The Idea of Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages - Introduction

 Charting the Maze

It may be good, like it who list,

But I do doubt. Who can me blame?

. . . . .

Alas, I tread an endless maze

That seek to accord two contraries;

And hope still, and nothing haze,

Imprisoned in liberties....

—Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ballade 85

ANCIENT and medieval labyrinths or mazes (the words have different etymologies but mean the same thing) are characteristically double. They are full of ambiguity, their circuitous design prescribes a constant doubling back, and they fall into two distinct but related structural categories. They presume a double perspective: maze-treaders, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted and fragmented, suffer confusion, whereas maze-viewers who see the pattern whole, from above or in a diagram, are dazzled by its complex artistry. What you see depends on where you stand, and thus, at one and the same time, labyrinths are single (there is one physical structure) and double: they simultaneously incorporate order and disorder, clarity and confusion, unity and multiplicity, artistry and chaos. They may be perceived as path (a linear but circuitous passage to a goal) or as pattern (a complete symmetrical design). They are dynamic from a maze-walker’s perspective and static from a privileged onlooker’s point of view. Their paths are linear, but—since many ancient and medieval labyrinths are round—their pattern may be circular, cyclical; they describe both the linearity and the architecture of space and time. They may be inextricable (if no one can find the exit) or impenetrable (if no one can find the center). Our perception of labyrinths is thus intrinsically unstable: change your perspective and the labyrinth seems to change. As images, then, labyrinths are convertible and relative: what you see and feel and understand one moment can shift completely the  next like a reversible figure, an optical illusion. Thus mazes encode the very principle of doubleness, contrariety, paradox, concordia discors, as Wyatt knew.1Accordingly, the aims of this book are dual: to reconstruct the idea of the labyrinth in the western Middle Ages by extrapolation from a wide variety of sources, both literary and visual, and to see how that idea informs an array of important literary texts. I use the word idea to mean the general governing concept of the labyrinth as a visual or verbal sign, its ruling principles, the theoretical set of characteristics abstracted from and manifested in the specific labyrinths of art or literature. The idea of the labyrinth thus encompasses both formal principles (e.g., circuitousness, complexity) and habitual, culturally shared and transmitted significances of labyrinths (e.g., artistry, imprisonment). Unlike a Platonic idea, the kind of idea I’m talking about is not “true,” universal, or immutable; like other human ideas, the idea of the labyrinth is subject to temporal change, the most marked change occurring in postmedieval times, when the presence of false turnings and repeated choice became the labyrinth’s dominant characteristic. But because there is considerable constancy in the idea of the labyrinth over many centuries, including those spanned by this book, I speak of an idea (albeit one with permissible variations), not of many ideas. Since it allows for certain variations, this idea is not monolithic, a fixed and perfect template; rather, it includes a small repertory of attributes and associations among which a maze-maker can select, emphasizing these as opposed to those to shape the precise significance of this particular maze, which will in turn be interpreted by readers or viewers in accordance with their familiarity with the received idea of the labyrinth.

The word idea is also appropriate because I am interested not only in “real” labyrinths—mazes one can see and touch, things that are labeled labyrinths—but also in metaphorical labyrinths and in the very concept of the labyrinth. Thus I am also concerned with the labyrinthine: with identifying certain features closely associated with labyrinths (for instance, enforced circuitousness; disorientation; the idea of planned chaos;2 the bivium or critical choice between two paths; inextricability; intricacy; complexity), and with examining how constellations of these features operate in things, metaphors, and texts that function like labyrinths even though they may not be identified as such. In this context, I have coined the term “labyrinthicity,” by which I mean the condition of possessing significant features habitually associated with labyrinths.

I speak of reconstructing the medieval idea of the labyrinth because I want to avoid imposing modern definitions and canons of interpretation on medieval mazes. The modern idea of a labyrinth is curiously limited. It holds that mazes must contain many points of choice between two or more paths (they are multicursal, to use a word that will recur throughout this study—see plate 4) with dead ends leading nowhere, and that they are intended to confuse and frustrate. This idea is not foreign to the Middle Ages: many literary texts assume a multicursal model, and some see confusion as the maze’s primary function where others present bewilderment as merely a byproduct of brilliantly complex structure. But the modern concept of the maze excludes virtually all medieval labyrinths in the visual arts, which show a single winding path leading inevitably to the center and then back out again (they are thus unicursal—see plate 5). The medieval idea of the labyrinth allows both patterns, so modern readers must discard their mental image of the maze if they are to approach medieval examples and see what is actually there. Previous studies of medieval labyrinths have been seriously handicapped by their failure to appreciate, let alone to examine carefully, the implications of the coexistence of these radically different paradigms of the maze. Similarly, most modern studies of labyrinths manifest an interest in determining anthropological origins or archetypal significance.3 This search for the Ur-labyrinth may tell us something about twentieth-century ways of thinking about signs in general and the labyrinth in particular, and it can provide cross-cultural insights and suggestive speculation about the maze’s prehistory, but it tells us next to nothing about how medieval people saw and used the sign and hence has no place in my discussion. Instead, I want to recover what medieval people actually thought about mazes, what their “horizon of expectations” might have been when they heard the word laborintus or saw a maze in a cathedral nave, what they meant by the sign in their own works; I want to describe an appropriate code for deciphering medieval visual or literary works involving literal or metaphorical labyrinths, to define the “literary competence” required to appreciate labyrinth references and intertextualities.4 The kinds of questions I want to answer are these: What was the documentable medieval reception and development of the form, concept, and meaning of the labyrinth, as witnessed by the broadest possible range of texts and visual images from both official and unofficial cultures? What were characteristic and atypical medieval ways of seeing the labyrinth? How did the idea of the labyrinth, both literary and visual, generate metaphor, and what are the consequent metaphorical uses of the sign?5 How does the idea of the labyrinth function as a heuristic tool for understanding labyrinthine literary texts that mayor may not explicitly identify themselves as labyrinths? This general focus on the medieval, the metaphorical, and the literary distinguishes my work from most recent studies of labyrinths.

Readers familiar with W. H. Matthews’s seminal Mazes and Labyrinths, Paolo Santarcangeli’s Livre des labyrinthes, and Hermann Kern’s Labirinti may wonder why another book is necessary. First, these previous studies concentrate on the visual arts, not on literature, and certainly not on labyrinthine texts. Second, they treat the labyrinth from prehistory to the present, and the medieval idea of the labyrinth merits far more attention than they have given it. Third, despite their visual orientation, they give little or no attention to the formal implications of the two medieval paradigms of the maze and the tensions between literary and visual traditions. Fourth, my work deals more with metaphorical labyrinths than with real ones.6The best way to suggest the scope, rationale, and methods of this book is through a brief overview of its contents. Part One lays the groundwork for the study of medieval labyrinths by examining several facets of the classical and early Christian background. Focusing on the written witness, Chapter 1 identifies, analyzes, and compares two major classical traditions associated with different kinds of literature and well-known to the Middle Ages—the historical-geographical, quasi-factual description of four ancient labyrinths as real buildings, discussed by Pliny the Elder, Strabo, and others, and the purely literary tradition established by Virgil and Ovid, the classical poets who most influenced medieval thought. Here I explore characteristically labyrinthine dualities—artistry vs. chaos, order vs. confusion, admirable complexity vs. moral duplicity—in these traditions and texts; I discuss the physical facts and narrative implications of the labyrinth and its associated myth; and I show how the written tradition presupposes the multicursal model of the maze, transmitting that model to the Middle Ages.

Chapter 2 focuses on the surprising conflict between written tradition and the visual arts, which endorse not the multicursal model but rather the unicursal model that persists in art throughout the Middle Ages. It is almost impossible to overestimate how remarkable this paradigmatic incompatibility is: as an analogy, imagine that literary descriptions of circles defined them as having four sides joined by right angles, whereas visual illustrations showed the figure we recognize as a circle. Other studies of the labyrinth at best mention the extraordinary discrepancy between medieval unicursal and modern multicursal visual models. But I will argue that it is precisely the peaceful coexistence of ancient and medieval literary multicursal models and visual unicursal models that is the key to understanding what medieval people meant by the word labonntus. Analysis of the two paradigms, then, constitutes the substance of Chapter 2. First I examine the formal implications of each model, showing how its characteristic features imply metaphorical potential; for instance, the presence of true and false paths in the multicursal maze may suggest the importance of correct moral or intellectual choice within a confusing world, whereas the single circuitous passage of the unicursal type argues that persistence in the difficult path prescribed by God—or in the devious path designed by the devil, or in the philosopher’s complex argument—leads ineluctably to the appropriate destination, be it heaven, hell, or knowledge. Since the single word laborintus denotes both unicursal and multicursal models, and since the name and the visual image often appear together, classical and medieval people must have assumed that the paradigms, so contradictory from our point of view, shared enough common features to comprise a single category; therefore I deduce the classical-medieval definition of this category, laborintus, by identifying the two models’ most important shared characteristics. The formal features that both models share broadly outline the general idea or the essence of the labyrinth; they reveal the most important criteria for labyrinthicity and shape the major aspects of the maze’s metaphorical potential. Formal features specific to one model or the other fill in the picture and allow considerable flexibility in individual instances: medieval authors can pick the model that best suits the metaphor in mind, or (occasionally) they can select features from both models, or (very rarely) they can describe a transformation of one model into the other.

