Text: Perry F. Holberg, “Poe: Trickster-Cosmologist,” Poe as Literary Cosmologer (1975), pp. 30-37 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 30, continued:]

Poe's Eureka — a cosmological “poem” of questionable literary and/or scientific merit, at least according to some — may, with valid results, be interpreted in the broad context of social and psychological developments. Poe, of the introductory satiric hoax in Eureka, is the trickster of neolithic tradition. Thereafter in the essay, he is the cosmological speculator, displaying an “uncondescending demonstration of a seamless web of argument by a mind which takes pleasure in the exercise of its own considerable powers.”(1) As a creative literary performer he fulfills a specialized function of the shaman, a healer of a psychic and social imbalance of the “tribal” culture, a mediator of the cosmic-human drama. As a rationalist invoking empirical data, he mediates speculatively on cosmological concepts. “Playing,” as he does, between these two modes of perceiving and relating to the world — the rational (intellectual) and the irrational (psychical), he serves an additional mediating function.

The thrust of this essay, then, is to explore Poe's role as a shamanic performer of cosmic ritual and as intellectual explicator of cosmological/metaphysical theory; further, to determine the various mediating functions of the psychic/intellectual modalities as they relate to Eureka; in addition, to explore the principle of negativism as it pervades and determines the philosophic, artistic, and experiential modes of Poe's actives and creative expressions.

At every turn, Poe confronts us with a negative action, condition, or principle that is intended to produce a positive result. It hung like a pall over his life style, sustaining a dark mood in the form of necromancy. It is at the very core of his cosmological speculation on the proposition of cosmic collapse. And of parallel interest, negation, in a myriad of forms, was central to the social upheaval of the nineteenth century. Romanticism was synonymous with social, political, and artistic rebellion, and hence negative. The Western world literally and figuratively turned upside down and inside out through negatively oriented social actions that transformed its goals and values. In this setting, Poe represents a self-appointed shaman, seeking both to exorcise and heal a psychically ailing society. In a crisis situation, he undertook a crisis solution in the manner of a shaman at a time when such a role was no longer clearly defined, let alone practiced. [page 31:]

Of additional clarification: primitive and archaic societies ritualize(d) the destruction and (re)construction of their cosmogonies in symmetrical reflection of the conceived cosmic process. In other words, equal weight was given the negative (chaos) and positive (cosmos) conditions of the process. Thereby the mechanism for personal and collective identity was effectively institutionalized. Poe's cosmological process is similarly constituted. His emphasis on destruction (ultimate cosmic annihilation), however, represents an asymmetric correction (or distortion) of the discredited static symmetry of Medieval cosmology archie and geocentric). Accordingly, his cosmological speculations were tuned to the dynamic social changes of his time as they continued to adjust to the consequences of Copernican revolutionary astronomy (heliocentrism). Thus, while traditional cosmogonies were ritualized primarily as a means of reaffirming the identity of the social order with the cosmic order, Poe's excursions into shamanic performance and speculative thinking represent alternative traditions for responding to social crisis. The destructive ritual or principle in static societies is primarily, if not totally, symbolic. On the other hand, destruction in transitional societies is functional to real change. Therein the destruction of the old order and the struggle toward reconstructing the new take place simultaneously. Appropriately, Poe and other romantic sensibilities accelerated the negative aspects of the sociological process of destruction/re-construction. He gave his own distinctive coloration to the romantic sociology of negativism, i.e., of rebellion, anomie, and valuation.

To review briefly the function of these elements in the context of social change: rebellion against institutional values is the reaction to and consequence of anomie, the passive phase of declining values through non-compliance, brought about by loss of faith in their relevancy; transvaluation or inversion is a further consequence of social disorientation (destruction), a sociological (as distinct from institutionalized) ritual which associates the symbols of one value system with those of another, generally its direct opposite.

