Panurge curled his lip as a sign of derision. Then he cried out, saying, ‘Would to God that here – without proceeding any further – I could have the Word of the Dive Bouteille.’
How Pantagruel landed at the manor of Messer Gaster, the first Master of Arts of this world
CHAPTER 57
[Rabelais invents a powerful myth in the wake of Calcagnini. First he gave us the ‘Manor of Truth’: now he gives us the ‘Manor of Virtue’. Rabelais retells Hesiod’s famous myth of the hard, stony path leading up to the serene plateau of Virtue (Works and Days, 289ff.).
Many Renaissance thinkers sought to discover the prime natural driving-force in this world. Love, Flato shows, links Heaven and Earth; but is not that driving-force. (Ficino, who is not mentioned, taught that it was.) For Rabelais Nature governs this world through the belly, through fear of hunger. In the Prologue to his Satires, Persius calls the Belly the world’s ‘Master of Arts and Dispenser of Genius’. All the earthly arts, crafts and accomplishments of men and beasts derive from him. Rabelais develops that theme.
The fifteenth-century Council of Basle led to the Pragmatic Sanctions of Charles VII. It deposed the Pope. It was for Gallicans a favourite Council.
Aesop provides a famous fable. Calcagnini, Plutarch and above all Erasmus often overlap and contribute much to this and the following chapters.69]
That same day Pantagruel landed on an island which was wonderful above all others both for its site and its Governor. At first it was steep, stony, precipitous and barren on all sides, ill-pleasing to the eye, very tough on the feet and hardly less inaccessible than that mountain in Dauphiné which is called Inaccessible because it is shaped like a toadstool and nobody in living memory has climbed it, except Doyac, King Charles the Eighth’s Master of Ordnance, who got up to the top by means of ingenious contrivances. There he found an aged ram. It was anyone’s guess what had transported it there: some suggested that an eagle or horned owl had carried it up as a kid and that it had then escaped into a thicket.
Overcoming the difficult approaches with great toil and not without sweat, we found the top to be so pleasant, fertile, wholesome and delightful that I thought it was the true earthly Garden and Paradise over whose situation our good theologians so much quarrel and strive.
Pantagruel assured us however – without prejudice to a sounder opinion – that it was the Manor of Arete (that is, Virtue), described by Hesiod. Its Governor was Messer Gaster, the first Master of the Arts of this world. If you think that fire is the Grand Master of the Arts as Cicero wrote, you are wrong and in error, for Cicero never believed it. If, as our ancient Druids used to believe, you think that Mercury is the first inventor of the arts, you are very mistaken. The judgement of the Satirist is true when he says that of all the arts Messer Gaster is the Master. (With him there peacefully dwelt Penia, that good Lady otherwise known as Want, the mother of the Nine Muses, from whom, in company with Porus, the Lord of Abundance, was born Love, that noble boy who mediates between Heaven and Earth, for which Plato vouches in The Symposium).
To Gaster, that chivalrous King, all of us were obliged to pay homage, swear obedience and do honour, for he is imperious, round, rigorous, hard, difficult and unbending. You cannot get him to believe anything or to accept any contestation or persuasion.
He hears nothing whatsoever. Harpocras (the god of Silence whom the Greeks knew as Sigalion) was by the Egyptians called astomé (that is, mouthless): Gaster was likewise created without any ears, as was the statue of Jupiter in Candia. Gaster talks only by signs; but everybody everywhere obeys those signs more promptly than the edicts of praetors or the commands of kings. Over his summonses he admits no delay, no demurral. People say that at the lion’s roar the beasts round about all shudder, as far that is as its voice carries. That’s written down. It’s true. I’ve seen it. But I assure you that, at the commandments of Messer Gaster, the whole welkin trembles and the Earth quakes. His commandment has been issued: obey it at once or die.
