In Greece, in Plato’s lifetime, the virtue of boy-love in men’s eyes had come to be suspect, and the faithful friends lost the ground in Eros they had imagined to claim as philosophers. He who had immortalized the Symposium was to condemn symposia in his Laws, where, in his old age, Plato sees the State as the stronghold of Reason:
Now the gymnasia and common meals do a great deal of good, and yet they are a source of evil in civil troubles; as is shown in the case of the Milesian, and Boeotian, and Thurian youth, among whom these institutions seem always to have had a tendency to degrade the ancient and natural custom of love below the level, not only of man, but of the beasts. . . . Whether such matters are to be regarded jestingly or seriously, I think that the pleasure is to be deemed natural which arises out of the intercourse between men and women; but that the intercourse of men with men, or of women with women, is contrary to nature, and that the bold attempt was originally due to unbridled lust.
The Platonic and Sapphic lovers are driven not only outside the law or the rational State but outside of the natural order into the criminal chaos from which Eros had first come.
In Jerusalem, the Temple was to fall and the Jews go scattered among the gentiles into the Diaspora. Gnostic cults taught that the Light Itself had been in the beginning scattered so into a Darkness, sparks or seeds of light imprisoned in matter. All men were to become outcasts and vagabonds. There was in Christ’s “today,” because of the promise, no end of time in the actual world.
He had also said: “The time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor at Jerusalem.” Man had retracted his worship from place and time. The old cosmic gods, and the Elohim among them, withdrew from mountain and temple to men’s minds. We saw in Plato’s teaching the old cosmology replaced by a new ideology. Now, everywhere, cosmology and ideology give way to psychology.
Hesiod, like the Old Testament, speaks of a beginning that was Earth and Sky. And Heraclitus says of Hesiod: “They think that he knew many things, though he did not understand day and night. For they are one.” And then: “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger. But he undergoes transformations—just as fire, when it is mixed with spices, is named after the savor of each.” This was the ancient world, where, if God was man, He was also day and night, beast and sun, wind and tree; where before there was man, there was Beauty, Eros, and Himeros.
But with the Gospel of John—is it six hundred years after Heraclitus?—a Book begins to take the place of the Old Testament that had been a spoken word, what-they-said or myth, passed from man to man. The new written testament knows nothing of Earth or Sky, of day or night, of summer or winter. “In the beginning was the Word,” the new Book tells us: “Everything came into existence through Him, and apart from Him nothing came to be.” The universe had once, almost, spoken to man. Now, a language that originated in the Word, the speech of man, was to be the true universe. The vis imaginativa in which the things of men’s souls and the things of the actual universe dance together, having concourse and melody, the magic world of resonances and freely associating rhymes—is disowned. And what appears is a world of two opposing possibilities—dogma and heresy.
The primal Eros rages in the division. Sex witches brew their ointments in Thessaly. Devils and lamiae swarm about the bodies of saints in the desert, familiar animals that were once dear to the household come now as familiars with messages from beastly hell. The old reverences die out or are scattered out from their centers to flare up in new woods and fountains, in the hearts of guilty lovers or upon pagan hearths, in the hinterlands where groves are too close and wheat too dear to be denied the worship of men. “In Benedict and Gregory,” Henry Osborn Taylor tells us in The Medieval Mind, “the salvation which represented the true and uncorrupt life of man on earth, as well as the assured preparation for eternal life with God, had shrunken from the universality of Christ, and even from the fullness of desire with which Augustine sought to know God and the soul.” But the Christ had not been more universal at first than Galilee in the midst of Judea was—He had been a god of a division among Jews, of a tribal dispute. The universal Christ is the god of an Empire and has that universality. The salvation which represented the true and uncorrupt life of man on earth had its counterpart in the Roman law which represented the civilized life of man on earth.
The universality and the fullness had, as had the Roman organization, boundaries beyond which was disorder. Clovis in the fifth century crossed the Rhine not only into the Romanized world but into humanity, for, as Gregory of Tours tells us, his ancestor was a dragon or demon of the other side. The Eros within was Christ; the Mother within was a Virgin. The Eros without or beyond the pale was “a monster Bridegroom,” was Pan and then Satan; the Mother without was Nature, was Aphrodite, was a Witch, was Lilith. The Church was a bulwark against them—against the unification of man with his other nature—even in marriage. The Nature without was lawless and false. The Church recognized a Nature within and defined what was outside that recognition as contra naturam.
