There used to be a story of a crypt which did conceal the seed of an ancient tree. The deceased had been sealed in a leaden case, the seed still contained in his hardened fist. The tree, of which it was but a germ, was to be of great worth as a preventative and as a remedy to many ills: afflictions that caused death and grief to old and young.
It is a rather long tale, but the upshot of it was, that eventually the seed was prised from the corpse and put to the rich soil with vast and hopeful expectation. However it did fail to take. There was no bonded union and the seed remained intact, refusing to sprout.
As the seasons turned over, they did pluck it back out from the ground and replant it in firmer, then looser soil; with water and then without, and so forth; but still the seed remained seed.
Disgusted and with disappointment, it was eventually surmised that there was no value to be had, and that either by corruption or inadequacy this marvel of a tree was not to be brought forth into the world.
And so it became a worthless curiosity which was commissioned to sit upon a plaque within a glass cabinet, along with several hundred other oddities for public display. There became the standard one line joke - "A dead man's remedy that will not subscribe to life!" And it was soon forgotten.
However, as with most famed articles, there was a presence of truth about this tiny seed, which had been invested with much conjecture. For all around the country there became a new variety of tree sprung up, and each and every one of them were ethereally bound to this precious seed. In point of fact, the owner from whose hand it was taken, knew of its remarkable link to life at a distance - dependent on it - and for reasons of security, planned to conceal it with his burial after long provision for care during his life.
However, the trees for which this seed was the parent, did go unnoticed by those who sought their properties, and flourished neglected. Came maturation, pods popped and birds pried, plucked and pecked the precious seed-peas. The birds as a result of this, became so overfull with life that the motion of the wings sweeping across the breast would enliven the currents around them.
You see, there may be mighty activity coming into and through the smallest of beings. These birds fed from the revivifying tree, and in turn gave out all that was not required, for them to be. Their tiny presence would alight at a distance a man, or to a child who was dejected or ailing miserably; and then in a passion of sympathetic understanding their need would be answered by the movement and presence of this empowered friend, for they knew also of the related properties and their purpose of prescription.
This is the nature of Love. It finds its way through mediums that will have it, go to it and give it. The men would not have profited similarly by scalding the leaves or boiling a brew, this was not the case, for the special nature of this tree was in relationships as ethereally supported from one to another, and by such we are suckled and sustained.
The tree would not be owned selectively to this or that community privy to its properties. And the men could not determine which foliage and what bough bore the effervescent vitalities, as the birds did see it a’ blazing, as if on fire.
Now the seed that was in the hand is one and the same which is kernel to the heart. All effort made manifest in the world, Love's efforts, are linked to that kernel. The offspring is always for the greater world and for so many who are as strangers to us, and yet dependent on our safekeeping of love's seed and our tenuous relationships without. Personal maturation does come after death, by which we truly come to eternal life.
The greatest affliction is a loveless life (and in life after death also) - the remedy being the giving freely, cultivating loving itself.
Spiritual Science endeavours to penetrate behind the mysteries of the spiritual conditions in the world. Religions are facts in the historical life of humanity. Spiritual Science can of course go so far as to consider the spiritual phenomena which have appeared as religions in the course of the world's evolution. But Spiritual Science can never desire to create a religion, any more than natural science surrenders itself to the illusion of being able to create something in nature. Hence the most various religious confessions will be able to live together in the profoundest peace, and in complete harmony within the circle of the view of the world taken by Spiritual Science, and will be able to strive together after knowledge of the spiritual — so to strive that the religious convictions of the individual will not thereby be in any way injured. Neither need intensity in the exercise of a religious belief be in any way lessened by what is found in Spiritual Science. Rather must it be said that natural science, as it has appeared in modern times, has very often led people away from a religious conception of life, from the exercise of true, inner religion. It is an experience which we have in Spiritual Science that people who have been alienated from all religious life by the half-truths of natural science can be brought back again to that life through Spiritual Science. No one need be in any way estranged from his religious life through Spiritual Science. For this reason it cannot be said that Spiritual Science, as such, is a religious belief. It desires neither to create a religious belief, nor to change a man in any way with regard to the religious belief which he holds. Nevertheless it seems as though people were talking about the religion of the Anthroposophists! In reality such a thing cannot be said, for all religious beliefs are represented within the Anthroposophical Society; and no one is prevented by it from practically exercising his religious belief in the fullest, most comprehensive and most intense way. It is only that Spiritual Science desires to include the whole world in its survey; it desires to survey historical life, together with the highest spirituality which has entered historical life. That for this reason it also takes a survey of religions is absolutely no contradiction of what I have just said. And thus it comes to pass that the view of the world taken by Spiritual Science must in a certain respect deepen a man, even with regard to the objects of religious life.
