This Moon Goddess is variously called Persephone, Kore, Diana, Luna, Hecate. She has so many names, explained philologist Károly Kerényi, “because the real one was not allowed to be uttered.” The symbol of the moon is used for obvious reasons. Both luminous and dark, bright and then gone, she shines and extinguishes, dies and comes back. But the moon is also something greater than the moon: a goddess, a deity, a metaphor, a force within love, within each of us. In the mystery cults, she is also called the Honied. Like honeybees, wrote Raine, “souls that descend into generation will make their way home to the eternal world.”
Today, such esoteric thought has to be spelled out for us to even begin grasping its meaning. But for those in whom this pictorial language lived, the meaning was clear, indisputable. Such myths were reminders. We die and then live on, returning again and again—like bees to the hive, like the moon in the sky, like water evaporating up and raining down. Another dimension to this mythology is hinted at in the actual encounter between the light-spirit and the Moon Goddess. Love is sacred, it suggests, divine in nature—and the feeling of love is what makes souls become human. Variations on this concept are found in mystical teachings of all times.
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According to the Swedish scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the sensation of love corresponds physically to the spiritual experience of God. Beginning in his mid-fifties, Swedenborg experienced a protracted series of religious revelations in which he spoke with angels. These conversations led him to a realization of the connections between this world and the spiritual world. His theory of correspondences states that everything on earth refers to something above. And we can only approach the things of the spiritual realm indirectly, he said, through correspondences, which take the form of symbols. To decipher the symbols around us is to come into contact with the sacred.
Swedenborg composed several encyclopedic works on the nature of symbols. These books, especially his treatise on the afterlife called Heaven and Hell, became sourcebooks for artists such as Borges, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Whitman, Strindberg, Balzac, and Goethe. As William Blake put it, “The works of this visionary are well worthy the attention of Painters and Poets; they are foundations for grand things.”
Swedenborg wrote at length on the symbolic meaning of fountains and water. At their most elemental level, both represent the possibility of coming into contact with divine truths. When the Bible speaks of a “pure river of water of life, bright as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God” or a “fountain of water springing up into everlasting life,” he wrote, it should be clear that something spiritual is meant, not something material—hence the use of correspondences. “It is manifest to everyone that the ‘waters’ here do not signify waters,” he explained, “but that spiritual waters are meant, that is, spiritual things which are of truth; otherwise this would be a heap of empty words.”
The ancient Greeks also spoke of correspondences in their doctrine of the Forms. They considered Forms to be eternal, unchanging archetypes of true Reality. All life in this universe, they said, spills forth from the Form of Beauty. Through love, we set eyes on the limitless ocean of Beauty, the fountain itself. Those witnessing the final object of all seeing cannot remain mere watchers, Plotinus wrote. Filled with the fountain’s overflow, they become molten into oneness with the vision. They become Beauty. The soul that beholds beauty, as Father Gervais often said in class, itself becomes beautiful.
In ancient Greece, Eros played a role in this process. Truth, explained Socrates, can only be attained through the inspiration of love. And all lovers desire both beauty as well as immortality. In the Phaedrus, love sent from above is described as “the greatest benefit that heaven can confer on us.” Why? Because it shows us that the soul is immortal and indestructible.
At that time, Eros was considered an “all-begetting and all-uniting life force.” It brought things together, had preservative powers, and tempted us to bring forth art and life. All creative efforts, what the Greeks called poiesis, or poetry, is done with immortality in mind. Plato distinguished between three main forms of poiesis. The first is sexual reproduction, a creative act which provides immortality in the sense that a genetic lineage will survive the parent’s own bodily existence. The second category of poiesis is the attainment of fame, which leaves a legacy after death. The third, and highest, expression of poiesis occurs when one’s Eros-inspired pursuit of wisdom results in an experience of the soul’s indestructibility.
