17
CHAPTER 2
MARDI
A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
The Polynesia of Mardi is the many islands of this world, and Mardi surveys their many religious, political, social,
sexual, economic, literary, and philosophical idols as well as the wooden idols carved by the Mardian Pope's official
idol maker. Although each of these idols depends from a myth in the most general sense of myth, some of them depend
from myths in the most restricted sense. To the extent that these myths are a theme of Mardi -- and this is a vast
extent -- Mardi is a study of mythology. To the extent that these myths are evaluated in terms of one another -- and
this also is vast -- Mardi is a textbook of comparative mythology. Typee and Omoo had assumed an ideal
religion which could brand the idolatrous theologies of pagans and Christians as mere mythology. Mardi is the first
of Melville's works which does not assume an ideal religion but which quests for it and questions all that the quest
discovers. Because there is no assumed religion in Mardi, any theology may or may not be mythology and any myth
may or may not be divine.
Mardi draws upon the mythologies of the Hindus, the Polynesians, the Incas, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Christians,
the Romans, and the Norse, and compares them to one another and to man's other myths and his idols. In this survey
Mardi quests through these myths and idols for a truth behind and beyond them.
The quest begins in the westward voyage of the ship Arcturion. When it veers north, the narrator leaves it. He takes
with him Jarl,
18
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
a modern Viking, and continues west in the whaleboat Chamois. From the Chamois he and Jarl board the
mysterious brig Parki, and after the Parki sinks they resume their westward voyage in the Chamois,
taking with them the last survivor of the Parki's crew, Samoa, "master of Gog and Magog, expounder of all things
heathenish and obscure. [1] The narrator then finds Yillah, a mysterious maiden who seems to be the consummation of his
quest, on a sacred Polynesian ark. He kills the priest who worships and is about to sacrifice Yillah, carries her to the
Chamois, and sails westward with her, Jarl, and Samoa to Mardi. When Yillah mysteriously disappears, the quest
resumes as an allegorical voyage through Mardi. Jarl and Samoa are soon killed, and the narrator's last links with
extra-Mardian lands are thus snapped. He now shares his quest with four others, each as interested as himself in its
outcome. Each of the other four consummates his quest, but the narrator is damned to never ending his.
Of the five questors who sail on the allegorical voyage, each has a peculiar mythological function: Mohi the historian
narrates historical mythology; Yoomy the poet warbles poetical mythology; Babbalanj a the philosopher babbles
philosophical mythology. As these three mythologize in the background, King Media acts the role of a euhemerized demigod,
and "Taji," the name assumed by the narrator, acts the role of an astronomical avatar. These five functions must be seen
in the context of contemporaneous mythology.
The great eighteenth-century Sanskrit research put comparative mythology and religion as well as ethnology, prehistory,
and philology permanently on a new path. In 1856 Max Muller, the follower of the eighteenth-century philological
mythologists, pointed back along the path: "If Hegel calls the discovery of the common origin of Greek and Sanskrit
the discovery of a new world, the same may be said with regard to the common origin of Greek and Sanskrit mythology." [2]
The man who led the discoverers of both new worlds was Sir Wilham Jones.
Melville seemed to consider Jones what he may very well have been -- the greatest linguist of all time [3] Jones and Sir
Charles Wilkins, working together, became in the early 1780's the first Europeans
__________
1. Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1849), I, 204. Because Mardi, Melville's
first major work, has been out of print more than a dozen years and because there has never been an adequate modern
edition, I use the first American edition. I have taken the liberty of correcting only those errors in spelling and
punctuation which are disconcerting and which are obviously errors.
2. "Comparative Mythology," Oxford Essays (1856), p. 86.
3. See Typee, p. 744, and Moby-Dick, end of the chapter "The Praire."
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
19
to master Sanskrit. Although Wilkins went on to translate the Bhagavad-Gita and Hitopadesa, Jones exerted
much the stronger influence on contemporary mythology. He was for a time undoubtedly the most influential of all
mythologists.
In 1784 Jones helped organize the Royal Society of Bengal and Calcutta. Under his leadership, the Society published its
extremely important Asiatick Researches and promoted scholarship in Asiatic history, geography, geology, botany,
philology, philosophy, ethnology, and, most especially, comparative religion and mythology. Jones himself was the chief
contributor to this last concern. As a fearless Protestant apologist, he industriously translated Asiatic sacred,
legendary, and profane writings into the language of most Protestant missionaries. His relating of Hindu scripture to
Christian scripture and his hints to future Christian missionaries in India were reiterated and amplified by dozens of
early nineteenth-century periodicals; his studies of Hindu gods were quoted and paraphrased in hundreds of books and
magazines; he became an almost legendary learned champion of the Judaic-Christian revelation.
Jones's most important single work was an essay entitled "On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India," published in the
first volume of Asiatick Researches. In this essay, he displayed the two new worlds he had discovered -- the
common origin of Greek and Sanskrit and the common origin of their mythologies.
Jones's theories, his techniques, his facts, his symbolic stature, and almost the entire essay "On the Gods of Greece, Italy,
and India" were all included and enlarged upon by Maurice's Indian Antiquities and History of Hindostan,
works familiar to Melville. Whether Jones's essay was a direct source for Mardi is unimportant. "On the Gods of
Greece, Italy, and India" deals with some of the central concerns of Mardi, treating them in strikingly similar
terms; it precisely locates Mardi's mythology in its chronological and intellectual setting, and thus defines what
is perhaps the most important structural principle of the book.
As Jones witnessed and abetted the discovery of Sanskrit literature, he realized the dangers of what he was finding.
If previous knowledge
20
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
of pagan religions had made possible a Bayle, a Voltaire, and a Hume, what monstrous generation of skeptics would this
new discovery breed? Sanskrit literature contained striking similarities to the Bible, evinced as high a degree of
civilization, and appeared to be more ancient. If the similarities between the Hebrew and Egyptian religions had caused
skeptics to suspect that the Mosaic cosmogony was merely a product of Moses' exposure to the Egyptian court, what would
they say about the striking similarities between ancient Hinduism and the Hebrew, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Christian
religions? And at the same time, archeology, astronomy, and geology were casting doubt on some of the dates and other
details of the Bible. With both the uniqueness and the accuracy of the Judaic-Christian revelation daily becoming more
equivocal, Jones attempted in "On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India" to wrest the weapons of comparative mythology
from the hands of the skeptics, deists, freethinkers, and atheists, to appropriate for orthodox Christian apologetics
what was later to be called Higher Criticism.
Jones begins by denying the theory developed throughout the eighteenth century -- the psychological explanation of similar
mythologies:
We cannot justly conclude, by arguments preceding the proof of facts, that one idolatrous
people must have borrowed their deities, rites, and tenets from another; since Gods of all
shapes and dimensions may be framed by the boundless powers of imagination, or by the
frauds and follies of men, in countries never connected; but when features of resemblance,
too strong to have been accidental, are observable in different systems of polytheism,
without fancy or prejudice to color them, and improve the likeness, we can scarce help
believing, that some connection has immemorially subsisted between the several nations
who have adopted them. It is my design, in this Essay, to point out such a resemblance
between the popular worship of the old Greeks and Italians and that of the Hindus.
Nor can there be room to doubt of a great similarity between their strange religions and that
of Egypt, China, Persia, Phrygia, Phoenicia, Syria; to which, perhaps, we may safely add,
some of the southern kingdoms, and even islands of America: while the Gothic system,
which prevailed in the northern regions of Europe, was not merely similar to those of Greece
and Italy, but almost the same, in another dress, with an
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
21
embroidery of images apparently Asiatick. From all this, if it be satisfactorily proved,
we may infer a general union or affinity between the most distinguished inhabitants of the
primitive world, at the time when they deviated, as they did too early deviate, from the
rational adoration of the only true GOD. [4]
After outlining his own theory of the sources of mythology, which we shall later examine in detail, Jones passes on
to the importance of comparative mythology "in an age when sane intelligent and virtuous persons are inclined to doubt
the authenticity of the accounts delivered by Moses concerning the primitive world." He then defines the lines
of battle:
Either the first eleven chapters of Genesis (all due allowances being made for a figurative
eastern style) are true, or the whole fabric of our national religion is false; a conclusion which
none of us, I trust, would wish to be drawn. I, who cannot help believing the divinity of the
Messiah, from the undisputed antiquity and manifest completion of many prophecies, especially
those of Isaiah, in the only person recorded by history to whom they are applicable, am obliged,
of course, to believe the sanctity of the venerable books to which that sacred person refers as
genuine: but it is not the truth of our national religion, as such, that I have at heart; it is truth
itself; and if any cool, unbiassed reasoner will clearly convince me, that Moses drew his narrative
through Egyptian conduits from the primeval fountains of Indian literature, I shall esteem him
as a friend for having weaned my mind from a capital error, and promise to stand among the foremost in
assisting to circulate the truth which he has ascertained. (P. 225)
After the central part of the essay -- a detailed comparison of Roman, Greek, and Hindu gods -- Jones returns to his
more vexing problems: "Since Egypt appears to have been the grand source of knowledge for the western,
and India for the more eastern, parts of the globe, it may seem a material question, whether the Egyptians
communicated their Mythology and Philosophy to the Hindus, or conversely." Then, after giving some tenuous
evidence suggesting the prior antiquity of the Egyptians, he maneuvers around the entire significance of prior
antiquities: "Be all this as it may, I am persuaded that a connection subsisted between the old idolatrous nations