But when, for instance, it happens that Spiritual Science is accused of not speaking of a personal God, when it is said that I prefer to speak of the Divinity, not of God, when it is asserted that what is called “the divine” in Spiritual Science is of a similar nature to that which is so designated in the pantheism of the Monists or Naturalists, this is all the opposite of the truth. Through the very circumstance that in Spiritual Science we are led to real spiritual beings, and to the real being that man is after death, just because we are led to concrete, real spiritual beings, we arrive at being able completely to understand how unreasonable it is to become a pantheist, how repugnant to commonsense to deny personality in God. One arrives, on the contrary, at seeing that one may speak not only of the personality, but even of a super-personality of God. The most thorough refutation of pantheism may be found through Spiritual Science.
Can it be a subject of reproach that the spiritual investigator only speaks with deep reverence when, out of the feelings which his knowledge arouses in him, he points the way with awe to the divine? How often it is said in the circle of our friends, “In Him we live, and move, and have our being.” And one who wishes to comprehend God with one idea, does not know that all possible ideas cannot comprehend God, because all ideas are in God. But the recognition of God as a being who has personality in a much higher sense even than man, in a sense which even through Spiritual Science cannot be fully perceived, becomes quite, I would say, natural to people, specially through Anthroposophy. Religious conceptions are not made misty, in the pantheistic sense, through Spiritual Science, but, in accordance with their nature, become deepened. If we say that God is revealed in our own hearts and souls, this is surely the conviction of many religious people; and it is again and again said in Spiritual Science that there can be no question in this of wishing to deify man.
I have often used the simile that a drop taken out of the sea is water — do I therefore say that the drop is the sea? If I say that something divine speaks in the individual human soul, a drop out of the ocean of the infinite divine, do I therefore say anything which deifies the individual human soul? Do I say anything which unites nature with in a pantheistic way? Far from it. And finally, if from certain deeply-seated feelings which are aroused by Spiritual Science itself, the name “GOD” is, in reverential awe, not named but paraphrased, should this be a subject of blame from the religious point of view? I ask, is not one of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain?” May not Spiritual Science stimulate to a faithful fulfilment of this command, if the name of God is not perpetually on the lips of its followers?
" Through an immoral conception of life we deprive ourselves of forces of attraction in the Mercury sphere. Through an irreligious disposition of soul we deprive ourselves of forces of attraction in the Venus sphere. We cannot draw from this sphere the forces we need; which means that in the next incarnation we shall have an astral body that in a certain respect is imperfect."
Although it is common for people to talk of finding strength 'within' in Western culture today, previously in centuries before, people would look 'outward' to find the strength required for certain things.
For example: courage is an accessible virtue, however excessive nervous energy can thwart the courage you might otherwise experience. If we invoke the consoling powers from without to bear down upon the excess energy and curtail their disruption, we are then free to experience the courage that comes most naturally to us.
Asking the powers without can be a way to define the powers within. Ancient cultures looked to the vapors, to the smoke and fire, to the elements of nature and supernature, to 'normalize' the great powers within.
Our being, our own nature within, holds the same essence, power and velocity of the purest and fiercest forces universally known. There are not many different lesser varieties, but rather each bearing that of the same - same forces also that drive the world as well. -B.Hive
Courage must be developed. I have told you that courage is all around us. Air is an illusion; it is courage that is everywhere around us. If we are really to live in the world in which we breathe, we need courage. If we are timid or cowardly, if we do not live together with the world but exclude ourselves from it, we breathe only in semblance. What is above all things for medicine is courage, the courage to heal. It is indeed so: if you confront an illness with the courage to heal, this is the right orientation which in ninety percent of cases leads you right. These moral qualities are most intimately connected with the process of healing.
The argument has to begin by gazing for a long time at a picture of Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving, the "Melencolia I"....