Socrates’s speech in the Symposium is more than a discourse on the possible meanings of love. It also serves as a guide on how Eros can launch us into an awareness of the sacred. Socrates begins by explaining that Eros is not a god but rather a spirit, half-human and half-divine. Eros, he says, is a kind of magical force that transmits messages and energy between mortals and immortals.
When Eros enters our life, a metaphorical ladder appears before us. Love is an invitation to climb. On the first rung of the ladder, we see beauty in our lover. On the next rung, we find ourselves appreciating the beauty in everybody. The following step is the realization of inner beauty, of mental beauty—that a beautiful soul is of higher desirability than a beautiful exterior. Once this stage has been attained, the lover starts noticing the beauty in daily habits, in everyday surroundings, in life as it is. This in turn leads to the erotic love of wisdom, an ascent that grants an inner vision of ultimate beauty, the breathtaking Form of Beauty itself, that limitless ocean of beauty. It is beyond time, eternal and uncreated, an everlasting loveliness from which all other manifestations of beauty stem.
Those falling in love can find themselves glimpsing into what lies beyond the grave. Having done so, assured of something greater than themselves, they feel ready to die. Socrates considered this to be the profoundest experience of immortality available to humankind.
For many pagans, the power of Eros was felt in a simpler way: through orgasms. In that little death, they felt the same thing mystics felt in their Eleusinian trance. Believers in the mystery cults considered orgasms to be proof of human indestructibility, spasms emanating from and connecting us to the bright world of the Forms. Perhaps they thought sexual climaxing was what everything would feel like in the never-ending perfection of the afterlife.
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In 1927, the Nobel Prize–winning French writer Romain Rolland coined the term “oceanic experience” to describe a spontaneous, mystical experience of oneness with the world. He called it a “simple and direct experience of eternity.” It’s the ineffable limitlessness felt in religious experiences, and in certain heightened moments of Eros, a sensation of an indissoluble bond with the divine. These oceanic moments transport us into what Rolland called a sur-vie, meaning something more than life: a blissful, exalted sense of omnipotence and elation.
Wondering what they signified, in psychological terms, Rolland sent a letter to Sigmund Freud, asking for his thoughts on such oceanic presentiments of eternity. Freud, who’d never been much of a mystic, replied that the oceanic feeling might be a vestige of the primordial unity everyone feels in their mother’s womb. Perhaps all mystical experiences, he speculated, are flashbacks to the tranquillity preceding birth.
During the intrauterine period, floating weightless in amniotic fluid, we really are one with our universe. We are the world. As newborns, we’re in a state of pure narcissism: we can’t distinguish between ourselves and the outside world. Gradually, we come to realize that our mother is not us, that we are not her, that we are the child but we are not, in fact, the world. We’ve left the prenatal garden of Eden. The trauma of separation makes us want to return to the state preceding it. The desire for the womb, to revert to a state of longed-for unity, remains with us in adulthood, if unconsciously so.
Freud felt that religious experiences confused the wish to reconnect with the womb with the wish to reconnect with the divine creator of all existence. This instinct to return to our literal maker—our mother, in whose belly we lived, in livin
g water where all our needs were met—got its wires crossed with the idea of a God in a carefree heaven where pure fountains gurgle through the meadows of paradise. Regardless of Freud’s opinions on religion, the womb-connection may explain why so many creation epics involve watery beginnings, why so many religions speak of aquatic miracles, even why the fantasy of a fountain of youth has persisted in our imaginations for so long.
Indeed, various hunter-gatherer tribes actually spoke of death as a watery world akin to the womb. Semang pygmies believed that immortal souls end up in Belet, but they can only eat the island’s miraculous breast-milk fruits once they have broken every one of their bones and flipped their eyes around in the sockets, reversing them so that they look inward. Papuans told of spirits ending up in Hiyoyoa, an idyllic land in the underwater ocean. Bulbous fruits seeping mother’s milk may or may not be there; we’ll find out when we die. Other Pacific Islanders spoke of the undersea paradise called Tsiabiloum, an enclosure without sickness or sorrow or any want whatsoever.