of Egypt, India, Greece,
__________
4. Asiatick Researches, 5th ed. (London, 18o6), I, 221-22.
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Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
and Italy, long before they emigrated to their several settlements, and consequently before the birth of
Moses: but the proof of this proposition will in no degree affect the truth and sanctity of the Mosaick
History, which, if confirmation were necessary, it would rather tend to confirm." In his next sentence Jones shows how
the greater antiquity of other religions confirms "the sanctity of the Mosaick History": "The Divine Legate,
educated by the daughter of a king, and in all respects highly accomplished, could not but know the mythological system
of Egypt; but he must have condemned the superstitions of that people, and despised the speculative absurdities
of their priests, though some of their traditions concerning the creation and the flood were grounded on truth." After
rhetorically enlarging this point, Jones concludes: "There is no shadow then of a foundation for an opinion, that
Moses borrowed the first nine or ten chapters of Genesis from the literature of Egypt: still less
can the adamantine pillars of our Christian faith be moved by the result of any debates on the comparative
antiquity of the Hindus and Egyptians, or of any inquiries into the Indian theology." Melville
examines the same problem, but his conclusion differs from Jones's: "I shudder at the idea of ancient Egyptians. It was
in these pyramids that was conceived the idea of Jehovah. Terrible mixture of the cunning and awful. Moses learned in
all the lore of the Egyptians. The idea of Jehovah born here." [5]
In the decades immediately following the publication of Jones's essay, Pacific voyages brought the problem full circle
around the world. One of the known sources of Mardi, William Ellis's Polynesian Researches, tries to
stretch the ever thinning line of diffusionism eastward from India to Polynesia, or, alternately, from India to America
and westward to Polynesia. [6] Ellis has the task of showing simultaneously the ultimate Hebrew and more recent Hindu
originof the Polynesians:
One of their accounts of creation... and the very circumstantial tradition they have
of the deluge, if they do not, as some have supposed, (when taken in connexion with
many customs, and analogies in language,) warrant the inference that the Polynesians
have an Hebrew origin; they show that the nation, whence they emigrated, was acquainted
with some
__________
5. Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, ed. Howard C. Horsford (Princeton, N.J., 1955), P. 118.
6. 4 vols. (London, 1831), I, 115ff.
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
23
of the leading facts recorded in the Mosaic history of the primitive ages of mankind.
Others appear to have a striking resemblance to several conspicuous features of the
more modern Hindoo, or Braminical mythology. [7]
In his attempts to identify Hindu and Polynesian mythology and to account geographically for Polynesian history, Ellis
continually returns to the "great mystery" which surrounds Polynesian origins. Mardi defines the identity of
Asiatic, Pacific, and Mediterranean gods -- Brami (Brahma), Manko (Manco Capac), and Alma (Christ) -- in terms which
steer clear of the perilously strained diffusionism of Jones and Ellis.
The concluding steps in Jones's argument bring us to this central mythological concept of Mardi. He accounts for the
striking similarities between the stories of Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu) and Christ by postulating that "the spurious
Gospels, which abounded in the first age of Christianity, had been brought to India, and the wildest parts
of them repeated to the Hindus, who ingrafted them on the fable of Cesava, the Apollo of
Greece." These very similarities will be, Jones concludes, the most difficult obstacle in the way of a mass
conversion of the Hindus:
The Hindus... would readily admit the truth of the Gospel; but they contend,
that it is perfectly consistent with their Sastras. The Deity, they
say, has appeared innumerable times, in many parts of this world, and of all
worlds, for the salvation of his creatures; and though we adore him in one
appearance, and they in others, yet we adore, they say, the same God, to
whom our several worships, though different in form, are equally acceptable,
if they be sincere in substance. (P. 274)
If this obstacle proves insurmountable, then, says Jones in his final words, "we could only lament more than ever the
strength of prejudice, and the weakness of unassisted reason."
The same prejudice and same unassisted reason seem to victimize the official chronicles of Mardi, for these chronicles
use both the Hindu concept and word avatar to describe Christ (Alma):
Alma, it seems, was an illustrious prophet, and teacher divine; who, ages ago,
at long intervals, and in various islands, had appeared to the Mardians under
the different titles of Brami, Manko, and Alma. Many
__________
7. Ibid., p. 115.
24
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
thousands of moons had elapsed since his last and most memorable avatar, as Alma
on the isle of Maramma. Each of his advents had taken place in a comparatively dark
and benighted age. Hence, it was devoutly believed, that he came to redeem the
Mardians from their heathenish thrall; to instruct them in the ways of truth, virtue,
and happiness; to allure them to good by promises of beatitude hereafter; and to
restrain them from evil by denunciations of woe. Separated from the impurities and
corruptions, which in a long series of centuries had become attached to every thing
originally uttered by the prophet, the maxims, which as Brami he had taught, seemed
similar to those inculcated by Manko. But as Alma, adapting his lessons to the
improved condition of humanity, the divine prophet had more completely unfolded his
scheme; as Alma, he had made his last revelation. (II, 38-39)
The Mardian chronicles, like Jones's Hindus, identify Brahma and Christ. These chronicles are the official statements
of Mardian history, narrated by Mohi, the official chronicler. To understand why this Western heresy is Mardian
orthodoxy, to understand the relation between the Mardian mythology and the narrative framework of Mardi, and
to understand the relation of Mardi to contemporaneous mythological theory, we may turn to Jones's theory of
mythology. For this theory coherently orders Mardi's mythology.
Jones's theory assumes "four principal sources of all mythology" -- the distortion of natural and human history, the
adoration of astronomical events, poetic invention, and metaphysical invention. His analysis distinguishes among various
kinds of mythological producers and their products. Historians and the kings they serve produce one kind of myth;
astronomical worship produces another kind; poets and philosophers produce still other kinds. The gods created by royal
policy, by astronomical awe, by poetic conceits, by philosophic hypotheses substantially differ from one another. On the
Mardian quest sail both producers of myth -- Mohi the historian, Yoomy the poet, Babbalanja the philosopher -- and
products of myth -- Media the royal deity, Taji the astronomical deity, and Azzageddi the metaphysical devil. The quest
seeks Yillah, who combines elements of historical, astronomical, poetic, and metaphysical mythologizing. Some of the
questors end with Alma, who also combines elements of the four
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
25
of mythologizing. Let us now look carefully at the producers of and their mythic products, comparing Jones's theoretical
myth-with the mythology Melville dramatizes.
THE MYTHS OF HUMAN AND NATURAL HISTORY
I. Historical or natural truth has been perverted into fable by ignorance,
imagination, flattery, or stupidity; as a king of Crete, whose tomb had been
discovered in that island, was conceived to have been the God of Olympus...
hence beacons or volcanos became one-eyed giants, and monsters vomiting flames;
and two rocks, from their appearance to mariners in certain positions, were
supposed to crush all vessels attempting to pass between them; of which idle
fictions many other instances might be collected from the Odyssey, and the
various Argonautick poems. The less we say of Julian stars, deification of
princes or warriors, altars raised, with those of Apollo, to the basest of
men, and divine titles bestowed on such wretches as Caius Octavianus, the
less we shall expose the infamy of grave senators and fine poets, or the
brutal folly of the low multitude: but we may be assured, that the mad
apotheosis of truly great men, or of little men falsely called great, has
been the origin of gross idolatrous errors in every part of the Pagan world.
"ON THE GODS OF GREECE, ITALY, AND INDIA," p. 222
The chronicles of Mohi, the official historian, exemplify point by amt Jones's first source of mythology. The fact that
Mohi, rather Akan Yoomy, narrates the traditional perversions of Mardian natural 'h may perhaps suggest that Melville
is consciously maintainingi jmes's categories. Be that as it may, strict euhemerism forms the lager part of Jones's
first category and an extremely large part of the t gage through Mardi. Indeed, by focusing narrowly on royal myths,
me can perceive a careful structure and a consistent purpose in what otherwise may seem a chartless voyage.
After the royal entourage leaves Media's kingdom, the first four visits trace four stages of kinghood, from King
Peepi the puny boy, In King Donjalolo the thin debauched youth, to King Uhia the vigmous muscular man who has forsaken
debauchery, to fat jolly old Borabolla. The stages are chronological, physical, moral, and spiritual, and each stage
but the last has an appropriate myth to support it. The myth of Peepi the boy king says that he inherits the souls
of many of
26
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
his subjects; Borabolla, who has no myth, is also supposed to have no soul. The first three kings are victims of myths
who victimize their subjects because of these myths; the last is a victim of no myth who victimizes his subjects because
he has no myth. While Peepi's subjects live in terror of the boy with many souls, Borabolla's subjects die to support
the gluttonous old man with no soul. Donjalolo the debauched youth and Uhia the reclaimed man rule entirely in terms
of their myths. Donjalolo's myth tells him that, because of a legendary ancestral battle and vow, he can live only in
the secluded glen at the heart of his kingdom. Uhia's myth tells him that when an island moves he will rule all of Mardi.