The Galenic theory of the humors locked man's psychology into the cosmos, for the four humors corresponded to the four elements and four planets as follows:
Sanguine--Air--Jupiter
Choleric--Fire--Mars
Phlegmatic--Water--Moon
Melancholy--Earth--Saturn
The most unfortunate and most hateful of all the four humors was Saturn--Melancholy. The melancholic was dark in complexion, with black hair and a black face-the facies nigra or livid hue induced by the black bile of the melancholy complexion. His typical pose, expressive of his sadness and depression, was to rest his head on his hand. Even his "gifts," or characteristic occupations, were not attractive. He was good at measuring, numbering, counting -- measuring land and counting money -- but what low and earthy occupations were these compared with the splendid gifts of the sanguine Jupiter -- man, or the grace and loveliness of those born under Venus.
Dürer's Melancholy was the livid hue, the swarthy complexion, the "black face" of the type; and she supports her pensive head on her hand in the characteristic pose. She holds compasses for measuring and numbering. Beside her is the purse for counting money. Around her are tools, such as an artisan might use. Obviously she is a melancholic, characterized by the physical type, pose, and occupations of the old, bad melancholy. But she seems also to express some more lofty and intellectual type of endeavor. She is not actually doing anything, just sitting and thinking. What, moreover, do these geometrical forms mean, and why does a ladder rise heavenward behind the polyhedron?
There was a line of thought through which Saturn and the melancholy temperament might be "revalued," raised from being the lowest of the four to become the highest, the humor of great men, great thinkers, prophets, and religious seers. In this view, to be melancholy was a sign of genius; the "gifts" of Saturn, the numbering and measuring attributed to the melancholic, were to be cultivated as the highest kind of learning which brought man nearest to the divine. This radical change in the attitude to melancholy had results in effecting a change in the direction of men's minds and studies.
This change was brought about through the influence of a text, the authorship of which was attributed to Aristotle, but which is more safely described as Pseudo-Aristotelian. The thirtieth of the Problemata physica in this Pseudo-Aristotelian treatise discusses melancholy as the humor of heroes and great men. The argument is very detailed and medical, but the main point is that the heroic frenzy, or madness, or furor -- which, according to Plato, is the source of all inspiration -- when combined with the black bile of the melancholy temperament produced great men. It is the temperament of genius. All outstanding men have been melancholics, heroes like Hercules, philosophers like Empedocles or Plato, and practically all the poets.
The theories of Pseudo-Aristotle on melancholy were not unknown in the Middle Ages, but in the Renaissance they attracted general attention. Assimilated into Neoplatonism through the Platonic theory of the furores, the notion of the melancholy hero whose genius is akin to madness became familiar to the European mind.
Ficino knew the Pseudo-Aristotelian theory and mentioned it in the De Triplici Vita, the work in which he sets forth his astral magic. Addressing students who were thought to suffer from melancholy through solitariness and concentration on their studies, he advises that the Saturnian or melancholic man should not avoid the deep study to which he is prone by temperament, but should take care to temper the Saturnian severity with Jovial and Venereal influences. The ingenuity of Klibansky-Saxl-Panofsky has proved that Dürer's engraving shows knowledge of Ficinian theory, for they demonstrate that the square on the wall behind the melancholy figure, containing an arrangement of numbers, is a magic square of Jupiter, calculated to draw down Jupiter influences through its numerical arrangement. Thus the severe influences of Saturn and his inspired melancholy are being tempered in the engraving with Jupiter influences, as Ficino advised.
Dürer's immediate source for the inspired melancholy was, however, not Ficino, but Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia. The date of the engraving is 1514, that is, nearly 20 years before the publication of the printed version of Agrippa's work in 1533. It is therefore assumed that Dürer must have used the manuscript version of 1510, which was circulated in manuscript copies and was certainly available in the circles in which Dürer moved.
Agrippa quotes the definitions of inspired melancholy from Pseudo-Aristotle and classifies the inspiration, or demonic power which emanates from it, into three types, or grades, or stages. The first stage is when the inspired melancholy fills the imagination, producing wonderful instruction in the manual arts, through which a man may suddenly become a painter or an architect or some outstanding master in an art. The second stage of inspired melancholy is when the inspiration seizes on the reason, whereby it obtains knowledge of natural and human things; through the inspired reason a man becomes suddenly a philosopher, or a prophet. But when, through the melancholic inspiration, the soul soars to the intellect, or the mens, it learns the secret of divine matters, the law of God, the angelic hierarchies, or the emergence of new religions.
