In Chrétien de Troyes, the confusion within the story of maiming, blood and consecration extends to the characters and family of those who rely on the “host” for sustenance, for healing and who must identify it, to extract it from mystery. Percival is told by his mother that “your father was wounded…through his thighs” during a barbarian invasion. “The noble Fisher King,” a maiden later tells Perceval “was struck by a javelin through both thighs.” By this defining symbol and title, he seems identical to “the son of the king who is served from the grail” as the “holy hermit” tells him . The hermit further identifies the king, “the man served from it [the grail dish] as his brother, telling Perceval, “your mother was his sister and mine, and the rich Fisher King, I believe, is the son of the king who is served from the grail” . So the Fisher King, “maimed through his thighs” is both the nephew, “I believe” says the hermit, mystifying the mystery, and the husband of Percival’s mother; that is he is Perceval’s father and also cousin. This demonic tangle of ambiguous relationships is intrinsic to Perceval’s failure to ask about the mysterious procession for it is stressed that in being a-typically mute he was following the advice of his mentor Gornemont who taught him the skills of combat .

It also is noteworthy to the tale’s ambiguities, trauma and drive for purification — goals intrinsic to image-work — that narratives of the Grail accompany, in the formative account of Chretien, intense expressions of hatred for Jews, the formative matter or ‘host’ absorbed by Greco-Roman culture into itself to form “the West,” matter with which its metamorphic sensibility of demonic erotic trauma cannot cohere. The penitents who meet Perceval on Good Friday and send him to the hermit tell him, “the wicked Jews whom we should kill like dogs…did us great good when in their malice they raised Him on the Cross: they damned themselves and saved us.” The negation neatly states the paradoxical need of the cult of aesthetics: seekers of purity must hate Jews and “kill [them] like dogs”; this need was made into doctrine by Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux, older contemporary of Chrétien. Adherents of the cult of aesthetics must eat the body of a dead Jew to be purified; their culture engorged and deformed the Jews and their culture in their passionate play for an imposed and magical purification. The Jew and his Promised Land is the dispossessed host who shows up as a vital accessory in the church’s play. With this twisted, over-determined logic the Jew serves the role of host-desecrator; that is, he desecrates the fiction developed from his history, writings, theology and Land.

Perceval’s mother introduced Jew hatred early in the story when she explains to him about his maimed father and tells the un-tutored, ‘natural’ boy what a church is: “a most holy and beautiful building with relics and treasures where they sacrifice the body of Jesus Christ, the Holy Prophet whom the Jews greatly defiled. He was betrayed…” Thus the Jews must be both appropriated as host or trauma site – the host itself modeled on Passover matzo (as well as symbolically subverting the Jews) but with a radically pagan import of eating god’s body — and condemned so that the new, hybrid culture can establish its identity and strive perpetually for “purity” against the host culture upon which it piggy-backed and whose adherents it seeks to scatter or slay. The confusion here gains another dimension that links the cult of aesthetics and relics to its creedal ambiguities: here the son is, as in Islam, “a Holy Prophet” before being “this Lord.”

These ambiguities are a “murderous confusion” of relationships at every level, cultural, theological-ontological and personal: two queens, the mother and grandmother of Gawain, on a quest Chretien interweaves with that of Perceval, define their savior as “the Glorious Father who made his daughter his mother” . The confusion runs from the parentage and family of Perceval, — a strong-headed, heedless naïf who refuses to answer questions but insists on his own, a fine emblem of the playful imperial thoughtlessness of the new cult and its inquisitors — to the nature of the Creator whose glory here resembles the traumatic transposition and theological and family displacements in the myth of the formation of Aphrodite and rise of Kronos. Similarly, it contains and refracts the incestuous passion of Myrhha for her father and the fruit of their union, the perfect champion of Aphrodite, Adonis , the fertility god whose wounded thigh resonates in the wounded Fisher King and the blood-dripping, ivory-tipped lance that brings new growth and purification to the Wasteland. The cult of aesthetics must fashion a glorious and healing artifice from the blood lust in its Greco-Roman substrate, a lust overt in all its Crusades, its various aesthetic-imperial projects.

The pagan parallels go further. Like Isis and Gaia, Perceval’s mother seems to have a husband who is either brother or nephew (or son) but Perceval’s sin, unlike that of the redeemer he seeks, “the white stag” in Malory’s simile, is to have killed his mother (with grief) by his quest which is necessary for healing her husband and his father, or their near kin. The paradox and ambiguities in the cultural appropriation are built into the drive for purification that the horrible ambiguities demand. The Wasteland of traumatic elemental confusion and displacement both generates and is created by the Quest. Aptly, Perceval and his family dwell in “the Waste Forest” of confusion and denial, the remnant of imperial Rome’s collapse and the ancient culture Rome took with it into a wilderness of metamorphoses and mirrors.

When Europe emerged from seven centuries of chaos, pillage and cultural fusion unleashed by Rome’s collapse it brought forth a myth of purification by magic and the combined need and hatred for Jews and Judaism it inherited as its seeds from the death of the moribund empire.

