Babbalanja’s Theurgy in Melville’s Mardi

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Thomas Stanley first published The Chaldaick Oracles of Zoroaster and His Followers (London, 1661) and later The history of Chaldaick Philosophy (London, 1662). However, the edition that Melville probably used was another book by Thomas Stanley: The History of Philosophy containing the Lives, Opinions, Actions and Discourses of the Philosophers of every Sect (London, several editions) whose 1687 edition included the two previously mentioned works in its last pages. I will quote exclusively from this last edition.

2. “Telestic lore,” sometimes equated with the theurgic science, “was conceived to procure a conversation with Daemons by certain Rites and Ceremonies” (Stanley 1050). Properly speaking, “telestic lore” (telestike episteme) or telestic art (telestike techne) was the art of preparing and animating statues to receive the gods (Johnston, “Animating Statues” 452).

3. This silence, prelude to an imminent solemn event, was narrated by the second messenger in Euripides’ Bacchae (1084–1085): “The air was calm, in the wooded valley no sound came from the leaves, and you could not hear a murmur of the wild beasts” (my translation).

4. In many sixteenth and seventeenth century European emblem books the mulberry appeared as a “wise tree,” following Pliny (Naturalis Historia, XVI 41), who considered the mulberry the wisest of all cultivated trees because it is the last to bud, which it never does until the cold weather is past.

5. The interested reader can consult Stanley 1036–1044; Brisson 97–100.

6. The reader, for instance, can compare Doxodox’s discourse in the novel Mardi with similar passages in Kant’s Critic of the Pure Reason:

In every syllogism I first think a Rule (Major) by means of the understanding. Secondly, I subsume a cognition under the condition of the rule (minor) by means of the faculty of judgment. Lastly I determine my cognition by means of the predicate of the rule (conclusio), consequently, à priori by reason. The relationship, therefore, which the major represent as the rule between a cognition and its condition, constitutes the different kinds of syllogisms. They are, hence, just threefold, as all judgments in general; so far as they distinguish themselves in the manner whereby they express the relationship of cognition in the understanding, namely; Categorical, or Hypothetical, or Disjunctive syllogisms. (Kant 271)

7. Melville writes in Mardi that in the future “ … the Stagirite and Kant [will] be forgotten, and another folio than theirs be turned over for wisdom” (Melville 13).