Chapter 3 shows how three shared formal characteristics generate a taxonomy of labyrinth metaphors: because of certain physical attributes, the labyrinth may be a sign of complex artistry, of impenetrability or inextricability, and of difficult intellectual, epistemological, and verbal process. These categories are illustrated and developed by a wide range of classical and early Christian texts, most of them known in the Middle Ages.7 In a general sense, then, Chapter 3 is a case history in how properties of structural models generate, or at least support, literary metaphor; more particularly, the chapter documents the specific metaphorical heritage of the maze on which medieval writers and artists could, and did, draw in creating their own labyrinthine works and metaphors.

Part One thus describes the literary, conceptual, and metaphorical backgrounds of the medieval idea of the labyrinth. Part Two tackles that idea directly. A brief introduction, Chapter 4, considers Latin etymology and vernacular terms for mazes and condenses the various ambiguities of labor intus and domus daedali into three general categories of meaning roughly corresponding to those outlined in Chapter 3: artistry, morality, and difficult process. Each of these categories is then explored. Chapter 5 examines the witness of the medieval visual arts (architecture, gardens, turf and stone mazes, cathedral labyrinths, mazes in manuscripts) to see how it informs written texts by exemplifying, developing, and popularizing certain aspects of the medieval idea of the labyrinth; in return, the literary tradition casts light on some puzzling aspects of visual labyrinths, including the hotly debated function of cathedral mazes. The visual arts are the major medieval locus of the classical and early Christian concept of the labyrinth as magnificent artistry, whether human or divine; they also provide evidence for a purely secular view of labyrinths in a culture that moralized most things, including mazes, and give some insight into the mazes of popular and aristocratic cultures. Thus the interaction of literature and art enhances our understanding of each and enriches our perception of the medieval idea of the labyrinth.

Chapter 5 stresses Daedalian artistry, the visual arts, and the labyrinth in bono; Chapter 6 turns to morality, literature, and the deceitful, nearly inextricable mazes of the world and sin. Most of the texts considered here draw as heavily on the story of the Cretan labyrinth as on the ambiguous building itself, and that narrative context tends to equate the structural windings or errores of the maze with moral error. Three sets of texts are considered. First, several elaborate fourteenth-century mythographical readings of the Cretan legend illustrate the rich and comprehensive metaphorical potential of labyrinthine characters, plot, and structure within the allegorical tradition. Next, fairly casual references to the labyrinth in selected nonmythographical texts document the maze’s commonplace metaphorical associations as background for more substantial discussion and fuller appreciation of particularly innovative works. The chapter concludes with four unrelated texts that draw more creatively on the plot and cast of the Cretan legend: the story of Gardinus in the Gesta Romanorum, Boccaccio’s Corbaccio, the anonymous Assembly of Ladies, and the Queste del Saint Graal. Each text reflects the medieval idea of the labyrinth and presents the world as a perilous maze in which one learns how to function only with great difficulty, and in each the idea of labyrinth serves as a revealing interpretive tool.

Chapter 7 concludes Part Two with the most interesting group of metaphorical mazes: intellectual and textual labyrinths. Here the maze becomes a model for the complex processes of creating and receiving texts as well as for the object of these activities, the text itself as a work of elaborate art. The chapter addresses the question of a labyrinthine aesthetic and shows how labyrinthine qualities are privileged in literary theory and practice even though the term “labyrinth” is most commonly applied pejoratively to failed art, art that is too complex for its intended audience and purpose.

Part Three, “Labyrinths of Words,” consists of four essays in practical criticism. Here I apply concepts developed in Parts One and Two to labyrinthine readings of four interrelated literary texts: Virgil’s Aeneid, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Chaucer’s House of Fame. Each of these texts plays with received ideas of the labyrinth, its plot, its characters; and each text reflects not only the idea of the labyrinth in its own age but also labyrinthine aspects of the texts that precede it in this remarkable series. Boethius uses and corrects Virgil’s idea of the labyrinth; Dante uses and corrects Virgil and Boethius; and Chaucer makes extraordinarily innovative use of all three masters. These four works constitute a complex study in labyrinthine intertextuality and an appropriate conclusion to my explorations of the idea of the labyrinth. Thus these chapters illuminate the texts they discuss and serve as models for readings of other labyrinthine literature.8

Obviously my methodology is eclectic. By nature and training a literary historian with some interest in modern theory, I share Paul Zumthor’s insistence on the need to respect the historicity of a text “and, simultaneously, to redefine, adapt, and sometimes reject modern critical concepts, so as to render them appropriate in seizing this historicity.”9 At the same time, I share many medievalists’ conviction that a good deal of modern thought has medieval ancestry.10 Thus I take a somewhat semiotic approach in considering the labyrinth as a sign with important formal attributes, but I don’t see this as ahistorical or anachronistic: medieval philosophers were interested in sign theory and believed that the meaning of any conventional sign (signum ad placitum) derived not only from traditional usage but also from qualities inherent in the sign—its etymology, if the sign is a word; its natural attributes, if the sign is a thing—that make it an appropriate symbol of the thing signified.11 Thus, for Isidore of Seville, amicus (friend) is derived from animi custos (guardian of the spirit), and the triangle, its three angles united in one geometrical figure, is an appropriate sign for the Trinity.12 Since the labyrinth is both a word and a thing, its etymologies and physical structure help delineate its significance.

Similarly, reader response and reception theories of literature inform my interest in the reception of the labyrinth in the Middle Ages, my speculations on the labyrinth as process, and my assumption that neither the sign’s meaning nor its significance in medieval texts is ever strictly determinate. But once again such concerns are not alien to medieval thought: rhetoricians and preachers were acutely sensitive to reader (or listener) response, and the labyrinth topos figures in such ruminations. Augustine discusses the polysemous nature of signs, and the validity of biblical interpretations never intended by the author, as long as these novel interpretations accord with the prevailing code, “the truth taught in other passages of the Holy Scriptures.”13 Ambiguity is as central to medieval hermeneutic practice as it is to the labyrinth itself. Deconstructionist ideas are also illuminating: the concept of aporia (the “un passable path,” self-contradiction, paradox) sheds light on the labyrinth’s embodiment of paradox, its simultaneous affirmation of antinomies: order/chaos, imprisonment/liberation, linearity/circularity, clarity/complexity, stability/instability. The view that what one sees in a text, however perverse by traditional critical standards, is worth writing about has encouraged me to be mildly speculative in discussing what a text expresses even if that expression may be remote from the writer’s probable intention. But what medieval exegete ever acted differently?

In some ways my discussion of the medieval idea of the labyrinth may even illuminate some contentious issues in contemporary theory. For instance, since the labyrinth is a model simultaneously for artistic intention (the architect’s plan), the integrity of a text (the labyrinth as artifact), and the experience of the reader (the well- or ill-informed choices of the maze-treader within the parameters set by the builder), it suggests some possible ways of dealing with the often conflicting claims of authorial intention versus reception in critical discourse.

Naturally, this study has limitations. It is not—nor does it aim to be—a catalogue of literary labyrinths comparable to Kern’s catalogue of mazes in the visual arts; but I am reasonably sure that I have covered all categories of labyrinthine metaphor as well as a representative selection of classical and medieval works in which the idea of the labyrinth plays a major part. Much as I would have liked to locate certain ways of seeing mazes on the vast map of intellectual history by linking this interpretation with Platonists and that with Aristotelians, say, I have been unable to do so: there seem to be no systematic linkages between labyrinthine metaphors and particular schools of thought, although in a very gradual temporal change the word labyrinth, though not the visual image or the idea, acquired predominately moral and pejorative connotations, as we shall see.

Another unavoidable limitation is suggested by Hans Robert Jauss’s comment that “modern scholarship still does not sufficiently differentiate between various levels of reception.”14 For Jauss, high-level reception is the “dialogue of great authors,” which creates truly innovative (and quite unpredictable) readings—Pascal reading Montaigne, for instance. Part Three of this book grapples with high-level readings in the labyrinthine tradition and by its very nature is not susceptible to “proof,” if proof is ever possible in literary criticism. We know how commentators like Servius and pseudo-Bernard Silvester read the Aeneid, and we know how Benvenuto da Imola and Guido of Pisa read Dante’s reading of the Aeneid in the Divine Comedy, but neither kind of evidence tells us how Dante read Virgil and his labyrinths. Middle-level reception involves “institutionalized reading,” interpretations of texts and visual images by skilled readers whose comments reflect competence but not the idiosyncrasies of genius and result in “traditionalized and authorized meaning.” Much of the material presented in Chapters 3 through 7 reflects middle-level reception and development of the idea of the labyrinth: commentaries on and uses of real and metaphorical labyrinths by men literate in Latin, schooled in the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic), familiar with such standard curriculum authors as Virgil and Ovid and their commentators, and trained to read and interpret in predictable ways. Here I have drawn on as many kinds of primary written and visual sources as possible: letters, commentaries, poetry, historical and geographical treatises, theology, biblical exegesis, encyclopedias, arts of preaching and rhetoric, sermons, formularies, philosophical works, manuscript illuminations, and so on—material that defined and transmitted official institutional culture. The idea of the labyrinth that evolves in the first two parts of this book, then, is primarily the idea shaped and accepted in middle-level readings, for this is the idea that can most easily be reconstructed and documented. At the lowest level is “pre-reflective” reading, the personal responses of a relatively inexperienced reader encountering a work for the first time. There is little classical or medieval evidence for low-level reading of the maze for the simple reason that the medieval equivalents of modern low-level “readers” were illiterate and their responses to the labyrinth went unrecorded. We may detect traces of low-level readings in the names of turf-mazes or labyrinthine stone circles, or in preaching manuals and sermon collections whose content might have been transmitted to unlettered parishioners. But what is transmitted is not necessarily what is received, so we can only guess at low-level reception of the labyrinth in the Middle Ages. Thus much of this book recreates a middle-level horizon of expectations regarding labyrinths, and its conclusions about the medieval idea of the labyrinth are neither comprehensive nor a handy interpretive template to be applied mechanically to all medieval uses of the image.