This classification accounts for the curious fact that the title of Dürer's engraving is "Melencolia I." It must be one of a series, the first in the series described by Agrippa, concerned with the inspired imagination of painters, architects, and masters in other arts. In fact, we see in the engraving the tools, the geometric figures, alluding to the traditional occupations of Saturn, his skills in number and measurement, but transmuted in an atmosphere of inspired melancholy to become the instruments of inspired artistic genius. The only active figure in the engraving is the putto, and he appears to hold an engraver's tool.
The book Saturn and Melancholy proves with immense learning the concern of Dürer's engraving with the melancholy humor in its inspired form and it points to Agrippa's work as a basic source for Dürer's thought on the subject. Yet, after all the brilliance and learning of the book, Panofsky's actual interpretation of the engraving comes as something of a disappointment and an anticlimax...
The part played by Cabala in Agrippa's book is emphasized all through as a guarantee of safety, that the magic described is a good and white magic, guided by angelic forces which ensured protection from evil powers. The three stages of inspired melancholy described by Agrippa would seem to be much in need of such protection since the inspiration is definitely said to be of a demonic nature. Dürer's "Melencolia" with her angel's wings expresses, I believe, the Agrippan combination of Magica and Cabala. Surrounded by Saturnian allusions, she magically invokes the inspiring influence of the highest of the planets, and is protected from harm by the angel of Saturn. Her angelic character is suggested not only by her angel wings but also by the ladder behind her, leading, not to the top of the building, but generally upwards into the sky -- Jacob's ladder on which the angels ascend and descend.
Dürer's "Melencolia" is not in a state of depressed inactivity. She is in an intense visionary trance, a state guaranteed against demonic intervention by angelic guidance.
The starved dog is an important key to the meaning. This hound is not another indication of a depressed mood of failure. It represents, I believe, the bodily senses, starved and under severe ascetic control in this first stage of inspiration, in which the inactivity is not representative of failure but of an intense inner vision. The Saturnian melancholy has "taken leave of the senses" and is soaring to worlds beyond worlds in a state of visionary trance. The only sense which is alive and working is the artist's hand, the hand of the putto recording the vision with his engraving tool -- the hand of Dürer himself recording his psychology of inspiration in this marvelous engraving.
Diana & Acteon, Lucas Cranach the elder
The classic moralization of the senses as hunting dogs is that given by Natalis Comes in his interpretation of the Actaeon fable, where Actaeon's dogs are the senses. The melancholy temperament was supposed to subdue the senses. One theorist on the humors defines Melancholy as "the sweet sleep of the senses." Or, we may turn to John Milton, who gave in "Il Penseroso" the supreme poetic expression of the theory of inspired melancholy.
"Divinest Melancholy," whose black face hides a saintly visage too bright for human sense, is accompanied by an ascetic "spare diet," and in her soaring vision she escapes from the senses: Or let my lamp at midnight hour Be seen in some high lonely tower, Where I may oft outwatch the Bear With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere The spirit of Plato to unfold What worlds or what vast regions hold The immortal mind that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshly nook. This is what Dürer shows, the trance in which the immortal mind is released from the senses-Milton's forsaken "fleshly nook" corresponds to Dürer's starved and sleeping dog of the senses.
Milton's melancholy inspiration of the imagination connects with higher realms of prophecy and angelic hierarchies. The three Agrippan stages can be clearly discerned in Milton's poem. His Melancholy mounts to the vision of
Him that yon soars on golden wing
Guiding the fiery wheeled throne
The Cherub Contemplation.
Dürer's "Melencolia I" represents the first of Agrippa's series, the inspired artistic melancholy. There was also a stage relating to prophetic inspiration, and a stage in which the inspired intellect rose to the contemplation of divine matters. All three are included in Milton's Melancholy, the saintly dark figure who descends from Reuchlin via Agrippa. And all three are intimated in Dürer's "Melencolia I" through the angelic wings which he had given to his black-faced figure.
In the same year in which he engraved the "Melencolia I," Dürer produced his famous engraving of St. Jerome in his study. Panofsky, in his book on Dürer, suggests that Dürer must have thought of the "St. Jerome" as a counterpart to the "Melencolia I" since he was in the habit of giving these two engravings together to his friends. No less than six copies were disposed of in pairs, while only one copy of the "Melencolia I" was given away singly.