The pilot recounted to us how, one day, following the example (which Aesop describes) of the Limbs conspiring against the Belly, the entire kingdom of the Somata conspired together against Gaster and swore to withdraw their obedience from him. They soon felt the effects of it, repented and very humbly returned to his service: otherwise they would have all died of widespread hunger. In no matter what company he may be, there can be no argument about rank or precedence: Gaster always goes before, be the others kings, emperors or indeed the Pope. He proceeded first at the Council of Basle, despite people saying that that Council was seditious on account of the contentions and squabbles over the top places.
The whole world is taken up with serving him; the whole world toils for him. And in return this is the good he does for the world: he invents all the arts, all the tools, all the skills, all the instruments, all the crafts. He even teaches brute beasts arts denied them by Nature: ravens, jays, parrots and starlings he turns into poets; and magpies into poetesses, teaching them to talk, to sing and to utter human speech.
And all for their innards.
Eagles, gerfalcons, falcons, sakers, laniers, goshawks, spar-hawks, merlins, hagards, passenger-hawks, unmoulted hawks – birds savage and wild – he so tames and domesticates that he can allow them the full freedom of the skies for as high as he chooses and as long as he likes, making them hover, proceed, fly and glide, paying him court and flirting with him from above the clouds, then making them suddenly swoop down again to earth.
And all for their innards.
Elephants, lions, rhinoceroses, bears, horses, and dogs he makes to dance, jig, jump, fight, swim, hide away, retrieve whatever he wants and carry whatever he wants.
And all for the innards.
Fishes from sea and lake, as well as whales and sea-monsters, he makes to surge up from the deep abyss; wolves he drives from the woods; bears, from amongst the rocks, foxes from their lairs, and snakes from the ground.
And all for their innards.
To be brief, he is so inordinate in his rage that he devours them all, beasts (and humans, as was seen amongst the Vascons when Quintus Metellus was laying siege to them during the Sertorian Wars, amongst the Saguntines besieged by Hannibal, the Jews, besieged by the Romans, and some six hundred other examples).
And all for their innards.
When his Regent, Penia, stalks abroad, wherever she goes all Parlements are prorogued, all edicts are mute; all ordinances, vain. To no law is she subject: from every law is she exempt. Everywhere everyone flees her, risking shipwreck at sea or electing to pass through fire, mountain or abyss rather than to be apprehended by her.
How in the Court of the Master-Inventor Pantagruel denounced the Engastrimyths and the Gastrolaters
CHAPTER 58
[‘Engastrimyths’ were in the strict sense ventriloquists – men or women with a prophetic spirit talking from within their bellies.
The name of Jacoba Rhodigina’s indwelling spirit, Cincinnatulus (in French Crêpelu) means ‘Curly-head’. This anecdote, which seems so personal, is in fact not so. It is not an account of something Rabelais had witnessed in 1513. The words are lifted date and all – even the ‘we’ – from the Ancient Readings of Richerius Rhodiginus.
Rabelais could well have called these people ‘Gastromarges’ (Gas-tromargoi, Men mad about their bellies) following Aristotle, as cited by Erasmus in an adage which influenced him here (II, VIII, LXXVIII, ‘Bellies’). But that term is too weak: the Fourth Book is concerned with idolatry. Monks are condemned not as men insanely devoted to the belly but as men who make the belly into a god. They are firmly condemned with echoes of the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer and by a long and sobering quotation from Saint Paul. (Philippians 3:19).
The Belly, Messer Gaster, is a created driving-force within Nature. He must be acknowledged, but he is not God. Not even a god. He works within fallen Nature. The dread Belly-worshippers are monks, now all condemned as more than idle men concerned with vestments: they, lik
e the Papimanes, worship a false god.
Rabelais confounds Hesiod with Homer over a quotation very frequently applied to monks by their critics and enemies.
He is still writing with his Plutarch open before him: his closing reference to the Cyclops is taken direct from the Obsolescence of Oracles, 435 AB. He also turns to the Adages of Erasmus for IV, I, XXXIX. ‘Eurycles’ (the name of a soothsaying ventriloquist in Antiquity). Rabelais starts off by calling Gaster ‘maistre ingénieux’; at that time ingénieux meant both ingenious and engineer.]
