Fountain of Fate

1) Evangelical Animals, The Book of Kells, Trinity College, Dublin, MS 58, fol. 27v
2) Baptistery, St. John Lateran, Rome
3) The Copernicus Planisphere, by Andreas Cellarius, Harmonia Macrocosmica, plate 4

Act I, scene i 

12
He stood beneath a dome of tow’ring height.
The ceiling of the room was far away;
a false sky met his gaze with twinkling lights,
a belt of time in Zodiac array.
Gold curtains fell like waterfalls, risqué
and riverine they flowed around the vault.
The veils were drawn across the grand archways
and framed the ceiling made of dark cobalt.
The neon lights flashed on and off like flaming salt.

13
A sea of bronze upheld by oxen pairs
stood brimful with the waters of the skies.
The waters poured out over stony stairs
into a fountain filled with golden bribes.
A sterling current rolled its liquid ice
spewed by a dragon from the fountain’s hearth,
while on its base were words deeply incised:
“All fate’s a wager—boldly now cast forth!
Dame Fortune favors those who go in quest of worth.”

14
Four faces ringed the watery wheel of chance:
a man, a bull, a lion, and a drake.
Laid out in gemstones on the floor, they danced, 
and bowed down towards the brazen oxen lake.
Their wings were dazzling in the water’s wake;
four bodies were of men, three faces beasts.
The creatures proffered; who would treasure take?
The man surveyed them, north, south, west, and east.
Their mouths gaped open, hungering for souls to feast.


Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my blog post. I look forward to hearing what you think!

F.B.

Popular posts from this blog

Draco Layer Four: The Anagogic or Mystical Sense

Image
Here be dragons. And doves. Human beings long for transcendence. Such longing is, for the world, always out of fashion because, of course, it is not a longing for the world, and the world knows it. We know what the world wants. The world—by which we mean Satan, the Lord of the World—wants above all our obedience, a jewel so precious that he will do anything to get it: lie, steal, murder, bear false witness, pretend to social standing, pretend to insider knowledge to get us to consent to his influence.  “God lied to you. You will not die.” And suddenly we are anxious about having other people dislike us, about losing prestige in our social circles, about other people being more popular or influential or successful, about other people having secret knowledge, about our own influence and fame. “You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” And with that temptation, our first parents fell. The irony is cosmic. There they were in the Garden, privy to conversation with God face-to-face, and
Keep reading

Draco Layer Three: The Moral or Tropological Sense

Image
Learn to discern. We all know what sin is, right? Right?!  Once upon a time in the desert , the hermit Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399) set out to make a list of the most deadly ones, albeit he called them “deadly thoughts,” not “sins.” You probably know the list, even if you don’t think you do: gluttony, impurity (a.k.a. lust), avarice (a.k.a. greed), sadness (a.k.a. feeling sorry for oneself), anger or wrath, acedia  or sloth, vainglory, and pride (two different things).  Not quite the list you were expecting? That is because some centuries later—we’re talking ancient times here, when centuries passed like decades do now (or vice versa)—Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) revised the list, somewhat accidentally, in his commentary on Job.  Gregory had been expounding Job according to its multiple layers—yes, that’s right! Job, like Shrek, has layers! —and he happened somewhere in book XXXI to mention the “seven principle vices” to which Pride,  the “Queen of Sins” gives rise: Vainglory, Envy,
Keep reading

Talking Points: Three Cheers for White Men

Image
1. When white women (see Marie de France and Eleanor of Aquitaine) invented chivalry and courtly love , white men agreed that it was better for knights to spend their time protecting women rather than raping them, and even agreed to write songs for them rather than expecting them to want to have sex with them without being forced. 2. When white men who were celibate (see the canon lawyers and theologians of the twelfth century and thereafter) argued that marriage was a sacrament valid only if both the man and the woman consented , white men exerted themselves to become good husbands rather than expecting women to live as their slaves. 3. When white women (see Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the suffragettes) invented feminism , white men supported them (see John Stuart Mill) and even went so far as to vote (because only men could vote at the time) to let them vote, not to mention hiring them as workers and supporting their education. And before you start telling me a
Keep reading

Risus et bellum

Image
MILO really needs to put this motto on a t-shirt: “Laughter and war.” It is what he called for back in November, when accepting the prize for courage in journalism from David Horowitz’s Freedom Center: So let us fight, but let our motto be Risus et bellum , Laughter and war. Because nothing stings our foes, foreign and domestic, more than our hearty laughter at their lies and nonsense. And also because nothing will better remind us what we’re fighting for than the laughter of Chesterton, of Chaucer and of Shakespeare, and of course the God who inspired them all. I have to confess, I am quite weary today. It is taxing withstanding a SJW attack. My colleagues in academia have, over the past week, used every weapon in the standard arsenal: long-running Facebook threads in which they talk about how deplorable I am; an open letter passed round the internet at the speed of light, garnering (at an estimate) some 1,400 signatures from colleagues at large to be sent to my Social Sciences
Keep reading

Progressive is the New Puritan

Image
Joseph Bottum has offered a weak (in the sense of historically shallow) version of this argument in his An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and Spirit of America  (New York: Image, 2014), where he attempts to account for the decline of the mainline Protestant churches in America over the last half century or so. As Bottum tells it, it was above all the new social gospel preached by the Baptist theologian Walter Rauschenbusch around the turn of the twentieth century that was ultimately responsible for the loss of confidence among American Protestants in themselves as Christians, if not in themselves as cultural elites. The story is complicated and involves lots of different currents in American culture from the late nineteenth century to the present, but the result, as Bottum convincingly shows, has been a profound transformation in the way in which American elites identify as religious or (mostly) not. The real question, left to a certain extent unanswered, is why they were so su
Keep reading