Poe's contributing examples of inversion cover a broad spectrum of “dark” experiences which, by Christian standards, are deemed immoral, degenerative, and thereby destructive of all traditional social virtues. But as examples of transvaluation, these were explored as a prerequisite to a desired spiritual renewal of society. Thus, by Satanic turns and twists, murder, sadism, masochism, incest, ritual orgies, drugs, gothic demonism and necromancy were explored and evaluated as alternative routes to an otherwise (and traditional) claim to redemption through virtuous behavior only. “Light through darkness,”(2) “the holiness of evil,”(3) descent into the abyss, voyages through the labyrinthine layers of consciousness that were seeking the mysterious “power of blackness”(4) — these read like a catalog of Poe's dream-world, passing along the low road of human experience seeking to gain the high road. His “heart of darkness”(5) harbors the ultimate negation that will shed the ultimate light — Eureka!

In accordance with tradition, the shaman is a performer rather than an intellectual. His creative work (theatrical exorcism, artistic expression, etc.) is in effect a microcosmic re-creation or re-assertion of the cosmic order. Indeed, “the shamans did not create the cosmology, the mythology, and the theology of their respective tribes; they only interiorized it, ‘experienced’ it, used it as the itinerary for their ecstatic journeys.”(6) A precondition of the choice of shaman requires that he have a pathological illness, a condition that Poe, by most counts, fulfills. His personal illness — shaman and Poe — predisposes him to the “evils” that may befall the collective condition of the tribe/society. When required, “as a technician of the sacred,”(7) he “heals” the tribal (psychic) malady (cosmic disequilibrium) by re-creating or experiencing the cosmogony which begins by a symbolic ritual of destructive stress, followed by various transactions that leads to a spiritual renewal or regeneration: “A process of self-healing, often regarded as capable, a purely psychic process portrayed in impressive images of dying and being cut to pieces, leads him to overcome the illness and finally to gain power over the spirits of disease.”(8) This describes the shamanic tradition expressed through Sabbatianism, a religious nihilism which formed a branch of Kabbalism, which reached its fullest development during the late eighteenth-century and, thereby, comes close to the time of Poe. Sabbatai Zevi, the Messianic force behind this movement, apparently had a “pathological state of mind.”(9) Sabbatianism thereby owes its intertwining metaphysical and psychological elements to his alternating “fits of deepest gloom and most uncontrollable exuberance and exaggerated joy.”(10) According to a contemporary follower, he was possessed by ‘'sufferings which [were] inflicted in Heaven,”(11) a kind of divine madness. Relative to our analysis, whereas Sabbatai Zevi performed a function equivalent to that of the shaman, Poe's shamanic activities may be regarded as a correlative to his intellectual activities as a cosmologist. The following summation of shamanic function ties together Poe's psychic, artistic, [page 32:] and speculative interests as components of his efforts to re-identify and re-structure the cosmic disequilibrium of his time. “Thus shamanism is above all a method, a psychic technique, with which, in a particular cultural situation, especially in a certain ‘dreamlike atmosphere’ still achieved today in Australia, psychic images and energies, that is to say traditional ideas or myths of a particular group, can be re-experienced, ordered, intensified, given artistic shape, and communicated by means of the trance of an individual specially prepared for this activity. The result of this activity is a strengthening of the collective psyche. It is a process of bringing order through artistic forms to the world of ideas, which has become chaotic through debilitating influences or conditions. The world of ideas, the vision of the world, have to be activated and reshaped.”(12)

The shamanic figure of psychic healer, taken in the broadest sense, narrows, under certain cultural circumstances, into a specialized performance as trickster. This role has striking application to Poe's literary devices and personal proclivities. To begin: Poe's preoccupation with various problem-solving “games,” which carried over into Eureka, comprises a pattern of behavior that suggests an affinity with the trickster technique in the overall role of the shaman. Of initial consideration, as pointed out by Richard Wilbur, Poe “was a maker and solver of puzzles, fascinated by codes, ciphers, anagrams, acrostics, hieroglyphics, and the Kabbala.”(13) He was, in effect, “possessed” by the need to reveal the cosmic mysteries of order/disorder) underlying (that is, concealed in) conglomerated (diffused) matter, about which these “puzzling” devices provided an analogical clue to the cosmic whole. To quote Wilbur again, “a man so devoted to concealment and deception and unraveling and detection might be expected to have in his work what Poe himself called ‘undercurrents of meaning.’”(14)

