids him to continue the tale, which he considers as ridiculous as what some people claim with regard to magic: magico susurramine amnes agiles reverti, mare pigrum coligari, ventos inanimes exspirare, solem inhiberi, lunam despumari, stellas evelli, diem tolli, noctem teneri (1.3). . . . that magical mumbo-jumbo makes swift rivers change their course, binds the sea against its will, makes winds die out lifeless, stops the sun, causes the moon to drop foam, plucks out the stars, abolishes day, makes night persist.

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Lucius, however, chides the nameless traveler for his skepticism, and urges Aristomenes to continue. Aristomenes relates how his hapless friend Socrates, while returning home from business, first fell prey to thieves, and then to a witch with whom he had an affair and who robbed him of what few resources he had left. Socrates enumerated to him the powers of the witch as follows: ‘Saga* inquit ‘et divina, potens caelum deponere, terrain suspendere, fontes durare, montes diluere, manes sublimare, deos infimare, sidera extinguere, Tart arum ipsum inluminare’ (1.8). "She’s a witch," he said, "and a sorceress, with the power to pull down the heaven and hang high the earth, to harden springs and dissolve mountains, to raise up ghosts and bring low the gods, to darken the stars and illumine hell itself.2 Not much later, in Chapter 2, Lucius’ aunt Byrrhaena warns him of Pamphile’s magical prowess: omnem istam lucem mundi sideralis intis Tartan et in vetustum chaos submergere novit. "She knows how to plunge all this light of the starry universe into the depths of hell and into the ancient chaos" (2.5). Later, in 3.15, Photis describes powers of Pamphile, "quibus obaudiunt manes, turbantur sidera, coguntur numina, serviunt elementa." [ ... by which she makes ghosts obey, confounds the stars, compels the deities, and enslaves the elements.] About these various discourses on the powers of witches two points should be made. First, they are quite commonplace, occurring frequently elsewhere in ancient literature, especially in Roman poetry.3 Second, to understand the underlying principle of these descriptions, we must briefly consider some motifs in ancient creation narratives. I cite Humphries’s translation of Ovid, Metamorphoses Iff.: Before the ocean was, or earth, or heaven, Nature was all alike, a shapelessness, Chaos, so-called, all rude and lumpy matter, Nothing but bulk, inert, in whose confusion Discordant atoms warred: there was no sun To light the universe; there was no moon With slender silver crescents filling slowly; No earth hung balanced in surrounding air; No sea reached far along the fringe of shore.

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Land, to be sure, there was, and air, and ocean, But land on which no man could stand, and water No man could swim in, air no man could breathe, Air without light, substance forever changing, Forever at war: within a single body Heat fought with cold, wet fought with dry, the hard Fought with the soft, things having weight contended With weightless things. Till God, or kindlier Nature, Settled all argument, and separated Heaven from earth, water from land, our air From the high stratosphere, a liberation So things evolved, and out of blind confusion Found each its place, bound in eternal order. The force of fire, that weightless element, Leaped up and claimed the highest place in heaven; Below it, air; and under them the earth Sank with its grosser portions; and the water, Lowest of all, held up, held in, the land. With this compare the familiar words of Genesis 1: And God said, "Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. A common thread runs through the Biblical account of the creative activity of Yahweh and Ovid’s description of creation by the mysterious god whom he calls the opifex or fabricator, Latin words which he uses to translate the Greek demiourgos, the great, nameless creator whom Ovid borrowed from Greek philosophy. That common thread or theme is separation/ categorization, the discordant, w arring elem ents of chaos being compartmentalized into clearly-defined spheres of being. Most ancient creation stories, both classical and Near Eastern, involve in some way this progression from chaos to kosmos. In this context, we can see why the assertions of and about witches and magicians, such as those cited above, were condemned as impious.4 Practitioners of magic claimed to be able to reverse the creative work of the supreme god and to plunge the kosmos back

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into its primeval state of chaos and disorder. Often this chaos which the witch accomplishes by her spells consists in obliterating the distinction between upper world and lower world, that is, darkening the heavenly bodies so that they no longer give their radiance, and revealing the dark and dismal secrets of the underworld so that all the terrors and horrors of that realm are brought to light. In the reversed, chaotic world of the witch, what should be light becomes darkness and what should remain in the dark is openly displayed. This is the supreme annulment of the creator’s work and the ultimate reversion to chaos. The chaos effected by the witch is characterized not only by the mingling of upper world and lower world, but also by the mingling of the living with dead, that is, the conjurations of the spirits of the dead to appear among the living and perform the bidding of the witch or magician. It is, however, a well-known topos in magic that some ghosts are more accessible than others. Important in this regard is the account in Chapter 11 in which a certain baker, having discovered his wife in adultery, proceeds to reject her. The wife employs the services of a witch and commissions her either to win back her husband’s affections for her or kill him. The witch, having failed in the former option, ipsi iam miserrimi mariti incipit imminere capiti umbramque violenter peremptae mulieris ad exitium eius instigare (9.29)."... began at once to be intent on the very life of the poor husband and to provoke the ghost of a violently slain woman to kill him." Compare this with the instructions of an actual magical handbook from the fourth century A.D.: "At sunset place the [curse] tablet by the grave of one who died a violent or premature death.”5 We know from magical handbooks and tablets,6 which have been excavated in Egypt and various parts of the Mediterranean, that witches and magicians often invoke the ghosts of those who died violent and/or premature deaths. Since such persons died before their fated time, their souls cannot proceed to their final rest in the house of Hades, but must remain in a state of restless waiting and wandering until their allotted period is fulfilled. Such ghosts are thus more readily pressed into the service of witches than others.7 What we must realize at this point is that it is the magic of the witch and sorcerer that captivates Lucius at the beginning of the novel and to which he wants to devote himself, a magic which we may appropriately call the magic of chaos. It is the magic of chaos which gets him into trouble; through dabbling in it Lucius is turned into an ass. Professor J.G. Griffiths8 and others have pointed out that the figure of the ass in the Metamorphoses must be viewed in the broader context of Egyptian religion. For the Egyptians, the ass was the animal of the god Seth;

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in fact, Seth is sometimes portrayed with the head of an ass. In various strands of Egyptian belief, Seth becomes a kind of Satan figure9 who personifies baleful and evil forces. In this regard, it is especially important for the Metamorphoses, as Griffiths also notes, that Seth is both the god of black/chaos magic and the god who is most often associated with sexual excess.10 It is indeed striking how often in the earlier part of the novel the realm of magic is closely connected with the realm of the erotic and serves erotic purposes. In the closing book of the Metamorphoses, after Lucius is transformed from the animal of Seth to human shape, he is in essence called upon, in the words of the ancient baptismal formula, to "renounce the devil and all his works." In chapter 15 of this book, the priest reminds Lucius that the cause of his downfall was twofold: lustful excess and ill-starred curiosity,11 the latter obviously referring to his dalliance in the magic of chaos; thus the two realms of Seth are in view here. Lucius is required to deny both; and in fact his initiation into the priesthood of Isis includes a vow of chastity.12 In this context, it is not difficult to see why G. Luck has recently proposed that Lucius* conversion to the mysteries of Isis is a conversion from and rejection of magic.13 He has a point; Lucius* conversion is a rejection of a certain kind of magic; but Professor Luck does not adequately take into account that in the Egyptian pantheon, Isis is in fact the goddess of miracle and magic.14 This is not only true in the sphere of Egyptian religion, but it also becomes quite obvious with respect to the Greco-Roman deities with whom Isis is identified. In Lucius* prayer on the seashore at the beginning of Chapter 11, he addresses her first as Selene, the moon goddess. In her response to him, among the divinities with whom she identifies herself are Diana (Artemis), Proserpine (Persephone), and Hekate, all goddesses of magic and the underworld in Greco-Roman belief. Lucius’ conversion to Isis therefore may be best described as the transferring of his allegiance from one sphere of magic to another. He forsakes the magic of the witch and adopts the magic of Isis, which may appropriately be called the magic of kosmos, elsewhere known as theurgy. When Isis first addresses Lucius she relates her various spheres of power: *En adsum tuis commota, Luci, precibus, rerum naturae parens, elementorum omnium domina, saeculorum progenies initialis,15 summa numinum , regina manium, prima caelitum , deorum dearumque facies uniformis, quae caeli luminosa culmina, maris salubria flamina, inferum deplorata silentia nutibus meis dispenso: cuius numen unicum multiformi specie, ritu vario, nomine multiiugo totus veneratur orbis’ (11.5).

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"Behold, Lucius, moved by your prayers, here am I, mother of the universe, mistress of all elements, first-born of the ages, highest of divine powers, queen of the underworld spirits, supreme among the heavenly beings, the uniform manifestation of gods and goddesses, I who by my nod set in order the gleaming peaks of heaven, the wholesome sea breezes, the dreaded calm of the underworld, I, one goddess, whom the whole world adores under different aspects, varied cults and many names." It is important that the realms over which Isis rules are exactly those which, as we have seen the witches claim to control by their spells: the heavenly bodies (particularly the moon), the ocean, the elements, and especially the underword and its inhabitants. This correspondence is not coincidental; Isis is the goddess of magic. Thus, when Lucius embraces her sacred mysteries, he embraces also her higher magic of kosmos, order and piety, a magic which leads him to union and sympathy with the created order rather than rebellion against it or threats to undermine it, and finally, a magic firmly grounded in an abiding relationship with the supreme goddess of magical arts. Department of Classics University of Texas at Austin

Notes

*The Latin text of Apuleius used in this paper is R. Helm’s third Teubner edition (Leipzig, 1931), with the single exception that at 1.81 I accept Colvius’ emendation, divina. The translations of the quotations from the Metamorphoses are my own. 2The point being that the witch can by her spells confound the entire universe, which is here delineated through a series of five polarities. Each member of each pair is magically turned into the opposite state or made to assume the opposite position than is natural (see further below on "chaos"). For "polar expression" and its use in legal, religious and magnical contexts, see the present author’s P. Michigan XVI: A Greek Love Charm from Egypt (Atlanta, 1991), p. 53.

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3For example, Ovid, Amores, 1.8.5-18; 2.1.23-26; Vergil, Eclogues 8, 69-71; Tibullus 1.8.19-21; Propertius 1.1.19-24; Horace, Epodes 5.45-46; Lucan, Pharsalia 6.499-506; Petronius 134. 4An excellent example of such a condemnation may be found in the Hippocratic treatise De morbo sacro, Littré, vol. 6, p. 360, admirably discussed by Wilamowitz, Euripides Heracles (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959), on line 1232 (Vol. 3, pp. 248ff.). 5My translation of Papyri Graecae Magicae, IV, 332f. (Vol. I, p. 82), ed. K. Preisendanz (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1973). 6For the magical handbooks written on papyrus, see H.D. Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. xli-liii; for the magical tablets (mostly lead), see K. Preisendanz in Reallexikon ß r Antike und Christentum, 8.1-29 s.v. "Fluchtafel (Defixion)." A brief, less technical account of both may be found in G. Luck, Arcana Mundi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 15-18. 7On the prem ature dead (ahori) and those who died violently (biothanati) see J.H. Waszink in Reallexikon ß r Antike und Christentum, 2. 391ff., s.v. "Biothanati." *The Isis Book, Apuleius Metamorphoses Book X I (EPRO 39, Leiden, 1975), pp. 24-26, with addendum, p. 351. Add to his bibliography W. Fauth, Oriens Christianus 57 (1973), pp. 106ff. 9H.C. Youtie in Studies . . . in Honor of A.C. Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 189-192 ( = Scriptiunculae I [Amsterdam, 1973], pp. 525-28). 10Griffiths, pp. 25 and 50 with n. 2 (see above note 8). n Ibid.y p. 47. 1211.6,19. 13Luck, p. 40 (see above note 6), where he argues this point very strongly. But see p. 59, n. 93, where he also admits that "a higher kind of magic" is involved. 14Griffiths, pp. 47-48 (see above note 8). 15With saeculorum progenies initialis, "first-born of the ages," compare Paul’s description of Jesus as protokos pases ktiseos, "the first-born of all creation" (Col. 1.15).

III. NARRATIVE ENTA[I]LED: METAMORPHIC REFLEXIVITY IN OVID AND APULEIUS EDWARD PETER NOLAN

aJiae quae nitentibus speculis pone tergum reversis venienti deae obvium commonstrarent obsequium. Others carried shining mirrors behind them which were turned towards the goddess as she came, to shew to her those which came after as though they would meet her.1 In Ovid and Apuleius the act of narrating engenders a sense of reality that is radically metamorphic; this is no mere theme spun out to capture our attention and rescue us from ennui, but something vital and central; for both writers, the act of telling is a tallying: a moving analogue of the process of life itself. "Tales within Tales" was part of the official title of the conference from which the essays in this volume evolved; in keeping with that theme, I would like to focus attention here on two such interpolated narratives. The first comes from the Metamorphoses of Ovid and has Venus at its center as she assists Pygmalion in the consummation of his all-too-human love of a statue of his own creation. The second belongs to the Metamorphoses of Apuleius; it features Lucius’ refusal to commit an all-too-bestial act of copulation in a public theater. Each of these narratives derives from oral traditions of folklore and yet is embedded in the skein of an extensive, self-consciously "literary" structure addressed to insiders, members of a "hermeneutic circle," an aristocratic, multi-cultural audience that constituted the intellectual-and to

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some extent the political-core of the Roman Empire. Each tale also embodies a moment of telling metamorphosis that allows us, in its reflexivity, to see into the anatomy and the program of the work in which we find it. One of the most useful modern essays on The Golden Ass was written by Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1930s; it has only recently been brought to general American attention. In the midst of his provocative remarks on Apuleius, he brings Ovid forward for a sound logistical reason: to set the "novels" of Petronius and Apuleius off as sharply as possible from the Hellenistic romances which preceded them. But in doing so he implies that Ovid and Apuleius shared a common metamorphic strategy.2 Although the Latin masterworks of Ovid and Apuleius we are concerned with shared the same Greek title, Metamorphoses, their metamorphic programs were in fact radically different. I would like to concentrate here on this difference. Only then can we more clearly sense the profundity of the intuition which haunted both writers regarding the residence of a mediating dea at the shared boundaries of art and the living world. Apuleius gives her many names: Ceres, Paphian Venus, Dictynnian Diana, Cecropian Minerva, Stygian Proserpine, Juno, Bellona, Hecate, and Rhamnusia, while privileging finally the Egyptian name of Isis: Ovid calls her always Natura. In the opening salvo of his Metamorphoses, Ovid proposes to fill up the abyss of time stretching from the world’s beginning with stories of change: he promises unending song, a carmen perpetuum, which will weave a tapestry of narrative intelligibility between the foundational moment of the world’s genesis to this morning’s rising sun. And he keeps his promise: all of his narratives concerning change link into this larger design. Each narrative involves a transformation, each transformation effects a move forward in human history. In tale after tale, Ovid initiates us into and through the private passions of lust, ecstasy, and difficult love to betrayal, envy, fear, dread and loathing: from the dark, inverted horrors of sadistically homoerotic, incestuous and bestial love, through the undoing of genesis by means of parricide, matricide and infanticide, to the ultimate deconstructions of mutilation and cannibalism. As he narrates our collective human agon, he moves us over the final thresholds of human capacity for pain, through the vortex of radical metamorphosis, and into a new, releasing, and saving form of nature: be it flower, tree, stone, fountain, or coronal of stars. Over and over, Ovid’s Natura provides fresh forms of adequation into which the poet translates the delights and agonies humans suffer in their run toward death. And it is in this very act of translating the random movements of human experience into the more stable forms of nature that the individual victim finds escape, and that the suffering itself finds a public image of

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validation and valorization: a way to be remembered. Nothing ever dies for Ovid; what we think of as death is never cessation, but always the transformation of immortal energy into new forms. Death, as Pythagoras says in the final book, is only the beginning of a difference. Thus Natura, through the mediating efforts of the narrating artist, provides a haven of signification for the random acts of human suffering we all bear.3 O vid's Natura achieves a life of her own throughout the Metamorphoses: sometimes acting with the gods, sometimes above or below them, sometimes alone. Always she acts like an artist; always the artist, or poet, acts, on her behalf, like nature. By the time we reach the end of the poem, we have a fully developed sense of Ovid as both an agent and a partial figure of Natura. Ovid's word for "poet" on key occasions is not poeta, but votes: we might well translate vates as bard or prophet, but perhaps a better translation here would be artist-priest. The last lines of the epic claim: "Wherever people read . . . if vatic intuitions carry any truth, I shall live [ore legar populi. . . si quid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam]!" The question is, who is speaking here at the end of the Metamorphoses? In a literal sense, it is Ovid himself, the poet whose triumph over death is accomplished by the successful translation of his biological energies into the literary form of his work. In an extended sense, his personal mouth freezes at the end of the poem into a motionless mouthpiece: and from the lips and tongue of his orphic head, severed from us by his personal death nearly two thousand years ago, we hear the word vivam spoken by Natura herself, through the metamorphic narrative ministrations of her mortal priest. Ovid’s narrative of Pygmalion is a tale within a tale: that is one of the most telling things about it. It nests within more than half a dozen narratives of inverse and forbidden love sung by Orpheus between his first and his final descents into Hell. We read of Pygmalion, an artist who falls in love with the ivory image he has made out of his own desiring. It is important to remember that he has made this ivory surrogate because his fastidious ideal of woman has evoked a revulsion for all "real" women of the flesh. He dresses his ivory image-lady in beautiful clothes, lays it in his bed, climbs in and caresses it. In spite of (or perhaps because of) Ovid’s descriptive tact, we remain only quietly aware that Pygmalion is engaging in onanistic revels with a sex-doll of his own making. The innocent exuberance of his enthusiasm and desire can easily dull the critical sensibility. During the great festival of Venus, Pygmalion prays that his art may undergo the ultimate transformation desired by all artists who engage in that forbidden love of "category trespassing," or metaphysical "cross-dressing": that radical metamorphosis from the order of art into the order of the living

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world. Venus, the goddess of love, grants the boon and Pygmalion returns home, not to an ivory, but a living doll. Tradition calls her Galatea; but in Ovid she has no name.4 The anonymity of the ivory-imago-tumed-woman in Ovid is as appropriate as it is unnerving. What is the true nature of this nameless one? How trustworthy, one wonders, are the ministrations of Venus? Is the transformation to be read as "real"? Or as the ultimate selfdeception of the libidinous, yet woman-hating artist?5 This fantasy transformation, mediated-and hence, it would appear, validated-by Venus, the Goddess of Love, echoes, in reverse, an analogous transformation of its teller Orpheus. Orpheus used his own arts of mimesis to move the gods of death to transform the dead Eurydice into a living wife once again. But Orpheus looked back and lost her forever. Thus Orpheus’ narrative of Pygmalion’s wish-fulfillment, whatever else it means, must also be read as an inverse representation of his own failure of desire. In a more encompassing sense, this tale within the tale also mirrors Ovid’s more positive desire as poet of the Metamorphoses. Ovid’s poetry conquers death by assisting Natura in the transformation of the world of experience into the forms of art: the paradox is that only by this transformation of life into form does art fully become alive and life achieve its portion of immortality. This is not mere hyperbolic metaphor. Anyone who reads Ovid with students today knows how well the Latin words can successfully mediate the actual mind of the biologically dead Ovid to the living minds of today’s readers. In the Golden Ass of Apuleius, on the other hand, most narratives of transformation lead irrevocably to death: there are no saving adéquations in natural forms, no fountains, stones, trees, flowers, no sidereal coronals: there is, in the reality of Empire, only death and dissolution. Erich Auerbach eloquently captured this sense of desolate absence in the third chapter of Mimesis: The Metamorphoses exhibits . . . [a] predilection for a haunting and gruesome distortion of reality. I have in mind not only the numerous metamorphoses and ghost stories, all of which border upon the gruesome and grotesque, but also many other things-the quality of the eroticism, for instance. With an extreme emphasis on desire, which all of the spices of rhetorico-realistic art are employed to arouse in the reader too, there is a complete absence of human warmth and intimacy. There is always an admixture of something spectrally sadistic; desire is mixed with fear and horror.6

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Ovid’s plan is clear from the beginning: the principle of ordination of all his tales is to weave a text(ile) of intelligibility from the creation to the present moment: his links and transitions are often outrageously arbitrary, but his own open acknowledgement of this fact on several occasions only serves to emphasize the centrality in his mind of the program of linkage, interconnection and interdependency which he so avidly pursues. In Apuleius there is no overtly stated program other than the clearly frivolous, tongue-in-cheek assertion at the beginning that this is merely another set of diverse fables, strung together in the Milesian mode, solely to delight our benevolent ears [at ego tibi sermone isto Milesio varias fabulas conseram auresque tuas benivolas lepido susurro permulceam].7 Of course, however far beneath the surface it may lurk, there is a program driving the Apuleian text, a program with a design every bit as subtle as that of Ovid. The difference is that there are no non-trivial articulations of that ordinating program until the very end; it must therefore be extrapolated by the reader in the act of reading.8 In fact, it can be argued that the discovery of such a promised but hidden pattern of secret coherence becomes the central quest of the reader in his own pilgrimage through the text. Lucius’ pilgrimage as ass-through-world becomes then an anticipatory mirror model of our response-to-text. Only at the end do we hear from a privileged voice of a deeper design by which we can validate whatever readerly responses we have developed in the meantime concerning the underlying program of the work. This deeper design is revealed by a priest called Mithras who tells Lucius (and us) that all the trials were part of a reverse pilgrimage, a via negationis, designed to convince him (and us) of the falsity of worshipping Fortuna as a figure of the world’s reckoning. Only by means of recognition in this negative, or inverse mode, he implies, can we turn to the light and behold the ordinating truth of providential Isis [en ecce . . . Isidis magnae providentia].9 Henry Ebel insists that in any readerly search for an undergirding Apuleian program we consider very seriously Homer’s Iliad and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses together.10 As a result of his own comparison he offers a useful tool for breaking into the Apuleian poetic: the idea of parataxis and/or montage. His point is that the sense of a conspicuous absence of programmatic direction can be just as powerful as any overt authorial directive in getting the reader to think about the problematic of a hidden design. It follows that our awareness of Apuleian disparateness between the parts should lead us to assess more carefully the implied relationships among those parts, and to enter into more creative, participatory modes of reading The Golden Ass.

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Parataxis, normally considered a grammatical or rhetorical mode of non-transition in syntax, can legitimately and very usefully be considered in an extended narratological sense: as a growing awareness, as we move along a narrative, of blips, breaks and chunks; of disruptions and dislocations between and among the parts of the story. If Ovid’s Natura provides an imaginable haven for human suffering by means of exterior, physical transformation, in Apuleius, by means of the programmatic absence of such saving natural transformations, we gradually learn that no such exterior, physical solution to human suffering is possible. The only solution available for Apuleius is an interior transformation of the soul, a point elaborated for nearly a quarter of the work in the embedded novella tradition referred to as the "Tale of Cupid and Psyche." In fact, the only significant change in the main narrative of the Golden Ass that does not eventuate in death is the main transformation which reverses itself: the change from Man to Ass back to Man. But it is exactly this exceptional metamorphosis leading to new life that becomes the mirror in which we are to understan d the final function of all the other death-fraught transformations. Professor Drake takes issue with the easy use of the anthropological term, "initiation," for characterizing the series of encounters which Lucius then undergoes as the Golden Ass. She senses a need for a term that would function more as an anticipatory analogue of the Stations of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.11 According to her, all of the events experienced, and the embedded stories heard, are to be read with participatory sympathy as liturgical scenarios of passage into greater self-knowing. They are scripts for an imaginative participation, by Lucius the Ass and by the reader, in which we engage in a kind of literary/existential foreplay: a forereplication, or forescreening of the entire journey of life itself, which moves penultimately through metamorphic vortices, analogues of death, and onward into either the release brought by real death, or a return, through ritual participation in fictions of death and transfiguration, to renewal, to a vita nova. The metamorphosis of Lucius into Ass is cast in a kind of parabola: from the narrating Apuleius to the narrated Lucius to the pilgrim Man/Ass, and then from the Ass/M an back to the narrated Lucius back to the narrating Apuleius, whom we discover to be both a practicing lawyer and priest of Isis. On Lucius’ parabolic return from the limits of asininity, we encounter Apuleius’ alternative image of the metamorphic feminine image at the center of the tale within the tale. However, the image of Lucius’ final testing is no ivory doll but a confrontation with a surrealistic horror show involving a nameless trinity of demented female devourers of worlds.

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In addition, it is also useful to consider the Golden Ass as a bifocular ellipse, a geometric form closely related to the parabola. The work as a whole, when seen as an ellipse, has one focal point near the beginning, in which Lucius confronts the female witch trinity comprising Byrrhaena, Pamphila, and Fotis and another focal point near the end, in which he confronts another, more terrifying, unnamed female trinity. This later trinity, like the first, veils aspects of the hidden, but "always already" emerging Isis. In the beginning, untransformed Lucius, young, wealthy and at loose ends, has a weakness for romancing the stone, a hankering after witches and magic. As a result of his run-ins with Byrraena, Pamphila and Fotis, he gets a bit more witchery than he bargained for. These witches comprise the first female trinity of the veiled Isis which he will encounter. Elsewhere in this volume, Professor David Martinez discusses Lucius* interest in magic, and he makes a fruitful distinction between the magics of chaos versus the magics of cosmos. These three early witches of chaos lead Lucius to his transformation into the Ass. Lucius’ final testing comes in encounters with a trinity of the Dark Domina: three terrible ladies who have no names. The namelessness is functional: to name them would diminish the range of their power, their terror and their threat to the nerve, the heart, and the imagination. To name them might also give us a self-deluding sense of control, it might vitiate our awareness of their eternal and universal presence within us. Professor Drake, in her essay here, identifies these dark ladies with extremely satisfying precision: they are instances of the ever-recurring manifestations of Phaedra, Pasiphae, and Medea. The first lady is pseuda-Phaedra. In her rage at being refused by her pseudo-Hippolytus stepson, she attempts to have him silenced by poison, and in this rage suffers no compunctions when her true biological son mistakenly drinks the poison and dies. All the personae survive because the dispensing pharmacist cleverly substituted a very effective soporific for the originally prescribed poison. But that apparent miracle brings with it no amelioration: it undoes nothing; it only refuses us any comfort we may have drawn from the illusion of closure to what is in fact an eternal threat that never dies. The substitution of exile for execution as punishment for the stepmother only indexes our never-ending vulnerability to her eternal return. The next narrative involves the pseuda-Pasiphae. By this time, Lucius has been discovered to have most unasinine appetites: preferring human food to barley. This appetite for human food in the beast delights his new owners and becomes a curious and lucrative subject for circus displays. As readers, we sense we have about reached the farther end of Lucius’ parabola of

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metamorphosis. The ass he has turned into is beginning to make a name for himself by showing human attributes; this is the verso of his metamorphosis and prepares us for the fact that he is on the road to return. A noblewoman, our unnamed pseuda-Pasiphae, falls in love with him, rents him for the night, and proves to Lucius that the male mind is all too feeble when it seeks to figure the limits of a woman’s sexual capacities. Ass-Ludus is astounded at the erotic capadties of the woman and says he now begins to understand how the wife of Minos could in fact get pleasure from her adulteries with the bull [nec minotauri matrem frustra delectatam putarem adultero mugiente].12 A puleius narrates this private, hidden seduction of the ass by th e noblewoman who really is in love with him with extraordinary tact. T h e beastliness genetically inherent in the tale is beautifully transfigured into a sense of wanton innocence, probably because the grounds of motive of both the lady stricken in love as well as the man in the ass are relatively pure. Yet when Lucius’ master finds out about it, he arranges a show to recapitulate that private act publicly for money, with the third and most spectacular female criminal in this trinity of dark desire as partner: th e nameless lady who combines the bestiality of Pasiphae and the incestuous desires of Phaedra with the infantiddal jealousy of Medea. The curtain-raiser which is designed to prepare the mind of the audience for this theatrical display of bestiality is taken from the mythology of Troy. We see as prologue a dramatic vignette of Paris and the Judgment o f the Golden Apple, a judgment which led to the paradigmatic violation of the marriage bed and the ruined city. This image of the seed of Troy’s destruction had been earlier, brilliantly, and unforgettably figured forth on the coverlet of the marriage bed of Peleus and Thetis in Catullus 64. The marriage bed assigned to the Dark Domina and Lucius the Ass thereby acquires an all-too-appropriate inter-textual context. If consummated, the copulation between the Killer-Lady and the Ass could provide a public mirroring of the bestiality that led to another, but related literary model of future-devouring: the consummation, in a similar kind of arena, of precisely that lust of Pasiphae for the Bull, which eventuated in the Minotaur who ate the boys and girls who not only signified but constituted futurity. Lucius the Ass, with a sudden flash of volition, makes null and void this public spectacle set up for a re-enactment of the bestial liaison between Pasiphae and the Bull by merely walking away. Like Bartleby, he would "prefer not to" engage in a public sex-show with a mad murderess who has devoured the future by wantonly exterminating her husband and children. To copulate with such a lady in public would be an act too inhumane for any ass to engage in. He denies evil by quietly walking away from it. In this

Ovid and Apuleius/45

pilgrimage allegory which we discover the Golden Ass is turning into even as we begin to read its closure, Lucius signals that he is now ready for conversion to-and redemption by-Isis, the Goddess of Constant Change. He has declared himself ready for her by discovering the capacity of his will to refuse her earthly inverse avatars. Now at closure we remember his earlier confrontation with the relatively harmless witches, Byrraena, Pamphila, and Fotis, and we see evidence of a sea-change. At the end of the pilgrimage the earlier titillation of externally worked magic reveals itself as an encoding of the far more dangerous interior metamorphoses of desire. The magic potions have been, if not deconstructed, at least unromanced: we can begin to know them for what they HreallyHare: pharmaceutical poisons. In the beginning, transformations into owls or asses were comedic, reversible by finding and eating roses. At the end, the transformations reveal themselves as absolute and irreversible, they move only into death. In the beginning, we could delude ourselves into thinking that the dark side was in fact a world elsewhere, a world not our own, but one of witches, of darkness and devils. Now we can see all that romantic magic for what it always was: an exterior, visible sign for the invisible interior, transforming power of our own darker desire for a co-mingling of eros and thanatos. This is the narcissistic desire that seeks the metamorphoses of the other into the self and calls it love. But it is a love which must finally be known and understood for what it is: cannibalistic murder. As the earlier witches undo cosmic genesis by dragging the stars through the darkness of Hell, these later black-widows undo biological creation by destroying their own children. By Lucius' asinine refusal to participate in the ultimate ritual of reverse generation, the copulation of the beast of human unknowing with the infanticidal mother, he renounces the final false veil of Isis. He has revealed himself as ready for the epiphany of Isis unveiled and his reformatio back into human form.13 Apuleius* radical alternative to Ovid’s story of Pygmalion’s dreamdesire of the artist comes in a metamorphoses of refusal: Lucius dead, awakens: he sees the desire for what it is and walks away. It is an interior metamorphosis that consecrates the beginning of a moral life. As a result of this first step into freedom, this admission of the absolute inevitability of death and dissolution, and a will to move away and onward, Lucius returns to human form and begins his initiation into his destined role of the vates, or artist-lawyer-priest of Isis. For us, Apuleius’ Isis is a kind of anticipation of what Goethe forever christened "das ewig Weibliche," the eternally feminine of many names which

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draws all of us forward and upward in desire. One of her many names, of course, is the name given her by Ovid: melior natura. I do not believe either Ovid or Apuleius would quibble with the implied equation: Isis and Natura, like Eliot's fire and rose, are one. As we map th e difference in the n atu re and function of metamorphosis in Ovid and Apuleius, we appreciate more clearly how profoundly convergent their senses were of the vatic duties of the poet in the face of nature: to serve the dea, that ever-evolving figura of the female power of ordination and change at the center of reality. As the priest says to Lucius upon his conversion: nam cum coeperis deae servire, tunc magis senties fructum libertatis. [for when thou beginnest to serve and honour the goddess, then shalt thou feel the more the fruit of thy liberty.]14 Thus the interior reflexive functions of the "tale within the tale" help us see more clearly both the differences in literary program which set Ovid and Apuleius apart; yet these very differences illuminate the penetrating vision which they ultimately shared: the discovery that true being is an eternally feminine, metamorphic process of becoming. Department of English University of Colorado, Boulder

Notes

lApulei Madaurensis Metamorphoseon, with an English Translation by W. Adlington (1566), revised, S. Gaselee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 11.9. 2"Forms of Time and Chronotype in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), pp. 114-115.

Ovid and Apuleius/47

3For more detailed discussion of Ovid’s metamorphic poetics, see "The Severed Head: Ovid, Orpheus and the Powers of Art" in my Now through a Glass Darkly: Specular Images of Being and Knowing from Virgil to Chaucer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). The base text for this essay is P. Ovidius Naso Metamorphosen, vol. 1, books 1-7, with commentary by Moriz Haupt; vol. 2, books 8-15, with commentary by Otto Korn, ed. Rudolf Ehwald, corrected with additional bibliography by Michael von Albrecht (Zurich and Dublin: Weidmann, 1966). The indispensable bibliography on the Metamorphoses, aside from the annual reviews in L ’A nnée Philologique, is H. Hofmann, "Ovids ‘Metamorphosen’ in der Forschung der letzten 30 Jahre (1950-1979)," Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, II: Principat (henceforward A NRW), ed. Wolfgang Haase (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), Bd. 31.4, 2161-2273. For the best of modern European work, consult the anthology published as Ovid, ed. Michael von Albrecht and Ernst Zinn (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968). More recent essays relevant to my approach are A. Crabbe, "Structure and Content in Ovid’s ’Metamorphoses,’" ANRW II.31.4, 2274-2327, and Michael von Albrecht, "Mythos und römische Realität in Ovids ‘Metamorphosen,’" ANRW , II.31.4, 2328-2342. See also E J . Kenny, "The Style of the M etamorphoses," in Ovid, ed. J.W. Binns (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 116-53. Also useful are Kenny’s introduction and notes to A.D. Melville’s recent translation, Metamorphoses (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). In addition, two articles by Charles Segal prove helpful in dealing with problems surrounding Ovid’s poetics: "Circean Temptations: Homer, Vergil, Ovid," Transactions o f the American Philological Association, 99 (1968), 419-42, and "Ovid’s Orpheus and Augustan Ideology," TAPA, 103 (1972), 473-94. Two useful articles on Orpheus and the problematics of art and the artist are: Eleanor Winsor Leach, "E kphrasis and the Them e of A rtistic Failure in Ovid’s Metamorphoses," Ramus, 3 (1974), 102-42; and Donald Lateiner, "Mythic and Non-Mythic Artists in Ovid’s Metamorphoses," Ramus, 13 (1984), 1-30. See also Douglas F. Bauer, "The Function of Pygmalion in the Metamorphoses of Ovid," TAPA, 93 (1962), 1-21; and Simone Viarre, "Pygmalion et Orphée chez Ovide (Met. X, 243-97), Revue des études latines, 46(1968), 235-47. 4Ovid reserves the name of Galatea for the reluctant object of Polyphemus’ infatuated buffoonery in Metamorphoses XIII. 5It would seem that Ovid has injected just enough ambiguity to keep the interpretive itch of the reader inflamed. Is Venus to be read as exterior

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divinity? Or as an interior psychological force? Or, which is more likely, both? In any case, to dabble at the liminality between life and art is a mirror of that more radical dabbling at the liminality between life and death and this, as I suggest, makes the narrative of Pygmalion’s inverse and "forbidden love" doubly appropriate for the voice of its narrator, Orpheus. 6Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation o f Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 60. A useful bibliography is that of C.C. Schlam, "The Scholarship on Apuleius since 1938," Classical World, 64 (1970-71), 285-309. See also Paul Junghanns, Die Erzahlungstechnik von A puleius* nMetamorphosesn und ihrer Vorlagey P hilologus S upplem entband no. 24/1 (Leipzig: D ie te ric h ’sche Verlagsbuchandlung, 1931); G.N. Sandy, "Petronius and the Tradition of the Interpolated Narrative," TAPA , 10 (1970), 463-76. 7Meta. 1.1. 8The most far-ranging study of this aspect of Apuleius’ poetics is John J. Winkler, Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius* Golden Ass (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). The most important chapters relevant to the questions raised in this essay are the first and the last: "The Questions of Reading," and "Conjectures." 9Meta. 11.15. 10Henry Ebel, After Dionysus: An Essay on Where We Are Now (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972). n Drawn from Professor Drake’s impromptu remarks at the ApuleiusChaucer conference, Boulder, Spring, 1989. See also, Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). n Meta 10.22. 13Lucius speaks of his metamorphosis, at the end, and in his greater understanding as a novitiate of Isis, as "reformatio mea" (XI.27). l*Meta. 11.15.

