Gargantua and Pantagruel

by François Rabelais

Diogenes was in his day a philosopher in a thousand, excellent and full of fun.

the golden bough sacred to the goddess of the Underworld and so highly celebrated by Virgil.

‘But,’ Pantagruel asked, ‘when will you be out of debt?’ ‘At the Greek Kalends,’ Panurge replied, ‘when all the world is happy and when you can inherit from yourself!

If you estimate the perfection of debtors from the multitude of their lenders you will not go wrong in applied mathematics.

the mountain of the heroic virtues described by Hesiod – I got top marks for him in my degree – consisted of debts, to which all human beings are seen to aim and aspire but few can climb because of the ruggedness of the path.

The Sun would never shine on their Earth: the heavenly bodies would pour no good influences down upon it, since that Earth refrained from lending them food in the form of mists and vapours by which they are fed (as Heraclitus stated, the Stoics proved and Cicero affirmed).

Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium remains a template of the ideas which he abuses. So do the standard medical notions of those who follow Plato, Aristotle and Avicenna (rather than always following Galen) of how food is digested and eventually refined into the ‘animal spirits’ (the spirits of the anima, the soul). The ‘rete mirabile’ is a supposed plexus of blood-vessels in the cranium at the end of the carotid artery. It refined the animal spirits. Rabelais holds to its existence, although Vesalius proved that it does not exist in Man.

Now life consists in blood. Blood is the seat of the soul. That is why one single task weighs down upon this microcosm: continually to forge blood. And in that forging all its members are in their proper roles, their hierarchy being such that each borrows from the other, each lends to the other. The material – the substance – proper to be transmuted into blood is supplied by Nature: bread and wine.

Apollonius of Tyana claimed to have encountered the Plague personified: he found her horrifying.]

entrust my epitaph to you. And I shall die, all peacefully pickled in farts.

‘When, with the succession of the Age of Iron – the Reign of Jupiter – there came an increase in wickedness between human beings, the earth began to bring forth nettles, thistles, thorns and other forms of revolt against Man on the part of vegetable life, and virtually all the animals, for their part, became fatally disposed to emancipate themselves from him and quietly conspired no longer to slave for him and no longer to obey him insofar as they could resist him, rather doing him harm according to their abilities and powers. ‘Man therefore, desiring to maintain his original privileges and to prolong his original domination, and not being able easily to forego the servitude of many of the beasts, found it necessary to don some novel armour.’

‘Reflect,’ said Panurge, ‘how Nature inspired man to arm himself and which part of his body he first protected with armour. It was, by God’s virtue, the balls. Sir Priapus, once he had done, Begged her no more, for he had won.

That is witnessed to by Moses, the Hebrew Captain and philosopher, who affirms that Man protected himself with a glorious and gallant codpiece, made – a most beautiful device! – from fig-leaves, which are in every way suited and naturally appropriate (by their strength, serrations, curl, sheen, size, colour, odour, quality and capacity) to the covering and protecting of balls (save only those horrifying balls of Lorraine which gallop unbridled down into the hose, loathing the mansion of proud codpieces and knowing nothing of good order: witness Viardière, that noble ‘King’ Valentin of Mardi Gras, whom I came across in Nancy one May-day when, in the name of elegance, he was scrubbing his balls spread out on a table in the manner of a Spanish cloak).

That is what moved the gallant Claudius Galen (in Book One of On Semen) boldly to conclude that it would be better to have no heart than no testicles – by better meaning less bad

And for less than a hundred francs I would believe that such were the very stones by which Deucalion and Pyrrha renewed the human race which had been wiped out by the [poetic] Flood. That is what moved the courageous Justinian (in Book 4 of On the Removal of Hypocrites) to locate the summum bonum in breeches and codpieces.

The following lines about her are written in the Third Book of The Maidens’ Chiabrena: She saw her husband dear his armour don, Save for the codpiece: he on battle bent. ‘I am afraid,’ said she, ‘It may get dent! ‘That part I love the best put something on!’ What! For such words should she be set upon? No, no, I say: she was concerned for it, Afraid of harm for that which she did long: That goodly part, her nicest tasty bit.

