BTZ42Reed: Von B's epigraph

[Ian Livingston]

Regarding “…continued spiritual existence after death.”


“The ghost or phantasm seen by the dreamer or the visionary is in
unsubstantial form, like a shadow or reflection, and thus the familiar term
of the shade comes in to express the soul. Thus the Tasmanian word for
shadow is also that for the spirit, the Algonquins describe a man’s soul as
otahchuk, ‘his shadow’; the Quiché language uses natub for ‘shadow, soul’;
the Arawak *ueja* means ‘shadow, soul, image’; and Abipones made the one
word *lo**ákol* serve for shadow, soul, echo, image. The Zulus not only use
the word *tunzi* for “shadow, spirit, ghost,‘ but they consider that at
death the shadow of a man will in some way depart from the corpse, to
become an ancestral spirit. The Basutos not only call the spirit remaining
after death the* seriti* or 'shadow', but they think that if a man walks on
the river bank a crocodile may seize his shadow in the water and draw him
in; while in Old Calabar there is found the same identification of spirit
with the *ukpon* or 'shadow,' for a man to lose which is fatal. […] also
what seems the fundamental thought of the stories of shadowless men still
current in the folklore of Europe, and familiar to modern readers in
Chamisso’s tale of Peter Schlemihl. Thus the dead in Purgatory knew that
Dante was alive when they saw that, unlike theirs, his figure cast a shadow
on the ground. Mircea Eliade, From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook
of the History of Religions, 177 (1967).

Pynchon uses light and shadow, light and dark, light and...well, other
light to great effect throughout. Eliade was considered pretty hip in the
day. Whether there is any intentional allusion is unimportant to me in this
context, but the great rocketeer invites us to ask what he means when he
says afterlife, and so, I think does Pynchon, especially considering this
first section. Chimes?
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