If these chapters really were written or dictated by Sor Juana, they would have been in seventeenth-century Spanish, and so would require a translation anyway. In the restaurant that night I missed a good deal, apparently, but what I now believe Beulah was announcing was not a factual representation, a resurrection or a possession: Beulah was not Sor Juana’s entranced medium, not her ‘voice.’ The choices she saw herself as making in Sor Juana’s name were not the creator’s choices—but the translator’s.
6. From Chapman’s translation of Homer.
7. Either don Pedro’s memory was faulty, or the day was preternaturally clear, or the mountain he took to be of the Atlas range (200 kms. away) was in fact the peak today called Tidirhine in the Er-Rif Mountains, some 150 kms. south of Gibraltar.
8. Also possibly an allusion to the Gallinero, a famed house of rare birds at Buen Retiro palace.
9. This is Augustine’s phrase for a ‘God who is remote, distant, and mysterious’ yet one ‘powerfully and unceasingly present in all times and places.’ Totus ubique—‘the whole of him everywhere.’
10. A reference to one of the great spiritual transports of The Confessions, Book 8, Chapter 12, “The Voice as of a Child.”
11. Allusions to Hesiod, who wrote of both luck and preparation, and who said in praise of his own time: When work was a shame to none.
12. Axolotl,‘waterdog’ or ‘waterdoll.’My interest piqued, I investigated further, as I imagine Beulah intended (the reference to harlequins was meant to be the tip-off). Undeniably strange, the axolotl wears a ruff of gills bristling on stalks about its neck. Though outside the laboratory it is an endangered species, the axolotl is cultivated in large numbers in labs around the world, in part for its regenerative capacities. These include the regeneration of complex structures—limbs, spine, brain. The other qualities Beulah would have wanted me to know about (and I you, dear reader, and I you) were its three-chambered heart, blunt teeth, and neoteny: the ability to mate while still in larval form. Among the axolotl’s mythological attributes (by way of its association with Xolotl, the Feathered Serpent’s double, usually represented as a dog): regeneration, deformity, twinning, dirty feet, a swamp life in hiding, cowardice and flight from sacrifice, death, especially by execution, and, oddly, playfulness or gamesmanship. Though it must be said that in the Meso-American tradition of the sacred ball court, such games were not necessarily of a sort we would call playful.
13. Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.
14. The translation of the Hebrew Bible was, according to one Aristeas, the project of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who wanted a Greek version for the library of Alexandria. Especially as concerns the specific number of translators (who were said to have been sent to an island, each to work in seclusion on his own version), the story may be apocryphal; but what is more certain is that the translation, considered highly skillful, was executed in Egypt during the reign of one of the early Ptolemies.
15. This light-hearted notion appears to come by way of an e-mail from the Canadian mathematician Chris Hermansen.
16. Translation of Nahuatl hearth poem by Thelma Sullivan, A Scattering of Jades (Simon & Schuster, Touchstone, 1994), p. 138.
17. From Canto I of Cantar de mio Cid, translated by R. Selden Rose and Leonard Bacon, and published in the year 1919, in Berkeley, California, by the University of California Press.
18. Speculatively attributed to Sor Juana.
19. Aside from the mention of magic, the concepts in this paragraph are a direct borrowing—be it tribute or theft—from Octavio Paz’s Sor Juana, cf. p. 80.
20. English translation appears in Miguel León-Portilla’s Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World (University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).
21. The scholarly Lucero, with his retinue of feminine companions, watches with growing horror the unfolding mystery of the Nativity, detecting in it the outlines of his final defeat.
22. Beulah’s totemism: I lack the cultural equipment to even attempt to explain it. Not just the sea cow, but squirrels, seals, dogs and oxen … is it Egyptian polymorphism, the more stable hybrid forms of satyrs and centaurs? Is it some variant of shamanism / animism / zoomorphic fetishism I am unfamiliar with? I do not, frankly, know.
23. Much of the first part of this chapter draws exhaustively upon a section of Giro del Mondo, a seventeenth-century account of a journey around the world by an Italian gentleman adventurer, Gemelli Carerri. The three volumes in which Carerri chronicles his travels in the New World are rich in detail. Carreri was an acquaintance of don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and a good part of the Italian’s information on Aztec lore and the Conquest very likely came from don Carlos himself.