Gazing at the two engravings side by side, as Dürer intended his friends to do, it is clear that there is an intended parallel between them.
The holy man is seated at his desk profoundly absorbed in his inspired writing. His cell is described by Panofsky "as a place of enchanted beatitude" informed with geometrical truth. The construction of space in the engraving is impeccably correct from the mathematical point of view. Panofsky contrasts this holy order with the disorder surrounding "Melencolia I" the tragic genius in her frustrated despair. This erroneous interpretation of "Melencolia I" prevents us from understanding that Dürer is representing different stages of inspired vision. The inspired imagination of the artist shown in "Melencolia I" is on a lower rung of the ladder of vision than is Jerome in his ordered surroundings, though the ladder is leading upwards. Jerome might be on the third grade of the Agrippan classification, in which the mens "Learns the secret of divine matters as for instance of the Law of God, the angelic hierarchy, and that which pertains to the knowledge of eternal things."
Where then is "Melencolia II," the second grade or phase of the inspired melancholy according to Agrippa, concerned with reason, with moral or philosophical matters, with prophetic insight into the state of the world or the state of society? I come now to a surprising part of this discussion, making what may seem an impossible transition from Dürer's engravings to the poetry of that most obscure Elizabethan writer, George Chapman. So far as I know, no one has ever attempted to show an influence of Dürer on the Elizabethans. Yet such an influence is not impossible, and, in the case of John Dee, it is a fact. When Dee in his mathematical preface to Euclid is discussing the theory of proportion he refers to Dürer's De Symmetria Humani Corposis, Dürer's famous book on proportion which Dee cites in the same breath as Agrippa's treatment of proportion in the De Occulta Philosophia. (I have discussed Dee's references to Dürer in my book Theatre of the World.) Thus Elizabethan disciples of Dee, the major philosopher of the Elizabethan age, had been referred to Dürer as the leading theorist on proportion, on artistic application of mathematical principles.
And it is not impossible that Dürer engravings were known in Elizabethan England. Unlike paintings, engravings could easily travel. Robert Burton had seen the "Melencolia I," which he describes in his Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton's book was not published until 1621, yet his mention of the engraving shows that it could travel to England and might have done so earlier. So, after these preliminaries I make my surprising transition from the study of Dürer's "Melencolia" to an analysis of one of the most obscure poems of the Elizabethan age, George Chapman's Shadow of Night.
This mysterious poem, published in 1594, opens by describing a "humour of the Night," a sad and weeping humor but one devoted to abstruse studies. The poem is in two parts, Hymnus in Noctem and Hymnus in Cynthiam. Many have been the attempts to unravel the hidden meanings of this most strange work. What is that darkness and that weeping humor through which the poet arrives at his moonlit visions?
Bent on concealing rather than revealing his meaning, Chapman nowhere uses the key word which would have put enquirers on the right track, the word "melancholy." Chapman is describing the inspired melancholy and its stages, as set out in Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia. Moreover, as I hope to show, Chapman was influenced by Dürer's visual imagery in his formulation in poetic imagery of the theme of the inspired melancholy.
In his letter before the poem, Chapman speaks of certain noblemen and others who have devoted themselves to deep studies. They and their friends are devoted with exceeding rapture of delight to the deep search for knowledge. Shod with the winged sandals of Mercury and "girt with Saturn's adamantine sword," they are bent on cutting off the head of ignorance and on "subduing their monstrous affections to most beautiful judgement." That Saturn, the Saturn of the Renaissance, star of highest and deepest learning and of profoundly ascetic life, is the guiding star of this group gives the clue to their place in the history of thought. These Elizabethan noblemen and their learned friends are "Saturnians," following the "revalued" Saturn of the Renaissance in their devotion to deep scientific studies and lofty ascetic and religious aims.
Once the Saturnian character of the deep search for knowledge is realized, we again have the clue to the meaning of Chapman's poem as concerned with Melancholy, the Saturnian humor. The following analysis will attempt to show that the inspired Melancholy herself appears painted by Chapman in word pictures which recall Dürer's engraving, "Melencolia I."