A mythic legend from the past deceives one; a mythic prophecy deceives the other. Entirely because of these myths,
Donjalolo retreats from the world, Uhia tries to conquer the world, Donjalolo abandons himself to his harem, Uhia
disbands his harem, Donjalolo dissipates his manhood in ultrarefined pleasures, Uhia nurtures his manhood and eschews
all pleasures, both envy the most miserable of their subjects, and both add to the misery of their subjects. The myths
in which they have transcendental faith, like the myth of King Peepi and the divine Mardian avatars, are presented to
us, most significantly, as part of the chronicles of Mohi, the chronicles which also include the Mardian Bible. Perhaps
this Bible will prove not only as fallacious but also as dangerous as the other myths of Mardi.
Indeed, the slavery of these Mardian kings and their subjects to royal myth foreshadows the slavery of the priests,
pilgrims, and people of Maramma to Biblical myth. The chronicles which support these kings are distinguished in no
way from the chronicles which represent sacred writ in general and the Judaic-Christian Bible in particular. What the
voyagers find on Maramma, the Holy Island, is merely an intensification of what they have found on the royal islands
of Mardi.
There are numerous connections between the island kingdoms and the Holy Island -- such as the fat priest on Borabolla's
island who seems to be "another Borabolla," the priest on Donjalolo's island who invests the king in his sacred girdle,
the priests on Media's island
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
27
who torture the king's subjects for heresy, the priests on Uhia's island who present the spear of the god Keevi to
persuade the most recalcitrant recusant. But none of these connections is as important as Mohi's chronicles, and Mohi's
chronicles most rigidly connect the courts of Mardi to its churches. Mohi himself is introduced as "a venerable teller
of stories and legends, one of the Keepers of the Chronicles of the Kings of Mardi." This designation of "Kings" includes
all the gods of Mardi; Mohi gives the official story and legend not only of each demigod king, but of every Mardian god,
including Alma. It is important to note that, although Mohi is an "historian," none of Mohi's stories gives unequivocated
historical truth. When Mohi, "the teller of legends," is compared with particular historians, it is with Diodorus and
Herodotus, whose pages abound in the fabulous, the mysterious, and the mythical. Mohi's history is fabulous and, because
of his position, title, and role, official. Mohi tells first of King Peepi and a strange rock. In the course of his
stories, he illustrates in detail Jones's first source of mythology, the perversion of human and natural history. When
he describes the divinity and mythical powers of Peepi the boy king, he dramatizes quite literally what Jones called
"the mad apotheosis of little men falsely called great." Jones had thus illustrated the perversion of natural truth:
"beacons or volcanos became one-eyed giants, and monsters vomiting flames; and two rocks, from their appearance to
mariners in certain positions, were supposed to crush all vessels attempting to pass between them." Mohi illustrates
the perversion of natural truth with legends about a rock, which appears to mariners in certain positions as "the open,
upper jaw of a whale." He tells how the water which drips from it cures ambition "because of its passing through the
ashes of ten kings, of yore buried in a sepulcher, hewn in the heart of the rock." Mohi's last legend of the rock will
prove worth remembering:
"Mohi," said Media, "methinks there is another tradition concerning that rock: let us have it."
"In old times of genii and giants, there dwelt in barren lands not very
28
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
remote from our outer reef, but since submerged, a band of evil-minded, envious goblins, furlongs in stature, and with
immeasurable arms; who from time to time cast covetous glances upon our blooming isles. Long they lusted; till at last,
they waded through the sea, strode over the reef, and seizing the nearest islet, rolled it over and over, toward an
adjoining outlet.
'But the task was hard; and day-break surprised them in the midst of their audacious thieving; while in the very act
of giving the devoted land another doughty surge and somerset. Leaving it bottom upward and midway poised, gardens
under water, its foundations in air, they precipitately fled; in their great haste, deserting a comrade, vainly
struggling to liberate his foot caught beneath the overturned land.
"This poor fellow now raised such an outcry, as to awaken the god Upi, or the Archer, stretched out on a long cloud
in the East; who forthwith resolved to make an example of the unwilling lingerer. Snatching his bow, he let fly an
arrow. But overshooting its mark, it pierced through and through, the lofty promontory of a neighbouring island; making
an arch in it, which remaineth even unto this day. A second arrow, however, accomplishing its errand: the slain giant
sinking prone to the bottom."
"And now," added Mohi, "glance over the gunwale, and you will see his remains petrified into white ribs of coral."
"Ay, there they are," said Yoomy, looking down into the water where they gleamed. "A fanciful legend, Braid-Beard."
Very entertaining," said Media. (1, 248-49)
Mohi next gives the legend to which King Donjalolo and his subjects are enslaved. The narrator introduces this recital
by saying, "Braid-Beard unrolled his old chronicles" and "regaled us with the history." Thus this legend, like the
"very entertaining" legend which immediately preceded it, may be only entertainment to the travelers. But the "sacred
oracle" of the legend, propagated by priests, imprisons King Donjalolo in a rocky glen and leaves his subjects to be
ruled by irresponsible and cruel viceroys. Babbalanja asks the all-important question to which there is no answer:
"Is it a fable, or a verity...?" In the same paragraph, Babbalanja comments on another legend from Mohi's chronicles:
"Touching the life of Alma, in Mohi's chronicles, 'tis related, that a man was once raised from the tomb. But rubbed
he not his eyes, and stared he not most vacantly? Not one revelation did he make." Is, then, the raising of Lazarus
like the legend of Donjalolo in more ways than that of being known only
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
29
from Mohi's equivocal chronicles? After Mohi's next legends about Donjalolo's island, the narrator remarks, "traditions
like these ever soon dubious."
Before landing on the Holy Island of Maramma, Mohi tells not only myths of three demigod kings (Peepi, Donjalolo, and
Uhia), but also myths of three gods -- Vivo, Keevi, and Roo. He describes the ascent of the god Vivo and the descents
of the gods Keevi and Roo. The myth of each of these gods reduces elements of Alma's myth to
absurdity:
Approached from the northward, Ohonoo, midway cloven down to the sea, one half
a level plain; the other, three mountain terraces -- Ohonoo looks like the
first steps of a gigantic way to the sun. And such, if Braid-Beard spoke truth,
it had formerly been.
"Ere Mardi was made," said that true old chronicler, "Vivo, one of the genii,
built a ladder of mountains whereby to go up and go down. And of this ladder,
the island of Ohonoo was the base. But wandering here and there, incognito in
a vapor, so much wickedness did Vivo spy out, that in high dudgeon he hurried
up his ladder, knocking the mountains from under him as he went. These here
and there fell into the lagoon, forming many isles, now green and luxuriant;
which, with those sprouting from seeds dropped by a bird from the moon, comprise
all the groups in the reef." (I, 314)
One object of interest in Ohonoo was the original image of Keevi the god of
Thieves; hence, from time immemorial, the tutelar deity of the isle.
His shrine was a natural niche in a cliff, walling in the valley of Monlova.
And here stood Keevi, with his five eyes, ten hands, and three pair of legs,
equipped at all points for the vocation over which he presided. Of mighty girth,
his arms terminated in hands, every finger a limb, spreading in multiplied digits:
palms twice five, and fifty fingers.
According to the legend, Keevi fell from a golden cloud, burying himself to the
thighs in the earth, tearing up the soil all round. Three meditative mortals,
strolling by at the time, had a narrow escape. (I, 319)
Mohi's account of Keevi's absurd descent precedes by a few pages his account of another absurd descent linked more
directly to Alma:
"It was by this same peak," said Mohi, "that the nimble god Roo, a great sinner
above, came down from the skies, a very long time ago. Three skips and a jump,
and he landed on the plain. But alas, poor Roo! though easy the descent,
there was no climbing back." (II, 9)
30
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
According to Ellis, Roo was one of "the most benevolent" Polynesian gods. Melville plays on Roo's name, likening him
to a kangaroo, calls him a great sinner, and, six paragraphs later, identifies the mountain of his descent with the
legendary mount of Alma's ascent. Alma, who both descends and ascends, links Vivo, Keevi, and Roo into the mythological
chain of Maramma. They in turn make equivocally absurd the scripture which tells the Mardians of Alma.
Mohi's chronicles include the Old Testament as well as the New. The allegory occasionally thins sufficiently for explicit
citations:
"However that may be," said Mohi, "certain it is, those events did assuredly
come to pass: -- Compare the ruins of Babbelona with book ninth, chapter tenth,
of the chronicles. Yea, yea, the owl inhabits where the seers predicted; the
jackals yell in the tombs of the kings." (II, 125)
Some contemporary research had found the ruins prophesied in Isaiah 13:21 and 34:13 and Jeremiah 50:39. But other
contemporary research had made more important parts of Mohi's scripture clearly mythical.