IV. THE VIRGIN PREFIGURED JOHN DOUGLAS HOAG

lam primum crines uberrimi prolixique et sensim intorti per divina colla passive dispersi molliter defluebant. Corona multiformis variis floribus sublimem destrinxerat verticem, cuius media quidem super frontem plana rotunditas in modum speculi vel immo argumentum lunae candidum lumen emicabat, dextra laevaque sulcis insurgentium viperarum cohibita, spicis etiam Cerialibus desuper porrectis. .. palla nigerrima splendescens atro nitore, quae circumcirca remeans. . . Per intextam extremitatem et in ipsa eius planitie stellae dispersae coruscabant. . . Since the late Old Kingdom in Egypt, Isis of Bouto in the Delta, under many names, nurses the infant Horus, identified with the Pharoah. As the sister-wife of Osiris she is Queen of the nether realm as well as protectress of the living. As Isis Lactans she is represented very frequently in late period votive statuettes in bronze as early as Dynasty Twenty-Six (Plate 1:1). When Ptolemy I established Alexandria as Egypt’s capital, he encouraged the worship of Osiris as Serapis and a probably colossal bronze statue by the sculptor Bryaxis was installed in the Serapaeion (Plate 1:2). The original is lost but many copies survive. Among the best is a life-size image from the colonnaded street of Perge of the second century after Christ. Serapis, seated on a high-backed throne, appears as Hades or Pluto with Cerberus beside him and a grain measure on his head. V. Tran Tam Tinh (1973).1 has

50/Tales within Tales assembled evidence that a Hellenized image of Isis Lactans was created at least as early as the second century before Christ for a shrine either in or near the Serapaeion. Again the best surviving example of this work was found in the colonnaded street at Perge and, like the Serapis, was installed in the second century after Christ. Isis is seated on a high-backed throne supporting the infant with her right arm while with her left she probably offered her right breast which is bare. Her robe shows the characteristic knot, her symbol from the period of the Old Kingdom (Plate 1:3). Tam cites multiple reduced copies of this image in terra cotta and on coins extending all the way into the early fourth century after Christ when a painted image was produced in Karanis in the Fayoum.2 In the Mammisi or birth houses attached to Egyptian temples during the Roman period as at Philae, Edfu, and Denderah, emperors from Augustus at least to Caracalla are presented in Egyptian style offering, among other gifts, mirrors and myrrh to Isis Lactans which might suggest préfigurations of the Epiphany. To this we shall return. The Christian representation of the Virgin Lactans appears first in Egypt but only in the seventh century as at Apa Jeremiah at Saqqara (Plate 1:4) where she appears flanked by angels as Theotokos, mother of god, a title given her at the Council of Ephesus in 431. This image, however, appears not as an element in larger iconographic schemes but as an object of private devotion in monastic cells. In the west Tam traces the image of Maria Lactans from the twelfth century on. The image was very frequent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Oddly, Byzantium seems never to have adopted it.3 Isis worship in Hellenistic and Roman times was enormously popular all over the civilized world but her cult image was not, or not predominantly, that of Isis Lactans. Isis stands alone, or if Horus-Harpocrates is present, he stands, nude, beside her (Plates 1:5,6). In about the middle of the second century after Christ, Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, while still imprisoned in the body of an ass, had a vision of the goddess Isis while at Cenchreae near Corinth. This is worth quoting: Her long thick hair fell in tapering ringlets on her lovely neck, and was crowned with an intricate chaplet in which was woven every kind of flower. Just above her brow shone a round disc, like a mirror, or like the bright face of the moon, which told me who she was. Vipers rising from the left-hand and right-hand partings of her hair supported this disc, with ears of corn bristling beside them. But what caught and held my eye more than anything else was the deep black lustre of her mantle. She wore it slung across her body from the right hip to the left

Isis and the Virgin/51

shoulder, where it was caught in a knot resembling the boss of a shield; but part of it hung in innumerable folds, the tasselled fringe quivering. It was embroidered with glittering stars on the hem and everywhere else, and in the middle beamed a full and fiery moon. In her right hand she held a bronze rattle, of the sort used to frighten away the God of the Sirocco; its narrow rim was curved like a sword-belt and three little rods, which sang shrilly when she shook the handle, passed horizontally through it. A boat-shaped gold dish hung from her left hand, and along the upper surface of the handle writhed an asp with puffed throat and head raised ready to strike. On her divine feet were slippers of palm leaves, the emblem of victory.4 The boat-shaped dish in Apuleius’ vision almost certainly refers to a very important aspect of the protective powers of Isis, her patronage of mariners, symbolized by the spring rite when her priests launched a decorated model boat at the beginning of the season of navigation. It was at this rite Lucius/Apuleius was relieved by her of his form as an ass. An ivory image of Isis, now in the cathedral of Aachen but probably carved in Alexandria in the sixth century after Christ, represents this function (Plate 1:7,8,9). The Virgin Mary as Stella Maris may well have inherited the same responsibility. Isis in her protective aspect was often presented winged as on the door of the third sarcophagus shrine of Tutankhamen about 1350 B.C. (Plate 1:8). A small bronze at Ephesus, second to third century after Christ, shows the survival of this image into our own era (Plate 1:9). It seems possible that John the Evangelist may have had such an image in mind when he described the woman clothed with the sun and the moon in the vision of the fifth seal (Plate 1:10). Without the wings this image was taken over for representations of the Immaculate Conception where the Virgin is often shown surrounded by a series of attributes (Plate 1:11), the lily, the rose, the palm, the fountain, the speckless mirror. All of these can be found as symbols of Isis from one source or another.5 It will be remembered that the Mirror was a gift from Tiberius to Isis at Philae. In the Isaic procession which led to Lucius/Apuleius’ return to his human form he saw a priest who carried a miniature golden palm tree as well as another who carried a golden vessel in the shape of a female breast from the nipple of which a stream of milk fell to the ground, clearly the fountain. Finally, his transformation was effected by a wreath of roses in the hands of the high priest. In an iconographical scheme, believed confined to the new world and supported by the Franciscan Order, the famous early eighteenth-century

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Virgin of Popoyan in Colombia regains the wings of St. John’s vision of the fifth seal, She is without the child, is crowned and aims a lance at the serpent of evil; nevertheless she is locally called the Immaculata.6 Such images are frequent in Colombia and Ecuador, nearly always under Franciscan auspices (Plate 1:12). The famous Virgin of Quito has this iconography. In Lucius/Apuleius’ last prayer to Isis here quoted there is not a word which could not be applied to the Virgin: Holiest of the Holy, perpetual comfort of mankind, you whose bountiful grace nourishes the whole world; whose heart turns towards all those in sorrow and tribulation as a mother’s to her children; you who take no rest by night, no rest by day, but are always at hand to succour the distressed by land and sea, dispersing the gales that beat upon them. Your hand alone can disentangle the hopelessly knotted skeins of fate, terminate every spell of bad weather, and restrain the stars from harmful conjunction. The gods above adore you, the gods below do homage to you, you set the orb of heaven spinning round the poles, you give light to the sun, you govern the universe, you trample down the powers of Hell. At your voice the stars move, the seasons recur, the spirits of earth rejoice, the elements obey. At your nod the winds blow, clouds drop wholesome rain upon the earth, seeds quicken, buds swell. Birds that fly through the air, beasts that prowl on the mountain, serpents that lurk in the dust, all these tremble in a single awe of you.7

Department of Art History University of Colorado, Boulder

Illustrations Plates 1:1 Isis Lactans, Dynasty 25, 664-525 B.C., bronze. Hermitage, Leningrad. 1:2 Serapis, after Bryaxis, late fourth century before Christ. Roman copy, second century after Christ, from Perge in Pamphylia. Antalya Museum, photo, author. 1:3 Isis Lactans, after original of second century B.C. Roman copy,

1:1

Isis Lactans. Dynasty 26, 664-525 B.C., bronze. Hermitage, Leningrad.

1:2

Serapis, after Bryaxis, late fourth century B.C. Roman copy, second century A.D. from Perge in Pamphylia. Antalya Muse­ um. Photo, author.

1:3

Isis Lactans, after original of second century B.C. Roman copy, second century A.D. from Pei^e in Pamphylia, Antalya Muse­ um. Photo, author.

1:4

Niche head from Apa Jeremiah, Sakkarah, seventh century A.D. Coptic Museum, Cairo.

1.5

Isis from Fozzuoli, second century A.D. Vatican Museum, Rome. Photo, author.

1:6

Isis with Harpocrates, Serapis, and Dionysis, ca. 140 A.D., from Henchir al-Atermine, Tunisia. Louvre, Paris. Photo, author.

1:7

Isis, sixth century A.D. Alexandria, Aachen Cathedral.

1:8

Winged Isis, Sarcophagus Shrine 3 of TUtankhamen, Eighteenth Dynasty, ca 1350 B.C. Egyptian Museum, Cairo.

1:9

Winged Isis. Ephesus, second century A.D., bronze. Ephesus Archaeological Museum, Selcuk, Türkey.

1:10

Albrecht Durer, woodcut, 1469-98. Opening of the Fifth Seal. The Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Seven-Headed Dragon.

1:11

Francisco Zurbaron, Immaculate Conception, ca. 1630. Nuestra Señora del Carmen, Jadraque, Guadalajara.

1:12

Anonymous Ecuadoran, eighteenth-century Virgin of Quito. Denver Art Museum.

Isis and the Vìrgin/53

second century after Christ, from Perge in Pamphylia. Antalya Museum, photo, author. 1:4 Niche head from Apa Jeremiah, Sakkarah, seventh century after Christ. Coptic Museum, Cairo. 1:5 Isis from Pozzuoli, second century after Christ. Vatican Museum, Rome, photo, author. 1:6 Isis with Harpocrates, Serapis and Dionysos, circa 140 A.D. from Henchir al-Atermine, Tunisia. Louvre, Paris, photo, author. 1:7 Isis, ivory, sixth century after Christ. Alexandria, Aachen Cathedral. 1:8 Winged Isis, Sarcophagus Shrine 3 of Tutankhamen. Dynasty 18, circa 1350 B.C. Egyptian Museum, Cairo. 1:9 Winged Isis, second-third century after Christ, bronze. Ephesus Archeological Museum, Selcuk, Turkey. 1:10 Albrecht Dürer, woodcut, 1496-98, Opening of the Fifth Seal. The woman clothed with the sun and the seven-headed dragon. 1:11 Francisco Zurbaron, Immaculate Conception, circa 1630. Nuestra Señora del Carmen, Jadraque, Guadalajara. 1:12 Anonymous Ecuadorian, eighteenth-century Virgin of Quito. Denver Art Museum.

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Notes

bibliography on Isis as a préfiguration of the Virgin is immense. I cite only the sources directly used here, all of which have bibliographies. They are V. Tran Tam Tinh, Isis Lactans (Leiden: Brill, 1973), henceforth Tam; James Stevens Curl, The Egyptian Revival (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982), henceforth Curl; Apuleius, The Golden A ss, translation by Robert Graves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), henceforth Apuleius; Pol Kelemen, Baroque and Rococo in Latin America (New York: Macmillan, 1951), henceforth Keleman. 2Tam, plates 10 and 11. Since 1973, the head has been found. Note that it has a socket for an attribute, either a lotus or disk between horns. ^am , pp. 47-48. 4Apuleius, p. 270. Apuleius properly identifies the disk but ranks it with uraei rather than horns. 5Curl, pp. 34-35 and passim. 6Keleman, pp. 139-40. 7Apuleius, p. 289.

V. THE METAMORPHOSES OF CUPID AND PSYCHE IN PLATO, APULEIUS, ORIGEN, AND CHAUCER CONSTANCE S. WRIGHT

Sed cum primum luminis oblatione tori secreta claruerunt, videt omnium ferarum mitissimam dulcissimamque bestiam, ipsum ilium Cupidinem formosum deum formose cubantem, cuius aspectu lucemae quoque lumen hilaratum increbruit et acuminis sacrilegi novaculam paenitebat. A t vero Psyche tanto aspectu deterrita et impos animi, marcido pallore defecta tremensque desedit in imos poplite. . . In the following essay I will discuss the myth of Cupid and Psyche in four texts: Plato's Phaedrus, Apuleius' tale of Cupid and Psyche inset in his Metamorphosesy Origen's Commentary on the Song of Songs, and Chaucer’s "Clerk's Tale.” In reading these texts and reading criticism about them I have noted that, in most cases, gender, which determines the meaning of the text, has not been treated, and this is what I propose to do here. The myth of Cupid (or Eros) and Psyche was well known in classical antiquity.1 A Greek narrative form of the story does not exist, but there are many Hellenistic lyrics which represent the relationship between the lovers as Eros, love or the god of love torturing the soul, the Psyche, which is the seat of the passions. Meleager, for example, says: "Love, if thou burnest too often my scorched soul,/ She will fly away; she too, cruel boy, has wings."2 Similarly, love may be either a personification or an actual embodiment of the God of Love in a specific person. Frequently, the theme is love as the charioteer of man’s soul. Anacreon addresses his all too human lover as "Boy

56/Tales within Tales with the looks of a girl, I pursue you, but you do not attend, not knowing that you are the charioteer of my soul."3 In the plastic arts, Eros is sometimes shown driving a chariot drawn by a soul or souls in the form of horses, butterflies, or feminine figures.4 The term psyche signifies either soul or butterfly in Greek, hence the representation of the psyche figure with butterfly wings. The concept of the soul changes in classical antiquity from the eidolon, a substance whose existence is dependent upon the life of the body to the psyche who, with the Platonists and Neoplatonists, is imprisoned in the body during life. Of divine origin, the soul passionately desires to return to the perfection from which it came, and to some form of union with the divine.5 In its philosophic form, the myth of Eros and Psyche appears in Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates instructs Phaedrus about love: Now he whose vision of the mystery is long past, or whose purity has been sullied, cannot pass swiftly hence to see beauty's self yonder, when he beholds that which is called beautiful here; wherefore he looks upon it with no reverence, and surrendering to pleasure he essays to go after the fashion of a four-footed beast and to beget offspring of the flesh, or consorting with wantonness he has no fear nor shame in running after unnatural pleasure. But when one who is fresh from mystery, and saw much of the vision, beholds a godlike face or bodily form that truly represents beauty, first there come upon him a shuddering and a measure of that awe which the vision inspired, and then reverence as at the sight of a god, and but for fear of being deemed a very madman he would offer sacrifice to his beloved, as to a holy image of deity. Next, with the passing of the shudder, a strange sweating and fever seizes him. For by reason of the stream of beauty entering in through his eyes there comes a warmth, whereby his soul's plumage is fostered, and with that warmth the roots of the wings are melted, which for long had been so hardened and closed up that nothing could grow; then as the nourishment is poured in, the stump of the wing swells and hastens to grow from the root over the whole substance of the soul, for aforetime the whole soul was furnished with wings. Meanwhile she throbs with ferment in every part, and even as a teething child feels an aching and pain in its gums when a tooth has just come through, so does the soul of him who is beginning to grow his wings feel a ferment and painful irritation. Wherefore as she gazes upon the boy's beauty, she admits a flood of particles streaming therefrom-that is why we speak of a ‘flood of passion—whereby she is

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warmed and fostered; then has she respite from her anguish, and is filled with joy. But when she has been parted from him and become parched, the openings of those outlets at which the wings are sprouting dry up likewise and are closed, so that the wing's germ is barred off. And behind its bars, together with the flood aforesaid, it throbs like a fevered pulse, and pricks at its proper outlet, and thereat the whole soul round about is stung and goaded into anguish; howbeit she remembers the beauty of her beloved, and rejoices again. So between joy and anguish she is distraught at being in such strange case, perplexed and frenzied; with madnes upon her she can neither sleep by night nor keep still by day, but runs hither and thither, yearning for him in whom beauty dwells, if haply she may behold him. At last she does behold him, and lets the flood pour in upon her, releasing the imprisoned waters; then has she refreshment and respite from her stings and sufferings, and at that moment tastes a pleasure that is sweet beyond compare. Nor will she willingly give it up. Above all others does she esteem her beloved in his beauty; mother, brother, friends, she forgets them all. Nought does she reck of losing worldly possessions through neglect. All the rules of conduct, all the graces of life, of which aforetime she was proud, she now disdains, welcoming a slave's estate and any couch where she may be suffered to lie down close beside her darling, for besides her reverence for the possessor of beauty she has found in him the only physician for her grievous suffering. (250e-252b) Greek society of Plato’s period was hierarchised, misogynistic, and homoerotic. The socially approved relationship of the eromenos, the young male beloved, and his teacher and lover, the erastes, is transformed in this passage from the Phaedrus from homoerotic desire for another human being to the desire for the ascent into the realm of ideas. The eros which exists between the two enables them to make the ascent which is to absolute beauty. As Evelyn Fox Keller puts it: The beloved learns about love from his older and wiser lover, reflecting the other’s eros, but to a lesser degree___In relation to his eromenos, the erastes is a teacher, but in relation to knowledge, he is a student, looking always upward. By reflection, the beloved also learns to look upward. Together, they climb Hthe ladder of love," with the erastes always in the lead. It is first upon him that the obligation lies to make "his way upward by a right use of his feeling of love for boys"

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(Symposium, 211b).6 Plato thus excludes women from philosophy, from eros, and thus from the study of truth. At the same time, Plato attempts to appropriate the female into his system. Page duBois writes: Plato uses the tension between the sexes in Greek culture to assert the authority of the male at the scene of philosophy, but also and more importantly, his own desire to appropriate the powers of the female makes that authority a very provisional one and marks the Platonic text as the threshold of a new description of sexual difference (Sowing the Body, p. 173). This desire to appropriate the feminine into a context which has rigid gender roles, is hierarchised and misogynistic, will be discussed later in this essay. It is only necessary to mention now that eros, the desire to possess, and its concomittant effects in a state of frustration (Phaedrus 251d-e) are exclusively male projects. While the Greek culture in which Plato wrote was misogynistic, from the time of the late Republic Roman women enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy and economic independence and played a role in the public life even if largely honorific.7 This independence of women coincided with the introduction of the religion of Isis in Rome.8 Writing of the practices of her cult in Rome, Eva Cantarella notes: Isis consoled human suffering and inspired hope in a life beyond death. To her all human beings were equal whether slave or free. Ail had an immortal soul, despite social status or sex.9 Of Apuleius’ Metamorphosis, M.M. Bakhtin writes:. T he basic plot of the novel, the life story of Lucius-is presented as the course of a life sheathed in a metamorphosis-as is also the case in the inserted novella about Cupid and Psyche, which turns out to be a parallel semantic variant of the basic plot."10 Lucius' painful journey to the divine cosmic woman, Isis, and his redemption by the goddess is paralleled by Psyche’s sorrowful journey to find Cupid, her apotheosis, and marriage to Cupid on Mt. Olympus. Curiositas, a concept central to both narratives, has negative and positive qualities in both.11 Rather than creating separate gender roles for Lucius and Psyche, Apuleius makes gender roles for male and female resemble each other in many respects.

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In the tale of Cupid and Psyche itself, Psyche herself represents every living soul pursuing the Neoplatonic goal of transcendence. When Psyche is living in her husband’s enchanted palace in darkness, she decides with some trepidation to discover her husband’s identity: Tunc Psyche et corporis et animi alioquin infirma, fati tamen saeuitia subministrante, uiribus roboratur, et prolata lucerna et adrepta nouacula sexum audacia mutatur. Sed cum primum luminis oblatione tori secreta claruerunt, uidet omnium ferarum mitissimam dulcissimamque bestiam, ipsum ilium Cupidinem formonsum deum formonse cubantem, cuius aspectu lucernae quoque lumen hilaratum increbruit et acuminis sacrilegi nouacula praenitebat. At uero Psyche, tanto aspectu deterrita et impos animi, marcido pallore defecta tremensque desedit in imos poplites et ferrum quaerit abscondere, sed in suo pectore; quod profecto fecisset nisi ferrum timore tanti flagitii manibus temerariis delapsum euolasset. Iamque lassa, salute defecta dum saepius diuini uultus intuetur pulchritudinem, recreatur animi. Videt capitis aurei genialem caesariem ambrosia temulentam, ceruices lacteas genasque purpureas pererrantes crinium globos decoriter impeditos, alios antependulos, alios retropendulos, quorum splendore nimio fulgurante iam et ipsum lumen lucernae uacillabat; per umeros uolatilis dei pinnae roscidae micanti flore candicant et quamuis alis quiescentibus extimae plumulae tenellae ac delicatae tremule resultantes inquieta lasciuiunt; ceterum corpus glabellum atque luculentum et quale peperisse Venerem non paeniteret. Ante lectuli pedes iacebat arcus et pharetra et sagittae, magni dei propitia tela. Quae dum insatiabili animo Psyche, satis et curiosa, rimatur atque pertrectat et mariti sui miratur arma, depromit unam de pharetra sagittam, et, puncto pollicis extremam aciem periclitabunda, trementis etiam nunc articuli nisu fortiore pupugit altius, ut per summam cutem rorauerint paruulae sanguinis rosei guttae. Sic ignara Psyche sponte in Amoris incidit amorem. Tunc magis magisque cupidine fraglans Cupidinis prona in eum efflictim inhians patulis ac petulantibus sauiis festinanter ingestis de somni mensura metuebat. Sed dum bono tanto percita saucia mente fluctuat, lucerna illa, siue perfidia pessima siue inuidia noxia siue quod tale corpus contingere et quasi basiare et ipsa gestiebat, euomuit de summa luminis sui stillam feruentis olei super umerum dei dexterum. Hem audax et temeraria lucerna et amoris uile ministerium, ipsum ignis totius deum aduris, cum te scilicet amator aliquis, ut diutius cupitis etiam nocte potiretur, primus inuenerit? Sic

60/Tales within Tales inustus exiluit deus ui&aque detectae fidei colluvie prorsus ex osculis et manibus infelidssimae coniugis tact us auolauit. At Psyche statim resurgentis eius crure dextero manibus ambabus adrepto sublimis euectionis adpendix miseranda, et per nubilas plagas penduli comitatus extrema consequia, tandem fessa delabitur solo.12 ["Then Psyche (somewhat feeble in body and mind, yet strengthened by cruelty of fate) received boldness and brought forth the lamp, and took the razor, so that by her audacity she changed herself to masculine kind. But when she took the lamp and the secret parts of the bed were made light, she saw the most meek and sweetest beast of all beasts, even fair Cupid, couched fairly, at whose sight the very lamp increased its light for joy, and the razor turned its edge. But when Psyche saw so glorious a body, she greatly feared, and amazed in mind, with a pale countenance, all trembling, fell on her knees, and thought to hide the razor, yea verily in her own heart; which she had undoubtedly done, had it not, through fear of so wicked an enterprise, fallen out of her rash and hasty hands. And now she was faint and had lost her strength, but when she saw and beheld the beauty of his divine visage, she was well recreated in her mind; she saw his hairs of gold, that were drenched with ambrosia and yielded out a sweet savour thereof; his neck more white than milk; his ruddy cheeks upon which his hair hanged comely behind and before, the brightness whereof did darken the light of the lamp; the tender plume feathers of that flying god dispersed upon his shoulders with shining gleam, and though his wings were at rest, the tender down of their edges trembling hither and thither, and the other parts of his body so smooth and soft that it could not repent Venus to bear such a child. At the bed’s feet lay his bow, quiver and arrows that be the gentle weapons of so great a god: which when Psyche did curiously behold, and marvelling at the weapons of her husband took one of the arrows out of the quiver, and trying the sharpness thereof with her finger, she pricked herself withal: wherewith she was so grievously wounded that some little drops of blood followed, and thereby of her own accord she fell in love with Love. Then more and more broiling in the love of Cupid, she embraced him and kissed him a thousand times, fearing the measure of his sleep. "But alas, while she was in this great joy, and her spirit languished and wavered, whether it were for foul envy, or for desire to touch this amiable body likewise, there fell out a drop of burning oil from the

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lamp upon the right shoulder of the god. O rash and bold lamp, the vile ministry of love, how darest thou be so bold as to burn the god of all fire, when surely some lover invented thee, to the intent that he might with more joy pass the nights in pleasure? The god being burned in this sort, and perceiving that promise and faith was broken, he fled away without utterance of any word from the kisses and hands of his most unhappy wife. But Psyche fortuned to catch him as he was rising by the right thigh with both hands, and held him fast as he flew about in the air, hanging to him (poor wretch) through his cloudy journey, until such time that, constrained by weariness, she let go and fell down upon the ground."] Reminiscences of Plato’s Phaedrus abound in this passage. Love is desire inspired by beauty (Phaedrus 251a; see Plate 11:1), which leads the lover, the soul, to seek that beauty throughout the world, as Psyche does, when, having fallen back to earth (Phaedrus 251de), she goes to Venus voluntarily to become her slave (Phaedrus 252a) in the hope of finding Cupid. Venus orders Psyche to be whipped by her handmaidens, Sollicitudo and Tristies (Sorrow and Sadness). The whipping represents a necessary purifactory stage in the soul’s progress to return to the world of essences. Whipping is not a feature of the Platonic asemblage nor of the folk lore analogues of the tale, but flagellation is part of the mystery religions.13 Venus then assigns Psyche four tasks which she must perform in order to regain Cupid: the sorting of an enormous heap of grain (Plate 11:2); the gathering of wool from sheep with golden fleeces; filling an urn with water from the river which feeds the Styx; and descending to the Underworld to obtain a little bit of Prosperine’s beauty for Venus. Since Venus is jealous of her daughter-inlaw, she designs the tasks so that they are impossible to perform. In their normal form, the first three labors are designed for women, as Pierre Grimal and Erich Neumann point out,14 and are referred to by folk lorists as "difficult female tasks."15 Moreover, the nature of the fourth task-the descent into the Underworld-is associated with the male rather than the female and brings to mind the descents of Theseus, Heracles, Dionysus, Orpheus, and Aeneas (Grimal, "Introduction," pp. 18-19). Thus, Apuleius’ mingling of gender roles for Psyche indicates that the human soul should have both masculine and feminine qualities. Psyche is not able to complete her tasks unassisted and "Providentia bona," the care of a helpful god, intervenes to aid her as Lucius is aided by the beneficent Queen Isis. In Apuleius’ philosophy, Cupid is a daemon, one of a class of beings who exist between the gods and human beings. They have immortality, like

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the gods, but experience passion like human beings.16 Thus, in Apuleius’ tale, Cupid, not able to endure the absence of his Psyche goes to her and pricks her with one of his arrows. She awakes from her deadly slumber. Both rise to Mount Olympus where Jupiter declares that their second marriage will be between equal partners under law. Psyche drinks ambrosia and becomes immortal, and a great marriage feast and banquet are held (Plate 113). After a time, a daughter is born to them, whose name, according to the old woman who tells the tale, is Voluptas (earthly pleasure), but whose name among the gods, we may conjecture, is Laetitia, the celestial joy of the Middle Platonis philosophers, and Apuleius himself uses related forms of the word in his Apologia and elsewhere in the Metamorphoses17 to express religious joy. The story of Cupid and Psyche undergoes another metamorphosis in the hands of the Alexandrian scriptural exegete, Origen (A.D. 185-254). Above all, Origen was a Christian, but as an Alexandrian he had access to the syncretic philosophy and religion of his age. Thus he shared a common cultural and philosophical milieu with Apuleius.18 As a catechetical instructor of catechumens, he simultaneously prepared his students, both men and women, for entrance into the Christian life and for martyrdom. He was also the instructor of cultured and intellectual pagans, who did not wish to become Christians necessarily but to explore yet another religion. In this, and in his preaching, he addresssed himself to audiences both male and female. As a scriptural exegete, he wrote for a somewhat narrower audience, but he disapproved of the elitist quality of Platonic philosophy and addressed a wider range of humanity than Plato did.19 From his earliest years, Origen wished for martyrdom. Christian ascetic theory of the third and fourth centuries was essentially eschatological and as Father Dani£lou puts it, " . . . it rested on desire for the ultimate meeting with Christ and on the provisional character of the present world" (Dani61ou, p. 12). It is perhaps in this context that Origen’s self-castration should be understood.20 Origen’s great Commentary on the Song o f Songs combines both a profound knowledge and understanding of Scripture and Platonic philosophy in an altered form: . . . sicut dicitur aliquis carnalis amor, quem et cupidinem appellaverunt poetae, secundum quem qui amat, in carne seminat; ita est et quidam spiritalis amor, secundum quem ille interior homo amans in spiritu seminat. Et ut evidentius dicam, si quis est qui portat adhuc imaginem terreni secundum exteriorem hominem, agitur

Cupid and Psyche/63 cupidine et amore terreno. Qui portat imaginem coelestis secundum interiorem hominem, agitur cupidine et amore coelesti. Amore autem et cupidine coelesti agitur anima cum perspecta pulchritudine et decore verbi Dei, speciem ejus adamaverit, et ex ipso telum quoddam et vulnus amoris acceperit. Est enim verbum hoc imago, et splendor Dei invisibilis, primogenitus omnis creaturae, in quo creata sunt omnia quae in coelis sunt, et quae in terris, sive visibilia, sive invisibilia. Igitur si quis potuerit capaci mente conjicere et considerare horum omnium quae in ipso creata sunt decus et speciem, ipsa rerum venustate percussus, et splendoris magnificentia ceu jaculo, ut ait propheta, electo terebratus, salutare ab ipso vulnus accipiet, et beato igne amoris ejus ardebit.21 [... just as there is one love, known as carnal and also known as Cupid by the poets, according to which the lover sows in the flesh; so also is there another, a spiritual love, by which the inner man who loves sows in the spirit. And, to speak more plainly, if anyone still bears the image of the earthly according to the outer man, then he is moved by earthly desire and love; but the desire and love of him who bears the image of the heavenly according to the inner man are heavenly. And the soul is moved by heavenly love and longing when, having clearly beheld the beauty and the fairness of the Word of God, it falls deeply in love with His loveliness and receives from the Word Himself a certain dart and wound of love. For this Word is the image and splendour o f the invisible God, the Firstborn o f all creation, in whom were all things created that are in heaven and on earth, seen and unseen alike. If, then, a man can so extend his thinking as to ponder and consider the beauty and the grace of all the things that have been created in the Word, the very charm of them will so smite him, the grandeur of their brightness will so pierce him as with a chosen dart-as says the prophet-that he will suffer from the dart Himself a saving wound, and will be kindled with the blessed fire of His love.] The Scriptural text of the Song of Songs is a series of lyrics, in which the Bridegroom describes the Bride’s beauty and she describes his; he departs from her from time to time, and she mourns his absence. He returns to her, their union is described, as well as her coronation, and food and drink are referred to throughout the text. On these lyrics Origen imposed the narrative pattern of the soul’s journey to God in the form of the myth of Cupid and Psyche.22 He identifies the Bridegroom of the Song as the Word

64/Tales within Tales or Heavenly Eros (caelestis Cupido) and the Bride as the soul or Psyche or anima.23 Love is desire aroused by beauty, love is a wound caused by a dart, which will save the soul.24 Evidently Origen knew some Greek narrative of Eros and Psyche, for he transposes that story and reminiscences of the Phaedrus to a Christian plan of redemption. As Origen and later Western exegetes of the Song of Songs describe the complete narrative pattern of the scriptural book, it tells of the disappearance of the Bridegroom from the Bride, her sorrowing, tears, sighing, languishing and sleeplessness in His absence, His return to her from time to time in immanence, her death, coronation, and marriage to Him in Paradise in transcendence, a great nuptial feast, and the birth of spiritual children. The resemblance to Apuleius* narrative is striking.25 Although Origen is actually addressing literate males, trained in scriptural exegesis, when he speaks of nos (we: PG, 13, 79C), he means "we" as every Christian soul, the Church, struggling and suffering to reach Christ in the Heavenly Jerusalem. Consistent with his ascesis, Origen’s Commentary has for the most part an eschatological thrust, the strands of the exegesis all leading to Paradise. For these reasons, gender is transcended in this text. It might be said of the temper of Origen’s Commentary: "In Christo enim neque masculus neque femina, sed omnes in ipso unum sumus" (Gal. 3. 28) [For in Christ there is neither male nor female, but we are all one in Him]. There are, according to Maxime Collignon, seven Roman Christian sarcophagi dating between the second and fourth centuries, the time period in which Apuleius and Origen wrote, that show the departed soul and Christ as Psyche and Cupid embracing in the after life. A pottery fragment from the Priscilla catacombs (Plate 11:4) shows Cupid and Psyche kissing in a Christianized version of the myth. The female figure is readily identified as Psyche since she wears spotted butterfly wings. The inscription on the fragment reads "Anima dulcis fruamur sine bile. Zeses." [Sweet soul, let us enjoy ourselves without reserve. Live.] The inscription intimates that the celestial joys of the after life are to be contrasted to the sensual joys of this world.26 Origen’s impact on Western exegesis of the Song of Songs was massive (Matter, pp. 20-48). By the twelfth century, however, exegesis was confined to the monastery or to clerical circles, and women were excluded from both. The sorrowful journey of the soul to God becomes an exclusively male enterprise and by a gendered role reversal, the male religious became the Bride of Christ in an atmosphere which was both misogynistic and homophobic. The appropriation of the female by the male patriarchy is reminiscent of Plato.

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Insofar as women were concerned, in the hierarchized world of the Western Church Fathers, particularly in the works of Jerome and Augustine, woman was relegated to inferior status because she was classified as flesh in contrast to man’s spirit. As a sexual being, she was to be despised " ... for that debasing carnality [which] draws the male mind down from its heavenly heights."27 As a way of avoiding this inferiority, women could choose the virginal life and renounce sexuality entirely, which meant becoming a "virile woman."28 To achieve this goal, women were advised to substitute the Heavenly Bridegroom for an earthly one, and to preserve their virginity by confining themselves to an enclosed space.29 Since virginity is a state of perfection and not a process of becoming, male gendered constructs for woman show her as a static rather than a dynamic figure.30 In the twelfth century, Alain of Lille and Honorius Augustodunensis and others wrote Marian interpretations of the Song of Songs. Their discussions of her refer to her as the anima perfecta (the perfected soul) because of her perpetual virginity.31 The Virgin is represented in exegesis and the pictorial arts as the enclosed space or in an enclosed space. She is thus referred to as the fons signatus (the fountain sealed), the hortus conclusus (the garden closed) from the Song of Songs 4.12, the cubiculum regis (the king’s chamber) from the Song of Songs 1.3 (Ante Vulgate), the porta clausa (the closed door from Josue 2.5 and 2.7, and the Templum Salamonis (the temple of Solomon).32 In many cases these symbolic representations refer to the Virgin’s ever virginal womb. Because of her perpetual virginity, the Virgin is most particularly fitted to be the Bride of Christ and to be crowned as His Bride in the after life (Plate 11:5). Thus, Catherine MacKinnon writes: " . . . each element of the female gender stereotype is revealed as, in fact, sexual."33 By the time that Chaucer came to write the "Clerk’s Tale," the myth of Cupid and Psyche had undergone further changes and it was from a folk tale version that Boccaccio had derived his story of Griselda and Walter, which appears in the Decameron (10.10). Petrarch, replying to Boccaccio’s version, had Christianized it in Epistola Seniles (17.3-4). Petrarch’s version and a French prose translation of Petrarch, "Le livre Griseldis," were Chaucer’s sources.34 In the "Clerk’s Tale" Griselda, the Psyche figure, is identified with space or place rather than time, and appears only in relation to her father’s house and W alter’s palace. James Wimsatt has shown that the two coronations and marriages of the Virgin to the Word, the first at the Annunciation when she marries the Word and is crowned and the second at her Assumption into heaven when she again marries the Word and is

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crowned correspond to G riselda’s two marriages to Walter and her coronation on both occasions.35 As Wimsatt writes: The pattern of Mary’s life is an exemplar or archetype for the life of the Christian so u l. .. Both the Virgin and Griselda begin as humble villagers; subsequently through a prince’s generosity that neither can merit, they are wed to him and crowned by him. They then endure severe and apparently unreasonable trials which are instigated or permitted by the prince; but, finally, having weathered these, their elevated and marital statuses are confirmed. The experience of the devout soul repeats this pattern (p. 198). As Wimsatt’s analysis shows, there is a shadowy likeness between Griselda’s trials and sufferings and those of Psyche in previous versions of her myth studied here. The difference lies in the fact that both Griselda and the Virgin represent virtue, while the Psyche figure in earlier versions must undergo some kind of purification to attain her goal. In the moralization of his tale, the Clerk narrator states that: This story is seyd nat for that wyves sholde Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee, For it were inportable, though they wolde, But for that every wight, in his degree, Sholde be constant in adversitee As was Grisilde, therfore Petrak writeth This storie___36 Chaucer has aligned humility, obedience, and patience with virginity in constructing his moral model for "every wight”—his audience of males and females. Since virginity is a state which once lost cannot be regained, it is difficult to see how virginity is to be made analogous to the virtues which Chaucer is trying to inculcate. The discrepancy between the two can be attributed to the desire and anxiety of the dominant males of the late Middle Ages to control the sexuality of women and to write gender roles for them in which their virginity or sexuality is at the root of all their vices and virtues. In conclusion, each of the four versions of the myth of Cupid and Psyche here discussed embodies a different gender construct and reflects the culture of the age in which it was written. Seeing the myth from a diachronic point of view, one is impressed with the power of the myth which undergoes many transformations, but still remains a vital part of the culture in which it

11:1

Psyche with her lamp discovers Cupid. Giulio Romano (1499-1546). The Sala di Psiche, Palazzo del Te. The Hall of Psyche is devoted to a series of illustrations of Apuleius’ story.

11:2

Psyche, despondent and alone, with the labor of sorting the piles of grain, Giulio Romano.

11:3

Cupid and Psyche at their nuptial banquet on Mount Olympus; the conclusion of Apuleius’ story. Giulio Romano.

11:4

Cupid and Psyche with butterfly wings embracing wedded in heaven. A Christianized version from the Priscilla catacombs.

11:5

The Coronation of the Virgin at her Assumption. The Pierpont Morgan Library. Book of Hours in the Sarum Use. Fifteenth Century. Morgan 105, fol. 21.

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was written. The myth will continue to be told and retold throughout the Renaissance and the historical periods which follow. Department of English University of Colorado, Boulder

Illustrations Plates 11:1 Psyche with her lamp discovers Cupid. Giulio Romano (14991546). The Sala di Psiche, Palazzo del Te. The Hall of Psyche is devoted to a series of illustrations of Apuleius* story. 11:2 Psyche, despondent and alone, with the labor of sorting the piles of grain, Giulio Romano. 11:3 Cupid and Psyche at their nuptial banquet on Mount Olympus; the conclusion of Apuleius* story. Giulio Romano. 11:4 Cupid and Psyche with butterfly wings embracing wedded in heaven. A Christianized version from the Priscilla catacombs. 11:5 The Coronation of the Virgin at her Assumption. The Pierpont Morgan Library. Book of Hours in the Sarum Use. Fifteenth Century. Morgan 105, fol. 21 recto.

Notes

*For discussion of Cupid (Eros) and Psyche in the classical period, see The Oxford Classical Dictionary under "Psyche"; Pauly-Wissowa, RealEncyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft under "Eros"; W.H. Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie, under "Eros." 2The Greek Anthology, ed. and trans. W.R. Paton (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1916), I, No. 57. *Greek Lyric Poetry, ed. and trans. C.M. Bowra (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 308. See also George MA. Haufmann, "Notes on the Mosaics from Antioch," American Journal o f Archeology, 2nd ser. 43 (1939), pp. 24042, for a number of additional references to the iconography of Psyche and

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Eros. 4See Adolph Furtwängler, Die Antiken Gemmen: Geschichte der Steinschneidekunst in Klassischen Altertum (Amsterdam: Verlag Adolf M. Hakkert, 1900), 3:300,340, and Haufmann, p. 240. 5For discussion of the evolution of the concept of the psyche, see Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult o f Soul and Belief in Imortality among the Greeks, trans. W.B. Hills, 2 vols (New York: Harper, 1966); H. Le Maitre, Essai sur le myth de Psyche dans la littérature française (Paris: Boivin, 1950), pp. 1-9; Franz Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism (New York: Dover, 1959); Werner Jaeger, Paideia, trans. Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), 2:40-49. 6Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 29; see also pp. 21-32; John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 41-82; K J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (New York: Random HouseVintage, 1980); Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the PreHistory o f the Great Chain o f Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), pp. 132-46; Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations o f Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 169-83. 7See Jane F. G ardner, Women in Rom an Law and Society (Bloomington: Indianà University Press), pp. 259-64. 8Pierre Grimai, Love in Ancient Rome, with a foreword by William R. Nethercut, trans. by Arthur Train, Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), pp. 305-6. 9Pandora's Daughers: The Role and Status o f Women in Greece and Roman Antiquity, with a foreword by Mary R. Lefkowitz, trans. by Maureen B. Fant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 156; see also pp. 141-42. On Isis in Rome, see also Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), pp. 217-226. 10The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). n On curiositas, see Hans Joachim Mette, "Curiositas" in Festschrift Bruno Snell (Munich: C.H. Beck’ssche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1956), pp. 227235; Serge Lancel, "’Curiositas’ et preoccupations spirituelles chez Apulée," Revue de Vhistoire des religions, 159 (1961), 25-46; LA. Mackay, "The Sin of the Golden Ass," Arion, 4:3 (1965), 474-480. While these articles differ on

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whether curiositas is a bad or good characteristic, all show the relationship between Psyche and Lucius. 12Apulée Metamorphoseis TV, 28-VI, 24 (Le Conte d ’A mour et Psyche), ed. Pierre Grimai (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 5. 22-23, pp. 78-82. 13For flagellation as part of the initiation rite in the mystery religions, see Marcel Brion, Pompeii and Herculaneum, trans. John Rosenberg (New York: Crown Publishers, 1960), plate 74, facing p. 136, and pp. 152-59. The fresco shown there is in the Villa of Mysteries at Pompeii and depicts an initiation into the Bacchic mysteries. 14Pierre Grimai, "Introduction" to Apulée Metamorphoseis, pp. 18-19; Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development o f the Feminine (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 110-118. ^F or the trials which the Psyche figure must undergo in the folk tales, see Jan Ojvind Swahn, The Tale o f Cupid and Psyche (Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1955), particularly pp. 28-31. l6On Apuleius’ discussions of daemons, see Deo Socratis in Apulei Platonici Madaurensis Opera Quae Supersunt 3: De philosophia libri, ed. Paul Thomas (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1970), 11.145, pp. 124-25, 129. See also Paul Friedlander, Plato: An Introduction, trans. Hans Meyerholt, Bollingen Series 54 (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 1, pp. 32-58, particularly 37; Grimai, "Introduction," pp. 23-24. 17On apotheosis and marriage, see C.C. Schlam, "Sex and Sanctity: The relationship of Male and Female in the Metamorphoses," in Aspects o f Apuleius9 Golden A ss, ed. B.J. Hiijmans, Jr. and R. Th. Van der Paardt (Groningen: Bouma’s Boekhuis, 1978), pp. 95-101, 104. Neumann points out that Voluptas is the name Cupid and Psyche's daughter is called by the world, but because she is a divine child, she must have a heavenly name. Neumann adds " . . . this child is the mystical joy which among all peoples is described as the fruit of the highest mystical union . . . ." Amor and Psyche, p. 140. The daughter’s name in Greek is Eupathiay see Plato, Phaedrus, 247d; Plotinus, The Enneads, 6.7.34. For references in Apuleius in which he uses laetuSy or laetor with a spiritual meaning, see Apologie, Florides, ed. and trans. Paul V allette (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960), sec. 64, p. 77, and M etam orphoses 1.1; 11.2; 11.9; 11.18.) See also R. Thibau, "Les Metamorphoses d’Apulée et la theorie Platonicienne de l’Eros," Studia philosophica gandensis, 3 (1965), 95-101. 18On Origen’s contact with Greek philosophy, see Jean Danielou,

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Origen, trans. Walter Mitchell (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955), pp. 73-88, particularly 73-74, and Henri Crouzel, Origene et la philosophie (Paris: Aubier, 1962), 19-101. 19John M. Rist, Eros and Psyche: Studies in Plato, Plotinus, and Origen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 210-211. 20See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 169. 21Patrologiae Graecae Cursus Completus, 13, 67ABC. O rigen’s Commentary exists only in the Latin translation of Rufinus. ^Origen imposed a narrative pattern on the Song of Songs because he expected to find one there. See E. Ann Matter, The Voice o f My Beloved: The Song o f Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 20-48. 23For discussion of exegesis of the Song of Songs during the Middle Ages, see, in addition to M atter, Friedrich Ohly, Hohelied-Studien: Grundzüge einer Geschichte der Hoheliedauslegung des Abendlandes bis um 1200, Schriften der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, 1 (Weisbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1958); Helmut Riedlinger, Die Makellosigkeit der Kirche in den lateinischen Hohelied-kommentaren des M ittelalters, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des M ittelalters, 38: 3 (M unster: West. Aschendorff, 1958); Ann W. Astell, The Song o f Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 24On Origen’s identification of Eros with the Word, Rist writes: "he recognized a downward flowing of Eros as well as the normal Eros which is desire" (p. 207). Rist also notes: "The object of Eros in Plato for the One is a love of what is impersonal, lifeless, and essentially unresponsive. Origen’s Bridegroom is personal" (p. 210). See Danielou, pp. 293-309. ^ O n Origen’s identification of the Word and the soul as Eros and Psyche, see FJ. Dolger, "Christus als himmlischer Eros und Seelenbrautigam bei Origenes," Antike und Christentum, 6 (1950), 273-5; R.P. Lawson, "Introduction" to Origen: The Song o f Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. R.P. Lawson (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1957), pp. 1516; Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, 21. All three recognize that Origen identified Christ and the soul as Eros and Psyche, but they do not recognize that the entire narrative pattern of exegesis of the Song draws in part on the story of Eros and Psyche.