[The erudition displayed in this chapter and the quotations – including the additions of 1552 – derive from a treatise, On Nobility by André Tiraqueau, the legal authority who had been a friend of Rabelais from his early days as a Franciscan at Fontenay-le-Comte.

Well might he metamorphose himself hundreds of times into a swan, bull, satyr, shower of gold, cuckoo (as he did when he deflowered Juno, his sister), into an eagle, ram, [pigeon, as he did when in love with that maiden Phthia who dwelt in Aegia,] fire, snake, even indeed a flea, into the atoms of Epicurus or, like a Magister Noster, into second intentions: I’ll nab ’im with me ’ook.’

the great prophet Proteus never predicted future events when he was transformed and disguised as fire, water, tiger, dragon or with any other strange mask,

‘Palingenesy’ is a Stoic term for the restoration of the body after its dissolution. Augustine uses it in the City of God (22, 28) to mean rebirth.

read that long ago the truest and surest oracles were not those delivered in writing or uttered in words. Even people who were considered discriminating and intelligent were many a time misled over them, partly on account of the ambiguities, amphiboles and obscurities in the words, partly because of the terseness of the judgements. That is why Apollo, the god of divination, was called Loxias (‘oblique’) in Greek. Oracles expounded by [gestures and] signs were deemed truest and surest. Such was the opinion of Heraclitus.

Apollo prophesy amongst the Assyrians, which is why they portrayed Apollo with a long beard, as a venerable old person of settled wisdom, not naked, young and beardless as portrayed by the Greeks.

[It is Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedo, 85 AB, who teaches that dying poets may be divinely inspired and therefore prophetic.

‘The great prophet Tiresias,’ replied Epistemon ‘made similar avowals at the beginning of all his divinations, stating clearly to all who came to consult him: “What I say will either happen, or not happen at all.” And such is the way of all wise prognosticators.’

‘He is, by God’s might, an heretic. I mean a formed heretic, a scabby heretic, an heretic as burnable as a pretty little clock.11 His mole is off to thirty thousand wagon-loads of devils. Know where? Golly, right under the close-stool of Proserpine, my friend, right inside that hellish basin where she discharges the faecal products of her clysters, to the left side of the Great Cauldron, six yards from the claws of Lucifer in the direction of Demogorgon.12 Ugh. Nasty specimen!’

I can hear them squabbling and having a devil of a quarrel amongst themselves over which will slurp up that Raminagrobitical soul and which will be the first to bring it to Lucifer’s lips straight from the spit.

Picatrix, the Reverend Father-in-the-Devil, the Rector of the Faculty of Diabolology,

according to the true diabolology of Toledo, devils cannot actually die from sword-cuts, but I maintain, following the aforesaid diabolology, that they can suffer a dissolution of continuity, as when you slash with your brackmard through a burning flame or a thick veil of smoke. And when they feel that dissolution they make a devil of a shriek since it is devilishly painful.

‘When you see the shock of two armies, do you think, do you believe, gross bollock, that the great and horrifying din that you hear comes only from the voices of men, the ring of armour, the clatter of the bards of the war-horses, the thud of maces, the clash of pikes, the shattering of lances, the cries of the wounded, the sound of the tabor and trumpet, the whinnying of horses and the thunder of blunderbuss and cannon? That counts for something, I admit. But the most terrifying din and the principal uproar arises from the anguished howls of the devils, who, lying in wait in that confused garboil, receive chance blows from swords and suffer ruptures in the continuity of their substances, which are both aerial and invisible. It is as when the chef, Master Grubby, gives a rap over the knuckles to scullery-boys munching rashers from the spit. Then they howl and ululate like devils, as did Mars when he was wounded by Diomedes before Troy: Homer says that he yelled at a higher pitch and with more terrifying shrieks than ten thousand men put together.

The ‘Motor Intelligences’ are moral and spiritual beings who guide the heavenly bodies and may show their approval of spiritual men and women.