Babbalanja vows that Nature, Oro's [*] book, "gives the grim lie to Mohi's gossipings." He bases his vow on the latest
geological theories, which he then recounts at length. To these theories, Media blandly responds: "Mohi tells us that
Mardi was made in six days; but you, Babbalanj a, have built it up from the bottom in less than six minutes." The
quarrel between Babbalanja's scientific truth and Mohi's chronicled truth, in a world apparently without knowable truth,
places both the cosmology of the Old Testament and the Saviour of the New beyond human knowledge.
In a world filled with similar gods, Babbalanja and Mohi must wage their disputes about Alma in the absurd context of
Vivo's ascent and the descents of Keevi and Roo:
"But, my lord, you well know, that there are those in Mardi, who secretly
regard all stories connected with this peak, as inventions of the people
of Maramma. They deny that any thing is to be gained by making
__________
* Melville makes Oro, the name of the great Polynesian god, the Mardian equivalent of the Judaic-Christian "God."
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
31
a pigrimage thereto. And for warranty, they appeal to the sayings of the great prophet Alma."
Cried Mohi, "But Alma is also quoted by others, in vindication of the pilgrimage to Ofo.
They declare that the prophet himself was the or pilgrim that thitherward journeyed:
that from thence he departed to the skies." (II, 10)
Without divine revelation, all scripture becomes myth. By 1849 it had become clear that the Judaic-Christian scripture
was not entirely literal revelation.
Although all these legends come before we learn that Brami, Manko, and Alma are avatars, they come after we have learned
of another deity who descended like Keevi, who voyaged from the sun like Vivo, and who, like Brami, Manko, and Alma, is
an "Avatar" -- "white Taji, a sort of half-and-half deity, now and then an Avatar among them;" "a gentleman from the
sun." Taji, the narrator of Mardi and an auditor of Mohi's stories, produces Jones's second kind of myth. But
since he himself is also the product -- an astronomical demigod -- he can be considered more profitably with the other
products. Another of the questors produces Jones's third kind of myth.
POETIC MYTH
III. Numberless divinities have been created solely by the magick of
poetry, whose essential business it is to personify the most abstract
notions, and to place a Nymph or a Genius in every grove, and almost in
every flower.
"ON THE GODS OF GREECE, ITALY, AND INDIA," p. 223
Jones sharply distinguishes between myths created by poetry and myths created by versified history, dividing them between
two of his four categories. Melville divides the two sources of these myths along precisely the same lines, but he then
shows these lines to be equivocal. The legends of Yoomy the poet are often indistinguishable from Mohi's official legends.
Yoomy's legends obviously come from the fancy and obviously are meant to entertain; but many of Mohi's legends are just
as fanciful and entertaining. The relation between Yoomy and Mohi, between poetic and historical mythology, between,
32
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
indeed, Mardian poetry and Mardian history, is made most clear in Chapter 93, "Babbalanja Steps in Between Mohi and
Yoomy; and Yoomy Relates a Legend." This chapter immediately follows the chapter in which Mohi recites the legends of
Keevi descending from a golden cloud and of the souls of fifty warriors ascending from a "fatal leap," and it begins
with Mohi ready to relate another legend. With Mohi about to turn over his chronicles, Yoomy interposes to ask that
he be permitted to narrate. Mohi, "highly offended," mutters "something invidious about frippery young poetasters
being too full of silly imaginings to tell a plain tale." Yoomy's answer is the age-old answer, familiar in English
since Sidney's Defense of Poesy:
Said Yoomy, in reply, adjusting his turban, "Old Mohi, let us not clash. I honor
your calling; but, with submission, your chronicles are more wild than my cantos.
I deal in pure conceits of my own; which have a shapeliness and a unity, however
unsubstantial; but you, Braid-Beard, deal in mangled realities. In all your chapters,
you yourself grope in the dark. Much truth is not in thee, historian. Besides, Mohi;
my songs perpetuate many things which you sage scribes entirely overlook. Have you
not oftentimes come to me, and my ever dewy ballads for information, in which you
and your musty old chronicles were deficient? In much that is precious, Mohi, we
poets are the true historians; we embalm; you corrode." (I, 372-23)
In another context, this answer might be no more than a well-stated commonplace. But here it is a dead end, not the
end sought, of a long and involved epistemological quest. Babbalanj a the philosopher attacks both the poet and the
historian: "Peace, rivals. As Bardianna has it, like all who dispute upon pretensions of their own, you are each nearest
the right, when you speak of the other; and furthest therefrom, when you speak of yourselves."
Jones had said that part of the "essential business" of poetry was "to place a Nymph or Genius in every grove, and almost
in every flower." Yoomy's legend betters Jones's description by placing a manikin or nymph in every flower, and
making manikins and nymphs grow into vines and flowers. Yoomy's "little nymphs" not only "haunted the lilies," but also
"toiled all night long at braiding
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
33
the moonbeams together, and entangling the plaited end to a bough; so that at night, the poor planet had much ado to
set." When Mohi interposes to ask, "Pause you to invent as you go on?" Yoomy responds by parodying Mohi's usual
language: "Little or nothing more, my masters, is extant of the legend." After Yoomy adds a few more whimsical details,
the argument of philosopher, poet, and historian resumes:
"Now, I appeal to you, royal Media; to you, noble Taji; to you, Babbalanja,"
said the chronicler, with an impressive gesture, "whether this seems a
credible history: Yoomy has invented."
"But perhaps he has entertained, old Mohi," said Babbalanja. "He has not
spoken the truth," persisted the chronicler.
"Mohi," said Babbalanja, "truth is in things, and not in words: truth is
voiceless; so at least saith old Bardianna. And I, Babbalanja, assert, that
what are vulgarly called fictions are as much realities as the gross
mattock of Dididi, the digger of trenches; for things visible are but
conceits of the eye: things imaginative, conceits of the fancy. If duped
by one, we are equally duped by the other." (I, 326)
Babbalanja decides that the poetic legend of Yoomy's nymphs and manikins has no more nor less of reality than, say,
Mohi's legend of a goblin slain by the god Upi, though verified by Mohi's pointing to "his remains petrified into
white ribs of coral." Mohi reasonably turns on Babbalanja: "But come now, thou oracle, if all things are deceptive,
tell us what is truth?" Although, as Babbalanja promptly admits, "that question is more final than any answer,"
Babbalanja himself has some tentative answers.
METAPHYSICAL MYTH
IV. The metaphors and allegories of moralists and metaphysicians, have been also very fertile in deities; of which a
thousand examples might be adduced from Plato, Cicero, and the inventive commentators on Homer, in their pedigrees
of the Gods, and their fabulous lessons of morality.
"ON THE GODS OF GREECE, ITALY, AND INDIA," p. 223
As mythologizer, Babbalanja the philosopher has much in common with both Mohi the historian and Yoomy the poet. Babbalanja
34
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
tends to align and identify himself with Yoomy; he too is a "poet," a propounder of conceits of the fancy rather than
conceits of the eye:
"Yoomy: poets both, we differ but in seeming; thy airiest conceits are as the shadows of
my deepest ponderings; though Yoomy soars, and Babbalanja dives, both meet at last. Not
a song you sing, but I have thought its thoughts; and where dull Mardi sees but your rose,
I unfold its petals, and disclose a pearl. Poets are we, Yoomy, in that we dwell without
us; we live in grottoes, palms, and brooks; we ride the sea, we ride the sky; poets are
omnipresent." (II, 139)
But Babbalanja is also interested in Mohi's legends, finding in them metaphors and allegories for his metaphysics.
Babbalanja is expected to object to Mohi's "silly conceit," his legend of the Plujii, little demons who cause all the
minor annoyances on Quelquo. As "arrant little knaves as ever gulped moonshine," the Plujii seem quite as fanciful as
Yoomy's manikins and moonbeam-weaving nymphs. But Babbalanja instead shows in detail to what use moralists and
metaphysicians may put such legendary conceits:
"I have been thinking, my lord," said Babbalanja, "that though the people of that island may at times err, in imputing
their calamities to the Plujii; that, nevertheless, upon the whole, they indulge in a reasonable belief. For, Plujii
or no Plujii, it is undeniable, that in ten thousand ways, as if by a malicious agency, we mortals are woefully put out
and tormented; and that, too, by things in themselves so exceedingly trivial, that it would seem almost impiety to
ascribe them to the august gods. No; there must exist some greatly inferior spirits; so insignificant, comparatively,
as to be overlooked by the supernal powers; and through them it must be, that we are thus grievously annoyed. At any
rate, such a theory would supply a hiatus in my system of metaphysics." (I, 306)
Here Babbalanja uses only the subjunctive "would supply." But soon he is demonstrating just how materially a legend may
supply a metaphysical hiatus. Babbalanja's transmutation of the legend of the Plujii takes two steps beyond Mohi's
narrative. The first is the construction and proof of a mythical theory in Chapter 104, "Wherein Babbalanja Broaches
a Diabolical Theory, and in His Own Person Proves it." The second is the creation of Azzageddi, a real devil who, at
least metaphorically and allegorically, possesses Babbalanja.
