The psychological interest of the piece for me, now I have finished, is
in the way that the logical argument broken by circlings of associative
thought, all however relevant to the emotional disturbance, is
continually being caught up again with an effort by the drowsy intellect.
When at last the sour grapes idea, with its accompanying fantastics, has
determined a reasonable and apparently final decision of rupture both
with the girl herself and with the traditional religion she represents,
the effort relaxes and the mind is overborne in sleep by nightmares, its
revolutionary enthusiasm flattened by the reaction of tradition. The
Morning Star theme is an interpolation by the outside Orator to stabilize
the drama which without some such solution comes dangerously near a
manifesto of atheism.
When you visit us in England I want to talk to you about Lucifer
and explain how I had been reading the Old and New Testaments while
writing this poem. Briefly in this way, as a record of the progressive
understanding of God throughout the ages by a single representative race,
the Jews. God is presented in three degrees at least. There is God the
creator of the race of man, but of man still animal of the animals, whose
daughters the sons of Adam found fair; let us call that God, Saturn. Then
there is Jehovah or Jove, Saturn’s successor: the Garden of Eden is the
perfect symbolic expression of the birth of Jehovah. It is more than a
fable of the dawn of sex consciousness, it dramatizes man’s recognition
of the end of a long biological phase, and the birth pangs of the new
experimental period called civilization. The old heritage of self-seeking
instinct, in conflict with a new principle of social order found
necessary for the further survival of the race, split the primitive idea
of God into two, the ideas of Good and Evil, Good being the approval by
the social mind of those non-conscious workings of the body which further
its aims, Evil being the condemnation of the old Adam inclinations which
run counter to it. This idea of Good then is Jehovah, the God of the
present, predominantly male, violent, blundering, deceitful, with great
insistence on uniformity of rites duties and taboos, at whatever cost to
the individual; Jehovah’s greatest champion I found in Moses.
Finally there is Lucifer, the God of the future, only a weakling as yet,
the hope of eventual adjustment between ancient habits and present needs.
As the spirit of reconciliation, Lucifer puts out of date the negative
virtue of Good fighting with Evil, and proposes an Absolute Good which we
can now conceive of as Peace.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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