The Grail legend as told by Chrétien provides a central datum on the inter-cultural and macro-cultural levels of the traumatic ambiguities and displacements central to the topic of The Head of Orpheus. From a cultural level it is natural that Chrétien formulated the essential mythic material of Christianity and that this be done in 12th century France about the “matter of Britain.” In the decades before he wrote his romances for Marie de Champagne, the first blood libels (that Jews make matzo using the blood of murdered Christian children) were proclaimed in Norwich and Lincoln, England resulting in mass murders of Jews. A few years before Chretien died and left his Perceval myth unfinished, England expelled its Jews. Early in his lifetime and a few decades before it, the dominant voice in the Church was Anselm who focused on the unique obstinacy of the Jews. In 1095, Peter the Hermit catalyzed the First Crusade whose war on the Turks began by slaughtering Jews in northern France and the Rhineland, a pattern repeated in the 1140s by Bernard and the second crusade. The century ending with the writing of Chretien’s Romances saw Europe develop distinctive forms of architecture and literature that were not based on classical Mediterranean culture as had been Romanesque. Thus, Chrétien’s Romances were the first expression of a distinctively European culture, weaving the tangled strands of extant Celtic and Germanic legends into a barely coherent version of Ovid, but suffused with ideological thrust. Central to the formation of “Christian Europe” was its programmatic negation and genocidal vilification of Jews. This was the cultural purification the imperial rape and possession “required, as a necessity requires” to rid the “collective body” of the discordant matter within it; to heal with the magic of artifice the constructed, hybrid culture. The means and aesthetic expression of this healing is the legend of the sankgreall. The ambiguities in the relationships of the main players in this legend are congruent with its odd theology and cultural need to vilify, slander and murder Jews. Purification by artifice and magic is the method and ideology of “the West” and the legends of Perceval were woven together at the center of organized mass Jew killing and Gothic architecture. This all is part of the Romance of the West as well as its distinctive aesthetic geometry of trauma.

The Jews, the Christians, Rome and the blood libels (of which the Grail is the aesthetic – cultural axis) are the grand geometry of trauma of “the West.” The blood libels were simply the twelfth century formulation of the foundational Christian gnosis about their avatar, his robe, the cross and the “perfidy” of the Jew. In short, they were the exemplary product and sign of Europe’s identity formation as a passion play in which the Jewish savior’s death must be avenged by slaughtering, culturally or literally the rest of the Jews whose difference exposes the irrational basis of Western ‘purity’ and its need to ‘fix’ its identity with images. The blood libels were followed logically by the attack on the “impure” blood of Jewish converts made by Christian torture, terror and proselytizing; by the ghettos decreed by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215); by the “blood purity” strictures of the “Statute of Toledo” (1547); and by Luther’s assertion of the uniquely “venomous and virulent nature of the true Jew…a calamity in our land” . Similarly, soon afterward, Philip II, Hapsburg declared that “all the heresies in Germany and France, as in Spain have been sown by descendants of Jews” . The more the cult of aesthetics confronts its irrationality, the emptiness, doubt and terror of its fiction, the more its cognitive disjunction is blamed on those who do not collude in the fiction, who pollute its ‘purity’ by threatening the in any case inevitable collapse of its rapturous collective delusion. As anthropologists explain, a culture will remove the source of perceived pollution , even in this unique case in which the pollution is the source of salvation and identity. In its illogic and its imagery, the West condemns itself.

Because the cult of the West is essentially aesthetic, a shadow play of imagery, irrational passion, and rapturous negation of thought, its gist is aptly captured by a great imagist of the 20th century, perhaps the definitive postmodern poet and celebrant of figuration:

The mind
Turns to its own figurations and declares,
‘This image, this love, I compose myself
Of these. In these, I come forth outwardly,
In these I wear a vital cleanliness…

The arrogance of self-creation and abyss of solipsism in the cult of aesthetics in this poem are clearly a dramatic act, a presentation of pageantry in which “the mind” takes its own “figurations” as a host, composes itself of them and makes a declaration of faith. Many strong poems of the mid-twentieth century have similar images of the mind being engorged by its imagery. The nominally secular Stevens champions the purity or “cleanliness” of a mind formed by its own images as the West by its dominant aesthetics. These were the decades when Europe approached the pinnacle of purifying its image and completing its lie by erasing the Jews.

The last stage of this “purification” is pure paganism and the insistence that the savior of Europe is not Jewish; this was the messiah-cult or cult of the leaders of the 20th century (a form of the “super-man” or “superhuman” cult of the artifice, hailed by Yeats). The final purification is all humans in communion in a global State, “a planetary human solution” achieved by engorging its original host in a ‘peace process.’ This macro-aesthetic project is sold by the ultimate artifice, the virtual reality of digitalized media. Having purged the Jewish root whose simple, wise and rational order is vital but alien to its image-crazed and metamorphic character, the West will find itself “inanimate in an inert savoir” adoring its petrified figurations in the web of a globalized cult of aesthetics.