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
35
The Plujii were described in the same language and present the same moral and metaphysical problems as the devils later
invented and embodied by Babbalanja. The Plujii apparently sprang from the fancies of the people of Quelquo and from their
wish to be irresponsible: "In short, from whatever evil, the cause of which the Islanders could not directly impute to
their gods, or in their own opinion was not referable to themselves, -- of that very thing must the invisible Plujii be
guilty.... All things they bedeviled." Media, sensing the dangers of this myth of moral irresponsibility, deflated it
with hard "facts." After Mohi had described an old lady being abdominally tormented by the Plujii, Media said that he had
seen her eat twenty unripe bananas just before these torments.
Babbalanja propounds his diabolical theory also to absolve man from responsibility, and Media reacts as he did to
Mohi's myth. The Plujii bedeviled all things; Babbalanja claims that "all men who knowingly do evil are bedeviled."
Media threw the hard facts of twenty unripe bananas at Mohi's myth of irresponsibility; he throws ropes and gags at
Babbalanja's myth of irresponsibility, roping the devil in him and gagging his devilish doctrine. But shortly the company
of questors receives its third allegedly supernatural being, the mythical and invisible devil Azzageddi, who apparently
possesses Babbalanja. When released from his ropes and gag, Babbalanja had said, "the strong arm, my lord, is no
argument, though it overcomes all logic." Now Azzageddi, though no argument, overcomes the strong arm. He appears, taunts
Media with impunity, and is pushed back down by Babbalanja only when the philosopher wishes to assume responsibility for
the words coming from his mouth.
The historian, the poet, and the philosopher -- each produces myths. Only the different purposes of the historical, poetic,
and philosophic myths distinguish them from one another. When Mohi's official myths are not obviously propping up royal
or ecclesiastical pretensions, they are hard to distinguish from Yoomy's myths, aimed at entertainment and poetic truth.
Poetic truth shades off into philosophic truth, which also can take mythical form, whether filling metaphysical gaps,
illustrating abstractions, or protecting the philosopher.
36
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
Historical and philosophic myths may be "poetic"; the poet and the philosopher may use historical myths. Although all
their myths are most equivocal, each branch of the Mardian mythology creates verbal realities which may materially
affect the Mardian world.
As the Mardian mythologists define the myths of Mardi, they sit in a boat with Media the royal demigod and Taji the
astronomical demigod, they hunt Yillah the idol of man, and they end the hunt with the god Alma. These four worshiped
beings -- Media, Taji, Yillah, and Alma -- incarnate the major myths of Mardi: the State, the Cosmic Role, Romance,
and the Church. The true nature of these myths is the subject of Mardi.
THE DEMIGOD OF THE STATE: MEDIA
It was not long after 1848; and, somehow, about that time, all round the world, these kings, they had the
casting vote, and voted for themselves.
"THE PIAZZA" (1856)
On the map that charts the spheres, Mardi is marked "the World of Kings."
MARDI (1849)
When the first four Mardian visits reveal four stages of kinghood, they indicate that one of the main objects of the
search will be to discover what a king is. From the time that Media says, "I myself am interested in this pursuit,"
until he renounces both his assumed role and the search itself, the changing definition of King Media forms much of
the structure of the voyage. Media's progress is an apparent decline which is really a rise, from sitting as a living
idol in his own temple in his own kingdom to kneeling on a strange island in order to renounce his demigodship and
invoke the blessings of Alma, the "prince divine." From the beginning of the apparent fall, there are hints of the
reality behind the appearance. Media's apparent height is the pedestal in his temple; here beside the idol of Media
the royal demigod and Taji the astronomical demigod is the idol of a third demigod -- a deified maker of plantain
pudding. In Media's "endless pedigree," he reckons "deities by decimals." Before they
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
37
part, Taji says that they in "due time met with several decayed, broken down demigods: magnificos of no mark in Mardi."
Many of jokes throughout the voyage (particularly recurrent ones, such as the fear of death betrayed by "immortal"
demigods) reduce euhemerism to an absurdity.
But euhemerism in Mardi is much more than an absurdity. As we have seen, several of the Mardian kings, themselves
enslaved, subject their people to the most extravagant and destructive myths; by use of myths, these kings attain and
maintain their supreme earthly power:
These demi-gods had wherewithal to sustain their lofty pretensions. If need were, could
crush out of him the infidelity of a non-conformist. And by this immaculate union of
church and state, god and king, in their own proper persons reigned supreme Caesars
over the souls and bodies of their subjects. (I, 207)
As a result, the Mardians often "addressed the supreme god Oro, in the very same terms employed in the political
adoration of their sublunary rulers." Media is no exception to the rule of Mardian kings; in his kingdom men "shrieked"
for denying his divinity: "There, men were scourged; their crime, a heresy; the heresy, that Media was no demigod." Only
after Media encounters real divinity does he vow that these groans will no longer be heard in the groves of his kingdom.
By this time, however, a revolution has taken the matter out of his hands.
The voyage through Mardi reveals kings on several levels of alleand on each level is written the mene, mene, tekel,
upharsin of all kings. Each kind of allegorical tour ends with the hint or fact of revolution. The revolution against
Media comes at the end of the voyage and brings it full circle. Although the outcome of this revolution remains in doubt,
Media's name suggests what it will be: the historical empire of Media was submerged when its last king was dethroned by
a revolution.
Even before the voyage starts, while Media is basking in the full glories of his state, his name and role hint of the
voyage's end. After he has donned his divinity, crowned in "the primitive Eastern style,"
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Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
and looking "very much like a god," Media evokes in Taji's mind the first tour of kings, which foreshadows in detail
the allegorical tours of the Mardian voyage. It takes place in the chapter entitled, most significantly (see Daniel 5:28),
"Belshazzar on the Bench":
A king on his throne! Ah, believe me, ye Gracchi, ye Acephali, ye Levelers, it is
something worth seeing, be sure; whether beheld at Babylon the Tremendous,
when Nebuchadnezzar was crowned; at old Scone in the days of Macbeth; at Rheims,
among Oriflammes, at the coronation of Louis le Grand; at Westminster Abbey, when
the gentlemanly George doffed his beaver for a diadem; or under the soft shade of
palm trees on an isle in the sea.
Man lording it over man, man kneeling to man, is a spectacle that Gabriel might
well travel hitherward to behold; for never did he behold it in heaven. But Darius
giving laws to the Medes and the Persians, or the conqueror of Bactria with
king-cattle yoked to his car, was not a whit more sublime, than Beau Brummel
magnificently ringing for his valet.
A king on his throne! It is Jupiter nodding in the councils of Olympus; Satan,
seen among the coronets in Hell.
A king on his throne! It is the sun over a mountain; the sun over law-giving
Sinai; the sun in our system: planets, duke-like, dancing attendance, and
baronial satellites in waiting. (I, 216)
From Nebuchadnezzar and Macbeth to Jupiter and Satan and thence to the sun is a long way, and a way that suggests what
the forthcoming allegorical tours will find.
These tours begin with generalized allegorical kings, pass on to thinly allegorized nineteenth-century political forces
and figures, and end by focusing again on King Media. The kings found on each tour range one behind another, each
shadowing forth another's most prominent features. Upon King Ludwig (of France) and King Bello (of England) are thrown
the shadows of King Piko and King Hello, who prune their excess subjects with murderous games, and of Kings Peepi,
Donj alolo, Uhia, and Borabolla, who chain their subjects to destructive myths; upon them all are thrown the shadows of
Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, of Louis le Grand and gentlemanly George, of Jupiter and of Satan. And all these shadows pin
down Media when, drunk, he reveals that "Peace is War to all kings." The destructive
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
39
power of all these kings derives, in the words of Sir William Jones, from "historical or natural truth [that] has been
perverted into fable by ignorance, imagination, flattery, or stupidity."
The king of all these Mardian kings is Hivohitee, Alma's supreme earthly priest, who "lived and reigned, in mystery,
the High Pontiff of the adjoining isles: prince, priest, and god, in his own proper person: great lord paramount over
many kings in Mardi; his hands full of sceptres and crosiers." When Hivohitee reveals that the mystery through which
he reigns is founded upon "nothing," he reveals that the greatest as well as the least king of Mardi is a mythical
fraud. The royal demigods of Mardi are as fraudulent as Taji, the demigod who comes to Mardi by way of the sun, in
reality a runaway sailor who steps out of a stolen whaleboat.
THE COSMIC DEMIGOD: TAJI
II. The next source of them [myths] appears to have been a wild admiration of the heavenly
bodies, and, after a time, the systems and calculations of astronomers; hence came a
considerable portion of Egyptian and Grecian fable; the Sabian worship in Arabia; the Persian
types and emblems of Mihr, or the Sun; and the far extended adoration of the elements and the
powers of nature; and hence, perhaps, all the artificial Chronology of the Chinese and Indians,
with the invention of demi-gods and heroes to fill the vacant niches in their extravagant and
imaginary periods.