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O n the wound of love, see Dom A. Cabassut, "Blessure d'amour," Dictionnaire de spiritualité, cd. Marcel Viller, F. Cavallera, J. de Guibert (Paris: Beauchesne, 1933), 1:1724-1729. The wound of love, however, does not occur in Scripture, at least when it is caused by an arrow or dart, and appears to have been introduced into exegesis from classical sources. O n the sorrowing, sighing, and tears of the soul for the Bridegroom, see Augustine, PL, 26, 508; Gregory the Great, PL, 75, 752; Origen, PG, 13, 162A; Richard of St. Victor, PL, 196,1209. O n languishing for love, see Robert of Tumbalenia, PL, 79, 496AB; Gilbert of Hoyland, PL, 184, 244ABC; Honorius, PL, 172, 428C; Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo in Cantica, 28.6. 3, and 74.2.5-7. On temporary immanence, see William of St. Thierry, Le commentaire sur le cantique des cantiques, sec. 18, 19, ed. M.M. Davy (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1958); Jean Leclercq, The Love o f Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York: Mentor, 1961), 73-74. On the coronation of the perfected soul in the after life, see Gregory the Great, De Isaac vel Anima, 5. 47, as quoted in Ohly, p. 44; Gilbert Foliot, PL, 202, 1259D-1260ABC; Robert of Tumbalenia, PL, 79, 511AB; Glossa Ordinaria, PL, 113,1148CD-1149A. On the banquet in the after life, see Origen, PG, 13, 154CD-155AB; Bernard of Clairvaux, PL, 183,159CD. On spiritual children, see Origen, PG, 13, 72CD. ^Maxine Collignon, Essai sur les monuments grecs et romaines relatifs au myth de Psyche, Bibliothèque des écoles françaises d’Athenes et de Rome, 2 (Paris, 1877), 341-349; 436-443; Nicholas J. Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: A n Interpretative History o f Kiss Symbolism and Related ReligioErotic Themes (Berkeley: University of California, 1969), 32-33. 27Rosemary Radford Ruether, "Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church," in Religion and Sexism, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 158. ^ J o Ann McNamara, "Cornelia’s Daughters: Paula and Eustochium," Women’s Studies, 11 (1984), 9-27. ^See Jerome, "Epistola 22: Ad Eustochium," Selected Letters, ed. FA. Wright (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1933), sec. 2 on the king’s chamber, and sec. 25 on Eustochium’s own chamber where the Bridegroom may sport with her. See also Abelard to Heloise, "Epistola 5," PL, 178, 202AC, on the king’s chamber as suitable for the religious woman, and Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience

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(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). •^Jerome says to Eustochium, " . . . cum omnia Deus possit, suscitare virginem non potest post ruinam [although God can do all things, He cannot raise up a virgin after her ruin], and he goes on to remark that a woman who has lost her virginity cannot receive the heavenly crown (sec. 25). 31On the Virgin as the anima perfecta, who is our moral exemplar by virtue of her virginity, see "Cantica Canticorum B. Mariae," ed. Paul E. Beichner, Marianum, 21:2 (1959) w. 45-57, 305-08; Adam of St. Victor, The Liturgical Poetry, ed. Digby S. Wrangham (London, 1881), 2:32, w. 49-53; and H. Barré, "Marie et l’église du Venerable Bede à Saint Albert le Grand," Etudes Mariales: Marie et l'Eglise, I-Bulletin de la Société française d'Etudes Mariales, 9 (1951), 64-65. See also Matter, pp. 155-77; Astell, pp. 60-72. 32Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (New York: Harper, 1971), pp. 145-46. 33"Feminism, Marxism, and the State: An Agenda for Theory," Signs, 7:3 (1982), 530. ^O n the folklore analogues of the Cupid and Psyche story, see Swahn, note 115. The Griselda story is one version of these folk tales; see Kate Laserstein, Die Griseldisstoff in der Weltliteratur, Forschungen zur neueren Literaturgeschichte, 58 (Duncker, 1928); Dudley D. Griffith, The Origin o f the Griselda Story, University of Washington Publications in language and Literature, 8 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1931). On the relationship of Petrarch’s story to the French translation and the texts themselves, see J. Burke Severs, T he Clerk’s Tale," in Sources and Analogues o f Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), pp. 288-92. For an analysis of the versions of Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer, see Robin Kirkpatrick, T he Griselda Story in Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer," in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 231-48; and for an analysis of all the fourteenth-century versions of the story, see Charlotte C. Morse, T h e Exemplary Griselda," Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 7 (1985), 51-86. 35"The Blessed Virgin and the Two Coronation of Griselda," Medievalia, 6 (1980), 187-207. ^T he Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), IV (E), 1142-48.

VI. THE ASSE TO THE HARPE: BOETHIAN MUSIC IN CHAUCER JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY

What! slombrestow as in a litargie? Or artow lik an asse to the harpe, That hereth sown whan men the strynges piye, But in his mynde o f that no melodie May sinken hym to gladen, for that he So dulys o f his bestialite ?” Pandarus, love’s preceptor, cries out these words in exasperation at the love-lorn Troilus who has spurned his elegant rhetorical consolatio} The words are borrowed from Boethius’ Philosophia who had uttered them in a tone of similar exasperation: "’Sentisne, inquit, haec atque animo illabuntur tuo an 6vot Vopat ?’" she says after having sung to him the Metrum 4, "Quisquis composito serenus aevo." Chaucer translated this passage: "‘Felistow,' quod sche, ’thise thynges, and entren thei aught in thy corage? Artow like an asse to the harpe?’"2 In the Troilus and Criseyde, probably written while Chaucer was translating Boece (see "Chaucer’s Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn"),3 Chaucer carried the asinus ad liram topos further than did Boethius. He has it jangle even more discordantly in Pandarus’ m outh-the advocate of lust-being wrenched out of context by Chaucer's P andarus from B oethius’ Philosophia. Pandarus is the schoolmaster of lust while Philosophia is the schoolmistress of reason. Though one apes the other, yet they are diametrically opposed. Besides the rhetorical topos of the Ass to the Harp there is also an extensive iconographic use of the harp-playing ass. An inlay on the soundbox of a sacred harp from Ur, circa 2600 B.C., shows an ass playing a lyre with other figures (Plate III:1).4 A fresco from Spain, now in the Cloisters Collection, executed about 1220 A.D., has a very similar group of figures in

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its border, one of whom is an ass, now playing the medieval harp (Plate III&).5 A capital at Nantes shows the ass with the harp and again one of the accompanying figures.6 The crypt of Canterbury Cathedral has capitals repeating these motifs, sculpted around 1120.7 Chaucer’s pilgrims could well have seen it.8 The iconographical motif thus remained astonishingly intact for nearly four thousand years. Boethius, in the Consolation o f Philosophy, makes use of the rhetorical topos, the asinus ad liram (I, Prosa 4). Chaucer translates the Boethian text, then uses the topos in the Troilus and Criseyde (1.730-35). But the literary ass does not play the harp. He hears it played by another uncomprehendingly: T h at hereth sown whan men the strynges plye, But in his mynde of that no melodie May sinken hym to gladen." This is Chaucer’s rendering in Troilus. However, Helen Adolf, in a Speculum article, considered the iconographical motif of use in analyzing the literary topos.9 Also, Emile Mâle cites a text where a complaint is lodged against the use of the ass and the lyre of Boethius, *onos lyras Boetii," in the decoration of churches, which clearly indicates an awareness during this period of a relationship between the iconographical motif and the rhetorical topos.10 The motif and topos function in all these instances as irreverent commentary. The relief upon the Sumerian harp shows the ass playing a harp that is the same as the artifact it ornaments. The Cloisters Collection’s Wyvem (a chimaera having wings and serpent tail upon a dragon’s body) has, for its border, figures which include men with tails who seem to echo the Wyvem in their chimaerical anatomy. Both clusters of figures, from the harp and the fresco, are clearly related to each other despite the passage of time. They are, as it were, an iconographical constellation. Willard Farnham notes the Gothic drollery of the Psalters where the figure of David with his harp may be mocked by similar grotesques, apes and asses playing harps, a goat, panpipes, and so forth.11 The capitals and portals of Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals also made use of this irreverent cluster of theriomorphic figures. Neither are the figures uniquely Babylonian or Gothic. They appear as well in Egyptian papyrii where donkeys, lions, crocodiles and apes play musical instruments, the instrument given to the ass being again the lyre.12 Though Helen Adolf saw the asinus ad liram topos as stretching back into totemic mists where the Babylonian ass was held to be sacred and possibly the inventor of music13 (certainly medieval manuscript grotesques include the musician whose instrument is the jawbone of an ass, perhaps a vestige of this concept across the bridge of time14), C.G. Jung’s "On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure," in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious discusses apes and asses in the medieval church showing how

Ill: 1 Plaque from the Ur Lyre with Ass Playing Harp, 2500 B.C. University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia.

111:2. Spanish Fresco with Ass Playing Harp, twelfth century, from Chapter House of San Pedro de Arlanza. The Metropolian Museum of Art, Cloisters Collection, 1931, New York.

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these were considered diabolical or buffoon figures who aped the sacred.15 Thus the sense in bono of the ass of Sumerian times underwent a reversal. The Pythagoreans held that the ass alone of all animals was not built according to harmony and Dante in explicating Boethius in his own Boethian Convivio echoed this concept: E però chi dalla ragione si parte, e usa pur la parte sensitiva, non vive uomo, ma vive bestia; siccome dice quello eccelentissimo Boezio: ’asino vive/16 Chaucer relates the ass to Priapus and his rites in the Parliament of Fowls (253-6). This sense of the bestiality of the ass is to be found generally. The 1566 Englishing of Apuleius’ Golden Ass was prefaced with a delightful imposed allegory by its translator, William Adlington: The argument of the book is, how Lucius Apuleius, the author himself, travelled into Thessaly. . . where after he had continued a few days, by the mighty force of a violent confection he was changed into a miserable ass, and nothing might reduce him back to his wonted shape but the eating of a rose, which, after the endurance of infinite sorrow, at length he obtained by prayer. Verily under the wrap of this transformation is taxed the life of mortal men, when as we suffer our minds so to be drowned in the sensual lusts of the flesh and the beastly pleasure thereof . . .that we lose wholly the use of reason and virtue, which properly should be in a man, and play the parts of brute and savage beasts. . . . But as Lucius Apuleius was changed into his human shape by a rose . . . so can we never be restored to the right figure of ourselves, except we taste and eat the sweet rose of reason and virtue, which the rather by mediation of prayer we may assuredly attain. Again, may not the meaning of this work be altered and turned in this sort? A man desirous to apply his mind to some excellent art, or given to the study of any of the sciences, at the first appeareth to himself an ass without wit, without knowledge, and not much unlike a brute beast till such time as by much pain and travail he hath achieved to the perfectness of the same, and tasting the sweet flower and fruit of his studies, doth think himself well brought to the right and very shape of a man. Finally, the Metamorphose of Lucius Apuleius may be resembled to youth without discretion, and his reduction to age possessed with wisdom and virtue.17

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Shakespeare’s treatment of Bottom metamorphosed as an unmusical musician ass for whom Titania lusts deals likewise with the ass as symbolizing bestiality and folly. It is interesting that in the topos of the ass and the lyre music is being parodied where the opposition between Reason and Bestiality is depicted. Chaucer in the House o f Fame renders the iconography where he describes the mocks who sit beneath the great harpers, Orpheus, Orion, Glascurion and their company: . . . smale harpers with her glees Sate under hem in dyvers sees, And gunne on hem upward to gape, And countrefete hem as an ape, Or as craft countrefeteth kynde. (1209-1213) The true musician, the David, the Orpheus, is in touch with celestial harmonies, the musica mundana. H.W. Janson notes this where a monkey perches atop Orpheus' lyre in mockery and plays panpipes, and W.C. McDermott has drawn attention to the parody of Orpheus by an ape with a lyre in an Afro-Roman mosaic, these contrasts stressing Orpheus' nobility.18 The same principle holds with the Sumerian harp and the Burgos fresco. The grotesques ape and mock divine music comically, being too involved with bestiality to hear truly the "hevenysshe melodie" which Troilus is finally to enjoy at his apotheosis, having laid aside lust (V.1807-1825). David S. Chamberlain has noted the relationship between Boethius’ treatment of music in the Consolation and his De Musica.19 In that work Boethius discussed the connection between music and morality in accord with Plato’s Republic in which music is to be "modesta ac simplex et mascula nec effeminata nec fera nec varia."20 Boethius then gives an interesting passage, in Doric Greek, concerning the Spartan abhorrence of the music of Timotheus of Milesius who added extra strings to the harp and taught polyphony to the Spartan youth thereby corrupting and softening them. He speaks of Pythagoras and Cicero on the effect of the Phrygian mode upon adolescents. A number of Boethius’ statements are concerned with the right guidance of young men. Boethius accounts for the doctrine of the influence of music upon morality (which is Pythagorean) by stating "tota nostrae animae corporisque compago musica coaptione coniuncta sit" (Li). Earlier he had noted that Plato’s world soul was Hconiunctam" to music. An excellent discussion of the use of these words in Western literature can be found in Leo Spitzer’s Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony. This ethos still

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exists in the phrase, "heart strings," which puns in Latin-cor, chorda; heart, string. In Boethius* second chapter music is divided into three parts, the first, musica mundana, the second, musica humana, the third, musica instrumentis. The first, musica mundana (Lorenzo’s famous speech in The Merchant o f Venice, V.i.54-65) is not heard by human ears but is created by the stars in their movements, the concors discordia of the warring elements and likewise the harmonious oppositions of the four seasons. The musica humana is the harmony between microcosm and macrocosm, body and soul, reason and folly. Musica instrumentis is primarily polarized between string and wind instruments: cithara and aulos, which in the Middle Ages become harp and bagpipes. Later in the De Musica Boethius gives the history of the harp. At first it had had four strings, one for each of the elements, which was said to be Mercury’s invention and which was the harp Orpheus played. Later the strings were expanded to seven, eight or nine, one for each of the planets and then the spheres so that the harp would accord with the musica mundana. The harp of Timotheus of Milesius had eleven strings (I.xx). The concept of the concordance of the chords of the harp to the harmony of the world was punningly seen to relate to the musica humana through the heart (cor).21 Chaucer, indeed, translated "animo" as "in thy corage" in the "Asse to the Harpe" passage. While the musica instmmentis is the least noble of the three divisions, being a mere imitation of the musica m undanat it in turn ranks its instruments. The harp is noble, wind instruments are not. The harp represents Reason, wind instruments that Folly which strives to undo the musica humana. Two Greek tales underline this concept. Marsyas is flayed because, with his wind instrument, earlier rejected by the wise Athena because of the distortions it produced in her face disturbing her musica humana, he essays to outdo Apollo’s lyre music.22 And, as the Wife of Bath tells us, King Midas wears ass’s ears because in a music contest he voted for Pan’s piping over Apollo’s harping, for lust over reason, only she twists the tale against herself having the secret that will out entrusted not to the barber but to the wife.23 Like the Wife who is "somdel deef," so, says Ovid, was Midas dull of ear, *aures stolidas" (174-5), "and that was scathe." We will come to see that this inability to appreciate musica mundana is due to defects in ears and hearts, to an imbalance in the musica humana towards folly and bestiality. The ass’s ears become symbolic of this state. Thus the topos and the iconography of the Ass and the Harp represent a discord in the latter two of the three divisions of musica mundana, humana and instrumentis.

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A further element to the ass's bestiality which counters reason is the Circe story which is recounted in Boethius and which Chaucer translates: Than betideth it that, yif thou seest a wyght that be transformed into vices, thow ne mayst nat wene that he be a man. For it he be ardaunt in avaryce, and that he be a ravynour by violence of foreyn richesse, thou shalt seyn that he is lik to the wolf; . . . and yf he be slow, and astonyed, and lache, he lyveth as an asse;. . . and if he be ploungid in fowle and unclene luxuris, he is witholden in the foule delices of the fowle sowe. Than folweth it that he that forleteth bounte and prowesse, he forletith to ben a man; syn he ne may nat passe into the condicion of God, he is tomed into a beeste. (IV. Prosa 3.101-127) It is probable that this despised theriomorphosis, encountered not only in Christianity but also in Classic Greece and Rome, is a vestige of earlier cultural totemism, which Lévi-Strauss has taught us to view as but a classificatory system used by most of mankind.24 It does survive with honor in medieval heraldry and also can be glimpsed in classic and medieval battle similes where heroes fight like lions, tigers, leopards, boars and so forth. It can be glimpsed as well in the mummers' plays and morris dances of England, where some of the dancers wear animal heads. (Shakespeare’s Bottom is perhaps an aspect of this.)25 However, the Christian and Classic religions, being anthropomorphic rather than theriomorphic, suppressed this classificatory system to the vices of man, not his virtues. Therefore man’s bestiality untunes him. The ass who plays the sacred harp renders it incapable of imitating the musica mundana or of restoring the musica humana within his hearers. It is musica instrumentis at its worst. Besides the iconography of the asinus ad liram, there was also the Aesopic fable of the unmusical musician ass. It, too, finds a place in medieval manuscript illuminations. Professor Robertson notes the marginal use of the unmusical ass whose music offends a lionlike grotesque who is trying in vain to stop up his ears. The illuminations, to which this is but part of the marginalia, concern the rejection of Thamar, where the love-lorn Amnon has followed his pandar’s advice (Jonadab) and feigned sickness, asking that Thamar be sent to his bedside. He then throws Thamar upon the bed, dishonors her, and sends her away. The ass and lion provide a mocking yet judgmental commentary upon the text. The action of Troilus and Criseyde echoes this tale in Books II through IV but with the sexes reversed after the first episode.26 Juan Ruiz in the Libro de Buen Amor retells the fable of the unmusical

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musician ass as an analogy to his poem:27 Dueñas, abrid orejas, oíd buena lición, entended bien las fablas: guadadvos del varón; al asno sin orejas e sin su coraron. [Ladies, open your ears, listen to a good lesson, pay careful attention to fables . . . be careful that it does not happen to you as with the lion to the ass without ears and without heart.] El león fue doliente, dolíale la tiesta. Quando fue sano d’ella, que la traía enfiesta, todos las animalias, un domingo en la siesta, venieron ante él todos a fazar buena fiesta. Estava y el burro, fezieron d’él juglar; como estava bien gordo comento a retobar, su atambor tañiendo muy alto a rebuznar: al león e a los otros queríalos atronar. Con las sus cazurrías el león fue sañudo; quiso abrirle todo e alcanzar non le pudo; su atambor tañiendo fuése, más y non estudo. Sentiós’ por escarnido el león del orejudo. (892-895) At the festival held at the recovery of the sick lion the ass has thought himself a fíne minstrel, beating his drum (traditionally covered with ass’s skin), braying very loudly, and in so doing has enraged the still headachy lion. He flees in fear. El león dixo luego que merced le faría; mandó que le llamassen, que la fiesta ornaría; quanto él demandasse tanto le otorgaría; la gulhara juglar a dixo que l’llamaría. Fuése la raposilla ado el asno andava paciendo en un prado; tan bien lo saludava: "Señor," dixo, "confadre, vuestro solaz onrava a todos, a agora non valen una hava. Más valía vuestra albuébula e vuestro buen solaz, vuestro atambor sonante, los sonetes que faz’ que todo nuestra fiesta; al león mucho plaz’ que tornedos al juego en salvoe an paz.

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Creyó falsos falagos, él escapó peor; tomóse a la fiesta bailando el cantador; non sabía la manera el burro del señor: escota el juglar necio e son del atambor. Como el león tenía sus monteros armados, prendiéronlo a don Burro como eran castigados; al león lo troxieron, abriól’ por los costados: de la su seguranza son todos espantados. (896-900) The lion sends off the minstrel vixen to entice the ass back, granting him pardon. The vixen informs the ass that the lion so loved the donkey’s cries of jubilation, his drumming, his sweet tunes, that he must return and the show go on. The stupid minstrel does so and is flayed by the lion. (This flaying of the unmusical ass is a variant of that other musical contest, the flaying of Marsyas who, in a woodcut in Sebastian Brant’s Ship o f Fools is shown as the bagpipes player of lust, as is Chaucer’s Miller, and with ass’s ears, while Apollo plays the lyre of reason.) Later the wolf gobbles up the ass’s heart and ears. He tells the lion that the ass was bom that way, which suggests the Pythagorean teaching of the ass not being created according (if you will forgive the pun) to the harmony of the musica humana, otherwise he could not have fallen for the trickery. Juan Ruiz concludes as he began: Assí, señoras dueñas, entended bien el romance: guar dadvos de amor loco, non vos prenda nin alcance; abrid vuestras orejas; el coraron se lance en amor de Dios limpio, loco amor non le trance. (904) His poem is like the vixen-minstrel’s enticement to return to the lion’s fiesta wherein great danger lies. Do not be taken in by it. Keep your years and heart open to the love of God, not to lustful folly (amor loco). The beast fable in the Libro de Buen Amor functions as Beryl Rowland observes of beast fables in medieval literature generally: "The absurdity of the idea of animals behaving like humans never minimizes the seriousness of the assertion that is being made: in the animal man may see his own characteristics and he can learn."28 A negative didacticism is at work. Maria Rosa Lida de Malkiel defines the genre of the Libro as the maqamat in which the persona practices the vice the author preaches against, Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale being an example of this literary type. Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, counsels against loco amor, yet his persona, Don Melón

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de la Huerta, avidly practices it.29 However, the Archpriest says he uses these escapades of Don Melón "por dar ejemplo, non porque a mí avino."30 The Archpriest writes ass-like, trickster-saviour poetry in order to preach against bestial lust, while appearing to practice it with rather disastrous results: his mistress dies of the poisonous aphrodisiacs his pandaress gives her, he sleeps with revolting m ountain girls, his lion/archbishop jails him. The autobiography is fictional yet functions with the paradoxical didacticism we see as a pattern with the topos of the ass as dull and bestial yet teaching, by these binary distinctions, wisdom. The figure of the ass is a constant theme in connection with education in Western literature. Nigel Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum, or, as Chaucer titled it, "Daun Burnel the Asse," states that the happy man is he who learns caution from another’s folly, being governed by reason: "Est igitur felix aliena pericula cautam/Quem faciunt, formant et ratione regi."31 The Speculum achieves this in the reader by presenting to him a mock paideia, where an ass learns nothing for all his quest for wisdom. Of its title, the Speculum Stultorum, it is said: "It has been given this name in order that foolish men may observe as in a mirror the foolishness of others and may then correct their own folly, and that they may learn to censure in themselves those things which they find reprehensible in others." In this vein too we see classic gems carved with the ass as pompous teacher lording it over schoolboys,32 while in later children’s literature Pinnocchio will learn wisdom from his folly, being transformed into a donkey and poor Eeyore, like Daun Burnel, suffers the loss of his tail and struggles in vain to become literate. Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools woodcuts show the fools with caps with ass’s ears and of them Barclay the translator says: "Asses erys for our folys a lyuray is."33 He also, in his introduction to the reader, pleads: But ye that shal rede this boke: I you exhorte. And you that are herars therof also I pray Where as ye knowe that ye be of this sorte: Amende your lyfe and expelle that vyce away. Slomber nat in syn. Amende you whyle ye may. And yf ye so do and ensue Vertue and grace. Within my ship ye get now rowme ne place. Brant’s Ship o f Fools is a sermon preached by Wisdom. Erasmus will have his Encomium Moriae preached by her opposite number, Stultitia?* The context in which Pandarus uses the Boethian topos in Troilus and Criseyde (where it undergoes a transformation from the manner in which

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Boethius used it; there, by Philosophia advocating Reason, here, by Pandarus advocating its reverse, Lust, much like Erasmus’ variation upon Brant) is interesting when seen juxtaposed with the Sumerian harp, the Gothic grotesques, the Consolation o f Philosophy, the Golden Ass, the Speculum Stultorum, the Ship o f Fools and the Libro del Buen Amor. Each has a consonance with all the others. The asinus ad liram is, in Jung’s words, a cultural "shadow," a trickster-figure threatening the culture it mocks, profanizing its sanctity, yet for psychic wholeness demanding a voice thereby becoming its trickster-saviour.35 The discord of the asinus ad liram mocks celestial harmony, but that mockery, paradoxically, defines the harmony that would otherwise go unperceived. Perhaps for this reason the Middle Ages cultivated polyphony, creating motets where vernacular profane verses mocked the sacred Latin against Boethius’ strictures,36 and illuminated manuscripts with sacred scenes mocked by similia Dei?1 Troilus, the Petrarchan lover, is fallen into wanhope. The topos is used to convey this. Ernst Curtius, when noting the topos of the lute-playing ass in the Carmina Burana, related it to the adynata, the topos of the "World Upsidedown" which Arnaut Daniel made use of to express the havoc wrought in the poet’s mind by false love, "amor /oco."38 Thus the topos, by its ridiculous contraries, expresses the discord wrought in the lover’s musica humana. Topology is here harnessed to psychology and is used to express a state of madness. Asses belong to the sphere of bagpipes, not of harps. "The Ass and the Lyre" is an oxymoron, a zeugma, a parodixically yoked opposition. It is absurd. Although Pandarus plies all his sophistic art to heal Troilus’ malady (but with the opposite intent than Philosophia) his labor in the long run will be in vain. He is the false physician, while she is the true. Troilus will rebuke him: . . thi proverbes may me naught availle. . . . Lat be thyne olde ensaumples [and it is nearly four thousand years old we recall] I the preye’" (1.756-760). But though he insists, "I am nat deef* (753), he is withdrawn from Pandarus, in a "Margie.” Philosophia observes Boethius persona to be in a similar state in I Prosa 2, Boethius being also speechless and unresponsive: "he is fallen into a litargie, which that is a commune seknesse to hertes that been desceyved. He hath a litil foryeten hymselve, but certes he schal lightly remembren hymself, yif so be that he hath knowen me or now; and that he may so doon, I wil wipe a litil his eien that ben dirked by the cloude of mortel thynges." In forgetting the precepts of Philosophia, he has fallen into wanhope,

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"bestialite" and the "cloude of mortel thynges" which correspond to Lorenzo's "muddy vesture of decay" which "doth grossly" stop up the harmony of immortal music. Troilus, similarly, is unheeding of the harp echoing the music of the spheres and, similarly, is beyond the consolation of philosophy. In short, he is an ass who cannot comprehend harmony. Yet Troilus willagain like Boethius-rise above this "cloude of mortel thynges" and this "muddy vesture of decay.” Chaucer is using the Boethian text to adumbrate his characterization of Troilus. What was a comic "ensaumple" at least as old as Ur is in Chaucer’s retractatio of Boethius a sophisticated concept endowed with Pythagorean philosophic qualities demonstrating the opposition between Reason and Folly. Thomas Usk in his Boethian Testament o f Love noted that Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde was a "philosophical" poem and he is correct.39 However, Chaucer’s method is to deliberately pervert Philosophia, then rectify her, in the course of the poem. Chaucer’s use of the topos comments upon a Troilus who hears but does not heed the harp of philosophy. He jangles her harmony. Lillian M.C. Randall mentions one illumination where the ass tramples the harp, exemplifying, she says, the "mere hearer of the Word."40 That is precisely what Troilus will do to Philosophia’s discussion of destiny and free will. (And so does also Chaucer in robbing Boethius’ II, Metrum 8 and perverting it to the celebration of adulterous lust in Book III.1744-1771, where its original version celebrated musica mundana as the harmony of love exemplified by "peples joyned with an holy boond, and knyteth sacrement of manages of chaste loves.") Troilus wrenches the Boethian text out of harmony just as surely as does the deaf Wife of Bath (associated with Midas’ ass’s ears) wrench scripture out of context. Yet critics are at odds concerning Troilus and Chaucer’s use of Boethius. Some take Troilus’ railing on destiny and free will as Chaucer’s own. Others disagree. Discord prevails.41 Chaucer twists the m atter further. Not only does Troilus not comprehend Pandarus’ consolation, being like an ass to the harp, but Pandarus is himself like the iconographical ass playing the harp mocking the celestial music with the bestial, for he has wrenched Boethius’ Consolation o f Philosophy to the uses of lust, not reason, and thus mocks the author of the major music text of the medieval universities by his discord. Pandarus is a grotesque. As lust’s preceptor, he is like that ass carved on a gem shown as schoolmaster lording it over boys. This mockery, however, defines the true by its opposition to it. Chaucer has Pandarus cite this principle in the Troilus and Criseyde giving the game away: "By his contrarie is everything declared" (1.637). This is the principle that underlies the David Psalter illuminations and the Sumerian harp where the mockery comments upon the true while

84/Tales within Tales self-consciously appearing within that which it mocks. The commentary of folly is comically didactic. For a moment recall the Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, manuscript frontispiece in which Chaucer is seen reading the Troilus and Criseyde to Richard II and his court. Recall also the commonplace, which grew out of the concept of the musica mundana, of the state as a lute as in Ulysses’ famed speech.42 Consider Chaucer’s relationship towards Richard II as that of a Pandarus towards a Troilus. Yet recall also that Chaucer in that illumination is shown as a soberly clad preacher speaking from a pulpit to a gaily bedecked and worldly court. Richard stands in cloth of gold attentively listening. The other figures pay little heed. The poem purports to be a romance, yet, as Thomas Usk pointed out, is "philosophical" in Boethius’ manner. Chaucer’s game is to seem a Pandarus but not to be such, to seduce his worldly hearers from lust by means of lust’s discords. To lead his hearers, especially his king, to the harmony of the musica mundana could be crucial to a realm that may well reflect the problems of that Troy from which Richard proudly traces his ancestry.43 Chaucer may be seeking to tune his kingly asinus ad liram to celestial harmonies. He does so through poetry (against which Philosophia railed) and thereby, paradoxically, seduces his hearers to virtue. An asinus ad liram reading of the poem could lead to false conclusions. Troilus and Pandarus and Boethius persona at this point are asini ad liram- though Philosophia is not-and are not to be confused with the viewpoints of their authors. This is a common quality to medieval poetry; the poets’ personae are presented in a stance of folly, obviously lacking the knowledge and wisdom of their authors. The Jesse tree of such personae whose progenitor is most likely Boethius, include de Meun, Dante, Juan Ruiz, Chaucer, Erasmus, and More. Their statements are not to be taken at face value but examined critically within the poems’ contexts. Physicially they may resemble their authors, mentally they do not.44 Medieval poetry of this type concerns itself with the reform of the reader, from folly to wisdom, the persona providing a useful scapegoat (a trickster-saviour) by means of his naïveté at which the reader can laugh but having done so cannot return himself to that behavior with impunity. Frequently the form is that of the maqamat in which the persona practices vices the reader and author know to be wrong, the poem thereby becoming a speculum stultorum , and consequently, though paradoxically, of wisdom. Mirrors reverse images. While Troilus is not Chaucer’s persona (though critics confuse his mental debates with Chaucer’s own), Pandarus in Chaucer’s Troilus and Crisedye reverses the relationship of Boethius’ Philosophia and is the author’s

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mock p erso n a . T roilus is a m em ber of R ichard I I ’s Jesse tree . C haucer/Pandarus would counsel him. In this Chaucer has altered Boccaccio’s poem in which Troilo was the author’s persona. In this manner he can adapt the matter to the court of England. But it is necessary for him to do so in the twisted court jester role of Pandarus, rather than of straight Philosophia, or the youthful Troilus, if he is to be heard. While Troilus, through lust, is temporarily an asinus ad liram, Pandarus is a variation on the theme. He appears to ape Philosophia, to play her lyre. But he wrenches her harmonies from the true. In this perhaps he echoes Amis in the Roman de la Rose who is introduced following Reason and who there openly tears down her arguments. Chaucer’s development conflates Amis with Reason, by having Pandarus "countrefete" Philosophia. Thus Pandarus becomes a "Faus-Semblant" Philosophia, masquerading as that which he is not. That recalls yet another Aesopic fable concerning the ass who, dressed in a lion’s skin, fools fools but not wise men. C.S. Lewis made use of this fable in the Chronicles o f Namia. In The Last Battle the Apocalypse is wrought through the Ape having the Ass dress as the Lion who is Christ/Aslan. In this instance, C.S. Lewis is using a further variant of the ass theme in medieval thought which is, despite its classic associations with Priapus, its Christ-likeness. The humble ass had conveyed Mary and the Child to Egypt, had borne Christ to Jerusalem, bears on its back the mark of a cross.45 Kantorowicz cites the messianic prophecies of Isaiah (62:10) and Zachariah (9.9) calling for the use of an ass in the Palm Sunday procession and then its return to its owner. John Chrysostom in a sermon analogized this to the Incarnation: "caro remissa est, ratio autem retenta est,”46 in which context the ass is again flesh versus spirit. Jung discussed the Beauvais celebrations of the festum asinorum which, though it began probably as a celebration of Mary’s flight into Egypt, degenerated into the mockingly pagan Festival of Fools with theriom orphic elements, the priest and the congregation braying their responses at the consecrated altar, foreshadowing Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in which the disciples, though God is dead, worship God as the Ass. Jung mentions as well the famous mocking crucified ass scratched on a wall in the Palatine 47 Pandarus is Chaucer’s persona, necessarily incarnated within the text, to set the lustful action afoot. In Boccaccio’s text Pandarus is Boccaccio’s age; in Chaucer’s he is altered to conform with Chaucer’s own and so his physical appearance. He mirrors Chaucer. But he is a mockery of Chaucer, the reverse of Chaucer’s intent in writing this poem. Chaucer pretends to be Pandarus, the fleshly and discordant asinus ad liram, but concludes with the

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musica mundana with Pythagorean harmonies: caro remissa est, ratio autcm retenta est, lust laid aside. The poem thus seduces and pandars the reader, through folly, from folly, Pandarus, thereby, is a trickster-saviour. Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde is both Pandarus and Philosophia, both ass and David harping. "By his contrairie is everything declared," he states. The poem has functioned to delineate lust, then its consequence, to involve the reader vicariously in that profane act, then teach its folly. The Boethian proverb, like the iconography of the grotesque upon cathedral and harp and manuscript, functions as a mockingly didactic commentary upon the poem and audience yet is in polyphonic harmony with it. Will Chaucer’s reader be an asinus ad liram as was Troilus once, or will he come to comprehend Chaucer’s deliberate twisting of the Boethian text and its ancient proverb, its "olde ensaumple," and laugh as Troilus did? His lighte goost ful blisfully is went Up to the holughnesse of the eighthe spere, In convers letyng everich element; And ther he saugh, with ful avysement, The erratik sterres, herkenyng armonye With sownes ful of hevenyssh melodie. And down from thennes faste he gan avyse This litel spot of erthe, that with the se Embraced is, and fully gan despise This wrecched world, and held al vanite To respect of the pleyn felicite That is in hevene above, and at the laste, Ther he was slayn, his lokyng down he caste. And in hymself he lough right at the wo Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste; And dampned al oure werk that foloweth so The blynde lust, the which that may nat laste, And sholden al oure herte on heven caste. (1808-1825) Medieval Studies University of Colorado at Boulder

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Notes

1Troilus and Criseyde, 1.730-5. 2Boece, 1, Prosa 4, 1-3. The Latin text used is Philosophiae Consolationef ed. Karl Büchner (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1947). 3Robinson notes, p. 320, that T h e association of Boece and Troilus in the Wordes to Adam Scriveyn and the very heavy indebtedness of the Troilus to the Consolation indicate that Chaucer had the two works in hand at about the same time." 4The lyre is in the possession of the University Museum, Philadelphia. See H.W. Janson, History o f Art (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1968), p. 66, and André Parrot, Sumer: The Dawn o f Art, trans. Stuart Gilbert and James Emmons (New York: Golden Press, 1961). Parrot feels the use of the animals adorning the harp reflect incidents sung to that harp. He describes the lyre inlay as representing preparations for a banquet, at which an ass will play a lyre, a jackal the sistrum and tambourine, and a bear will dance; also with them are a scorpion man and a gazelle. He notes that the iconography recurs in the satirical papyrus of Turin, in the ostraca from Dei el-Medina, in the fables of Aesop and Phaedrus, and finally in Romanesque capitals. These animals likewise, it should be noted, are featured in Apuleius’ Golden Ass: asses, bears, dogs, goats, apes. 5The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cloisters Collection, purchase 1931. From the Chapter House of the Monastery of San Pedro de Arlanza, near Hortiguëla, Burgos, Spain. 6Emile Mâle, L'Art religieux du XIIe siècle en France (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1924), p. 339, fig. 197. Mâle notes the use of the Ass and the Lyre also at Saint-Sauveur de Nevers, at Saint-Parize-le-Châtel (Nièvre), on the portals of Saint-Aignin de Çosne and of Fleury-la-Montaigne (Saône-etLoire) and Meillers (Allier), at Brionde, and at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire. He observes: "A la face meridional du vieux clocher de Chartres, on voit encore aujourd-hui la statue de l’âne qui joue de la lyre. Elle invitait à l’application les jeunes clercs qui venaient en foule suivre les leçons des fameux maîtres de Chartres, et, tout à côté, un ange avec son cadran solaire leur mesurait le temps," p. 340. 7George Zarnecki, English Romanesque Sculpture 1066-1140 (London: Tiranti, 1951), Plates 55-56. Similar sculpture, on a doorway this time, is to be found at St. Mary’s, Barfreston, Kent, circa 1170-80. My thanks to Steven Ellis, University of Birmingham, Stephen Stallcup, Southern Methodist

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University, for this information. 8See "From Every Shires Ende: The World of Chaucer's Pilgrims," A Pilgrim Films Production. 9"The Ass and the Harp," Speculum, 29 (1950), 49-57. 10M âle, p. 340, because of this thirteenth-century complaint concerning sculpture using Boethius' ass and lyre, considered Boethius the source for the iconography. The Sumerian harp, however, considerably antedates Boethius. n The Shakespearian Grotesque: Its Genesis and Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 24-5. 12Adolf, p. 50. The proverb, incidentally, is extant in a variant form in modem Chinese and is used to convey the same meaning as Philosophia's. It is the "playing the lyre before the ox" (the Sumerian harp has at its base the head of a bull as it is shown in the plaque) and it may have reached China via the trade routes. 13P. 51. 14Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image, trans. Dora Nussey (New York: Harper, 1958), p. 61. Also Hours o f Jeanne d’Evreux, fol. 54. 15Trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Bollingen, 1959), pp. 255-272. 16II.viii.25. 17(London, 1935), pp. xvi-xvii. ^Apes and Apelore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: W arburg Institute, 1952), p. 108 and PI. XIIc; The Ape in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938), fig. 489, pp. 288-290. See also Michael Masi, "The Christian Music of Sir Orfeo," Classical Folia (1974), 3-20; Kathi Meyer-Baer, The Music o f the Spheres and the Dance of Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 69, 77, 204-8, 222, etc.; John Block Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). David in MSS illuminations is shown with the mocking beasts or with his harp and throne ornamented with bestial forms, Princeton Index of Christian Art, David with Harp. 19"Philosophy of Music in the Consolatio of Boethius," Speculum, 45 (1970), 80-97. See also Manfred F. Bukofzer, "Speculative Thinking in Medieval Music," Speculum, 17 (1942), 165-180. 2°I use the edition of Godofredus Friedlein (Lipsiae, 1867). 21Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas o f World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation o f the Word "Stimmung” ed Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), pp. 85-93.