1. The formative century is the twelfth, or more broadly, the period from Anselm’s prime to the completion of Notre Dame de Chartres and the Fourth Lateran Council, about 1065-1215. “Sankgreall” is a contraction of “blood [sang] dish” [graal] originally a plate for a consecrated ‘host,’ later a chalice of wine-blood.
2. Chretien de Troyes, “The Story of the Grail (Perceval)” in Arthurian Romances (London 1991, translation and notes by William W. Kibler), 386, 424, 460
3. Ibid. 460
4. Ibid. 420-22
5. Ibid. 458, 388
6. This is the result of the “treacherous” message of the centaur, Nessus in the Women of Trachis by Sophocles. The “confusion” is the work of the “sickness” of Aphrodite whose power the centaur embodies. She also literally embodies perverse erotic trauma, displacement of the Father and metamorphosis.
7. “the Story of the Grail” op. cit. 482
8. Ovid, Metamorphoses Book X
9. “The Story of the Grail” 386, 417, passim
10. Book in progress by E. Narrett
11. For example, Chartres Cathedral of “Our Lady” was built c. 1145-90 during the last decades of Chretien’s life; “Our Lady of Paris,” Notre Dame de Paris was begun in 1163. The names of the sites emphasize the core of goddess worship and the continuity of the Aphrodite-Isis core of pagan antiquity. Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) established ghettos, distinctive dress and special taxes for Jews even as Notre Dame was being completed and Talmud burning set to begin about 1240.
12. Martin Luther, “On the Jews and their Lies” (1543); the Toledo statute or “limpieza de sangre”
13. James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: the Church & the Jews (Boston 1999), 368-79 passim
14. Mary Douglas, Purity & Danger (NY 1966) explains this well and shows the rational basis of “the abominations of Leviticus,” the title of one chapter. A rare academic, she found wisdom and positive value in Judaism and empirical practices, rather than ‘spiritual’ beliefs as a grounding for the sacred.
15. Wallace Stevens, “Poem with Rhythms” 13-17; cf. “Of Modern Poetry” and “Asides on the Oboe”:
“Say that final belief must be in a fiction: it is time to choose.” See also, “the Plain Sense of Things.”
16. See for example, Theodore Roethke, “Night Crow” where the result is utter darkness, un-creation.
17. See theosophist Alice Bailey on “the Inner Source of the Outer Turmoil” 1939
18. Stevens, “the Plain Sense of Things” (1954), 4

But the radical (“from the roots”) instability of the West stems not only from its project of yoking together Hebrew and Hellenic cultural elements. The origins of the magic and imperial ambitions of the cult of aesthetics inhere in its Hellenic-Roman roots, especially in the emphasis on metamorphosis (usually unnatural, magical) and its frequent location in erotic trauma and ensuing displacement and transmutation. These elements define the demonic; define, too, Greco-roman ‘rape,’ capture and appropriation of Hebrew culture (and land) and its subjection of Jews and Judaism to the status of a dispossessed host.

Because the West is a compulsive and essentially irrational construct, it was inevitable that its last phase would produce an ideology called postmodernism, the notion that nothing is genuine or integral, that everything is a collage, an adulterate and arbitrary mixture, a classic definition of “impurity”[i]. The denial of any truth but the reigning cultural dogmatic clichés ally postmodernism with communism and the Church: universal utopians who back their absurd (illogical) claims with brute force, professed compassion and mountains of lies which the West dresses in gorgeous rhetoric and imagery, now amplified and made ever more insubstantial and unreal by the mass media, a ritual that negates the four-dimensional humanity of ritual: art as surface, as illusion.

Because the West’s main ingredients negate each other like oil and water, the passion of the West is a play for purification, for clarity of identity. Purification means adoration of the self, both the individual and the corporate collective body or persona ficta in the form of images. Thus, in his famous Confessions, Rousseau defined and re-made himself as a fiction: “the more I lie, the more I am true.” Moreover, this fictional self was a model, a point of comparison for the humanity of everyone else. This merging of identity with fiction and the egomaniac, tutelary aspect of his project took shape in his definition of the corporate collective “Sovereign” in which “everyone will be forced to be free”[ii]

The ambiguities, contradiction, ideological, economic and military rape are part of the dark matter in the heart of the West that must be sanitized, glorified and worshipped. This “mire and complexity of human blood”[iii] does not consist only of the possession, displacement and transmutation of Jewish matter into Greco-Roman and then into feudal-gothic civilizations, the former moribund and decadent, the latter chaotic, fanatic and irrational. The darkness in the core of the West also is essentially Mesopotamian (the Devil) and above all Hellenistic. Those who study Hesiod, the first compendium of Greek thought, Homer and the Greek tragedians[iv], and the summary of their material by Ovid in Metamorphoses find that erotic trauma, demonic possession, transformed identity and form is the essence of the Hellenistic world view. The insistence on this terrifying nexus of events literally is embodied in the fiction of Aphrodite and her violent formation from the private parts of Ouranos, “the starry heavens” who was both consort and son of Gaia, the earth. “The sweetnesses and deceptions” of Aphrodite show the shifty nature of life as attested by “Pre-Socratic” philosophers like Heraclitus and Empedocles as well as in the dramatists and Ovid. Aphrodite’s description by Hesiod (c. 600 BCE) as “a modest lovely goddess” is in effect the first and ruling artifice-deceit of Hellenism in its veiling of the violent, perverse horror of her formation and substance fused of ocean brine and ‘divine’ male members.[v] Postmodern feminism shows the Aphrodite complex surging to dominance, glorified by showers of media imagery and academic-legal fictions.

