MD Query

[Jim Caufield]

Having signed on to the list just last week after finishing Mason & Dixon,
I'm very impressed with the tone of the intercourse, promiscuous as it is.
I'm especially fascinated with the historical minutia that are generously
provided, whether it's the provenience of the ampersand or the relative
pockiness of Anglo-Indian relations. It's the same pleasure I got from the
book itself.
	One quick question, please, and if this was covered in postings  prior to
my arrival, then I apologize. Did Dixon's insinuation, somewhere toward the
end of book the second, that Mason intended illicit sexual relations with
some one of a number of dead lambs in the hold of the ship, and was
prevented only by the oleaginous impediment to firm footing, make oblique
reference to the ancient Carpocratians' practice of heretical love feasts
in which communion with the lamb, as theriomorphic figuration, was sought
with devout abandon, or was this merely a reprise of the high-seas buggery
motif found earlier in book the first? Cf. Irenaus, Adversus Haereses,
XXV.iv. _They deem it necessary, therefore, that by means of transmigration
from body to body, souls should have experience of every kind of life as
well as every kind of action (unless, indeed, by a single incarnation, one
may be able to prevent any need for others, by once for all, and with equal
completeness, doing all those things which we dare not either speak or hear
of, nay, which we must not even conceive in our thoughts, nor think
credible, if any such thing is mooted among those persons who are our
fellow-citizens), in order that, as their writings express it, their souls,
having made trial of every kind of life, may, at their departure, not be
wanting in any particular._
	Since this is my first Pynchon book, I suspect there's a lot more going on
here than the surface reveals, but I defer to you devotees.
	Thanks you.