24. Appears to be taken from a song lyric by Jane Siberry.
25. Speculatively attributed to Sor Juana.
26. Translation by Alan Trueblood in A Sor Juana Anthology (Harvard University Press, 1988).
27. Adapted from a translation by Alan Trueblood.
28. Translation by Alan Trueblood.
29. Two rich sources on this topic: Mario Lavista, “Sor Juana, musicus,” and Rcardo. Miranda, “Sor Juana y la música: una lectura mas,” in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: memoria del coloquio internacional. Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura.
30. Yet another translation that appears to take liberties with the original.
31. The fresco painter Luca Giordano did come from Italy to Madrid, did praise Las Meninas as the theology of painting, only he came in 1692, and at no time before 1667. The Vicereine, therefore, could not have been there or known anyone who had, could not therefore have lied or exaggerated about it, or even have been referring to a similar incident, ‘the theology of painting’ being so specific. If the anachronism is deliberate, its purpose is not obvious. Sor Juana, I suppose, could have heard this phrase and misremembered who’d told her of it, but only if she were looking back on her days at the palace at a distance of some twenty-five years…. But then this, I suppose, could be the point.
32. Probably an allusion to Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America.
33. For a detailed account of the galanteos de Palacio, the reader might begin with the Duke de Maura’s Vida y Reinado de Carlos II (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1942), pp. 41–54. See also Deleito y Piñuela’s El rey se divierte. Octavio Paz, in Chapter 7 of Sor Juana, admirably situates the galanteos in the context of the history of courtly love and analyzes their function in the sexual economy of palace life. Paz’s image of a dance around a dying sun king has been lifted with a minor, if significant, modification: that Philip IV was the Planet King, and what was dying was not just the King but geocentrism.
34. It’s likely that Beulah read something of this sort in Little’s brilliant essay in Josep M. Sola-Solé and George E. Gingras, eds., Tirso’s Don Juan: The Metamorphosis of a Theme (Catholic University of America Press, 1988).
35. If da Vinci has been held above all else and all others as the model Renaissance Man, today there is a tendency to see him as the illustration of a failed ideal. Athanasius Kircher, born in 1602, might be considered the model Baroque Man. But few have heard of him today. His reputation has suffered much more than the Renaissance da Vinci’s, perhaps by becoming the unfortunate epitome of an age with an image problem, the Baroque. If anything, his reach was broader and more ambitious than da Vinci’s. He proposed a system of universal knowledge, which was to become a powerful inspiration to Sor Juana, the poet of Primero sueño. Mystic, magus, humanist, geologist, linguist and (mis)interpreter of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Kircher nevertheless found time to serve as one of the pre-eminent Jesuit theologians of his time even while becoming a encyclopaedist of music; he also designed magnetic toys and magic lanterns (and has often been credited with inventing the latter). None of his many scientific theories earned him the acclaim of a Newton or a Liebniz, though he did claim to have resurrected plants from their ashes. But over two hundred years before the discovery of the plague bacillus, Kircher’s pioneering work with microscopes led hi
m to formulate a theory that the bubonic plague was transmitted through invisible ‘infective corpuscles….’
36. This was no mere racist hysteria on the part of the Dominicans and others faced with explaining a much longer list of uncanny correspondences: notably the red and black crosses adorning the robes of Quetzalcóatl in the ancient codices; trials in the desert; a promised land; an Aztec network of monasteries and convents and an almost-Catholic priestly hierarchy; fasting and celibacy and moveable feasts; confession in confidentiality followed by prescribed acts of contrition; the association of baptism and naming …
37. Joseph Campbell, clearly … 1000 Masks?
38. The family of Nezahualcóyotl (‘fasting coyote’) would continue to be associated with dissent and self-sacrifice. For instance, in a manoeuvre devised to prevent the Snake Woman Tlacaelel, a brutal general, from acceding to the Tenochca throne of the Triple Alliance. Nezahualcóyotl pledged to make himself and his people forever subordinate to the Tenochcas, who were then free to make Tenochtitlán the new imperial capital. Similarly, even as the Aztecs were being consumed by their fetishes for idols and blood sacrifice, Nezahualcóyotl was resurrecting from the Toltec tradition the possibility of an unknowable, unseeable god everywhere present—simultaneously near and far—and instilling all with holiness. Nezahualpilli, the poet-emperor’s son, would one day visit Moctezuma II in his brooding solitude and foretell the calamities that would soon befall the Aztecs as a result of Moctezuma’s misdeeds. Nezahualpilli’s son, don Carlos Ometochtzin Chichimecatecuhtli, in 1539 was judged and condemned to death by the Inquisition as an apostate, idolator, libertine and predicator of the ancient beliefs. His son and the father of Juan de Alva, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, would make it his life’s work to preserve and make known the poetry and philosophy of his great-grandfather and the literature of his people. In 1692 it was this distinguished family’s land titles that Carlos Sigüenza rescued, at some risk to himself, from archives set alight by rioters in Mexico City’s main square.