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22John Hollander, The Untuning o f the Sky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 35. In Sebastian Brant’s The Ship o f Fools, trans. Alexander Barclay (Edinburgh, 1874), are two woodcuts, Vol 1,256 and Vol. II, 28 in which these themes are crystallized. The Fool chooses the bagpipes over the harp or lute and Marsyas is flayed for choosing the bagpipes over the harp. Both Fool and Marsyas are shown with ass’s ears. See also House o f Fame, III. 1227-1232. Meyer-Baer discusses wind instruments’ relation to death and mourning in antiquity for this opprobrium, pp. 219, 289 and passim. 23Canterbury Tales, III. 951-982. u Le Totemisme aujourd-hui (Paris: Plon, 1962). The principles which Lévi-Strauss discusses in Mythologiques, binary distinctions and "zoèmes," are at work in the development of the asinus ad liram theme. See L ’Homme nu (Paris: Plon, 1971), pp. 481-558 and pp. 68-74. Also Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), pp. 172-7 and 185-8. ^Beryl Rowland, Blind Beasts: Chaucer's Animal World (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971), p. 10. 26D.W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 223 and figs. 93-5 from British Library Egerton MS 3277, fols. 142,61,62v, 63v. 27Ed. and trans. Raymond S. Willis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 238-241. 28Blind Beasts, p. 10. 29Marfa Rosa Lida de Malkiel, Two Spanish Masterpieces: The Book o f Good Love and The Celestina," Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 49 (Urbana, 1961), 21-27. Willis and others dislike the term as its HispanoHebrew originals were pious and solemn. 30Willis, p. xlvi. 31Lines 3893-4. 32Princeton Index of Christian Art, from Cabrol, F. D i e t I2 (1907), fig. 586. 331.181. ^W alter Kaiser, Praisers o f Folly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 35. William Empson’s arguments concerning double plot (Some Versions o f Pastoral) are applicable here as well as Victor Turner’s perception that T he structure of the whole depends on its negative as well as its positive signs," p. 201.

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^P p. 255-272. Till Eulenspiegel (Mirror of Wisdom) is an example. He mocks the learned University by teaching an ass to seem to read. 36The word, "polyphony," occurred in Boethius’ account of Timotheus of Milesius. It is of interest that Jan Van Eyck was to paint a portrait of a leading composer of his day giving the portrait the inscription "Timotheus." Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, Vol. I, 196-7 and Vol. II, fig. 261, conjectures that the portrait is either of Guillaume Dufay or, more probably, of Gilles Binchois. See Polyphonies du X IIe siècle: Le Manuscrit H 196 de la Faculté de Médecine de Montpellier, ed. Yvonne Rokseth (Paris: 1936), II, 83-114; and Bukhofzer, pp. 173-177. 37See Janson, and McDermott on fig. 489, pp. 288-290, where the ape plays Orpheus, the ass Christ. Shakespeare plays a similar game where he has Bottom the ass and the rude mechanicals ape the harmony of his Midsummer Night's Dream. ^Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Pantheon, Bollingen Series 36, 1953), p. 95. See Ancient Misericords in the Priory Church, Great Malvern (Worcester, n.d.), p. 6. 39Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), p. xxii. 40"Exempla as a Source of Gothic Marginal Illuminations," Art Bulletin, 39 (1957), 104. In a similar vein Mâle, The Gothic Image, p. 44 and fig. 18, discusses Honorius on the adder: "The adder is the image of the sinner who closes his ears to the words of life" (which relates that image to the "somdel deeP Wife of Bath). The adder shown is similar to the Wyvern and the serpent man of the Burgos fresco and the Sumerian harp, having legs and wings as well as a tail. 41For an account of the debate on Troilus and Criseyde by Chaucerians see the essay by John P. McCall in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 370-384. 42Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, I.iii.83-124. 43D.W. Robertson, Jr., Chaucer's London (New York: John Wiley, 1968), p. 3, notes Richard of Maidstone’s contemporary identification of London as New Troy, the Black Prince as Hector, Richard II, rather unflatteringly, as Troilus. ^ O n the use of the persona see Leo Spitzer, "Note on the Poetic and Empirical ’I’ in Medieval Authors," Traditio, 4 (1946), 414-422. The stance of the author is best exemplified in the Boethius manuscript iluminations

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garnered by Pierre Courcelle in La Consolation de Philosophie dans la tradition littéraire (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1967). In these and in the illuminations to the Roman de la Rose and the Commedia, writer and dreamer physically resemble each other but do not occupy the same space. A further aspect is the relationship of the poet to his realm which is similar to that of a prophet. See for example the city Bible illuminations of Jeremiah preaching to Jerusalem showing Jerusalem as their own city which iconographically recurs in the Duomo fresco of Dante reading the Commedia to Florence. 45Beryl Rowland, Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), p. 20. ^Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study o f Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton Univesity Press, 1957), p. 85. G.K. Chesteron celebrates the absurd Christ-bearing ass in poetry. Medieval Palm Sunday processions sometimes included wooden figures of Christ astride the ass. The Cloisters Collection and the Detroit Art Museum both possess examples. 47P. 259. See also Félix Clément, "L’âne au Moyen Age," Annales archéologiques, 16 (1856), 30-33. The harp, as well as the ass, could allegorize Christ, this being seen by pseudo-Hugh of St. Victor as the cause of David’s healing of Saul’s madness, Allegoriae in Vetus Testamentum, VI, Patrologia Latina 175, 692A. Even this could be mocked. Hieronymus Bosch shows music in hell with, among other figures and instruments, a harp growing out of a lute, figures crucified to both instruments. The music made is obviously discordant and one figure stops up his ears in agony.

VII. MUSICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ASS OLIVER B. ELLSWORTH

. . . asinum pinnis agglutinatis adambulantem cuidam setxi debili. . . . Symphoniae dehinc suaves, fistulae tibiaeque modulis dulcissimis personabant. I am aware of three late medieval representations of the ass in music. The first of these is the Conductus o f the Ass that appears in a manuscript, compiled at Beauvais between 1227 and 1234, but now in the British Library (MS Egerton 2615). This manuscript contains a complete liturgy-both Mass and Office-for the Feast of the Circumcision (New Year’s Day), as well as the well-known Play o f Daniel, written by university students at Beauvais, which would have ended the Matins service on that date. The liturgy is noted for the large number of interpolated pieces, among them processionals, or "conducti." The conductus, as a genre, had a long history as an incidental processional in monophonic chant, but, with the advent of liturgical drama in the eleventh century, it acquired a dramatic function as well. Finally, the growth of cathedral music at Paris and elsewhere in the thirteenth century led to a demand for polyphonic conducti, which reached their peak in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, at the precise time of the Beauvais manuscript. The Conductus o f the Ass is a strophic piece in seven verses, with a poetic text in rhyming verse and a recurring terminal refrain: "Hez, sir asne, hez" [Bray, Sir Ass, bray]. It occurs in two versions: as a monophonic song on the first folio of the manuscript and as a three-voice polyphonic piece on folio 41. The monophonic version bears the rubric: "Conductus as the ass is led in.H

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The ass in question is the one that entered Bethlehem, bearing on its back the Virgin Mary, who, as the poor animal must have been painfully aware, was "great with child." A further echo of the braying refrain recurs later in the Play o f Daniel, when King Darius replies to his evil counsellors, who are trying to entice Daniel into breaking a royal decree. As Darius reaffirms his decree, he ends each stanza with the braying refrain "O hezy* thus confirming the asinine nature of his edict.1 Closely associated with this manuscript is the "Festa fallorum," or "Feast of Fools," which was celebrated throughout northern France in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. An unidentified source from Beauvais describes such rites as censing the altar with pudding and sausage, carrying on drinking contests on the church porch and bringing an ass into church. The participation of the clergy, particularly subdeacons, in this rite became so prevalent that a papal council forbade that practice in 1212. This edict had little if any measurable effect. There is no direct evidence for such abuses in the Beauvais manuscript, but the Feast of Fools was celebrated on New Year’s Day, and the rubric for the Conductus o f the Ass also suggests that an ass was brought into church on that occasion. Furthermore, the absence of several carefully excised folios does stimuate speculation as to what might have been there originally. The program notes that accompany the Clemencic Consort recording of La fête de l’ône provide additional information on this event:2 The Feast of Fools (Asinaria festa, Festa stultorum, Festum follomm, Festum baculi) of the subdeacons was held during the High and late Middle Ages in the period between Christmas and Epiphany and particularly on New Year's Day. The principal scene of the festival was the church itself, but the entire town often participated in the procession and cavalcades. These festivals were, in fact, relics of extremely ancient rituals of rebirth and renewal which took place at the beginning of the year and involved the turning upside down of all values. Nothing was too sacred to be spared: the Christian religion was the force that permeated everything. Only within this framework was the exuberant, therapeutic "sloughing of the skin" of the clergy possible. "Our forefathers, who were great men, sanctioned this festival, why then should it be forbidden to us? We do not mean it in earnest, but only in jest, to amuse ourselves according to ancient custom, and to give folly, which is second nature and seems inherent to us, a chance to let off steam once a year. Even the wine vats would burst if one did not sometimes open the bung-hole to let out the air

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. . . So, for a few days, we play the buffoon in order that we may then return with greater zeal to our religious duties." (In these terms the Theological Faculty of Paris was still defending the festival in 1440). Occasional prohibitions by the ecclesiastical authorities and attempts at reform remained ineffectual until well into the sixteenth century. In a spirit of a reversal of all values, this was the festival of the lower clergy, the subdeacons, who ruled the roost for the day. "In the cathedral a Fool’s Bishop was elected. He celebrated a solemn Mass and spoke the blessing. The disguised clergy danced and skipped into the choir singing bawdy songs. At the altar, under the nose of the priest who was reading the Mass, the subdeacons devoured sausages, played at cards and dice before his eyes, and placed pieces of old shoe soles and excrement instead of incense into the censer so that the foul odour assailed his nostrils. After the Mass everybody ran, danced and leapt about the church as the fancy took him and indulged in the most unrestrained excesses, some even stripping themselves completely naked. Whereupon they clambered onto carts laden with excrement, had themselves drawn through the town and pelted the accompanying mob with filth. At Antibes the lay priests occupied the priest's seat in the choir. They dressed themselves in ragged priestly vestments, turned inside out, held the books upside down and pretended to be reading from them, singing not Psalms or liturgical chants, but mumbling incomprehensible gibberish and bleating and lowing like animals." (K.F. Flogel: Geschichte des Grostesk-Komischen) And, probably a relic of ancient magical animal cults, a principal role was invariably played by the ass (Fertility symbol, symbol of strength, epitome of stupidity, Christ's entry into Jerusalem?). Finally, there is the famous Roman de Fauvel of the early fourteenth century. This is a lengthy dramatic poem in two parts by Gervais de Bus, a clerk in the Chancellery of the Kings of France from 1313 to 1338. It is a political and social satire, symbolized by the ass Fauvel, whose very name contains a multitude of associations. As a complete word, it suggests that his color is a dirty reddish-yellow ("fauve*), since he does not merit the brighter colors that represent the virtues. As two separate syllables, the name refers to the "veiled falsity" of his nature. Finally, the name is a six-letter acrostic, embodying the initial letters of the six vices, Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Variété, Envié and Lascheté. The popularity of the poem led to the expression "to curry fauvel," which time has rendered into the relatively meaningless "to curry favor."

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Gervais de Bus completed the two parts of the poem in 1310 and 1314, respectively, in one of the dozen manuscripts that preserve the poem, there are musical interpolations, compiled by Chaillou de Pestain in 1316. These interpolations represent a broad sampling of various musical styles and genres, both sacred and secular, gleaned from over the span of the century. Most important are the motets, which run the gamut from the earliest motets (dating from the repertoire of Notre Dame Cathedral in the second quarter of the thirteenth century) to some of the most recent and progressive motets of Phillipe de Vitry, who was still in his twenties when the poem was written, and who is noted today as the most significant French composer in the generation before Guillaume de Machaut. De Vitry*s pieces are particularly significant, since they already demonstrate some of the subtle rhythmic complexities and intricacies for which fourteenth-century French music is noted. Modern performances, usually edited down considerably, due to the length of the material, show how effective a dramatic reading of the poem can be when it is acted out on stage, along with the musical insertions, which also provide commentary on the action.3 College of Music University of Colorado, Boulder

Notes

îFor more information on the Conductus (or Prose) of the Ass, see William S. Smoldon, The Music o f the Medieval Church Dramas (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 225-226. For more information on the Beauvais Manuscript, see David Hiley, "Beauvais," in The New Grove Dictionary o f Music and Musicians, 2 (London: MacMillan, 1980), 326-327. 2Harmonia Mundi, compact disc 901036,1980. These notes are by Dr. René Clemencic. See also Smoldon, pp. 226-227. This music was played during the luncheon of the conference. The talk was accompanied by musical examples. 3For more information on the Roman de Fauvelt see Richard H. Hoppin, Medieval Music (New York: Norton, 1978), 357-362.

VIII. CHAUCER AND HUIZINGA: THE SPIRIT OF HOMO LUDENS RICHARD J. SCHOECK

Tunc ille quomndam astu paulisper cohibitus risus libere iam exarsit in plebam: hi gaudii nimietate gratulari, illi dolorem ventris manuum compressione sedare, et certe laetitia delibuti meque respectantes cuncti theatro facessunt. Huizinga gave us an anthropology of play in his seminal work on Homo Ludens (1944), which is a study of the play element in culture. With Erasmus we are given a rhetoric of play in such works as the Colloquies, the Adagia and The Praise o f Folly, that supreme turning and twisting of the mock encomium, itself a playing with the strategies and forms of rhetoric.1 With Chaucer we are given a poetics of play, and Huizinga can provide a rich sense of playing as a civilizing function for our reading of Chaucer. There is a many-sidedness in the play that we find in Chaucer, ranging from an awareness of the play-concept in language (of which Huizinga writes richly), to the more Complex strategies of irony. In emphasizing play in Chaucer we are in no way diminishing or limiting his essential seriousness, for "seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness."2 One of the concepts that resonate in Chaucer throughout is that of the contrastive force of earnest and play, or, in that much-echoed phrase, "in earnest or in game." Again turning to Huizinga, "the conceptual value of a word is always conditioned by the word which expresses its opposite. For us, the opposite of play is earnest, also used in the more special sense of work; while the opposite of earnest can either be play or jesting, joking."3 In the poetry of Chaucer we are never far away from this contrastive force of earnest and game, and it compels us to consider the extent to which

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Chaucer is exploring the antithesis and insisting on the positive value of play. Another model of the kind of play-or, better, the reach of play-that I have been adumbrating is provided by Herman Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel (Zürich, 1943, translated into English as Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game, 1970). The game is one played with beads on an abacus, and the beads and the game combine symbolically all branches of knowledge. Play enough, we might say; but the novel was written under the dark clouds of the Nazi regime, and it asks the question whether it is right to continue such a game, such play, when the political world cries out for action. There is a striking parallel with the fate of Troilus, for the hero of Hesse’s novel, having decided to abandon the game, dies accidentally as he is moving towards a life devoted to human rights. In this brief essay I should like to deal with only one work—but that his one completed major work, the Troilus and Criseyde-in order to explore the Chaucerian sense of homo ludens. There was much game in the medieval world. Children have always had games, and medieval children-making allowances for means and leisure in a hierarchy from peasant house to aristocratic castle and court-had their "rocking horses, tambourines, drums, painted birds," rattles and various games of their own, as Georges Duby observes.4 For children, adolescents and adults there were even game rooms in larger houses (414), and, later, rooms for tennis and jousting, practice rooms for bow and arrow and arquebus (504). In fine, by the end of the Middle Ages, there was a place for play in the spatial organizations of homes and courts-even "the utmost private space, the place where one went to relax and perhaps to play ’chamber games’" (502). More fully conceived, Huizinga writes: "Medieval life was brimful of play: the joyous and unbuttoned play of the people, full of pagan elements that had lost their sacred significance and had been transformed into jesting and buffoonery, or the solemn and pompous play of chivalry, the sophisticated play of courtly love" (179). In such a changing world Chaucer grew accustomed to games and a larger sense of play, and one can suggest that in the reading of a long romance that dealt with courtly love-read aloud by a person of Chaucer’s mercantile/legal/ civil-service background to ladies of the court-there would have been an ultimate, and in the hands of Chaucer’s delicately tasteful telling a delicious, sense of playing with all of the conventions of the age. In the full-page illumination that we find in the fifteenth-century manuscript in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, there is the background of a royal palace, with young ladies and lords moving in their rich, simple dress down the slopes of a garden. The Queen is seated on the grass, her ladies around her; and King Richard stands in cloth of gold; to the right there is an

Homo Ludens/99 older man, gazing at the pulpit from which Geoffrey Chaucer is reading from a book, his Troilus and Criseyde.5 In this scene we may perceive and understand the fullness of play and the richness of play as a civilizing function. There were, we may say, three kinds of play most important in Chaucer’s world of the church and court: the games about hunting and warfare, the games about love (courtly love especially), and the sense of life itself as a game. Let us take them up in turn. War Games: War was a constant and left its mark on medieval life. The twelfth century transformed it into a game6-an indication of the tension between earnest and game. In an age of Chaucer’s Knight and his campaigns across the map of Christendom, men and women knew that it was "the most intense, the most energetic form of play and at the same time the most palpable and primitive.”7 The Canterbury Tales provides a canvas of the game of war, in the story of the Knight and in the training of the Squire, and in many of the tales told by other pilgrims. Troilus and Criseyde is a distant mirror: no war was farther removed in time than the Trojan War, and fewer were more fresh in the imagination, thanks to the abundant treatment of the Trojan theme in romances. In stanza nine, which begins Book One proper, Chaucer sums up the familiar story: It is wel wist how that the Grekes stronge In armes, with a thousand shippes wente To Troiewardes, and the cite longe Assegeden, wel ten yer or they stente; And, in diverse wise and oon entente, The ravysshyng to wreken of Eleyne, By Paris don, they wroughten al hir peyne.8 The fighting is backgrounded while Troilus and Criseyde play at love, but it is never far from their consciousness. Part of the public function of war and its games was a display of individual prowess, and this had its effect in winning Criseyde. In Book Five Troilus is slain, but the actual death is blurred by the authorial withdrawing behind his sources: And if I hadde ytaken for to write The armes of this ilke worthi man, Than wolde ich of his batailles endite. But for that I to writen first bigan

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Of his love, I have seyd as 1 kan,His worthi dedes, whoso list hem heere, Rede Dares, he kan telle hem alle ifeere.

V.1765-1771

"In history, art and literature," Huizinga concludes his chapter on play and war, "everything that we perceive as beautiful and noble play was once sacred play. The tournaments and joustings, the orders, the vows, the dubbings are all vestiges of primeval initiation-rites. The links in the long chain of development are lost to us."9 And the links were lost to the men and women of the fourteenth century; but one of the interests in so long a telling of the story of Troilus and the Trojan War was in its mirroring, its glimpse into the earliest vestiges of the war-play that still mattered to the age of Chaucer-at least at court. The careful rendering of the codes of honor, of the rites of warfare, the dress: all of this in Troilus and Crisedye reinforces our twentieth-century sense that this world of war-play had not lost all meaning, even at the end of the fourteenth century.10 One may reinforce this observation by a reading of Georges Duby’s fine study of William Marshall, whose life was filled with war and games.11 Tournaments were, of course, where men played the game of war during times of peace; and jousting was a risky sport, for injuries were common and often enough mortal: "the games of the flesh are perilous."12 Courtly Love: Courtly love was in fact a game that two people played within society.13 The rules were complex, but the principles were relatively simple. Secrecy was of the essence, and loyalty had to be tested. That there was both earnest and game seems incontrovertible; the difficulty comes in our drawing the line at this distance in time, and with the evidence at hand. Again, I echo Huizinga:14 . . . That the love-court was a poetic playing at justice with, however, a certain practical validity, accords well enough with the customs of Languedoc in the twelfth century. What we are dealing with is the polemical and casuistic approach to love questions, and in play-form .. . . At the bottom of all these is neither the lawsuit proper, nor a free poetical impulse, nor even social diversion pure and simple, but the age-old struggle for honor in matters of love___ Let us recall that fifteenth-century manuscript illumination from the Troilus and Criseyde: the poem was delivered orally, and a part of the full meaning is that of a specific performance,15 which in this instance was that of a middle-class poet-for convenience I use this anachronistic terminology-

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reading about aristocratic love-games to an audience largely composed of ladies of the court. All of Chaucer's playfulness in dealing with courtly lovethe bashfulness and naivete of Troilus against the greater experience of Criseyde (she was, after all, a widow), would have been one kind of playfulness in the telling and hearing of the story, as would the delightfully playful account of Pandarus’ helping to bundle Troilus into bed-all of that, which is such an original note in the sometimes serious telling of courtly love games in medieval poetry. If we emphasize the fact that men played the game of war in tournaments, where women were a large part of the audience, we must also emphasize the fact that women played the game of courtly love with men and that it could at times be a dangerous game. But danger was one spice in the playing. I have glossed over the courtly-love dimensions of Troilus and Criseyde, and one must acknowledge that there is a wide spectrum of interpretation ranging from the Tatlock-Lewis interpretations that saw a dualism in the poem, to the sympathetic interpretations of Talbot Donaldson and others that argue, in varying ways and degrees, that Chaucer idealizes Troilus' love as a natural kind of devotion-"vertuous in kynde" (1.254). Pagan love was natural to the Trojans, and courtly love was advocated by its adherents as ennobling: true enough. But Chaucer's perspective is larger than either pagan or courtly love, and each is but a synechdocal part of that larger whole of which I shall speak shortly. May we not suppose that in the world of the Ricardian court the alternative interpretations were also debated as much as today at the English Institute or the New Chaucer Society, and that there was a kind of play-element in Chaucer’s artfully balancing these alternatives? In recent scholarly studies of medieval literature generally, and of Chaucer in particular, there has been much attention to orality and to orality versus literality. Surely there was some awareness of this in the Ricardian court and one might expect as much pleasure from this awareness as say, from Suetonius' observation (in his Lives) that Augustus never addressed his wife without notes: for fear of saying too much or too little (do we smile with a quickening sense in observing that Suetonius also wrote The Games o f the Greeks?) Life as Game: Chaucer, one feels, would have applauded Huizinga’s formulation that "civilization arises and unfolds in and as play,"16 and one discovers innumerable ways in which the ludic functioned in medieval society, including in its cities. For "the medieval city had ample scope for magnificence in its ideas of play,"17 and Chaucer’s London knew its pageants and his Ricardian court its careful magnificences. Those contemporary

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aspects overflow into the ideas of play in the Troy pictured in Troilus and Criseyde, but that must be studied elsewhere. With the ascension of Troilus at the end of Book Five we perceive the laughter of Troilus at life: And down from thennes faste he gan avyse This litel spot of erthe, that with the se Embraced is, and full gan despise This wrecched world, and held al vanite To respect of the pleyn felicite That is in hevene above; and at the laste, Ther he was slayn, his lokyng down he caste. (1814-1820) And the narrator adds his apostrophe on the action that has been portrayed, in the O giovanetti of lines 1835-41—" . . . and thynketh al nys but a fa ire/ This world, that passeth soone as floures fairen- a faire, a Vanity Fair with all of its glitter and gaiety, its games, its folly. There is always game in a skillful rhetorician’s playing with his audience’s awareness of his rhetorical techniques, as the Pardoner does in the Canterbury Tales. So too does Erasmus in the Praise o f Folly in having Dame Folly subsume that audience-recognition in her splendid peroration which is really a mock peroration: But I’ve long been forgetting who I am, and I’ve overshot the mark. If anything I’ve said seems rather impudent or garrulous, you must remember it’s Folly and a woman who’s been speaking. At the same time, don’t forget the Greek proverb: "Often a foolish man speaks a word in season," though of course you may think this doesn’t apply to women. I can see you’re all waiting for a peroration, but it’s silly of you to suppose I can remember what I’ve said when I’ve been spouting such a hotchpotch of words. There’s an old saying, "I hate a fellowdrinker with a memory," and here’s a new one to put alongside it: "I hate an audience which won’t forget."18 Chaucer was lucky in having an audience that would not forget, remembering the poet of the minor poems as well as the poet of the Canterbury Tales as he stood before them reading his Troilus and Criseyde. The poem Troilus and Criseyde is a poem of beginning and endings played against each other: may we not recall and perhaps hear in the background of the chamber-recital, Machaut’s En mon commencement est

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mon fin?-played forward and backward simultaneously?19 Like a paradigm of life, the poem was born in the playfulness of the war-games and was nourished on the poetry and noblesse of the courtly love that so ennobled Troilus. And the apotheosis observes the laughter of Troilus as he understands what a faire life itself is.20 May we not conclude by declaring that Troilus himself is homo ludens? University of Colorado, Boulder Universität Trier Lawrence, Kansas

Notes

Huizinga writes with gusto, and illumination, of Erasmus: "Erasmus: his whole being seems to radiate the play-spirit. It shines forth not only in the Colloquies and the Laus Stultitiae but in the Adagia, that astonishing collection of aphorisms, from Greek and Latin literature commented on with light irony and adorable jocosity. His innumerable letters and sometimes his weightiest theological treatises are pervaded by that blithe wit he can never completely do without," Homo ludens, English translation (Boston: Beacon, 1955), p. 181. Still more, again and again in his letters, Erasmus is playful. One may cite, for example, two letters to a student, Christian Northoff, to whom he writes first in a manner that sets up the game: writing about seeing a play, he then transposes that play into a battle-royal between a housewife and her servant, and then makes use of that to establish a contest between himself and the student in the writing of letters and sending of gifts. The second letter develops the theme, and declares that "indeed, a constant element of enjoyment must be mingled with our studies" Collected Works o f Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 1.114 -both letters are dated 1497. An even more striking example is to be found in Epistle 61, CWE 1.12432- a model for a certain kind of epistolary style. A final note: in his own epigrams Erasmus is often capable of play. But that must remain for treatment in another place. The recently published first volume of the correspondence of Johan Huizinga, Briefwisseling, 1 ,1894-1924, ed. Léon Hanssen et al. (Veen: Tjeenk Willink, 1989), reveals how immersed he and certain of his correspondents

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were in the reading and discussion of Chaucer, Dante, Erasmus and other medieval and Renaissance writers. In 1921 (to give but one example) his friend André Jolies wrote concerning his interest in the Facetiae of Heinrich Bebel, and of his own articles on "Het amorvisioen in de Vita Nuova" and "De facetie van Guido Cavalcanti" (Briefwisseling, 1.332). The point is that Homo Ludens drew not only upon Huizinga’s scholarship in Eastern as well as Western literature and religion, in history and anthropology, and ethnology, but also upon his friends’ studies and writings, which ranged from scholarship to the writing of poetry and plays. 2Huizinga, p. 45. 3Huizinga, p. 44. 4A History o f Private Life, vol. II. Revelations o f the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 224, 241,415. 5I have drawn from the portrayal of this illumination by Nevill Coghill in Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers and their Work, 79 (London: Longmans, Green, 1956), 62-3. Brian Stock’s focus is upon an earlier period, but his concept of textual community is a valuable one for Chaucer and his world-see Implications of Literacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). Chaucer’s world was a textual comunity in which the Roman de la Rose and the compositions of Guillaume de Machaut jostled with Scriptures and other texts. Chaucerian intertextual play was possible on more than one level. 6Duby, p. 141. 7Huizinga, p. 89. 8Troilus and Criseyde, ed. R.K. Root (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), lines 57-63. Few writers have had such joyful play in involving reader and audience in the awareness of sub-text as Chaucer does in Troilus and Criseyde: "Rede Dares," as Chaucer tells them in V,1771. And that awareness, again and again insisted on by Chaucer himself, plays against such topoi as authorial responsibility and such tropes as the poet working within his fable to induce reflective thinking. Huizinga, p. 104. 10The application of reader-response criticism has its value in an historical sense: we want to know as much as possible about the responses of a fourteenth-century audience to a work of art as we do today in adducing twentieth-century responses. What is so striking in Chaucer is not simply that

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there was audience response, but that there was an interaction between auctor and readers A J . Minnis has demonstrated the fecundity of the several traditions of Ovidian commentary and his well-argued case for making use of the vocabulary of medieval and not modern critical theory is strong and persuasive: see Medieval Theory o f Authorship, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988). Yet another dimension is that of rhetoric, which was of course susceptible to play. One does well to emphasize the practicality of rhetoric-as I endeavored in "The Practical Tradition of Classical Rhetoric," Rhetoric and Praxis, ed. J.D. Moss (CUA Press, 1986), 23-4b -but the inexaustible resources for playfulness need also to be stressed. In a revision of Intertextuality and Renaissance Texts I shall explore this dimension of rhetoric. Even the usually-serious form of sermon could be parodied, whether by the Boy-Bishops or the self-parodying Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales. In this light, is not Troilus and Criseyde a fabling that still within the work ipse metamorphoses itself into a kind of sermon? 11Georges Duby, Guillaume le Maréchal ou le Meilleur Chevalier du monde- English translation as William Marshal: The Flower o f Chivalry (New York, 1983). 12Duby, pp. 519, 592. 13Duby, p. 519. 14Huizinga, p. 125. 15I am here glancing at a complex problem of interpretation, that of the kinds of texts and the modes of interpretation appropriate for these differing kinds. As indicated briefly in Erasmus Grandescens (1988), I adopt the hermeneutical theory of E. Betti to the effect that there are three kinds of texts: legal and religious (where there is an authority external to the text), historical and literary, and performance or presentational texts-see his Teoria generate della interpretazione (1955), according to which the appropriate hermeneutic approach to Troilus and Criseyde, at least in part, would be to acknowledge the performance dimensions of the work-and that would call attention to the ludic qualities as well. 16Huizinga, Foreward. 17Huizinga, p. 172. 18CWE, 27.153; Erasmus was of course aware of his playing dangerously with the topos of garrulous women; he moved in a world with many aristocratic women at the Burgundian court, with more than one of

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whom he played rhetorical games in order to seek patronage; see RJ. Schoeck, Erasmus Grandescens (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1988), pp. 9596,-and the Praise o f Folly was written in More's household, where Lady Alice was known for her tongue. Chaucer was not the only one writing for an audience dominated by women 19See R J . Schoeck, "T.S. Eliot, Mary Queen of Scots, and Guillaume de Machaut," MLN, 62 (1948), 197-8. 20Play and faire point towards folly, and one may cite Folly and Insanity in Renaissance Literature, by Ernesto Grassi and Maristella Lorch (Binghamton, New York: MRTS, 1986), for its exploration of folly as an important philosophical problem, with discussions of the theme of folly in poems of chivalry as well as Erasmus' Praise o f Folly and Alberti’s Momus.

IX. ISIS IN SPENSER AND APULEIUS STELLA P. REVARD

Necdum satis conniveram, et ecce pelago medio venerandos diis etiam vultus attollens emergit divina facies: ac dehinc paulatim toto corpore pellucidum simulacrum excusso pelago ante me constitisse visum est. Spenser critics generally agree that the episode at Isis Church that takes place just past mid>point in Book Five of The Faerie Queene has enormous significance for the book as a whole. Not only is it important for the development of Britomart, the future queen, who, like Isis, represents equity, the necessary component for the proper functioning of justice, but it is also vital for the rescue of the hero Artegall. For unless Britomart experiences her vision at Isis Church, she cannot go on to release Artegall from prison. Both Artegall’s rescue and the successful completion of his mission, after his release, depend on this pivotal episode. The gods Isis and Osiris, who appear and are described in this canto, represent, critics also agree, both the ideal king and queen and the virtues justice and equity. Hence they are the idealized archetypes for our hero and heroine, Artegall and Britomart. In describing the gods Isis and Osiris and in developing the setting at Isis Church, Spenser relies on the principal sources from antiquity: Plutarch’s Mora lia, Diodorus Siculus’ Biblioteca Histórica and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or Golden Así.1 All three sources furnish Spenser with a wealth of information about the ancient cults of Isis and Osiris. Two of the ancient authors approach Isis and Osiris from the vantage of foreigners looking at Egyptian religion; only

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one is a devotee of the cult he describes. Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus are Greek writers, who are interested in comparative religion and so wish to investigate both the peculiarities of the cults of Isis and Osiris and the likenesses of worship of these gods to the worship of the principal GraecoRoman deities. Apuleius, however, describes Isis and Osiris from the point of view of an initiate into their cults. For him, they are the true gods to whom other deities may be compared, but who supersede them all. Further, for him, Isis is not merely a goddess to be described, but an important character in his narrative. She is the divine figure, to whom Lucius comes at the end of his adventures, the person who makes possible the happy outcome of his story and the one, whose own story enfolds, includes and replicates Lucius’ own. Hence, as a source for Spenser, Apuleius* narrative is basically to be distinguished from Plutarch’s and Diodorus’ treatises. Apuleius contributes more to Spenser’s than merely information about Egyptian cults; he supplies him with themes and narrative structures that shape this important canto of Book V of The Faerie Queene. As long ago as 1936, Charles Grosvenor Osgood urged readers of Spenser to pay more attention to Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. He pointed out that the experience of Lucius the Ass in Book XI of Apuleius’ narrative was the model for that of Britomart at Isis Church.2 Despite Osgood’s remarks, however, there has been no full scale study of the episode at Isis Church in the light of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Yet, as Osgood observed, it is plain to see that Isis serves a function in The Faerie Queene analogous to that she serves in the Golden Ass. As she is the savior for Lucius and the model for his future conduct, so she is savior to Britomart and model as well. She appears to both Lucius and Britomart at crucial moments, in answer to their prayers, bringing relief to suffering and directing a new course of life. Further, her own suffering-her own story-has an intimate relationship to the stories of those she succors. Like Lucius and Britomart, Isis underwent an ordeal of love, transformation and release, and so she has a special ability to help those who suffer as she had. The story of Isis and her devotion to Osiris is the narrative touchstone, therefore, for both the Metamorphoses and for The Faerie Queene. The actual story of Isis and Osiris comes to us in its most complete form in Plutarch’s Moralia (351c-384), though it is retold in other sources, both in antiquity and in the Renaissance.3 Plutarch provides both necessary background, moreover, for both Apuleius’ and Spenser’s narratives. In fact, Apuleius mentions Plutarch in the very first chapter of the Metamorphoses. Lucius makes a point of telling us that he is descended from Plutarch on his mother’s side, thus establishing him as a fitting authority. For Plutarch, as

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later for Apuleius and Spenser, Osiris was the earthly incarnation of the god of all wisdom and justice; his sister consort was Isis. As a man Osiris ruled over the Egyptians, civilized them, gave them law and taught them agriculture and the proper worship of the gods. He travelled all over the earth, dispensing law and the arts of civilization. Spenser appears to model his description of Osiris and Isis on what Plutarch tells us. At the very outset of canto vii of Book V, he names Osiris as a god of the Egyptians, who was of the race of kings and when alive, T he iustest m an. . . and truest did appeare" (V.vii.2,9).4 Isis, he identifies as Osiris' wife, "A Goddesse of great powre and souerainty,/ And in her person cunningly did shade/ That part of Iustice, which is Equity" (V.vii.3.2-4). Like Plutarch, Spenser regards Osiris and Isis as both human and divine-a king and queen who ruled historically, and a god and goddess, who become symbols for justice and its proper functioning within society. As both real human beings and as symbols for justice and equity, Artegall and Britomart are their fitting modem counterparts. In Plutarch, however, Osiris and Isis are not merely rulers and symbols of justice; they are the fertility principles that govern Egyptian religion. With his sister-wife Isis, Osiris represents the fertility of the earth itself, the dark fertile earth of Egypt that brings forth abundant crops. In Egyptian religion, they are the great male and female fertility gods, their counterparts in Graeco-Roman culture being Bacchus and Ceres, the gods of wine, grain and harvest. They guarantee the fertility and the continuance of human society. In Artegall and Britomart, who are the founding father and mother of the Tudor dynasty, Spenser also celebrates fertility and the perfection of male and female sexuality. As fertility principles and as rulers, Isis and Osiris face the opposition of their brother and enemy, Seth, or as Plutarch calls him, Typhon. As the principle of sterility and hindrance, Seth attempts to impede that which Isis and Osiris seek to bring forth. As they are connected with moistness and with organic growth, he is fiery and connected with the desert, the unmitigated heat of the sun, and with volcanic activity. In Greek myth, Typhon, Seth’s counterpart, is imprisoned under Aetna and causes its volcanic disturbances. Seth's color is red or yellow, his animal the ass. When Lucius in the Metamorphoses takes on the form of the ass, he comes under the power of Seth and is controlled by his passions and by the violent upheaval of events. He is unstable, unproductive, unclean. Having taken on the form of an animal that the goddess Isis says she abhors, he is lost to proper generative life, until he is freed from the form of the ass by the goddess Isis. It is Isis who controls Seth and prevents him from doing harm. As Plutarch relates (356b-358b), it was during Isis' absence that

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Typhon (Seth) was able to destroy Osiris. He invited Osiris to a feast, at which he persuaded the guests to try out the dimensions of a coffer by lying down in it. He had secretly made the coffer exactly to Osiris' dimensions, so that, when Osiris lay down in it, he fit it exactly. Typhon closed the coffer, sealed it with lead, and threw it into the Nile. On her return, Isis found Osiris missing and began her long quest to locate the coffer in which he had been sealed. After much wandering, she located the coffer and brought the body of Osiris back for proper interment. But before she could complete the rites, Typhon attacked again, taking advantage of Isis’ absence from the vigil over the body. He rent the body into fourteen pieces and scattered it. Isis then began her quest anew, locating all but one of the pieces of Osiris’ rent body, reassembling it and restoring the lost member in wax. The story of Isis’ search for Osiris is inseparable from the story of Isis herself. Her loyalty and love become the standards by which to judge all relations between the sexes. Her long and difficult quest first to find her husband’s body and then to reassemble it becomes a touchstone for all quests to regain love, to restore life, and to reassume integrated being. The story of Isis’ quest relates intimately to the quests of Lucius in the Metamorphoses and of Britomart in The Faerie Queene. First, let us look at the goddess Isis and her relationship to Lucius in the Metamorphoses. She comes to him at the very end of his adventures in the form of an ass, after he has broken away from his former life. He has purified himself seven times in the sea and has offered his prayer to Isis at night when with the moon full the goddess has her greatest power. As Plutarch explains (367e-368d), both Isis and Osiris are associated with the moon, their authority increasing as it waxes and decreasing as it wanes. Osiris was destroyed on the seventeenth day of its cycle, when the power of the full moon was over. As Plutarch notes and as many of the representations of Isis show us, she wears a head-dress of the full moon, it signifying the source of her power. She is especially associated with those goddesses, such as the Graeco-Roman Artemis/Diana, who reign through lunar power. When Lucius appeals to Isis in the eleventh book, he does not at first invoke her by name, but calls upon those goddesses of the Graeco-Roman world that are connected with her: Ceres, the goddess of earth and fruitful grain; Proserpina, her daughter, queen of the underworld and the bringer of spring; Diana, in her triple aspect as goddess of the heavens, earth and the underworld; and finally the celestial Venus, who in the beginning coupled all things together with the generative power of love. By having Lucius appeal to Isis first through the goddesses associated with her, Apuleius affirms the universality of the principle that Isis represents. Though Lucius does not

