Wheels within wheels

Fortuna, Ixion and King Lear

In the last post we visited Tartarus, the classical hell, and met a few of its inhabitants: notably Ixion, former king of the Lapiths in Thessaly. Readers will recall that Ixion’s big mistake was to abuse the hospitality of Zeus by attempting to seduce his wife, Hera. His lustful intentions were however discovered, and Ixion was tricked by Zeus into having sex with a cloud instead. The cloud later gave birth to the race of the centaurs; Ixion was punished for his hubris by being bound to a revolving wheel of fire in Tartarus.

Why this form of punishment specifically? Some commentators see in the wheel of Ixion the vestiges of a more ancient sun-god myth; others, including Robert Graves, suggest that the fire was a later addition, and put more emphasis on the crucifixion aspect of Ixion’s torture. Some suggest that the wheel is symbolic of the eternal nature of his punishment.

Across centuries and cultures, wheels have symbolised destructive power, whether they are attached to a mighty Juggernaut or are little and green; the most common allusion to the wheel in medieval and early modern literature, however, is in the form of The Wheel of Fortune, or Rota Fortunae. It is an allegory of the inexorable workings of fate, a metaphor which explains in simple terms the vicissitudes of the human condition: you may be a king today, but tomorrow you could find yourself on a storm-lashed heath without a crown or even an umbrella. As the cowboy said, sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you. The goddess Fortuna sometimes gives the wheel a bit of a spin, changing your luck for better or worse. When, in King Lear, Kent finds himself humiliatingly condemned to the stocks, he calls upon Fortune to Smile once more. Turn thy wheel… (Lear II, 2, 167).

Fortuna has traditionally been personified as a fickle woman: from comparison with the inconstant moon in Carmina Burana’s O Fortuna velut luna; to Frank Loesser’s Luck be a Lady: A lady doesn’t wander all over the room/ and blow on another guy’s dice. In Macbeth, Fortune is described as acting like a rebel’s whore; in Antony and Cleopatra she is a false housewife; in Hamlet, she is a strumpet, and the subject of a somewhat contrived dirty joke: on being asked how they are doing, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell Hamlet that they are neither at the top of Fortune’s cap, nor at her shoes. When Hamlet obligingly offers the feed line: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours? Guildenstern delivers the punchline, Faith, her privates we, doubtless thinking back of the net.

Back in Lear, the revolving wheel is obvious in the relationship of the half-brothers Edgar and Edmund: at the beginning of the play, the illegitimate son Edmund is aggrieved at his comparatively low status and the obvious contempt of his father, Gloucester; he contrives the exile of his legitimate brother and the downfall of his father, with the aim of inheriting his wealth and power. Edmund is now at the zenith, and Edgar at his nadir: Fortune spins once more, however, and when Edmund is mortally wounded by his brother, he accepts that the wheel is come full circle (Lear V, iii, 203).

Fortune, the stars and the gods are all at one time or another blamed for the ups and downs of the characters: Gloucester complains that as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport (IV, I, 36f); Kent that stars above us govern our conditions (IV, iii,33). But the villainous Edmund can see that this is so much nonsense. In a soliloquy, he mocks his father’s astrological explanation of Lear’s foolish behaviour towards Cordelia and Kent (I, ii, 118-135), clinching the argument with reference to his own nature: I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

There is a tension here, and elsewhere in Shakespeare, between external and internal influence, between the workings of fate and personal responsibility. As Cassius remarks in Julius Caesar, The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars/ but in ourselves… (I,ii,140f). Human agency, rather than Dame Fortune, brings about the downfall of both Gloucester and Lear: a downfall which has its origins in their own flawed characters and actions.

So when in Act IV Lear declares to Cordelia: Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound/ Upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears/ Do scald like molten lead (IV, vii 46-48) the wheel imagery is not so much (or not only) an allusion to the Wheel of Fortune, but to the punishment of Ixion. Lear recognises that the hell in which he finds himself is not a temporary downward turn, but eternal punishment for his own folly: his only consolation is that Cordelia is not in Tartarus with him.

This is not the only allusion to the story of Ixion in King Lear: earlier (IV, vi, 124-125) he describes his other daughters thus: down from the waist they are centaurs/ Though women all above.  

