We are told that the silhouetted warriors in Greek vase
painting look like insects -- ants -- because they lack
insides, and are conceived in terms of their
arthropod-like exoskeletons--otherwise arms. Likewise
Robocop and his science fiction kin. Or the hood and
thorax of the bat-suit, with which one may wish to compare
the Batmobile, which is armed to the teeth. The US
military's research & development branch seems to want the
TALOS suit to enable, among other things and in
particular, the wearer's busting through doors safely (so
the video to which David Miller refers us). The
association of Spenser's Talus with thresholds as well as
assault is pronounced. Thus commentary: "Talus is ... a
creation of 'romance,' if only because he is _animate_
hardware. As a metal guard, he belongs to a whole class
of such automata; his kind survives in the haunted castles
of gothic romance down to the current movie era. The
example closest to Spenser seems to be the romance of
_Virgilius_, where the magician Virgil invents a copper
horseman with an iron flail, for the purposes of
discouraging 'night-runners and theives' and enforcing a
curfew at Rome. Spenser's character 'vsed in time of
jeopardy / To keepe a nightly watch' (V.iv.46). The same
_Virgilius_ elsewhere describes a gate guarded by copper
porters with iron mallets or sledges; and similar porters
are met with in other medieval romances. Conformably,
Talus is associated with various entryways in the course
of his duties. ... Spenser has thus made Talus a kind of
vigilant 'two-handed engine at the door.' (AnFQ 416f.)
The "archetypal" connection between the Talus of The
Faerie Queene and the merkebah or merkevah in Israelite
and Jewish literature could be made via the chariot --
"the embattled cart" -- of the Souldan in Spenser's Book
V, canto viii. "The chariot" -- or the Spanish Armada --
"is filled with military inventions ('all other weapons
lesse or more, / which warlike vses had deuizd / of yore,'
Vi.viii.38). From it the Soldan throws a 'wicked shaft
guyded through th'ayrie wyde, / By some bad spirit.' The
malign influence at work may well be that of Ares, the god
not only of war, but also of mischance. It follows that
the Souldan, 'armed in rusty plate' (V.viii.29), is the
god of arms in his iron chariot, holding the reins of war
or 'Of armes al the brydel' [Chaucer, Knight's Tale, 2009,
describing the temple of Mars]." (AnFQ 420f.) "As a suit
of armour like the one worn by Mars, [Talus] bears some
resemblance to the empty shield and armour of the Soldan,
all that remians of the warmonger after his disastrous
campaign against Arthur." (AnFQ 414.)
The weaponizing of the Hebrew prophet's divine
throne/chariot of course occurs in Milton's Paradise Lost,
though it may originally be a satanic idea as much as a
godly one (cf. the Throne or seat of Satan in Rev. 2:13,
and compare the great altar at Pergamon [now in Berlin]
and also the throne set in heaven in Rev. 4:3), and yet it
appears that Milton's God has something like war and
mobilization in mind or in reserve from of old. And
again, we may associate the image with the operation and
guardianship of gates, especially those that are
characterized as automata. To wit:
The noise of hell’s gates in Paradise Lost II contrasts
with that of heaven’s, the gates of an armoury through
which four chariots come forth in Zechariah 6:1 and
through which the Son’s chariot comes forth in Book VII:
About his chariot numberless were poured
…chariots winged, …
…and now come forth
Spontaneous, for within them spirit lived,
Attendant on their Lord: heaven opened wide
Her ever during gates, harmonious sound
On golden hinges moving, to let forth
The king of glory…(VII.197f, 203ff)
Here then is a gate through which an army does come forth
(the possibility proposed for the gates of hell), but it
is announced by the angels singing “Glory ... to the most
high, good will / To future men, and in their dwellings
peace” (VII.182f). The Son goes forth to vanquish chaos
by creating the world, an advent analogous to his advent
on earth, at the Incarnation, when the Pax Romana closed
the gates of war (so the Nativity Ode, Hymn iii-iv, with
Aen.I.293-96); therefore he commands the troubled waves
“Peace” (VII.216).
The gates of heaven are not precisely the gates of war in
a new transformation, despite their parity with the gates
of hell. But like the gates of war and the gates of hell
they make a prophetic noise. This noise is an unhappy one
in the Homeric originals of the Miltonic heavenly gates,
which are also spontaneous. Thus Homer:
…moving
of themselves [automatai] groaned the gates of the sky
that the Hours guarded,
those Hours to whose charge is given the huge sky and
Olympos,
to open up the dense darkness or again to close it.
(Iliad 5.748ff, tr. R. Lattimore)
These gates, in turn, are the source of the “gates of
light” unbarred “by the circling hours” at the opening of
Paradise Lost’s sixth book (which recounts the war in
heaven). The hours have the place of the threshold
guardian Janus in Ovid's Fasti and Sin in Milton, and
Janus is not really absent from the Miltonic descriptions
if we consider that the gates almost come into existence
with the chariot of paternal deity—for its four faces make
it, metonymically, a “double Janus,” or Janus quadrifrons.
The angelic cohort of Michael is described like the
quadriga: “four faces each / Had, like a double Janus”
(XI.128f). The cherubs conveying the Son’s chariot “four
faces each / Had, wondrous” (VI.753f). Same diction, same
enjambment, same door jambs.
The Homeric passage on the gates of the sky is taken from
the description of Athena’s military incarnation on the
day when she and Hera mount what is virtually a chariot of
maternal deity and come to earth to inspire Diomedes to
drive Ares from the field of battle. The book ends with
Zeus repulsing the same deity. -- Now Athena
…assuming the war tunic of Zeus who gathers
the clouds, she armed in her gear for the dismal fighting.