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know the goddess until she appears to him, he does know the principle she stands for, a principle that manifests itself in the ruling goddess of every land and which has accordingly many names. We may remark that Britomart also is ignorant of Isis before her visit to Isis Church, but she does have special relations with Diana and Venus, those goddesses associated with her in the Graeco-Roman pantheon. She too inherently identifies with the principle Isis represents. Isis appears to Lucius in a dream-vision. While he is sunk in sleep, she emerges gradually from the sea and stands before him. The element water, as Plutarch explains, is the first principle of life, from which all things come; hence it is especially connected with the generative aspect of both Isis and Osiris. Apuleius’ description of Isis agrees in general with that in Plutarch. Her hair is loose and scattered about her; she has many garlands on her head and a compass in the middle of her forehead, symbolizing her association with the full moon. On either side of the compass are stalks of grain from which emerge serpents. Like Ceres, Isis is a grain-goddess, who makes all things grow; like Athene, she is connected with the serpent, possessing its wisdom and healing power. Like Athene, she is also self-generated, her name coming from the Greek, (eoOai » which means moving or hastening. Movement and knowledge are in effect the same in Isis, for moving creates knowledge in her (375c, 376a).5 In contrast to Osiris, whose garments are pure white and who himself is perceived as a steady white unchanging light, Isis is changing and full of color. Her garments, as Apuleius describes them, are yellow, pink and flaming red in color; Isis stands for material life; she embraces all things-day, night; life, death; beginning, end. Hence, her garments and those of her attendants are of many colors and used over and over again; in this she once more contrasts with Osiris, who stands for the life beyond the material world, and whose vestments may only be worn once. The Isis that Apuleius describes resembles the goddess as she appears in painting and in cult statuary. He tells us that she holds a timbrel of brass in her right hand and a cup of gold in her left, out of which emerges the serpent aspis, lifting his head. The serpent is an important symbol; in that it is capable of motion without limbs, it signifies immortality. It has, as Plutarch comments, facility and suppleness, and it is like a star. Isis not only appears to Lucius bearing the symbols of her cult, she also breathes forth incense, the pleasant spice of Arabia, reminding us that her processions are always attended by those scattering incense. In the scene that follows, Isis introduces herself to Lucius and, so to speak, begins to initiate him into her cult. She identifies herself as the mother

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of all things, the initial progeny of the world, the chief of powers divine and she lists those names and titles by which she is known: queen of heaven, principal of gods celestial, light of goddesses, actual titles used in her worship. Her powers, she tells him, are great, for at her will the planets of the air, the winds of the sea, the silences of hell, all are disposed. Her name is adored throughout the world, but as she explains, in different places, she is known by different names. To the Phrygians she is Mother of the Gods; to the Athenians Minerva; to the Cyprians Venus; to the Candians Diana; to the Sicilians Proserpina; to the Eleusinians Ceres; and elsewhere Juno, Bellona, Hecate, or whatever name designates the chief goddess of the land. In Egypt she is Queen Isis. Both the name of Isis and the ceremonial practices of the Egyptians she clearly prefers. In his commentary on Apuleius the Renaissance scholar, Filippo Beroaldo (1453-1505) remarks that though the goddesses be one, the names are many, and like the moon with which she is associated, Isis has many aspects. But also, like the moon, she is always Queen of Heaven.6 Isis comes to Lucius not only to restore him to his proper shape, but also to bring health of mind and body to him, such health as can only be properly attained by his becoming a member of her cult. She tells him at once to put away all weeping and lamentation, for the healthful day has come. Health, as Plutarch points out, is intimately associated with Isis, for she is the enemy to all sickness. Seth is the part of the soul subject to passion, impulse and lack of reason; he is the part of the body subject to unsoundness and disease. With the concealment of the sun and the disappearance of the moon, Seth rules; when the moon is full, as it now is, Isis controls. When the elements are favorable then, Isis can subdue turbulence in mind and body, joining all things together and bringing health. But in order to check turbulence, she requires that temperance and sober life that maintain health. Those in service to her are hardy and vigorous, not softened by luxury and intemperance. In order to become her servant, Lucius must be released from the ass, the intemperate, passion-driven beast, despised by Isis. Isis gives Lucius specific instructions on how he may be released from the beast in which he has been imprisoned. She will bring all things to pass, she assures him, but he must not be afraid of the hard or the difficult. Once he is released, she tells him, he will become bound to her for life. She will be his guide and protector, and after his death, she will appear to him as now, shining in the darkness of Acheron. As Isis disappears, the darkness is chased away with the rising of the sun. Symbolically, the sun of the new day is Horus, the child of Osiris, the sun of yesterday, and of Isis, the moon. Both Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch

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connect Osiris with the sun, Isis with the moon. In The Faerie Queene Spenser says that whereas Isis "doth the Moone portend," Osiris "signifies the Sunne" (V.vii.4,7-8). Spenser makes the point of telling us, moreover, that both sun and moon, both Osiris and Isis, run like races of justice. In the Metamorphoses, Lucius enters into a new phase of his life as the new sun rises. He awakens, joyful that the sun has chased away the hoar-frost and that the earth smiles as though spring has come to regenerate it. Such is the effect of Isis, the mistress of all the world and the force that causes nature to rejoice in its own fertility. Although Isis is Lucius’ deliverer, he must participate actively in his own delivery, following those instructions that she has given him. His release from the ass takes place in the context of the worship of Isis-at the very moment that her procession appears and while her priests are looking on. The chief priest, in fact, has been instructed by the goddess. He holds out the garland of roses to Lucius, which Lucius in turn seizes and eats in order to restore himself to his natural shape. His restoration is a miracle of the goddess and so takes place, appropriately, before the worshippers of Isis. Through Isis’ power, Lucius is reborn into his own body. Just as Isis found and restored the body of Osiris, she also restores the body of Lucius to its proper form. Lucius’ adventures relate to Isis’ archetypal quest. The Metamorphoses is the story of a search for a meaningful and properly integrated life, and so the search that Lucius undertakes relates inevitably to Isis’ search for her husband, undertaken as a labor of love. Both Lucius and Isis undergo much wandering and hardship. But until the goddess intervenes, Lucius has not realized the implication of his transformation and subsequent suffering. Like Osiris, he cannot be saved, cannot reclaim his manly shape, unless the goddess assists him. Once he returns to his human shape, he recognizes that he is now inseparable from the goddess, just as Osiris is inseparable from Isis. Ultimately too, he must become not only the initiate into the rites of Isis, but also into those of Osiris. His story is enfolded in theirs, and he finds the meaning to life through these two gods. Information about Isis could have come to Spenser from many different sources, not only from Apuleius and Plutarch, but also from Diodorus Siculus or from Renaissance mythographers, such as Lilio Gregorio Giraldi and Natale Conti. He could well have known Apuleius in the original Latin, possibly in one of the editions that contained Beroaldo’s commentary. But The Golden Asse had also been translated into English in 1566 by William Adlington, who dedicated his translation to the Earl of Essex.7 Spenser almost certainly knew this translation. He might have come to Plutarch’s Moralia in the original Greek, but Latin and French translations of

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this work were available to him.8 Of these sources, certainly Apuleius is the most important, for Isis plays a role in The Faerie Queene comparable to that she plays in the Metamorphoses. She responds to the prayers of a character who has lost her way and is hard beset with troubles; she provides the example to that character of the way of temperate life; she becomes the model for her to follow and helps her save her loved one. The Isis episode in The Faerie Queene occurs in canto 7 of Book V, just past mid-point in the book, in exactly the same position structurally as the crucial story of Cupid and Psyche occupies in the Metamorphoses? Like the Cupid-Psyche story, it is essential to the narrative, for it elucidates those adventures that precede and follow. Like the Cupid-Psyche story, also, it is an episode that tests love and devotion. Artegall, the knight of justice and, as Spenser makes clear, the modern counterpart of Osiris, has been imprisoned by Radigund. Radigund, an amazon, treacherously defeated and imprisoned Artegall, tricking him, just as Seth had tricked Osiris. Talus, Artegall’s servant and companion, has informed Britomart, Artegall’s betrothed, of his im prisonm ent, and the two have journeyed together to rescue him. Britomart, however, is deeply troubled and full of doubt, worried not only about the danger to Artegall, but also about his apparent faithlessness to her. She has spent a sleepless night in the house of her enemy, Dolon, who has attempted to mislead her. Weary and perplexed, she arrives at Isis Church, entering it alone. She prostrates herself before the idol of the goddess and offers prayers to her. The priests of Isis welcome Britomart and offer her lodging for the night. Spenser describes both the appearance of the priests and their way of life, drawing most of his details from Plutarch. He tells us that the priests wear linen robes and have rich mitres, shaped like the moon, on their heads. Though he does not give them the close shaven heads that both Apuleius and Plutarch describe, he does tell us that they are temperate-that they abstain from wine and meat and have taken vows of chastity. Spenser’s description of Isis in drawn in part from Plutarch, in part from Apuleius, and in part from other sources. The statue of Isis is made of silver and is dressed in linen garments and has a crown of gold. At the feet of the statue is a crocodile that enfolds her middle with its wreathed tail. The statue has one foot on the crocodile and controls it with an outstretched rod. Both the statue of the goddess and the crocodile feature prominently in Britomart’s adventures at Isis Church. Like Lucius in the Metamorphoses, Britomart makes a direct appeal to Isis for relief from her troubles. Before she goes to sleep, she prays to the goddess, and the idol appears to incline with amiable look: HBy outward shew

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her inward sence desining" (V.vii.8,3). Britomart accepts the sign joyfully, and unlacing her helmet lies down at the altar side. She sleeps sweetly all night long under Isis’ wings, renewing herself after her "long daies toile and weary plight" (V.vii. 12.4). Although Isis neither appears to nor speaks directly to Britomart, as she does to Lucius, she figures prominently in the dream that Britomart has that night. Diodorus Siculus comments that Isis frequently gives aid to human beings during their sleep, especially when they have appealed to her for help (1,25,3). As a goddess her special delight is to assist and to heal. In her dream Britomart sees herself doing sacrifice to Isis, dressed in a linen stole and wearing a moon-like mitre. Her costume resembles both that of the goddess and of a worshipper of the goddess.10 In fact, in her dream Britomart appears to merge her identity with Isis. Spenser might have recalled that Beroaldo commented that the Dictyean Diana or Britomartis was the Cretan equivalent to Isis.11 Hence Britomart by name and by heritage is associated with one aspect of Isis. While Britomart is doing sacrifice to Isis in her dream, her stole and mitre are transformed into a scarlet red queenly robe and a crown of gold. Fire and tempest arise in the temple, and in her dream the crocodile beneath the idol’s feet wakes and devours the flames and tempest. Then, swollen with pride, the crocodile threatens to eat her. The goddess, however, beats him back with her rod. He then becomes meek and humble and sues for grace and love, which, as Spenser says, she accepts. she accepting, he so neare her drew, That of his game she soone enwombed grew, And forth did bring a Lion of great might; That shortly did all other beasts subdew (V,vii, 16,4-7) It is not clear in Spenser’s description whether the "she" in the narrative is Isis or Britomart or both. Spenser seems deliberately to conflate the two.12 On awakening from her sleep, Britomart is visibly distressed, so much so that one of the priests asks the reason for her change of cheer. She recounts her dream, and the priest, recognizing her as a royal princess interprets the dream for her. For that same Crocodile doth represent The righteous Knight, that is thy faithfull louer, Like to Osyris in all iust endeuer. For that same Crocodile Osyris is, That under Isis feete doeth sleep for euer:

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To shew that demence oft in things amis, Restraines those sterne behests, and cruell doomes of his. (V.vii,223-9) According to the priest then, the crocodile in Britomart’s dream should be interpreted both as Osiris and Artegall. This interpretation, however, is problematical. The crocodile is usually connected with the Egyptian god Sebek, not with Osiris. It can be both a symbol of divine power or of destructive energy. Plutarch considers the crocodile an emblem of divinity, for it is the sole animal destitute of a tongue, signifying that divine reason does not need a voice. Walking along a silent path, the crocodile guides mortal affairs according to justice. Its divinity, Plutarch continues, is manifest in other ways. Of all things living in water, the crocodile alone veils its eye with a thin transparent lid, thus enabling it to see without being seen (381b-c). This clearly is an attribute of divinity. Rosemary Freeman, noting that the crocodile in Peacham’s emblem book, Basilikon Doron, appears with a marginal gloss to Plutarch, argues for Plutarchan authority in interpreting Spenser's crocodile.13 Other Spenser critics are less sure, regarding the crocodile, at best, as a paradoxical symbol. Jane Aptekar, for example, believes that the crocodile is both a creative and destructive force; she sees it as a particularly apt symbol for sexual desire, which Isis, like Minerva, must control.14 James Nohrnberg, on the other hand, thinks the crocodile is Typhonic, in that it is connected with solar energy.15 Plutarch notes that Typhon once assumed the form of a crocodile (371d-e). It was not Osiris, moreover, who threatened Isis, but Seth or Typhon, and it is Seth or Typhon that Isis must continually control, as the idol at Isis Church controls the crocodile when it awakens. The crocodile, as a symbol of solar energy, need not be Typhonic, however. Eusebius, for example, thought the crocodile symbolized the beneficient aspect of the sun. A sixteenth-century handbook, The Fountaine o f Ancient Fiction, cites Eusebius' views on the crocodile. . . . in Aegypt the Image of Sol was so framed, that it seemed to be set in a ship, carried vp, and supported by a Crocadile: meaning to signifie by the ship, that quicke motion and liuely stirring, which in each moisture and humiditie worketh for the generation of what it containeth: & by the Crocadile is vnderstood that wholesome and sweet water from which the Sun by vertue of his temperate raies exhaleth away all corruptible and infesting humors.16 In this context the crocodile is a fertility symbol and so by extension

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might be connected with such fertility gods as Osiris and Isis. The crocodile is also pictured as a ship; in Stephen Batman’s The Golden Book o f the Leaden Gods Isis holds the image of a ship in her hand, "in honour of Osiris, which for her sake had passed many and daungerous Seas." Batman portrays Osiris himself, however, not as a crocodile, but as a three-headed serpent, holding his tail in his mouth.17 Spenser’s crocodile, however we look at it, is a symbol that can be interpreted in many ways. We need not restrict ourselves to the interpretation that the priest of Isis offers. Clearly the crocodile is a power that must be controlled by the goddess. The crocodile saves the temple and the goddess by devouring the flames and tempest that threaten to destroy them. In this, as the priest tells Britomart, he assuages the storms and raging flames that hinder her from assuming the just heritage of her father’s crown. But after his feat of conquest, he must not be allowed to become proud; he must sue for love and being accepted, he must assume office jointly with the female and rule with her. Spenser’s description of Isis and Osiris at the beginning of canto vii of Book V tells how the two function to balance one another; they are component figures that together make up that sacred virtue justice. He sees them as both divine and human, regal and common, male and female, singular and universal. To Osiris as king, Isis as queen is necessary as consort and a goddess of great power. She rules with him, checks both his decrees and his authority with her equity. Spenser means to tell us that as Isis is necessary to Osiris, so Britomart is to Artegall, both in complementing him as his consort and in balancing his justice with her equity. In the dream vision that Britomart experiences, she learns not only that she and Artegall are the modern counterparts to Isis and Osiris, but also how the equity of the goddess must control the pride of the crocodile. Only when she understands this can Britomart fulfill her Isis-like destiny. From Britomart and Artegall, as formerly from Isis and Osiris, will come the true king, the lion of great might, destined to found the royal dynasty of the Tudors in England, as Horns, the son of Isis and Osiris, founded the royal race of Pharoahs. If Spenser, following Plutarch, almost remakes Britomart in the dream sequence and the passages that follow, into a modern Isis, he restores her at the end of the episode to the role of devotee, rather than goddess. In so doing, he once more exploits Apuleius as a model for narrative. Like Lucius in the Metamorphosesy Britomart is a suffering human being, whom Isis relieves and enlightens. Like Lucius also, she enrolls herself among Isis’ followers, bestowing rich rewards on Isis* priests and giving royal gifts of gold and silver to the goddess herself. In becoming Isis* devotee, Britomart has recovered, as Lucius had, her mental health. Once more her life has purpose

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and direction. Now she can follow in the very footsteps of the goddess and bring relief and help to others. In her recovery Britomart returns to those very ideals of chaste love that in her jealousy and mistrust of Artegall she had temporarily abandoned. In her journey to save Artegall, she must undergo a kind of purifying trial before, confirmed in her love for Artegall, she can rescue him. Her experience at Isis Church is one phase of that trial and in her willingness to suffer so that she can be reunited with her loved one, she resembles not only Isis, the supreme model of loving faithfulness, but also another female character from Apuleius’ narrative-Psyche. Although we cannot consider fully the resemblances between Psyche’s and Britomart’s trials, it suffices to say that both women must accomplish certain tasks in order to learn to trust their loved ones, such tasks that will ultimately equip them to become mature and to realize their potential as wives. Like Isis, both Psyche and Britomart are figures who attain the acme of happiness in idealized married love. Spenser could look to Apuleius as one of the few ancient writers who regarded married love as one of the ennobling experiences in life. In Book V of The Faerie Queene Spenser accepts the Apuleian Isis as the ideal model for the kind of chaste wifedom to which his Britomart aspires. Through Britomart the influence of the goddess Isis touches Artegall also. Indeed, in many ways Artegall, rather than Britomart, is even more in need of the purifying force of Isis. His predicament in Book V, in fact, more nearly resembles that of Lucius. Like Lucius, Artegall has fallen victim to sexual deception. Under the influence of the charms of Fotis, Lucius had lost his manliness and been transformed into an ass. Artegall has likewise been betrayed by erring sexuality. Engaged in a fight with Radigund, he spared her because for a moment he was intoxicated with her beauty. She took advantage of his weakness, stripped him of his weapons and armor, put him in women’s clothing, and required him to do women’s work. Like Lucius, Artegall has become an object of shame, a loathly uncouth sight, his manhood hidden by an "unmanly maske" (V,vii,37,9). Britomart assumes the role in The Faerie Queene that Isis had played in the Metamorphoses; she brings relief and restoration to a man who has lost all semblance of manliness. Isis abhorred the shameful body of the ass that enclosed Lucius; Britomart, on seeing Artegall’s shameful transformation, turns her head aside, "abasht with secrete shame" (V.vi.38,3). Ah my deare Lord, what sight is this (quoth she) What May-game has misfortune made of you? Where is that dreadfull manly looke? where be

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Those mighty palmes, the which ye wont to’embrew In bloud of Kings, and great hoastes to subdew? Could ought on earth so wondrous change haue wrought, As to haue robde you of that manly hew? (V.vii,40,l-7) Bringing him to the bower, she has his unmanly clothes taken off and restores him to the appearance and station of a knight. Then she takes over the reins of government and rules jointly with Artegall, just as Isis and Osiris had once ruled jointly. When Artegall departs, Britomart continues to rule alone, just as Isis had. In creating this episode in Book V of The Faerie Queene, Spenser uses material from Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, Apuleius and others. But among these, Apuleius plays a special part. Book XI of the Metamorphoses contributes both character portrayal and narrative design to The Faerie Queene. As in Apuleius* account, Isis appears first as savior, then as model for the future devotee that she rescues. Isis is, moreover, an idealized figure for perfect marital devotion, that very kind of devotion which will lead Britomart to rescue Artegall. As Psyche endures trial in the Metamorphoses before she can attain happiness with her bridegroom, Britomart is tried in Book V. Both Psyche and Britomart have before them the perfect model of Isis herself. The final goal that Spenser looks to, moreover, is analogous to the goal that Lucius attains in the Metamorphoses when he becomes the devotee of Isis and Osiris and submits his life to their rule. For Britomart and Artegall this goal is internalized as well as externalized. They become not only devotees to the supreme gods, but also in a way they become the very gods Isis and Osiris, ideals themselves of perfect married love. Spenser has transformed Apuleius* narrative and characters to fit the Renaissance notions of love and the perspectives of his sixteenth-century dynastic epic. Department of English Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville

Notes I wish to thank Gertrude Drake, who, like the Apuleian Isis, has led me and illuminated my way.

1For Plutarch, see "De Iside et Osiride,” Plutarch's Moraliay trans.

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Frank Cole Babbitt (London: William Heinemann, 1936), V.3-191; for Apuleius, see The Golden Ass, Being the Metamorphoses o f Lucius Apuleius, trans. W. Adlington and Rev. S. Gaselee (London: William Heinemann, 1915); for Diodorus Siculus, see Biblioteca Histórica, I.xi-xxvii (London: William Heinemann, 1933). 2See Charles Grosvenor Osgood in The Works o f Edmund Spenser, A Variorum Edition, The Faerie Queen, Book Five, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Frederick Morgan Padelford, Ray Heffner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1936), p. 216. 3See Natalis Comes, Mythologiae (Venice, 1567), VIILxviii; Lilius Gregorius Gyraldus, De Deis Gentium Libri (Basel, 1548), syntagma xii. Conti conflates Isis with Io, as do many Renaissance commentators. Also see C. Iulius Hyginus, Fabularum Liber (Paris, 1578), fols. 33v, 51v, 74. 4Citations of Spenser are to Edmund Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. J.C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). 5Both Alistair Fowler in Spenser and the Numbers o f Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 45, and James Nohrnberg in The Analogy o f The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 388, argue that Spenser interprets the name Isis to mean equal, from the Greek, tooq . 6Filippus Beroaldus, Lucii Apuleii in Asinum Aureum Opus (1516), fol. 152 recto. 7Adlington’s translation was popular and was reprinted several times in the sixteenth century. I have consulted a copy of the 1571 edition, held by the Folger Shakespeare Library. 8The first Greek edition of Plutarch's Moralia was printed by Aldus in 1509. The work was popular and was translated into Latin several times in the sixteenth century. Xylander's Latin translation appeared in 1571; Jacques Amyot’s French translation in 1574. Spenser could have known both of these. The Moralia was not translated into English until Philemon Holland’s complete translation appeared in 1603. For Spenser’s knowledge of Plutarch, Apuleius, Diodorus Siculus and other sources, see Variorum Commentary, Book V, esp. pp. 214-217. 9Alistair Fowler places the arithmetical center of Book V in canto vii at stanza 4, which speaks of Isis and Osiris and the "race in equall justice," Spenser and the Numbers o f Time, p. 45. 10Female devotees of Isis often dressed in the costume of the goddess and took on her person. Cleopatra, for example, dressed like Isis. See

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Lempriere, Classical Dictionary (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1947) under "Isis." 11Beroaldus, fol. 154v. 12See A.C. Hamilton's note on this passage in The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 1977), p. 576. 13Rosemary Freeman, The "Faerie Queene*:A Companion for Readers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), p. 35. 14Jane Aptekar, Icons o f Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book V o f The Faerie Queene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 87-107. 15Nohrnberg, p. 395; Elizabeth Bieman in "Britomart in the Faerie Queene/ UTQ, 37 (1968), thinks that the fiery crocodile is Typhon, but the humbled crocodile who woos Britomart Osiris (pp. 168-69). Also see Alice Miskimin, "Britomart's Crocodile and the Legend of Chastity," JEGP, 77 (1978), 17-36. For further commentary on the Isis episode in Spenser see Clifford Davidson, "The Idol of Isis Church," Studies in Philology, 66 (1969), 70-86. 16"ApolIo" in The Fountaine o f Ancient Fiction, Wherein is liuely depictured the Images and Statues of the gods o f the Ancients, with their proper and particular expositions (London, 1599), n.p. Also found in Cartari (see Nohmberg, pp. 388-9). 17Stephen Batman, The Golden Booke o f the Leaden Goddes (London, 1577), fols. 15v-16r.

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X. APULEIUS AND MIDSUMMER NIG H TS DREAM: BOTTOM’S METAMORPHOSES JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY

. . . sed cutis tenella duratur in corium et in extimis palmulis perdito numero toti digiti in singulas ungulas et de spinae meae termino grandis cauda procedit; iam facies enormis et os prolixum et nares hiantes et labiae pendulae, sic et aures immodicis horripilant auctibus___Ac dum salutis inopia cuncta corporis mei considero, non avem me sed asinum video---In 1566, Richard Adlington published his translation of Apuleius’ Golden A ss.* Around 1594-1595, Shakespeare produced Midsummer N itfit’s Dream? Let us look at Shakespeare’s use of intertextual material in Midsummer Night's Dream, at its rich tapestry of anxiety and outrageousness, in the manner of both Freud’s and Foucault’s Interpretation o f Dreams,3 and of Em pson’s discussions of political censorship and encoding in the Elizabethan theatre,4 seeing that material in this play as coming from dual sources, the classic and the chthonic, the Greek and the English, being texts about "Metamorphoses,'’ derived from Ovid and from Apuleius, and palimpsesting these in the rich manner of dream work with texts from the world of "Faerie," from the Mabinogion,5 Sir Orfeo,6 Thomas Rymer/Thomas of Erceldoune,7 Chaucer’s "Sir Thopas" and T h e Wife of Bath’s Tale,"8 Spenser’s Faerie Queene,9 Robert Greene’s James Fourth , 10 and later, continuing through such works as Jonson’s masque, Oberony and Alexander Pope’s Rosicrucian machinery to the Rape of the Lock,11 in its literary double plotting concerning anxieties about all-too-real succession plotting and

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politics.12 The use of faerie machinery presents a mirror world, in which therapy can occur defining identity, that then can heal the real realm. We gain this insight from Ernst Kantorowicz’ The Kings Two Bodies P We can apply it to the dual realms, one mortal, one immortal, of Midsummer Night's Dream,14 It is probable that the staging of the Dream had the same actor double for Oberon and Theseus, a boy actor for both Titania and Hippolyta, further stressing the analogous realms of Athens and of Faerie, which in turn were mirror-reflecting Elizabeth of England. M irroring, parallel dream s, plays and tales are the "uses of enchantment"15 in which discourse can take place safely-with healing-about perceived "clear and present dangers" to both the individual psyche and the monarch of the realm. In such dream work’s grammar that which is presented as the most comic is in fact the most serious. The world upsidedown and bottoms up mirror reflects and reverses reality.16 I Apuleius’ pagan text, written in the second century after Christ, makes use of the theatre and of its illusory magic in rich and powerful ways. He presents himself within his text as Lucius, its white protagonist, while being also the black African lawyer who writes this text about Greece, in Latin, with a Nilotic reed upon Egyptian papyrus, calling attention self-referentially to these transcultural translations and metamorphoses within his preface as indicative of those within his text.17 As a lawyer he calls upon his vast knowledge of criminal alibis, constructed by logographers for their guilty clients to save them from crucifixions and gladiatorial spectator sports and he makes full use of these tales told within a tale to ward off death.18 Versed in magic, he makes use of enchantments, both of his characters-and of his readers. His text is filled with anxiety, wit and the greatest artistry. The novel begins with Lucius traveling about Thessaly, that region of black arts, and, while resting his horse, meeting with two other travelers who are telling tales, embedding oral tales within scribal text.19 The story that is told is of Socrates, living in terror of his mistress who is a witch and who is killed by her but, zombie-like, is able to continue traveling the next day-until he comes into contact with running water. The stories of magic continue in this part of the text, Lucius encountering further examples of the living dead, corpse watchers who are themselves mutilated having the identical name as the corpse, and so forth. At one point, Lucius believes he has murdered three robbers. He is on trial for his life, the court room changes venue to a theatre, the citizenry is in stitches of laughter, he is in the throes of anxiety-and then

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it is revealed to him that the three corpses are nothing but goatskin wineskins, transformed by his hostess’ magic into men and then turned back again.20 Eventually Lucius’ host’s wife turns herself into an owl and Lucius, desiring the same metamorphosis-alas, by a mishap-is transformed instead into an ass, a donkey. He must remain in that state until he can devour a garland of roses.21 He is next captured by outlawed robbers who need him to transport their booty. In their cave he listens to tales of their criminal exploits and bravado-and also to the tale told by the old crone to the young virgin bride, just captured by these same robbers, who is in despair of a fate worse than death. The tale the crone tells is a consolation tale, of Cupid and Psyche. It is almost the same tale that Leslie Silko told that is narrated in her pueblo for consolation-about loss and sorrow metamorphosed into beautiful butterflies (Psyche = Soul = Butterfly).22 In the tale Psyche is so beautiful that she arouses jealousy, from her two sisters first, then from Venus, goddess of love, who plots her downfall, requiring Cupid to make Psyche be infatuated with some ridiculous object, such as an ass. Cupid, however, falls in love with Psyche himself and their courtship takes on the form of the Beauty and the Beast tale. She must never see him. She disobeys, incited to do so by her jealous sisters, and next must carry out task after impossible task for cruel and jealous Venus, in which she succeeds and thus can marry Cupid. When the old hag has finished telling her tale the Virgin and the Ass attempt to escape from the cave. The teller of the tale, having also cooked the robbers’ meal, next hangs herself, the robbers recapture the maiden, named Charité, with the donkey, and eat the food, as we have devoured the tale of our story­ teller of the romance within the romance. The robbers then decide to punish the donkey and the maiden by placing her within his disembowelled body, leaving both to that living death-but, perils of Pauline, there is an interruption. Her spouse, pretending himself to be a brigand, arrives on the scene to rescue her and succeeds, the two consummating their interrupted marriage. Alas, their relationship is soon violated by a sexual triangle of cupidinous jealousy, of cupidity, and her husband, on a boar hunt, then Charité, both die. From now on Lucius as a donkey listens to countless obsessively narrated tales of sexual triangles, ending in criminal murders, until finally it is decided that he should copulate on the public stage with a woman who-out of jealousy-has murdered everyone in her family. Prior to his own act he witnesses a tawdry stage presentation of the tale of the apple of discord, with naked actor/actresses as Venus, Juno and Minerva offering the golden fruit to Paris. The scene is described with all its illusory skill stripped and bared,

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much as did the war-time film of Shakespeare’s Henry V present the staging and actors of the Globe.23 Disgusted, Lucius escapes from his act-and finally finds roses he can eat and becomes the priest of Isis, the Egyptian goddess who demands celibacy of her devotees and who loathes asses. Throughout the tales within tales donkeys were fragmented and decomposed; Psyche is told-in the tale within the tale-that she will meet a lame donkey and a man gathering firewood in Hell-and that she must not stop to help them; the procession of the Magna M ater includes a representation of Pegasus, not as a horse, but acted out by a mere donkey with wings crudely glued to his sides24; plus Lucius himself owns a horse, Candidus, who appears at the beginning and the end of the romance, being returned to him. These represent Plato’s use of the horses in the Phaedrus: Candidus is his rational side; the ass, whom Candidus loathes, his brutish part.25 In descriptions of Circe’s enchantments through time, vices become transmogrified into beasts, the one being totemically projected upon the other classificatory system.26 Usually the donkey with its large phallus symbolizes lust, and, with the other form of that animal’s name, Ass, almost matching Arse, the more immature form of lust at that, anality, sodomy, buggery. Children’s games "innocently" play at "Pinning the Tail on the Donkey," putting it in inappropriate, perversely absurd places.27 A major facet of this ass mischief had, in fact, been the medieval plays, which go back to pagan Isis rituals, yoking together Seth’s beast, the Ass, and the Virgin, now projected and displaced as the Christian Mother of God, rather than of Isis and her child by Osiris, Horus, whom she nurses.28 In these plays the priests and the congregation would bray like asses as the Virgin and the Ass entered such cathedrals as that at Beauvais, celebrating blasphemy within the sanctuary, in the manner noted by Bakhtin and by Jacobson, where parody equals magic and in poetry’s "figures of grammar," which are likewise those of dreams, in this powerful realm of playfulness.29 Throughout the weaving of tales in Europe’s cultural heritage, especially those in the realm of theriomorphic tales, such as the Roman de Renard, we find donkeys: Nigel Wireker, friend of Thomas &Becket and John of Salisbury, writing in the Speculum Stultorum, the Mirror for Fools> of Daun Bumellus, the Ass who went to the Universities of the Sorbonne and Salerno, which is the tale within the tale, too, of Chaucer’s "Nun’s Priest’s Tale"; the hero of the Roman de Fauvel; the animal musicians of the "Musicians of Bremmen"; Till Eulenspiegel teaching an ass to read; then, in later times (and now for children only), Carlo Collodi’s Pinnocchio; and, above all, A.A. Milne’s Eeyore who struggles to learn to read and write and who neurotically and obsessively keeps putting Piglet’s burst balloon in and out of Pooh’s

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empty jar of honey. Frederick Crews Freudianly omits and censors that most Freudian part of Winnie the Pooh in his Pooh Perplex ** For, in a repressed society what adults can not cope with is given to children and goes underground-like Alice.31 Apuleius, contributing this material to the future, is writing with the knowledge of the past, of Greek, Roman and Egytpian culture and is aware of the uses of the theatre, first by the Greeks for therapy, for catharsis, with the protagonist as pharmakos. Greek plays at the Dionysian Festivals presented both tragic trilogies and a comic satyr play as interlude, the satyr play usually dealing with shape-changing, shamanistic, Protean trickster pranks of half men, half beasts, representing the forces of unreason.32 That symbolic world of half men, half goats, or half men and half horses, of satyrs and centaurs, as well as chimaera such as the Sphinx, part woman, part lion, part eagle, and the Gorgon with serpents for hair who turns men to stone, were ways through which Greeks coded messages concerning what they feared.33 Elizabethan Neoplatonists Renaissanced this material. Today these monsters and monstrosities can still be found in children’s texts, such as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things A r e For it is in dreams and in dramas, in written stories and in the verbal telling of tales in the firelight that we can practise the uses of enchantment, of fantasy, of the imagination, creating an artifice of theory in which to play out war games, Dungeons and Dragons, and such similar blueprinting and scriptwriting, making use of trial and error, before carrying out the real thing in the praxis of life.35 II Shakespeare playfully, within his play concerning sexual anxiety, marital jealousy, and a divorce custody battle, makes use of the intertextuality of the Golden Ass of Lucius/Apuleius, becoming himself Bottom courted by Titania while guised as an ass, while making an ass of himself. Spenser had already, before him, turned a graceful compliment to the Queen, with his Virgin worshiped equally with the Ass in the Faerie Queene. That work had also drawn upon the fantasy of a dream as its frame, making use of the analogy of the world of faerie paralleling that of fact, blueprinting it in the realm of theory.36 Dreams, games, dramas, plays, jokes, texts, poems are spheres of the fantasy and theory in which the real problems of praxis can be presented and resolved analogously, within the parameters of ancient coded rules, with chthonic characters. Such material uses the safety of the past or of the animal kingdom or of the fantastic unreal, of non-sense, using for these purposes the safety of the not-present, the not-logical, the not-mortal to get past

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psychological or political censorship. Elsewhere, in other plays-and poems-major characters, perhaps as personae for their authors, can assume madness in order to say what cannot be said safely: Hamlet, Tristan, Orpheus, Ywain, Othello, and many more. Shakespeare, in Midsummer Night's Dream, presents dreams within dreams, plays within plays. Ernest Jones, writing on Hamlet and Oedipus, remarked, in an almost completely censored comment, relegated to the merest footnote, that the play within the play, like the dream within the dream is that which the dreamer wishes were not true but which is.37 Ingmar Bergman recognized this with his mousetrap play of Hamlet within his film, Through a Glass Darkly, decomposing that also into Seventh Seal with player actors journeying toward Elsinore. The frame dream surrounding it is its opposite, in this chthonic grammar, presented thereby as the opposite of the truth, its mirror reversal. Florentines state openly that their city is one that welcomes sodomy, this having been sanctioned by homosexual Medici princes. Heterosexuality can play with homosexual sexual positioning. Shakespeare delicately is presenting that crude posturing, giving, concerning his Queen, the schoolboy joking upon asses and arses.38 The theriomorphic figures, to be seen first upon a Babylonian harp, of 2,500 B.C., of the absurd and unmusical musician ass, the body, playing the harp, the soul, alongside of goats playing panpipes, repeated next in frescoes and on capitals, 1200 A.D., also appeared transmogrified as the half human, half animal forms sculpted upon the Parthenon and illuminated in medieval manuscripts, those grotesques such as satyrs and centaurs and fauns, those strange persons along the margins whose nether parts are animal heads which play musical instruments, which fart and mock the sacred text they adorn. Mikhail Bakhtin has seen this joking in the Middle Ages as the result of the Two Worlds of Latin and vernacular, of authority and the folk, conjoined.39 By the Puritan and the Victorian periods such playfulness is forbidden and repressed. For the Classical, Medieval and Elizabethan worlds, however, repression was not practised and it was considered therapeutic to give vent to such imagery, joyously mixing up and confusing orality, anality and genitality, the id having its Bacchanalia, its Saturnalia and its Carnival. Caliban counterpoises Ariel, Bottom, Puck, Lucius as Ass, Cupid and Psyche, the heavenly soul being woven into the tapestry of the earthbound body. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre at Southwark was in London’s red light district. Modern counterparts would be New York’s theatre district and Nevada’s Las Vegas, of the commerce of dreams and illusions. After the Greek theatre’s use of drama for therapy, as at Epidauros, the great Greek

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medical center with its labyrinth and theatre, and with its violence kept off stage and out of sight, the Roman theatre-as in Apuleius-was more disturbing, thrilling and erotic, though far less therapeutic, making use of the spectator sport of even real violence and sex thrown in for box office on the public stage. Reality is sick when it is too much mixed with fantasy, and likew ise fantasy should not be reality.40 Augustine and Boethius wrote against such theatre. Illustrations to the Comedies of Terence show his theatre-goers being accosted by whores. Shakespeare himself wrote into his plays a considerable amount of sexual disgust. One recalls especially his lines given to Othello and Leontes. His women characters were played by boy actors. He addressed his love sonnets in praise of a fair boy and against a dark lady. What Shakespeare saw of heterosexuality was not pleasant. It did not help that he left behind Ann Hathaway41 and came to Elizabeth Tudor, who held sway with absolute power. A political paradigm shift had occurred between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in England, the Reformation, in which the King or Queen now became the Head of the Church instead of the Pope. The mirrorreversed, photographic negative, parody magic world of Carnival now could be transferred from sacred biblical text to royal pageant as its anti-masque 42 just as much as could Doomsday portrayals of God now become Armada portraits, still with the damned to the left, the saved to the right, of Queen Elizabeth I, as Virgin Monarch. Hating to be called "Queen," which meant, in Elizabethan English, "whore," she would declare, "I am your Prince!" One masque performed before her was of the Apple of Discord-in which Paris diplomatically decided to offer the reward for the fairest, not to Venus, Juno or Minerva, on the stage, but to his monarch in the audience, Elizabeth, flattering her.43 (We recall Lewis Carroll’s rewriting of Queen Elizabeth or her half-sister, Bloody Mary, as the Red Queen of Hearts, of Cards, shouting "Off with his Head!" she being there epitomized as the castrating female.44) Two episodes from Apuleius’ Golden Ass’s tales within tales’ double plotting are metamorphosed in Shakespeare’s play, the first, from the tale within the tale, being Cupid’s enchantment of Psyche to fall in love with a beast/him self, which parallels A riel’s teasing Caliban and Puck’s enchantment of Titania to fall in love with beastly Bottom,45 the last, from the frame tale, of the planned copulating on stage of Lucius metamorphosed as an ass with a nefariously jealous, murderous woman criminal. Titania is infatuated, out of all reason, and pleads that Bottom sing: "I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:/ Mine ear is much enamoured of thy note;/ So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;/ And thy fair virtue’s force perforce doth move m e/ On the first view, to swear, I love thee" (III.i.140-144), and Bottom’s

130/Tales within Tales declaration, "I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let’s have the tongs and the bones" (IV.i30), recalling the Pythagorean jokes through time concerning the unmusical musician ass.46 In Titania’s words to Bottom are compressed many other episodes from Apuleius’ Golden A ssy the flowers on Fotis* bed Fotis and Lucius copulate on, and their garlands of roses, Titania saying to Bottom she’ll sing to him, "while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep" (III.i.162) and "Come, sit thee down upon this flow’ry bed,/ While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,/ And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,/ And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy" (IV.i.1-4); Oberon noting, "For she his hairy temples then had rounded/ With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers" (IV.i.54-55); Lucius as ass’s desire for oats and hay, Bottom declaring, "Truly, a peck of provender: I could munch your good dry oats. Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay. good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow" (32-35), and the gluttony Lucius as ass enjoys when he robs food from the dinner table, Titania saying, "Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,/ With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries" (III.i.169-170); and the Psyche episode, "And pluck the wings from painted butterflies/ To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes" (1756). Puck crows to Oberon, "My mistress with a monster is in love./ . . . [I] left sweet Pyramus translated there: When in that moment, so it came to pass,/ Titania wak’d and straightway lov’d an ass" (III.ii.6,31-34). Even Spenser’s virginal Una’s Lion, as well as her Ass, gets fragmented into this dramatic presentation within the dream within the drama, with the lion that threatens Thisne (as they scramble and lisp her name) 47 Their play is interestingly preferred over ones of centaurs and bacchanals; the lion reminds the assembled courtiers of foxes and geese (V.i.232-237). The chaste horse is echoed in Hippolyta the Amazon who will die in giving birth to chaste Hippolytus, their names embodying the Greek for horse, "hippo." That future event is already foreshadowed in the death in childbirth of Titania’s friend, mother to the posthumous changeling child. And in between the acts, between the rehearsal and performance, is Bottom’s Dream and his Waking: "I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was-there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and methought I had,—but man is a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was" (IV.i.203-216). That dream is also, of course, our own-for we were its auditors. And Theseus’ epithet for the seeming-dead actor is "With the help of a surgeon he might

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yet recover, and prove an ass" (316-317).48 Dreamers and lovers, lunatics and poets are all one, making the discordant universe concordant and musical, though its misrule is "like a tangled chain; nothing impaired, but all disordered" (V.i.108-127), in its Protean use of classical and faerie metamorphic dream work. Above all, Bottom is an upside-down centaur, not a m an’s top and a horse’s nether part, but an ass on top, a man beneath, within this charmingly absurd world upside down. In the movement, the paradigm shift, from sacred to secular power, from the Church to the uses not so much of religion as of the chthonic, displaced world of Faerie hand in hand with the pagan world of Athens, we can find hum -drum English Nick49 Bottom as weaver textually (de)constructing and acting out his satyr/centaur play within a play, the comic tragedy, the "most lamentable comedy," of Pyramus and Thisbe5**- and thereby teasingly becoming Titania’s crowned and garlanded ass consort, her absurd poet-laureate, a mocking shadow understudy for our William Shakespeare, another "Hobgoblin run away with the garland of Apollo, "51 as partner in the Globe Theatre, playwright and sometime actor for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, puckishly and asininely celebrating with saving laughter, with brilliant folly, his hate/love, love/hate sexual politics towards his patron, the Virgin Queen. Medieval Studies University of Colorado, Boulder

Notes

^ p u le iu s, The Golden A ss, trans. John Adlington (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), Loeb Classical Library 44; trans. Jack Lindsay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960). 2The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 377ze Interpretation o f Dreams and Dreams, in The Standard Edition o f the Complete Psychological Works o f Sigmund Freud, vols. IV, V, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1958); Michel Foucault, "La méthode d’Artemidore," Histoire de la sexualité: Le Souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 36-38, on sexual bestiality in dreams as the knowledge of feminine secrets. 4Sir William Empson, in a discussion, 1976, Princeton Inn College. In

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connection with this play, see his "Fairy Flight in A Midsummer Night's Dream,* in Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David B. Pirie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 223-230. 5"Pwyll Lord of Dyved," as dual surrogate with Arawn, King of Annwvyn, in Mabinogion, trans. Jeffrey Gantz (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). Oberon, of course, is from the medieval romance of "Sir Huon of Bordeaux” and continues through Rudyard Kipling’s Puck o f Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies. 6Sir Orfeo, ed. A J. Bliss (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). 7William P. Albrecht, The Loathly Lady in ‘Thomas o f Erceldoune' with the Text o f the Poem Printed in 1652 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954). 877ie Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), pp. 212-216. 9Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene in The Poems o f Spenser, ed. J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). 10Robert Greene, The Scottish History o f James the Fourth, ed. Norman Sanders (London: Methuen, 1970). My thanks to Professor John Murphy who suggested that I pursue this vein of faerie gold. 1frequently in these "faerie" texts is the important presence of their poet within the poem who visits the underworld. See Julia Bolton Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study in Dante, Langland and Chaucer (Bern: Peter Lang, 1987), for this pattern elsewhere. 12See Richard J, Schoeck, Intertextuality and Renaissance Texts (Bamberg: H. Kaiser Verlag, 1984); William Empson, "Double Plots," in Some Versions o f Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1960), pp. ; Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," Myth, Symbol and Culture, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 1-37; Steven Orgel, The Illusion o f Power (Berkely: University of California Press, 1975); C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); Maria Corti, "Models and Antimodels," New Literary History: A Journal o f Theory and Interpretationsy, 111979), 339-66. 13Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). However, the chthonic realm is also that of Aeschylus’ Eumenides and of Goethe’s Faust II’s "Descent to the Mothers." 14I owe much of this material to discussions with my colleague, Professor John Murphy.