Chapman's sad humor of the night is the source of inspiration; she presides over the court of skill; through her all secrets are reached:
now let humour give
Seas to mine eyes, That I may quicklie weepe
The shipwracke of the world: or let soft sleepe
(Binding my senses) lose my working soule,
That in her highest pitch, she may controle
The court of skill, compact of misterie,
Wanting but franchisement and memorie
To reach all secrets . .
Chapman is invoking a melancholy humor to lead the "working soul" through inspired furor (the senses being asleep) to reach her highest pitch when she controls the court of skill. The entranced figure of Dürer's Melancholy, freed from the sleeping senses (the sleeping dog), reaching her highest pitch in the court of skill, presents in visual images the theme which Chapman translates into poetic images.
The extraordinarily intense atmosphere of Dürer's engraving finds a parallel in the intensity of Chapman's words. He appeals to all serious poets to steep themselves in the Humour of the Night, the humor of inspiration:
All you possest with indepressed spirits,
Undu'd with nimble and aspiring wits,
Come consecrate with me, to sacred Night
Your whole endeuors, and detest the light . . .
No pen can any thing eternal write,
That is not steept in humour of the night.
The pen wielded by the poet in the night of inspiration, as described by Chapman, may be compared with the engraver's tool wielded by the artist in the Night of inspired Melancholy, as depicted by Dürer. Chapman's words, "the court of skill," used to describe the surroundings of his Melancholy Night figure, would describe admirably the setting of Dürer's "Melencolia I," surrounded by instruments and figures referring to learned activities and meditations. The man of genius, whether the artist or the poet, is the inspired melancholic. This is the theme of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Problemanta, reflected by Agrippa in the De Occulta Philosophia. Dürer's engraving depicts the melancholic inspiration of the artist-scientist. Chapman's poem describes in terms of very similar imagery the melancholic inspiration of the poet.
Night and Melancholy have in common that both are dark. Chapman's Night is personified as a female figure with a black face, the facies nigra of melancholy:
Mens faces glitter, and their hearts are blacke,
But thou (great Mistresse of heauens gloomie racke)
Art blacke in face, and glitterst in thy heart.
There is thy glorie, riches, force, and Art.
This dark figure with the black face, secretly imbued with power and wealth and all force of Art, has a Düreresque intensity. We think of Dürer's "Melencolia I," with her swarthy face, her moneybags, and the symbols of her mental power.
There is another curiously close parallel to Chapman's melancholy imagery in a painting which the authors of Saturn and Melancholy reproduce as among the compositions which have obviously been influenced by Dürer's engraving. This is the painting attributed to Matthias Gerung and dated 1558 and now at Karlsruhe. It shows in the center a winged female in the melancholy pose, head on hand. Her dark robes mingle with the patch of darkness within which she is seated. Immediately in line with her, near the lower edge of the picture, is a philosopher measuring with compasses the globe of the world and surrounded by darkness. Indubitably these figures reflect Dürer's "Melencolia" and her characteristic interest in abstruse studies. The influence of Dürer's engraving is also apparent in the rainbow in the background.
In other respects Gerung's composition would seem to have no relation at all to Dürer's engraving or to the theme of melancholy. It is filled with quantities of figures engaged in many kinds of activities -- soldiers exercising near their tents, people at banquets, having baths, engaged in many kinds of sports and pastimes. These active figures seem unrelated to the two meditative, melancholy figures. As the authors of Saturn and Melancholy observe in describing this picture:
we see every possible activity of urban, rural and military life. . .but these representations seem to have no connection of any kind with each other or with the notion of melancholy.
George Chapman can throw light on this picture, for after his word picture reflecting "Melencolia I" he paints a word picture in which the busy occupations of the Day are contrasted with the meditative Night of Melancholy. At the coming of Day, all sorts of men come forth and engage in their various activities:
All sorts of men, to sorted taskes addrest,
Spread this inferiour element: and yeeld
Labour his due: the souldier to the field,
States-men to counsell, Judges to their pleas,
Merchants to commerce, mariners to seas:
All beasts and birds, the groues and forrests range,
To fill all corners of this round exchange,
Till thou (deare Night, o goddesse of most worth)
Lets thy sweet seas of golden humor forth
And Eagle-like doth with thy starrie wings,
Beate in the foules and beasts to Somnus lodgings,
And haughtie Day to the infernall deepe,
Proclaiming silence, studie, ease and sleepe.
