“Metamorphoses” (The Giants’ War, VII) – Ovid
“The Garden of Earthly Delights“ (1510 – 1515)
Hieronymus Bosch
__________
Nor from his patrimonial Heaven alone
Is Jove content to pour his vengeance down;
let me say something about Heaven
here, a concept that is quite different
from the earlier Ancient Greek and
Roman understanding of the term,
was it, for that matter, even a term
then, of the Ancients, that would’ve
meant nothing other to them than
the blue sky above, not at all an
area reached by extraterrestrial
transcendence
the abode of the gods and goddesses
at the time of Ovid was Mount Olympus,
and had been for centuries, much closer
to the earth than the more ethereal home
we imagine of the gods today, every one
of them, however professedly uniquely
supreme, otherworldly
all gods, note, no goddesses, what’s up
with that, I’ve long wondered
the Underworld was for the Ancients
the dwelling place of the departed,
somewhere deep beneath the earth,
or at the very ends of all the seas,
never totally beyond the very
cosmos, as our prevailing faiths
now uniformly preach
the image of Heaven, Hell, and
Purgatory for that matter, that last
a completely Catholic invention – to
account for the salvation, however
partial, of innocent souls deprived
of Heaven for not having been
christened, though not able yet, at
so early an age, to have sinned –
was pretty well codified by Dante
in the 14th Century in his
masterpiece, The Divine Comedy,
a daunting, but profoundly
illuminating read, which has
shaped our impression of these
several possible afterlives ever
since
see above
this particular translation, however
magisterial, but crafted after over a
thousand years of Catholic cultural
domination, cannot avoid the impact
of the Catholic understanding of
Heaven
neither, now, can we, for that matter,
intimately imbued as we are with
the binding faiths of our relatively
more recent forebears
be therefore perspicacious
Aid from his brother of the seas he craves,
To help him with auxiliary waves.
later, we’ll learn that Jove’s brother
of the seas is Neptune, god of all
aqueous things
The watry tyrant calls his brooks and floods,
Who rowl from mossie caves (their moist abodes);
rowl, or roil, upset
mossie, mossy
And with perpetual urns his palace fill:
To whom in brief, he thus imparts his will.
Neptune is stockpiling water, with
the help of his conforming waterways
Small exhortation needs;
no time, in other words, no need,
to do much coaxing, much
exhortation
your pow’rs employ:
use, put into action, or employ,
your pow’rs
And this bad world, so Jove requires, destroy.
Jove, god of gods, is here commanding,
authorizing, orchestrating
Let loose the reins to all your watry store:
Bear down the damms, and open ev’ry door.
The floods
will inexorably follow
stay tuned
R ! chard
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