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15Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses o f Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance o f Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976). 16Ernst Curtius, "The World Upside-Down," Latin Literature and the European Middle Ages (New York: Harper, 1963); Barbara Babcock, ed. The Reversible World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. 17Trans. Lindsay, p. 31. Seven Sages, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, etc.; even children begging parents for another story-because of their unspoken terror of monsters and death. 19I have elsewhere published on the paradigm, the archetype of the two travellers meeting with a third while telling tales, of whom one traveler is also the writer of these tales (Pilgrim and Book> chapter 2). The paradigm or archetype includes the Gospel of Luke, Dante's Commedia, Langland’s Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East, Graham Greene’s The Third Man. 20This episode gets intertextually recycled by Cervantes in Don Quixote, by Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews. 21The classical meaning of garlands placed upon the head by a lover, as with wedding rings placed on fingers, was explicitly sexual, the phallus in the vagina-or elsewhere. Fotis and Lucius adorn each other and themselves with garlands of roses in their love scene. 22"Changing the Canon," English Institute, Harvard University, 1979. Joseph Conrad, similarly, in Lord Jim uses the image of butterflies at the center of his double-plotted work; in that episode butterflies are analysed= psychoanalysis. 23Breaking illusion to deepen it, C.L. Barbour and Leslie Fiedler, MLA, 1972. 24This image corresponds to the clumsy seeming but actually magnificent artistry of Nicholas Bottom/William Shakespeare. ^Plato, PhaedruSy trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), Loeb 36; Gertrude Drake, "A Unifying Theme in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses," Classical Journal, 64 (1968), 102-109; Constance S. Wright, "’No Art at all’: A Note on the Proemium of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses," Classical Philology, 67 (1973), 217-219. 26Boethius, De Consolation Philosophiaey trans. S.J. T ester (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), Loeb 74, IV. iii. 334; The Consolation o f Philosophy, trans. V.E. Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

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1969), IV. iii. 125; Claude L6vi-Strauss, Anthropologic structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958), etc.; Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Basic Writings o f Sigrnund Freud, ed. A A Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), pp. 807930. See medieval manuscript marginalia and cloister capitals, a continuation into sacred books and structures from the Greek drama which conjoined serious tragedy with comedy and satyr plays. 27On play, see Laura Kendrick, Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study o f the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962); Plato, The Laws. 28V. Tram Tinh, Isis Lactans (Leiden: Brill, 1973); John Douglas Hoag, T h e Virgin Prefigured." 29Roman Jacobson, "Medieval Mock Mystery (The Old Czech Unguentarius," Selected Writings VI: Early Slavic Paths and Crossroads, Part Two: Medieval Slavic Studies (Berlin: Mouton, 1985), pp. 666-690, who even notes an American Black version of the Second Shepherds' Play, pp. 668-9. P. 686, notes 1274 ecclesiastical concern where people at Easter act out shameless plays and dances, like Hellenes celebrating Dionysus’ Festival. See also his "On the Verbal Art of William Blake and Other Poet Painters," in Selected Writings III: Poetry o f Grammar and Grammar o f Poetry, ed. Stephen Rudy (Hague: Mouton, 1981), pp. 322-344, where he discusses the Douanier Rousseau’s "Dream" in painting and verses, p. 687; comment on poetry’s "figures of grammar," borrowed by Jacobson from Gerald Manley Hopkins. 3(>This last detail is censored from Frederick Crew’s Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook (New York: Dutton, 1963), yet is the most Freudian image within Milne’s masterpiece. 31William Empson, T h e Child as Swain," Some Versions o f Pastoral (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1960), pp. 241-282. 32For Centaurs, half men, half horse, see Odyssey, XXI 295-303; Parthenon and Olympia Temple sculptures of Centauromachia; for satyr plays and their iconography, see bibliography compiled by E.W. Handley and Frank Brommer, Satyrspiele (Berlin, 1959), Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals o f Athens (Oxford, 1968); Dana F. Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play (Meisenheim: Anton Hain, 1980); Lear’s hermaphroditic conflation of male Centaurs with female Sirens and Sphinxs: "Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above," IV.vi.123-4. 33Plato, The Republic, IX, in The Dialogues o f Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), p. 409, on the image of the

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soul as created by the artist like the composite creations of ancient mythology, such as the Chimera, in which two or more different natures coexist (lion, m an), some of the animals being tame, some wild, metamorphosing at will. See also, X, p. 429. ^M aurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: Harper, 1963); Julian Jaynes, The Origin o f Consciousness in the Breakdown o f the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). 35Bettelheim, Enchantment (though Socrates, Plato, Republic, II, had strongly disapproved of such fictional uses, desiring that the tellers of fictional tales be banished from ideal cities, a legacy which has caused generations of American children to be forbidden fairy tales); Erich A uerbach,"Figura," in Scenes from the Drama o f European Literature: Six Essays, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 11-76; Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964). ^ In Book I, Canto VI, Fauns and Satyrs find Una and her Ass, who have just escaped from Sans Loy, "Outlaw." At first they worship her, then, when Una teaches them not to commit such pagan idolatry, they charmingly proceed to worship her Ass, degenerating yet further from the worship of a human form, to that of an animal. The woodborne people fall before her flat, And worship her as Goddesse of the wood; Glad of such lucke, the luckelesse lucky maid, Did her content to please their feeble eyes, And long time with that saluage people staid, To gather breath in many miseries. During which time her gentle wit she plyes, To teach them truth, which worshipt her in vaine, And made her th’Image of Idolatryes; But when their bootlesse zeale she did restraine From her own worship, they her Asse would worship fayn. (16,19) Spenser echoes poetry about Queen Elizabeth and his own wife, Elizabeth Boyle ("That all the woodes and forestes did resownd"; "That all the woodes with doubled Eccho ring," echoing "The woods shall to me answer and my Echo ring," and "The woods no more shal answere, nor your

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echo ring," Fairie Queene, I.vi.7,14; Epithalamion, 18, 314, Amoretti, XXXV, LXXXIII. Jerome had already in his tale of Saint Paul and Anthony played with Satyrs and Hippocentaurs, lying chimaera within a presumably true saint's legend, which C.S. Lewis would borrow for the Chronicles o f Namia. Nietzche further echoed the episode of the worshiping of the Ass, Thus Spake Zarathustra, IV, The Ass Festival. The laughter-filled material goes back to anti-Christian satires, including graffiti of crucified asses on Roman walls. One of the most powerful things that can be done with satire is for the satirized party to adopt and celebrate it. We recall Kafka's "Leopards in the Temple." 37P. 101. ^William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Saving the Queen (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976) implies the same crude joke. 39Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 1-58, 437-74. ^Frank Kermode, Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 41Whom James Joyce jokingly called "Ann hath a way," Ulysses (New York: Modern Library, 1942), p. 189. 42Maria Corti notes this quality in medieval material, "Models and Antimodels in Medieval Culture," in New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, 10 (1979), 339-66. 43George Peele, The Arraygnement o f Paris, ed. R. Mark Benbow, in The Dramatic Works o f George Peele (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 1-131. ^But, of course, Alice states, "You are all nothing but a pack of cards" at the end of her dream, relegating them to IBM cardsorting of the brain, in theory, and not yet practice. See Empson, "Child as Swain." Recall, as well, Alexander Pushkin, "The Queen of Spades." 45Oberon, omitting donkeys, states: I'll watch Titania when she is asleep, And drop the liquor of it in her eyes. The next thing then she waking looks upon, Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull, On meddling monkey, or on busy ape, She shall pursue it with the soul of love (II.i.177-82). 46Julia Bolton Holloway, "The Asse to the Harpe; Boethian Music in Chaucer," Boethius and the Liberal Arts, ed. Michael Masi (Bern: Peter Lang,

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1981), pp. 175-86; reprinted here. 47The "lion among ladies" is said to also refer to an actual substitution for a lion at a court christening. Professor John Murphy has discussed at length with me the political succession question in relation to these playful plays as being their topic, a topic of the greatest anxiety at court. 48Bergman further played with the theme of the dead actor’s Resurrection, Seventh Seal. "Is there a doctor in the house?" was a typical joke in St. George Mummers’ Plays. 49We should not forget that St. Nicholas who did not really exist is the patron of thieves and students-and related to the Old Nick, Father of Lies. Shakespeare has nicked Bottom for himself from Lucius/Apuleius, and has nicked the tapestry of tales for Midsummer Night's Dream from Ovid, Statius and Apuleius, and from Thomas of Erceldoune, Chaucer, Spenser, and Robert Greene. See Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Myths, with essays by Karl Kerenyi, "The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology," and C.G. Jung, "On the Psychoanalysis of the Trickster Figure" (London: Routledge and Paul, 1956). 50See Julia Bolton Holloway, "Strawberries and Mulberries: Ulysses and Othello," Hypatia, ed. William Calder III, Ulrich K. Goldsmith, and Phyllis B. Kenevan (Boulder: Colorado Associated Press, 1985), pp. 124-36. 51Gabriel Harvey’s comment upon Edmund Spenser’s rewriting of The Faerie Queene, from which I conjecture that the first books Spenser wrote were those in the present center, modeled more closely on the Italian epics and Renaissance Neoplatonism, the later additions being those which medievalize the text, making use of Sir Walter Ralegh’s use of topoi concerning pilgrimage, etc.

XI. ORAL

Sic captivae puellae délira et temulata ilia narrabat articula; sed astans ego non procul dolebam mehercules quod pugillates et stilum non habebam, qui tant bellam fabellam praenotarem.

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE FROM THE PUEBLO INDIAN PERSPECTIVE LESLIE MARMON SILKO

Where I come from, the words that are most highly valued are those which are spoken from the heart, unpremeditated and unrehearsed.1 Among the Pueblo people, a written speech or statement is highly suspect because the true feelings of the speaker remain hidden as he reads words that are detached from the occasion and the audience. I have intentionally not written a formal paper to read to this session because of this and because I want you to hear and to experience English in a nontraditional structure, a structure that follows patterns from the oral tradition. For those of you accustomed to a structure that moves from point A to point B to point C, this presentation may be somewhat difficult to follow because the structure of Pueblo expression resembles something like a spider’s web-with many little threads radiating from a center, criss-crossing each other. As with the web, the structure will emerge as it is made and you must simply listen and trust, as the Pueblo people do, that meaning will be made. I suppose the task that I have today is a formidable one because basically I come here to ask you, at least for a while, to set aside a number of basic approaches that you have been using and probably will continue to use in approaching the study of English or the study of language; first of all, I come to ask you to see language from the Pueblo perspective, which is a perspective that is very much concerned with including the whole of creation and the whole of history and time. And so we very seldom talk about breaking language down into words. As I will continue to relate to you, even the use of a specific language is less important than the one thing-which is the "telling," or the storytelling. And so, as Simon Ortiz has written, if you approach a Pueblo person and want to talk words or, worse than that, to break down an individual word into its components, oftimes you will just get

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a blank stare, because we don’t think of words as being isolated from the speaker, which, of course, is one element of the oral tradition. Moreover, we don’t think of words as being alone: words are always with other words, and the other words are almost always in a story of some sort. Today I have brought a number of examples of stories in English because I would like to get around to the question that has been raised, or the topic that has come along here, which is what changes we Pueblo writers might make with English as a language for literature. But at the same time 1 would like to explain the importance of storytelling and how it relates to a Pueblo theory of language. So first I would like to go back to the Pueblo Creation story. The reason I go back to that story is because it is an all-inclusive story of creation and how life began. Ts6itsinako, Thought Woman, by thinking of her sisters, and together with her sisters, thought of everything which is, and this world was created. And the belief was that everything in this world was a part of the original creation, and that the people at home realized that far away there were others-other human beings. There is even a section of the story which is a prophecy-which describes the origin of the European race, the African, and also remembers the Asian origins. Starting out with this story, with this attitude which includes all things, I would like to point out that the reason the people are more concerned with story and communication and less with a particular language is in part an outgrowth of the area [pointing to a map] where we find ourselves. Among the twenty Pueblos there are at least six distinct languages, and possibly seven. Some of the linguists argue and I don’t set myself up to be a linguist at all about the number of distinct languages. But certainly Zuni is all alone, and Hopi is all alone, and from mesa to mesa there are subtle differences in language-very great differences. I think that this might be the reason that what particular language was being used wasn’t as important as what a speaker was trying to say. And this, I think, is reflected and stems or grows out of a particular view of the story-that is, that language is story. At Laguna many words have stories which make them. So when one is telling a story, and one is using words to tell the story, each word that one is speaking has a story of its own too. Often the speakers or tellers go into the stories of the words they are using to tell one story so that you get stories within stories, so to speak. This structure becomes very apparent in the storytelling, and what I would like to show you later on by reading some pieces that I brought is that this structure also informs the writing and the stories which are currently coming from Pueblo people. I think what is essential is this sense of story, and story within story, and the idea that one story is only the beginning of

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many stories, and the sense that stories never truly end. I would like to propose that these views of structure and the dynamics of storytelling are some of the contributions which Native American cultures bring to the English language or at least to literature in the English language. First of all, a lot of people think of storytelling as something that is done at bedtime-that it is something that is done for small children. When 1 use the term storytelling, I include a far wider range of telling activity. I also do not limit storytelling to simply old stories, but do again go back to the original view of creation, which sees that it is all part of a whole; we do not differentiate or fragment stories and experiences. In the beginning, Ts6itsiinako, Thought Woman, thought of all these things, and all of these things are held together as one holds many things together in a single thought. So in the telling (and today you will hear a few of the dimensions of this telling) first of all, as was pointed out earlier, the storytelling always includes the audience and the listeners, and, in fact, a great deal of the story is believed to be inside the listener, and the storyteller's role is to draw the story out of the listeners. This kind of shared experience grows out of a strong community base. The storytelling goes on and continues from generation to generation. The Origin story functions basically as a maker of our identity-with the story we know who we are. We are the Lagunas. This is where we came from. We came this way. We came by this place. And so from the time you are very young, you hear these stories, so that when you go out into the wider world, when one asks who you are, or where are you from, you immediately know: we are the people of these stories. It continues down into clans so that you are not just talking about Laguna Pueblo people, you are talking about your own clan. Within the clans there are stories which identify the clan. In the Creation story, Antelope says that he will knock a hole in the earth so that the people can come up, out into the next world. Antelope tries and tries, and he uses his hooves and is unable to break through; and it is then that Badger says, "Let me help you." And Badger very patiently uses his claws and digs a way through, bringing the people into the world. When the Badger clan people think of themselves, it is as people who are of this Story, and this is our place, and we fit into the very beginning when the people first came, before we began our journey south. So you can move, then, from the idea of one's identity as a tribal person into clan identity. Then we begin to get the extended family, and this is where we begin to get a kind of story coming into play which some people might see as a different kind of story, though Pueblo people do not.

144/Tales within Tales Anthropologists and ethnologists have, for a long time, differentiated the types of oral languages they find in the Pueblos. They tended to rule out all but the old and sacred and traditional stories and were not interested in family stories and the family’s account of itself. But these family stories are just as important as the other stories-the older stories. These family stories are given equal recognition. There is no definite, pre-set pattern for the way one will hear the stories of one's own family, but it is a very critical part of one's childhood, and it continues on throughout one's life. You will hear stories of importance to the family-sometimes wonderful stories-stories about the time a maternal uncle got the biggest deer that was ever seen and brought back from the mountains. And so one's sense of who the family is, and who you are, will then extend from that-"I am from the family of my uncle who brought in this wonderful deer, and it was a wonderful hunt—so you have this sort of building or sense of identity.2 There are also other stories, stories about the time when another uncle, perhaps, did something that wasn't really acceptable. In other words, this process of keeping track, of telling, is an all-inclusive process which begins to create a total picture. So it is very important that you know all the stories-both positive and not so positive-about one's own family. The reason that it is very important to keep track of all the stories in one's own family is because you are liable to hear a story from somebody else who is perhaps an enemy of the family, and you are liable to hear a version which has been changed, a version which makes your family sound disreputable-something that will taint the honor of the family. But if you have already heard the story, you know your family's version of what really happened that night, so when somebody else is mentioning it, you will have a version of the story to counterbalance it. Even when there is no way around it-old Uncle Pete did a terrible thing-by knowing the stories that come out of other families, be keeping very close watch, listening constantly to learn the stories about other families, one is in a sense able to deal with terrible sorts of things that might happen within one's own family. When a member of one's own family does something that cannot be excused, one always knows stories about similar things which happened in other families. And it is not done maliciously. I think it is very important to realize this. Keeping track of all the stories within the community gives a certain distance, a useful perspective which brings incidents down to a level we can deal with. If others have done it before, it cannot be so terrible. If others have endured, so can we. The stories are always bringing us together, keeping this whole together, keeping this family together, keeping this clan together. "Don't go away, don’t isolate yourself, but come here, because we have all had these

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kinds of experiences"—this is what the people are saying to you when they tell you these other stories. And so there is this constant pulling together to resist what seems to me to be a basic part of human nature: when some violent emotional experience takes place, people get the urge to run off and hide or separate themselves from others. And of course, if we do that, we are not only talking about endangering the group, we are also talking about the individual or the individual family never being able to recover or to survive. Inherent in this belief is the feeling that one does not recover or get well by one’s self, but it is together that we look after each other and take care of each other. In the storytelling, then, we see this process of bringing people together, and it works not only on the family level, but also on the level of the individual. Of course, the whole Pueblo concept of the individual is a little bit different from the usual Western concept of the individual. But one of the beauties of the storytelling is that when something happens to an individual, many people will come to you and take you aside, or maybe a couple of people will come and talk to you. These are occasions of storytelling. These occasions of storytelling are continuous; they are a way of life. Storytelling lies at the heart of the Pueblo people, and so when someone comes in and says, "When did they tell the stories, or what time of day does the storytelling take place?" that is a ridiculous question. The storytelling goes on constantly-as some old grandmother puts on the shoes of a little child and tells the child the story of a little girl who didn’t wear her shoes. At the same time somebody comes into the house for coffee to talk with an adolescent boy who has just been into a lot of trouble, to reassure him that he got into that kind of trouble, or somebody else’s son got into that kind of trouble too. You have this constant ongoing process, working on many different levels. One of the stories I like to bring up about helping the individual in crisis is a recent story, and I want to remind you that we make no distinctions between the stories-whether they are history, whether they are fact, whether they are gossip-these distinctions are not useful when we are talking about this particular experience with language. Anyway, there was a young man who, when he came back from the war in Vietnam, had saved up his Army pay and bought a beautiful red Volkswagen Beetle. He was very proud of it, and one night drove up to a place right across the reservation line. It is a very notorious place for many reasons, but one of the more notorious things about the place is a deep arroyo behind the place. This is the King’s Bar. So he ran in to pick up a cold six-pack to take home, but he didn’t put on his emergency brake. And his little red Volkswagen rolled back into the arroyo and was all

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smashed up. He felt very bad about it, but within a few days everybody had come to him and told him stories about other people who had lost cars in that arroyo. And probably the story that made him feel best was about the time that George Day's station wagon, with his mother-in-law and kids in the back, rolled into that arroyo. So everybody was saying, "Well, at least your mother-in-law and kids weren't in the car when it rolled in," and you can’t argue with that kind of story. He felt better then because he wasn't alone anymore. He and his smashed-up Volkswagen were now joined with all the other stories of cars that fell into that arroyo. Again there is a very beautiful little story. It comes from far out of the past. It is a story that is sometimes told to people who suffer great family or personal loss. I would like to read that story to you now, and while I am reading it to you, try to listen on a couple of levels at once. I want you to listen to the usage of English. I came from a family which has been doing something that isn't exactly standard English for a while. I come from a family which, basically, is intent on getting the stories told; and we will get these stories told, and language will work for us. It is imperative to tell and not to worry over a specific language. The imperative is the telling. This is an old story from Aunt Suzie.3 She is one of the first generations of persons at Laguna who began experimenting with our notions of English-who began working to make English speak for us^that is, to speak from the heart. As I read the story to you, you will hear some words that came from Carlisle. She was taken from Laguna, New Mexico, on a train when she was a little girl, and she spent six years at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in an Indian school, which was like being sent to prison. But listen and you will hear the Carlisle influence. This is a story that is sometimes given to you when there has been a great loss.4 This took place partly in old Acoma and Laguna. Waithia was a little girl living in Acoma. One day she said, "Mother, I would like to have some yastoah to eat." Yastoah is the hardened crust of corn meal mush that curls up. The very name yastoah means sort of "curled up," you know, dried, just as mush dries on top. She said, "I would like to have some yastoah," and her mother said, "My dear little girl, I can’t make you any yastoah because we haven’t any wood, but if you will go down off the mesa, down below, and pick up some pieces of wood, bring them home and I will make you some yastoah." So Waithia was glad and ran down the precipitous cliff of the mesa. Down below, just as her mother told her, there were some pieces of wood, some curled, some crooked in shape, that she was to pick up and take home. She

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found just such wood as these. She went home and she had them in a little wickerlike bag. First she called to her mother as she got home and said, "Mother, upstairs." The Pueblo people always called "upstairs" because long ago their homes were two or three stories, and that was their entrance, from the top. She said,"Naya, deenil Mother, upstairs!" And her mother came. The little girl said, "I have brought the wood you wanted me to bring." She opened her little wicker basket and laid them out and they were snakes. They were snakes instead of the crooked pieces of wood, and her mother said, "Oh, my dear child. You have brought snakes instead." She says, "Go take them back and put them back just where you got them." The little girl ran down the mesa again. Down below to the flats. And she put those snakes back just where she got them. They were snakes instead, and she was very hurt about this, and she said, "I am not going home. I am going away to the beautiful lake place and drown myself in that lake. Kawaik bunyanah, to the west. I will go there and drown myself." So she started off, and as she came by the Enchanted Mesa, K£tsima, she met an old man, very aged, and he saw her running, and he said, "My dear child, where are you going?" She said, "I am going to Kawaik and jump into the lake there." "Why?" "Well, because," she says, "my mother didn’t want to make any yastoah." And the old man said, "Oh no, you must not go my child. Come with me and I will take you home." He tried to catch her, but she was very light and skipped along, and every time he would try to grab her she would skip faster away from him. So he was coming home with some wood on his back, strapped to his back and tied with yucca. He just let that strap go and let the wood fall. He went as fast as he could up the cliff to the little girl’s home. When he got to the place where she lived, he called to her mother, "Deenil Upstairs!" "Come on up." And he says, "I can’t. I just came to bring you a message. Your little daughter is running away. She is going to Kawaik to drown herself in the lake there." "Oh my dear little girl!" the mother said. So she busied herself around and made her the yastoah she loved so much. Corn mush, curled at the top. She must have found wood to boil the corn meal and make the yastoah. And while the mush was cooling, she got the little girl’s clothing, she got the little dress and all her other garments, little buckskin moccasins that she had, and put them in a bundle, too-probably a yucca bag. And she started down as fast as she could on the east side of Acoma. There used to be a trail there, you know. It’s gone now. But

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it was accessible in those days. And she followed, and she saw her way at a distance-saw the daughter-she kept calling: "Tsumatusu, my daughter, come back. I have got your yastoah for you." But the little girl did not turn. She kept on ahead, and she cried. And what she cried is the song: "My mother, my mother, she didn’t want me to have any yastoah. So now I am going to go away and drown myself." Her mother heard her cry and said, "My little daugther, come back here." "No," and she kept a distance away from her. And they came nearer and nearer to the lake that was there. And she could see her daughter now, very plain. "Come back, my daughter, I have your yastoah." And no, she kept on, and finally she reached the lake, and she stood on the edge. She tied a little feather in her hair, which is traditional: in death they tie this little feather on the head. She carried a little feather, the girl did, and she tied it in her hair with a little piece of string, right on top of her head she put the feather. Just about as her mother was to reach her, she jumped into the lake. The little feather was whirling around and around in the depths below. Of course the mother was very sad. She went, grieved, back to Acoma and climbed her mesa home, and the little clothing, the little moccasins she brought, and the yastoah. She stood on the edge of the mesa and scattered them out. She scattered them to the east and the west, to the north and to the south-in all directions and where every one of the little clothing and the little moccasins and shawls and yastoah, all of them turned into butterflies, all colors of butterflies! And today they say that Acoma has more beautiful butterflies: red ones, white ones, blue ones, yellow ones. They came from this little girl’s clothing.5 Now that is a story that anthropologists would consider to be a very old story. The version I have given you is just as Aunt Suzie tells it. You can occasionally hear some English she picked up at Carlisle-words like "precipitous." You will also notice that there is a great deal of repetition, and a little reminder about yastoah and how it was made. There is a remark about the cliff trail at Acoma-that it was once there, but is there no longer. This story may be told at a time of sadness or loss, but within this story many other elements are brought together. Things are not separated out and put into separate categories; all things are brought together. So that the reminder about the yastoah is valuable information that is repeated, a recipe, if you will. The information about the old trail at Acoma reveals that stories are, in a sense, maps, since even to this day there is little information or material

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about trails that is passed around in writing. In the structure of this story the repetitions are, of course, designed to help you be able to remember. It is repeated again and again, and then it moves on. There is a very definite pattern that you will hear in these pieces. The next story that I would like to read to you is by Simon Ortiz from Acoma Pueblo. He is a wonderful poet and works also in narrative, and one of the things that I find in this piece of short fiction to be very interesting is that if you listen very closely, you begin to hear what I was talking about in terms of a story never beginning at the beginning. And they certainly never end. As the Hopis sometimes say, "Well, it has gone this far for a while." But there is always that implication of a continuing. The other thing that I want you to listen for is within one story there are many other stories together again. There is always, always this dynamic of bringing things together, of interrelating things. It is an imperative in Pueblo oral literature, it seems to me, and it occurs structurally in narrative and in fiction. Listen to the kinds of stories contained within the main story. Through the narrative you can begin to see a family identity and an individual identity, while at the same time it addresses a particular incident. "It was that tim e___" Listen to this and see if you can hear these things. This is called "Home Country," a short piece that Simon Ortiz has recently completed: Well, it’s been a while. I think in 1947 was when I left. My husband had been killed in Okinawa some years before and so I had no more husband, and I had to make a living. Oh, I guess I could have looked for another man, but I didn’t want to. It looked like the war had made them into a bad way. I saw some of them come home like that. They either got drunk or just stayed around a while or couldn’t seem to be satisfied anymore with what was there at home. I guess now that I think about it, that happened to me too, although I wasn’t in the war, in the army, or even much off the reservation; just those years at Indian school. Well, there was that feeling, things were changing not only the men and the boys, but things were changing.6 One day the home nurse, the nurse that came from the Indian health service was at my mother’s home. My mother was getting near the end, real sick; and she said that she had been meaning to ask me a question. I said, "What is the question?" And the home nurse said, "Well, your mother is getting real sick and after she is no longer around for you to take care of, what will you be doing?" You and her are the only ones here." And I said, "I don’t know." But I was thinking about it. What she said made me think about it. And the next time she came she said, "Eloise, the

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government is hiring Indians now in the Indian school to take care of the boys and girls. I heard one of the supervisors say that Indians are hard workers, but you have to supervise them a lot. And I thought of you. Well, because you have been taking care of your mother real good and you follow all my instructions." She said, "I thought of you because you are a good Indian girl and you would be the kind of person for that job." I didn't say anything. I had not even thought about a job, but I kept thinking about it. Well, my mother died and we buried her up in the cemetery. It is real nice on the east side of the hill, where the sun shines and the wind doesn't blow too much sand around right there. Well, I was sad. We were all sad for a while, but, you know how things are. One of my auntys came in and advised me and warned me about being too sad about the end. She wished me that I would not worry too much about it because old folks go along pretty soon. Life is that way and then she said maybe I ought to take in one of my aunty's kids or two because there was a lot of them kids and I was all by myself now. But I was so young and I thought that I might do that, you know, take care of someone. But I had been thinking too, about what the home nurse had said to me about working. Hardly anybody at our home was working at something like that. No woman, anyway. And I would have to move away. Well, I did just that. I remember the day very well. I thought my auntys and we were all crying and we all went up to the highway where the bus to town passes by every day. I was wearing an old kind of bluish sweater that was kind of bluish, that one of my cousins had got from a white person-a tourist one summer-in trade for something she had made, a real pretty basket. She gave me that and I used to have a picture of me with it on. It’s kind of real ugly. Yeah, that was the day I left wearing a baggy sweater, carrying a suitcase that someone gave me, too. Well, I think, or maybe it was the home nurse. There wasn’t much in it, either. I was scared and everyone seemed to be sad. I was young and skinny then. My aunt said (one of them who was real fat), "You make sure you eat now. Make your own tortillas, drink milk and study, candy is not good." She learned that from the nurse. "Make sure you got your letter, honey," and I said I had it folded in my purse. Yes, I had one purse, a brown one of my husband’s when he was still alive and home on furlough. He bought it on my birthday. It was a nice purse and still looked new because I never used it.The letter said I had a job at Keams Canyon, at the boarding school there. But I would

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have to go to the Agency first for some papers to be filled. And that's where I was going first, the Agency. And then they would send me out to Kearns Canyon. I didn’t even know where it was except that one of our relatives said that it was near Hopi. My uncles teased me about watching out for the Hopi men and boys. Don’t let them get too close, they said. You know how they are-they’re pretty strict about those things. And they were joking, and they really weren’t joking. And so I said, "Oh, they won’t get near me. I’m too ugly." And I promised I would be careful anyway. So we all gathered for a while at my last aunty’s house, and then the old man, my grandfather brought his horses and wagon to the door. We all got in and sat there for a while until my aunty called her father: "Okay, father, let’s go," and shook his elbow because the old man was old by then and kind of going to sleep all the time. You had to talk to him real loud. I had about $10.00,1 think. That was a lot of money; more than it is now, you know. And while we got to the highway where the Indian road, which is just a dirt road, goes off the paved road, my grandfather reached into his blue jeans and pulled out a silver dollar and put it into my hand. I was so shocked. We were all so shocked. We all looked around at each other. We didn’t know where the old man had gotten it, because we were real poor. Two of my uncles had to borrow on their accounts at the trading store for the money I had in my purse. But there it was, a silver dollar so big and shiny in my grandfather’s hand. Well, I was so shocked and everyone was so shocked that we all started crying right there at that junction of the Indian road and the paved highway. I wanted to be a little girl again, running after the old man when he hurried with his long legs to the corn fields or went for water down to the river. He was old then and his eyes were turned grey and he didn’t do much anymore, just drive the wagon and chop a little bit of wood. But I just held him and I just held him so tightly. Later on, I don’t know what happened to the silver dollar. I guess it had a date of 1907 on it. But I kept it for a long time because I guess I wanted to have it when I remembered my home country. What I did in between then and now is another story. That’s the time I moved away. There are a great many parallels between Pueblo experiences and the remarks that have been made about South Africa and the Caribbean countries^ similarities in experiences so far as language is concerned. More specifically, with the experience of English being imposed upon the people.

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The Pueblo people, of course, have seen intruders come and intruders go. The first they watched come were the Spaniards; while the Spaniards were there, things had to be conducted in Spanish. But as the old stories say, if you wait long enough, they’ll go. And sure enough, they went. Then another bunch came in. The old stories say, well, if you wait around long enough, not so much that they’ll go, but at least their ways will go. One wonders now, when you see what’s happening to technocratic-industrial culture, now that we’ve used up most of the sources of energy, you think perhaps the old people are right. But anyhow, our experience with English has been different because the Bureau of Indian Affairs schools were so terrible that we never heard of Shakespeare. There was Dick and Jane, and I can remember reading that the robins were heading south for the winter, but I knew that all winter the robins were around Laguna. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on. I worried for quite a while about the robins because they didn’t leave in the winter, not realizing that the textbooks were written in Boston. The big textbook companies are up here in Boston and their robins do go south in the winter. But this freed us and encouraged us to stay with our narratives. Whatever literature we received at school (which was damn little), at home the storytelling, the special regard for telling and bringing together through the telling, was going on constantly. It has continued, and so we have a great body of classical oral literature, both in the narratives and in the chants and songs. As the old people say, "If you can remember the stories, you will be all right. Just remember the stories.” And, of course, usually when they say that to you, when you are young, you wonder what in the world they mean. But when I returned-1 had been away from Laguna Pueblo for a couple of years, well more than a couple of years after college and so forth-1 returned to Laguna and I went to Laguna-Acoma high school to visit an English class, and I was wondering how the telling was continuing, because Laguna Pueblo, as the anthropologists have said, is one of the more acculturated pueblos. So I walked into this high school English class and there they were sitting, these very beautiful Laguna and Acoma kids. But I knew that out in their lockers they had cassette tape recorders, and I knew that at home they had stereos, and they were listening to "Kiss" and Led Zeppelin and all those other things. I was almost afraid, but I had to ask-1 had with me a book of short fiction (it’s called The Man to Send Rain Clouds [New York: Viking Press, 1974]), and among the stories of other Native American writers, it has stories that I have written and Simon Ortiz has written. And there is one particular story in the book about the killing of a state policeman in New Mexico by three

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Acoma Pueblo men. It was an act that was committed in the early fifites. I was afraid to ask, but I had to. I looked at the class and I said, "How many of you heard this story before you read it in the book?" And I was prepared to hear this crushing truth that indeed the anthropologists were right about the old traditions dying out. But it was amazing, you know, almost all but one or two students raised their hands. They had heard that story, just as Simon and I had heard it, when we were young. That was my first indication that storytelling continues on. About half of them had heard it in English, about half of them had heard it in Laguna. I think again, getting back to one of the original statements, that if you begin to look at the core of the importance of the language and how it fits in with the culture, it is the story and the feeling of the story which matters more than what language it’s told in. One of the other advantages that we have enjoyed is that we have always been able to stay with the land. The stories cannot be separated from geographical locations, from actual physical places within the land. We were not relocated like so many Native American groups who were torn away from our ancestral land. And the stories are so much a part of these places that it is almost impossible for future generations to lose the stories because there are so many imposing geological elements. Just as Houston Baker was speaking about the mesas-there are such gigantic boulders-you cannot live in that land without asking or looking or noticing a boulder or rock. And there’s always a story. There’s always at least one story connected with those places. So this is again a kind of-if it’s an advantage, or at least, I don’t know whether it’s fair to call it an advantage-it’s just a fact. I had one other thing to tell you about humor. One of the things about the attitude about language at home is that people are very suspicious of prepared speeches and preconceived words that someone has to say. And when old men come to pray-praying is also speaking to the people-and of course with the oral tradition, it is almost always a kind of extemporaneous act. And I think I am not one of the better practitioners of this act. But one of the other things I wanted to throw out to you was a little bit on the idea of humor. I mention this simply because a great many of the stories that are told contain within them simultaneously a wide range of emotional dimensions. So when you hear a story, a story that is supposed to be consoling somebody, it will often be a funny story although the occasion is sad. We have quite a number of funeral stories which are very funny. And this, of course, is not peculiar to Pueblo culture alone. One of the things that you will notice is that often in the stories there will be a movement toward a balance-the funny with the serious-and this goes back to the Creation, and back to one of the basic Pueblo religious concepts. And what I have for you today is a short

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excerpt about humor. I mention that this is oftentimes something people from outside the Pueblo will not understand. They will think that something is funny, and it is comedy, and we put it over here; or something is serious and must be put over here [indicating]. If you go to Hopi for the summer dances, you will see the clowns, you will see the mud-head clowns carrying on in a most outrageous way and in a delightfully risqué manner. People who don’t understand the place of humor in Pueblo culture will be very much taken aback by that. The same with the stories. Many times when I read a narrative like "Home Country," people won’t laugh at the parts where you should laugh because they think that the story is basically a sad story. But the humor is always there, even with the most sacred or solemn. Just as serious reminders occur at joyous occasions. This is from an article by Emory Sekaquaptwea about Hopi clowning. It concerns the punning which the Hopi clowns are famous for: Because the Pueblo vision of language stems out of a world which is inclusive rather than exclusive, the Hopi clowns do not hesitate to use English or any other language in order to get laughs with elaborate puns. This complex and slightly arcane Hopi pun illustrates one of the many directions that has been taken by traditional Pueblo people with the English language. I’ll tell you one I heard long ago. When it was time for this young clown man to make his confession, this is a part of the dance in which the clans are mocked or criticized in hopes of bettering them again, he jumped up and said, "Ai, Ei, geology, geology. Ai, ei.”Then he made a beautiful little breakdown of this word so that it has Hopi meaning. "You probably think that I am talking about this geology which is a white man’s study about something or other. Well, that’s not it," he says. "What it really is, is that I have a grandmother, and, you know, she being poor and ugly, nobody would have anything to do with her. She is running around all summer long out in the fields, doing a man’s job. It breaks her down. She would go out there every day with no shoes and so her feet were not very dainty, not very feminine. If you pick up her foot and look at the sole, it is all cracked, and that is what I am talking about when I say geology." Every Hopi can put that together. "Tsiya" means "to crack" and leetsi means things "placed in a row." So these cracks are in a row on the bottom of

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the feet. Geology. Tsiya-leetsi. [Emory Sekaquaptewa, "One More Smile for a Hopi Clown," Parabola]. Thus, even in the most sacred of ceremonies, traditional Hopis see no reason not to use an English word to get a laugh, a laugh being their sacred duty and a part of the whole overall ceremony. Delight in the power of language, and the effect achieved by juxtaposing language and world views is foremost in the Pueblo view. Dennis Brutus talked about the "yet unborn" as well as "those from the past," and how we are still all in this place, and language-the storytelling-is our entry way of passing or being with them, of being together again. When Aunt Suzie told her stories, she would tell a young child to go open the door so that our esteemed predecessors may bring in their gifts to us. "They are out there," Aunt Suzie would say. "Let them come in. They’re here, they’re here with within the stories." I last visited her about four months ago. She is 106, and so if you walk into the room and try to ask her how many years she was at Carlisle Indian School-a direct question-she says she doesn’t remember. But if you just let her speak her mind, everything she says is very clear. And while I was there, she said, "Well, I’ll be leaving here soon. I think I’ll be leaving here next week and I will be going over to the Cliff House." She said, "It’s going to be real good to get back over there." I was listening and I was thinking of her house at Paguate, at Paguate village, which is north of Laguna. And she continued on, "Well" (and she gave her Indian name), "my mother’s sister will be there. She has been living there. She will be there and we will be over there, and I will get a chance to write down these stories I’ve been telling you." And it wasn’t until she said it was her mother’s sister who would be there that I realized she wasn’t talking about dying or death at all. She was talking about "going over there," and she meant it as a journey, a journey that perhaps we can only begin to understand through an appreciation for the boundless capacity of language which, through storytelling, brings us together, despite great distances between cultures, despite great distances in time. Laguna Pueblo University of New Mexico University of Arizona

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Notes

1This "essay" is an edited transcript of an oral presentation. The "author" deliberately did not read from a prepared paper so that the audience could experience firsthand one dimension of the oral tradition-non-linear structure. Her remarks were intended to be heard, not read. [I was privileged to be in the "author's" audience at the 1979 English Institute, "Opening up the Canon," held at Harvard. Concluding her presentation we found ourselves talking about the analogue of Leslie Silko's people's storytelling to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and its audience within and without that work. But its closest analogue is the Pueblo consolation story about the lost daughter and butterflies with the tale told about Psyche (soul/butterfly) to Grace by the old woman in the robbers’ cave to console her for the loss of her husband on her wedding day. JBH.] 2See Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1981), photographs and text, esp. pp. 78,176. JBH. 3Photograph, Storyteller\ p. 5. JBH. 4This is the analogue to the Cupid and Psyche tale, similarly told to console its hearer. When Leslie Silko told it at Harvard it spellbound the audience. JBH. 5Copyright by L.M. Silko in Storyteller. 6See Leslie Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin, 1986). JBH.

