Letters полностью

18. He meets with a mysterious death,

19. Often at the top of a hill.

20. His children, if any, do not succeed him.

21. His body is not buried, but nevertheless

22. He has one or more holy sepulchers.*

C. Joseph Campbell, mythologist and comparative religionist, drawing upon Lord Raglan’s analysis and the theories of Carl Jung, arranged these events into a cycle of 9 (or 23) several events or features, thus: †

D. I, whom these matters have long and obsessively concerned, find such divisions, while illuminating, as finally arguable as the measurement of an irregular coastline (Bertrand Russell’s example). Is the perimeter of Bloodsworth Island 10 miles? 100 miles? 1,000 miles? The answer depends upon how much particularity one ignores: the larger and smaller coves (Okahanikan, Tigs, Pone); the larger and smaller creeks (Long, Muddy, Fin); the bights and bends; the several points and spits that grow and shrink with the tide; the individual tussocks, hummocks, and fingers of each of these; the separate spartina stalks, oyster shells, and sand grains that comprise them, themselves irregular down past their molecules to the limits of definition. The coastline of Bloodsworth Island is infinite!

Likewise the itemization of, say, Perseus’s career, which I can as reasonably divide into 2, 8, 28, or 49 coordinate parts as into Campbell’s 9 or Raglan’s 22. Many of the 49, even, in my tidy 7x7 diagram thereof (which never mind), could be separated further or combined with their neighbors. Ought its items C5, C6, and C7, for example (Espial of Andromeda on Cliff at Joppa, Slaying of Sea Monster, Marriage to Andromeda), to be a single item (Rescue and Marriage)? Or ought its C7 to be divided into Rivalry with Phineus, Wedding Feast, Battle in the Banquet Hall, etc.?

All which considerations are but homely reminders of what mystics and logicians know (and mythic heroes at the Axis Mundi): that our concepts, categories, and classifications are ours, not the World’s, and are as finally arbitrary as they are provisionally useful. Including, to be sure, the distinction between ours and the World’s.

E. If therefore, for formal elegance, I divide the story of Perseus the Golden Destroyer first into 2 “cycles” (e.g., I: The official myth; II: My projected fiction about his later adventures: his midlife crisis and its resolution); and if I further divide each of those cycles into, say, 7 parts or stages, of which the 6th in each case is the climax; and if I still further divide each of those climactic 6th stages into 7 parts, of which ditto, my division will be about as defensible as those of Lord R. & Co.

F. Such an analysis might give us, for example,

1. In the First Cycle, like scenes in a mural,

I. The official myth

A. Perseus’s conception in Argos upon virgin Danaë in the brass contraceptive tower, by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold.

B. His rescue, with Mother Danaë, from the brassbound box in which his maternal grandfather has set them adrift in order to escape the usual oracle: grand-infanticide or grand-parricide.

C. After an otherwise eventless childhood-in-exile on the island of Seriphos, his advisement by Athena on ways & means to accomplish the task laid on him by King Polydectes (i.e., the slaying of Medusa the Gorgon), who wants Perseus dead so that he can have Danaë. Athena’s further equipping him with Hermes’s curved sword and her own mirror-bright shield.

D. His outwitting of the 3 Gray Ladies, who alone know where the Styx-Nymphs live, who alone can give him the other equipment he needs to kill Medusa. His theft of the Graeae’s single eye as surety, and subsequent loss of it into Lake Triton.