The impulse to re-present in images and art the violent, metamorphic cultural substrate of Hellenism joined with the need simultaneously to use and transform Jewish material –while vilifying the Jews — as the dynamic, unsteady core of the West’s image project, its cult of aesthetics. As this process is a disembodiment, a separation of the perfect ‘head’ or image from the boggy cultural substrate, it is aptly represented by Orpheus and termed ‘the Orphic project’ after the singer of harmony who was torn apart and decapitated by the maenads (followers of Dionysus) whose rebellious rage is a symbol of disorder and the resurgence of fertility cults that achieve communion by eating a human god and drinking his blood. Adonis, beloved of Aphrodite (Venus) is one such avatar, himself born of an incestuous union. After his loss of Eurydice, Orpheus preferred “young boys” and was himself the eromenos of Apollo[vi]; so ambiguity inheres in his ‘pure’ song too.

With this unstable cultural matter at its heart, Western civilization will disgorge rituals of heterogeneous commingling, multiculturalism and fictive purification, the strictures of the ‘Welfare’ or Nanny State, the current form of Aphrodite. The drive for purity expresses itself in two main forms: dogmatic aesthetic movements and utopian social ideologies each of which have a universalizing, imperialist bent; and the need to assimilate the Jews in a grand “humanitarian solution”[vii] or, in the alternative, to exterminate them outright. If the West achieves the latter, it will get rid of the ‘spoil sport’ that exposes the flaws and magic in the rules of its game[viii]; it also will lose the last aspect of its coherence that does not have a petrifying, totalitarian thrust. The holocaust (shoah) was the climax of the West’s drive to clarify and untangle the hybrid, forced, traumatic union at its core; the ‘peace process’ is the denouement, a slow motion erasure of Judaism as a national-cultural identity and its absorption in the last and total grand project or the West: a world state ruled by a new “universal church,” a “Faith Foundation” that will mingle all religions in a new puree that can be poured, like Proteus into any form its ‘gods’ desire, — the better to mould the product.

 In a universal State there is no room for genuine difference, only controlled dissent. The metamorphic impulse of Hellenism flows into virtual reality, into demographic and economic displacements.

The upshot of the “rational” theology of Anselm and Aquinas in the era when the cult of aesthetics asserted its European form was that the Jews were not just out of date and misguided but willfully ignorant and, therefore, needed to be ‘corrected,’ by preaching first (including in synagogues), and if that didn’t work by burning all their books, and then them. A review of Hesiod and Ovid will show that the mass hysteria of Christian formation from the First Crusade 1095 to the blood libels (beginning 1142), book burnings (starting about 1230), dress regulations and pogroms reveals the hysteria and terror inherited from ancient Hellas, demonstrated recently in the shoah and now in the ‘peace process’ and ‘war on terror.’ “I hail the superhuman,” Yeats wrote late in 1930 as a new era of hysteria gained head: “I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.” The forces of cultural morbidity and murderous confusion were aligned[ix]; the hysteria in the ‘bed of trauma’ of the image cult peaked as its leading image-makers willed themselves into a rapture and “agony of flame,” into mad passion over apocalyptic beasts “slouching to Bethlehem to be born.”[x] The shoah was an aesthetic project and not only a German one.

An example of the ability of images to beget images in the attempt to ‘purify’ a fictive or ambiguous identity is the ostensible appearance of stigmata on Francis of Assisi in 1224 near the core of the era in which Chrétien wrote and the Dominicans invented “host desecration” to incite massacres of Jews in the name of the fiction that Francis imitated. 

Chrétien de Troyes also was attuned to the temper of his times, the century when the cult of aesthetics established its post-Mediterranean identity with Arthurian Romances, Crusades, Gothic architecture and dogma that only through the Roman church and its Pontifex Maximus[xi] can a human being escape ‘hell.’ A group of penitents cry to Perceval on Good Friday, “the wicked Jews whom we should kill like dogs…damned themselves when they raised him on the Cross.” This is the logic of Aquinas and those who celebrate “the Glorious Father who made His daughter His mother.”[xii] Traumatic transposition is the essence of the demonic and the core of artifice, the construed ‘purity’ of the cult of aesthetics.

The preaching of globalism by the clergy of the media, a new treason of the clerks,[xiii] its progressive legislation by court hirelings and enforcement by hi-tech knights is the last passion play of the “universal apostolic” church proclaimed almost eight centuries ago. It is the end in petrifaction of the cult of aesthetics whose metamorphoses henceforth will be of a highly controlled, increasingly artificial and untenable nature. “Images that yet fresh images beget” describes the functioning of the electronic media, the distraction machine crucial to the power structure that holds together the new Byzantium or Rome. The fact that it is radically impure in content follows naturally from its essential nature as artifice, as a scrim of imagery, a modern Aphrodite, beautiful allure with a perversely violent substrate. As with Lancelot and Orpheus, purification means madness and death. 