There is yet another limitation to be acknowledged. I began studying medieval labyrinths almost twenty years ago while lecturing on Chaucer’s House of Fame as a labyrinthine poem, and though I have worked on the topic ever since, I have certainly not read everything published or in manuscript that might be relevant. Moreover, I am not a classicist or a specialist in Italian and French literature, and I have not read all the secondary material on the Aeneid or the Divine Comedy or the Queste del Saint Graal, to name but three works I treat at some length. Rather than refrain from discussing obviously pertinent texts, I have forged ahead in the hope that by looking at old material with fresh eyes, much-appreciated guidance from willing experts, and a different perspective—the view from the labyrinth—I can suggest new threads to follow through these textual mazes. I acknowledge these problems with regret but also with a lively awareness that treaders of multicursallabyrinths inevitably leave some paths untraced and forget what they learned in others. I sometimes think it is a miracle that I have extricated myself from this endless labyrinth of contraries at all: nineteenth-century discussions of church mazes are dotted with references to one M. Bonnin, who had collected more than two hundred maze designs that he intended to publish as soon as he had completed the accompanying text.15 So far as I can tell, nothing ever appeared in print, and the cautionary figure of M. Bonnin stalks my nightmares.

Before this errand into the maze begins in earnest, two small points: first, in dealing with some examples of labyrinth metaphors, I address meanings that emerge from the immediate context of the image rather than from its place in the whole work, lest a long study grow completely out of bounds. Second, since I want this book to be useful not only to medievalists but also to nonspecialists interested in labyrinths, I quote most texts in translation, either a published version or my own.16

Finally, for readers who may not have details of the Cretan legend at their fingertips, I provide a summary based on Ovid but including a few details and variants from other classical and medieval retellings.

· The Cretan Labyrinth Myth ·

Outraged by the death of his son Androgeos in Athens, King Minos of Crete besieged that Greek city. Meanwhile, his wayward wife Pasiphae fell passionately in love with a handsome bull. To satisfy her lust, she enlisted the help of the Athenian Daedalus, master inventor of antiquity, who built her a wooden cow covered with hides. Pasiphae climbed into the cow, mated with the bull, and conceived the Minotaur, a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull. When Minos returned triumphantly to Crete, he was shamed by this visible proof of his wife’s lechery, and he bade Daedalus construct the confusing and inextricable labyrinth in which to emprison and conceal the Minotaur. So bewildering were the maze’s paths that even Daedalus could scarcely find his way back to the entrance.

Every nine years (or, some say, every year), Minos fed the Minotaur with Athenian youths sent as tribute in atonement for the death of Androgeos. At the time of the third tribute, one of the fatal lots fell to Theseus, King Aegeus’s son, who, with his companions, was brought to Crete. But Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, fell in love with the young prince and determined to save him from labyrinth and Minotaur alike. To this end—and, some say, on the advice of the crafty Daedalus—she gave Theseus a clue of thread, which he tied to the entrance of the labyrinth and unwound as he followed the twisting paths to the center. There, some say, he took Ariadne’s second gift, a ball of pitch, and threw it into the Minotaur’s gaping mouth. Choking on the ball and unable to attack the man who should have been his prey, the Minotaur fell victim to Theseus’s sword (or, in other accounts, his club). The young Athenian rewound the clue of thread, retraced his steps, and emerged safely from the hitherto inextricable labyrinth. Taking Ariadne and her young sister Phaedra with him, Theseus set sail for Naxos, where he abandoned Ariadne. Moved by her plight, the god Dionysus consoled her, transforming her crown into a constellation. Theseus and his companions sailed on to Delos, where they performed a labyrinthine dance in celebration of their escape from Crete. But Theseus’s triumphant homecoming to Athens turned to tragedy. He had promised his father Aegeus that if by some miracle he escaped the labyrinth, he would replace the black sails on his ship with white ones. Having already forgotten Ariadne, Theseus was equally forgetful of his promise to his father: the black sails remained aloft, and the distraught Aegeus hurled himself into the sea.

Meanwhile Daedalus, inventor of the labyrinth, was himself made prisoner. Some say that Minos cast him and his son Icarus into the labyrinth as punishment for assisting Pasiphae or for having helped Ariadne save Theseus; others claim that Minos refused to let so ingenious an inventor return home to Athens. Whatever the truth may be, Daedalus made wings so he and Icarus might escape the maze by flight. Daedalus warned his son to take a middle course—the sun would melt the wax that held the feathers in place, the waves would drench them. But Icarus ignored his father’s advice, soared sunward, and plummeted into the sea.

As Daedalus mourned, he was taunted by a partridge who had once been his own nephew, Talos (or Perdix). This precocious lad had been apprenticed to his uncle, but when the child proved his brilliance by inventing the saw and the compass at the tender age of twelve, Daedalus grew jealous, threw him off the Acropolis, and fled to Crete. Athena, pitying the child, turned him into a partridge, a bird that still shuns heights because it remembers Talos’s terrible fall.

After the death of Icarus, Daedalus flew to Italian Cumae, where he built a temple to Apollo, sculpting on its doors the story of the Cretan labyrinth. Some say that Daedalus then flew to Sicily, where he was welcomed by King Cocalus. Still seeking vengeance, Minos offered a reward to anyone who could thread a tightly spiraled shell. Daedalus, as crafty as ever, drilled a tiny hole in one end, inserted an ant with a thread attached to its body, induced it to enter by smearing honey on the shell’s mouth, and thus traced the windings of the shell. Sure that no one but Daedalus could have accomplished such a task, Minos came to claim him, but the Sicilians, reluctant to give Daedalus up, murdered Minos.

1. See epigraph to this chapter and Ballade 85 in Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 120–121.

2. I first encountered this phrase in Alfred David’s “Literary Satire in The House of Fame,” PMLA, 75 (1960), 333-339, where it struck me as the perfect definition of a maze.

3. See, e.g., Janet Bord, Mazes and Labyrinths of the World (London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1976); Philippe Borgeaud, “The Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King: The Greek Labyrinth in Context,” History of Religions, 14 (1974), 1-27; Gaetano Cipolla, Labyrinth: Studies on an Archetype (New York: Legas, 1987); Raymond J. Clark, Catabasis: Vergil and the Wisdom-Tradition (Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1979); C. N. Deedes, “The Labyrinth,” in S. H. Hooke, ed., The Labyrinth: Further Studies in the Relation of Myth and Ritual in the Ancient World (London: SPCK, 1935), pp. 3-42; Kern, Labirinti; W. F. Jackson Knight, Cumaean Gates: A Relation of the Sixth Aeneid to the Initiation Pattern (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936); Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths; Jill Puree, The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974); and Santarcangeli, Livre des Labyrinthes. My short study “The Labyrinth in Medieval Culture: Explorations of an Image,” University of Ottawa Quarterly, 52 (1982), 207-218, based on papers given at Oxford III 1975 and at Ottawa in 1981, is very sketchy in comparison to the present book.

4. See Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” pp. 3-45 in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, introd. Paul de Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), and Jonathan Culler, “Literary Competence,” pp. 101-117 in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Culler’s essay is excerpted from his Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).

5. We encounter a chicken-or-egg question in regard to whether the visual image of the labyrinth generated myth and metaphor or vice versa. Given the great antiquity of the typical round, unicursal design, the visual image may have come first, begetting (or attaching to itself) myth and metaphor, but the question is really unanswerable.

6. I remain deeply indebted to Matthews’s pioneering work and appreciative of the valuable studies of Santarcangeli, Kern, and Batschelet-Massini; these works have not significantly influenced my own approach or conclusions, but they have made this book shorter than I expected when I began my research in 1970, for they cover some ground so ably that, to paraphrase a medieval commonplace, if in some ways I can see farther and more accurately, it is because I am standing on the shoulders of giants I can cite in footnotes.

7. In most of this book (Part Three is an exception). I am not concerned with establishing the direct influence of one author on another. Most authors cited would have known both the unicursal visual design and the multicursal literary tradition, and I hypothesize that the idea of the labyrinth and its metaphorical potential are defined theoretically by the structural features, contrasts, and commonalities of the two models. If that is correct, then although many writers probably borrowed labyrinth metaphors from other writers, any writer could visualize a labyrinth and independently deduce appropriate metaphors without the mediating influence of a text.

8. I intend to pursue some such readings, most notably of several great English Ricardian poems, at a later date. Those who have heard my talks on the labyrinths of sir Gawain and the Green Knight will have to wait for the appearance of that discussion in print.

9. Paul Zumthor, “Comments on H. R. Jauss’s Article,” NLH, 10 (1978),367-390.

10. For example, the labyrinthicity of texts, almost an idée fixe for J. Hillis Miller and a recurrent image in modern critical theory, has considerable medieval precedent, as we shall see. For Miller, see, e.g., “Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure, II,” Georgia Review, 30 (1976), 330-348, where critical theory and texts are both seen as labyrinths. I hope to publish separately a short study of how medieval labyrinth theory anticipates modern critical theory.

