MDMD(11): Her Plainly Visible Phantom

[Dave Monroe]

Reminds me ...

"...her plainly visible Phantom attends Mason as if he
were a Commissioner of Unfinish'd Business,
representing Rebekah at her most vital and belov'd. 
Is this, like the Bread and Wine, a kindness of the
Almighty, sparing him a sight he could not have
abided?  What might that be, too merciless to bear?"
(M&D, Ch. 16, p. 172)

"At times he believes he has almost seen black Fumes
welling from the Surface of her Apparition, heard her
Voice thickening to the timbres of the Beasts...the
serpents of Hell, real and swift, lying just the other
side of her Shadow...the smell of them in their long,
cold Waiting....  He gazes, at such moments, feeling
pleasurably helpless." (M&D, Ch. 16, p. 172)

"She bares her Teeth, and pales, and turns, drifting
away, evaporating before she is halfway across the
slain forest." (M&D, Ch. 16, p. 172)

"Her eyes have broken into white, and grown pointed
at the outer ends, her ears are back like a cat's."
(M&D, Ch. 15, p. 164)

>From Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), Ch. 1, "Grotto, an
Opening," pp. 1-23 ...

   "The scientific revolution was itself built on the
sixteenth-century Reformation, which had imposed
limits on the old Christian cosmogony that were to
have far-reaching consequences.  Most significantly,
the new Protestant dogma had fized the 'cessation of
miracles,' in D.P. Walker's phrase--and hence the
direct intrusion of the supernatural into human
loves--back to the year 600 C.E.  The repudiation of
miraculous events and other intrusions from the higher
world, including ghosts, became not simply the
dividing line between the new mainstream Protestant
culture and the older Catholic belief but a marker of
piety as well.  Keith Thomas relates a telling
anecdote of early seventeenth-century England: 'When
Sir Thomas Wise saw a walking spirit in the reign of
James, the local archdeacon was inclined to think it
might have been an angelic apparition.  But the
theologian Daniel Featley firmly declared that it must
have been an evil spirit because it was well known
that good ones could no longer be expected to appear.'
 Henceforth any instance of supernatural
intervention--that is, of the influence of an assumed
invisible world on our world of the senses--would be
seen as the work of the Devil." (p. 7)

And see here ...

Walker, D.P.  "The Cessation of Miracles."
   Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual
   History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe.
   Ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus.
   Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library,
   1988.  111-24.

Thomas, Keith.  Religion and the Decline of Magic.
   New York: Scribner's, 1971.  p. 590.

And, yes, sports fans, Walker's title is a play on
Plutarch's "On the Cessation of Oracles," apparently
...








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