These lines are a poetic counterpart to the Gerung picture. They explain the sorted men to sorted tasks addressed of the picture as the occupations of the Day, or of the active life, which are contrasted with the Night of contemplation and study. Like the Gerung picture, Chapman's lines describe Night as the inspired Melancholy, contrasted with the empty and uninspired occupations of the Day. The theme is related to the conventional debate between the active and the contemplative lives.
For Chapman, the followers of the Night with its studious peace, as opposed to the noisy bustle of the Day, its pure contemplative visions as opposed to vulgar activities, are the followers of virtue, who reject the "whoredoms" of the painted light. So in the Gerung picture the gentle melancholy Night, and her attendant the deep student who is measuring the globe, are marked off by Night and darkness from the "fooleries" of the Day, and pursue their meditations undisturbed.
In the Gerung picture, a conflict is going on in the sky between some not very clearly defined mythological figures. One of these is shooting at the Sun, thereby hastening the advent of Night, which is spreading in gloomy clouds. In Chapman's poem Hercules is urged to shoot at the Sun to stop his lustful activities and to cleanse the beastly stable of the world by descending from heaven:
Fall Hercules from heauen in tempestes hurld,
And cleanse this beastly stable of the world:
Or bend thy brasen bow against the Sunne. . .
Now make him leaue the world to Night and dreames.
Neuer were vertues labours so enuy'd
As in this light: shoote, shoote, and stoope his pride
Suffer no-more his lustful rayes to get
The Earth with issue; let him still be set
In Somnus thickets; bound about the browes,
With pitchie vapours, and with Ebone bowes.
How strangely close this seems to the Gerung picture, where someone is shooting at the Sun, where dark tempests are spreading, overcoming the sunlight, where the vanquishing of the Sun and Day brings in the melancholy Night of study, contemplation, and virtue.
The resemblances in imagery between this picture and Chapman's poem are so close -- the sorted men to sorted tasks addressed, the conflict between Night and Day, the shooting at the Sun -- that it seems probable that Chapman had seen something like the Gerung picture. I am not suggesting that he had seen the Gerung painting itself. What I am suggesting is that the Gerung painting is perhaps a copy of a lost engraving by Dürer, the lost "Melencolia II." Chapman saw the "Melencolia I," which we know, hanging beside "Melencolia II," lost except for the copy of it by Gerung. This is the Hypothesis.
We have arrived at the extraordinary result that the obscure Elizabethan poet, Chapman, can actually be of assistance to students of Dürer's engravings by indicating that the Gerung picture may be a copy of "Melencolia II."
I suggest that this is indicated by the way in which Chapman in his poem passes from his word picture of "Melencolia I," the dark-faced figure in the Court of Skill, to his word picture reflecting "Melencolia II," as copied by Gerung. The first stage in the Agrippan classification was the melancholy of the inspired artist. The second stage was concerned with moral insight, the political melancholy of the utopian dreamer, profoundly dissatisfied with the world as it is, hating Day with its meaningless activities compared to the contemplative dreams of Night. The Gerung picture, understood as "Melencolia II," would correspond in the world of Elizabethan melancholy to the malcontent humor, the "nighted humor" of Hamlet with which the Prince of Denmark surveys the lustful activities of the Day.
Chapman's Hymnus in Noctem begins in the imaginative stage of inspired melancholy and moves into the moral or political stage at about the middle of the poem, though images from both poems overlap throughout.
There was a third stage of Agrippan melancholy, when the melancholic saw visions of a religious nature, prophetic insights into coming religious changes. Where is this third stage in Chapman's poems?
The overall title of the poem is The Shadow of Night, but it is divided into two parts. The first part has the title Hymnus in Noctem, and it is this first part which contains the two melancholy visions we have been studying. The second part is called Hymnus in Cynthiam, Hymn to the Moon. In this part, the moon of revelation arises in the Night of Melancholy.
The Moon is already rising at the end of Hymnus in Noctem. She ascends as a glorious bride; associated with her "enchantress-like" is the "dreadful presence of our Empress." A note by Chapman states that this alludes to Queen Elizabeth's "magicke authority." In the Hymnus in Cynthiam the magic moon has fully risen in her "all purging purity." She does not banish Saturn. On the contrary, Cynthia's chastity performs the same "adamantine" function as Saturn's sickle. Through a parallel between the castration of Saturn and the chastity of Cynthia, the Moon, the latter becomes identified with the Saturnian theme of the poem.