11. On medieval sign theory and related issues, see Ross G. Arthur, Medieval Sign Theory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knuwledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); and Archéologie du signe, ed. Lucie Brind’Amour and Eugene Vance, Papers in Mediaeval Studies, 3 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983).

12. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 10.4.

13. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 3.27, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 102. As far as I know, Augustine does not consider what happens to the stability of a text if any part of it can be destabilized in the manner he describes. On reader response approaches to medieval texts, see Chauncey Wood, “Affective Stylistics and the Study of Chaucer,” SAC, 6 (1984), 21-40, which also discusses the citation from Augustine. Other discussions of modern critical theory in the study of medieval texts include Judson Boyce Allen, “Contemporary Literary Theory and Chaucer,” Chaucer Newsletter, 3 (1981), 1-2; Morton W. Bloomfield, “Contemporary Literary Theory and Chaucer,” in New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism, ed. Donald M. Rose (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1981), pp. 23-36; Florence Ridley, “A Response to ‘Contemporary Literary Theory and Chaucer,’” ibid., pp. 37-51;. and, taking a conservative but constructive stance, A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984).

14. Hans Robert Jauss, “Theses on the Transition from the Aesthetics of Literary Works to a Theory of Aesthetic Experience,” in Interpretation of Narrative, ed. Mano J. Valdés and Owen J. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 137-147.

15. See Matthews, p. 201.

16. I have crosschecked published translations against the original and usually cite both versions—or easily available, facing-page Loeb editions—in notes. For my own translations, I have had generous assistance from Brian Stock and A. G. Rigg (Latin), Ross G. Arthur (Greek), and Christina Hawkes (German). When shades of meaning in the original language are important, I include the original in brackets.

Penelope Reed Doob

Philautia, or self-love

Stultus stulta loquitur
Fools in their folly speak

Euripides in the Bacchae: [...] Fools in their folly speak.
Our prophet Isaiah expresses the same thing in just the same words. Seneca to Lucilius: 'The Greeks have a proverb that as men's life is, so is their talk'. What this was like is not clear, except that there is a verse very like it current in Greek: 'Man's character is known from what he says' In Laertius, the philosopher Democritus called speech 'the mirror of life' a sort of reflection of it, as it were. Nothing could be said more truly. For no mirror reflects the bodily appearance better or more definitely than speech reflects the image of the heart. Men are discerned by their words just as brazen vessels are by their resonance.
**
Oculis magis habenda fides, quam auribus
Better trust eyes than ears

Eyes are to be believed rather than ears. What is seen is more certain than what is heard. So Horace: 'Wide-open ears / Entrusted secrets ill retain'. Again in the Art of Poetry:

Tidings that come by ear we find
Less actively distress the mind,
Than what the looker-on espies
Thrust plainly 'neath his faithful eyes.

Though perhaps that is a little different. Closer to the meaning is Plautus' phrase when he called a bawd's hands 'eyed' not 'eared', meaning that in the end they believe only what they see. Again, when people wish to represent a story as actual fact, they use a word derived from historein, which means 'to see'. Finally there is that fiction of Virgil's about the two gates of the underworld, one of ivory, by which is meant what comes out of the mouth, because of the ivory whiteness of the teeth, and the other of horn, by which is meant what is seen by the eyes, because of the blackness of the pupil. In a word, ears do more for knowing, eyes are surer in producing confidence. And so in ordinary speech, when someone tells an unlikely story, we usually enquire if he has seen these things. If he says no, he only heard them, he gets laughed at.

The proverb is found in Julian's letter to Leontius, 'A certain Thurian saying has it, men's ears are less faithful than their eyes'. He called it Thurian to indicate that Herodotus was the author of the saying, either because of his divine inspiration, or because that writer lived and died at Thurii; however it was taken from his Clio, 'For ears are less faithful to men than eyes.'

**
Malum malo medicari
To heal one evil with another

To heal one evil with another, is to use a second evil to cure the first. Sophocles in the Ajax Mastigophoros: 'Peace, peace! Seek not the ill to remedy / With further ill, and make fate's wound yet worse'. Tecmessa warns Ajax not to add to the misfortune of his madness by yet another and greater misfortune, his voluntary suicide. And Herodotus in Thalia: 'Do not cure evil by evil.'
**
Suum cuique pulchrum
What is one's own is beautiful

Suum cuique pulchrum is a proverbial saying about people who prefer what is their own, whatever it may be like, and rather out of prejudice than judgment. It arises from the usual attitude of mind among the human race, with whom philautia, or self-love, is so deeply rooted that you will find no one so modest, so thoughtful, or so clear-sighted that he will not be blind or suffer from delusions, misled by some mental bias, when it comes to putting a value on something of his own. Have we ever seen anyone born in such a barbarous land that he does not think his home country the best of all? What race is so savage, or has a tongue so uncouth, as not to consider all others beneath it? What bodily form is so brutish as not to appear most beautiful to itself? Aristotle wrote truly in his Rhetoric, book 2: 'And besides all men are self-lovers, and whatever is their own is of necessity sweet to each, eg their deeds and words; on this account they are as a rule fond of flatterers.' This is true in general and universally (as Horace says, 'self-love is blind'), but it particularly applies to artists, and among them specially to poets, and also to lovers. Aristotle wrote most rightly in his Ethics, book 4, that every crafts-man is greatly delighted by his own work, as if these were things sprung from himself. Poets love their own poems as parents love their children. A work is to the craftsman something like the offspring of the mind, and Socrates said that the midwife was a better judge of progeny than the mother herself. It is the way of loving husbands to vie with each other in singing the praises each of his own bride. An outstanding example of this is found in the youthful Tarquins. Even today there is a shrewd and common saying, 'there's no such thing to be found as an ugly sweetheart' because to him who loves them even homely things must seem very beautiful. Theocritus expressed this idea with elegance in his sixth Eclogue:'- for often in love, O Polyphemus, the least fair seems fair'. Plato expressed this proverb in the Lysis, but contrariwise: 'There is a danger lest, according to the old proverb, that should be dear which is beautiful', as if we should not find a thing beautiful because it is dear, but dear because it is beautiful. To this belongs what Cicero writes in the fifth book of the De finibus: 'Everyone is most influenced by his own particular interest' and again in book i of the De officiis: 'Each of whom, engrossed in his own profession, undervalued that of the other'.

However, it can be forgiven if that common self-love goes just so far as to make each of us tend a little to favour our own children, our own arts or business or discoveries, our own country, so long as it does not sweep us to that point of blindness which makes us libel the virtues of others and flatter our own vices, giving them the name of virtues - so that we see ourselves like Suffenus in Catullus or Maevius in Horace. In his Epistles Horace observes this failing: 'While my faults please me' he says, 'or deceive me in the end'. At this place Porphyrio points out that Horace is alluding to the widespread opinion that men not only fail to be sorry for their faults but actually find them pleasing. He says there was a well-known Greek proverb on this subject, but this proverb is lacking in the texts owing to the fault of the copyists.

Another remark of Horace applies to this too: 'Base vices dupe the blind, or even please: / Balbinus loves the polyp that on Agne's nose he sees. To Balbinus, a stupid lover, even the polyp of his darling Agne seemed to smell sweet. (A polyp is an affection of the nostrils which smells strong, like the goaty smell of the armpits; so we talk about sufferers from the polyp and the goat.) Cicero to Atticus, book 14: 'My dear fellow, let me give you a general rule on matters in which I have a fair amount of experience. There was never a poet or orator yet who thought anyone better than himself. This applies even to the bad ones. How much more to one so gifted and erudite as Brutus! I actually made the experiment the other day in connection with the edict. I composed a draft at your request. I liked mine, he preferred his own. Indeed, when, at his own entreaty, I might almost say, I addressed to him an essay on the best style of oratory, he wrote not only to me but to you too, that he could not agree with my preference. So pray let every man write as best suits himself. "For every man his own bride, mine for me. For every man his own love, mine for me." Not a very elegant distich. Atilius wrote it, a most clumsy versifier'. Thus far Cicero. It appears from his words that the two verses, 'For every man' etc come from some play by Atilius. Again, Cicero says in the Tusculan Questions, book 5: 'He was, in fact, an enthusiastic musician, a tragic poet too - how good, matters little: for in this art, more than in others, it somehow happens that everyone finds that what is his own is beautiful. So far I have never known the poet (and I have been friends with Aquinius) who did not think himself the best; this is the way with them: You are charmed with your work, I with mine'. The same idea is expressed by Plautus in the Stichus, in different words but with great elegance: 'To every queen her king is fair, to every bridegroom his bride'.

With this we can also connect that line of Theocritus: 'Nor am I so unbeautiful, if truth be told'. And Virgil imitating it:

Nor am I so ill-favoured; once of late
I saw myself reflected on the shore
When dying winds had left the water calm.

Horace alludes to the adage more openly in one of his epistles:

You are keeping them for Jove's ears.
Beautiful in your own eyes, you believe that you
And you only, drip the whole honey of poetry

'Beautiful in your own eyes' means self-admiring. This phrase is little different from what St Augustine says in several places, for instance in Letter 48, drawing it from a certain Tychonius: 'What we wish is sacred'. (It is a half-line from an heroic poem.) One could wish that this saying were not so applicable to the ways of some people today, who lay claim to piety more arrogantly than ever the Pharisees did, and, while they are steeped in vices neither to be tolerated nor mentioned, show astonishing self-satisfaction in their savage criticism of the way other men live.