As we have seen, Ixion was the progenitor of the centaurs, who developed a reputation for bad sexual etiquette, such as the attempted rape of the bride at their cousin’s wedding. They symbolise the untamed, incontinent beast literally underlying civilised and domesticated humanity, and in the case of Regan and Goneril, what Shakespeare sees as a most unladylike lust, ruthlessness and ambition. Lear is explicit about the location of good and evil in women:

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,/ Beneath is all the fiends’ (IV,vi, 127-8)

The sexism of these expected gender roles is of its time; the misogyny of the language of King Lear is something else altogether, however.  From the opening scene where Gloucester asks Kent, Do you smell a fault?  in reference to the circumstances of Edmund’s conception, there is a queasy insistence on associating foul odour and burning pain with women, or more precisely, their genitalia, culminating in the extremes of

There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding stench, consumption… (IV, vi, 129f)

Some critics see in this language a description of a sexually transmitted infection: D H Lawrence for one attributed Shakespeare’s misogynistic language in Lear and other works to the “shock of his consciousness of syphilis”; Anthony Burgess in the fictional biography Nothing Like the Sun came to a similar conclusion.  When Edgar tells Edmund: The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices/ make instruments to plague us:/ The dark and vicious place where thee he got/Cost him his eyes (V, iii, 170-3) he is making the point that their father Gloucester’s sexual desires have resulted in his destruction.

Lear too, though his daughters were got ‘tween lawful sheets, is being punished for the sexual activity that created them. In his fevered mind, women are promiscuous temptresses, men are hypocritical slaves of lust, deserving of painful retribution: Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;/ Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind/ For which thou whipp’st her (IV, vi, 161-3). 

We cannot now know whether the misogyny of Lear’s language is rooted in Shakespeare’s self-disgust, or derived from a (highly unlikely) late conversion to Puritanism/Calvinism, or indeed is purely character-driven, without any resonance in his own life; but for whatever reason, the imagery of King Lear points to the female of the species as the sulphurous pit, the dark and vicious place, – Tartarus; and the male protagonist, tortured eternally on the burning wheel of his own lust, another Ixion.

Delaunay, Ixion précipité dans les Enfers 

Some kind of terrible, terrible fall

As discussed in the previous post, Greek and Roman religious belief was that the dead inhabited an underground kingdom, overseen by various chthonic deities such as Hades, Persephone and Charon. Unlike the Judaeo-Christian tradition of a subterranean Hell dedicated to the punishment of sinners (aka the burny fires, as my Presbyterian mum pleonastically called it), the classical Underworld was the final destination of us all, good and bad, just and unjust.

Punishment was certainly available for those who merited it, however; and it was meted out in the place called Tartarus. According to Hesiod’s Theogony (8^th or 7^th Century BCE), Tartarus (originally created by the gods as a prison for the troublesome Titans) is situated as far beneath us as we are beneath heaven:

τόσσον ἔνερθ᾽ ὑπὸ γῆς, ὅσον οὐρανός ἐστ᾽ ἀπὸ γαίης:
τόσσον γάρ τ᾽ ἀπὸ γῆς ἐς Τάρταρον ἠερόεντα.
ἐννέα γὰρ νύκτας τε καὶ ἤματα χάλκεος ἄκμων
οὐρανόθεν κατιὼν δεκάτῃ κ᾽ ἐς γαῖαν ἵκοιτο:
ἐννέα δ᾽ αὖ νύκτας τε καὶ ἤματα χάλκεος ἄκμων
ἐκ γαίης κατιὼν δεκάτῃ κ᾽ ἐς Τάρταρον ἵκοι.

Hesiod, Theogony 721-725

…as far beneath the earth as heaven is above earth; for so far is it from earth to Tartarus. For a bronze anvil falling down from heaven nine nights and days would reach the earth upon the tenth: and again, a bronze anvil falling from earth nine nights and days would reach Tartarus upon the tenth.

Incidentally, the Greek here for anvil (akmōn) has the same root as the word acme (meaning summit or peak); a linguistic link serendipitously developed by Chuck Jones some two-and-a-half millennia after Hesiod.

John Milton was probably alluding to Hesiod’s cosmology when, in Paradise Lost, the Archangel Raphael tells of the rebel angels falling “nine days” from Heaven into Hell. Milton presumably imagined that a rebel angel would fall twice as fast as a bronze anvil: obviously he was unaware of Galileo’s then recent proposal that bodies falling in a vacuum will fall with uniform acceleration.

Angel or anvil, nine days is an awful long time to be falling. Obviously it is a poetic trope, an expression of the metaphysical distance between the living and the dead, or the blessed and the damned. But to our post-Galilean and post-Newtonian (and post-Jonesian) world, it seems ridiculously exaggerated, not to say impossible. As a matter of interest, I tried to work out roughly how far away Hesiod’s Heaven and Hell might actually be if they were to be considered in terms of physical, rather than mythological cosmology: unfortunately, my brain very soon began to overheat, what with having to take into account the gravitational constant and all, so I gave up and am going to rely on this guy’s calculation of 65,800 kilometers.