The Palace of Eros, where once Psyche had known every imagined thing, had fallen into the darkness of a perishing civilization, and Psyche’s tasks had begun. Driven by dogma, threatened by excommunication, she must harrow Hell before she come again into the light of the upper world.
Pound, in The Spirit of Romance, recalls another contemporary of Apuleius and Ignatius of Antioch in the second century—the author of the Pervigilium Veneris. When we put together the spiritual world projected by the magician, the Christian saint, and the pagan poet as they portrayed the dream content of their time as it were, we begin to gather that not only Christians but others too experienced the loss of a Divine Power in their history, and the promise in which Time, the time of history, became the stage of a spiritual drama, and in which there was to be a Resurrection, a Reunification of Paradise. In the division, there was not only the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, or the Christ Enthroned, God of the Roman Empire, but there was an other Christ of the mystery cults, who had His place with Isis and with Aphrodite, the Venus Genetrix, and with the Virgin Without.
“Yea, hers is the song, and the silence is ours!” so the poet of the second century sings in prophecy of the Dark Ages ahead:
Ah, when shall mine own spring come?
When, as a swallow long silent, shall my silence find end?
Then Pound tells us: “The song did not again awake until the Provençal viol aroused it.” The song, the “spring,” the consort, the Sun, the Son—these seem to belong to the complex of one spiritual experience, once we read beyond the limitations of the permissions and prohibitions of the particular church.
The Church was a husk of the divine realm. The medieval synthesis was also the ground of a winter in which seeds of a new transformation worked, crossings-over and minglings of spirit where it had been scattered and gathered now toward new growth and species. In the eleventh century, poets again appear, as if spring, nine centuries underground, had returned from the Pervigilium Veneris. “High and low among the first come leaves,” Arnaut sings: “The boughs and sprays are new with flowers, and no bird holds mute a mouth or throat, but cries and sings.”
The Spring genius breaks through the husk everywhere in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, within the Church and without. In Poictiers and Champagne, the trouvères sang once more of a Lady and of an ars amatoria that was the secret of an ars poetica. There were courts of a law that was Love’s or Amor’s, where certain ladies sat in judgment, and poets avowed they knew no other law over their hearts. Pound, writing for G. R. S. Mead’s journal The Quest, suggests that the Lady “serves as a sort of mantram” and he quotes from a code of Amor’s law: “The lover stands ever in unintermittent imagination of his lady (coamantis).” It was perhaps the Law Without, for the ladies commanded duties of love or proofs that were acts contra naturam. “I am Arnaut,” Daniel sings, “who swims against the current,”—nadi contra suberna.
; There was some inner rite; there was a trobar clus. There was a forbidden matter, a going against the current so Pound tells us, that needed a poetry that would carry more than one current of meaning. For some it was a matter of alternative meaning; for some, of double meanings. The poetry of Provence was divided into an orthodox language of single meanings and an heretical language where meanings were united in a spiritual double-entendre. “We find this poetry divided into two schools,” Pound writes:
the first school complained about the obscurities of the second—we have them always with us. They claimed, or rather jeered in Provence, remonstrated in Tuscany, wrangle today, and will wrangle tomorrow—and not without some show of reason—that poetry, especially lyric poetry, must be simple; that you must get the meaning while the man sings it.
Where there was, some objected, a willful obscurity, there was for others a matrix of meanings. In Provence, in castles on the Rhine, up from the hinterlands of the Pyrenees or of Wales, poets began to sing of hearts or of a land that had long lain waste and desert, of a Lady who is Queen of Love, of Fairy, of an Island or a Wood. There is a requirement of adultery or a condition of adultery; things are mixed or must be mixed. But also, the hero of the new mysteries must transgress the sacraments of the Church to come into the environs of the Eros Without; he must prove his Love. Forbidden sexual acts are bidden as proofs. There is no service that is not ordered.