[ii] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, chapters 6-7, “The Social Compact,” “the Sovereign”

[iii] W.B. Yeats, “Byzantium” 7-8, 24, 33

[iv] See for a prime example the venomous “sickness” of Aphrodite as treated by Sophocles in his Herakles play, the Women of Trachis

[v] Hesiod, Theogeny (U Michigan, 1959, Lattimore translation), lines 95-253

[vi] As was Hyacinth, see Ovid, Metamorphoses book X; eromenos is a male pupil sexually initiated and partner to his teacher (erastes).

[vii] Alice Bailey, “the Inner Source of the Outer Turmoil” 1939 in Externalization of the Hierarchy

[viii] I’m paraphrasing Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938; 1945; 1955 English trans); Huizinga’s text is a paean to “the play spirit” as the essence of civilization whose peak he sees in chivalry, its tournaments and cult of Beauty. Huizinga celebrated war as a form of play in 1938…

[ix] “Byzantium” (Sept. 1930), 15-16, inter alia for the domination of life by aesthetics & image-work

[x] Yeats, “The Second Coming”; the 1^st stanza laments the mire and confusion; the 2^nd offers a fiction whose monstrous, “pitiless” ambiguity contains and continued what Conrad called “the fascination of the abomination.”

[xi] The Pope is the “Great Bridge” between the pagan and Jewish worlds; the church the grand synthesis whose “complexity of mire and blood” naturally cloaks itself in elaborate aesthetics, fictions that veil its radical incongruities and pollution.

[xii] Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, “the Story of the Grail (Perceval)” (NY 1991), 458, 486; on the transposition of family-biological roles, see Lear 1.4.176-82 for a sober corrective.

[xiii] See Julien Benda, La Trahison des Clercs (1928; Norton 1966)

 This study has developed an interpretive model to examine the singular drive of Western culture to purify, idealize and define itself by fictions, by visual or written images, the latter also being termed by convention “figures” or “tropes.” The compulsion of the West to create an artifice by which to present itself readily becomes a need to transform itself into an artifice. Western identity is a project of transformation and the result, like the heads of Orpheus or Medusa, otherwise so different retain an image-making power in the mesmeric horror of their attenuation that mirrors the traumas in which the drive to the artifice began. The death and loss of Eurydice and the rape by medusa by Poseidon are the founding traumas; the decapitations and the song, sculpture that eventually result are artistic forms the idealize the horror from which they sprung. As the trajectory of culture plays itself out, the internal horror becomes discussed and represented with increasing clarity in mages of Medusa, Sphinxes, the death of Orpheus, sexual ambiguity and novels like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ultimately, with the birth of the early Modern period, in the mid-Victorian and Symbolist era the horror and ambiguity is seen as good by increasing numbers of intelligentsia first and then, seeping downward the lower classes, “workers, puppets” or “cattle” of the idle nobility who alone know beauty, as Ruskin put it [2]. At that point, I should say, this point, whichever way one seeks to flee is hell because institutions, assumptions and ideals have been redefined in hellish, that is traumatic ways with the ultimate terror being the arrival of a virtual reality, an ultimate artifice that displaces life as utterly as the Demonic triumphs in “Christabel.”

Milton long ago identified this process of transposing evil and good with Satan whose role, in Christian mythology is the ultimate meddler, commingler and insinuating “mar-plot” as Melville terms him, always intent on “slipping in his card” whenever human beings are in ambiguous or out of place situations [3].

 Not only the horror of the originating trauma, confusion or ambiguity but also the horror and terror that arise when life is absorbed, displaced or suppressed by artifice accounts for the myriad “Wasteland” tropes that fill the arts, values, ideology, politics, pop culture and geopolitics of the West from the reign of Hadrian or Constantine till this day.

We have explained, principally in “the Geometry of Trauma” and “Struggles of the gods” that Aphrodite or, more properly, the genesis and formation of Aphrodite epitomizes the metamorphosis that is essential to Hellenist thought, the restless and apparently irresistible root of the West, and to the primary deities of traumatic transformation, displacement and image-work on whose attributes this study reflects: Aphrodite herself, Apollo, Athena and Ares. I understand Ares not merely as war per se but as strife, conflict and any contest that is somewhat organized. In this I follow Huizinga whose fascinating study’s alarming tone and values precisely measure its inability to account for, and predictable failure to more than briefly mention Judaism which is the negation of his mad, Wagnerian paean to “play” in all its insane, Hellenist-Gothic ferocity. “The noble life is seen as an exhilarating game of courage and honor” and “bloody violence can only be fully experienced and enjoyed as an aesthetic function.” This Dionysian rapture confounds his view of “idleness or leisure as the principle of the universe” and, as he relates it, essentially Greek. What a pity that the hierophant of “play” didn’t bother to read the first chapter of Genesis in which the creation is made for peace and rest, for Sabbath [4].

