Hypnerotomachia Poliphili & Secondary Orality

1. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is such a esoteric work that one can become daunted by the task of deciphering it. Many have tried, few have succeeded, but this adds to the appeal of it, as if you were exploring a cave which no one has ever stepped foot in. (There is also the danger of getting stuck, ala "127 Hours", or chased by the crazed archetypal monsters from an unexplored past, like in "The Descent"; caves really are great metaphors, it turns out.) Printed in 1499 by Aldus Manutius in Venice, it was said to have been choreographed by the Dominican priest, Francesco Colonna. It wasn't translated into English, however, until 1999, possibly because the author switches between various languages, or more likely because it has been labeled 'unreadable'. Frances Yates describes Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in The Art of Memory as "an artificial memory gone out of control into imaginative indulgence" (123). Its plot depicts a distressed Poliphilo unable to sleep after being rejected by his one and only, Polia ("many things"), but in a Dante-esque turn of events, he ends up being transferred to a mythic wood and encounters archetypal terrors. After several various misadventures, he awakens, and begs for Polia's love. She rejects him as before, but Cupid appears and convinces Polia to kiss the poor fellow. Love does blossom anew under the blessings of Venus. But Poliphilo opens his eyes. The whole adventure, including Polia falling for him, was all a dream. Of course this reminds me of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". I am going to choose to believe that Dr. Sexson was referencing the movie when he brought it up in class.



Now I will explore these terrifying images which appear in the first dream of Poliphilo's journey. The cherub-boy, with his wings and possessed face, is the stuff of nightmares. In fact, he looks like a flying monkey from Oz attacking Dorothy, and because he is riding in a chariot, I think it is safe to assume that he is a sun god, the divine infant from above sent to save us from our mortal sins. What sins you ask? WOMEN. Women have seemingly enslaved man from the beginning (of course this is from a man's perspective), and as I have described in another blog, Venus was directly identified as Lucifer in esoteric tradition. The boy has thus trapped the devil and is making him/her cart him around.

The nude women are also the Maiden, Mother, and Crone archetypes. The one off to the side is the Crone because she is hunched over with a cane, though I cannot quite make it out. As for why she is over there and not being whipped like the others, I am not sure. Hags in fairy tales are typically villains, or she could possibly be the infant's mother egging on the young child in revenge of others' beauty. Typically the divine child ends up marrying a mother/wife, so she could be identified as both. What we are seeing is a revenge fantasy being played out by Poliphio's unconscious. Frankly, he is bitter that a woman has so much control over his life--he wants to be in control.



In the next picture, however, the woman off to the side seems to regret what she has allowed to happen. Perhaps she is a distraught Polia lamenting what she has done to poor Poliphio. She wanted him to take control, but when it actually happens, she sees its terrible results. Again, this would make sense with the divine child/mother-lover myth (Osiris/Isis, Tammuz/Innana, etc.).

The invention of agriculture was at first a great thing for women, but also led to the birth of writing. We see the lady in the forest happy with what her wild little boy is doing, but after watching her fellow women being sliced up, she looks saddened. It is also relevant that she is in the forest. The tripartite goddess is cut to pieces in the realm of civilization/agriculture (you can actually see a barn in the distance), while the wood remains a place without boundaries. The Goddess in the Right Brain is seeing the Left Brain boxing the cosmos into categories. Again, I see this as a revenge fantasy. It is quite similar to the Babylonian Marduk chopping Tiamat to pieces and creating the earth from her parts. This tale also came at a great turning point in history--Hammurabi's laws and the first record of writing--just like this one originated during the beginning of the printing press.

Leonard Shlain, in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, describes Marduk's revenge on the Mother Goddess as the first written myth from a "proto-Western culture":

"in the Freudian lexicon, sons are supposed to wrest power from their fathers--not their mothers. Unless, of course, the mother originally held the power. Alongside the thousands of creation myths of other cultures, The Seven Tables of Creation [where this tale is recorded] stands starkly alone. [...] In the files of comparative religion, there does not exist a more misogynist and macabre story" (50).

The younger gods, led by Marduk, are terrified of the power of the Goddess, so they set out to kill her and her escort. After Marduk succeeds on both accounts, he "decide[s] to create the universe by dismembering her. Tiamat's buttocks became the mountains and her breasts the foothills. He pierced her eyes with his spear, and the tears welling up from within her sockets formed the two great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. He then pricked her breasts in many places, creating all the tributaries that flowed into these two main rivers, and in a final indignity used the Great Mother's pubic mound to support the sky" (50). As for Tiamat's new lover, Kingu, Marduk creates man from his blood. Like Dionysus being alive inside us all, so is Kingu; however, it also gave the ancient Mesopotamians the continual sense of guilt which is so common in Western culture.

Here is my narrow, concrete vision for what is happening so far: the woman in the forest is the child's mother. She told him to go out and essentially conquer the world, use his masculine energy to dominate the globe and create glory for himself and her. However, the nascent being, in this case the beginning of typography, and in Marduk's case, that of choreography, is also the harbinger of hierarchy, boxing, class structure, and misogyny. Men have a deep resentment of women. Females held the power in mating, and when a man was lucky enough to secure one, he had to go out and risk his life to bring her meat. After the creation of agricultural communities, she gained even more power because she seemingly ruled all spheres of life. However, with the invention of the alphabet, the exclusive left brain could finally take control. What is being depicted in these images is a pre-Eden event. Adam is killing Eve/Lucifer before she can take the forbidden fruit and ruin eternity for him. At least, this is what his unconscious goal is. Poliphilo, in his torment, wants to be free of her. He wants to roam with the animals, like Enkidu does in an other famous ancient Babylonian myth, and like the shamans depicted in Paleolithic caves, he wants to take to the skies on his wings and communicate with the gods and to be in harmony with animals (something that is hard to do with demystified domesticated ones). The Mother Goddess in the forest can only lament this loss.



In Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, it is a griffin, dragon, and winged horse which guard Morpheus' (the god of dreams) castle. Morpheus also has a long, terrible history with woman. At one point he becomes so frustrated that he banishes his most cherished lover to Lucifer's prisons. In another, he lets the poor muse Calliope suffer years of torment in writers' cells. There is an undercurrent of extreme misogyny being represented here. Morpheus is a male god because the author is male. Would we see a female writer take another path with a similar story? Would she still be at the whim of some terrible, jealous god's fancy? Probably, because that is still the zeitgeist of our materialistic age, though it is changing. I think in this last image we are seeing the archetypal beasts of the male ego completely devour what is left of womankind, literally rendering her into feces. Remember, this is revenge. Man wants to go to war, that is who he is. He wants to construct abstract enemies. He isn't inclusive, he is exclusive. The more I have been writing about this topic, especially of the stories we build for ourselves, the more I realize that it is not the way it has to be. The right brain doesn't give meaning to anything, the left brain does. The metaphor of the forest, with its lack of borders or fences, is pertinent here. In a way, you can see the battle between the mother and Saturn being played out in a very real sphere. The wood was torn down in ages past but is slowly growing back. Anyway, that is my thoughts on these three images.









2. Secondary Orality

The invention of print put logos on steroids. It provided a means of quality control, standardization, and economies of scale. Before written word was focused towards the author's needs, now it was to the reader's. It also accelerated seeing words as objects and not as sounds. (I was quite fascinated when I realized that during speech we don't leave a space between words; it flows quite quickly. I had noticed this fact when I heard others languages being spoken but somehow took it as tacit that in English we put a punctuated space between each word. There is some interesting videos online where non-speakers of English try to make sounds as if they were speaking in that language. Of course it is gobbledygook.) According to Ong:

"Eisenstein's spells out in detail how print made the Italian Renaissance a permanent European Renaissance, how it implemented the Protestant Reformation and reoriented Catholic religious practice, how affected the development of modern capitalism, implemented western European exploration of the globe, changed family life and politics, diffused knowledge as never before, made universal literacy a serious objective,, made possible the rise of modern sciences, and otherwise altered social and intellectual life" (Ong 161).

Print drastically changed our lives and how we interact with the universe. It freed our minds in some respects, but also trapped it in others. It led to a culture increasingly focused on sight, rather than sound. "I'll see it when I believe it," is a popular phrase today. Seeing names on the dotted line gives more authority than speech does and also a finality to things. It is usually impossible to discuss with the writer what they meant or correct them on a point. It exists only on the page.

Modern man takes for granted alphabetization, lists, and catalogs, which "have 'no oral equivalent'" (Ong 167). It is impossible for most of us to imagine a world which didn't revolve around a series of nouns, that a book's title and author should be the emboldened words on the book's cover, not the the opening words or what its about. In our culture, books are "less like an utterance, and more like a thing" (Ong 169) and the axiom that they 'contain' information is a modern conception. It is in our age where plagiarism (based on the plagiarius, "a torturer, plunderer, oppressor") became a taboo, where reading lent itself to increasing individualism, but maybe most of all, where it "encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space" (Ong 177). The electronic era is the next great paradigmatic transformation, which Walter Ong calls an age of 'secondary orality'. We have become so inwardly focused that it is starting to turn outward again. No longer is grammar and spelling as important as it was. "Secondary orality is both remarkably like and remarkably unlike primary orality," says Ong, "Like primary orality, secondary orality has generated a strong group sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in on themselves. But secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture--McLuhan's 'global village'" (Ong 184). What Tom Horn so feared in that internet group-think would rob us of our individualism is true. The more connected we become to new information technologies, the more oral our culture will be again. And oral is definitely more community-focused.

My philosophical stance has always been to give more power to the individual, because what is taken away only gives someone else more control. However, what I have not taken into account in the past is orally based thought, in that, humans gain most of their happiness through their interactions with others. What is true is that God gave us the freedom to decide for ourselves what our lives will be. He never intended for us to hand over control to another to make our decisions. The challenge then is to somehow reunite humanity with intuitive based thought, rather than analytical, but not get rid of the former completely--where to find that balance? Now that is challenging and will require a great deal more thought on my part to come to a conclusive answer. Leonard Shlain, near the end of his book says, "Since World War II, the technologies of information transfer have transformed the foundations of culture and, in the process, helped it balance feminine and masculine. Iconic information proliferating through the use of television, computers, photocopiers, fax machines, and the Internet have enhanced, and will continue to enhance, the positions in society of images, women's rights, and the Goddess" (Shlain 428). It appears that whether we like it or not, the female aspect of the cosmic struggle is going to regain some ground. The foundations of society are wiggling. In my next entry on The War on the Goddess, I will go further into describing why the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center were a direct result of this struggle, why women will ultimately win out everywhere in the world, and what some of the consequences might be. Notably, I will also discuss how thinking in a masculine way has led to the terrible wars of the 20th century as well as fiat currency. Quite the undertaking, I know.