While in the courts of the feudal order there appeared those other courts of Poetry and Romance, at large in Provence another movement was at work—or perhaps another phase of the same happening? Out of Bulgaria, from the margins of Christendom in the East, had come preachers of a Manichean Christ—so the Church says—and they won converts everywhere. There are echoes of the Hellenistic gnosis in their legend. They kept certain laws of the spirit—they would not eat meat nor would they kill; they would not take oath; they volunteered poverty. There were rites of purgation, catharsis, to free the spirit from its bondage to the body of this world. They were exiles from Paradise and sought return, purification. They had revived the old order of Spirit, Soul, and Body, as the Hellenistic culture had pictured them, as separate and contesting identities, and they had turned against the Incarnation. This heresy we know because these things had become spiritual scandals in the eyes of the Church, which brought them to trial. Not only the Albigensians but Waldenses and Spiritual Franciscans—those who kept the terms of Saint Francis’s will and testament and who embraced Poverty—“the Lady Poverty,” he had called her—were hunted down and exterminated.
Christ, verus imperator mundi, in the person of His vicar, Innocent III, out of His plenitudo potestatis, His fullness of power in this world, released the horrors of the Albigensian crusade upon Provence, where the specter of an other Christ had invaded the Empire. If we do not believe, as the Albigensians were said to have believed, in a dualism throughout the universe between forces of light and forces of dark, eternally alien to each other, what we see here is a God divided against Himself. The Eros within Christendom was permitted or gave His permission only in the orders of generation; all other Eros was forbidden. So, from outside the Empire, from the margins where things mix, a Christ returns, and an Eros too, whose law is now the verso of the law of the established Church. In this new Law, the generative order is forbidden; all other Eros is permitted. An echo of the Church’s accusations against the Cathars or Bogomils—they were, originally, Bulgars—is left in our word today for one of these forbidden sexual acts that is still outside the law of the established State: buggery. In this feature of transgression in Eros, the cults of the Perfecti resembled the courts of Amor.
There was another likeness between the code of the Troubadour and the creed of the Cathar, for in each there was a cult of the Lady. If the heresy of Provence was of the Gnostic-Manichean tradition, it would have taught that the secret of the Light or Spirit that was imprisoned in the world had something to do with a Woman—a Helen or Sophia. There was at Montsegur, so the twentieth-century Albigensian devotee Maurice Magre writes, a Lady Esclarmonde. But when we seek out her legend, we find there were two—Esclarmonde de Foix, the chaste, who keeps the castle, and, wandering with the outcasts in the forests and mountains, Esclarmonde d’Alion, the bastard, l’amoureuse. Where does the story come from? It comes, one suspects, made to fit the romance of the Gnostic Helen or Sophia who had been “Light of the World,” yet was found by the Magus Simon in a brothel in Tyre. Once fitting, it becomes part of the story. There was then a Lady. However close, whatever correspondence there was or was not, between the heresy and the ars amatoria of the poets and their Lady, the trobar of Provence came to an end when the Cathar came to an end.
But the infection was abroad, the signs of a new time continue. On the Rhine they refused to take oath; at Lyons they gave their goods to the poor and went out to preach, inspired by the Spiritus Sanctus—or was it the “Santa SPIRITA, breather, life, / Beyond the light,” as the New World poet Walt Whitman is bold to name Her in his “Chanting the Square Deific.” At Assisi, Saint Francis in his Testament said that God Himself commanded him and his brothers give all to the poor and to be content with but one patched cloak. “And I labored with my hands,” he wrote, “and I wish to labor; and I wish all other brothers to labor.” Labor, that, like woman, had been designated a necessary evil, was proclaimed in the new vision a great good. Poverty itself was taken to be good. There was too close a likeness perhaps between the vows of poverty that the Cathars made and the love Saint Francis proclaimed for his Lady, his sancta paupertas. After the death of the saint, from the infallibility of His dogma, Pope John XXII declared the love of poverty to be heretical. The Saint was to be established Within; his Wish was to be banished Without. In 1318, at Marseilles, four who kept their vows to Saint Francis’s Rule were burned.
