Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (80 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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Swedenborg’s Devils
In the works of the famous eighteenth-century Swedish visionary, we read that Devils, like angels, are not a species apart but derive from the human race. They are individuals who after death choose Hell. There, in that region of marshlands, of desert wastes, of tangled forests, of towns levelled by fire, of brothels, and of gloomy dens, they feel no special happiness, but in Heaven they would be far unhappier still. Occasionally, a ray of heavenly light falls on them from on high; the Devils feel it as a burning, a scorching, and it reaches their nostrils as a stench. Each thinks himself handsome, but many have the faces of beasts or have shapeless lumps of flesh where faces should be; others are faceless. They live in a state of mutual hatred and of armed violence, and if they come together it is for the purpose of plotting against one another or of destroying each other. God has forbidden men and angels to draw a map of Hell, but we know that its general outline follows that of a Devil, just as the outline of Heaven follows that of an angel. The most vile and loathsome Hells lie to the west.
The Sylphs
To each of the four roots, or elements, into which the Greeks divided all matter, a particular spirit was later made to correspond. Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician, gave them their names: the Gnomes of earth, the Nymphs of water, the Salamanders of fire, and the Sylphs, or Sylphides, of air. All of these words come from the Greek. The French philologist Littré traced the etymology of ‘sylph’ to the Celtic languages, but it seems quite unlikely that Paracelsus, who gave us the name, knew anything about those tongues.
No one any longer believes in the Sylphs, but the word is used as a trivial compliment applied to a slender young woman. Sylphs occupy an intermediate place between supernatural and natural beings; Romantic poets and the ballet have not neglected them.
Talos
Living beings made of metal or stone make up some of fantastic zoology’s most alarming species. Let us recall the angry bulls with brass feet and horns that breathed flames and that Jason, helped by the magic arts of Medea, yoked to the plough; Condillac’s psychological statue of sensitive marble; the boatman in the Arabian Nights, ‘a man of brass with a tablet of lead on his breast inscribed with talismans and characts’, who rescued the third Kalandar from the Magnet Mountain; the ‘girls of mild silver, or of furious gold’, which a goddess in William Blake’s mythology caught in silken nets for the delight of her lover; and the metal birds who nursed Ares.
To this list we may also add a draft animal, the swift wild boar Gullinbursti, whose name means ‘golden-bristled’. The mythologist Paul Herrmann writes: This living piece of metalwork came from the forge of skilful dwarfs; they threw a pigskin into the fire and drew out a golden boar with the power of traveling on land, sea, and air. However dark the night, there is always light enough in the boar’s path.’ Gullinbursti pulled the chariot of Freya, the Norse goddess of love, marriage, and fertility.
And then there is Talos, the warden of the island of Crete.
Some consider this giant the work of Vulcan or of Daedalus; Apollonius of Rhodes tells us about him in his
Argonautica
(IV, 1638-48):
And Talos, the man of bronze, as he broke off the rocks from the hard cliff, stayed them from fastening hawsers to the shore, when they came to the roadstead of Dicte’s haven. He was of the stock of bronze, of the men sprung from ash-trees, the last left among the sons of the gods; and the son of Cronos gave him to Europa to be the warder of Crete and to stride round the island thrice a day with his feet of bronze. Now in all the rest of his body and limbs was he fashioned of bronze and invulnerable; but beneath the sinew by his ankle was a blood-red vein; and this, with its issues of life and death, was covered by a thin skin.
It was through this vulnerable heel, of course, that Talos met his end. Medea bewitched him with a hostile glance, and when the giant again began heaving boulders from his cliff, ‘he grazed his ankle on a pointed crag, and the ichor gushed forth like melted lead; and not long thereafter did he stand towering on the jutting cliff’.
In another version of the myth, Talos, burning red-hot, would put his arms around a man and kill him. The bronze giant this time met death at the hands of Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, who were led on by the sorceress Medea.
The T’ao T’ieh
Poets and mythology seem to have ignored it, but everyone at some time has discovered a T’ao T’ieh for himself at the corner of a capital or in the middle of a frieze, and felt a slight uneasiness. The dog that guarded the flocks of the threefold Geryon had two heads and a single body, and luckily was killed by Hercules. The T’ao T’ieh inverts this order and is still more horrible: its huge head is connected to one body on the right and another on the left. Generally it has six legs since the front pair serves for both bodies. Its face may be a dragon’s, a tiger’s, or a person’s; art historians call it an ‘ogre’s mask’. It is a formal monster, inspired by the demon of symmetry for sculptors, potters, and ceramicists.
Some fourteen hundred years
b
.
c
.
, under the Shang Dynasty,
it already figured on ceremonial bronzes.
T’ao T’ieh means ‘glutton’ and it embodies the vices of sensuality and avarice. The Chinese paint it on their dishes in order to warn against self-indulgence.
Thermal Beings
It was revealed to the visionary and theosophist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) that this planet, before it was the earth we now know, passed through a solar stage, and before that through a Saturnian stage. Man today is composed of a physical body, of an ethereal body, of an astral body, and of an ego; at the start of the Saturnian period he was a physical body only. This body was neither visible nor tangible, since at that time there were on earth neither solids nor liquids nor gases. There were only states of heat, thermal forms, defining in cosmic space regular and irregular figures; each man, each being, was an organism made of changing temperatures. According to the testimony of Steiner, mankind during the Saturnian period was a blind, deaf, and insensitive multitude of articulated states of heat and cold. ‘To the investigator, heat is but a substance still subtler than a gas,’ we read in one page of Steiner’s
Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss
(Outline of Occult Science). Before the solar stage, fire spirits, or archangels, animated the bodies of those ‘men’, who began to glow and shine.
Did Steiner dream these things? Did he dream them because they had occurred ages earlier? What is undeniable is that they are far stranger than the demiurges, serpents, and bulls of other cosmogonies.