A possible clue to unlocking these “undercurrents of meaning” lies in the techniques displayed by the trickster (shaman). According to Claude Levi-Strauss, “the trickster is a mediator.”(15) ‘'Since his mediating function occupies a position halfway between two polar terms, he must retain something of that duality namely an ambiguous and equivocal character.”(16) Traditional shamanism functions, as previously mentioned, within the symbolic structure of mythology. Reality is effectively dealt with through the language of myth, a reality, according to Levi-Strauss, depending more on the structural relation of the operants than on the details of the mythic scenario. The essential dualism which the trickster is called upon to mediate is life-death. All dualisms are variations of that essential contradiction or ambiguity. The trick of the mediator, then, is to partake of the two polar conditions and resolve the ambiguity they represent, to trick ambiguity out of ambiguity through ambiguity — ultimately, to trick life out of death.

Enlarging the analysis into the psychological realm, Jung characterizes the trickster as “an archetypal psychic structure, “a “psychologem.”(17) He “is a primitive ‘cosmic’ being of divine-animal nature.”(18) Thus defined, tricksterism is a confrontation of the subconscious (animal) level with higher (divine) consciousess, mediating ambiguity by mythic personification. “The conflict between the two dimensions of consciousless is simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche, which like any other energic system is dependent on the tension of opposites.”(19) Representing the collective condition between unconscious disorder and conscious order, the trickster parallels the individual shadow, that haunting figure that frequents dreams. Seeds of their opposite are contained in both the individual and collective shadow. In the example before us, this reversibility principle works through the negative character of the shadow, revealing what is hidden; out of darkness will come light; out of death will come life. The trickster, then, is the forerunner of the savior, signaling the advent of the “divine deceiver.”(20) Fultering down through other analytical approaches to the mythic trickster and his surviving expressive counterparts of today, we find a thread leading us to a picaresque literary figure — Poe.

Since the archaic period, primitive trickster traits were perpetuated in theatrical and literary forms, comic and prankish in nature. In Greek folk tales of late archaicism the trickster manifests stupidity, which is linked with cunning and personified in the contradictory fashion of a cunning fool and a stupid rogue. While theatrical forms of trickster survive in the clown and in Punch-and-Judy plays, its chief mode of expression emerged in picaresque literature. Broadly interpreted, this genre developed the trickster as an anti-hero, the spirit of disorder that opposes the old order, the new restorer of the process of dynamic cosmic dualism. For example: “Rabelais, with his grand bawdy book, fights in the interests of humanism against medieval forms of life. In Spain the picaresque novel constituted itself as a literary genus and remained the sole means of revolt against the rigidity of tradition. Goethe wrote Reynard the Fox during the French Revolution and this trickster epic is a classic example of its kind.”(21) “Like every other trickster, “Poe, “too, operates outside the fixed bounds of custom and law.”(22) He is the trickster par excellence, performing in the service of a cultural transvaluation, mediating the restructuring of the “old” social objective reality through the subjective dream reality. [page 33:]

