Oedipa's Nighttown. Goes out to The Mexican Girl in second last para, so to speak.

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Am 26.01.2016 um 17:18 schrieb Monte Davis:

> But reaching to the original Circe: when Odysseus went to rescue his
> men, Hermes gave him moly as a protection against her spell

Oh yes. Holy Moly. "The root was black, while the flower was as white as 
milk".

Circe was a sorceress and later, in Christian times, viewed as the 
original evil witch (she is not purely evil in the Odyssey, in fact 
eventually shows Odysseus the way home to Ithaca, as it were). Odysseus 
needed a counter spell to Circe's magic potion and it was provided by 
Hermes, swift and cunning messenger of the gods, conductor of souls, god 
of transitions and boundaries, moving freely between the worlds of the 
mortal and divine -- the original trickster, a patron of thieves, a god 
of the zone, of the in-between, of the interface between worlds, 
constantly in flux and flight -- like the imagination, if one wishes.

Karl Rahner's brother Hugo has many interesting things to say about moly 
and related matters in his "Griechische Mythen in christlicher Deutung" 
('Greek Myths & Christian Mystery').

Just riffing.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l