Freud’s contemporary Sándor Ferenczi developed his own psychoanalytical theories about “thalassal regression.” (Thalassa is a Greek word meaning “the sea.”) Our desire to climb back into the womb goes even deeper than infancy, he argued: it’s actually a wish to return to our oceanic origins, to the primal evolutionary sea from which humanity emerged eons ago. He felt that we all yearn, on some deep, amphibian level, to rebecome the aquatic creatures we once were.
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It is essential, if complicated, to distinguish between a symbolic image and the ulterior Reality of which it is suggestive. We sometimes lose sight of this important difference. Just as the image of something is not the thing itself and a map is not a territory, a symbol is not the object it represents. It’s common to identify too closely with a symbol. Physical immortalists do it all the time. No life-form has ever been proven capable of existing indefinitely, of living for millions upon millions of years, yet radical longevists think we’ll get there. Perhaps I’d made the same error by trying to see Copperfield’s fountain. Or perhaps it really existed. I didn’t know.
Symbols have a special power over us. We may even come to feel that a symbol can permit us to transcend the human condition. But that is not within the scope of a symbol’s attributes. We all need myths. When old myths wear out, we create new ones, such as the myth of physical immortality. When we enter into new mythologies, we should be careful about mistaking a symbol for what it represents. It’s so simple to slip into magical thinking.
Spiritual immortality is not literal immortality. And the fountain of youth isn’t real. But humans have always been particularly adept at literalizing the symbolic, at confusing divine constructs with actual reality. It’s part of our innate tendency to attempt to make sense of our ever-shifting surroundings and interior states by dipping our fingers into something intangible and then triumphantly declaring that it’s actually tangible.
* * *
Back at home after my trip to Musha Cay, I still harbored hopes that the fountain might be real. My BestLife story wouldn’t be able to resolve the mystery of his gene-reversing liquid, but I wanted to believe that writing “David’s Magical Island” would incite him to invite me back so I could actually see it. I sent off an e-mail, telling him that the magazine piece would essentially discuss what it’s like to visit Musha, with its treasure hunts and that incredible assortment of artifacts, while also incorporating David’s vision of its future, from the valley of the giants to the yetis. “This means that we’re going to veer away from the fountain-of-youth angle for BestLife,” I concluded. “That said, I seriously plan to pursue that aspect for another story in the future (as we’ve discussed, David).”
But before I even had a chance to write the puff piece, my editor e-mailed, saying that BestLife had folded.1 Martha got in touch shortly thereafter to express her condolences. Musha Cay was doing fine, she wrote. “David has had some interesting bookings and he keeps relentlessly building his world. He has added another Treasure Hunt. He really does live in a world of fantasy!!”
I asked if his giraffes had arrived yet.
“No giraffes yet,” replied Martha. “Let me see if I can get an ETA.”
Later that day, the phone rang while I was in the bathtub. Recognizing Copperfield’s number, I picked up and suggested we speak after my bath. He quickly mentioned that the giraffes weren’t there yet; he was still designing their barn. But he’d just bought a flock of eighty flamingos. “That’s pretty cool, right?” he asked, uncertain.
I reminded him to contact me once he was ready to show the fountain. He said he would be sure to. He never did.
* * *
Six months after my trip, Lacey Carroll, his accuser in the rape case, called Washington State law enforcement after blacking out and waking up in a hotel room in the company of a man assailing her. Video footage showed the two of them at the front desk of the Bellevue Club Hotel together. Carroll seemed in full control of her faculties. But that’s not how she remembered it. She told 911 she couldn’t remember checking in at all. The man, whoever he may have been, had a very different story. He told police that she asked him to “put $2,000 in my purse and you can have it all.” He refused to pay her. She then got upset, he alleged, and stormed out of the room. He found her in the lobby, surrounded by hotel staff, saying that he had taken advantage of her.