Edna Millay’s life was a celebration of ambiguity and artifice centered on liberated sex. It is difficult to find a more through blending of the alluring “deceptions, delight and sweetnesses of love” made as formally elegant and beautiful in alluding to enchanting sexual openness and mixtures. Transgression and dirt, “matter out of place” is the liminal status in which Millay, a quintessential Hellene glories. The ultimate adulterate structure is the composite being she makes of her life and art, each feeding the other but ultimately constrained by the image work that compels Eros to mingle with its sweet design. “I have him” [5] cries the queen of a strikingly beautiful but necessarily doomed wasteland of life consumed by its devotion to its Aphrodite-laden version of the Orphic project.

Millay began the outward phase of her career (utterly in tune with the ‘bleeding edge’ of the times as it was, already a generation into the thrilling phrase, “Boston marriage”) by demanding in school that she be called “Vincent.” Sent to Vassar with funds from a female admirer, of her art, the beautiful maiden had various Sapphic amours some of which were turned into verse whose formal mediocrity does not detract from the horrible power of her Hellenist-Modernist project. She found her way to Greenwich village where a commitment to the ‘shock of the new’ was the surest way to merge with the tangled ambiguities of communion of the day’s most sophisticated players among whom a Dionysian sexual sharing was as much or more a ticket to stardom as the ability to live life as an artifice, an essential preciosity that reflects the resurgent goddess rapture of the Modern West. This narcissistic mode emphasizes image, reflection and surface all of which Millay had with beauty; she also was a master image-maker, a singer who beguiled maenads, centaurs and rhapsodes alike. Being that her prime was the second quarter of the 20^th century, sixty years into “this strange disease of modern life” it also garnered her kudos and awards from those who wealth enables them to define and re-shape culture; the oligarchs who manage the dos of play and the Orphic project.

Millay works on the other side of the ‘doubleness’ of the sacred; she sets herself apart from the “cattle” to mingle herself more thoroughly as an artfully fashioned prostitute (kedaisha) who carries her own temple in her body and transposes the “set apart” into the way she elects to mix with anonymous revelers in Dionysian ecstasies. She plays out the horror, perhaps the trauma of her “deceptions, delights and sweetnesses” in “fair imaginings…of the honor and beauty” of her unique body work [6]. The castration is imagined, proudly, and the memorial implanted in the lover’s memory as “a ghost in marble” as if an image (“ghost,” “memory”) implanted by a Medusa with Aphrodite’s (or Vivien’s) charm and body, — and her bloody bisexual substrate [7].  

Millay’s poem of demonic, Medusan possession is cast as a mental act, a series of imaginative figures: “I think I should have loved you presently,” she begins, launching the series of alluring, taunting hypotheses of what she might have offered to her oblivious partner, a body without a name for it is the function and role of the player in her drama that matters. The entire ‘promise’ is a jest, is subjunctive and liminal: “I think I should have loved” but s/he and we will never know for what matters are the “deceptions” and image play of the goddess. And every figure that follows contains transformation, sliding what was into what could have been according to the artist whose artistry and magical core was overlooked, an intolerable offense to one who deals in images and constructed identities and relationships and whose entire project is “to capture the eyes” and “steal the mind” [8].

….. [opening of chapter 16; please support these trans-cultural studies on the nature of the West and its relation to Israel].

1. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “I think I should have loved you presently,” 6-8

2. John Ruskin, A Crown of Wild Olive, Lectures on Industry & War (1866) quoted by Huizinga.

3. John Milton, Paradise Lost IV 108-110 and 75-9 alluded to in the lines above. I quote Melville’s “Billy Budd,” chapter 2: Billy’s “stutter… was a striking instance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet…he is sure to slip in his little card…”

4. Homo Ludens, 103-122, 161; contrast Genesis 2:1-3; moreover, even a cursory knowledge of Hebrew scripture repeatedly commands elaborate and exuberant ritual and ‘art’ as part of the sacred, the “set apart” for joy and integrity, as in the ceremonies of the three pilgrim feasts, the tying of the first fruits, etc. “The free man had no need to work for his living,” enjoying a society built on slavery and the Israelite, who was commanded to work six days a week was “set apart” (kadosh usually mistranslated as holy”) from this worldview which continues to try to obliterate its antithesis in various kinds of fusion from theosophy to the third Reich to Mr. Blair’s slyly imperial “Faith Foundation.”  

5. Millay, “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines,” 1952, see discussion below.

6. Homo Ludens 101

7. Tennyson, Idylls, “Merlin and Vivien” 42-51 compare the tale of Vivien’s birth upon her dead father’s bloody body with the formation of Aphrodite from the brine and bloody foam of the members of Ouranos. Like Kronos, Vivien’s father was a rebel against the king and brought forth filth from filth that Vivien transforms into the “smiles and deceptions” of a lie (70-83), buttressing her claim that “there is no Truth!” Everything, like Aphrodite, her medium, substance and the representation of the lie is the traumatic horror of displacement and Vivien aptly locates her bloody genesis on “the sad sea-sounding wastes of Lyonesse.” 