"ON THE GODS OF GREECE, ITALY, AND INDIA," p. 222
As Merrell Davis has demonstrated, the conception of the sea as space, islands as stars, and the Mardian archipelago
as a constellation in the Milky Way was central to the genesis of Mardi. [8] The narrator's astronomical role
is defined even before he quits "the firmament blue of the open sea," lands on "some new constellation," and proclaims
himself an astronomical demigod. He is the perpetual westward voyager who breaks from the Arcturion when it
veers north, who steers perpetually by Arcturus, who thinks the Arcturion may "illustrate the Whistonian theory
concerning the damned and the comets."
After he lands on the Mardian constellation, he claims that he
__________
8. See Melville's "Mardi": A Chartless Voyage (New Haven, Conn., 1952), pp. 67-70.
40
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
came from the sun. Later (II, 271), after envisioning the Mardian isles as clusters of stars, he thinks of himself
as a miniature counterpart of the sun: "And, as the sun, by influence divine, wheels through the Ecliptic; threading
Cancer, Leo, Pisces, and Aquarius; so, by some mystic impulse am I moved, to this fleet progress, through the groups
in white-reefed Mardi's zone." As Taji, he pursues Yillah, "a seraph from the sun" who first instilled in his mind and
in the minds of the Mardians the notion that he is a demigod. Taji and Yillah are pursued by the moonlike Hautia, who
"glided on: her crescent brow calm as the moon, when most it works its evil influences." A "thousand constellations"
cluster about Hautia, who "burned" as a "Glorious queen! with all the radiance, lighting up the equatorial night"; "all
space reflects her as a mirror." In some sort of allegorical or metaphorical sense, Taji is a comet, Yillah a sun, and
Hautia a moon.
Such curious identities would not be strangers to the comparative mythology of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries, in which mythology was habitually related to astronomy. Before the close of the eighteenth century,
many skeptics and mystics had reduced all mythology to fictionalized astronomy. The astronomical identifications of
Taji, Yillah, and Hautia, although almost frivolous, help to order the structure of Mardi. When they are defined as
comet, sun, and moon, Taji, Yillah, and Hautia take their places in the mythology of Mardi. It is mere myth which gives
them cosmic roles.
But Taji is a comet in another sense, and his voyages dramatize a particular kind of comet, a Whistonian comet. In the
first of Mardi's one hundred ninety-five chapters, the narrator learns that the Arcturion is about to head
from the equator to the pole. He then makes what proves to be a most important suggestion: "We were going, it seemed, to
illustrate the Whistonian theory concerning the damned and the comets: -- hurried from equinoctial heats to arctic frosts."
The source of this suggestion shows what it means in detail:
I observe, that the Sacred Accounts of Hell, or of the Place and State of
Punishment for wicked Men after the general Resurrection, is agreeable not
only to the Remains of ancient profane Tradition, but to the true
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
41
System of the World also. This sad State is in Scripture describ'd as a State of Darkness, of outward Darkness,
of blackness of Darkness, of Torment and Punishment for Ages, or for Ages of Ages, by Flame, or
by Fire, or by Fire and Brimstone, with Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth; where the Smoak of the Ungodly's
Torment ascends up for ever and ever; where they are Tormented in the Presence of the Holy Angels, and in the
Presence of the Lamb; when the Holy Angels shall have separated the Wicked from among the Just, and have cast them into
a Furnace of Fire. Now this Description does in every Circumstance, so exactly agree with the Nature of a Comet,
ascending from the Hot Regions near the Sun, and going into the Cold Regions beyond Saturn, with its long smoaking
Tail arising up from it, through its several Ages or Periods of revolving, and this in the Sight of all the Inhabitants
of our Air, and of the rest of the System; that I cannot but think the Surface or Atmosphere of such a Comet to be that
Place of Torment so terribly described in Scripture. [9]
Long before the narrator meets Yillah and conceives of passing himself off as a demigod, he is regarded more than once
as a supernatural being, as, to be specific, a ghost or goblin. When, at the very end, he claims to be the "spirit's
phantom's phantom" of Taji and renounces this "life of dying," he pulls together fragments of a structure that are
scattered through the book. The narrator is in fact a Whistonian damned soul, at least to the extent that he is a
Whistonian comet. His damnation consists of repeating over and over again an act of moral abdication and being regarded,
after each abdication, as a supernatural being. In the first chapter, with something like tragic irony, the narrator
brashly proclaims "were I placed in the same situation again, I would repeat the thing I did then."
His first abdication is his midnight leap from the Arcturion, "an undertaking which apparently savored of a moral
dereliction." Immediately, this abdication makes him feel as though he were a ghost: "For the consciousness of being
deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully
tenanting a defunct carcass." As the first illustration of the Whistonian theory, Jarl and the narrator become like lost
souls: "What a mere toy we were to the billows, that jeeringly shouldered us from crest to crest, as from hand to hand
lost souls may
__________
9. William Whiston, Astronomical Principles of Religion (London, 1725), PP• 155-56.
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Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
be tossed along by the chain of shades which enfilade the route to Tartarus." Soon "the sun and the Chamois seemed all
that was left of life in the universe;" "All became vague and confused; so that westward of the Kingsmill isles and
the Radack chain, I fancied there could be naught but an endless sea." Beyond Mardi the narrator will indeed find "an
endless sea;" for these very words appear again as the last words of the book.
At this point the narrator not only anticipates his fate but actually experiences it. The mere toy of a boat drifts
into a calm, and it seems that the two lost souls have entered the unformed chaos on the edge of the universe:
... the two gray firmaments of sky and water seemed collapsed into a vague ellipsis. And alike, the Chamois seemed
drifting in the atmosphere as in the sea. Every thing was fused into the calm: sky, air, water, and all. Not a fish
was to be seen. The silence was that of a vacuum. No vitality lurked in the air. And this inert blending and brooding
of all things seemed gray chaos in conception. (I, 64)
This is the very region to which the narrator, just after his "desire to quit the Arcturion became little short of a
frenzy," thought the captain had brought him: "The ignoramus must have lost his way, and drifted into the outer confines
of creation, the region of the everlasting lull, introductory to a positive vacuity." At that early point the narrator's
musings had been prophetic: "Thoughts of eternity thicken. He begins to feel anxious concerning his soul."
When they board the Parki, Jarl thinks the ship "purely phantomlike," "a shade of a ship, full of sailors' ghosts"
which soon "would dissolve in a supernatural squall," and his "superstitions" are partly borne out when the Parki
dissolves in a natural squall. His feelings are matched by those of the two survivors of the Parki's crew, Samoa and
his mate Annatoo: "For their wild superstitions led them to conclude, that a white man's craft coming upon them so
suddenly, upon the open sea, and by night, could be naught but a phantom. Furthermore... they fancied us the ghosts
of the Cholos." The "Cholos" were the two half-breed pirates who had led the attack on the Parki and who had been
killed by Samoa. The mistaking of Jarl
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
43
and the narrator for their avenging ghosts foreshadows the spectral avengers who later haunt the allegorical voyage
through Mardi. Samoa and Annatoo next think that Jarl and the narrator are "goblins," which is exactly what Jarl had
thought them. Jarl and the narrator had behaved so strangely that they "almost led Samoa to fancy that we were no
shades, after all, but a couple of men from the moon." On the other hand, Jarl "to the last" "stoutly maintained that
the hobgoblins must have had something or other to do with the Parki," and later the narrator finds that his "suspicions"
concerning Samoa's story "returned." In an odd anticipation of the devils which possess Babbalanja and the people of
Quelquo, Annatoo is "possessed by some scores of devils." The narrator's moral abdication on the Parki is a mere
peccadillo, the fraudulent seizing of the ship's command to further his personal quest. When the Parki goes down
in a squall and Annatoo is swept into the sea, Samoa, Jarl, and the narrator take to the Chamois. They soon
discover that they look to each other as Jarl and the narrator had looked just after abandoning the Arcturion:
"a cadaverous gleam" from the sea makes them look "to each other like ghosts."
The narrator attains his next supernatural identity after his most heinous moral abdication, the murder of the priest
Aleema. He persuades Yillah, the maiden he has seized from Aleema, "to fancy me some gentle demi-god, that had come
over the sea." Yillah becomes an "idol" for the narrator, and Jarl prophetically thinks her "an Ammonite syren, who
might lead me astray." In the chapter entitled "The Dream Begins to Fade," the narrator finds that his sexual love of
his idol is dissipating his own divinity. "Love" in turn induces him "to prop my failing divinity; though it was I
myself who had undermined it": "in the sight of Yillah, I perceived myself thus dwarfing down to a mortal." Meanwhile
both Yillah and Jarl think of Samoa as a "goblin," while, significantly like the narrator, Samoa also makes Yillah an
"idol." Thus as the Chamois draws near Mardi, its occupants include beings who at one time or another have
been considered goblins, ghosts, phantoms, wandering shades, a demigod, and a goddess.
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Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
The narrator's penultimate abdication comes when he makes his grandest claim, assuming the astronomical half of the
Whistoniantheory. On the Arcturion the narrator had talked to the clouds and developed a "fellow-feeling for the
sun." After leaving the Arcturion, he had become a "fellow-voyager" of the sun. When he lands on Mardi, he
proclaims himself a demigod from the sun: "Men of Mardi,I come from the sun. When this morning it rose and touched the
wave, I pushed my shallop from its golden beach, and hither sailed before its level rays. I am Taji."