Collected Works of Erasmus
Vol 31

Sens-Plastique Malcolm de Chazal

 

Introduction

The French writer, painter, and mystic thinker Malcolm de Chazal is little known outside his native island of Mauritius except for echoes of the clamor in Paris that greeted the Gallimard edition of his Sens-Plastique in 1948. This volume, his literary masterpiece, containing about two thousand unnumbered aphorisms, pensées, and longer reflections, was introduced by Jean Paulhan as an original work of genius, a poetry of rude supernatural precision. It was enthusiastically praised by André Breton for its revolutionary oracular truthfulness of statement and as a type of writing without historical precedent. A controversy ensued in the pages of Figaro, Combat, and other journals about whether Chazal’s aphorisms presented an occultist’s view or constituted a new form of surrealism, whether Chazal was writing poems or prose, whether his meanings were to be taken figura- tively or literally. After the Gallimard publication in 1949 of La Vie Filtrée, a collection of essays explaining the principal ideas of Sens-Plastique and elaborating on his methods of thinking and writing, Chazal continued to occupy the literary stage for a while.

Since the 1950s, however, although several later books of his have been published in Paris, most of his writings were issued only under a Madagascan or Mauritian imprint, and Chazal has been largely forgotten abroad.

Malcolm de Chazal comes from a French family that established itself on the island of Mauritius in the 18th century. He was born in Vacoas, Mauritius, in 1902, and except for six years at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, where he received an engineering degree, he has remained most of the time in Mauritius. He worked as an engineer on sugar plantations and later for the Office of Telecommunications, retiring at the age of 55. By his own admission, an uneventful life, but teeming with ideas and images that began to take written form in 1940 with the publication in Mauritius of the first volume of his Pensées. In the next five years five more collections of Pensées appeared, consisting in all of almost 3000 numbered passages. In 1945 a seventh volume of Pensées appeared, bound with another collection of aphorisms entitled Sens-Plastique; and two years later a separate Sens-Plastique, volume II, appeared. It was this latter volume on which the Gallimard edition was based and that brought Chazal into prominence in France.

The Pensées and the Mauritian editions of Sens-Plastique have long been out of print. According to the Mauritian writer Camille de Rauville, who quotes from the Pensées in his Chazal des Antipodes, the passages are written for the most part in the moralist tradition of La Rochefoucauld, and it was only in the last two volumes of the Pensées that Chazal’s mind and style began to adopt the aphoristic mode of sensuous intuition that is fully distinctive of his greatest achievement, Sens-Plastique.* What struck Jean Paulhan and André Breton, Denis Saurat, Leopold Sedar-Senghor, and W. H. Auden as astonishing and unclassifiable about Sens-Plastique—to name some well-known literary figures who have written about it—can perhaps be illustrated by a few excerpts.

Half-opened petals give the flower an adenoidal look.

We know the halls of the eye like welcome visitors but we live in our mouth.

Any man who acts singly in the press of a mob will get trampled. Shifting into reverse while making love can kill you.

Immediately before it falls, water turns into a living being as if a person’s soul had just slipped into it: look at the way it bends and twists, writhing in desperation.
(What if you threw a not quite cold corpse out of an airplane—would the dead awaken?...)

Our surprise in reading these observations carries with it a certain uneasiness, a quizzical amazement at their meanings. If the author’s imagination and literary artistry are his prime movers here, then these are probably “poems”—but there is an inscrutable self-assurance in them that at the same time leads us away from their inventiveness and towards the objective world they describe. And this is where Chazal’s status as an illuminatus begins: he is telling us things that we can’t completely follow unless we decide to trust his revelations, trust them even when we fail to understand him completely. In the examples given above, the comparison between flower and face can be recognized wryly and then dismissed as a fanciful truth, on the level of a conceit.

The second comparison, however, merges analogy with identity, reminding us that we live “inside” our own bodies. In the third example, about crowds and sexual love, Chazal is making a more comprehensive statement about the self and otherness.

In the last one we are on the verge of comparison as a metaphysical method, no longer figurative only, a method based on some secret sense of animistic correspondences. When we consider that Sens-Plastique is made up of thousands of such comparisons, it seems likely that for all his strange sense of humor, Chazal intends to be taken seriously and means likeness to be understood as a form of identity: the adenoidal look of the half-opened petal is just as real as it is apparent.

One can make something too much of Chazal’s engineering training, but it should be kept in mind when we consider the kind of information Sens-Plastique contains. The uniqueness of its material and style seems more understandable if we consider the passages to be prose statements of fact, that is, “scientific” observations, rather than prose poems, as they are sometimes taken to be. They are also science fictions, extensions of present knowledge, visionary statements, verbal accounts of a sensory investigation of man and nature, mostly visual but frequently deriving from the other senses. Chazal thinks of his writing as a form of pic- turing in words that demonstrates what he perceives.

He has remarked that after Georges Braque read Sens-Plastique, he wrote to say that the book was “beyond literature,” essentially an album d’images, and that Chazal should take up painting.

He did not follow Braque’s suggestion until 1954. Since the 1960s he has had exhibitions in France and England. The afterword in Camille de Rauville’s commemorative volume represents the opening address by Léopold Sédar-Senghor at an exhibition of Chazal’s paintings, November 22, 1973, at the Musée Dynamique de Dakar. They are vivid, simplified renditions of the Mauritian landscape, especially its flora and fauna, seen as glowing metamorphic emblems.

The mental and spiritual energy that filled the pages of Sens- Plastique led in one direction towards painting and in another towards a number of books which systematized Chazal’s views as a mystical thinker.* A third direction led Chazal towards poetry proper, indicating that only as a colorful, sensuous, impassioned expression in words should Sens-Plastique be considered poetry.

Chazal did not find inappropriate W. H. Auden’s inclusion of excerpts from it in The Viking Book of Aphorisms. But the fact that he also wrote the gnomic verses of Sens Magique as a companion volume in title and subject matter showed his intention to distinguish the form of the aphorism from that of the poem.** The passages in Sens-Plastique consist of assertions about the ways in which all the elements in nature relate to each other, and the language is intended to be simply declarative. Chazal is an empiricist reporting on events in nature, noting correspondences for their own sakes. He recreates their essential unity by looking at “term” one through the eyes of “term” two, that is, by intuitively becoming the second term himself. He is not working with figurative language, metaphors, or similes, but with the things themselves. The writing reads like poetry because it enlarges our sense of possibility, but Chazal here keeps crossing the border between literature and prophecy, language and the ineffable, for the whole enterprise of Sens-Plastique is dedicated to descrying in nature’s oneness exactly how everything may be understood as everything else. Those of us who still find it literature—communicative as well as expressive and symbolic—can none the less think of it as factual writing because, often enough, its psychological truthfulness and accuracy of perception are so impressive. When we are not impressed there is often a doubt whether we haven’t understood rather than that Chazal has got his psychic optics or his arcane physics wrong.

Chazal developed this personal mode of perception slowly, after years of observing physical materials, colors, light effects, time relations, and situations in space, as well as nature in all its forms, notebook in hand as he walked the beaches, fields, and woods of Mauritius. The minute precision of his perceptions of phenomena gives him a semi-professional voice when his subject lies in astronomy, physics, physiology, ethology, horticulture, fashion design, or other supposedly circumscribed fields, in each of which, however, he sometimes speaks with the accents of a Goethe or a Rudolph Steiner: he will not be stopped from unifying science even at the risk of hermeticism. The biographical information that Chazal has never been reluctant to divulge, that one uncle was a Swedenborgian and another a friend of Claude de Saint-Martin, satisfies some of our curiosity about inherited influences.

And critics have of course long since noted that he has brought to some kind of fruition the speculative poetics of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, since Chazal has got closer than any other visionary man of letters to naming the connections between forces and forms, and in one example after another to defining the laws by which correspondences in nature are determined. He has, however, refused to be identified with any previous person or system. To the extent to which Chazal propounds his own system, which he has referred to as Unisme, in his writings of the past thirty years after the publication of Sens-Plastique, he claims to have received a unique revelation as the crowning result of the intuitive methods he pursued in the creation of his masterpiece.
The casual reader would refuse to give Sens-Plastsique a second glance if Chazal’s distinctiveness were merely a matter of his coining a new system—there are too many already—except that so many of his minted pieces look solid and ring sound.

High heels elongate the movement of legs toward the torso, so that the lower part of women’s bodies ends in a birdlike gait at the same time as the upper part of their bodies develops an elephantine waddle.

It is impossible to improve any part of the human body arti-ficially without detracting from the natural grace of some other part.

The scurrying snake sculls with his whole body— which gives him wings. The fish flopping in the grass sculls while running—which gives him legs. Rippling and rolling water flies higher in space.

With branches, stems, petals, flowers, and fruit, it is never a question of right or left because the plant world offers us no cardinal point of view. The only apparent direction is that every branch stands out like a left arm when it looks at us. If it were otherwise we wouldn't see space head-on as we do but in all directions at once whenever we turned its way. If nature gave us an immediate sense of right and left whenever we looked at it, space would simply lie askew to our open eyes.

