Wasteland Worm & Fisher Kings

[Terrance]

http://home.vol.com/godsword/leviath.htm

Anatomy Of Criticism, four essays by Northrop Frye

>From His Third Essay,  Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths


The leviathan is usually a sea-monster, which means metaphorically that
he is the sea, and the prophecy that the Lord will hook and land the
leviathan in Ezekiel is identical with the prophecy in Revelation that
"there shall be no more sea." As denizens of his belly, therefore, we
are also metaphorically under water. Hence the importance of fishing the
Gospels, the apostles being "fishers of  men" who cast their nets into
the sea of this world. Hence too, the later development, referred to as
The Waste Land, of Adam or the impotent king as an ineffectual "fisher
king." In the same poem the appropriate link is also made with
Prospero's rescuing of a society out of the sea in the Tempest. 

Sakuntala
Rudens
Beowulf
Christ



And as the leviathan, in his aspects as the fallen world, contains all
forms of life imprisoned within himself, so as the sea contains the
imprisoned life-giving waters whose coming marks the spring. 

When in April the showers sweet
is the cruelest month




Lastly, if the leviathan is death, and the hero has to enter the body of
death, the hero has to die, and if his quest is completed the final
stage of it is, cyclically, rebirth, and dialectically, resurrection. 

Slothrop is King George, after the fact of course. 

In the St. George plays the heroes dies in his dragon-fight and is
brought to life by a doctor, and the same symbolism runs through all
they dying-god myths. 

In Chapter 60 of M&D, the worm is hooked and tossed in a well. He
poisons the waters. He grows and becomes a land creature. How becomes,
not the sea but  the land or the waste of it, The Waste Land, "enlarging
his Zone of emptiness." So we are below the ground or above it. Only the
castle is left, seemingly inviolable - Sacred and secure from violation
or profanation and impregnable to assault or trespass; invincible.  

The worm has made the castle the center of his waste land. 

Folks are crowding to the Castle Chapel -sanctuary. 

Others, more scientifik and militaristic, try to convert a catapult into
a giant fishing rod. Folks outside the castle keep vigils, watch, and
wait, fearing the destruction of the castle and the worm's turning. 

The hero shows up. He fights the worm and defeats it. But he fails to
keep one of oaths he took when preparing himself for the fight because
to keep it would have meant killing his own father. 

A-what a father anyway? Just another son, right? Didn't stop old Abe
from taking his boy up on the mountain, didn't stop the granddaddy of
all from sending his only son down here to be sacrificed. 

Christ won the day! 

Or did Hobbes