39. The principal sources for this section on Guadalupe and Aztec sacrifice are (if the copiousness of Beulah’s notes gives an indication) works by Clendinnen, Gillespie, Brundage, Carrasco, Lafaye and Neumann. Central here is Susan Gillespie’s thesis of ‘the women of discord,’whose violent deaths propel the Mexica toward their destiny.
40. In this connection the interested reader might profitably turn to Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America, particularly the first chapter of a section devoted to the theme of love in the Conquest.
41. Vino de obsidiana or obsidian wine was not necessarily wine, or even a drink at all, but seems to have been a decoction administered to victims before sacrifice. The early Spanish sources believed its main function to be sedative.
42. Fredo Arias de la Canal, Intento de un psicoanálisis de Juana Inés y otros ensayos SorJuanistas, p. 22.
43. Arias de la Canal, p. 40.
44. Pfandl, p. 51.
45. The quote from Thomas Gage appears in Octavio Paz, Sor Juana, p. 122.
46. Pfandl, p. 51.
47. Octavio Paz paraphrasing Ludwig Pfandl.
48. Pfandl, p.51.
49. Ludwig Pfandl, after Carlos Sigüenza, in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico’s Tenth Muse. Translated by Beulah Limosneros.
50. This entire chapter is almost certainly under the influence of the Robert Graves translation from Apuleius’s The Golden Ass.
Blessed Queen of Heaven, whether you are pleased to be known as Ceres, the original harvest mother who in joy at the finding of your lost daughter Proserpine abolished the rude acorn diet of our forefathers and gave them bread raised from the fertile soil of Eleusis; or whether as celestial Venus, now adored at sea-girt Paphos, who at the time of the first Creation coupled the sexes in mutual love and so contrived that man should continue to propagate his kind for ever; or whether as Artemis, the physician sister of Phoebus Apollo, reliever of the birth pangs of women, and now adored in the ancient shrine at Ephesus; or whether as dread Proserpine to whom the owl cries at night, whose triple face is potent against the malice of ghosts, keeping them imprisoned below earth; you who wander through many sacred groves and are propitiated with many different rites—you whose womanly light illumines the walls of every city, whose misty radiance nurses the happy seeds under the soil, you who control the wandering course of the sun and the very power of his rays—I beseech you, by whatever name, in whatever aspect, with whatever ceremonies you deign to be invoked, have mercy on me in my extreme distress, restore my shattered fortune, grant me repose and peace…. (Farrar, Strauss & Young: New York, 1951. pp. 263–264).
Sappho BOOK THREE
1. An introduction to the themes of science and exploration in Sor Juana’s Martyr of the Sacrament can be found in an article by Héctor Azar, “Sor Juana y el descubrimiento de América.”
2. As a reminder to the Queen, Sor Juana’s use of Plus Ultra here might have been twofold: When the first Hapsburg King of Spain, Charles I (1516–1556), sailed for Spain from the Netherlands to claim the throne, an armada of forty ships sailed with him. On his flagship was an image of the Pillars of Hercules and the young king’s new motto, Plus Ultra, which came to represent Spain’s ambition to rule both hemispheres and proved to be an ambition that outlasted the Hapsburgs. Philip V (formerly Philippe, duc d’Anjou), grandson of Louis XIV, and the first of the Spanish Bourbon kings, had the motto stamped onto the Spanish eight-reales coin.
3. Apparent reference to the twelve labours of Herakles. The eleventh was to retrieve the apples of the Hesperides, the golden fruit given to Hera by Mother Earth as a wedding gift. The retrieval was actually performed by the Titan Atlas freed from the eternal task that was his punishment: to bear the world (or the celestial sphere) upon his back, a burden that Herakles offered to shoulder, proposing as a respite that Atlas grapple instead with the hundred-headed dragon guarding the golden tree. The Titan, having successfully retrieved the apples, very nearly did not take his burden back, and was only tricked into it by a Heraklean bit of table-turning.