This penultimate abdication is his penultimate allegorical death, and it signalizes his death as the most important being
in Mardi. From this point on, ironically and appropriately the Mardians become far more important than the narrator.
"Taji" as a Mardian conceptionbecomes more significant than the player of Taji. The three mythologists and their king
make Taji's quest their own. Although theyfinally all disassociate themselves from his quest, realizing that Yillah is but
a phantom,they follow until then what they believe to be"white Taji, a sort of half-and-half deity, now and then an
Avatar," to the brink of doom. Taji's own quest for Yillah continues afterthey forsake him, and it ends as it began, with
an abdication:
"Now, I am my own soul's emperor; and my first act is abdication! Hail! realm of shades!" -- and turning my
prow into the racing tide, which seized me like a hand omnipotent, I darted through.
Churned in foam, that outer ocean lashed the clouds; and straight in my white wake, headlong dashed a shallop, three
fixed specters leaning o'er its prow: three arrows poising.
And thus, pursuers and pursued flew on, over an endless sea.
Before this abdication he has reduced himself to "the spirit's phantom's phantom" of Taji. His soul has completed its
hellish orbit, earlier described: "Thus deeper and deeper into Time's endless tunnel, does the winged soul, like a
night-hawk, wend her wild way; and finds eternities before and behind; and her last limit is her everlasting beginning."
"Behind and before" are not only eternities, but ever, as in the chapter of that title, the pursuers and the pursued.
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
45
THE IDOL OF ROMANCE: YILLAH
As a comet and as a damned soul, the narrator passes through world after world on his circular orbit from the
Arcturion to the Chamois and Parki to Odo to Serenia and back to the endless sea beyond Mardi.
Yillah is worshiped and sought by inhabitants of each of the worlds in Mardi. From the Arcturion and
the Parki come the narrator and Samoa, who slay the Polynesian priest carrying Yillah to the sacrificial rites.
Yillah then becomes the idol of the Chamois, worshiped both by the narrator and by Samoa, "master of Gog and
Magog, expounder of all things heathenish and obscure." When the Chamois is beached on Mardi, Yillah becomes
a goddess of the Mardians. After she disappears, four symbolic questors come from the allegorical worlds of history,
poetry, philosophy, and government to join the narrator's search for her.
Yillah may be, as she has been variously defined, Truth or Happiness or the Absolute or simply the eternal Lure. But
whatever else, she is what Babbalanja tells Taji she is, "a phantom that but mocks thee." She is to Taji, Media,
Babbalanja, Mohi, and Yoomy what the Chamois is to the fish that follow it singing "we care not what is it, this
life / that we follow, this phantom unknown." Yillah's history is significant only in so far as the characters misconstrue
it, fashioning it into a myth to shape their own quest.
Yillah herself has been wrought upon by the priests whose "pupils almost lose their humanity in the constant indulgence
of seraphic imaginings." "Enshrined as a goddess" by the priest of Amma, she is easily passed off by Taji, the new priest
who has murdered the old, as a "seraph from the sun." The narrator at first admits that he "might have been tranced into
a belief of her mystical legends." Later, he acts as though they were true, rejecting her true and mundane history as
coming "too late, too late." Their sexual relations tend toward the "extinguishment of her own spirituality," but when
she lands on Mardi she retains enough so that "the adoration of the maiden was extended to myself."
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Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
As the search for Yillah continues, philosophy and history have less and less to say about her, and poetry becomes her
interpreter. Yoomy begins the search confident that "Yillah will yet be found." His hopes become dimmer and dimmer as
his descriptions of Yillah become increasingly enlightened. Toward the end of the quest, he uses the same language to
describe Yillah that Taji had used before her disappearance. Taji and Yoomy, using the commonplace romantic hyperbole,
equate a romantic idol with the sun. Taji tells how "my Yillah did daily dawn, how she lit up the world"; Yoomy tells
how "Yillah now rises and flashes! / Rays shooting from out her long lashes," and how she makes "All the buds blossom"
and "leaves turn round." But Taji's and Yoomy's conceit is something more than a hyperbolic cliche. Yillah is the sun
in a very real, if only metaphoric and allegoric, sense. She is a false sun, whose pursuit leads to destruction and
damnation.
The narrator as Whistonian comet crosses paths first with Yillah, who seems to be the sun, and then with Hautia, who
seems to be the moon. Both Yillah and Hautia prove to be Whistonian meteors, "Mock-Suns... resembling the Moon or Sun
for a while." [10] Yillah, as a mock sun, is the phantom that but mocks Taji; Hautia, addressed by Taji as the moon,
is merely a "meteor." Mardi's astronomical mythology consummates in the true Sun.
THE GOD OF CHURCH AND HEART: ALMA THE SUN
Until they reach Serenia, the five questors maintain their mythological roles. Mohi's historical mythology, Yoomy's
poetical mythology, and Babbalanj a's philosophical mythology provide the background and chorus for Taji the
astronomical pseudo-avatar, Media the euhemerized king, and Alma the institutionalized myth of Mardi. But the true Alma
of Serenia shatters these roles. The psychological and moral truth of Alma, experienced in Serenia, makes impertinent
the historical, philosophical, and poetic truth of all myths, including the official myth of Alma.
Babbalanja is the first to recognize the true sun in "great Oro and his sovereign son": "'Oh, Alma, Alma! prince divine!'
cried Babbalanja,
__________
10. An Account of a Surprising Meteor etc. (London, 1716), p. 63.
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
47
sinking on his knees, -- 'in thee, at last, I find repose. Hope perches in my heart a dove; -- a thousand rays illume; --
all Heaven's a sun. Gone, gone! are all distracting doubts. Love and Alma now prevail.'" Babbalanja's conversion breaks
the demigods' leadership and for all except Taji ends the quest. All now follow Babbalanja's leadership but Taji, Alma's
rival avatar, who pursues his destructive chase of Alma's rival absolute -- Yillah, a false sun.
For the others, the true sun puts out all false suns. Yoomy sees the summer's dependence not on Yillah but on Alma:
"In Alma all my dreams are found, my inner longings for the Love supreme, that prompts my every verse. Summer is in
my soul;" Mohi cries out, "I see bright light;" Media renounces his divinity and cries, "Alma, I am thine." When "king,
sage, gray hairs, and youth" all kneel, they are bathed in the light of the true sun: "There, as they kneeled, and as
the old man blessed them, the setting sun burst forth from mists, gilded the island round about, shed rays upon their
heads, and went down in a glory -- all the East radiant with red burnings, like an altar-fire." The sunset and the
night that follows consummate the astronomical images of Mardi.
The astronomical level of action received its first extended definition in the first few pages of Mardi, where
one passage can now be seen as central to the book's astronomical rhetoric and astronomical conceits. Mardi
dramatizes, clause by clause, the strange rhetoric and fantastic conceits of this passage:
King Noah, God bless him! fathered us all. Then hold up your heads, oh ye Helots, blood potential flows through your
veins. All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; since in antediluvian
days, the sons of God did verily wed with our mothers, the irresistible daughters of Eve. Thus all generations are
blended: and heaven and earth of one kin: the hierarchies of seraphs in the uttermost skies; the thrones and principalities
in the zodiac; the shades that roam throughout space; the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one and
all, brothers in essence -- oh, be we then brothers indeed! All things form but one whole; the universe a Judea, and God
Jehovah its head. Then no more let us start with affright. In a theocracy, what is to fear? Let us compose ourselves to
death as fagged horsemen
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Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
sleep in the saddle. Let us welcome even ghosts when they rise. Away with our stares and grimaces. The New Zealander's
tattooing is not a prodigy; nor the Chinaman's ways an enigma. No custom is strange; no creed is absurd; no foe, but
who will in the end prove a friend. In heaven, at last, our good, old, white-haired father Adam will greet all alike,
and sociality forever prevail. Christian shall join hands between Gentile and Jew; grim Dante forget his Infernos, and
shake sides with fat Rabelais; and monk Luther, over a flagon of old nectar, talk over old times with Pope Leo. Then,
shall we sit by the sages, who of yore gave laws to the Medes and Persians in the sun; by the cavalry captains in Perseus,
who cried, "To horse!" when waked by their Last Trump sounding to the charge; by the old hunters, who eternities ago,
hunted the moose in Orion; by the minstrels, who sang in the Milky Way when Jesus our Saviour was born. Then shall we
list to no shallow gossip of Magellans and Drakes; but give ear to the voyagers who have circumnavigated the Ecliptic;
who rounded the Polar Star as Cape Horn. Then shall the Stagirite and Kant be forgotten, and another folio than theirs
be turned over for wisdom; even the folio now spread with horoscopes as yet undeciphered, the heaven of heavens on high.
