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as in the gold mosaic of a wall
Jan. 5th, 2011 10:57 amGuide Us to Thy Purple Plight (as I Probably Wrote Last Year, and the Year Before That)
The exotically robed Three Wise Men of the Nativity Scenes were figures of comedy to American children of fifty or sixty years ago, as witness the loaded cigar that brought them low one by one in the parody song as though in a three-verse abbreviation of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
In like fashion, Pierce Moffett the errant protagonist of John Crowley’s Ægypt novel joyously mangles the closing words of “We Three Kings of Orient Are” alongside little Sam, the child who would be a Gnostic savior or Sophia if she were not in a novel of which the purpose is the overthrow or abolition of all such categories.
Unable to remember what it is that the star of wonder is supposed to guide them to while it is “westward leading,” they decide it cannot be “purple plight,” and settle on humming the last three notes.
The Perfect Light that they were unable to recall seems to have been a matter of great interest to Victorians for whom Eastern Wisdom was suddenly a romantic alternative to Calvinist and Catholic certitudes. We ought not to take too seriously Edward Said’s dyspeptic assertions regarding their motives, even if such aspersions are renewed and amplified in such recent books as Donald Lopez’s Curators of the Buddha, if I an informed rightly.
No, the nineteenth century was grappling with the uncertainties implanted by Darwin, Lyell, and company, the notions of unfathomable gulfs of time instead of the tidy chronologies of Genesis, unthinkable depths of animality in lieu of the models of self and soul and passion versus reason inherited from Plato and Aristotle via Aquinas and/or the Enlightenment. And in that hothouse atmosphere, sober orientalists were doing their thing as responsibly as they could independent of the doings of their colonizing facilitators, while random romantics ran with their brand-new translations into realms of fancy unplumbed by anyone else short of Sir Richard Burton and the mystico-salacious Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.
Hence the Magi as a bridge to Eastern Wisdom within a sober Protestant milieu. Hence the star that guides in the Christmas carol, not to the Light of Christ (for which, thanks be to God, as the liturgy of the western church responds in the Easter acclamation) but to its own perfect light.
Hence, too, a lot of ad hoc made-up Masonic ritual, which we know most vaguely by virtue of not being Masons or members of the Order of the Eastern Star. I assume that historians of nineteenth-century America have paged through Albert Pike’s compendious companion to the rituals to see what he has to say about all this, but I have not. My sense, unsupported by anything resembling hard evidence, is that the Magi were on the one hand incorporated into the generalized romanticization of the Mystic East that gave us the dreaming onion domes of the Tampa Bay Hotel in Florida, ca. 1888, along with the tiles of Lord Leighton’s extravagant Arab Hall in his home in London, ca. somewhere in there.
But of course on the other hand the Magi and their extravagant gifts provided an important Biblical precedent, impossible to dispute, for the family-centered festival of exchange that arose in America and England in the same time period, courtesy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s encountering what may have been the only family in Germany to give one another presents under the candlelight of a Christmas tree.
In any case, it is the festival of the Magi as the Christmas season comes to its annual end, and in carnival cultures like that of New Orleans, flows seamlessly into Mardi Gras. The Kings Cakes of French tradition baked for Twelfth Night, whereby the lucky ring rendering its finder Lord or Lady of Misrule for the festive evening has become the plastic baby that commits the recipient to be the giver of the next party, and this continues right up until Ash Wednesday ushers in Lent and serious repentance. It seems a fine way of getting through winter, even as mild a winter as usually obtains in hurricane-prone parts of the planet.
And we are left with the sense that perhaps we are after all being guided to a purple plight, from which the indeterminacy of humming along may be the only deliverance. But that would take us into the methodological essay that I have been withholding for weeks now, so I shall shut up, at least until the next post on the topic. (For which, as usual, you may not have long to wait.)
The exotically robed Three Wise Men of the Nativity Scenes were figures of comedy to American children of fifty or sixty years ago, as witness the loaded cigar that brought them low one by one in the parody song as though in a three-verse abbreviation of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
In like fashion, Pierce Moffett the errant protagonist of John Crowley’s Ægypt novel joyously mangles the closing words of “We Three Kings of Orient Are” alongside little Sam, the child who would be a Gnostic savior or Sophia if she were not in a novel of which the purpose is the overthrow or abolition of all such categories.
Unable to remember what it is that the star of wonder is supposed to guide them to while it is “westward leading,” they decide it cannot be “purple plight,” and settle on humming the last three notes.
The Perfect Light that they were unable to recall seems to have been a matter of great interest to Victorians for whom Eastern Wisdom was suddenly a romantic alternative to Calvinist and Catholic certitudes. We ought not to take too seriously Edward Said’s dyspeptic assertions regarding their motives, even if such aspersions are renewed and amplified in such recent books as Donald Lopez’s Curators of the Buddha, if I an informed rightly.
No, the nineteenth century was grappling with the uncertainties implanted by Darwin, Lyell, and company, the notions of unfathomable gulfs of time instead of the tidy chronologies of Genesis, unthinkable depths of animality in lieu of the models of self and soul and passion versus reason inherited from Plato and Aristotle via Aquinas and/or the Enlightenment. And in that hothouse atmosphere, sober orientalists were doing their thing as responsibly as they could independent of the doings of their colonizing facilitators, while random romantics ran with their brand-new translations into realms of fancy unplumbed by anyone else short of Sir Richard Burton and the mystico-salacious Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.
Hence the Magi as a bridge to Eastern Wisdom within a sober Protestant milieu. Hence the star that guides in the Christmas carol, not to the Light of Christ (for which, thanks be to God, as the liturgy of the western church responds in the Easter acclamation) but to its own perfect light.
Hence, too, a lot of ad hoc made-up Masonic ritual, which we know most vaguely by virtue of not being Masons or members of the Order of the Eastern Star. I assume that historians of nineteenth-century America have paged through Albert Pike’s compendious companion to the rituals to see what he has to say about all this, but I have not. My sense, unsupported by anything resembling hard evidence, is that the Magi were on the one hand incorporated into the generalized romanticization of the Mystic East that gave us the dreaming onion domes of the Tampa Bay Hotel in Florida, ca. 1888, along with the tiles of Lord Leighton’s extravagant Arab Hall in his home in London, ca. somewhere in there.
But of course on the other hand the Magi and their extravagant gifts provided an important Biblical precedent, impossible to dispute, for the family-centered festival of exchange that arose in America and England in the same time period, courtesy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s encountering what may have been the only family in Germany to give one another presents under the candlelight of a Christmas tree.
In any case, it is the festival of the Magi as the Christmas season comes to its annual end, and in carnival cultures like that of New Orleans, flows seamlessly into Mardi Gras. The Kings Cakes of French tradition baked for Twelfth Night, whereby the lucky ring rendering its finder Lord or Lady of Misrule for the festive evening has become the plastic baby that commits the recipient to be the giver of the next party, and this continues right up until Ash Wednesday ushers in Lent and serious repentance. It seems a fine way of getting through winter, even as mild a winter as usually obtains in hurricane-prone parts of the planet.
And we are left with the sense that perhaps we are after all being guided to a purple plight, from which the indeterminacy of humming along may be the only deliverance. But that would take us into the methodological essay that I have been withholding for weeks now, so I shall shut up, at least until the next post on the topic. (For which, as usual, you may not have long to wait.)