In his Frederick II, Ernst Kantorowicz sees Francis as a poet, for he lived in this world, it seems to the historian as if it were in the eternal presence of all things; he lived in metaphor as if it were not a mere device of rhetoric but were a reality of what was. He was, Kantorowicz writes, “the first open-eyed soul who spontaneously experienced Nature and Life as magic and emotion, and traced the same divine pneuma in all that lived.” Francis lived in the Palace of Eros then, in the fullness of the imagination, and, receiving the stigmata, he received too the burn from the oil of Psyche’s lamp—he impersonated Eros.
If Saint Francis can be seen so, to be not only a saint but a poet, and his very sanctity to be a verity of his poetic imagination, we too begin to experience “Nature and Life as magic and emotion.” A story or mythos of many myths begins to unfold in history itself that has poetic organization. Actual men become dramatis personae of a stage beyond the actual. Again and again, in eternal return, the old orders will not behave themselves, but move to speak in the new.
So, not only the song of the minnesingers sounds in the religious poetry of Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of God, so that we recognize in the language of the Catholic mystics’ illumination erotic terms that may be traced to a theophany that once belonged to the troubadours of Provence, but we may see too in the Catholic devotee’s address to Frau Minne ghostly parallels to the old story of Cupid and Psyche that Apuleius told in the Hellenistic second century in which the mythic identities of Logo, Light, and Love, were compounded. “My Lady Love,” the Soul in Mechthild’s poem pleads, “Thou hast hunted and taken, bound and wounded me; never shall I be healed.” It is Christ who is the all-but-lost Bridegroom of the Soul, in love of Whom the Soul is wounded. The terms are Christian, but we remember that Christ, too, like the Bridegroom in Apuleius’s tale, was Love wounded for the sake of Love, and was taken up into heaven, because of a Disobedience. Dimly, but, once we suspect its presence, persistently, elements from an earlier story show through the later writing in the palimpsest. When Frau Minne answers the Soul, saying: “It was my pleasure to hunt thee; to take thee captive was my desire; to bind thee was my joy,” behind her figure another s
eems to stand—Venus in her wrath upbraiding Psyche. “I drove Almighty God from His throne in heaven, and took His human life from Him, and then with honor gave Him back to His Father,” she continues, “How couldst thou, poor worm, save thyself from me!”—even so we may remember another god driven from his palace and his bride, his human life, by Venus, and removed into the realm of immortal Zeus, beyond Psyche’s reach. Psyche, who in her beauty was yet but a soul-worm, yet to become the soul butterfly herself. The story of one Eros we find entering the story of the other Eros.
Provence was laid waste, but out of the cult of its poets the ars amatoria went as a poetic tradition, from Toulouse to Palermo and Florence. In that tradition or teaching, Dante was to discover in his Beatrice a magic having to do with the vision of God; His Lady was to lead him until she drew him “Within the yellow of the eternal rose”—Nel giallo della rosa sempiterna—“which doth expand, rank upon rank, and reeketh perfume of praise unto the Sun that maketh spring for ever.” Such is the inspiration of Dante, and such his vision therein, that in Commedia, as in Saint Francis’s legend and his Canticle of Brother Sun, it almost seems as if the separation of and from Eros were to be healed.
Out of the Celtic world, in the twelfth century, from the extreme Western borderlands of Christendom, possibly first by a Welsh prince, Bledri ap Cadivor, who was, so Jessie Weston tells us, “Latinarius” or “translator” and who had come over to the Norman side from the pagan Welsh world, a story came over to the Christian side, a magic is translated into the content of a religion, and again, the Eros Without comes over into the Eros Within. Francesca, who whirls in the hellish storm of the Eros Without, tells Dante that she and Paolo were seduced by the enchantment of reading the story of Lancelot, seduced by Romance. The Celtic genius in a poetry that was not a rational melody but the weaving of a spell so intertwined and elaborated its figures that now we see the one Eros and now the Other, Within and Without dance in interchanging patterns. Which came first? the scholars still ask. Fertility cult, folk lore, or Christian mystery—however we read—the hallows, the Grail, the Lance that drips its blood into the Dish, the Wound, the Question that is not asked, the Lamenting Women that attend, are feyrie, phanopoeia. The sacra of the Church and the magic treasures of ancient kings, the sexual emblems and ritual objects of chthonic cults, have been stolen to furnish the changeling mysteries of a Romance in Poetry. They have become properties of an other stage that presents a play within the play.
The H.D. Book Page 10