The legal phrase ‘the dice of judgement’, used here in its usual, metaphorical sense, is soon to be developed in unexpected ways.]

the accomplishments of each one in his vocation (which are far beyond the dice of judgement)

lightning never burns or breaks anything but hard, solid, resistant substances and never strikes anything soft, hollow or yielding (burning the steel blade without harming the velvet scabbard, and destroying the bones in a body without touching the flesh which covers them)

Solomon says that ‘the number of fools is infinite’ in Ecclesiastes 1: 15. Avicenna says that ‘the species of madness are infinite’ (Canon: Fen I, cap. 14, doc. xix. Tertii).

No wonder, then, if he, coming across the lecher, abetted by his mystagogue,41 suborning his daughter and ravishing her from his home, can and must – even if she be consenting – put both men to a dishonourable death and cast out their corpses to be ripped apart by wild beasts as being unworthy of sepulchre (as we term that sweet, desired and ultimate embrace of Earth, our great nursing mother).

‘Passer-over-Perilous-Ways’ was the name which Jean Bouchet gave himself. Bouchet was a moralizing poet and a long-time friend of Rabelais. They exchanged poems, which Bouchet printed.

Saffron comes from the crocus, which was named after the lover Crocus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 4, 283.]

ferocious Juno when she interlocked her fingers, heckle-shaped, to impede the birth of Hercules from Alcmene his mother)

others from the metamorphoses of men and women with similar names, as daphne (that is, the laurel) from Daphne; myrtle, from Myrsine; pitys – pine – from Pitys; cinara (that is, the artichoke); narcissus, saffron, smilax and so on;

he was delivered during a period of thirst, just when that plant is harvested and the Dog star of Icarus bays at the Sun, turning folk into troglodytes, constrained to live in cellars and underground shelters.

sacred plant such as verbena (which is revered by the happy and unhappy souls of the dead)

the fire will burn the body through the pantagruelion and reduce its flesh and bones to ashes; as for the pantagruelion itself, it will not only not be consumed in the fire, it will lose not one single atom of the ashes enclosed within it; and you will get with it not one single atom of the ashes of the pyre, whilst the pantagruelion itself will eventually emerge from the fire fairer, whiter, cleaner than when you cast it in. That is why it is called asbestos. You will find quantities of it going cheap in Carpasium and in the lands about Syene. O, what a great and marvellous thing it is! Fire, which devours all, wastes all, consumes all, uniquely cleans, purges and whitens that asbestine pantagruelion from Carpasium.45

[Rabelais cites the ancient Roman legal formulas Do – Dico – Addico (I give – I say – I adjudicate) as though they were in the second person: ‘You give – You say – You adjudicate’. This makes nonsense of those august formulaic utterances by which the Praetor, on auspicious days, solemnly authorized judgement to be done: Do judicem (I appoint the judge) dico jus (I state the case of the plaintiff) and addico litem (I hand over the cause to the magistrate to judge).

Near the cross of Malchara a battle so savage was joined that is horrifying merely to think of it. It ended with the magpies losing the battle: on the field were cruelly slain jays up to the number of 2589362109, not counting the women and children (that is, as you realize, not counting the female magpies and the little magpielets).

As in the Bible, the dead males are the only ones counted

I presume they were some monstrous species of barbarous beasts dating from the days when men’s bonnets were tall (a species now naturally extinct, since all things sublunary have their end and period, and we cannot know how those words were defined: as you realize, once an object has perished its name quickly perishes too).

All things have their time

It is as though one were to make bread mean a stone; fish, a serpent; egg, a scorpion.

Luke

‘Who the devil is it down there howling so horribly?’ asked Jupiter. ‘By the might of the Styx! were we not and are we not still sufficiently encumbered with decisions about controversial and weighty affairs? Have we not voided the dispute between Prester John, the king of the Persians, and Soliman the Sultan, the emperor of Constantinople?

You sweated under the strain; it was from your sweat falling upon the Earth that round-headed cabbages were born. All

Najinski

Tohu bohu is the Hebrew term for chaos in Genesis 1:2.

an adage of Erasmus: I, V, LXIV, ‘What if the sky were to fall?’