In order to then get to Tartarus, the anvil must presumably fall through a hole in the Earth (diameter 12,742 km) and drop out the other side. Assuming it landed with a splash at the entrance to the River Acheron, in present–day Epirus, it would have popped out of the South Pacific antipode like a Trident missile and end up in Tartarus after travelling a further 53,058 km through space. Coincidentally (?), this is about the distance from Earth that a putative space elevator would have to extend in order for an object attached to it to achieve escape velocity.   

To confuse matters even further, Virgil (never one to allow Roman Epic to be outbid by the Greeks) claims that Tartarus is double this distance:

...tum Tartarus ipse
bis patet in praeceps tantum tenditque sub umbras
quantus ad aetherium caeli suspectus Olympum.

Aeneid VI 577-579

...Tartarus itself stretches down into darkness, twice the flying distance from heavenly Olympus.

Milton’s Tartarus is even trickier to locate. A curious blogger came to the conclusion that an angel falling for nine days to Earth would have to begin the drop somewhere on the far side of the Moon. Milton also tells us that Hell is:

…As far removed from God and light of Heaven
As from the centre thrice to th' utmost pole.

At first glance this would seem to suggest that the distance from Heaven to Hell is three times the radius of the Earth, or 19,113 km. This would imply that a rebel angel falls at 88.4 kph, which is coincidentally (?) just on the legal side of the average speed limit on the real road to Hell*. So not really very rebellious after all. Such calculations assume that Hell, as in the classical tradition, is somewhere under the Earth’s crust. But in Paradise Lost, the banishment of the rebel angels to Hell precedes the creation of Earth: their “dungeon horrible” therefore cannot be terrestrial and subterranean. Nevertheless, Milton’s pole and centre probably refer to the distance from the Earth’s pole to the centre of Heaven.

Blake: Casting the Rebel Angels into Hell

So Milton follows, and trumps, the classical writers: in a sort of poetic grade inflation, Hesiod locates Tartarus the same distance as Heaven is to Earth; Virgil goes with twice that distance; and Milton three times as far.

Our classical tourists in the Underworld, Odysseus and Aeneas, have slightly different takes on the geography of the home of the damned. In the Odyssey, Tartarus seems to be open-plan in the style of Camp X-Ray: from his rocky viewpoint, Odysseus can observe the torment of various hubristic ne’er-do-wells:

·       Tityos the giant (condemned to Tartarus for the attempted rape of Apollo’s mother): he is stretched out on the ground and his liver is eternally pecked by a pair of vultures.

·       Tantalus (food issues: he killed and cooked his own son, then tried to serve Junior to the gods at a banquet): he is eternally thirsty and hungry; he stands in a stream beneath a fruit tree, but is prevented from consuming either.

·       Sisyphus (generally taking the piss out of the gods, but in particular chaining up Death with the consequence that nobody could die): sentenced to endlessly roll a stone up a hill, only to see it roll back down again from the top.

Sisyphus, Ixion and Tantalus

The Aeneid, as always, has to be a bit more ornate: Tartarus has triple walls, a massive iron tower and a gate made of toughened steel. Aeneas can hear the howls of anguish and the crack of the lash, but is not permitted to enter to see for himself. Luckily, his companion, The Sibyl, has previously had a guided tour and fills our hero in on the various villains within. It is of course a longer list than Homer managed, and includes in addition to the usual suspects the hubristic ingrate Ixion.

Ixion, king of the Lapiths in Thessaly, was a thoroughly bad lot. According to Pindar (Pythian Odes 2) and other sources, he was the first human to kill his own relative (having murdered his father-in-law in a dispute about money). He was shunned by all mankind for this crime, but Zeus took pity on him and brought him home to Olympus. Ixion repaid the Zeus’ uncharacteristic good deed by trying to seduce his wife, Hera. When the god found out about this, he decided to deceive the deceiver by making a 3D model of Hera from a passing cloud: Ixion promptly did the deed with this blow-up doll named Nephele, then boasted of his supposed success with the goddess.

Rubens: Ixion and Nephele

In punishment for this egregious breach of houseguest etiquette, Ixion was bound to an eternally-revolving wheel of fire and dumped in Tartarus. In an odd postscript, the nebulous sex-toy gave birth to the race of the centaurs, half human and half horse.

In the Aeneid, the Sibyl’s description of Ixion’s punishment is a bit puzzling: she describes Ixion seated nervously beneath a tottering rock; there is a banquet spread before him, but he is unable to reach it because of a menacing Fury. This is the punishment associated with Tantalus: almost all other sources (including Virgil himself in the Georgics IV 484) have Ixion on a wheel. One commentator has explained the discrepancy away by suggesting that the Sibyl is giving an impressionistic description of the scene,  “a confused sense of terrors inextricably blended,” but this seems a bit like special pleading. Perhaps even Virgil, like Homer, nods occasionally.

More about the ungrateful Ixion in the next post.

* Correction: the E6 now bypasses Hell and goes straight to Trondheim airport.