Poe's rogueries, satires, hoaxes, plot-ruses, comic fantasies, and the like are variations of the trickster repertoire. Many commentaries have pointed out these categories separately. For example: “the is modes of Poe's parvenu are brash trickery and improvization, again aspects of the ratiocinative determination to control life.”(23) Here Stephen L. Mooney used the term “trickery” only incidentally, and elsewhere in his article he employed similar terms appropriate to the trickster, such as “burlesque tales, ““ingenious ruses,” and ‘'serio-comic vision, “which were regarded as “elaborate camouflage[s]” obscuring the mystery of the individual shadow. Constance Rourke comments on the comic trick of inversion or reversibility: “Poe's command of verbal humor was uncertain; his puns fall below tolerable levels. Yet these two are part of the mode of the time — a time when language was being carelessly and comically turned upside down and even re-created, as if to form a new and native idiom.”(24) As if to form a new order, to re-phrase Rourke, by reducing his readers “to an involuntary imbecility, “by reducing laughter and terror to “brutal comedy, ”(25) Poe seems once more the trickster at work. To argue that Eureka is a literary satire, another much discussed aspect, does not necessarily negate its intent to be a serious and important speculative statement on cosmology. Ironically, Harriet R. Holman's support of the former contention adds credence to the significance of the latter. She states: “As scholars now recognize, Poe customarily addresses two audiences, his surface meaning conveying far less than the hidden meaning.”(26) Assuming the “hidden mean to be the satire and the ‘'serious meaning” to refer to cosmology, we suggest, in accordance with the trickster thesis, that they are complimentary. Edwin Honig's description of the satirical mode, though determined independent of the rhetoric of tricksterism and the anti-hero, nonetheless underscores the trickster's interiorizing of the cosmic process. Consequently, “in dethroning the epic hero and questioning the active virtues which modeled him, satire appears heretical or iconoclastic. But in attempting to revitalize ideals from which society is pulling away, satire reveals its essentially conservative bias. Defects in the epic hero are discovered and magnified, and the exposure is made to undermine all contemporaneous forms of heroism. But the undercover means by which something of the authority and values of heroic times — an otherwise forgotten Golden Age — is dramatically invoked.”(27) For Poe the Golden Age was the return to the Beginning. Finally, according to Daniel Hoffman, since “his hoaxes are all serious beneath the surface, his serious writings seldom resist the temptation to impose on the reader, for Hoaxiepoe and Edgar the Metaphysician are one and the same, a regular practitioner of that aesthetic which keeps the reader off balance and always on the defensive against the superior cunning of the author.”(28)

The location of psychic and cosmic centers created a problem for Poe. As a cosmologist he rejected the pre-Copernican tradition of a total universe revolving concentrically around an absolute power center (axis mundi) in favor of a point in space toward which all matter (galaxies, clusters, planetary systems, and lie conglomerates) is moving in a rectilinear direction (more fully discussed below). However, despite intuitive/ratiocinative rejection of an actually concentrically located center, the trickster-shaman side of Poe continued to respond according to the dictates of the psyche, pursuing the psychological need to have a center of being. Artistically, he continued to travel the ego-axis connecting the transcendent self (upper world) with the collective unconscious (lower world), in uncertain emulation of the. shaman tradition of negotiating passage between three regions of the cosmos.(29) Consequently, Poe's fictional characters are forever descending into the abyss, the pit, a winding or whirlwind, circular or spiral “descent of the mind into sleep.”(30) Therein, the trickster is trying to negotiate passage to the lower world by purging himself of earthly associations. Wilbur characterizes what no reader can help noticing — that “there is no end to dim windings in Poe's fiction: there are dim and winding woods paths, dim and winding streets, dim and winding watercourses — and, whenever the symbolism is architecture, there is likely to be dim and winding passages staircases.”(31) “But Poe's center is that place — to use Dante's great figure — ‘where the sun is silent.’ Since he refuses to see nature, he is doomed to see nothing.”(32) Although the weight of Poe's preoccupation involves the dark obscurities of descent imagery, there are, though less frequent and less compelling, references to the opposite imagery of ascent. Thus, however diminished its impact, Wilbur has made clear Poe's specific use of a chandelier to symbolize the heavenly end of the axis mundi. This important lighting fixture occurs in approximately half of Poe's room descriptions and displays a variety of decorative and utilitarian attributes, which are of little use to the subject at hand. Rather, “what we must understand about chandelier, as Poe explains in his poem Al Araaf, is that its chain does not stop at the ceiling: it goes right on through the ceiling, through the roof, and up to heaven. What comes down the chain from heaven is divine power of imagination, and it is imagination's purifying fire which flashes or flickers from the chandelier. That is why the immaterial angelic Ligeia makes her appearance directly beneath the chandelier; and that is why Hop-Frog makes his departure for dreamland by climbing the chandelier-chain and vanishing through the sky-light.”(33) Thus, Poe the trickster traveled the psycho-cosmic axis, however unevenly weighted in favor of the nether pole, in an effort to mediate the ambiguity of life-death. In true shaman fashion as former, his fiction/poetry served as an instrument of healing the social malaise through an exorcistic, nihilistic dissociation, while his cosmological speculation sought both to explain the cosmic basis of the social upheaval and brighten the hope of future human prospects for an identity of Oneness (self and cosmos) — albeit through negation. [page 34:]

