Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 55
As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair;
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Make heaven drowsy with the harmony
-is not mere pretty language, as such things usually are in Shakespeare's
countless imitators. It is a heretical statement, following Bruno's sonnets
and the tradition of Eleanor of Aquitaine, boldly declaring the path of the
lover superior to that of the soldier or the ascetic. As Francis Yates suggests,
it is even possible that Prospero the Magician in The Tempest is also modeled
on Bruno's magico-Hermetic practices, which involved quite a bit of the old
Cathari-Templar-troubadour tradition of sexual occultism.
Ezra Pound, the modern poet who has given the most careful attention to
historical research on the evolution of these notions, explains in somewhat
guarded language (he was writing for the prudish English public in 1933):
They [the troubadours] are opposed to a form of stupidity not limited to
Europe, that is, idiotic asceticism and a belief that the body is evil ...
The senses at first seem to project a few yards beyond the body ... [in] a
decent climate where a man leaves his nerve-set open, or allows it to tune in
to its ambience, rather than struggling, as a northern race has to for
self-preservation, to guard the body from assaults of weather. . . .
He declines, after a time, to limit reception to his solar plexus. The whole
thing has nothing to do with taboos and bigotries. It is more than the simple
athleticism of mens sana in corpore sano. The concept of the body as perfect
instrument of the increasing intelligence pervades. . . .
We appear to have lost the radiant world where one thought cuts
through another with clean edge, a world of moving energies... magnetisisms
that take form, that are seen, or that border the visible, the matter of Dante's paradiso,
the glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror, those
realities perceptible to the sense . . . untouched by the two maladies, the
Hebrew disease, the Hindoo disease, fanaticisms and excess that produce
Savonarola. ... *
John Donne, who may have influenced English romantic poetry almost as
much as Shakespeare, attended Oxford while Bruno was lecturing there
and seems to have picked up some of the Nolan's doctrines. The fact that
Donne's poems often have double and triple meanings, concealed jokes and
Hidden symbolism is a critical commonplace, but this has not usually been
* Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, n.d.) In The Spirit of Romance, with
roore clarity but equal caution, Pound grants that what was involved was a yoga utilizing
the opposite polarities of male and female." De Rougemont in love in the Western World
leaves no doubt that it was classic Tantric yoga, prolonging the sex act into a trance in
which the "souls" or "magnetisms" are, to some degree, visible.