According to Chazal’s scroll of pictures as it unrolls passage after passage in no predetermined order—observations of air, noses, sex, jewelry, insects, chronology, race, generations, flowers—the natural and the moral world are the same, one makes no sense without the other despite their conventions of distinctness. Sens-Plastique tells us that it is man’s incapacity to encompass the perception of both worlds in one view that creates absurdity and not any gap between the worlds. Sens-Plastique provides us with microscopic and telescopic, infra-red and ultra-violet camera glimpses of this essential unity; and Chazal’s genius lies in his choice of ambush for each view. Hence the form he chose for a collected display: a sequence of separate statements. Anyone can argue convincingly that reality lies behind appearance, but it is not our intellects that need convincing. Poetry, music, and painting argue even better by convincing our imaginations. But one still longs to perceive this reality and Sens-Plastique reports that it is indeed perceptible and flashes it before us.

The green of leaves at early dawn creates in us a sensation of mauve. The eye sees green but the soul sees mauve. The interior realities of colors are absolutely unrelated to their exterior realities. The spiritual body is color-blind to the physical body. If we actually saw vi blue in our soul at the same time as we saw blue in nature, the fusion would be so complete between mind and body that we would suffocate like the strangling man who must live on the pocket of air in his lungs.

We never feel that nature is excessive in anything because color and form are so completely connected: button and buttonhole adjusted by divine fingers. Only manufactured objects strike us as excessive in one way or another, and this arises from the fact that either the buttonhole is too tight or the button “swims” in its moorings.

Chazal is at the opposite extreme of certain dehumanizing and anti-humanist tendencies in modern thought. Instead of disinfecting the natural world to keep it free from human influence and pathetic fallacies, he endows it with the features of that most enig- matic evidence of total symbolism—the human face and form: and at the same time enlarges the human face and form to universal proportions.

A mountain is a mountain, an automobile is an automobile, space is space—we are usually content to regard them as irreducible data, though in dreams and poems they may take on eyes and noses. But to the same degree an eye or a nose is never other than itself either, and although we may sometimes liken eyes to lakes and noses to peaks or bridges, we feel we have failed to grasp their spiritual quality. We suspect that eyes and noses may really be creatures with their limbs tucked under. There is something discrete and discontinuous about them. We should like to give them proper names. We don’t really know the faces of people we know well, although from the gestures of their features we can begin to predict what they are likely to do. Everyone is also a poor amateur of the human face in general: the eyes express the soul, the nose expresses intelligence, the mouth, sensibility, and we leave it at that. The biographer analyzing the pictured representation of his subject in the frontispiece wastes his time; any reader can do as well after he finishes the book.

Chazal is the first of physiognomists because he has been able to trace the profile of each trait or feature by according it the dignity of a self, through a system of physiognomy treated as symbolic of vii the system of a universe in which everything is expressive of everything else. Each feature of the face and form modifies every other one; the human body itself is seen as a distributive form of the face, and each of the five senses is a symbol of the other. Chazal is so sensitive to the multiple implications of facial traits that he can read the personalities even of eyelashes more fluently than other physiognomists have been able to read the eyes and lips of personalities.

The eyelashes are the last of the features to grow old in man. Completely white eyelashes would deactivate the glance, and the eye itself would seem buried in the face just as the landscape seems to go underground after a snowfall. Only the mountain range of the nose would emerge in the heights of the face, an Alp in the naked plains and the featureless skies of the forehead.

Since the human face and form lie at the center of his thought, it is not surprising that Sens-Plastique emerges as the work of a Christian thinker. We are led by statements in passage after passage back to the Incarnation as God’s reminder to man that the correspondence between nature and man is complete, that all of nature is in the human face and form, polarized according to another scheme, and Christ a fusion of all things in time and space whom God exploded on the Cross.

Clothed as they are in gestures, our fingers hide their feelings. Our palms are as naked as light itself, com- municating with the core of the brain. Hence the re- markable truthfulness of the lines of the hand and the miraculous imposition of Christ’s hands—the palms leading to God—by which the Man-God works all his miracles. Do we not assign extraordinary importance to the gesture of blessing, to the total contact of the handshake, to the simple avowal of the hand raised in oath, to the useless washing of Pilate’s hands (the palm being incapable of lying), and to the exposure of the Divine Palm on the cross, a palm whose supreme death throes shine like a lighthouse in the night of God’s agony? Denude your gestures, your voice, and your step and you will feel yourself dressed in light.

Chazal wrote Sens Magique to put the reader into the experience of sensing and perceiving the world as if through the author’s own faculties rather than demonstrating and explaining the reality of it as he does in Sens-Plastique: the pithy verses of Sens Magique represent an existential version rather than an expository one. In Sens Magique the incident itself is presented as the magical moment embodied in verse, the laws of its occurrence are not discussed as they are in Sens-Plastique. It is the difference between

The white
crying
of the lilies
chilled space.
A red bird
flew nigh
and white burst its
vessels.
Summer was snowing.

and

Light-dazzle jacks up space, adding a second storey to our view of things. Indeed, space keeps piling up levels as the breadth of our look increases. Imagine what would happen otherwise: our eyes would tend to see any sudden brilliance of light from behind rather than in front, in a sort of fourth dimensional perspective that would turn us all into seers.

The difference between an aphorism or pensée and a poem is the difference between static and dynamic, an appeal to the reason to recognize and discriminate and one to the imagination to participate. An aphorism brings the subject to you, a poem takes you to it. What is confusing about Sens-Plastique is that it would seem to do both. We smile with pleasure at how Chazal has managed to super-realize his experiences but we still don’t believe that the features are really animals; that flowers have faces; that the senses constitute an interconnecting system; that color is a moral condition of the world; that the sameness of the sun’s light in physics, God’s grace in theology, and the human look in psychology is a fact; and so on. And that is why Chazal wrote Sens Magique: to demonstrate by simplification, having gone as far as he could in Sens-Plastique. By using the form of verse, albeit an open form, he will put you inside the rhetorical vehicle and trans- port you to his magic land of the Sixth Sense lyrically.

The present selective translation of Sens-Plastique is intended to represent Chazal’s great work by characteristic examples. It consists of the complete corrected text of my previous translation, Plastic Sense (1971), with numerous additions translated from the first half of Sens Plastique. It is hoped that the present volume will constitute the first installment of a complete translation of the original work. No attempt has been made to translate the original title, which the previous publisher’s rendering, Plastic Sense, misrepresented over my objections and to the author’s dismay. As Chazal himself has noted, he wanted sens to refer to the alchemy of the senses and plastique to call art into mind.

Although the reader may dip into Sens-Plastique at any point without missing the author’s purpose—for only rarely does a particular subject fill successive passages—it should be noted that the passages tend to become longer as the work progresses, and the translation follows the order of the original. I have tried my best to capture the imagistic exactness of each selection by searching for an idiomatic and structural equivalent in English without departing too far from Chazal’s stylistic intentions, and I have been greatly helped by the author’s encouragement. He has been kind enough to say that my English reads more forcefully than the French. I hope that any advantage I may give to the reader of this translation has not been gained at the expense of misconstruing the original.

I am indebted to the State University of New York Research Foundation for some of the financial support that enabled me to translate this work.

Irving Weiss Pine Bush, New York November, 1979

The idealist walks on tiptoe, the materialist on his heels.

Our organs nurse at our veins like infants at the breast. Blood is cellular milk. In fact, adult or aged man, whether we suck, chew, or gulp our mixture, our entire life on earth is a physiological activity at the sucking bottle of ourselves. Organically we are our own mother-and-child; and in the infinity of things, in Absolute Allness, we suck from God Himself.

The act of love is a greyhound race of desire in which the pursuer collapses in front of the finish line, always short of his prey.

There is far north, yonder, far south, and here is the equator of words.

Every flower is a Mona Lisa following our glance whenever we look at it.

The flower is all woman: mouth, breasts and vagina—sex’s three-in-one.

Animals exemplify whatever is natural, except when domesticated.

Grey puts the mind to sleep as brown the nerves. Whenever you feel indolent, give your mind a jolt of red and your nerves a dash of yellow.

The mouth is the starting point of laughter, with the eye its destination. Long after the mouth is exhausted the eye continues to laugh.

Light is never dirty except in the human glance.

No matter how plain or common her other features, a superb look in her eyes will turn any woman into a queen.

The beams of the eye can develop a kind of psychic force as circus trainers certainly know, who make use of it to overpower wild animals. Once we come to understand the inner mechanism of this force we will be able to use it on infinitely more sensitive forms of life, such as flowers. The flower held in our penetrating glance will then be set in motion by the transfusion of this invisible charge until it obeys us on its stem, dipping and bowing like a robot plane.

Goodness is a civilizing force. Think of all the saints who were peasant girls to begin with and ended as grandes dames!

Adultery is a stimulant to men but a sedative to women.

Exercise develops all the muscles except those of the face which regulate the traction of the features. This is because the psychic forces controlling the face are completely unlike those that control the rest of the body and force the laws of physiology slightly out of orbit.

In prehistoric ages time was an idea of secondary importance in life. Man was so overly occupied then that he lived immersed in the present. Boredom invented the clock and the clock increased boredom. Idleness, which banished man from the present and uncoupled him from life, gave him a sense of time as something exterior to himself, like a person on the bank watching the river flow beneath his feet. Since those distant ages when time flowed freely within us it has fled our soul and become our own jailer.