Despite the foregoing, it is the descent-half of the creation cycle, poised uncertainly on the dream-edge of a new perception of (a) transcendent reality, that dominates Poe's thinking and action. Consequently, his cosmology is asymmetrically tilted to the destructive, dark side of the creative (creation) cycle at the expense of an articulated image of the other side, as portrayed, for example, by Dante in The Divine Comedy.

To review what has been stated previously, Poe's cosmological speculations are conditioned by a process of dissociation taking place in a society gripped by anxiety, anomie, and alienation (fragmentation into chaos) on the negative/passive side and by rebellion, transvaluation, attempted renewal (reconstruction of the fragments into a whole cosmos) on the negative/active side. Negation thus serves the double function of destruction and reconstruction as a simultaneous enactment of the sociological process of renewal. Similarly, in Poe's cosmology the force of negation culminates in a final cosmic collapse, at which point the transcendent “reality” is attained, i.e., a “posthumous consciousness” is realized — so characterized by George Poulet.(34)

Moreover, the sociological process, like its cosmic analog, is cyclical, an endless cycle of ebbing and flowing in the cosmos, as Poe ceaselessly postulates. The end is portended in the beginning, the Begining as well as little beginnings, just as little ends and the great End are postulated as returns to beginnings. All stages of progression from Beginning (portending the End) to Beginning (a return) End as a Beginning or re-Beginning, a continuing cosmic rite: . .that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine.”(35) The End is the Beginning in the metaphysical sense, i.e., “the symmetry of principle sees the end of all things metaphysically involved in the thought of the beginning; seeks and finds in this origin of all things the rudiment of this end.”(36) On the other hand, “the Universe has no conceivable end” in the physical sense, i.e., “the cycles of the Universe are perpetual”(37) — another way of stating “the end is the beginning.” But this isn’t the end of the matter, the stuff of the universe, latter is the vehicle for objectifying the ‘'spiritual Ether” (Poe's term), i.e., the medium through which spiritual energy, by irradiation, animates and differentiates its otherwise immateriality or essence. “In this view, we are enabled to perceive Matter as a Means — not as an end. Its purposes are thus seen to have been comprehended in its diffusion; and with the return into Unity these purposes cease. The absolutely consolidated globe of globes would be objectless: — therefore not for a moment could it continue to exist. Matter seated for an end, would unquestionably, on fulfillment of that end, be Matter no longer. Let us endeavor to understand that it would disappear, and that God would remain all in all.”(38) Thus, the material nature of the diverse — the micro and macro objects of orbiting bodies and animated conscious bodies resulting from diffusion — becomes annihilated in the End to ensure the survival of the simplified unity of the Beginning; matter dissolves into essence. Obviously, Poe was uncomfortable with the mundane material world. For him the multiplicity of differentiated objects, or thingness, hides the unitary essence underlying and structuring their actions. His use of the term “nothingness,” as implied in the context cited below, suggests a meaning of nothing-ness. Nothingness therein does not appear to mean a void or emptiness of, say, consciousness, essence, or spirit, but of matter, materiality, thingness. “Matter shall have returned into its original condition of ‘ne.”(39) “Matter empties itself of and at the same time becomes its immaterial origins, that is, “Matter without Attraction and without Repulsion — in other words, Matter without Matter — in other words, again, Matter no more. In sinking into Unity, it will sink at once into that Nothingness which, to all Finite Perception, Unity must be — into that Material Nihility from which alone we can conceive it to have been evoked — to have been created by the Volition of God.”(40) From mortal death to immortal life is thus a metamorphosis through negation.

