There are at least two books that ought to be in, or accessible in, any family home. One is the Bible and the other is Bulfinch’s Mythology. The suggestion of the Bible does not carry with it any particularly religious implication—merely to recognize the sacred text that is genetically linked with so very much of our literary, political, and intellectual history of the last two thousand years. The possessive pronoun frankly invokes the important elements still shared by nations of Europe and their many descendants on other continents. Bulfinch’s Mythology is simply a convenient modern English-language anthology of the ancient Greek and Latin myths scattered throughout classical literature but particularly prominent in the works of Ovid and a few others. Some medieval writers spoke of the two Bibles: the Bible of the Theologians and the Bible of the Poets. The European literary tradition continues to find inventive ways of bringing the two together, as we see so famously done by Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and so many others.
There is certainly nothing sacred about Bulfinch, except that he was a very early American scholar, a Bostonian born in 1797, whom I favor on patriotic grounds. He represents the learned strain that was in our country from its very founding. But there are probably half a dozen other encyclopedias of myth to which one could turn. Not only could, but probably ought to. The great myth systems of the world are among the richest aspects of its cultural legacies.
I can hardly claim a coherent thematic architecture in the choice of blog topics, but I at least sometimes do have some sense of affinity—conscious continuity or conscious contrast—as I move from one week to the next. The grievous sudden death of my wonderful friend Andrew Seth of course made an “emergent occasion” that fully occupied my mind. It still occupies my mind, but grief can be tutored by philosophy, and even as one begins the process of grief one does begin to see a little more clearly and think a little more calmly. I now regard it as a serendipity that only two weeks ago I wrote a little piece touching upon the plangent myth of Proserpina, as circumstances now allow, indeed almost require, that I return to it today. That is because in the last few days there are many signs of Proserpina’s return. And Proserpina is, in a certain sense the spring. And spring is arriving—not merely in the technical calendrical sense—but in both physical and spiritual senses as well.
The story of Proserpina favored by Bulfinch contrasts, as so many of the myths do, the capriciousness and cruelty of the gods with the dignity and natural charity of humble mortals. Proserpina, a lovely young girl, was a flower-gatherer. Pluto was the dark king of the Underworld. The hot goddess Venus could be a real bitch at times—such as most of them. Just to stir things up Venus instructs Cupid to shoot Pluto, spotted making a rare appearance above ground, with one of his fatally aphrodisiac arrows. Standard results ensue: hot pants in high places. Inflamed by “love” Pluto sees Proserpina gathering flowers, grabs her, and carries her home to hell. The kidnapped girl’s mother Ceres, goddess of agriculture, searches for her vainly in the four corners of the earth. Of course she does not find her; she is under the earth.
Few detective novels are more carefully plotted than the ancient Greek legends, and there is much more fine-grained narrative in this myth, but in the end Proserpina is almost rescued. A compromise is arranged. Proserpina must spend half the year with her hellish husband, the other half on the sunny earth. We have here obvious allegories of both a calendrical and a spiritual nature. The pattern recurs endlessly: life, death, rebirth….the eternal return.
“Fear first invented the gods.” We find that in an ancient Latin poem, and we find it in English literature as early as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a brilliantly imagined epic historical novel in verse written by a Christian author seriously attempting to enter the mental life of his imagined ancient pagan characters. What must it have been like, the author asks, to live in that ancient society of those who, as Saint Paul put it, “have no hope”? The philosopher George Santayana said this: “That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.” But I deny that fear is the source of the strange Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead, which at least claims to be based in an empirical, historical experience. Fear and hope are very different things. Rebirth a delusion? Perhaps. Extravagant hope, doubtless. But if your experience is that life is good, so good indeed that its final defeat is to you unthinkable, you find yourself trying to imagine the unimaginable along with Piero della Francesca in the fifteenth century or Sir Stanley Spencer in the twentieth. The brilliance of Spencer’s art resides in its combination of the humdrum and the barely imaginable. Here a random group of ordinary English villagers are coming out of their graves as if from a slumber party!
So a dear friend is dead, and there’s no denying that. But Proserpina has returned, even if here it is still so cold as to make one think twice before walking out in the chill air to take in the flowers that are already appearing massively in her train. But Palm Sunday is only four days hence, and then but a week more to an unusually early Easter. Chances are good it will be fairly warm by then. And now each Easter I myself have left, however few or many they may be, will be vivified by happy memories of a great friend and companion—and of bright and fragrant spring flowers.