Passion cannot survive without an audience. Romeo and Juliet as castaways would have set up petty housekeeping in no time.

A woman’s heart is her sex in slow motion; her sex is a thumping heart.

Dressed in fig leaves they looked more naked than ever. A flower is most naked amid its leaves. Without them it looks rather asexual.

What you hear in the voice of the seashell is the waves whispering in the wind’s ear.

The sun is pure communism everywhere except in cities, where it’s private property.

We can put up with our body twitching at night, but not our mind.

Goodness civilizes the intelligence.

A look of indifference is a perpetual goodbye.

Intelligent people laugh quickly and smile slowly. A slow mind lengthens the laugh and shortens the smile.

Well-being is quantitative for animals, as it is for all graceless sensualists.

The ideas of some men are mainly versions of their bodies, like animals of the same species.

An animal’s sense of time depends on whether he is famished or full. All animals react to time in the same way on an empty stomach but each according to his digestive rhythm after eating.

A woman’s girdle is like one of those highly decorated picture-boxes of chocolates that promises so much more than it has inside.
The imbecile writes his look in space with painstaking penmanship so that everyone may understand what his face intended. An intelligent man’s look is finely inscribed right in his own eye while it shapes vaguely symbolic linguistic characters in space as though to keep his intention to himself.

The eyes of an honest man are yoked together and in step. In the look of a hypocrite his face seems to veer this way and that as the eyes keep changing step, like two draught animals refusing to pull together.

The act of love is a mutual birth delivery between two carnal tombs in the desert cemetery of the spirit.

Copulating in love: one is unanimously and unitarily two.
Copulating without love: one is alone and three.

“Ah” is the shortest as “oh” is the longest of human cries. Man is born in an “ah” and dies in an “oh,” for birth is immediate and death is like an airplane taking off.

Where seduction is concerned man is the better strategist, woman the superior tactician.

Plenty of diplomats are better and more ingenious at telling lies than certain women—but there isn’t one who can do it faster.

The average man becomes insane when his mind gets “all mixed up.” The genius goes mad when his imagination expands to the point of blotting out reason and memory, loosening their ties to reality the way a sheet of air rising too high or too quickly consumes the air around it, creating a vacuum and digging its own grave in the wild column of the vortex.

A thousand today where there was only one yesterday—but there will be as many hopes and desires tomorrow as there are tomorrows.

Is there any worse misfortune than to feel the body aging long before the spirit? Torture equal to the anguish of the snail who suddenly realizes how imprisoned he is in his shell.

Two is civility, three is mediocrity, ten is vulgarity, and then the mob takes over, the more the uglier. The day we all become aristocrats will mean the end of aristocracy.

An anonymous crowd often intensifies our moral solitude but it has the tonic effect of making us feel more at home in our own bodies. Crowds are especially good for people who are physically dissatisfied with themselves. Women who lament the passing of their beauty should forget about cosmetics and milk baths and simply immerse themselves in crowds.

Once upon a time opinions amounted to no more than a local disease—in those happy days when communications were so poor that intellectual plagues never exhausted their own backyards.
But as soon as books began to circulate, the set opinions of any one place swarmed across the nearest frontiers everywhere and tidy little Eastern ideas headed West, passing on the way a crowd of tidy little Western ideas going East—the way the Near East and Europe exchanged diseases during the Crusades. Books are stepping stones for those who are intellectually agile but treacherous surfaces for the rest of mankind, who lose their critical footing easily and drown in a welter of ready-made ideas. Books are really useful only to people with a talent for thinking.

Animals wake up first facially and then bodily. Men’s bodies wake up before their faces do. For the animal sleeps inside his body, whereas man sleeps with his body in his mind.

The sexual act is a letter unanswered, a bottle forever adrift in the ocean. It is the only kind of one-way impact. The river never returned to its source. The only absolutely unrecapturable thrill in life.

Think of all those who turn religious because they’ve given up all hope of enjoying life—like a woman disappointed in love taking the first man that comes along just in order to settle down for good.

In committee meetings humor is more important than ideas.
The man who can make others laugh gets more votes behind a measure than a man who forces others to think.

Lovemaking is a single-dish banquet for a man, but all of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper for a woman.

The overreaching mind devours the senses and the senses too far indulged consume the mind. Philosophers end as emotional infants. Don Juan ends with the mind of a little boy.

Suffering doesn’t ennoble unless there is greatness to begin with.

The real criterion of intelligence is our individual capacity to define it.

The sweetening effect of goodness on the human face is so great that certain acts of goodness are better than a facial massage.

Like the sun, greatness needs no proof: everybody recognizes it.

Tears are an aphrodisiac only at twenty.

As soon as the Devil walks the earth as an imaginary being, religion is ready to collapse.

If we didn’t talk so much about what was wrong with everything, we wouldn’t be so conscious of defects. If you invoke the devil, you end up by finding him there before you.

Patience Worth

 THE COMING OF PATIENCE WORTH

UPON a July evening in 1913 two women of St. Louis sat with a ouija board upon their knees. Some time before this a friend had aroused their interest in this unfathomable toy, and they had since whiled away many an hour with the inscrutable meanderings of the heart-shaped pointer; but, like thousands of others who had played with the instrument, they had found it, up to this date, but little more than a source of amused wonder. The messages which they had laboriously spelled out were only such as might have come from the subconsciousness of either one or the other, or, at least, were no more strange than innumerable communications which have been received through the reading of the ouija board.

But upon this night they received a visitor. The pointer suddenly became endowed with an unusual agility, and with great rapidity presented this introduction:

"Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name."

The women gazed, round-eyed, at each other, and the board continued:

"Wait. I would speak with thee. If thou shalt live, then so shall I. I make my bread by thy hearth. Good friends, let us be merrie. The time for work is past. Let the tabbie drowse and blink her wisdom to the firelog.

"How quaint that is!" one of the women exclaimed.

"Good Mother Wisdom is too harsh for thee," said the board, "and thou shouldst love her only as a foster mother."

Thus began an intimate association with "Patience Worth" that still continues, and a series of communications that in intellectual vigor and literary quality are virtually without precedent in the scant imaginative literature quoted in the chronicles of psychic phenomena.

The personality of Patience Worth—if personality it may be called—so impressed itself upon these women, at the first visit, that they got pencil and paper and put down not only all that she transmitted through the board, but all the questions and comment that elicited her remarks; and at every meeting since then, a verbatim record has been made of the conversation and the communications.

These records have accumulated until they have filled several volumes of typewritten pages, and upon them, and upon the writer's personal observations of the workings of the phenomena, this narrative is based. They include conversations, maxims, epigrams, allegories, tales, dramas, poems, all the way from sportive to religious, and even prayers, most of them of no little beauty and of a character that may reasonably be considered unique in literature.

The women referred to are Mrs. John H. Curran, wife of the former Immigration Commissioner of Missouri, and Mrs. Emily Grant Hutchings, wife of the Secretary of the Tower Grove Park Board in St. Louis, both ladies of culture and refinement. Mrs. Curran is a young woman of nervous temperament, bright, vivacious, ready of speech. She has a taste for literature, but is not a writer, and has never attempted to write anything more ambitious than a personal letter. Mrs. Hutchings, on the other band, is a professional writer of skill, and it was to her quick appreciation of the quality of the communications that the starting of the record is due. It was soon apparent, however, that it was Mrs. Curran who was the sole agent of transmission; for the communications came only when she was at the board, and it mattered not who else sat with her.

During the first months only Mrs. Curran and Mrs.
Hutchings sat, but gradually the circle widened, and others assisted Mrs. Curran. Sometimes as many as five or six would sit with her in the course of an evening. Mr. Curran has acted as amanuensis, and recorded the communications at most of the sittings, Mrs. Curran's mother, Mrs. Mary E. Pollard, occasionally taking his place.

The ouija board is a rectangular piece of wood about 16 inches wide by 24 inches in length and half an inch thick.
Upon it the letters of the alphabet are arranged in two concentric arcs, with the ten numerals below, and the words "Yes" and "No" at the upper corners. The planchette, or pointer, is a thin, heart-shaped piece of wood provided with three legs, upon which it moves about upon the board, its point indicating the letters of the words it is spelling. Two persons are necessary for its operation. They place the tips of their fingers lightly upon the pointer and wait. Perhaps it moves; perhaps it does not. Sometimes it moves aimlessly about the board, spelling nothing; sometimes it spells words, but is unable to form a sentence; but often it responds readily enough to the impulses which control it, and even answers questions intelligibly, occasionally in a way that excites the wonder and even the awe of those about it. Its powers have been attributed by some to supernatural influence, by others to subconsciousness, but science has looked upon it with disdain, as, until recent years, science has looked upon nearly all unprecedented phenomena.

Mr. W. T. Carrington, an eminent English investigator of psychical phenomena, in an exhaustive work upon the subject, has this to say of the ouija board: "Granting for the sake of argument that the board is moved by the sitter, either consciously or unconsciously, the great and vital question still remains: What is the intelligence behind the board, that directs the phenomena? Whoever sets out to give a final and decisive answer to this question in the present state of our knowledge will have his task cut out for him, and I wish him happiness in the undertaking. Personally I am attempting nothing of the kind."