While Richard Wilbur and Harry Levin are recognized as early proponents of the positive thrust of Poe's negativity in the twentieth century, other advocates of this principle (Baudelaire, Mallarmè, and Valery, to mention the French contingency) were influenced by his thinking and orientation. We will, however, confine this commentary to a few examples. Wilbur's interpretation is clear and precise: ‘'Since the poet's business is to help undo phenomena toward unity, dreaming the oak of the creation back to its original acorn, his negation of human and earthly subject-matter becomes in Poe's cosmic theory positive; his destructiveness becomes creative”(41) Levin's characterization provides a somewhat more vivid coloration of Poe's metaphysical negativism: “Poe's cult of blackness is not horripilation for horripilation's sake; it s a bold attempt to face the true darkness in its most tangible manifestations. If life is a dream, then death s an awakening.”(42) [page 35:]

A similar concept of birth-death-rebirth cycles is central to Hindu cosmology. The parallels with Eureka have been reviewed by D. Ramakrishna, and the possible conduit through Transcendentalism to Poe has been explored by others as well. However, Transcendentalism envisions no destructive phase of the creation process, while, as already indicated, Hinduism does. In the Indian Mahabharata, the cosmic drama s enacted by the personified attributes of the demi-urge, Brahma, who in one day (4,320, 000, 000 years) causes the forces of creation to unfold. Then, “at the end of that time evolution changes to involution just as sleep follows waking, inbreathing follows exhalation. The worlds collapse on themselves, the suns explode, the nebulae are scattered into the primeval void. Actuality returns to the state of potentiality. The curtain falls, the cosmic drama is over, actors and audience, props and producers are alike enfolded in he sleep of nonbeing.”(43) To review Poe's position for comparison: he postulates a dynamic universe of change, first through irradiation of matter and spirit, then followed by its progressive collapse — an interesting prefiguration of the explosion-implosion cycle of the Bing Bang cosmology and the principle of entropy in the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Poe's ambivalent posture regarding the role of instincts (trickster) and reason (cosmologist) provided him with an ambience, strangely enough, suited to the social and cosmic process he espoused. This dualistic posture played “tricks” with his private/public roles of mediating the condition of cosmic alienation. The resolution of these contradictory positions of reason and instincts was built into his trickster-cosmologist roles or ambience (discussed more fully in the previous section). On the one hand, Poe identified instinct (intuition) as the instrument of cosmological conception while, on the other, his intellectual side speculated through logic and the data of astronomical observations. To connect Poe with the cosmological tradition once again: creation myths (cosmogonies) reflect a “perceived” analogical relationship between the macro/microcosmic worlds — a result, according to Poe, of the human “propensity for analogical inference,”(44) a subjective predisposition to perceive a unity of ordered reality. A contemporary physicist, Richard Schlegel, reverses this approach by contending that the objective reality is controlled by a “cosmological postulate”(45) that ultimately influences the evolutionary behavior of man. Poe's attempted resolution would appear to lie between his analogical inference and Schlegel's cosmological postulate. His internal struggle with the ambiguity of instinct/reason is thus an analog of the broader collective problem of cosmic identity, of the mind/ body dualism, of the intellect's “struggle against its propensity for analogical inference.”(46) in sum, Poe's struggle with analogical inference (subjective) is basically one of “finding” the cosmological postulate (to use Schlegel's objective category) for his intuited cosmology, or to put it another way, of determining the prevailing condition of the universe in his time and subsequently relating to it.

