As above, so below.

* * *

FALL

Why is every Angel a fallen star?

Without the Fall there would be no story,
without the Fall there could be no Spring!

* * *

http://jesterspeaks.blogspot.com/

Thank you for your response. I posted my original thoughts on that discussion more than two years ago now, and because I failed to see much in the way of responses, I stopped checking – at least until recently. Just for fun I decided to type my name into google to see what came up, and the first link was Edelman’s site. I checked it only to discover the discussion had been shocked back to life.

On allegory, I’d support your comment with a quote from Tolkien’s letter to Milton Waldman from 1951 (a gold mine), which I suspect you’ve also read. In sum, he says “I dislike allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language”.

Earlier in the letter he wrote that the Arthurian world was “imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its ‘faerie’ is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion. For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world.”

This seems to me an appropriate path to have taken, considering the raised-eyebrows that he may have received had he mixed an explicitly Christian cosmogony with the use of magic and the occult. In regards to Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘All Religions are One,” all I can really say is that I’m yet to read them, and that you’ve whetted my appetite to do so.

I think key to talking about Tolkien’s use of the word ‘magic’ is his consistent conflation of the word with “the Machine,” and his comment that “The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognized.” He went on to say that while he had not partitioned the word into what we might interpret as good magic and dark magic, his idea was that:

“the Elves are there (in my tales) to demonstrate the difference. Their ‘magic’ is Art, delivered from many of its human limitations: more effortless, more quick, more complete (product, and vision in unflawed correspondence). And its object is Art not Power, sub-creation not domination and tyrannous re-forming of Creation. The ‘Elves’ are ‘immortal’, at least as far as this world goes: and hence are concerned rather with griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change, than with death. The Enemy in successive forms is always ‘naturally’ concerned with sheer domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines; but the problem: that this fruitful evil can and does arise from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others – speedily according to the benefactor’s own plans – is a recurrent motive.”

It seems that when he talks about magic in his work (as employed by Morgoth), it could certainly be analogous to our modern use of machines (he used the word himself), particularly of the weapons of war which removed the ‘romantic heroism’ from battle he knew too well: Howitzers, machine guns, mustard and chlorine gas. Less specifically, magic in our world might be the tools we employ to expedite the things we do in hopes of attaining utopia (if even subconsciously).

This, I suspect, is related to your reminder of what Illuvatar said to Melkor – namely that all the secrets of his mind were “but a part of the whole, and tributary to its glory” – that while Melkor had plans of his own doing, he ultimately participated in a grand story (both literally and figuratively) of which he was but a part – a part which culminated in the provisional triumph of good over evil . It was no accident, I think, that in the end “he was bound with the chain Angainor which he had worn aforetime, and his iron crown they beat into a collar for his neck.” That is, the crown which held his most prized possessions became the instrument of his enslavement.

You used an interesting verse from Isaiah 30. I thought that the first part of the first verse was related to our discussion too:

“Woe to the obstinate children,”
declares the LORD,
“to those who carry out plans that are not mine…”

Have I gone off topic? Speak freely, I beseech you.

Mark

mwisborg@hotmail.com
wisborm@mcmaster.ca

Hi Mark, do keep in touch, it’s nice to see somebody interested in my research and conjecture on these themes. I call myself the Jester so that I can play the Devil’s Advocate and think the unthinkable. My conclusions about the nature of archetypal metanarratives might just be a big joke, but they correspond exactly with Tolkien’s notion of ‘Mythopoeia’ – suggesting that, after all, many a true word might actually be spoken in jest.

Self-conscious allegory is almost by necessity clumsy and transparent – you know this, I know this and Tolkien knew this with knobs on. But in the very act of not imposing one’s own order on the narrative one is inviting ‘inspiration’, which Blake calls ‘Poetic Genius’.

Do you see the analog I am suggesting here? – the character Melkor does the opposite, he seeks to impose his own order on history, with horrific results, he thinks his order is better than God’s – yet in the end what is Melkor’s story revealed to be? His story is revealed to be a perfected allegory.

“And thou, Melkor, wilt discover all the secret thoughts of thy mind, and wilt perceive that they are but a part of the whole and tributary to its glory’ [The Silmarillion]

History is revealed to be a perfected allegory. Tolkien refuses to write an allegory, yet he always “had the sense of recording what was already there, somewhere, not of ‘inventing’ ” [from Tolkien's letter at the beginning of The Silmarillion]. William Blake is notably less coy in his intention -

“to speak to future generations by a Sublime Allegory, which is now perfectly completed into a Grand Poem. I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be anything other than the secretary; the authors are in eternity”

Yet for all Blake’s brilliance these claims for his poem ‘Jerusalem’ seem to apply more to that which Tolkien weaved upon the looms of the universal archetypal uber-metanarrative. Blake is fiery and cryptic, his allegory is perfect, but sometimes it seems that maybe only I understand him, while conversely Tolkien’s legacy is perhaps capable of explaining the same elusive truth to almost everybody else, or at least play its own small part in guiding the collective dialectic towards a tipping point where the consensus view of reality is redefined.

In Isaiah it speaks of a time when ‘they will say to the prophets tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions’. It is my ‘cosmic joke’ that this may be literally true, and that the time it is referring to could only be this era of fictional best-sellers and fantasy blockbusters. Who are the prophets? The Quakers believed they were returning to the original spirit of Christianity, their organisation held no hierarchy and they held silent ‘meetings of friends’ where anyone could speak if they felt touched, on the principle that they placed an individual’s inner communion with the divine over scripture, dogma and the idolisation of popes and kings. If they are right and we can all share in the same one love?

Perhaps we can find the answer in Blake’s ‘All Religions Are One’, I have abridged it here to make it easier to read: “The Poetic Genius is the true Man and the outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. The forms of all things are derived from their Genius, which by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon. As all men are alike in outward form, so (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius. All sects of Philosophy are from the Poetic Genius adapted to the weaknesses of every individual. The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius, which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy. The Jewish & Christian Testaments are an original derivation from the Poetic Genius.. As all men are alike, tho’ infinitely various, so all Religions have one source. The true Man is the source, the Poetic Genius.”

As regards Tolkien’s faith? Leonard Cohen is an observant Jew, but also a Zen Buddhist. I see no contradiction in this, he sees no contradiction in this. So it is with Tolkien. There are no ‘Muslims’, no ‘Christians’, no ‘Jews’ – there is only one G-d, to claim one name for that-which-defies-naming is better than another is the reason people kill in the name of a deity who everyone agrees said ‘thou shalt not kill’. There are no ‘Muslims’, no ‘Christians’, no ‘Jews’, there are only Holy men and those in need of healing. This is the Whole War, this is The Holy War – the war that is fought upon hate in ourselves and is won by Love.

While I have seemingly diverged from the point at hand I think all of this is relevant when trying to reconcile Tolkien’s devout Catholicism with the close correspondence to the occult metaphysics of Blake and Boehme. In the end all these men are Christians, ‘the occult’ is a blanket label that the established churches use to debunk all mystical practise that occurs without their authority.

Mark, I would be fascinated to read anything you come up with, or anyone else’s comments, my email address is josh.steed@gmail.com

Josh

jester.me.uk
reverbnation.com/thecelebratedmrk
whatbaffledme.blogspot.com