The ouija board has been in use for many years. There is no element of novelty in the mere fact that curious and puzzling messages are received by means of it. I emphasize this fact because I wish to place the board in its proper relation to the communications from the intelligence calling herself Patience Worth. Aside from the psychical problem involved—and which, so far as the board is concerned, is the same in this case as in many others—the ouija board has no more significance than a pen or a pencil in the hand. It is merely an instrument for the transmission of thought in words. In comparison with the personality and the literature which it reveals in this instance, it is a factor of little significance. It is proper to say, however, at this point, that every word attributed to Patience Worth in this volume was received by Mrs. Curran through this instrument.

NATURE OF THE COMMUNICATIONS

"He who buildeth with peg and cudgel but buildeth a toy for an age who will but cast aside the bauble as naught; but he who buildeth with word, a quill and a fluid, buildeth well."—PATIENCE WORTH.

THERE are a number of things that distinguish Patience Worth from all other "intelligences" that have been credited with communications pretending to come from a spiritual source. First is her intellect. One of the strongest arguments against the genuineness of such communications has been the lack of intelligence often displayed in them. They have largely been, though with many exceptions, crude emanations of weak mentalities, and few of the exceptions have shown greater intellect or greater knowledge than is possessed by the average human being.

In a work entitled, "Is Death the End?" Dr. John H. Holmes, an eminent New York divine, gives considerable space to the psychic evidence of immortality. In the course of his discussion of this phase of his subject he concisely describes the characteristic features of psychic communications.

"Nobody," he says, "can study, the evidence gathered in this particular field without noticing, first of all, the triviality, almost the inanity, of the communications received. Here we come, eager for the evidence of future life and information as to what it means to die and pass into the great beyond. And what do we get? First of all—and naturally enough, perhaps—frantic efforts on the part of the alleged spirits to prove their identity by the citation of intricate and unimportant details of where they were and what they did at different times when they were here among men. Sometimes there is a recounting of an event which is taking place in a part of the world far removed from the locality in which the medium and the recipient are sitting. Again and again there is a descent to obscurity and feeble chattering."

I quote this passage, not merely because it so clearly states the experience and conclusions of many who have investigated these phenomena, but because it serves to show by its marked contrast the wonder of the communications from Patience Worth. There are no efforts on her part to prove her identity. On the contrary, she can rarely be induced to speak of herself, and the personal information she has reluctantly given is disappointingly meager. "About me," she says, "thou wouldst know much. Yesterday is dead. Let thy mind rest as to the past." She never speaks of her own acts as a physical being; she never refers to any event taking place in the world now or that has taken place in the past. But far more important than these, she reveals an intellect that is worthy of any man's respect. It is at once keen, swift, subtle and profound. There is not once but always a sustained level of clear thought and fine feeling." There is obscurity it is usually the obscurity of profundity, and intelligent study generally reveals a meaning that is worth the effort. There is never a "focusing of attention upon the affairs of this world," except for the purpose of displaying its beauties and its wonders, and to assist in explaining the world that she claims is to come. For that other world she seems to try to explain as far as some apparent limitations permit, speaks as few have spoken before, and her words often bring delight to the mind and consolation to the soul.

Before considering these communications in detail, it would be well for the reader to become a little better acquainted with the alleged Patience herself. I speak of her as a person, for whatever she, or it, may be, the impression of a distinct personality is clear and definite; and it is, besides, more convenient so to designate her. Patience as a rule speaks an archaic tongue that is in general the English language of about the time of the Stuarts, but which contains elements of a usage still more ancient, and, not rarely, word and phrase forms that seem never to have been used in English or in any English dialect.

Almost all of her words, however, whether in conversation or in literary composition, are of pure Anglo-Saxon-Norman origin. There is seldom a word of direct Latin or Greek parentage. Virtually all of the objects she refers to are things that existed in the seventeenth century or earlier. In all of the great mass of manuscript that has come from her we have not noticed a single reference to an object of modern creation or development; nor have more than a dozen words been found in her writings that may be of later origin than the seventeenth century, and some of these words are debatable.
She has shown, in what would seem to be a genuinely feminine spirit of perversity, that she can use a modern word if she chooses to do so. And if she is living now, no matter when she was on earth, why should she not? (She has twice used the word "shack," meaning a roughly constructed cabin, a word which is in that sense so new and so local that it has but recently found a place in the dictionaries.) But the fact remains that the number of such words is so small as to be negligible.

Only one who has tried to write in archaic English without committing anachronisms can realize its tremendous difficulty. We are so saturated with words and idioms of modern origin that it is almost impossible wholly to discard them, even when given every advantage of time and reflection. How much more difficult must it be then to use and maintain such language without an error in ordinary impromptu conversation, answering questions that could not have been expected, and flashing repartee that is entirely dependent upon the situation or remarks of the moment. Yet Patience does this with marvelous facility. So she can hardly be Mrs. Curran.

All of her knowledge of material things seems to be drawn from English associations. She is surprisingly familiar with the trees and flowers, the birds and beasts of England. She knows the manners and customs of its people as they were two or three centuries ago, the people of the fields or the people of the palace. Her speech is filled with references to the furniture, utensils and mechanical contrivances of the household of that time, and to its articles of dress, musical instruments, and tools of agriculture and the mechanical arts. There are also a few indications of a knowledge of New England life. Yet she has never admitted a residence in England or New England, has never spoken of a birthplace or an abiding place anywhere, has never, in fact, used a single geographical proper name in relation to herself.

The communications of Patience Worth come in a variety of forms: Conversation that is strewn with wit and wisdom, epigrams and maxims; poems by the hundred; parables and allegories; stories of a semi-dramatic character, and dramas.
Here is an example of her conversation from one of the early records—an evening when a skeptical friend, a young physician, somewhat disposed to the use of slang, was present with his wife.

As the ladies took the board, the doctor remarked:
"I hope Patience Worth will come. I'd like to find out what her game is."

Patience was there and instantly responded:

"Dost, then, desire the plucking of another goose?"

Doctor.—"By George, she's right there with the grease, isn't she?"

Patience.—"Enough to baste the last upon the spit."

Doctor.—"Well, that's quick wit for you. Pretty hard to catch her."

Patience.—"The salt of today will not serve to catch the bird of tomorrow."

Doctor.—"She'd better call herself the bird of yesterday. I wonder what kind of a mind she had, anyway."

Patience.—"Dost crave to taste the sauce?

Doctor.—"She holds to her simile of the goose. I wish you'd ask her how she makes that little table move under your hands to spell the words."

Patience.—"A wise cook telleth not the brew."

Doctor.—"Turn that board over and let me see what's under it."

This was done, and after his inspection it was reversed.

Patience.—"Thee'lt bump thy nose to look within the hopper."

Doctor.—"Whew! She doesn't mind handing you one, does she?"

Mrs. Pollard.—"That's Patience's way. She doesn't think we count for anything."

Patience.—"The bell-cow doth deem the good folk go to Sabboth house from the ringing of her bell."

Doctor.—"She evidently thinks we are a conceited lot. Well, I believe she'll agree with me that you can't get far in this world without a fair opinion of yourself."

Patience.—"So the donkey loveth his bray!"

The Doctor's Wife.—"You can draw her on all you please.
I'm going to keep perfectly still."

Patience.—"Oh, e'en the mouse will have a nibble."

Mrs. Curran.—"There! She isn't going to let you off without a little roast. I wonder what she has to say to you."

Patience.—"Did'st ever see the brood hen puff up with self-esteem when all her chicks go for a swim?"

Doctor.—"Let's analyze that and see if there's anything in it."

Patience.—"Strain the potion. Mayhap thou wilt find a fly."

This will be sufficient to illustrate Patience's form of speech and her ready wit. It also shows something of the character of the people to whom and through whom she has usually spoken. They are not solemn investigators nor "pussy-footed" charlatans. There is no ceremony about the sitting, no dimmed lights, no compelled silences, no mummeries of any sort.

The assistance is of the ordinary, fun-loving, somewhat irreverent American type. The board is brought into the living-room under the full glare of the electric lamps. The men perhaps smoke their cigars. If Patience seems to be in the humor for conversation, all may take part, and she hurls her javelins impartially. A visitor is at once brought within the umbra of her wit.

PATIENCE WORTH A PSYCHIC MYSTERY By CASPER S[alathiel]. YOST [1864-1941]

***
WORTH, PATIENCE(United Kingdom, 1649-c. 1680s) Born in England, Worth traveled to America with some of the early English settlers when she was in her thirties. By her own account, she had a feisty, witty personality and held some unconventional views for her time, especially about religion. She was apparently killed in a skirmish with Native Americans. At least, that's what Pearl Lenore Curran says Patience Worth told her over a period of about twenty-five years, beginning in 1912. Curran, a St. Louis, Missouri, housewife who died in 1937, claimed to have been in telepathic contact with Patience Worth some 260 years after the latter'sdeath—and to have taken posthumous dictation, with the help of a Ouija board, of Worth's poems, novels, and "proverbs." Proverbs is the right word to describe these sayings; the language is archaic and the themes very Old Testament. In the book The Case of Patience Worth, Walter Franklin Prince writes, "almost immediately after Patience Worth announced herself . . . she began to make replies, which in pith, wit, wisdom and generally in terseness, resemble the proverbs of old time."

Essential Aphorisms

A fiery tongue belongs to one worth burning.

A basting but toughens an old goose.

A lollipop is but a breeder of pain.

A pot of wisdom would boil to nothing ere a doubter deemeth it worth tasting.

Prod ye the donkey's rump ye are sure of a kick.

It taketh a wise man to be a good fool.

Geary's guide to the world's great aphorists