Our imagination, he says, envisions “a revolution of all the orbs of the Galaxy about some gigantic globe which we take to be the central pivot of the whole,”(47) but astronomy fails to discover it, despite speculative guesses as to its location. Consequently, Poe rejects the assumption of circularity for one of rectilinearity in which “all bodies would be a right line leading to the centre of all.”(48) Such lines are, according to Poe, characterized by an “infinity of particular curves” as opposed to the infinity of concentric circles around a fixed and absolute center. The former permits an adjustment of direction of the particular curves as each proceeds “on its journey to the End.. .while the merely general direction of each atom — would, on my hypothesis, be, of course, absolutely rectilinear.”(49) Thus, Poe rejects the concept of “the eternal stability of the Universe,”(50) based on the apparent circular orbiting of the planetary system around a “particular centre unknown, whether luminous or non-luminous.”(51) He hereby conceives (or perceives) a shift in the location of the axis mundi of tradition to a point at which cosmic collapse will occur, a fulfillment of the destructive phase of the creation cycle. Here we detect a corresponding shift in Poe's rationale from subjective (analogical inference) to objective (cosmological postulate) criteria, wherein a new center point is only vaguely “located” by the convergence of all matter to it, which point is eccentric or asymmetric both to traditional psychic and cosmological needs for centers and centering. But Poe's asymmetrically projected center is consistent with his negative principle (i.e., symmetry as opposed by asymmetry), for “the ‘state of progressive collapse’ is precisely that state in which alone we are warranted in considering all Things.”(52)

The chief connection between Poe's cosmic collapse and social collapse is one of process. They do not function on a parallel time scale, though the distinction is at least obscure. Having noted this reservation, we behold Poe's description of the physical condition of the universe: A prior condition, i.e., the irradiation of “diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe” is being replaced (through progressive collapse) by “the regathering of the diffused Matter and Spirit [which] will be but the re-constitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God,”(53) the original Unity. Thus, the perfected state of spirit/matter is the negation of the [page 36:] diffused state, rife with its imperfections. Further, the diffused state of matter can be compared with an overly complex social order, attendant with its imperfections and lack of unity. Correctively, then, in both the social and physical worlds, only destruction will set in motion a reconstruction of a meaningful whole once again. The struggle against imperfections is, in effect, the struggle against evil, a condition that is however, without its “virtues,” as Poe states: “In this view, and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddles of Divine Injustice — of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone the existence of Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more — it becomes endurable. Our souls no longer rebel at a Sorrow which we ourselves have / imposed upon ourselves [because we are God and he us] in furtherance of our n purposes — with a view — if even with a futile view — to the extension of our own joy.”(54) poe here sancns, without clearly specifying, that which is otherwise expressed in the totality of his fictional/poetic accounts, i.e., a joyous satanism, an ecstasy in pain, the pursuit of evil toward positive ends — as did idelaire, Jean Genet, and Henri Michaux after him. He thereby expressed belief in a dualistic God of good and evil and in the psychic vehicle of trans valuation. A more fully articulated spiritual significance of s idea is to be found in the mystical heresy of Sabbatianism (previously mentioned), wherein the parallels to Poe's cosmology as well as to his life style are enlightening. Gershon Scholem summarizes their subversionary doctrine for restoring cosmic harmony (Tikkun) as follows: “The radicals could not bear the thought of remaining content with passive belief in the paradox [new values through evil] of the Messiah's [Sabbatai Zevi] mission. Rather did they hold that as the end draws nearer this paradox necessarily becomes universal. The action of the Messiah sets an example and to follow it is a duty. The consequences which flowed from these religious ideas were purely nihilistic, above all the conception of a voluntary Marranism [Judaic Christianity] with the slogan: We must all descend into the realm of evil in order to vanquish it from within. In varying theoretical guides the apostles of nihilism preached the doctrine of the existence of spheres in which the process of Tikkun can no longer be advanced by pious acts; Evil must be fought with evil. We are thus gradually led to the position which, as the history of religion shows, occurs with a kind of tragic necessity in every great crisis of the religious mind. I am referring to the fatal, yet at the same time deeply fascinating doctrine of the holiness of sin, that doctrine which in a remarkable way reflects a combination of two widely different elements: the world of moral decadence and another, more primitive, region of the soul in which slumbering forces are capable of sudden resurrection.”(55) Thus, in concert with Poe's position, is the world renewed, the cosmic equilibrium maintained, and the transcendent quest of man attained in our time — through negativism.