The police charged her with prostitution. Copperfield’s lawyers pounced, vociferously denouncing Carroll as a fraud. At her trial, Carroll’s prostitution and false-statement charges were dismissed in exchange for her pleading guilty to charges of obstructing a police officer. The bargain cost her $953 and thirty hours of community service. “She is not a prostitute or a liar,” said her attorney, Robert Flennaugh, in a statement to media. But she was done with the court system. “She just wants to put this behind her and get on with her life.”
As a result, the assistant US attorney heading the federal grand jury investigation announced that they were dropping the Copperfield investigation “based on jurisdictional grounds.” Whatever happened in the Bahamas, it was staying in the Bahamas.
* * *
“I know this much for sure: Copperfield never woulda raped anybody,” Rick Marcelli told me over the phone. I’d called Marcelli, Copperfield’s former personal manager (and the image-maker who gave him his trademark romantic-rocker matinee-idol look), to ask his opinion about the fountain. “Fountain of youth my ass—tell his hair that,” Marcelli responded, laughing. “It looks like he has a dead rat up there.”
I did recall being puzzled about Copperfield’s hair. On the island, he always wore a baseball cap, but at times he’d angle his hat up slightly to wipe his forehead, revealing wispy, sparse hairs matted there. “What—does he have hair plugs or something?” I asked Marcelli.
“I have no idea what’s going on with that. And I should know! But to me, this whole ‘fountain’ scheme is brilliant marketing for the island. Listen, he’s a magician. It’s not the Bible business. It’s not the truth business. It’s the art of misdirection. It’s deception. It’s lying.”
Bill Zehme opened his 1994 Esquire profile of David Copperfield with the line “Nothing he does is real.” After reading the article, the magician faxed off a three-page letter expressing his discontent: “I was, I will admit, excited to have an in-depth article about my career. . . . I will also admit, I wasn’t quite prepared to learn that my soul was primarily about Pringles, diarrhea, trivia, nipples, and the importance of having a tan.” Gossip columnist Liz Smith, commenting on the dustup, noted, “Reading about oneself is a very subjective matter indeed. What strikes others as fascinating may make the subject’s own skin crawl.”
A few weeks after Lacey Carroll’s case imploded, an e-mail arrived from Martha, asking if I’d be able to write about his having been “officially exonerated.” Even though the “David’s Magical Island” angle died when BestLife folded, I assured her I would certainly tell the story of my island experie
nce. He may have withheld the fountain, but Copperfield had been generous enough to give me a story. If it wasn’t the story either of us had hoped for, there was still a kind of magical complicity in what transpired.
One moment in particular will always stay with me. On the speedboat leaving Musha, smiling uncontrollably, childishly, I looked at Raf and realized I felt so happy. Whether or not the fountain existed, Copperfield had made me believe it might. And that was enough.
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1. Shortly before this book went to press, Rodale relaunched BestLife as a quarterly.
17
Transmuting Magic into Science
There is in this business more than nature.
—Shakespeare, The Tempest
Then it seemed like falling into a labyrinth; we thought we were at the finish, but our way bent round and we found ourselves as it were back at the beginning and just as far from that which we were seeking at first.
—Socrates, in Plato’s Euthydemos
THE TEMPEST ends with Prospero breaking his wand in two. Ridding himself of enchantments, he rejects magic, finds forgiveness, and accepts reality with all its limitations and infirmities. In this way, just as Prospero acts as a stand-in for an aging Shakespeare, Prospero’s story is our story. We’re all betrayed by growing old.
We’re also all born with an epistemophilic instinct, an urge to know, to understand where we come from and how we got here. This natural inclination can never be fulfilled. We’ll never understand why life is or what death means. As we age, the magical explanations we concocted in childhood either fall away in disillusionment or evolve into increasingly complex illusions. Our ravening hunger to know more leads us into the desire to unearth hidden arcana, to compute the suprasensible, to solve existence.
Book of Immortality Page 27