HENRY CORNFIELD: ENRIQUE MILPAZ ROSE CORDOVA

Christopher Columbus gathered all his men for the trip to the New World or to the end of the world or to the West Indies or wherever the voyage would take them. The Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria, the three ships, were already docked. Queen Isabella had hocked her jewels to finance the voyage and we know that some of that jewelry became the property of Baby Doe Tabor in Colorado-but that is another story. The story we are about to tell is really about women, about something that Queen Isabella knew that she must do. Queen Isabella realized that after all the work she had done, all the commitments that she had made, whatever was going to happen in the New World, she thought that she should have a woman’s viewpoint, a report of the adventures from where all these men were going, that there should be a woman, somebody to safeguard her good interests. And so she decided to look for a woman to represent her. She sent word out very quietly and very secretly for girls to apply for the job of making the trip with Columbus. And so the girls came and came. One said, 'This is what I intend to do if you choose me to make the voyage . . . . " Some of the girls were beautiful, some of them not, some of them had really good qualities, and some of them had bad qualities, some of them had combinations of qualities, and some of them didn’t have any qualities at all. One said, "I’m really jealous," one said "I’m very outspoken," one said "I’m not afraid," another said "I’m hard to manage. Nobody can tell me what to do." And Queen Isabella just kept thinking, "You know, the ships are just about ready to sail and I have not made up my mind which girl I want to choose." Then finally one day, close to the time when the ships were ready to sail, a girl appeared at the castle and Queen Isabella asked her, ''Why do you want to go? Why do you want to make this voyage? Why do you want me to choose you?" And the girl leaned over and whispered something quite

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outrageous to Queen Isabella. Queen Isabella started laughing and called in her secret agent. She said, This is the girl I want to go with Columbus." The girl went home to get ready. Queen Isabella called for more agents and ordered, "I want you to find a way to get this girl as a stowaway on one of the ships." Queen Isabella talked to the girl when she returned and asked which ship she would like to be on. The girl excitedly answered, "I plan to go on the Pinta." Queen Isabella declared, "My goodness! Do you know that ‘Pinta’ is short for ‘penitentiary5? That’s where all the pardoned convicts will be going." The girl asserted, "I want to go on that ship. I want to go on the Pinta. I’ll take care of myself." Queen Isabella remembered the whispered secret and wholeheartedly agreed. She again told her agents to get a place ready where this young girl could hide and also assure a way to get her to board the ship so that nobody would see her. Late at night the girl, whose name was Cebollita, followed the agents to the dock and up the gangplank. The girl was not surprised when they led her into the pantry where all the supplies and vegetables were stored away for the trip. She went in there with no regrets. Finally the Pinta set sail and for days she was hiding there and nobody bothered her. One day somebody did see her, one of the convicts on the ship, the Pinta, a sailor convict. He decided that he would tell no one, that he would go and try to make friends with Cebollita. He did not know her name and it would be a long time before he would but he said to himself, "I saw a girl in the pantry and I am going to try and make friends with her." He honestly tried to make friends with Cebollita, but as soon as he got close to her, his eyes started watering and he started making horrible grimaces. Soon he was crying uncontrollably. He was so embarrassed, he tried to blink, then to dry the tears from his eyes, and he tried to keep on talking, the more he tried, the more he cried and whimpered. Finally, he ran out. Cebollita remembered that Queen Isabella had told her that some day she would get married, but to make sure that the man she married did not cry when he met her. So being that the convict cried, she said, "Oh well, you know, I’m not going to marry him, I wouldn’t anyway." Well, pretty soon, other convicts found out that there was a girl that was hiding in the pantry. Each man came in secretly hoping to make friends with Cebollita. The same thing happened. Each one started talking very boldly, or very sweetly, or trying to be gentle, each trying a different manner, hoping that he would be the one that Cebollita would make friends with. Pretty soon, most of the convicts had gone in there and Cebollita fondly noted that all of them had cried. One convict would ask another, "What happened in there?" Each convict would start acting coy or would start denying that he had even been in

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there. He wouldn't admit to being in there, much less that he had wept. Convict after convict went in and talked to Cebollita every which way, very boldly or very gently, but the same thing happened-the man would start crying and out he would run. He would deny to his friends that he had seen anything or tried to be friends with any girl or even knew about a girl on ship. They were all so ashamed that each one had gone in there and cried. Pretty soon most of them had gone in there, or all of them had gone in there, and of course Cebollita would let them be because they had all cried. Finally one day the ships docked. Cebollita came down the gangplank. Pretty soon she met an Indian brave. His name was Don Cacaguate. (People in this time and place called each other gift, Don.) Cebollita started talking to Don Cacaguate.1 She noticed that he talked and talked but did not cry. So she said to herself, "This is the man that I will marry." So eventually they did get married. They settled down in this place where people called each other gifts. Their main source of income was corn growing. Don and Doña Cebolla planted acres and acres of corn. Of course they started raising a family, as per Queen Isabella’s instructions. Don Cacaguate and Doña Cebolla became well known in the village. Their eldest daughter was named Mariquita. Mariquita grew up to be a very beautiful young girl, very attentive to her chores. She would get up early in the morning and go out to hoe the corn. One day she was out there hoeing the corn. Around the bend came a young man. Sweetly attractive, he had very delicate features.2 He came walking very proudly, through all the rows of corn, right to the place where the young girl was working with the hoe. Mariquita could hear the steady beat of his heart-the young man, whose name was Henry Cornfield, could hear the steady beat of Mariquita’s hoe. Once in a while Henry Cornfield’s heart beat would stop when Mariquita turned the hoe backwards. She would start hitting the mounds of dirt with the back, with the hump, of the hoe. Henry Cornfield’s heart would again start beating. Then Mariquita would again bend down, sliding the hoe so gracefully and she would ignite the young man’s heart beat. Henry Cornfield told himself that this was the girl that he would want to marry. He sat down on a boulder and wrote a letter to Don Cacaguate and Doña Cebolla. "I come to honor your house," he wrote. He looked around and saw that the house was located in the distance. He walked up boldly and knocked on the door. When Don Cacaguate came to the door, Henry Cornfield introduced himself and gave him the letter, then followed up by telling Don Cacaguate that he had seen the girl hoeing the corn and that he had fallen in love with her and that he was asking for her hand. This was not strange because this was done at that time and place where men could just go

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and ask for the hand of a maiden. This is the story of a people who called each other "gifts/ at a time and place where childing (parenting) was everybody's business, where the aged crossed the finishing line of life free of anxiety as ancianos. When Don Cacaguate heard what Henry Cornfield was saying and also reread the letter, he realized for the first time that his daughter was of marrying age. It really shocked him. He declared, "Oh, how can I let you marry my daughter? I don't know you. How do I know that you’re going to take care of her?" He added, "Besides, I’ve raised her so delicately and we’ve planned so much for her life and for the lives of the rest of our children, that you really shock me. It’s too sudden. I can't make up my mind." Henry Cornfield said, "Well, you know, the custom is followed here-a man falls in love with a girl, and the world goes on and on." Don Cacaguate said, "Well, you know, I know that this is true. My daughter is of marrying age, but I want to be assured that she will be taken care of and that she will be treated as a good wife." Finally, Don Cacaguate said, "Well, I’ll make a deal with you. I have to check you out." Henry Cornfield said, "Go ahead. Check me out." He said, "Well, why don’t you show up tomorrow de mañana (at dawn). You come to work with me hoeing the corn and I will see if you are worthy of marrying my daughter." Don Cacaguate cunningly added, "Oh, you know, I really don’t think that you will pass the text. Everyone knows what a good worker I am, and I know that you look so delicate, you might not be able to keep up with me." The next morning, de m añana, bright and early, before Don Cacaguate was even through drinking his coffee, here was Henry Cornfield knocking on the door. He had brought his own hoe and he was ready to go to work. Don Cacaguate asked Henry Cornfield, "Would you like some coffee? Come on in." "No," answered Henry Cornfield, "I came to work. Let’s go." So they went out there to the field. Henry Cornfield started hoeing the corn. He hardly stopped for lunch, he hardly stopped for water, he just worked really hard all day. Then towards evening, Don Cacaguate was the one that was tired, sweating, grunting, and irritable. He just couldn't believe how Henry Cornfield had worked. Henry Cornfield asked Don Cacaguate point blank, "Don Cacaguate," he says, "Sir, do you think I can marry your daughter? Do you think that I passed the test? What can you tell me that I can do to improve?" Don Cacaguate answered, "Well, you know, I'd like to tell you I just decided that you can’t marry my daughter. But," he said, "with all due respect, you kept up so well with me and you did better work than I expected you to do. You knew

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how to do it, and you did the work right. Now, tell me, how come, why didn’t you ever stop to drink water? And you hardly even ate lunch." And he added, "You are just a really good solid worker. So I could say, ‘No, you can’t marry my daughter,’" he said, "but I really don’t have an excuse, because," he said, "I like to keep my word. I gave you my word, if you passed the work test, that you could marry my daughter, if you could prove that you could take care of her and always hold her in high esteem." Henry Cornfield replied, "Well, Sir, what else would you like to know? "Well, I would like to know how you can work so hard all day like that and not even stop." Henry Cornfield said, "Well, I know how to work, and I value work. I did all this work in spite of the fact that I worked all day with this in my shoe." Henry Cornfield sat down and took off his shoe. And, my goodness, he had a great big blister on his foot. It had already popped and broken into a great big sore and red tears started coming out of that sore. Red tears started coming out of the grotesque injury. Henry Cornfield took a great big rock, a quite jagged one, out of his shoe, and showed it to Don Cacaguate, and it, too, had red tears falling from it. Don Cacaguate said, "My goodness! Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you stop to take it out? How could you work with that jagged rock in your shoe?" Henry Cornfield replied, "Well, I decided to work with the jagged rock in my shoe because I was afraid to tell you. I thought that if I told you that I had a rock in my shoe, or if I stopped to take it out that you would think that I was just being lazy or taking time out from work." Don Cacaguate exclaimed, "My goodness! You know, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t marry my daughter, but I think you know the answer." He said, "Even if you don’t pity yourself, if you don’t have any self esteem for yourself, that you work with a jagged rock in your shoe all day just because you are afraid of what I would think, you’re never going to be able to take care of my daughter." Don Cacaguate excused himself. He went to the shed and came back with a tubful of pumpkins. Handing Henry Cornfield the tubful of pumpkins, he said, "Here, you know what this means." In Spanish culture all life’s symbols are food, and the symbol of rejection is the pumpkin. So Don Cacaguate handed Henry Cornfield a pumpkin, his irreversable answer. Henry Cornfield went away sadly, with his little tubful of pumpkins. He went and distributed the pumpkins to the poor. Right about twelve o’clock at night, he returned to the farmhouse, up to Don Cacaguate’s door, to the home of Mariquita, of the girl he would love forever. He knocked on the door. Doña Cebolla heard the knock and woke up in shock. Doña Cebolla yelled to Don Cacaguate and said, "Did you know there’s a knock at

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the door?" Don Cacaguate asked, "Who could be there?" And Dona Cebolla answered, "Oh, I don’t know." She pushed Don Cacaguate off the bed. "Go and check.” Don Cacaguate went to the door and peeked out of its little window. "Do you know," he said, "there’s that crazy Henry Cornfield. What could he want?" Don Cacaguate opened the door and screamed, "Get away from here. Are you drunk or something? What are you doing here? It’s after twelve o'clock midnight." Henry Cornfield replied boldly, "Well, I would like to talk to you further." Don Cacaguate said, "No, you don’t. I told you, I explained to you, by giving you the pumpkins, I gave you my answer. You cannot marry my daughter because you worked all day with that jagged rock in your shoe. If you can’t care for yourself, you will never care about my daughter. And you can’t come here saying that you would." So Don Cacaguate insisted on telling Mr. Henry Cornfield how awful it is not to have self-esteem. But Henry Cornfield tried to explain his new intentions to Don Cacaguate. "Oh, excuse me, Don Cacaguate," he said, "I didn’t come back to try to change your mind. I came back to ask you if you would let me be a scarecrow in your cornfield. I love Mariquita so much that I want to spend the rest of my life close to her. Even if just guarding your cornfield as a scarecrow." Don Cacaguate started laughing uncontrollably, and he said, "Well, you’re crazy, you’re crazy, you’re loco." Then he said, "Who’s going to stop you? There’s the cornfield over there. Go grab that loose fencepost and hang yourself. I don’t care." Henry replied, "So you’re giving me permission to become a scarecrow in your cornfield?" Don Cacaguate said, "That is precisely what I am doing." He just slammed the door in Henry Cornfield’s face and went to bed. Well, the next morning, lo and behold, Don Cacaguate and the village gossips were surprised to look out their windows and see Henry Cornfield hanging from the fencepost in the center of the cornfield. Time went by, and people got used to seeing the scarecrow hanging at the Cacaguate cornfield. But they also wondered why the face and the clothes kept getting really more beautiful. Indeed, everything got more and more beautiful. The face got rid of his wheat color and turned heavenly blue. Instead of being ragged, parts of his wearing apparel became gold, like gold brocade on blue, then gold lace started growing on the bottom of the pants and around the collar and around the cuffs. And the scarecrow’s hair started turning blue also, like the color of heaven. The hair was as soft as cornsilk. On the hat that the scarecrow, Henry Cornfield had worn, on the left hand side, was a beautiful silver rose. It was shiny, and as the scarecrow turned around on the post, it seemed to mesmerize the birds and they did not dare fly in and eat the corn. The greatest change was that the scarecrow started

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growing jewels. There were jewels down the front of his coat, even on his shoes. And he turned into a kind of light. We’re talking about the scarecrow. Sometimes thieves would think that they would come and take some of the jewels. They would sneak over at night and would take some jewel, but whenever they were worn in public, the jewels would turn into jagged rocks and cruel red tears. Finally the thieves gave up and just left the scarecrow alone. But then, one day, Mariquita went to borrow some of the jewels from the scarecrow. When Mariquita wore them she could take them anywhere and they would not turn into rocks and shed red tears. One day Mariquita met someone very special and got married. The scarecrow decided that he was not going to weep, he was not going to be sad, because he had lost the girl of his dreams, because he didn’t have self­ esteem. He knew he couldn’t blame Don Cacaguate. Time went by. A few years after Mariquita had married, her children were sleeping in the little house there, close to the cornfield, close to where Henry Cornfield was hanging from the fencepost. He saw them and sang a song with words about the beautiful cornfield, and the beautiful white house that would have been his, and a beautiful dark-eyed lady that could have loved him. Now she lent him her eyes so that he see her happiness forever in his soul. Now everything was lost, the cornfield did not have its own horses and cows, they were not Henry Cornfield’s. The scarecrow sang the song late at night, very sadly. The children heard him. They slipped over to visit with the scarecrow. Henry Cornfield reached under the fencepost and took out a mysterious box. Out of it he’d tell the children stories about love and how he would have loved to belong here, in that little house that was surrounded by cornfields. Mariquita didn’t know that the children were going over there and visiting with the scarecrow. They would come back and go to bed. As time went on, Don Cacaguate just took it for granted that the scarecrow would always be guarding the cornfield, and the birds wouldn’t eat too much of his corn-he harvested a good crop and he could even afford to throw some out to the birds. Well, time went on, and Don Cacaguate would stroll down to the village, and people would beg him to tell the story about the sacrecrow. Don Cacaguate would tell the story over and over again, how it all had happened, and he would tell a little about how Doña Cebolla had come on the ship, the Pinta, and how he had met her and how they had married and how they had started a family and decided that they would be corn growers. And then he would come to the part where Henry Cornfield had come around the bend and had decided to marry Mariquita and how he had asked for her hand and how he, Don Cacaguate, had refused Henry Cornfield because Henry

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Cornfield did not have any self esteem. So, once the village folks knew a little about the scarecrow they wanted to know more. So they asked Don Cacaguate, "What do you think really happened? Where do you think this man came from? What is his name?" Don Cacaguate said, "Well, you know," he said, "his name is Henry Cornfield in English, you see, but in Spanish his name is Enrique Milpaz, which means "Enrichment and a Thousand Measures of Peace."

Aurora, Colorado

Notes

1Cebolla=onion, cacaguate-peanut. 2Rose Cordova tells this story with the doll she has made of Henry Cornfield. He has a girlishly delicate face and a hat shaped like the hats worn by Spanish pilgrims journeying to the shrine of Compostela-or by el Nino de Atocha. See Plate IV:1

AN ENGLISH ROSE ROSE LLOYDS AND GEORGE HARRIS

LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL The County Hall Westminster Bridge London, S.E.l. 16 May, 1962 Dear Madam, At your request, a search has been made in the records of the Greenwich Board of Guardians, now in my custody here. I have pleasure in giving you the following information: Name - Rose M. Harris Born - April or August, 1911 (exact date and place not stated) Admitted to Greenwich Infirmary, aged 2,10 September, 1913 Transfered finally to Greenwich Institution, 1 September, 1914 Transferred to Sidcup Home, 26 July, 1915 Discharged to Service, 24 July, 1928. Father - George T. Harris, of 23 Giffin Street in 1914 Mother - Rose Harris Brother - George, born 1905 As I understand that you cannot obtain a birth certificate I suggest that you keep this letter carefully to use in the future as evidence of your age and identity for official purposes such as employment, pension, etc. Yours faithfully, for Clerk of the Council

IV: 1.

Rose Cordova and Don Cacaguate.

IV:2. Rose Lloyds.

Tellers of Tales/167 I lived in Mulberry Cottage with a wonderful mulberry tree on the green, such a friendly tree. In the spring, birds seemed to come from nowhere to sing. Teachers from our school would come to pick the tender leaves for their silkworms. The mulberries came in abundance. Many a stomach ache I had eating the fruit before it was ripe, but mulberries went down so well when we were so hungry. Of course, this was strictly forbidden. If we were caught we would be punished, maybe a whole weekend in confinement with very little food. In the autumn when the leaves fell we would have great fun running through them while sweeping them up. In the winter, although bare, it was still there, big and strong. Years later, I went back to see the children who then lived in Mulberry Cottage and the tree was gone. I was told that a foster mother who had only stayed for six months, had had it cut down. To her the leaves had been too much clearing up. I felt I had lost a dear friend of my childhood. * It was a warm summer evening. My friend and I were up on Blackheath; there was a Territorial Army Barracks near and we were out for a walk looking for soldiers. This was not a pastime for me. I was twenty-seven years old, and up to now I had never been dated by a man, let alone a soldier, Maybe I was trying to find out what was missing in my life, and that there was more to life than just work. I put my head round one of the doors of Holly Hedge Barracks. "Hello, ladies," said a voice. "Come in." "Are you interested in joining the Army?" asked two A.T.S. Officers. "No, not really," we said. "Oh well, we might as well have your names and addresses while you are here." Eight weeks later, I was in a Chiesmans Van travelling to my first Army camp in Sevenoaks. I’d been "called up." A week later, World War II was declared. A part of my life was over, a life that had started eleven years earlier, when I'd left the Institution to go into the big world. * "Do not speak unless you are spoken to," the Matron had warned. Six of us sat on a form in Matron’s office to be viewed by our prospective employer. It was a hot day in July. The door was opened with great ceremony. We all stood, and in walked Matron with a very large pregnant woman. (Although I did not realise at the time she was pregnant, as sex education was never taught and I knew very little then.) Matron walked down the line telling the lady about each one of us in turn, and what we were capable of doing. Needless to say the Lady was looking for a Domestic Servant. We were all used to scrubbing floors, polishing and cleaning and black-leading grates. In the last year we were taught basic cookery and spent

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one day a week inthe laundry, learning how to wash, starch and iron - with heavy flat irons, which were heated on a red-hot stove in the ironing room. Yes, I’d learned a lot, and I knew it all. I was sixteen years old, and looked forward to going out in the world. What a shock I had in store. It hadn’t occurred to me that one day I might be on my own. In the Institution I had my friends. We had learned, worked and played together for over thirteen years. Soon, I'd have no one. "You’re very lucky,Rose. You have been chosen." Everything moved very quickly. I was taken to a clothing store in town and fitted out with two of everything. These clothes were put into a tin trunk. How I got to this place of work, I do not remember. The Assistant Matron had brought me, and in saying "Goodbye," reminded me yet again how lucky I was to have been chosen. Then she was gone, and I was alone. I hadn’t felt so alone since my mother had left me at the Institution all those many years before. But this time I didn’t cry. I went to my bedroom. It was in the attic. In the room was a bed, a wooden chair and a table with a basin and water jug, a rail to hang my clothes on and in the corner my tin trunk. I remember looking out of the window and seeing buses and cars going by, and a newsboy on the corner calling out to buy his papers. So much noise. This was indeed a new world! The lady called. She wanted me to change into my working dress to start right away. I quickly did her bidding. She told me what was expected of me. I was to rise at half past five in the morning and most days I would not be finished before eleven at night. I’d have half a day off weekly and Sunday evening to go to church. She would pay me five shillings a week. Up to now, apart from the dollar my brother sent me for Christmas, I had never had that much money all at once and I thought it was a fortune. I was really going to work hard for this in return. I soon found out just how hard I must work to earn it. *

As I remember . . . I was wearing a red velvet dress, and holding tight to a lady’s hand. I was four years old and this day is very clear in my mind. I was about to enter the Poor Law Institution run by Greenwich and Deptford Board of Guardians. We came to some very large iron gates. The lady rang the bell and a man came out to unlock the gates and let us in. Bang went the gates behind us. We were taken into a room known as the gate-house. A woman in a nurse’s uniform came in. She asked the lady to leave. I started to scream and scream. I didn’t want her to go. I was so frightened and then was very sick. I was told later that the lady had been my mother - 1 never saw her again from that day to this. And on that awful day I started my life in the Poor Law

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Institution.

* We lived in Cottages, fifteen children (all girls) to a cottage. We never saw the boys in the home as boys and girls were kept apart. There was a school in the home grounds behind the big iron gates that locked out the rest of the world. The girls and boys had separate playgrounds, well fenced round so neither could meet, but there were small peep-holes cut in the fence just big enough to see a face through. One day-just by chance-1 heard a boy call my name: "Rose, Rose, come to the fence. I am your brother. My name is George." That was the first time I ever knew I had a brother. I saw him many times through the hole in the fence, but only on Christmas Day were we allowed to meet and have tea together. *

Rose's brother, George, told her then and later her early history: "I attended kindergarten school at the end of Giffen Street and Water Street. I remember the large wooden rocking horse in class, also the slate and pencils. When King George V and Queen Mary came to the throne, we were all given a tea party and each received a cup and saucer with pictures of the King and Queen. I remember the breaking of cups dropped in the playground by the young children gathered there, plonk, bang, crash. "We had a nice flower garden and Mom liked Sweet Peas, her favorite flowers. We lived at Coldwater Street, Deptford, in one large room. Its contents, one bed to sleep Mom and Dad and the baby Rose. I slept at the foot of the bed between two pairs of feet, Mom and Dad’s. On account of no money, because our Dad visited the pubs and would come home drunk. "He drove a team of heavy-built horses. One morning, at almost daylight, he drove up to the house with a huge load of hay. I remember the small lamp beside his legs before he got off the wagon. It was a dark morning. I was seven years old. I admired the splendid team of horses in their harnesses. "Dad came into the home and an argument began between him and Mom. Next, Dad, drunk and staggering, picked up the chair and threw it across the room and it went smashing through the window. I am eighty-six this September, 1991.1 remember it now. "Mom yelled, ‘Georgie, go and bring in the chair.’ She put large sheets of cardboard in the frame of the broken window. In my memory I can picture her yet, stretching to place the cardboard to keep out the wind and rain. "We had scant food. I remember Mom carrying a large paper bag of rotten oranges. She cut away the rot and fed the family with another bag of little pieces of broken biscuits for us to eat.

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"Many days I walked the streets of Deptford and Giffen Street where we again lived. I would be hungry and looking for the odd apple core in the gutter. Once in a while, I would sit near the door of a pub and men would fill me up sponge cakes from a jar of them on the counter. I remember being so hungry, I hooked a bunch of bananas, the police chasing me. My pants were badly in need of sewing up, so 1 would hold the rips together to keep out the wind. "Finally, Mom took Rose, two years old, and myself, eight years old, on the top of a bus. Mom fed us hard-boiled eggs and bread while on the ride to the Greenwich Poorhouse. There we were separated. Mom was a ward maid in Greenwich Hospital where Rose was for two years. In the next few days I was sent to Sidcup Homes. Three years passed and I recognized my sister, playing in the Girls' Playground. By that time she was five years old, and when I called to her through a hole in the fence she did not know me. So I asked her where she was located in the Homes and told her I was her brother. I kept track of my sister the rest of my life. "I remember, just for looking at a plum tree, being held down by several men, between the legs of one of them, and caned on the but. I can't eat plums. They bring back the memory of that cruel punishment. Another was, if I whispered in bed, the punishment was to be made to go downstairs and stand in my nightshirt and bare feet, hands high over my head, on the cold tile floor." * The foster mothers in each cottage were very strict. I had many a whipping with the back of a hair brush until I was black and blue. I spent many a weekend in bed for punishment with very little to eat and sometimes I was forgotten altogether. I would have nightmares. I would sleepwalk, looking for my mother. I would wake up screaming almost every night, well into my adult life. Army friends even now reminisce and laugh about how when, in the A.T.S. during the war, my screams disturbed them more than Hilter’s bombs. And many a time I’ve scared the wits out of my husband as my screams made him jump half out of bed before he'd even woken up. Needless to say, both my brother and I suffer from inferiority complexes. *

I don't want anyone to think that my early life had no highlights and that I always felt let down. There were happy times, when we children made our own fun. Also folks not connected with the running of the Poor Law Institution would give us presents and parties at Christmas, which stand out well in my memory. The nurses in the Infirmary were very kind and so were

Tellers of Tales/171 the teachers at the school. I well remember the teachers would bring in their stale cake and cut it into small pieces so each of us could have a little. Some of the children were visited on a Saturday afternoon by relatives and friends from two o’clock until four o’clock, but none ever came to see me. I cannot remember this worrying me too much. Though I looked forward to it as some of the children had sweets to share. *

When I was eight years old I caught mumps and was put in the Infirmary. One evening I was told to look out of the window and wave goodbye to my brother as he was being sent to Canada. He was fifteen years old. I didn’t know what this meant, but I waved goodbye. I didn't know I wouldn’t see him again for fourteen years. Twenty-four other boys were going as well. They were promised the Good Life. What they didn't say about this Promised Land was that task-masters would work him to a standstill, and that he'd have to combat the raw tyranny of the seasons, the loneliness of the long evenings in a strange house in a strange land with no friends, beyond the reach of any kind of love or affection. He would on many a night cry himself to sleep. He was put on a farm owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Dickie. They put him to work from four o'clock in the morning until sunset. He has told me since that he had to do the family wash, clean the house and work on the farm, wages being next to nothing. He eventually earned the respect of his employers, had a family and bought a home. I didn't see my brother again while I was in the house, though I had many letters and at Christmas he would send me one of his hard earned dollars. *

What stands out most in my mind at this time was always being so hungry and cold. Food was very meagre, two thin slices of bread and treacle for breakfast and tea. I can see the mutton stew now on the plate at dinner time, swimming in fat, and lumps of swede floating around in it. We were so hungry we would eat it and be very sick afterwards. I spent my school life watching the hall clock, waiting for it to point to twelve o'clock dinner time. When we said grace, I would have one eye open in case the girl next to me pinched my one and only potato. When the house mother had her breakfast she had fried bacon, and we would stand behind her to see which one of us could get the bacon rind from her plate first. We took it in turns after a while. We children only had fried bacon on Christmas Day and an egg on Easter Sunday. All through the year we strip-washed in cold water in very cold rooms.

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I can see the ice-covered windows now. There was one room with a coal fire in the winter, but we were never allowed by the fire. One morning stands out in my mind still. One of the girls, my age-we were friends-was very sick, and as we were sick very often the foster-mother didn't take any notice. That night she was very bad and the next day she died of meningitis. It took me a long while getting over that. *

We worked very hard, rising at quarter to six in the morning. Before going to school we would have to polish and scrub floors, and blacklead the coal-stove. After our dinner we cleaned cutlery and pots and pans, which had to be bright and shining. Evenings we would have to sit on forms, dam our stockings, patch our clothes and knit our own black stockings when we could dam our old ones no more. *

Religion played a big part in our lives. A text from a religious calendar had to be learned every morning before breakfast. The Sunday Collect had to be learned by hear before breakfast every Sunday. I still know most of them. And God help us if we didn’t know what prayer-book Sunday it was. I would get m uddled, and still do, with Septuagesim a, Sexagesim a and Quinquegesima, but it had to be right. We had to learn not only the Collect, but also the Epistle and Gospel during the day, answering questions on them in the evening. I found them very hard to remember. There had been so much going on in the day. On Sundays we had to keep so clean and tidy and so holy and silent out of fear of the foster mother and punishment. We would have a morning service in the school hall taken by a very old clergyman, whom some of the boys at the other side of the hall would make fun of and then get punished for it. It wasn’t a very bright service and the sermon seemed very long. I never could understand it. I was hoping all the time he would hurry up and end so we could go back to dinner which would be cold mutton and dry bread as there was no cooking on Sunday. In the afternoon we would be taken in twos behind each other to the local church. We felt the lowest of the low, sitting on one side of the church with all outside people, as we called them, sitting on the other side of the church in their grand clothes. We always felt their children held their noses far too high in the air when they looked at us. Matron would walk up and down the pews to look for good girls whom she would give a penny or a halfpenny to put in the collection bag. When she came to or near me I would sit up straight and look holy in hopes she wouldn’t pass me by. Then the Sunday came, my heart leaped, she gave

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me a penny to put in the bag. I hoped the outside people were looking that I was rich enough to give a whole penny to the church, which I thought must have been very poor to want of children who never saw a penny, which they had held in their hand for such a short time. It couldn’t be for the clergyman. He was big and fat and very well fed. My hopes were dashed to the ground on the following Monday morning at school. The teacher was talking about giving and said that when Matron gave us our money to put in the church collection, God knew it was not from us, as we didn’t have it. Oh, how pleased God must have been with Matron. After tea, which sometimes we had with some very burnt seed cake, being Sunday, we had another service where whoever was called had to answer questions on the Epistle and Gospel which could be a dreaded nightmare. I remember it still. Best part of Sunday for us was later in the evening when we had hymn singing and not being allowed to talk we all let rip. My favourite was: T h e day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended.” +

In between school times we spent many hours on our knees not necessarily praying, though we had to do a great deal of that, but scrubbing and polishing and gardening. So very early in life I learned to pray the Kitchen Prayer: Lord of pots and pans and things, Since I’ve no time to be A saint in doing lovely things, Or watching late with Thee, Or dreaming in the dawn light Or storming Heaven’s gates; Make me a saint, dear Lord, By getting meals and washing up the plates. Although I must have Martha’s hands, I have a Mary mind, And when I black the boots and shoes Thy sandals, Lord, I find; I think of how they trod the earth Each time I scrub the floor. Accept this meditation, Lord, I haven’t time for more. * I wasn’t ill very often, but I did have to go every morning to the

174/Tales within Tales Infirmary to have my ear cleaned as they discharged all the time. I wasn't alone; nearly all of us had to go to Outpatient for something or other. It was always full the room we waited in. I sometimes wondered if it was such a room where the roof would open, as in Jesus’ time, and a bed would come through the roof. But, of course, it never did. As I got older I suffered from very large, painful boils on my chin, under the arms, between the legs, and on my bottom so I couldn’t sit down. At one time when I was really suffering badly, I couldn’t work and the foster mother got really nasty with me to make me work. She came with a stick to get me out of bed as her room had a small window looking out on my bed and she saw I wasn’t up. I moved as quickly as I could to get away from her, and I couldn’t stop crying, I was in such pain. When I got to the Infirmary Outpatient, I was in such a state, the nurse said I was to see the doctor (who had come in that day). The doctor said I was to stay in the Infirmary. Oh, what bliss. The nurses were so kind and gentle with my boils. At that time the only treatment was very hot fomentation to bring the core out. It took a long time to get better. I was in the Infirmary four weeks, but to me it was heaven. The nurses gave us nice things to eat, such as pat-a-cake biscuits, and cocoa with sugar in it for supper, unheard of in Mulberry Cottage. The nurses would kiss and cuddle us when they tucked us in to sleep at night. I don’t ever remember feeling more safe than at that time. The children told me the foster mother had come out of her room the next morning to see if I was up. She told them she would get me on my return. But as fate would have it, she was moved and I didn’t come in contact with her again. * I was fifteen years old when I was given a tin trunk and a change of clothing and sent to a family in Blackheath as a domestic servant for five shillings a week. I worked daily from five in the morning until eleven at night with one half-day off a week, and two hours off on Sunday evening to go to Church. * That first night in service I thought I was going to die of loneliness and my early days in service I found a nightmare. I had to work to the clock. The routine went something like this: Rise at five thirty, clean the kitchen boiler and fire grate in the sitting room and all coal fire grates throughout the house, clearing away the ashes and relaying the fires. Furniture and ornaments had to be dusted. I’m afraid I broke some of the ornaments in my haste, so after a while I was not allowed

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to touch them. The breakfast table was to be laid, the hall tidied, front steps and brass on front door cleaned, all the shoes were to be cleaned. I cooked breakfast, then made myself presentable to serve it. After breakfast, made the beds, cleaned the bedrooms, landing and stairs, empyting chamberpots. Then at this time a weekly job was done, Monday washing, Tuesday ironing, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday spring cleaning each room. Next I would prepare and serve a light mid-day lunch. Afternoons were spent cleaing silver and makings scones and cakes for tea. These were always made fresh each day. This was followed by cooking a large evening meal, with endless pots and pans to wash. After which, wood, coke and coal had to be brought up from the cellar for the boiler and fires for the next day. Then I went to bed if the Mistress did not want me anymore. "You will call me Madam and my husband the Master. You will not speak unless spoken to." (I was used to that.) "You will always stand if you are sitting when we enter the room. Knock on the door before you enter and never open the door if you are not told to do so. You will wear your cap and apron at all times." After I had been in service a week, I seemed to have worked non-stop with no time for food, although none was really left for me. I ate left-overs if there were any. One midday I was so hungry I ate a whole small loaf of bread, nothing on it, just bread. At tea time the lady rang her bell to tell me she was having a visitor to tea and would I serve some bread and butter. "Where’s the bread?" I asked. "There's a small loaf in the larder," she answered. "Oh, I ate that," I said. "I was hungry." "All of it?" she asked; her face showed signs of disbelief. However, it seemed to make her realize I had| to eat and from then onwards she would leave some food for me. * Every Monday I did the big weekly wash. Sheets, table cloths, towels and personal clothing. The sheets and linen I boiled in a copper, heated with a wood fire. I did the rest of the washing by hand. I used soda and Sunlight yellow soap and a blue bag to whiten the sheets. Which at first turned out more blue than white. I used a large wooden mangle. I would hang the wash in the garden whatever the weather. In winter, the washing would freeze and hang like boards on the line. I expect I didn’t mangle enough water out, but the mangle was large and hard to turn. My hands were red, and chapped with the wind and soda and the broken chilblains that covered them and my feet. *

You may ask why I did not leave, but where would I go? As the time went by, the hours of drudgery, physical and social isolation, long hours of work, over a hundred each week, I got to wondering how long I would last. I

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had nowhere to go, I was alone, so like thousands of other orphans all over the country, in the same position as I was, I learned to keep my voice low and respectful and never to reply without a "Sir" or "Madam," never to talk, unless it would be to deliver a message or ask a necessary question, and then do it in as few words as possible. If I asked Madam a question and she was with anyone else, she would just ignore me. If I ever had to carry a case or parcel for the mistress, when she was going anywhere, I had to walk behind her. She would never be seen walking with a servant. The rule was accept your station in life without complaint! * When I had been in service about six weeks, the mistress' baby was born. I had been woken up at four o'clock, and told to make some tea. The Master went for the doctor. The Mistress sat on the stairs crying with pain. I just didn’t know what to do to help, I was so frightened, as I didn’t know what was happening. But then the doctor arrived and soon the baby was born. Then I really knew why the Mistress needed a servant. Baby clothes and nappies made a daily wash necessary, and to tend the baby’s needs were added to my other duties. I remember clearly one evening after the baby was born, Madam went out to a party. I was left to look after the baby. At ten o’clock in the night I went and laid on my bed to wait for their return, and fell asleep. The next thing I heard was this woman shouting at me for being asleep. I jumped up and my foot gave way, my toe joint coming out of its socket. Not knowing what I had done, it was never seen to. The bone joint is out to this day, as later was too late to set it right. The mistress would bath her baby in front of a gas fire in the nursery. I remember one day I heard a cry. I went rushing into the room to see what had happened. The baby had a six-inch long burn on its bottom. The Mistress had sat the little girl on her potty too near the fire. I rushed for the doctor, but the baby was in so much pain it couldn’t stop crying and the burn was so deep she would be scarred for life. The doctor left soft coverings and bandages, and I had another job. Four times a day I would stop what I was doing and dress the baby’s wound. Even on my half-day off, if I’d gone out, I’d come back to dress it. This went on for many weeks. I grew very fond of the child. I’d say, "Hello, little someone," and Little Someone she became. I found myself doing more and more for her. She would laugh and smile everytime I went near her and cry when I left the room. * When it was my half-day off I would leave the evening meal all ready to put on the table, so there was no work for the Mistress to do. When I