West Chester State College

[[Footnotes]]

1. Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1972) ch. x, p. 285.

2. The subject of Henri Michaux, tr. Haakon Chevelier, Light Through Darkness (N.Y.: The Orion Press, 1963). ——————

3. As described in Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (N.Y.: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 40-79.

4. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1960).

5. Joseph Conrad's pertinent short story of the same name.

6. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton Univ. Press, 70), Bollingen Series LXXVI, p. 266.

7. Ibid., p. 33.

8. Andreas Lommel, Shamanism: The Beginnings of Art (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1967), p. 146.

9. Scholem, op. cit., p. 298.

10 Ibid., p. 290.

11. Ibid., p. 291.

12. Lommel, op. cit., p. 148.

13. “The House of Poe, “in Eric W. Carlson, ed., The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe (Ann Arbor, Mich.: The Univ. of Michigan Press, 1970), p. 256.

14. Ibid.

15. Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooks Schoepf (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1967), 223.

16. Ibid.

17. C. G. Jung, “On the Psychology of the Trickster, “in Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (N. Y.: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 200.

18. Ibid., pp. 203, 204.

19. Ibid., p. 209.

20. As discussed by Karl Kerenyi, “The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology,” Radin, op. cit., p. 186.

21. Ibid., p. 185.

22. Ibid.

23. Stephen L. Mooney, “Poe's Gothic Waste Land,” in Carlson, op. cit., p. 290.

24. “Edgar Allan Poe,” ibid., p. 170.

25. Ibid.

26. “Splitting Poe's ‘Epicurean Atoms’”, Poe Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (1972), p. 33.

27. Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (Walker-deBerry, Inc., 1960), pp. 158, 159.

28. Hoffman, op. cit., p. 284. [page 37:]

29. That is, as described by Eliade, op. cit., p. 259, as follows: “there are three great cosmic regions, which can be successfully traversed because they are linked together by a central axis. This axis, of course, passes through an ‘opening, ‘ a ‘hole’; it is through this hole that the gods descend to earth and the dead to the subterranean regions; it is through the same hole that the soul of the shaman in ecstasy can fly up or down in the course of his celestial or infernal journeys.”

30. Wilbur in Carlson, op. cit., p. 257.

31. Ibid., p. 268.

32. Allan Tate, “The Angelic Imagination,” in ibid., p. 254.

33. Wilbur, ibid., p. 273.

34. Poulet, “Poe,” in ibid., p. 233.

35. Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1973) a reprint edition of G. Putnam, 1848, with “line numbers, exploratory essay, and bibliographical guide” by Richard P. Benton, p. 139.

36. Ibid., p. 135.

37. Ibid., p. 134.

38. Ibid., p. 137.

39. Ibid., p. 138.

40. Ibid., p. 139.

41. Richard Wilbur, gen. ed., Poe (N. Y.: Dell Pub. Co., Inc., 1965), The Laurel Poetry Series, p. 12, intro.

42. Levin, op. cit., p. 163.

43. Robert S. deRopp, Science and Salvation (N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1962), p. 83.

44. Poe, Eureka, p. 120.

45. “Quantum Physics and Human Purpose,” Zygon (Sept.-Dec., 1973)

46. Eureka, p. 120.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid., 127.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid., p. 128.

51. Ibid., 126.

52. Ibid., p. 128.

53. Ibid., p. 141.

54. Ibid., p. 142.

55. Scholem, op. cit., p. 315.