MDDM ch.67: "Yet, does it live" (657.13)

[Terrance]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> Dixon seems to have the insight that Mason lacks, when they're trying to
> answer the Native American's query about where the Holy resides and Dixon
> gestures to include the earth itself, all their surroundings.  Dixon, at
> this point at least (he seems to waver and wobble a bit through the novel)
> seems to grasp an idea that runs throughout Pynchon's fiction, the living
> earth, the planet as a sentient being, Gaia, a point of view (which I am
> _not_ saying is Pynchon the man's, only that it is present in his fiction)
> evident in Vineland, GR, and the rest. There is no dividing line between
> "animate" and "inanimate" -- that's an illusion that, post-Enlightenment,
> leads to tragic results.


Mason is not very confident about all this. When asked where his God
dwells, He "rather uncertainly indicates up." The Indians are confident
and in agreement, they **ALL** gesture straight out the line, West. And
all nod when Mason asks if their God dwells at the horizon. 

One god dwells in the sky or north and one god west or at the horizon or
apparent hoizon--intersection of the earth and sky as seen by an
observer. 

To what should we attribute Mason's lack of certitude? Certainly, being
a man of the church, he knows that his god and his heaven are up in the
sky, north, but also, as Dixon reminds him, all around, within,
all-encompassing. So, one could say that Dixon's reply indicates that
he, being a Quaker, has a very different view of heaven and god's
dwelling, than Mason, but I'm not sure this explanation makes sense. 

It's worth turning back to Mason's conversation or imagined conversation
with his father about bread and transubstantiation--Mason Sr. remaining
close to the Catholic view while young Mason seems to reject the baker's
POV, bread making, his father, even as he apprentices his own sons to
the old man. 

In any event, god is remote. Celestially structured  supreme beings
disappear from the practices of religion, from cult; they depart from
among men, withdraw to the sky or the horizon, become remote, inactive
gods (see the Herero) (see dei otiosi). 

"The history of supreme beings whose structure is celestial is of the
utmost importance for an understanding of the religious history of
humanity as a whole (p121)." One fact is that they tend to disappear or
become obscured from religious practice. They remove to inaccessible
distances from humans and become inactive (dei otiosi). The supreme god
thus looses religious currency. Yet, in times of dire necessity when all
else has failed such a god becomes the last resort "not only among
primitives." "Each time that the ancient Hebrews experienced a period of
peace and prosperity, they abandoned Yahweh for the Baals and Astartes
of their neighbors. Only historical catastrophes forced
them to turn to Yahweh. 'And they cried unto the Lord, and said, We have
sinned, because we have forsaken the Lord, and have served Baalim and
Ashtaroth: but now deliver us out of the hands of our enemies, and we
will serve thee (I Sam. 12:10)' (p 126)." "The various divinities who
took the place of the supreme beings were the repository of the most
concrete and striking powers, the powers of life. But by that very fact
they had become 'specialists' in procreation and lost the subtler,
nobler, more spiritual powers of the Creator Gods. In discovering the
sacredness of life, man let himself be
increasingly carried away by his own discovery; he gave himself up to
vital hierophanies and turned from the sacrality that transcended his
immediate and daily needs (p128)." Though the celestial gods loose
currency their symbolism retains "a preponderant place in the economy of
the sacred (p128)."
"...no world is possible without verticality, and that dimension alone
is enough to evoke transcendence (p129)." Thus the sky ever draws eyes
up into its vastness as it evokes and symbolizes the loftiness of the
sacred.

http://www.csun.edu/~rcummings/sacred.html

See Frazer, The Worship of Nature

see Eliade The Sacred And Profane, page 138-140  for a discussion of the
Indians of Pennsylvania and the dwelling in the telluric earth

and 147-151 for the giant vegetation and so on..... 

see chapter 2 (The Sky and Sky Gods) of Eliade's Patterns in Comparative
Religion
and Chapter VII Vegetation

Otto wrote:
> 
> Well, not if you're Orpheus, right?
> 
> Otto

Not if you are anyone pre- or post- Homeric. 

If you are Orpheus, you are to be found in the folk tales and myths
round the globe, your flesh torn to pieces, tossed in the water. 

In some tales your head will be recovered, in others, only the penis you
thought was your own. 



>From Milton's PL



		But drive far off the barbarous
                  dissonance 
              33.Of Bacchus and his revellers, the
                  race 
              34.Of that wild rout that tore the
                  Thracian bard 
              35.In Rhodope, where woods and
                  rocks had ears 
              36.To rapture, till the savage
                  clamour drowned 
              37.Both harp and voice; nor could
                  the Muse defend 
              38.Her son. So fail not thou, who
                  thee implores: 
              39.For thou art heavenly, she an
                  empty dream. 

Urania is the muse of Astronomers. 

>From Milton's Lycidas


                His goary visage down the stream was sent,
                                                         
                Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.

Not much use for a Penis there! Unless you are an Egyptian. 

Of course, the christian poet is tossed in the water first, his body
fished from the sea, but he also must pay a fee to the ferryman, for
even the fishers of men can not live on bread alone.