In the Court of that great Master, that ingenious engineer, Pantagruel noticed two kinds of retainers, both importunate and far too obsequious, whom he held in great abomination. Some were called Engastrimyths; the other, Gastrolaters.
The Engastrimyths (citing on this subject the testimony of Aristophanes in his comedy called The Wasps) claim to be descended from the ancient family of Eurycles. That is why they were called Euryclians in ancient times as Plato writes (and Plutarch too in Why Oracles Have Ceased). They are called Ventriloquists in the holy Decretum (26 question 3), and Hippocrates (in Book Five of the Epidemics) calls them in Greek ‘Ones talking from the belly’ (Sophocles calls them Sternomantes). They were fortune-tellers, casters of spells and deceivers of simple folk, appearing to speak, and to answer those who questioned them, not with their mouths but their bellies.
About the year of our Blessèd Servator 1513, there was just such a woman, Jacoba Rhodigina, an Italian of humble origins, from whose belly we, and an infinite number of others in Ferrara and elsewhere, often heard the voice of the foul Spirit (soft, certainly, weak and low, yet well articulated, clear and intelligible) after she was summoned and sent for out of curiosity by certain rich lords and princes of Cisalpine Gaul. To remove any suspicion of feint or hidden fraud they stripped her quite naked and stopped up her mouth and nose. Her wicked Spirit called himself Curly-head or Cincinnatulus and seemed to enjoy being thus addressed. When he was called by that name he at once replied to anything put to him. If questioned about matters past or present, he replied so pertinently that those listening were moved to wonder; when questioned about the future he always lied, never telling the truth once, and often seemed to be admitting his ignorance by letting off a fat fart in lieu of an answer or else by mumbling a few unintelligible words with barbaric inflections.
The Gastrolaters were in another place, huddled together in groups and bands, some merry, elegant and cuddly, others sad, grave, severe and sour: all lazy, doing nothing, never working, ‘a useless load and burden on the world’, as Hesiod put it. They were (as far as one could judge) terrified of offending and pinching their belly, and what is more so bizarrely masked, cloaked and disguised that it was a sight to see. You say – and it is written by several wise philosophers of Antiquity – that the intelligent workings of Nature are wondrously revealed in the joyous abandon she seems to show in the forming of sea-shells: we find such variety in them, so many shapes and colours, so many lines and forms inimitable by art. Well, I can assure you that in the vestment-shells of those Gastrolaters we noticed no less diversity and disguises. They all held Gaster to be their great God; they worshipped him as God; sacrificed to him as to their God Almighty. They had no other God before him; they served him and loved him above all things; and as their God they hallowed him. You could say that the Holy Apostle was writing specifically of them in Philippians 3: Tor many walk, of whom I have told you often and now tell you even weeping tears: enemies of the Cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly.’
Pantagruel compared him with the Cyclops Polyphemus, to whom Euripides attributes the following: ‘I never sacrifice to the gods: only to me, and to the greatest of all the gods, this my belly.’
Of the absurd statue called Manduces; and how and what the Gastrolaters sacrificed to their Ventripotent God
CHAPTER 59
[Carnivalesque fun at the expente of a frightening idol and the sacrifices offered to it by its monkish worshippers.
Rabelais draws in detail upon the explanation by Erasmus of an adage, IV, VIII, XXXII, ‘Manduces’ (a term applied to the extremely hungry and thence to a carnival-type figure in Antiquity with clacking wooden teeth. The name of the equivalent figure at Lyons in the time of Rabelais was Maschecrotte or Mâchecroutte. It was both frightening to little children and comic. Rabelais would also have seen Graulli, the figure of a dragon with clashing jaws which was paraded through the city on Saint Clement’s day.
Rabelais again lends a Classical Bacchic savour to his satire: ‘dithyrambs’ are wild Bacchanalian hymns addressed to Dionysius, ‘kraipa-lokomics’ are songs of crapulous Bacchanalian revelry, and ‘epaenetic hymns’ are songs of praise. All such hymns are addressed by the Gastrolaters to their belly-god.]