And across her shou1der she threw the betasselled,
terrible
aegis, all about which Terror hangs like a garland,
And Eris is there, and Battle Strength, and heart-freezing
Onslaught
and thereon is set the head of the grim gigantic Gorgon,
a thing of fear and horror, portent of Zeus of the aegis.
Upon her head she set the golden helm with its four sheets
and two horns, wrought with the fighting men of a hundred
cities.
She set her feet in the blazing chariot and took up a
spear
heavy, huge, thick, wherewith she beats down the
battalions of fighting
men, against whom she of mighty father is angered. (Iliad
5.736ff., tr. Richmond Lattimore)
We may compare the panoply arming the Son on the day he
goes to war in Milton's Book VI:
Over their heads a crystal firmament,
Whereon a sapphire throne, inlaid with
Amber, and colours of the showery arch.
He in celestial Panoply all armed
Of radiant urim, work divinely wrought,
Ascended, at his right hand Victory
Sat, eagle-winged, beside him hung his bow
And quiver with three-bolted thunder stored,
And from about him fierce effusion rolled
Of smoke and bickering flame, and sparkles dire;
Attended with ten thousand saints,
He onward came, far off his coming shone,
And twenty thousand (I their number heard)
Chariots of God, half on each hand were seen: (VI. 757ff)
The phrase “(I their number heard)” is eschatological: it
refers to both the number of the sealed or elect (Rev.
7:4), and the number of angelic destroyers visited on the
nations (Rev. 9:16: “‘Release the four angels bound at the
great river Euphrates.’ So the four angels were
released…to kill a third of mankind. The number of the
troops of cavalry was twice ten thousand times ten
thousand: I heard their number”). The "showery arch"
almost surely comes from Rev. 4:3, but, again,
archetypally, recalls the iconography of the en-charioted
Assyrian with his bow trained on the targeted enemy, as
doubled with the solar disc with the god Asshur armed and
aiming the same way. Genesis 9:13-16 revises this image
or sign in favor of (a seal on) a peace treaty.
The Homeric juggernaut contains two goddesses, one the
wife of the Father-god, the other his daughter. The
Miltonic vehicle is paternal, is ridden by the Son, and
yet the Father is with it too (so VII.587ff). The Homeric
deities go to aid in war, yet also to gain respite for the
Greeks—hence the routing of Ares himself, whose appeal for
Zeus’ pity is rebuffed. The Son goes to end war (warfare
in heaven), and yet he, as much as the goddesses, “beats
down the battalions of fighters, against whom the one of
mighty father is angered.”
If all this is right, then the image of the Miltonic Son
in the chariot of Athena becomes an epiphany of power: the
maiden’s Gorgon-headed shield was instrumental in the
defense of heaven against the attack of the giants, and so
the power is transcendent. Like the four faces of the
cherubimic cohort, the aegis suggests the power to face an
enemy down, and like the chariot it is property of the
Father. In a way, then, it is the armour of
righteousness, though it also the terrible purity of
armaments: one can see this in a related Homeric passage
describing the arms of Agamemnon, with portentous serpents
like rainbows (Iliad 11.25—28), circles and knuckle-like
knobs, a two-horned, four-sheeted helmet, a blank-eyed
gorgon face on a shield—“with her stare of horror, and
fear was inscribed upon it, and Terror” (11.37)—and with
the accompanying thundercrash when Agamemnon puts all this
on. The thunder comes from Hera and Athena, and so we
know that Agamemnon is putting on, as it were, the
chariot-power of maternal deity. But it is especially
Athena’s asexual and intellectual generation that
resembles her to the Son in Milton. Both Athena and the
Son are epiphanies of the Godhead, and hence the image of
the Gorgon is important precisely for its absence. For
the image of the terrible head with its terrible locks
meets us often in Milton’s poetry, and contrasts with the
placable and mild aspect of the Son—an aspect that's no
less an expression of the Father in Milton than the aegis
is in Homer. But the chariot looks like a war-machine to
me, and the Son may be a reincarnation of Cromwell, old
Ironsides, who, proceeding to Ireland, "in warlike
Equipage / Like Guy of Warwick rides, / He hopes t'extract
a Golden-age / Out of his Ironsides" (Mercurius Elenicis,
edited by Milton's compatriot Ralph Josselin, and as cited
in Antonia Frazer's Cromwell).
-- Jim N.
On Wed, 6 Nov 2013 07:16:55 -0500
Kenneth Gross <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> This reminds me that the Israeli military years ago
>developed a mobile,
> tank-based weapons system that was called "Merkabah,"
>Hebrew for "throne,"
> the word traditionally used as a shorthand to describe
>Ezekial's vision of
> God seated on a moving throne with its mystic creatures
>and
> wheels-within-wheels.
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 6:56 AM, David Miller
><[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> The sixteenth century is upon us.
>>
>> This is a story about military equipment that's in the
>>pipeline:
>>
>>
>> http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2013/11/05/iron-man-suit-from-the-silver-screen-to-the-battlefield/
>>
>> The acronym for this equipage is TALOS, for Tactical
>>Assault Light
>> Operator Suit.
>>
>> --
>> David Lee Miller
>> University of South Carolina
>> Columbia, SC 29208
>> (803) 777-4256
>> FAX 777-9064
>> [log in to unmask]
>> Center for Digital Humanities <http://www.cdh.sc.edu/>
>> Faculty Web Page
>><http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/people/pages/miller.html>
>> *Dreams of the Burning Child
>> <http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100865590&CFID=8776879&CFTOKEN=5f96265f3e78e4c1-CD8CDD45-C29B-B0E5-3A132DAF587030F4&jsessionid=8430cfc86f9c780302f52b2158647f227d5dTR>*
>> *A Touch More Rare
>> <http://www.fordhampress.com/detail.html?id=9780823230303>
>>*
>>
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
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