U.E. echoes A.E.

I recently posted on A.E.'s "language of the gods" -- the attempts of the Irish mystic who wrote under that name to intuit the "true" meanings of the individual letters or sounds of which language is composed.

After laying out his alphabet, A.E. goes on to imagine some of the primitive words our distant ancestors may have created. He gives six or seven examples of such words, the first of which -- obviously suggesting to the mind the Semitic word for "God" -- is El.

I imagine a group of our ancestors lit up from within, . . . feeling those kinships and affinities with the elements which are revealed in the sacred literature of the Aryan, and naming these affinities from an impulse  springing up within. I can imagine the spirit struggling outwards making of element, colour, form or sound a mirror on which, outside itself, it would find symbols of all that was pent within itself, and so gradually becoming self-conscious in the material nature in which it was embodied, but which was still effigy or shadow of a divine original. I can imagine them looking up at the fire in the sky, and calling out "El" if it was the light they adored, or if they rejoiced in the heat and light together they would name it "Hel." . . .

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Approximately three days after posting on A.E.'s alphabet, I happened to be reading Serendipities, a translated collection of essays by Umberto Eco, which I had picked up at a used bookstore probably in March or April (when I was writing about the Wheel of Fortune) on the strength of its appropriately serendipitous cover art, which featured (or so it appeared at first glance; more on this below) a Hieronymus Bosch painting which had recently come to my attention during my meditations on that card.

The second essay in that book, called "Languages in Paradise," deals with the evolution of Dante's thoughts regarding the original language spoken by Adam -- specifically with how they changed between De Vulgari Eloquentia and Paradiso -- and speculates about the possible influence of the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia.

In De Vulgari Eloquentia, writes Eco,

Dante thought that the first sound emitted by Adam could only have been an exclamation of joy that, at the same time, was an act of homage toward his creator. The first word that Adam uttered must therefore have been the name of God, El (attested in patristic tradition as the first Hebrew name of God).

In Paradiso, though, Dante has Adam say that he had originally called God I (thus in the Italian; a single vowel, not the first-person pronoun) and that he became El only later. Eco's translator William Weaver provides what he calls a "literal translation" of the passage in question (Paradiso XXVI, 133-138).

Before I descended into the pains of Hell, on earth the Highest Good was called I, from whence comes the light of joy that enfolds me. The name then became EL, and this change was proper, because the customs of mortals are like leaves on a branch, one goes and another comes.

Having just read A.E.'s account of the ancients "calling out 'El' if it was the light they adored," I was surprised to find the name El here again associated with "the light of joy that enfolds me." I also thought it odd that I didn't remember Dante's ever using that particular turn of phrase -- and, sure enough, he didn't. Looking back at the original Italian, I saw that Weaver's translation was indeed quite literal -- with the single exception of the reference to "light," which does not appear in the original! Dante wrote simply "onde vien la letizia che mi fascia," translated by the peerless Allen Mandelbaum (the gold standard for Dante translations) as "from which derives the joy that now enfolds me." Weaver's addition of "light" is quite unaccountable. Verse translators who fall short of Mandelbaum's virtuosity might fudge like that to meet the demands of meter, but Weaver's translation is in prose and professes to be strictly literal.

The juxtaposition of El and Hell -- echoing the El and Hel of the A.E. passage -- is, obviously, also an artifact of translation.

Eco goes on to speculate as to where Dante got the name I and suggests Abulafia.

[F]or Abulafia, each letter, each atomic element, already had a meaning of its own, independent of the meaning of the syntagms in which it occurred. Each letter was already a divine name: 'Since, in the letters of the Name, each letter is already a name itself, know that Yod is a name, and YH is a name' . . . Paleographers say that in certain codes [sic; codices?] of the Divine Comedy I is written as Y. Why can this not lead us to suppose that the I of Dante was the YOD of Abulafia, a divine name?

This passage, with its reference to each letter having a meaning of its own, was actually the first parallel to A.E. that I noticed. Only after noticing it did I go back and see the various related coincidences discussed above.

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Now, about that cover art.

In my post on some of the early Wheel of Fortune Tarot cards, I noted that one of the creatures on the wheel in the Tarot de Marseille closely resembles the dog in Bosch's painting The Conjuror. I then wrote "Some critics have even identified the other creature, the one in the conjurer's basket, as a monkey, but this is a mistake. The reappearance of this pair in the central panel of Bosch's St. Anthony Triptych leaves no room for doubt that it is a barn owl" and included a relevant detail from that latter painting.

Note that the only reason I mentioned or posted this painting was because of the owl perched on the pig-man's head, which proves that the creature in the conjuror's basket in The Conjuror is also an owl, not a monkey.

The copy of Serendipities I found features on the cover what is immediately recognizable as the St. Anthony Triptych. Not until I wrote this post did I actually take a good look at it and realize that it is not Bosch at all but a terribly amateurish copy -- of which the most striking difference from the original is the complete absence of the owl.

Serendipities cover (left) with detail (right) showing its owllessness

Apparently this is the São Paulo "version" of the painting rather than the more familiar Lisbon one -- and, while I had called the São Paulo painting "a terribly amateurish copy," apparently many art historians are of the opinion that they were both painted by Bosch. After looking at some higher-quality reproductions of the São Paulo painting, I would like to modify my previous statement and say that it is very obviously a terribly amateurish copy! Be that as it may, it's a strange sort of anti-serendipity that the book caught my eye because of the St. Anthony Triptych, that I was interested in that triptych largely because of the owl, and that the version on the book turns out not to have an owl.