The greater part of the Hymnus in Cynthiam is taken up by the description of a shadowy hunt. The nymph Euthemia (Joy) takes the forms of wild beasts who draw after them a pack of hunting dogs. The names of the dogs are taken from the account of Comes' Actaeon fable, in which the dogs of Actaeon are moralized as the senses . In the shadow hunting, the dogs of the senses hunt after false joys. The hunt lasts during the Day, but ends when Night returns. Thus the dogs, or senses, are once again the evil forces of Day, sleeping in the Night of inspired Melancholy.
The moonlit visions of the Hymnus in Cynthiam belong to the politico-religious aspect of inspired melancholy, its aspirations after Saturnian golden ages, its messianic expectations . This prophetic grade of the inspired melancholy (the third in the Agrippa formulation) is brought into line with the cult of Queen Elizabeth I as the Virgin of the imperial reform. This part of the poem is full of Elizabeth symbolism, Elizabeth as virgin of the imperial reform such as I have analyzed in my book Astraea, the relevant parts of which I need not repeat here, though I will just mention the very definite link with the Elizabeth symbolism disclosed in the lines recalling the device of the Emperor Charles V that was constantly used of Elizabeth and her imperial reform:
Forme then, twixt two superior pillars framed
This tender building, Pax imperii named. . .
Here is the familiar image of the two columns of the famous imperial device used as the framework for the vision of Elizabeth as the Moon of the Empire to which Chapman's series of visions of the inspired melancholy have been leading.
She appears in bridal attire, as a mystic bride, and the portrait is full of recondite allusions. It has been described as "Queen Elizabeth in Occult attire." It may be suggested that the atmosphere of this portrait is similar to that evoked by Chapman in the third part of his poem, on the third stage of melancholy inspiration, in which he refers to Elizabeth as a "bride of brides" exercising a "magicke authority."
The discovery, as so I believe it to be, of the connections between Chapman's poem, The Shadow of Night, and Agrippa's analysis of inspired melancholy into three stages introduces a new dimension into the mysteries of Elizabethan symbolism and imagery. If this poem is inspired by Cornelius Agrippa on the inspired melancholy, and if its imagery is influenced by Diirer's presentation in imagery of Agrippa's theme -- then we have an altogether new source suggested for the themes and images of Elizabethan poets and dramatists. Chapman's poem is indeed of central importance for the Elizabethan age and its poetry, as has long been recognized, and many have been the efforts to discover its meaning.
One line of enquiry has suggested that Chapman may allude in his poem to the so-called "School of Night," perhaps a group of noblemen and their friends engaged in abstruse studies. The phrase "School of Night" is used by Shakespeare in Love's Labour's Lost. The King is taunting Berowne for loving a dark-complexioned woman. "What zeal what fury hath inspired thee now?" cries the King, who has surely recognized the furor of inspired melancholy in Berowne's words. A few lines later, the King criticizes Berowne's extravagant praise of "blackness," with the words
O paradox. Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeones and the school of night. . .
words which have been interpreted as referring to some group of students of the abstruse, of which Chapman was one.
However, I suggest that the new approach to Chapman's night imagery lifts it out of the world of personal allusion, or allusion to small cliques of courtiers and poets, into a larger European world -- the world, for example, of the Emperor Rudolf II, with its deep interest in the occult. Rudolf was a passionate admirer of the works of Dürer, and the tracing of a probable influence of Dürer's imagery on an important Elizabethan poet-George Chapman -- suggests the importance of influences from the imperial court on the Elizabethans.
These are very large questions, awaiting further enquiry. My concern in this lecture has been first of all with re-interpreting Dürer's engraving as alluding to the trance of melancholy inspiration, not to a depressed mood of failure; and secondly, with attempting to unravel the influence of Agrippa's definition of the stages of melancholy inspiration in other representations of this theme, and above all in Chapman's Shadow of Night.
These minute enquiries may lead eventually to far-reaching results, some of which I have suggested in my last book, where I argue that the occult philosophy of which Agrippa was such a notable exponent was a leading influence on the Elizabethan age, profoundly affecting the poets and their imagery.
What I have said here, and in my book, is obviously only a first attempt at breaking new ground. I leave these problems with you and with the scholars of the future.
--DAME FRANCES YATES (speech given at the University of Rochester on September 18, 1980)