8. Moshe ben Maimon (“Maimonides”), Mishne Torah (“Review of the Torah”), comments on negative commandment #32 as itemized and explained in Sefer HaMitzvoth (“the Book of the Commandments”). Essential to the way of Judaism is to forbid and warn against the witchcraft of such image-work.

About ten years ago when my son was twelve and a half, my Mom sent us a Hanukkah gift. It was a blue plastic candle-holder and small candle; one of those little items that comes in cheap colored cardboard wrapped in hard, form-fitting plastic. It was Hanukkah and my son was with me: hence my Mom’s sweet remembrance. Before supper we took out the candle and set it on our collage table by the dining room windows near our familiar Hanukkiyot and precious items like the copper plate my maternal grandparents brought back from the Promised Land in the 1960s, incised with a picture of the huge Eshkol (Bamidbar 14). 

The little candle was supposed to burn for fifteen minutes, the writing on the cardboard said, and the base would play “Maoz Tzur” for thirty minutes. “Wonderful,” we thought. How sweet and homey, like Mom Mom.

The miracle began when we lit the new arrival, shortly after saying the blessings and lighting the nairot in our two standby menorahs.

Surely it is not mere coincidence that the word for candles or lamps is cognate with our name…

We were reading some wonderful Hanukkah stories and noticed that the little candle had been burning a long time, much longer than advertised; we marveled at it, talking delightedly. The little light flamed for more than half an hour. Beautiful, a little miracle, something special: Mom’s love for us and the joy of being together after another long absence.

We read, and watched it, and marveled; it made our special time even more special; the power of Hanukkah blending with our happiness in the glad familiarity of our long-time home.

Then we realized something more remarkable was happening; in its perky, piping drone, the candle was ‘singing’ Maoz Tzur for much longer than thirty minutes. We started to pay attention: forty-five minutes, fifty, an hour; an hour and fifteen minutes. It took our thoughts from the stories and the sports flashing on the television. An hour and a half; then a few minutes more: we looked at each other with amazement and awe filled our delight.

More time passed; it was singing, determined and lively of the victory over Edom and all the oppressors and invaders; something very special was happening that put our precious time together on an even more special level. Our eyes and hearts were sparkling.

With the enthusiasm and wonder of youth, my son went to the table and looked closely at the candle: how could this be? We were the secret, our simple joy and the joy of Hanukkah. But youth has to learn: he reached his hand gently to the little blue plastic toy and picked it up: the song ended. We were a bit dismayed but our wonder reached new heights and with it some questions that will never be completelyll answered: it had been very precious indeed, a moment vivid to this day and always…

“Establish for us the seven shepherds…”

I was born on 25^th Kislev, the first day of Hanukkah when the Temple had been purified and the Menorah lit again, a testimony to the love and rationality of providence, of the Creator’s design. When I was a boy in middle school, already I loved to read even as much as I loved baseball, and that was a very great deal. Already I was devouring the great texts, literature and history of Western culture. When I got to College and then again in Graduate School of course I read the “Old Testament,” as everyone is taught to call it, with special interest. But still it was part of my studies.

After thqt watershed of modern goddess rapture, the cult of divorce and throw-away fathers, amid my struggles to protect my son’s relation to me I began to study Judaism as a Jew who had an extensive knowledge of the culture of the West, the culture of Edom built largely of Jewish wisdom it deformed, just as rubble from the Second Temple was used to build the coliseum in Rome: no starker contrast of two cultures is possible.

The more I studied Derekh Yehudi, the more I discovered its profound wisdom for living; I gained a greater and deeper perspective on the uniqueness and unique madness and denial of the West and understood with deep appreciation the dictum of the sages that “it is an iron law of nature that Esau hates Jacob.” Not scholars of the classical Humanities, they didn’t know how right they were, how profound was their knowledge.

I wrote increasingly on this topic and began using it as a template for understanding the West; it informs the last three books I’ve written and even more so the one I’m at work on now, a study that contains no politics, focusing solely on the West as a cultural project that tries to establish a “pure” identity via art, an identity, however conscious of the desire it may be, to slough off its Jewish content that is so radically opposed to its worship of a constructed, idealized image, an image whose beauty or dazzle buries the confusion in its murderous, hybrid heart. I call it, the Head of Orpheus and invite seekers of truth, cultural peace, and an end to terrors and fictional history to contribute to it.

