Margaret and Her Friends / or, Ten conversations with Margaret Fuller upon the mythology of the Greeks and its expression in art, held at the house of the Rev. George Ripley, Bedford Place, Boston, beginning March 1, 1841

I asked Margaret if this was not something like her own thought,—this Venus, for example, was it not better than that we got from Greek art?

She said it was the primal idea, but she did not attach much importance to chronology. Philosophy must decide the age of a thought.

I gave her as good an abstract of Bode’s theory as I could.

William White took the drawing of Orpheus from me, and, while speaking of its beauty, said it always made him angry to think of the deterioration of the human figure. He thought it ought to have been prevented, and that his ancestors had deprived him of his rights.

Upon this, Margaret entered into a lively disquisition upon masculine beauty. She said the best specimens of it she had ever seen were a Southern oddity named Hutchinson and some Cambridge students who came from Virginia.

We lost a finer talk to-night through the inclemency of the weather. Wheeler was to have come with a great stock of information. Had he done so, I need not have quoted Bode or Proclus.

CAROLINE W. HEALEY.

April 23, 1841.

IX.
HERMES AND ORPHEUS.

April 29, 1841.

We did not have a very bright talk. There were few present, and we had only the subject of last week. Margaret did not speak at length. Wheeler had been ill, and his physician prescribed light diet of both body and mind.

Somebody spoke of Mercury sweeping the courts of the Gods, but that suggested nothing to Margaret.

Sarah Shaw had a pin, with a Mercury on it, represented as holding the head of a goat.

Margaret had never seen anything that would explain it, and there was some dispute about it.

E. P. P. said that, according to the Orphic Hymn, Mercury sought the love of Dryope under the form of a goat. Pan was the fruit of that amour. In this form also he wooed Diana.

We wandered from our subject a little, to hear Mr. Mack talk about the Gorgons. He thought they stood for the three sides of human nature. Medusa, the chief care-taker, the body, was the only one not immortal, and the only one beautiful. Stheno and Euryale, wide-extended force and wide-extended scope, represented spirit and intellect, essentially immortal. The changing of Medusa’s curls (or elements of strength) into serpents represented the fall. It was not the Gorgons who had but one eye and one tooth between them, but three sister guardians, whom Perseus was compelled to destroy before he could reach Medusa.

Mr. Mack did not tell us why human nature so divided had a certain petrifying power!

E. P. P. thought the intellect, not the body, was the care-taker. Mr. Mack tried in vain to explain, owing, I think, to his German misconception of words. Certainly the five senses are the providers, which was what he must have meant.

Margaret liked his theory, because there was a place in it for sin! She disliked failure. Perhaps we all had perceived her attachment to evil! Not that she wished men to fall into it, but it must be accepted as one means of final good.

The only copies of Bode belong to Edward Everett and Theodore Parker. Neither is at this moment to be had. The talk turned on the age of the Orphic idea.

The Orphic Hymns, Wheeler said, were merely hymns of initiation into the Orphic mysteries. They were altered by every successive priesthood, and finally by the Christian Platonists. Those now remaining were undoubtedly their work. Perhaps the ancient formulas were still hidden in them. We know the beautiful story of Orpheus. If he indeed represents many, yet all that has been said of him is also true of one.

Mr. Mack declared that Eurydice represented the true faith! She was killed by an envenomed serpent, which might possibly stand for an enraged priesthood!

I got a little impatient here, and said I did not care to know about the Hymns; but the Orphic idea, which made Scaliger speak of the Hymns as the “Liturgy of Satan,”—how old was that?

Margaret could not guess why he called them so.

Charles Wheeler said that, since they made a heathen worship attractive, perhaps he fancied them a device of the Evil One!

Too great a compliment to Scaliger, I thought.

Margaret had no objection to Orpheus as crowning an age; she liked that multitudes should produce one.

Charles Wheeler said that Carlyle had spoken of Orpheus as standing in such a relation to the Greeks as Odin bore to the Scandinavians.

Margaret said at this point (I don’t see with what pertinency) that Carlyle displeased her by making so much of mere men.

James Clarke quoted Milton, speaking of himself among the revellers of the Stuart Court, as like Orpheus among the Bacchanals.

I said that Bode placed Homer in the tenth century before Christ, and Orpheus in the age just preceding, say the thirteenth century before.

Mr. Mack thought all that mere conjecture.

I told him it made a good deal of difference to me whether the Orphic Mythology came before or after that of Homer. Had man grown out of the noble and into the base idea? Was all our knowledge only memory? Had the Orphic fancies no beauty till the Platonic Christians shaped them?

Margaret responded to what I said, that she did not like a mind always looking back.

E. P. P. said there was a great deal of consolation in it. Memory was prophecy. She didn’t like such a mind, but since she happened to have it she wanted support for it.

Mr. Mack said all history offered such support.

Charles Wheeler didn’t like to believe it, but felt that he must. He spoke of the Golden Age.

Margaret said every nation looked back to this; but, after all, it was only the ideal. The past was a curtain on which they embroidered their pictures of the present.

William White said that all great men looked to the appreciation of the future. We are too near to the present.

Margaret agreed.

E. P. P. said, all the science of Europe could not offer anything like the old Egyptian lore.

Margaret said the moderns needed the assistance of a despotic government.