4. As the story goes, according to one of Beulah’s trusty sources, Robert Graves: For excesses committed on the banks of the river Heracleius, Hera visited upon Herakles a fit of madness. In a god-sent delusion, he mistook six of his children and two of a friend’s for enemies and in a berserk fury murdered them. Turning to the Pythoness at Delphi for a way to expiate his blood crime, he was sentenced to twelve years of labour for King Eurystheus. The legendary twelve labours.
5. Beulah’s oracle of preference, Robert Graves, lists three daughters born of Neptune to Amphitrite, the Triple Moon-Goddess: Triton (since masculinized), Rhode and Benthesicyme—lucky new moon; full harvest moon; dangerous old moon.
6. One might infer that by ‘Ocean’ the poet means Amphitrite, Queen of the Oceans, but finds it indelicate to say this directly, having already linked Amphitrite to the Vice-Queen.
7. In chapters of great general interest, Octavio Paz’s discussion of triumphal arches is particularly satisfying to those averse to the baroqueness of the Baroque. As one such reader, I followed Beulah’s research notes here with attention. In the seventeenth century, the absolute monarch’s divine right to rule was promoted as never before, precisely when more human claims to legitimacy were becoming ever more plainly incredible: inherent nobility, wisdom, courage in the field …
Baroque art, largely sponsored by monarchs and by princes of the Church, for the most part actively colluded in the promotion of its patron’s claims to divinity or sanctity. The equation being: beauty = divinity/sanctity = the right to wealth and privilege. (Arguably the equation still holds, if high-concept advertising, political campaigns and the vast majority of Hollywood movies offer an indication.) Much as the godlike beauty of actor-models in their Elysian settings serve today, countless examples of seventeenth-century art drew on the gods of pagan antiquity, already secularized by the later Greeks. Thus, even as the pope was God’s Vicar, the king in the guise of Jupite
r or Neptune might now be seen as His viceroy. So it was that Baroque theatre, painting and poetry made demi-gods of their patrons at a time when not a few were pushing the opposite threshold, of the sub-human.
Sor Juana participated in the norms of her time. As an artist dependent on her patrons she did at least her share of beautifying and sanctifying; nevertheless, as in so many areas, she diverts and subverts these norms to her own ends: she turns the canons and cameras of Baroque art, as it were, on herself. It is herself she beautifies, reifies and sanctifies, not so much for wealth (though she was not averse) or for power per se, but for the privilege to do as she wishes, for a woman’s freedom of action and inquiry. As Paz points out, Allegorical Neptune is a riddle at the heart of which Sor Juana herself sits, on the throne of the goddess Isis, mother, widow, knowledge incarnadine, Man to the second power. Sophia, Ennoia, Athena (Wisdom, Thought, Mind) are all feminine for Sor Juana. This takes her well beyond even the tenets of Gnostic heresy.
8. Why Neptune? The incoming Vice-King was Marquis de la Laguna, Marquis of the Lake. Surrounded by floating gardens, Mexico was built on an island and was in need of protection from floods made worse every year by logging and soil erosion. Neptune was the Roman (and therefore less pagan) version of Poseidon, who turned Delos from a floating island into a stable one; was master of earthquakes and flood; built the walls of Troy; invented navigation and first tamed horses; fathered monsters but also water figures such as his granddaughters the Danaïdes. Sor Juana followed Pausanias in making him father of Athena, which is not completely far-fetched: Athena was without dispute sired on the sea-nymph Metis, was born along the river Triton, and was raised by Triton, offspring of Neptune and Aphrodite. Next, with a little quick footwork of her own, Sor Juana made Neptune the son of Isis—Horus/Harpocrates, god of silence and of wise councils. Just as significantly, Sor Juana’s verses of welcome made the incoming Vice-Queen Amphitrite, Neptune’s consort, goddess of the sea, mother of all waters, of all life, creativity, wisdom; and alternatively Aphrodite/Venus, foam-born daughter of the sea, beauty embodied, morning star, Lucifer rising at dawn, antebellum and antibellum, as it were, to oppose the bellicose fires of the Apollonian Sun. In sum, it is perhaps in this rather more dangerous context that we are to read the strange if beautiful fragment of Allegorical Neptune that Beulah has selected, as it veers away from the rising sun of Christian patriarchy and in doing so, towards Gnostic heresy, or plus ultra.
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