(I, 24-25)
Given the theocracy, the universe with God Jehovah at its head, then "the shades that roam throughout space," such as
the narrator, Jarl, and Samoa, are of one kin with the seraphs, such as Yillah, a "seraph from the sun." They are indeed
what they claim to be after Taji's apotheosis, "all strolling divinities." All of them have monarchs such as Media and
sages such as Babbalanj a for kinsmen. The nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth, such as the world of
Mardi, named for a nation of wandering herdsmen, are brothers in essence to the constellations and worlds in the Milky
Way, the thrones and principalities in the Zodiac, such as Arcturus in Bootes, the herdsman. Even the space travel
promised in the latter half of the passage becomes a reality; angels and archangels conduct through creation the man who
can call, as Babbalanja finally does, "Oh, Alma, Alma! prince divine." When Babbalanja recognizes the theocracy and avows
the supreme royalty of Alma, he is immediately rewarded by the vision which the narrator fruitlessly and eternally seeks.
The chapter entitled 'Babbalanja Relates to Them a Vision" parallels point by point the astronomical voyage of the
narrator. But
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
49
whereas the narrator voyages as a lost soul, roaming throughout space as a damned comet, Babbalanja voyages as a soul
surely guided by an angel. Babbalanja, his eyes "fixed on heaven," first sees the angel as a "shining spot, unlike a
star." Then he sees not the vacuity which Taji finds beyond the Mardian Milky Way or the unformed chaos on the edge
of the universe, but a mystical world, also imaged forth in terms of a tropical voyage:
"Then, as white flame from yellow, out from that starry cluster it emerged; and
brushed the astral Crosses, Crowns, and Cups. And as in violet, tropic seas, ships
leave a radiant-white, and fire-fly wake; so, in long extension tapering, behind
the vision, gleamed another Milky-Way.
"Strange throbbings seized me; my soul tossed on its own tides."
When the angel asks him what he has learned from the "grace of Alma," Babbalanja presents his passport for mystical
space travel: "This have I learned, oh! spirit! -- In things mysterious to seek no more; but rest content, with knowing
naught but love." They immediately embark:
"We clove the air; passed systems, suns, and moons: what seem from Mardi's isles,
the glow-worm stars.
'By distant fleets of worlds we sped, as voyagers pass far sails at sea, and hail
them not. Foam played before them as they darted on; wild music was their wake;
and many tracks of sound we crossed, where worlds had sailed before.
"Soon, we gained a point, where a new heaven was seen; whence all our firmament
seemed one nebula. Its glories burned
like thousand steadfast-flaming lights.
"Here hived the worlds in swarms; and gave forth sweets ineffable. "We lighted on
a ring, circling a space, where mornings seemed for ever dawning over worlds unlike.
"'Here,' I heard, 'thou viewest thy Mardi's Heaven.'"
A greater angel then takes Babbalanja and his guide far above, to a point from which "Your utmost heaven is far below."
From this point, Babbalanja "beheld an awful glory": "Sphere in sphere, it burned: -- the one Shekinah!"
Mardi culminates in a heavenly reward through Alma and a
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Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
hellish punishment for spurning Alma. Of course the conclusion does not merely exalt Alma at Taji's expense. Taji,
though a damned soul, is also glorious. Taji's gloriousness considerably weakens the emotional effects of Alma's
glories, and one can hardly understand either Melville or Mardi without recognizing Taji's glorification. Yet
the fact remains that Taji is damned and those who follow Alma are saved. And unlike many of the later works,
Mardi does not make those who are saved appear contemptible. Melville's failure to order coherently the
ambiguities of this ending may explain in part the failure of the entire book. For, after all, Mardi provides
no reasonable basis for Taji's glorification. He is no demon-hunting Ahab nor even a Bulkington, heroically steering
away from the dangerous safety of the shore. On the physical level, "Taji" is only the assumed name of a runaway
sailor chasing a girl. And on the allegorical level, which is more important, Taji is a phony demigod chasing a
phantom. He refuses to recognize the simple fact that the Alma of Serenia is the only true god in Mardi, that this
Alma is truly the Christ, Saviour, Messiah, and Sun.
Once we recognize the fact that there is only one true sun, one divine light, one supreme prince, one Absolute in
Mardi, we may return to the myths about other incarnate suns, other divine princes, other absolutes. The true Alma
appears in a world swarming with dangerous myths, including the most dangerous myth of all, the myth of Alma.
The mythologists of the Mardian world create myths which support courts and churches, which absolve man from
responsibility, which turn strangers into gods, which merely entertain, which explain obscure natural events, which
fill gaps in metaphysical theories, which satisfy emotional needs, which order all the parts of the Mardian world.
The myth of Alma does all that these myths do. It supports kings and clerics, making its Pontiff Hivohitee the most
powerful of princes, "prince, priest, and god, in his own proper person; great lord paramount over many kings in
Mardi; his hands full of sceptres and crosiers." Just as Azzageddi, "in propria persona," absolved Babbalanja
from responsibility, the myth of Alma, defined by an official
Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
51
Pontiff as a "god, in his own proper person," transfers man's moral and spiritual responsibility to his priests and church.
Alma himself, when he had come as a stranger to the Holy Island, had not, like Taji, found safety in his deification; but
the mythic Alma is there enshrined. Alma's myth, officially chronicled, proves as entertaining as any other of Mohi's
legends. Defined by both church and state, Alma's myth officially fills all metaphysical gaps, supplies all religious
needs, explains all obscure events, and orders the Mardian archipelago.
The official myths defined by Maramma and chronicled by Mohi provide no way of distinguishing between the divine and the
mythical. The myth of Alma is like all the other myths of man. But the true Alma is not a "prince divine" because of his
legendary past, supernatural character, or prophetic destiny. The basis of his divinity is not that of Peepi, Media, Taji,
the deified maker of plantain pudding, or even the Alma of Maramma. The Alma enshrined as a god on the Holy Island of
Maramma is no more divine than Yillah, who was "enshrined as a goddess" on the holy island of Amma. The
avatars of Alma inscribed in the chronicles of Mohi are no more divine than the "Avatar" of "white Taji." The temporal
Pontiff of Alma may entertain only equivocal "incorporeal deities from above passing the Capricorn Solstice at Maramma."
Alma is divine on Serenia only because Alma on Serenia is Reason.
The psychological qualities which Taji and, for a time, Yoomy adore in Yillah are misplaced, just as are the metaphysical
properties which Babbalanja locates in an abstract absolute, the royal divinity located in Mardian royalty, the
astronomical attributes falsely defined by all. Only the message of Serenia accurately defines Alma's divinity:
"Right-reason, and Alma, are the same; else Alma, not reason, would we reject. The Master's great command is Love;
and here do all things wise, and all things good, unite. Love is all in all. The more we love, the more we know; and
so reversed. Oro we love; this isle; and our wide arms embrace all Mardi like its reef. How can we err, thus feeling?
We hear loved Alma's pleading, prompting voice, in every breeze, in every leaf; we see his earnest eye in every star
and flower." (II, 358-59)
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Mardi: A Study of Myths and Mythmaking
It is essential to note that the Serenians define Alma as the embodiment of intuitive moral and psychological perceptions
which they call "right reason." This is not discursive reason, nor is it merely feelings. It is the reason of the heart,
which establishes a religion of the heart.
Only the Serenian definition of Alma, as first Babbalanja and then Yoomy, Mohi, and Media discover, can validate the
passport to heaven. In their Mardian voyage, the questors met this definition only once, in the mouth of a youthful
pilgrim to Maramma. This young disciple of the religion of the heart becomes a sacrifice to the mythological religion
of Maramma. When he pleads Oro's message in his heart to excuse himself from abasement before Oro's idol, the priests
of Alma seize him: "'Impious boy,' cried they with the censers, 'we will offer thee up, before the very image thou
contemnest. In the name of Alma, seize him."' When the priests of Alma sacrifice in his name they equate their god
with Apo, the god to whom Aleema was to sacrifice Yillah, the god who bears one name of the great Serpent, the Evil
Being. [11]
In Mardi, mythical truth is irrelevant to religious truth, and may, in fact, destroy it. The youth, although
a disciple of the religion of the heart, does not consistently practice it. He makes a pilgrimage to the place of his
destruction because he does accept one myth, a myth about Alma's ascension, the very myth about which Mohi and
Babbalanja had disputed inconclusively: "But though rejecting a guide, still he clings to that legend of the Peak."
The epistemological dead ends of Mardi turn all history, poetry, and philosophy into myth. By dramatizing the identity
of Sir William Jones's four sources of mythology, Melville rejects the mythological basis of religion. In a world in
which history, poetry, and philosophy offer mere myths, the only safe basis for religion seems to be intuitive
psychological and moral truth.
__________
11. Edward Davies, Celtic Researches on the... Ancient Britons (London, 1804), p. 522, observes that "Apo" is
Hebrew for viper; Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson, A Second Series of the Ancient Egyptians, 2 vols. (London, 1841),
I, 435, says that "Apop, which in Egyptian signifies a 'giant,' was the name given to the Serpent" or "Evil Being."
7. Ibid., p. 115.
8. See Melville's "Mardi": A Chartless Voyage (New Haven, Conn., 1952), pp. 67-70.
9. William Whiston, Astronomical Principles of Religion (London, 1725), PP• 155-56.
10. An Account of a Surprising Meteor etc. (London, 1716), p. 63.
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