ahab as luddite (Quakerism)

[Terrance]

The Great Quail wrote:

I think Melville
> has a very ironic view of religion and its relationship to man's
> everyday life (as witnessed in the sermon to the sharks and so on),
> and he certainly exploits the fact that the whale butchers are
> Quakers, but I don't see it as being a dominant tonic in Melville's
> impressive symphony -- merely one minor theme among numerous themes
> minor and major. Of course, this is just my own reading of the book,
> and I make no claims to deep scholarship or personal enlightenment!

Thanks, I too can claim only my own reading of the book and of course
being a catholic I don't believe in *Personal* Enlightenment. ;-)


Well, as you well know, scholars have not left a single stone unturned.
The deep divers have salvaged his Bible, his Shakespeare, his Milton,
and of course his letters. When they compile the evidence,  they argue
convincingly that Quakerism is not a minor importance. 

To my reading of both M-D and M&D (Pynchon and Melville are
quintessential *American*  authors and both are very interested in
comparative religion and the history of religious conflicts) Quakerism
is an important religion and sect. The spirit of toleration and
religious freedom
that gradually expanded through the American colonies was present in
Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, home of the Quakers. The humane and
tolerant Quakers, or "The Society of Friends," as they are known,
believe in the sacredness of the individual conscience as the
fountainhead of social order and morality (Dixon holds to this principle
and it is very important that Ahab and his Nantucket men, particularly
Starbuck, are Quakers--note that when Starbuck is introduced and
described, he is described first, as a Quaker). The fundamental Quaker
belief in universal love and **Brotherhood** make Quakers deeply
Democratic and opposed to dogmatic religious authority (Ahab is an
Anti-Quaker or corrupted Gnostic Quaker in this sense). Are we surprised
that Dixon, a Quaker (Quakers were leaders in the anti-slavery
movements, but also pacifists)  lifts his hand against Slavery? 
Pynchon's texts are very
interested in why  certain peoples were either driven out, as the
Quakers were, as the Ulster Scots were, Huguenot, Anabaptists, so on and
on,  or exterminated (as the Pequad--the name of the Quaker ship in M-D
or the Herero) because of  religious beliefs and practices. 

Helen P. Trimpi, "Melville's Use of Demonology and Witchcraft in
Moby-Dick," Journal of
the History of Ideas, vol. XXX (Oct.-Dec., 1969), p. 543-562.

http://www.angelfire.com/me2/artgirl/trimpi.html

Melville's interest in demonology and witchcraft as a literary subject,
possibly one formative in the writing of Moby-Dick, is evident in some
jottings he made in his set of Shakespeare acquired in 1849.  In Volume
VII he wrote. "Ego non baptiso te in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus
Sancti - sed in nomine Diaboli," a parody of the Christian baptismal
formula. He repeated the formula partially in Ahab's baptism of the
harpoon in Moby-Dick (Chap. CXIII, "The Forge"), and again partially in
a letter to Hawthorne while he was finishing the romance in late June
1851. In the letter to Hawthorne he wrote that the whole book was
"broiled" in "hellfire" and that its secret motto is "Ego non baptiso te
in nomine . . . ," suggesting that the inverted formula is the key to
the book's
meaning, as a motto or epigraph was supposed to be in this period. In
the jottings he also wrote, "Madness is undefinable - It & right reason
extremes of one, - not the (black art) Goetic but Theurgic magic - seeks
converse with the Intelligence, Power, The Angel." Some other notations
which Mansfield and Vincent in their edition of Moby-Dick point out as
being related to Moby-Dick read: "(Devil as a Quaker)" and "Ten loads of
coal to burn him -/Brought to the stake - warmed himself by the fire."
They notice a Faustian suggestion in the entry, "A formal compact -
Imprimus - First - Second./The aforesaid soul. said soul &c -
Duplicates." Concerning the jottings about "a Society of
D's," a letter addressed to the D- 'My Dear D'-," "visits from the
principal d's," and "Terra Oblivionis" and "Hellities," they say that
they may have had some part in the diabolism of Moby-Dick.


Navigatio Brendani I read
Father tipping one
and the sails tipping too
Three hours from sun set
And I'm praying to the moon
Tug Dad's Grandad into the abyss