This is from Robinson Jeffers “Roan Stallion,” this little stanza:
The fires threw up figures and symbols, meanwhile
Racial myth swarmed and dissolved in it
The phantom rulers of humanity
That without being are yet more real than what they are born of
And without shape
Shape, that which makes them
The nerves and the flesh go by, shadow like
The limbs, the lives, shadow like
These shadows remain
These shadows to whom temples
To whom churches
To whom labors and wars visioned themes are dedicated
I mean, a poet can say in a few sentences like that what it takes philosophers a much longer time to say.
The phantom rulers are the archetypal patterns, the mythological patterns, the supernatural susceptibilities to which our species has been vulnerable ever since “The Iliad,” for example. I mean, here you have these Greeks fighting out there on the plains of Ilium, and overhead the gods and the goddesses are fighting it out, and they are doing their divine squabbles, and they’re putting people into devilishly fierce trances and making them blood thirsty and making them cunning and giving them creative ideas like the Trojan horse and all that stuff and inflaming Achilles wrath, and you know…I mean, so, it’s been going on a long time, you know, in the Old Testament, the children of Israel were wandering around the deserts of the near east and as often as not kind of… they were a rather fierce band of very smart nomads, and when they came upon settled communities, they maybe got along, maybe didn’t get along, and they didn't like the religions, which were mostly goddess-centered religions. So they kind of tended to be iconoclastic, they broke the idols of the old guys.
Then they substituted a sky god, for which you mostly can't make images. They really didn’t like the idea of graven images. But then, I think you have to say, "Well, what about the Cherubim and the Seraphim that sat at the entrance to the Holy of Holies," or "What was that stuff in the Ark of the Covenant?" and "Why is the Inner Sanctum of the temple holier than the Outer Sanctum?" So, whether people despise other people’s graven images of the sacred, or whatever, we all seem to be susceptible to it. In modern terms, what you have is that people venerate the Bible as if it were the effigy of a god.
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