Charles Wheeler spoke of the monuments in Central America; but before he could utter what was in his mind, Margaret interrupted, saying that all the greatness of the Mexicans only sufficed to show their littleness. We might have lost in grandeur and piety, but we had gained in a thousand tag-rag ways.

Mrs. Farrar whispered to me, “Write that down!” and I have done it.

Charles Wheeler said that late discoveries proved that there was a complete knowledge of electricity among the ancients. There were lightning-rods on the temple at Jerusalem, and they are described by Josephus, who however does not know what they are.

Margaret and I clung to the “tag-rag” gain.

Charles Wheeler agreed with me in thinking the Orphic Hymns of very late origin.

Margaret could not see the use of creating a race of giants to prepare the earth for pygmies! If these must exist, why not in some other sphere? She referred to the beautiful Persian fable. The first was God, of course; since man may always revert to Him, what matter about the giants?

I said that primitive ages were supposed to be innocent rather than great.

Margaret said the Persian fable bore to the same point as the Vishnu and Brahma. It was antagonism that produced all things. The universe at first was one Conscious Being,—“I am;” no word, no darkness, no light. This Conscious Being needed to know itself, and it passed into darkness and light and a third being,—the Mediator between the two. This Trinity produced ideals,—men, animals, things; and after a period of twelve thousand years all return again into the One, who has gained by the phenomena only a multiplied consciousness.

“Were they merged?” asked Charles Wheeler.

Margaret said, “No! once created, they could not lose identity.”

C. W. HEALEY.

April 30, 1841.

X.
BACCHUS AND THE DEMIGODS.

May 6, 1841.

Few present. Our last talk, and we were all dull. For my part, Bacchus does not inspire me, and I was sad because it was the last time that I should see Margaret. She does not love me; I could not venture to follow her into her own home, and I love her so much! Her life hangs on a thread. Her face is full of the marks of pain. Young as I am, I feel old when I look at her.

Margaret spoke of Hercules as representing the course of the solar year. The three apples were the three seasons of four months each into which the ancients divided it. The twelve labors were the twelve signs.

E. P. P. accepted this, and spoke of Bryant’s book, which Margaret did not like.

Margaret said Bryant forced every fact to be a point in a case. Bending each to his theory, he falsified it. She wished English people would be content, like the wiser Germans, to amass classified facts on which original minds could act. She liked to see the Germans so content to throw their gifts upon the pile to go down to posterity, though the pile might carry no record of the collectors. She spoke of Kreitzer, whose book she was now reading, who coolly told his readers that he should not classify a second edition afresh, for his French translator had done it well enough, and if readers were not satisfied with his own work, they must have recourse to the translation. This she thought was as it ought to be.

James Clarke said it always vexed him to hear ignorant people speak of Hercules as if he were a God, and of Apollo and Jupiter as if they might at some time have been men.

Margaret said, Yes, the distinction between Gods and Demigods was that the former were the creations of pure spontaneity, and the latter actually existent personages, about whose heroic characters and lives all congenial stories clustered.

J. F. C. did not like the statues of Hercules; the brawny figure was not to his taste.

Margaret thought it majestic. She said he belonged properly to Thessaly, and was identified with its scenery. She told several little stories about him. That of his sailing round the rock of Prometheus, in a golden cup borrowed of Jupiter, was the least known. She told the story from Ovid, the glowing account of his death, of the recognition by delighted Jove. She said Wordsworth’s “Tour in Greece” gave her great materials for thought.

Then she turned to Bacchus.

To show in what manner she supposed Bacchus to be the answer or complement to Apollo, she mentioned the statement of some late critic upon the relation of Ceres and Persephone to each other.

Persephone was the hidden energy, the vestal fire, vivifying the universe. Ceres was the productive faculty, external, bounteous. They were two phases of one thing. It was the same with Apollo and Bacchus. Apollo was the vivifying power of the sun; its genial glow stirred the earth, and its noblest product, the grape, responded.

She spoke of the Bacchanalian festivals, of the spiritual character attributed to them by Euripides, showing that originally they were something more than gross orgies.

Mrs. Clarke (Ann Wilby) said that they licensed the wildest drunkenness in Athens.

I said that was at a later time than Euripides undertook to picture. Were they identical with the Orphic? Did Orpheus really bring them from Egypt?

Margaret would accept that for a beginning.

E. P. P. thought that next winter we might have a talk about Roman Mythology.

Margaret liked the idea, and James Clarke seemed to accept it for the whole party. He said that he had never felt any interest in the Greek stories, until Margaret had made them the subject of conversation.

E. P. P. said she had felt excessively ashamed all through that she knew so little.

Margaret said no one need to feel so. It was a subject that might exhaust any preparation. Still, she wished we would study! She had herself enjoyed great advantages. Nobody’s explanations had ever perplexed her brain. She had been placed in a garden, with a great pile of books before her. She began to read Latin before she read English. For a time these deities were real to her, and she prayed: “O God! if thou art Jupiter!” etc.

James Clarke said he remembered her once telling him that she prayed to Bacchus for a bunch of grapes!

Margaret smiled, and said that when she was first old enough to think about Christianity, she cried out for her dear old Greek gods. Its spirituality seemed nakedness. She could not and would not receive it. It was a long while before she saw its deeper meaning.

CAROLINE W. HEALEY.

May 7, 1841.