It seems that the structure and spirit built into my birth date is asserting itself as I grow older; and I see how it has given pattern to my life and studies. I have prepared myself to know and appreciate what the West is to its core and in all its glorious “golden boughs”; my love and struggle for my son, and to keep him attached to my parents and our traditions imbued the study of Judaism the finally enables me to see the West whole, from the outside as well as the inside. As told in a brilliant passage of Midrash HaGadol, Esau will not rest until he involves Ishmael in the murder of Isaac and Jacob, — and then takes him to court, in the Hague, no doubt, piously wringing his pig’s knuckles about genocide and gathering his most brilliant architects to build yet another holocaust memorial, their favorite “artifice of eternity…”

As I watch the candles burn, candles I lit three hours ago with my son on a cement window sill in a far away land, I think of that small miraculous blue candle and its spirited song, a song that goes on forever, until the appointed time and perhaps during it. And I, I stand astride the greatest cultural divide in history untangling its confusion and identifying the morbid predations of Esau for what they are; the sane joy and wisdom of Derekh Yehudi for what it is and can be. I see that the light of 25^th Kislev has been glowing within me and structuring my difficult and unique road. Something of the persistence and courage of the Maccabees and all the House of Israel, I hope, is there too; it must be: were it not, I would not be here with you and still trying to separate the oil and water, the glaring deep darkness from the beautiful warm glow and chessed of the nairot that are rebuilding the Temple.

That’s a bitter joke enforced by an oligarchy of nasty jokers clinging to their myth of a Jokerman, an illusion asserted as a savior, the man who, like Charlie on the MTA never returned as Maeterlinck confessed in his play, “the Blind” (1891) and as Beckett joked with lewd bitterness in Godot (1955). The passion is a bad joke for those blamed and for those inventing and inheriting the fiction of blame, compressing history and shifting the Empire into the role of hapless enforcer of the father people’s supposed cruelty. Since “Bar Abbas” means ‘son of father” then the crowd… but this is just one of a host of basic confusions in the ruling myth that result in attempts to fix its lies via art: to impose its fictions as dogma. Centuries of images show the cult of mercy and art centered on a myth of human sacrifice and blood drinking…the Dionysian paradigm. Where else to put such matter than a Grail cup, to sublimate and make it pretty, purifying; what else does that phantom goblet of blood evince than a Gorgon’s head, the raw cultural matter that the fleeing Perseus forever turns into “monuments” [1]?

As noted, it’s a bad and bitter joke increasingly reflected in the horrors of modern culture.

“Is he not coming yet” ask the personae in the asylum that bad ideas, dishonest ideas have made of the West. (Lawrence felt like “a second comer” when he saw the snake at his trough, at “the horrid black hole” but that gaming was a semi-jest). The blind of Maeterlinck are shadows that cannot see, surrounding themselves with echoes of the virtual reality of which their culture was built.

First Blind Man:

I was asleep too.

THIRD BLIND MAN
I was asleep too.

FIRST BLIND MAN
Is he not coming yet?

SECOND BLIND MAN
I hear nothing coming.

THIRD BLIND MAN
It must be about time to go back to the asylum.

FIRST BLIND MAN
We want to know where we are!

SECOND BLIND MAN
It has grown cold since he left.

FIRST BLIND MAN
We want to know where we are!

THE OLDEST BLIND MAN
Does any one know where we are?

THE OLDEST BLIND WOMAN
We were walking a very long time; we must be very far from the asylum.

This is the asylum of art made “not for love” but for “the love of Beauty, the love of the Idea, the love of Mystery…and Bayreuth…a state of harmonious ecstasy.” In the sleep of reason, in the dominion of imperial conceit; in images of unnatural desire and power at last there are only echoes in a dark wood after a very long walk. They killed the King of loving kindness and compassion and replaced his ineffable majesty with an avatar fiction, a composite being, hybrid like the culture; “the character of Christ, a union of man and woman, strength and sweetness” reflected in myriad effeminate Greek heroes and menacing female goddesses and demons. This is a Joke, a fantastic and lethal one and earns the cult of the West the title of Jokerism. Like the Joker, it leaves its acolytes in a dark wood [2], freezing to death after their brief escape, if they have escaped from the asylum of their fictions.

When Beckett re-visits this paradigm of despair and confusion with brisk, insouciant modern repartee the banter has a socialist and perverse erotic aspect as if fulfilling the enthusiasms of Peladan and Huysmans. Sucking on carrot ends, fumbling with their zippers, considering hanging themselves for erections that will seed mandrakes that “scream” when plucked, Vladimir and Estragon make Western hope as a joke, its expectations of the avatar maddening and sour. They don’t know where they are either and audiences laugh or are chastened at the vision of the end time’s teeming mall. The head of Orpheus sings but the harmonious song has become a joke. The way was ready for the routine cynicism of postmodernism and belief in nothing, the end game of a cult of identity by images.

1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book V, 217-40
2. Dante, Inferno, Canto 1, 1-3 passim
 

Sterility and the Image 
 “I have heard the mermaids singing each to each;
I do not think that they will sing to me…” [1]

We have established that the West is defined and cursed by its inauthenticity, by its hybrid and self-negating identity. Further, and consequent upon this fact, the West allays its anxiety and emptiness by glorifying imagination and image-making, by aesthetics that show the self it would be. It is inevitable, however, that representation of its inner malaise and manifold confusions will increasingly show it images of disembodiment, of hybrid genders and species, of monsters.

[excerpt from a book, "the Head of Orpheus." Please support this vital work of cultural analysis]