As we all contemplated in sheer amazement the grimaces and gestures of those lazy, great-gulletted Gastrolaters, we heard the impressive stroke of a bell at which they all drew up as for battle, each according to his charge, rank and seniority. Thus they moved towards Messer Gaster, following the lead of a portly, gross young Fat-guts who bore on top of a long golden pole a badly carved wooden statue, coarsely painted, such as is described by Plautus, Juvenal and Pompeius Festus. During the carnival at Lyons folk call it Mâchecroutte; here they call it Manduces. It was a monstrosity of an effigy, absurd, ghastly and terrifying to little children, with eyes bigger than its belly, with a head, bigger than the rest of its body put together, and with capacious, wide and horrible upper and lower jaws both lined with fangs, which were made to clack together by the ingenious device of a small cord hidden within the gilded pole (as is done at Metz with their Saint-Clement’s dragon).
As those Gastrolaters drew nearer, I could see that they were followed by a great number of fat serving-lads laden with panniers, baskets, hampers, pots, sacks and saucepans. Whereupon, led by Manduces, they chanted I-know-not-what dithyrambs, kraipalokômics and epaenetic hymns as, opening their baskets and their jars they offered up to their god:
White hippocras with soft dry toast,
white bread,
canon’s baps,
six varieties of grilled meats,
couscous,
hazlet,
fricassees (nine kinds),
thick slices of monastical bread-and-dripping,
lyonese sops,
hot-pots,
savoury bread,
burgher-bread,
goat meat (roasted),
veal-tongues: roasted, cold, sprinkled with ginger and
mustard,
pasties (small),
grey-bread soup (known as greyhound),
cabbages: (round-headed) stuffed with beef-marrow,
salmagundis,
amidst perpetual potations, with the good, taste-enticing white preceding, followed by the claret, chilled and red – as cold, I say, as ice – and each served in huge silver goblets.
Then they offered up:
chidlings dressed in fine mustard,
sausages (wet),
ox-tongues (smoked),
meats (salted),
chine-of-pork with peas,
veal (larded and stewed),
puddings (white),
saveloys,
sausages (dry),
hams,
boars’ heads,
venison (salted, with turnips),
pig’s-liver slices (grilled),
olives (pickled in brine).
All accompanied by perpetual potations.
Then they would shovel into Gaster’s gullet:
legs of lamb in garlic sauce,
pasties in hot gravy,
pork cutlets with stewed onions,
capons, roasted, all basted with their own dripping,
capons, young,
goosanders,
goats,
fawns,
deer,
hares, leverets,
pheasant, pheasant-poults,
peacocks, peachicks,
storks, storklets,
woodcocks, jadcocks,
ortolans,
turkeys: cocks, hens and chicks,
woodpigeons: young ditto,
pork in beer-wort,
ducks in onion sauce à la française,
blackbirds,
corncrakes,
moor-hens,
sheldrakes,
egrets,
teals,
loons,
bitterns,
spoonbills,
curlews,
hazel-grouse,
coots with leeks,
robin red-breasts,
kids,
shoulders of mutton with capers,
beef-cutlets à la royale,
breasts of veal,
boiled hens with fattened capons in a rich cream-and-
almond sauce,
pintails,
pullets,
rabbits, young coneys,
quails, quail-chicks,
pigeons, pigeon-chicks,
herons, hernshaws,
bustards, bustard-chicks,
beccaficos,
guinea-fowl,
plovers,
geese, goslings,
pigeons,
wild ducklings,
redwings,
flamingos,
swans,
shoveller-ducks,
snipe,
cranes,
red-shanks,
curlews,
whimbrels,
turtle-doves,
rabbits,
porcupines,
and
brook ouzels.
Reinforced throughout by wsne.
Then followed huge:
venison pasties,
lark pasties,
loir pasties,
alpine-ibex pasties,
roe-deer pasties,
pigeon pasties,
chamois pasties,
capon pasties,
bacon pasties,
pigs’ trotters in lard,
savoury pastry-fricassees,
broiled legs of capon,
cheeses,
peaches from Corbeil,
Gargantua and Pantagruel Page 85