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returned, I'd have to clear the table and wash up. Sometimes I’d show how cross I was about this situation by banging the pots and pans and making a lot of noise with the dishes. But it didn’t do any good. Sometimes I got the comment of, "Do you feel better this morning?" I hadn’t the nerve to tell her I wasn’t going to wash up on my half-day off. I can remember losing my temper many times. Madam would always ring a little hand bell when she wanted me. One day I was very busy. The Mistress had rung her little bell all day for this, or that. I’d got behind with my work, so I was late making the scones for tea. I had my hands in the flour, when the bell rang. I quickly washed my hands, and made myself presentable. I went and knocked on the door. She kept me waiting, then I heard, "Come." I went in. "Ah, Rose," she said, "Put a piece of coal on the fire." I just couldn’t control myself. "Couldn’t you even do that?" "Rose, how dare you___ " But I was gone with a slam of the door. Everything always had to be perfect. I remember one time, there was a luncheon party. As well as my other duties I had to cook a four-course meal for ten people. I tried so hard but I remember that as I was serving the meal I dripped some gravy onto the table cloth. The Mistress was furious. She shouted at me to take everything away and change the cloth. But I burst into tears and ran from the room. I went to my room and cried and cried. I just couldn’t take any more. Was so tired, I fell asleep. I woke about half past nine in the evening and went down stairs. I was so worried, I felt sure I would be given notice. I went into the kitchen to get something to eat. Madam was in there. She didn’t say a word. 1 opened a tin of sardines and made a sandwich. I shared the rest with the cat. The Mistress said, "Your cat never does what it is told!" "It’s not always easy," I said softly. She looked at me and burst out laughing. "Let’s forget it," she said. * My first Christmas was a great come-down to what I had been used to at the Institution. There we would wake on Christmas morning to the sound of Carols. The boys would walk round the cottages with their band singing and playing. In our stockings we would find an orange and six boiled sweets. Paper-chains were hanging on the walls and we had fried bacon for breakfast. After Church, we had roast beef and Christmas pudding for lunch. We’d play musical chairs after lunch, and then we’d have tea with some of the boys. My first Christmas in service was a cold foggy day, the Master and Mistress were going out for the day, so I was left to look after the baby. Before she went out the Mistress gave me a present, a little working apron, as she said I needed a new one, and I was very down-hearted, and after they had gone out I had a good cry. Then I felt better. We went out and spent most of the day in

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Greenwich Park. *

I remember a nice light moment that gave me great joy. (Young girls today would not believe it.) I was sent out on a message in my cap and apron, and 1 was hurrying along the road when a lorry-load of young workmen drove by and started cheering and whistling at me. I turned and they waved at me, and I waved back. They never knew what joy and uplift they gave me. I felt so good that someone had even noticed me. * It was unheard of to be ill in anyway, and if I had a cold or flu, the Mistress would say, "Go to bed when you have finished your work," or "Stay in bed on your half-day off." Which I did many times anyway, because I was so tired or because I had no money to spend. I remember one time I worked for three weeks covered with spots, and nothing was said until one morning the Mistress said, "Oh, your spots have gone. You must feel better." *

I was allowed to go to the evening service at church on a Sunday evening, but not allowed to sit where I wanted to. The churchwarden would be at the door, to show people to their seats. Grand ladies and gentlemen would be shown to the front rows of the church with great ceremony and smiles, and they would point to the back rows for such as myself. I would also be one of those who didn’t get a handshake and smile from the priest on the way out, just a nod of the head, and he never once asked my name or where I worked. It was of no importance to him. I could not have given him the money he needed to keep his church going. But for me prayers and faith are more important and that’s just what I had. They couldn’t take that away. Jesus and I worked together. When sometimes I found I couldn’t go on, or everything was on top of me, it was because I hadn’t talked to him about my days’ work for fear of not getting all the work finished in time. I Would start work the moment I got out of bed, but I learned after a time to pause and lift my eyes to heaven and pray for help, and as the day passed I would talk to Jesus all the time. I knew many hymns and would hum them all the time. No pop music, radio or television was to be had in my world of work. * When I had been in my first job for eighteen months I was given notice. The excuse was that I was getting too fond of the baby. I looked around for another place of work. This was not as easy as it sounds. By the end of the week I had to have at least a roof over my head, having no

Tellers of Tales/179 relatives or any one to turn to who would take me in for a while. The hunt was on. This time I had to find myself a job, and inwardly I felt a bit of panic. Where was I to start? The Mistress gave me two hours off in the afternoon to look for a job. In the Post Office I found out where there was a servants’ registry office. I could put my name down for a day’s pay. When I told the lady who ran the agency my wage was five shillings a week, she asked for one shilling, and said I should do better for wages in my next job as my face fell when she asked for a shilling. She had nothing on her books at the moment but perhaps she might if I called the next day. Asking for time off to find a job was a great worry, for all the work had to be fitted in somehow. Then at the end of the week the unbelievable happened. I was promised a job at twelve shilling and six pence a week. Then the lady I was working for changed her mind, and said she would like me to stay and would raise my wage to ten shillings weekly. I told her it now wasn’t possible as my future employer was coming to see her that afternoon for my references. * I had been in service about three years, when a lady called to see me. She said she was an Inspector from the Institution, to see how I was getting on. I was so taken aback, I said, "What, after all this time?" "Yes," she said, "there are so many of you, I have only just been able to get around to you." I wondered, after she had gone, what awful misery most of us put up with, without anyone knowing anything about it. In 1934, my brother George came over to England. He was sitting in the kitchen where I worked when I returned from my half-day off. The surprise was too much for me and I started to cry. He was tired after his journey, but no hospitality of any kind was shown by my employers. He’d have slept on the floor if allowed, but he was directed to a guest house, about a mile away. He returned the next day wearing a large hat and a light coloured suit. I let him in and he walked straight into the lounge and sat down. He was redirected to the kitchen, and I was given a lecture that he could come and see me as long as he knew his place. I could give him a lettuce sandwich and a cup of tea. After three days he told me he didn’t like "rabbit food" and I could give him a lump of the gingerbread I had made the day before. He told the lady I worked for that I worked very hard, and that she was very lucky to have me. I still remember the look on the lady’s face. I can laugh now, but at the time I was doing my best to get my brother away from the lady as quickly as possible. George took me out quite a bit on my afternoons off. One day, we

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went to the Zoo. He had a camera and took some pictures. I still have them. George didn't stay very long in England. For a while I didn't know where he was. Then about four months later, I had a letter. He was back in Canada, and I was alone again. * In the middle Thirties, I had gained better confidence in myself and knew I was able to do most jobs well. By this time I had joined the Girl Guides and the Young Women’s Christian Association, and met some folk of my own age, one afternoon and one evening a week, plus a prayer meeting on Sunday after church. One of the friends I made was working in service not far from me, and she hated it. One day she told me she had heard there were two rooms being rented out for seven shillings and sixpence a week. It sounded a fortune to me. She asked me if I would leave my live-in job and get a daily job and share her rented rooms. Nothing like this had occurred to me before and I got quite excited about it, but my excitement grew less as everyone I came in contact with were against the idea, telling me of the pitfalls of leaving the sheltered life of domestic service. Looking back, I can see their point, but at the time I wouldn’t listen. I was going to do what I wanted to do. You know, you can’t tell anything to the younger generation! After much thought and planning, I started looking around for a daily job. I knew I would have to stand out for more money - at least a pound a week. I was under one month’s notice. On my afternoon off, I would do my rounds of the domestic agencies. Here again, I met opposition. Did I know what I was doing, and what expenses I would incur? They could offer me some wonderful live-in jobs. I could take my pick. No, thank you. I wanted a daily job. Well, that wouldn’t be easy. Please call again. I called many times. Then one day I was offered a job from seven in the morning to seven at night, at a pound a week, starting the next Tuesday. I was delighted as that was the day after leaving my live-in job, and whatever was right or wrong with this job, I knew I would have to take it. ♦

I remember so well leaving my last live-in job. I was due to leave at twelve noon, I did all my work in the morning and prepared lunch. I was so excited, I couldn't get away quickly enough. The lady said to stay and have some lunch, but I was in too much of a hurry. The lady gave me my wages and two parcels. In one was an eiderdown for my bed. This was from the Mistress, who said if I’d stayed with her for seven years, and not sue, she

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would have given me two blankets. The other parcel was a lovely leather writing case, from the Grandma of the children. I was so taken aback, such generosity had never been shown before. After my goodbyes, I went out the back door with a new wooden trunk and my two parcels and I was as free as a bird. I spent a whole shilling in a Lyons Tea Shop for a meal of sausages and beans. I don’t think anything has ever tasted so good. ♦ We didn’t have much in our two rooms - two beds, a table and two chairs, and there was a sink and a gas ring to boil a kettle on. We made do on what we were given to eat at work as we couldn’t afford to buy extra food. We were free to go our own ways. At first I got very tired and went to bed early. It was so nice to be able to go to bed if I wanted to and not be on call to midnight. My new job meant paying two pence on the bus to get to work early in the morning. I would walk home to save the fare. Then I found my shoes needed mending more often. The lady took to me right away. She hadn’t had a daily help for a long while and I think she took me on as a gift from heaven. She had four children and her husband was a school master. I told her where I had worked before, but she didn’t seem interested, and didn’t get a reference. There was a different atmosphere working in a daily job. I didn’t have to depend on feeling owned. I went to work fresh every morning and was treated as someone who mattered, someone to say "Good Morning" to. The Mistress was pleased to see me and would say "Thank you," more times than I can remember. I really enjoyed this first job, but it came to an end when the lady was left a large house in an uncle’s will. She wanted me to livein, but I couldn’t take that on again. So I left. *

Daily jobs were not easy to find. I had a rough time between jobs. There were days when I didn’t eat at all - no Supplementary Benefits in those days! I managed to get some lesser daily jobs, working a week here and a week there, and staying longer if I liked the mistress or if she liked me. I look back on that time with happy memories. It was still all work and no play but I was treated as someone and I enjoyed what I was doing. In the meantime the country was talking about war, but surely it would never come. 1938 came and went. Prime Minister Chamberlain waved his piece of paper and said "Peace in our Time," and we thought all would be well. Then one morning in August, 1939, the lady I was working for said, "Rose, you will sleep in. I can’t be alone if war comes." I said, "On, no. I couldn’t do that." "I order you to," she demanded. I went home with a heavy

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heart. I put my key in the front door and there on the mat was a buff envelope with "ON HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE." Here were my calling-up papers. I was to report to a nearby army barracks by ten in the morning of that day. But the time had passed. I rushed to the barracks to explain I had just received the letter. They told me to report the next day. I had just spent my last day in domestic service, for a mistress, and servant life would never be quite the same again. The next morning at ten, I had started my journey to my first army camp. I was to spend the next seven years in the A.T.S., then marry and have a daughter, eventually grandchildren. But that would be another story. * The photograph of me (Plate IV:2) was taken for George. He paid for it to be sent to him when I was nine years old. I was wearing a scotch dress and I was allowed to wear it afterward, instead of the navy blue we always wore. No ribbon for my hair, only a boot lace.

Lewisham, England

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Editions in Chronological Order: Disciplinarian Platonis epitome. Edited, Johannes Andreas de Buxis. Rome: Sweynheym and Pannartz, 1469. Lucii Apuleii in Asinum Aureum Opus. Edited, Philippus Beroaldus with Commentaries. Bologna: Benedictus Hectoris Faelli, 1500. The xi. bookes o f the golden ass, conteininge the Metamorphosis o f Lucius Apuleius. Translated, William Adlington. London: Henry VVykes, 1566. Apulei Platonici Madavrensis Metamorphoseon Libri XI. Edited, Rudolf Helm. Leipzig: Teubner, 1931. Third edition. Les Metamorphoses. Edited, D.S. Robertson. Translated, Paul Vallette. 3 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1940. Apulée Metamorphoseis IV,28-VI,24 (Le Conte d’A mour et Psyche). Edited, Pierre Grimai. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. The Isis Book, Apuleius Metamorphoses Book X I. Edited, J.G. Griffiths. Etudes préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’empire romain 39. Leiden: E J . Brill, 1975. The Golden Ass, Being the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius. Trans. W. Adlington. Revised, S. Gaselee. Loeb Classical Library 44. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Secondary Sources: Aspects of Apuleius* Golden Ass. Edited BJ . Hiijmans, Jr., and R. Th. Van der Paardt. Groningen: Bouma, 1978. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation o f Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Edited, Michael Holquist. Translated, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. ________. Rabelais and his World. Translated, Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses o f Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Knopf, 1976. Boccaccio and Petrarch. La novella di Griselda fra Boccaccio e Petrarca. Edited, Luca Carlo Rossi. Palermo: Sellerio, 1991. Boethius and the Liberal Arts. Edited, Michael Masi. Bern: Peter Lang, 1981. Clément, Félix. "L’âne au Moyen Age." Annales archéologiques, 16

Bibliography/185 (1856), 30-33. Davies, Robertson. A Mixture o f Frailties. New York: Penguin Books, 1980. English Literature: Opening up the Canon. Edited, Leslie A. Fiedler, Houston Baker, Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. D rake, G ertrude. "Candidus: A Unifying Theme in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses," Classical Journal, 64 (1968), 102-109. __________ . "The Ghost Story in The Golden Ass by Apuleius." Papers on Language and Literature, 13 (1977), 3-15. __________ . "Lucius’ ‘Business’ in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius," Papers on Language and Literature, 5 (1970), 339-74. Empson, William. Some Versions o f Pastoral. New York: New Directions, 1960. Faulkner, R.O. The Ancient Egyptian Book o f the Dead. Ed. Carol Andrews. London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1985. Festugière, André-Jean. Personal Religion Among the Greeks. Sather Classical Lectures, 26. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." In Myth, Symbol and Culture. Edited, Clifford Geertz. New York: Norton, 1971. Pp. 1-37. Gleason, Judith. Oya: In Praise o f the Goddess. Boston: Shambala, 1987. Haight, Elizabeth Hazelton. Apuleius and his Influence. New York: Cooper Square, 1963. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study o f the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. Kendrick, Laura. Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbury Tales. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Lewis, C.S. Until We Have Faces. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956. Marrou, H.-I. Saint Augustine et la fin de la culture antique. Paris: Boccard, 1958. Merkelbach, Reinhold. Roman und Mysterium in der Antike. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1962. Neumann, Erich. Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development o f the Feminine: A Commentary on the Tale by Apuleius. Translated, Ralph Manheim. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Norden, Eduard. Die Antike Kunstprosa. Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1958. Reprint of fifth edition. Plato. Phaedrus. Translated, Harold North Fowler. Loeb Classical Library 36. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. Plutarch. De Iside et Osiridae. In Moralia. Trans. Frank Cole Babbitt. 5 Loeb Classical Library 5. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962.

186/Tales within Tales R obertson, D.W. A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. Rose, Danis. Chapters o f Coming Forth by Day. A Wake Newslitter Monograph 6. Colchester: A Wake Newslitter Press, 1982. Schoeck, Richard J. Intertextuality and Renaissance Texts. Bamberg: H. Kaiser Verlag, 1984. Scobie, Alexander. Apuleius Metamorphoses (Asinus Aureus): A Commentary. Messenheim (am Gian): Hain, 1975. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1986. ________ . Storyteller. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1981. Smoldon, William S. The Music o f the Medieval Church Dramas. London: Oxford University Press, 1980. Tam Tinh, V. Tram. Isis Lactans. Leiden: E J. Brill, 1973. Taylor, Thomas. Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings. Edited, with introductions, Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper. Bollingen Series 98. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Tobin, J.J.M. Shakespeare's Favorite Novel: A Study o f the Golden Asse as Prime Source. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1970. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. Walsh, P.G. The Roman Novel: The fSatyricon' o f Petronius and the ‘Metamorphoses' o f Apuleius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. Baltimore: Penguin, 1967. Winkler, J. Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius' Golden Ass. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Wright, Constance. "‘No Art at all’: A Note on the Proemium of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses," Classical Philology, 67 (1973), 217-219. Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. New York: Vintage, 1969.

INDEX

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I: Primary Aachen, 51 Abelard and Heloise, 71 Acheron, 112 Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, 146,147,148,149,152,153 Actaeon, 8 Adlington, William, 46,75,123 Aeneas, 61; and Dido, xii Aenis, 23 Aesop, 78,85,87 Aetna, 109 Africa, ix,xi,xii,xiv Alain of Lille, 65 Alberti, Momus, 106 Alexandria, 49,51,62 Amon, Temple of, 24 Anacreon, 55 Annunciation, ix Antelope, 143 Anthony, 136 Anubis, 24 Apa Jeremiah, 50 Apep, Aapef, 6,13 Aphrodite Anadyomene, 13 Apocalypse Now, ix Apollo, 12,77,121 Apuleius, ix,x,xiv; Apologia, 62,69; De Platone, 23; Deo Socratis, 69; Florida, 22,69; Metamorphoseon/ The Golden Ass, x,xiv,22,69 Aquarius, 26 Arabian Nights, 133 Ariadne, 27 Aristides, Aelius, Sacred Discourses, 22 Aristomenes, 5,6,29,30 Armada portraits, 129 Artegall, 107 Artemis, 33,110; see Diana

Asia, xii Asinius Marcellus, 26 Ass, donkey, 8,18,23,33,50-51,7391,110,123-137; ass playing harp, xiv,73-91,Plates 111:1-2 Assumption, 65 Athens, 131; University of, 7 Athenians, 112 Augustine, x^d^di,65,71,129 Augustus, 50,101 Aunt Suzie Marmon, 146,148,155 Babylon, Babylonian, 5,74 Babrius, Valerius, 15,26 Bacchus, 109; Bacchante, 16 Bachanalia, 128 Badger, 143 Bagpipes, aulos, 77,80,89 Bartleby, 44 Batman, Stephen, Golden Book of Leaden Gods, 117,121 Bear, 25 Beauvais, 85,93,94,126 Bellona, 38,112 Bergman, Ingmar, Seventh Seal, 128,137; Through a Glass Darkly, 128 Bernard of Clairvaux, 71 Beroaldo, Filippo, Lucii Apuleii in Asinum Aureum, 112,115,121 Bible: Colossians, 35; Galatians, 64; Isaiah, 85; Joshua, 65; Luke, 133; Song of Songs, 63-65,70; Zachariah, 85 Binchois, Gilles, 90 Black Prince, 90 Black Virgins, ix; Black Virgin of Czestochowska, xiii Boccaccio, Giovanni, ix,x,85; Decameron, x,65

Index/189 Boeotia, 23; Boeotian, 11 Boethius, Consolation o f Philosophy, xiv,73-91,129,133; De musica, 76 Book o f the Dead, xiv,17 Bordeaux, xi Bosch, Hieronymus, 91 Boston, 152 Boy Bishop, 105 Brant, Sebastian, Ship o f Fools, 80,81,82,89 IJrionde, 87 Britomart, 107 Bryaxis, 49 Buckley, William F., Saving the Queen, 136 Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim's Progress, 4 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 152 Burgos, Spain, 73,76,87 Burns, Robert, "Tam o’Shanter," 6 Bus, Gervais de, 95,96 Butterfly, 12,56,133 Byrrhena, 7,8,10,17,24,30,43,45 Byzantium, 50 Cacaguate, Don, xiii,159-164 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 84,98 Canada, 171 Candians, 112 Canon, "Opening Up the Canon," English Institute, 1979,133,156 Canova, xi Canterbury Cathedral, xiv,74 Caracalla, 50 Caribbean, 151 Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 146 Carmina Burana, 82 Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland, 127,129,136 Carthage, xi; Carthaginian, 3

Caserta, 24 Catullus, 44 Cenchreae, 17,27,50 Centaurs, 134 Cerberus, 49 Ceres, 14,38,109,110,111 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 10,133 Charity, 12 Chartres, 87 Chaucer, ix,104,132; Canterbury Tales, x*xiii,99,102,133,137,156; Clerk’s Tale, 55,65; Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 81,126; Pardoner, xiii,105; Pardoner’s Tale, x,80; Parson, xiv; Tale of Sir Thopas, 123; Wife of Bath, 77,83,90; Wife’s Tale, 123; "Chaucer’s Words unto Adam," 73; House of Fame, 76; Troilus and Criseyde, xiv,73-91,97-106 Cheops Pyramid, 4,20 Chesterton, G.K., 91 Chinese boxes, xii Chrysostom, John, 85 Christ, xiv,85,90,95 Cicero, xiv Circe, 78,126 Cleopatra, 120 Cloisters Collection, 73,87,91 Cocytus, 14 Collodi, Carlo, Pinocchio, 81,126 Colorado, xii Columbus, Christopher, xii,157 Conductus of the Ass, 93,94 Congo River, ix Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, ix; Lord Jim, 133 Comes, Natalis, Mythologiae, 113,120 Cor, cordis, 77 Cordova, Rose, xii,xiii; with Don

190/Tales within Tales Cacaguate, Plate IV: 1 Corinth, 5,6,50; Corinthian circus, games, 8,16; Corinthian Gulf, 17 Coronation of Virgin at Assumption, Pierpont Morgan, Plate 11:5 Cornfield, Henry, xiii,159-164 Courtly Love, 100 Coyote, xiii Cupid, 7,12 Cupid and Psyche, xi, 12,13,16,5572,125,Plates 11:1-4 Curiositas, 58,68 Cyprians, 112 Daniel, Araaut, 82 Daniel, Play of, 93 Dante Alighieri, 104; Commediay ix,4,133; Convivio, 75,84,133; Vita nuova, 104,133 Dares and Dictys, 104 Darius, King, 94 David, King, 74,76,83,86,88,91 Davies, Robertson, A Mixture of Frailties, xv Deafness, 77,83,90 Denderah, 50 Demeas of Corinth, 6 Detroit Art Museum, 91 Diana, 8,33,38,110,111,112; see Artemis Dick and Jane, 152 Diodorus Siculus, Biblioteca Historica, 24,107,112,115,120 Dionysius, 10,16,61; Dionysian festivals, 127,134 Doric Greek, 76 Dufay, Guillaume, 90 Dumas, Alexandre, xiv Earl of Essex, 113 Edfu, 50

Egypt, 32,49,85; Egyptian, x,3; Egyptian papyri, 74 Eleusinians, 112 Eliot, T.S., 106 Elizabeth I, Queen, 127,128,129, 131 Elsinore, 128 Enchanted Mesa, K&sima, New Mexico, 147 England, xii,85 Epidauros, 128 Epimetheus, 15 Epiphany, 50 Ephesus, 51; Council of, 50 Erasmus, 103,104\ Adages y xiv,97,103; Colloquies, 97,103; Encomium Moriaey81,84,97,102, 103 Eros, Amor, Love, 10,13,16,18 Eusebius, 116 Eustochium, 71,72 Europe, xii Festival, Feast of Fools, 85,94 FELICITER, x Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews, 10,133 Fleury-la-Montaigne (Soane-etLoire), 87 Florence, x Formalism, xiii Fotis, 7,8,10,11,18,43,45,130 Fountaine of Ancient Fictiony 116 Francis, St., xiv; Franciscan Order, 51 Fury, 16 Galatea, 40 Ganymede, 26 Genesis, 31 St. George Mummers’ Plays, 137 Gilbert Foliot, 71

Index/191 Gilbert of Hoyland, 71 Giraldi, Lilio Gregorio, De Deis Gentium Liber, 113,120 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 45; Faust II’s "Descent to the Mothers," 132 Glascurion, 76 Globe Theatre, Southwark, 128 Gorgon, 127 Gothic, 74 Grace, 12,15,27 Great Books, xv Greek, x Greene, Graham, The Third Man, 133 Greene, Robert, Henry Fourth, 123,132,137 Gregory, 71 Griselda, 65,66 Hades, Hell, Pluto, 14,25,49 Haemus, 15 Harp, cithara, 77,89 Harpocrates, 13 Harris, Rose, George, 166 Harvey, Gabriel, 137 Hathor, 17 Hecate, 25,33,38,112 Hector, 90 Heracles, 26,61 Hermes Stropheus, 23 Heru-Ra, Heru-Manus, HeruTem, 13 Hesiod, 5,15,23 Hesse, Herman, Das Glasperlenspiel, 98; Journey to the East, 133 Hippocratic De morbo sacro, 35 Hippolyta, 124,130; Hippolytus, 130 Horace, Epodes, 35 Holy Family, 4,21

Homer, xi,47; Homeric Hymn, 25; Iliad, 26,41; Odyssey, 26,134 Honorius Agustodunensis, 65,71,90 Hope, 15 Hopi, 142,154,155 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 134 H orus, 4,17,19,21,49,112,126; Horus-Ra, 17; Horus* Harpocrates, 50 Hugh of St. Victor, Pseudo, Allegoriae, 91 Huon of Bordeaux, 132 Hyginus, C. Iulius, Fabularum Liber, 120 Hypata, 5,7,9,18,23,24 Immaculate Conception, 51; Immaculata of Colombia and Ecuador, 52; of Francisco Zurbaran, Plate 1:11 Isabella, Queen, 157,158 Isis, ix,3,4,5,10,17,21,22,23,29,33, 41,45,49-54,58,68,107-121,Plates 1:5,6,7; Isis Lactans, 49,50,Plates 1:1,3; Winged Isis, 1:8,9 Jan Van Eyck, 90 Jerome, 65,71,72 Jerusalem, 85 Jesse tree, 84,85 John the Evangelist, 51 John of Salisbury, xiv Jonadab, 78 Jonson, Ben, Oberon, 123 Joy, 4 Joyce, James, Ulysses, 136 Judgment of Paris, 8,25,44,125, 129 Juno, 38,112,125 Jupiter, 14,15

192/Tales within Tales

Kä, 9 Kafka, Franz, "Leopards in the Temple," 136 Karanis, 50 Kearns Canyon, New Mexico, 150, 151 Kipling, Rudyard, Puck o f Pook’s Hill, Rewards and Faeries, 132 Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, 142, 146,152 Langland, William, Piers Plowman, 133 Language Freedom, ix Laocoön, xii Latin, ix,x Laurentian Library, x law, x,3,124 Lewis, C.S., Chronicles o f Namia, 85,136 Lloyds, Rose, xii,166-182,Plate IV:2 Logos, 17,22,65,70 London, 101; London County Council, 166 Love, 14,25,26,45; see Eros, Amor Lucan, Pharsaliay35 Lucius, 5-passim Lysias, xii Mabinogioriy 123,132 Machaut, Guillaume de, 102,106 Madaura, 4 Mammisi, 50 Maqamaty 80 Marco, Convent of San, x Maria Lactans, 50 Mariquita, xiii,159-164 Marlowe, ix Mars, 15 Marshall, William, 100

Marsyas, 77,89 Mary, Queen of Scots, 106 Mary’s, St., Barfreston, Kent, 87 Medea, 16,25,43,44 Medicis, x Mediterranean, ix,32 Meillers (Allier), 87 Meleager, 55 Melön de la Herta, Don, 80-81 Mercury, 14,77 Meroe, 5,6,24 Meun, Jean de, Roman de la Rose, 84,85,91 Michelangelo, x Midas, King, 77 Milne, A A., Eeyore, xiv, 126 Miletus, 12,26; Milesian tale, 26 Milesius, 77 Milo, 6,7,10,11,18 Milton, John, Areopagitica, xiv; Paradise Losty 4,5,8; Paradise Regainedy 4 Minerva, 38,112,125 Minos, 44 Minotaur, 44 Mithras, 24,41 Montaigne, xi More, Thomas, 84 Mozart, Magic Flute, xi Musica mundana, Humana, instrumentisy 77 Muslim, 3 Myrrhina, 10 Nantes, 74 Nativity, ix Natura, 38,46 Nepthys, 10 Nicholas, St./"01d Nick," 137 Nietzche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 85,136 Nile, 24,110,124

Index/193 Northoff, Christian, 103 Oberon, 124 Official English, ix Ohio River, ix Okinawa, 149 Olympus, Mount, 4,58; Temple of, 134 Origen, Commentary on Song of Songs, 55,62,69,70,71 Orion, 76 Orpheus, 39,40,47,61,76,77,90,128; Sir Orfeo, 123 Ortiz, Simon, 141,149; The Man to Send Rain Clouds, 152 Osiris, 4,10,16,17,21,24-26,49,107113,115,117,120,121,126 Ovid, Amores, 35; Metamorphoses, xn,30,31,37-48,77,137 Oya, xi Palatine, 85 Palm Sunday, xiv,91 Pamphile, 7,8,10,11,30,43,45 Pandarus, 73,81 Pandora, 15 Panthia, 6 Paris, 93; University of (Sorbonne), xiv,126; Notre Dame, 96 Parthenon, 128,134 Pasiphae, 16,43,44 Paul, Colossians, 35 Paul of the Thebaid, 136 Peacham, Basilikon Doron, 116 Peele, George, The Arraygnement o f Paris, 136 Pegasus, 126; Pegasean Gulf, 23 Peleus and Thetis, 44 Petrarch, Epistola Senilis, 65 Petronius, 35 Perge, 49,50

Pestain, Chaillou de, 96 Phaedra, 16,43,44 Phaedrus, 87 Pharmakos, 127 Pharoah, 49 Philae, 50,51 Philodespotus, 9,10 Pinocchio, xiv,81,126 Pinta, Nina, Santa Maria, 157,158 Plato, xi,xii,xiv,3,23,62,64,69; Phaedrus, xiv,5,6,24,55,56,57,58, 61,64,69,126,133; Republic, 76, 134; Symposium, 58; Timaeus 5, 23; Platonic, 20; Platonists and Neoplatonists, 56,62 Plotina, 25 Plotinus, Enneads, 69 Plutarch, 4,27; Moralia; De Iside et Osiride, 23,107-119 Polyphony, 90,93 Pompeii, 25; and Herculaneum, 69 Pope, Alexander, Rape of the Lock, 123 Postructuralism, xiii Priapus, 75 Prometheus, 15 Propertius, 35 Proserpina, Persephone, 14,26,33,38,61,110 Proteus, Protean, xi,127,131 Psyche, 4,12,26,55-72,118 Pueblo, xii,141 Punic, 3 Pushkin, xiv; Eugene Onegin, xiv; Queen of Spades, 136; Tales of Belkin, xiii; Tsar Peter's Moor, xiv Pygmalion, 37,39,45,48 Pyramus and Thisbe, 131 Pythagoras, xi; Pythagorean, x,3, 4,7,19,20,21,27,75,76,80,85,130 Pythias, 7

194/Tales within Tales

Renaissance, x Rhamnusia, 38 Rhodes, 26 Richard II, King, 84,85,90,98,101 Richard of Maidstone, 90 Richard of St. Victor, 71 Robert of Tumbalenia, 71 Roman de Fauvel, 95 Roman de la Rose, see Meun, Jean de, Roman de Renard, 126 Romanesque, 74 Rome, 68; Roman Empire, 38 Rufinus, 70 Ruiz, Juan, Libro de Buen Amor, 78-81 Russian dolls, xii Saint-Aignin de Cosne, 87 Saint Benoît-sur-Loire, 87 Saint-Parize-le-Châtel (Nièvre), 87 Saint-Sauveur de Nevers, 87 Salerno, University of, xiv,126 Salvia, 7 Saturnalia, 128 Selene, 33 Saqqara, 50 Sebek, 116 Second Shepherds' Play, 134 Sekaquaptwea, Emory, 154 Sendak, Maurice, Where the Wild Things Are, 127 Serapis, 49,Plate 1:2; Serapaeion, 49,50 Seth, 4,8,9,15,16,17,24,25,32,33, 109,110,112,114,116,126; (Sutech, Zatch), 9 Seven Sages of Rome, 133 Shakespeare, 152; Hamlet, xi,128; Henry V, 126; Lear, 134; Othello,

x,128; Merchant of Venice, 77; Midsummer Night's Dream, 76, 123-137; Troilus and Cressida, 90 Shepherds, ix Sicilians, 112 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 77ie A/a/i to Send Rain Clouds, 152; Storyteller, 156; Ceremony, 156 Sinon, xi Slaves, ix Socrates, xii,5,6,124 Song of Songs, 63,70 South Africa, 151 Spartan, 76 Spenser, Edmund, 77te Faerie Queene, 107-121,123,130,132,137 Sphinx, 127 Statius, Thebaid, 137 Stella Maris, 51 Strabo, 23 Styx, 9,14,61 Suetonius, Games o f the Greeks, 101; Lives, 101 Sumerian, xiv Sussex, xii Sycamore, 24 Terence, Comedies, ix,129 Thamar, 78 Thanatos, 45 Thebes, 23; Thebes, Egyptian, 24 Thelyphron, 9,25 Theotokos, 50 Theseus, 61,124,130 Thessaly, 5,23,29,124 Thomas Becket, xiv Thomas Rymer, Thomas of Erceldoune, 123,137 Thoth, 22 Thrace, 15 Thrasyllus, 16 Tiberius, 51

Index/195 Tibullus, 35 Till Eulenspiegel, 90 Timotheus of Milesius, 76,90 Titania, 124 Tlepolemus, 15,16,26 Translatio studii, xii Tricks ter-saviour figure, 74,84, 127,137 Tristan, 128 Troy, xii; Trojan war, 8,44 Ts6itsinako, Thought Woman, 142,143 Tudor, 109 Turin papyrus, 87 Tutankhamen, 51 Tyche, 14 Typhon, 15,109,110,116,121

Wireker, Nigel, Speculum Stultorum, "Don Burnel the Asse," xiv,81,82,126 Women, ix Wyvern, 74,90

Ur of Sumeria, 73,128 Usk, Thomas, Testament of Love, 83,84

Adolf, Helen, 74,88 Albrecht, Michael von, 47 Albrecht, William P., 132 Aptekar, Jane, 116,121 Astell, Ann W., 70,72 Auerbach, Erich, 40,48

Vanity Fair, 102 Venus, 13,14,37,38,40,48,60,110, 111,125; see Aphrodite Virgil (Vergil), 41;Aeneid, xi,xii; Eclogues, 35 Virgin Mary, 51,65,66,72,85,94,126 Virgin of Popyan, Columbia, 52 Virgin of Quito, Plate 1:12; see also Maria Lactans Virgin Queen, see Elizabeth I, Queen, Vitry, Philippe de, 96 Waithia, 146 Walsingham, xii,xiii Walter, Lord, 65,66 Wakefield Master, ix War Games, 99 "We Three," xiv William of St. Thierry, 71

Y crossroad, 25 Yastoah, 146 Yorkshire, ix Ywain, 128 Zatchlas, 9 Zeus, 15,26 Zuni, 142

II: Secondary

Babcock, Barbara, 133 Baker, Houston, Jr., xv,153 Bakhtin, Mikhail, xiii; Dialogic Imagination, xiii,38,46,58,68; Rabelais and his World, xiii, 126, 128,136 Barber, C.L., 132,133 Barré, H., 72 Battle, Newrise, xv Bauer, Douglas F., 47 Beichner, Paul E., 72 Bettelheim, Bruno, 133 Betti, E., 105 Betz, H.D., 35 Bieman, Elizabeth, 121 Boswell, John, 68 Bowra, C.M., 67

196/Tales within Tales Brion, Marcel, 69 Brommer, Frank, 134 Brown, Peter, 70 Brutus, Dennis, 155 Budge, Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis, 20,24,27 Bukhofzer, Manfred F., 88,90 Cabassut, Dom A., 71 Cantarella, Eva, 58,68 Chamberlain, David S., 76,88 Clemencic, René, 96 Clément, Félix, 91 Coghill, Nevill, 104 Collignon, Maxine, 71 Corti, Maria, 132,136 Courcelle, Pierre, 91 Crabbe, A., 47 Crews, Frederick, 127,134 Culler, Jonathan, xii Cumont, Franz, 68 Curl, James Stevens, 53 Curtius, Ernst, 82,90,133 Daniélou, Jean, 62,69,70 Davidson, Clifford, 121 Derchain, P., 24 Derrida, Jacques, xii Dolger, FJ., 70 Dover, KJ., 68 Drake, Gertrude, xiii,23,24,25,43, 48,119,133 DuBois, Page, 68 Duby, Georges, 98,100,104,105 Duchend, Hertha von, 24 Ebel, Henry, 41,48 Ehwald, Rudolf, 47 Ellis, Steven, 87 Empson, William, 89,131,132, 134,136 Erman, Adolf, 25

Farnham, Willard, 74,88 Fauth, K., 35 Fergusson, John, Fiedler, Leslie A:, xv,133 Foucault, Michel, 123,131 Fowler, Alistair, 120 Freeman, Rosemary, 121 Freud, Sigmund, 123,131,134 Friedlander, Paul, 69 Friedman, John Block, 88 Funk-Hallet, Charles, 27 Furtwängler, Adolph, 68 Gardner, Jane F., 68 Geertz, Clifford, 132 Gleason, Judith, xi Grant, Michael, 25 Grapow, Hermann, 25 Grassi, Ernesto, 106 Griffith, Dudley D., 72 Griffiths, J. Gwyn, 23,32,33,35 Grimal, Pierre, 61,68,69 Hamilton, A.C., 121 Handley, E.W., 134 Harrison, Jane, 26,27 Haupt, Moriz, 47 Haufmann, George MA., 67,68 Hawthorne, J.G., 27 Helm, R., 34 Hiley, David, 96 Hoag, John Douglas, 134 Hofmann, H., 47 Hollander, John, 89 Holloway, Julia Bolton, 132,136, 137 Hoppin, Richard H., 96 Hubaux, J., 24 Hu-Dehart, Evelyn, xv Huizinga, Johan, xv,97-106,134 Humphries, Rolfe, 31,32

Index/197

Jacobson, Roman, xiii,126,134 Jaeger, Werner, 68 Janson, H.W., 76,87,87,90 Jones, Ernest, xi,128 Jung, Carl G., 74,85,137 Junghanns, Paul, 48 Junne, George, xv Kaiser, Walter, 89 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 91,85,124,132 Keleman, Pol, 53 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 57,68 Kendrick, Laura, 134 Kenny, E J., 47 Kerenyi, Karl, 23,137 Kermode, Frank, 136 Kirkpatrick, Robin, 72 Korn, Otto, 47 Lemprière, John, 121 Lancel, Serge, 68 Landee, J., 24 Laserstein, Kate, 72 Lateiner, Donald, 47 Lawson, R.P., 70 Leach, Eleanor Winsor, 47 Leclercq, Jean, 71 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 78,89,134 Lida de Malkiel, Maria Rosa, 80, 89 Lorch, Maristella, 106 Luck, G., 33,35 Mackay, LA., 68 Maitre, H. Le, 68 Mâle, Emile, 74,87,88,90 Martinez, David, 34,43 Masi, Michael, xv,88 Matter, E. Ann, 64,70,72 McCall, John P., 90 McDermott, W.C., 76,90

McKinnon, Catherine, 65,72 McNamara, Jo Ann, 71 Mercer, SA.B., 24 Mette, Hans Joachim, 68 Meyer-Baer, Kathi, 88 Minnis, A J., 105 Miskimin, Alice, 121 Moret, A., 25 Morse, Charlotte, 72 Murphy, John L., 132,137 Neumann, Erich, 26,61,69 Nolan, Edward P., 47 Norhnberg, James, 116,120,121 Ohly, Friedrich, 70,71 Orgel, Stephen, 132 Osgood, Charles Grosvenor, 108, 120 Otto, E., 25 Panofsky, Erwin, 72,90 Parrot, André, 87 Pauly-Wissowa, 67 Perella, Nicholas J., 71 Pickard-Cambridge, Arthur, 134 Pomeroy, Sarah, 68 Preisendanz, K., 35 Radin, Paul, 137 Randall, Lillian M.C., 83,90 Revard, Carter, xiii Riedlinger, Helmut, 70 Robertson, D.W. Jr., 78,89,90 Robertson, Elizabeth, 71 Rohde, Erwin, 68 Rokseth, Yvonne, 90 Rowland, Beryl, 80,89,90,91 Rudnitzky, G., 25 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 71 Sandy, G.N., 48

198/Tales within Tales Schlam, C.C., 48,69 Schoeck, Richard J., xv,105,106, 132 SchwaUer de Lubicz, R A., 27 Segal, Charles, 47 Severs, J. Burke, 72 Shinnier, P.L., 24 Smoldon, William S., 96 Spitzer, Leo, 76,88,90 Stallcup, Stephen, 87 Stecchini, Livio Catulli, 23,27 Stevick, Robert D., 27 Stock, Brian, 104 Sutton, Dana F., 134 Swahn, Jan Ojvind, 69,72 Tam Tinh, V. Tram, 49,50,53,134 Thibau, R., 23,69 Thompson, see Budge, EA. Thompson Wallace Tomkins, Peter, 23 Turner, Victor, 48,89 Viarre, Simone, 47 Walker, Lucy, xv Walsh, P.G., 23 Waszink, J.H., 35 Widengren, George, 24 Wilamowitz-Moeflendorf, Ulrich von, 35 Wimsatt, James, 65,66,72 Winkler, John J., 48 Wright, Constance, 133 Youtie, H.C., 35 Zarnecki, George, 87