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All the same, Aeschylus was killed when the shell of a tortoise was dropped from the claws of an eagle flying high in the air; it fell on his head and split his cranium.
that man who is buried in Rome along the Flaminian Way who laments in his epitaph that he died from a cat-bite on his little finger;
Dog
Philomenes, for whom his servant-boy, having prepared some fresh figs as a first course for his dinner, put them down and went off to fetch the wine; meanwhile an amply balled donkey ambled in and immediately consumed them; Philomenes then arrived and closely noted the graciousness of that figo-phagic beast and said to the servant-boy when he came. back, ‘Reason commands that, since you abandoned these figs to that devout donkey you should also produce for it some of that good wine you have brought in!’ Having uttered those words he became so merry of mind that he burst out into such enormous
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Zeuxis the artist, who suddenly died of laughing while looking at the grimacing portrait of an old woman whom he had painted;]
Rabelais took his ‘kataigides’ (violent winds), ‘thuellai’ (stormy gusts), ‘lailapes’ (whirlwinds) and ‘presteres’ (meteors) straight from Aristotle’s De Mundo, 4, 2, barely Gallicizing them.
‘O! Thrice and four times blessèd are those who plant cabbages. O Fatal Sisters, why did you not spin me the thread of a planter of cabbages?
for they always have one foot on the ground and the other not far above it.
truly blessèd, with far more reason than Pyrrho had, who when in such danger as we are now, and seeing a pig near the shore which was eating some scattered barley, pronounced it most blessèd in two respects: namely, that it had barley in plenty and, moreover, was on the shore.
Nullus sum (I am nought) is an adage of Erasmus (I, III, XLIV), where we are told that it is an hyperbole found in Euripides and Plato and used when one is in danger of perishing.]
the Lord’s Frayer.
The Lord’s Fryer, cause It loves chips
The basic authority is I Corinthians 3:9: ‘We are workers together with the Lord’. In the Vulgate Latin we are God’s ‘helpers’ (adjutores); Erasmus and others insisted that ‘synergism’ entails ‘cooperators’, or ‘workers together’ not ‘helpers’. (God, being almighty, needs no help but by allowing human beings to cooperate with him he bestows on them the dignity of causality.) Such synergism forms the very stuff of the moral laughter in Rabelais.
Byre Leddy, I used to think in my Land-of-Thought that they were immortal like angels fair.
Rabelais is now ‘however’ to retell not a tale but an histoire, an historical event: the death of Pan vouched for by Plutarch’s professor of grammar, Epitherses. If that god Pan really did die in the sense of his soul’s having been snuffed out, then even the higher souls are mortal and come eventually to an end. But with a second ‘however’ Pantagruel will proceed to unveil the hidden truth. By inserting the word ‘god’ into his text – ‘the great god Pan is dead’ – Pantagruel opens the way for what is for Christians the only God truly to die, Jesus, and his death is no snuffing out into
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Once again Rabelais applies to Christ the title the Most-good, Most-great God, the old title of Jupiter definitively adopted by Christians for God the Father.
‘Tapinois’ means dissimulation, hypocrisy. ‘Quarêmeprenant’ is for many the three days before Ash Wednesday but for Rabelais he is the personification of Lent (Carême). He is a bleak, unnatural figure who traditionally defeats fat and festive Mardi Gras.
The followers of Mardi Gras were, and still ought to be, allies of pantagruelism. Glum Lent is the enemy.
‘You’ll find nothing for your pot,’ he said, ‘but a great swallower of dried peas, a great champer of snails, a great catcher of moles, a great trusser-up of hay, a semi-giant with a mangy beard and a double tonsure, of the Lanternland breed, a great lantern-lecher, the banner-bearer of the Ichthyophagi, a dictator of Mustardland, a beater of little boys, a burner of ashes, a father and enricher of physicians, one who abounds in pardons and indulgences (and church-visits to gain them) – a fine man, a good Catholic and of great devotion! He weeps three-quarters of the time and is never found at
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a brain which, in size, colour, substance and potency is like the left testicle of a male tick;
the spermatic cords, like a puff-pastry-cake; – the prostate, like a barrel of feathers; – the bladder, like a catapult;
– the muscles, like a bellows; – the tendons, like a falconer’s glove; – the ligaments, like a money-bag; – the bones, like cream buns; – the marrow, like a beggar’s wallet; – the cartilages, like a tortoise from the moorlands of Languedoc;
– the animal spirits, like a rain of heavy punches;
the memory which he had was like a game-bag; – his common-sense, like a droning; – his imagination, like a ring of bells; – his thoughts, like a murmuration of starlings; – his conscience, like a sedge of young herons leaving the nest; – his deliberations, like a bag of barley;
his enterprises, like the ballast of a galleon; – his understanding, like a tattered breviary; – his intellect, like snails slithering out of a bed of strawberries; – his will, like three walnuts in a bowl; – his desires, like six bales of holy-hay; – his judgement, like a shoe-horn; – his discernment, like a mitten; – his reason, like a cushion-stool.’
– an arsehole, like a crystalline looking-glass;
‘He used his fist as a mallet; he also wrote prognostications and almanacs on ill-scraped parchment using his heavy writing-case.’
Nostradamus
‘There indeed is a strange and monstrous carcass of a man,’ said Pantagruel, ‘if man he should be called. ‘But you have recalled to my mind the forms and figures of Amodunt and Discordance.’ ‘What forms did they have?’ asked Frère Jean. ‘God forgive me, but I’ve never heard of them.’
Henry Cornelius Agrippa had published a Disputable Opinion suggesting that the serpent which tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden was in fact Adam’s penis.]
the Tempter was a Chidling called Ithyphallus, into whom, long ago, was transformed good Messer Priapus, that great tempter of women in gardens (called paradises in Greek
Melusina, their original foundress, had the body of a female down to her prick-wallet and that all the rest below was either a serpentine Chidling or a chidlingesque Serpent. Yet she had a fine and gallant step, still imitated today by Breton dancers when performing their tuneful floral-dances.
Ora, the Scythian nymph, similarly had a body which was partly woman, partly Chidling, yet she appeared so fair to Jupiter that he lay with her and produced a handsome son called Colaxes.
Phoenicopters are flamingos, called flamants in Languegoth (that is in the Languedoc tongue which Rabelais again assimilates to a kind of Gothic).
Rabelais exploits two adages of Erasmus: ‘YΣ ΑΘΗΝΑΝ (Hys Athenan), A Pig [teaching] Minerva’. That adage (I, I, XL) is to be read together with the one which follows it (I, I, XL, ‘A pig undertakes to fight Minerva’). Both were well known, meaning ‘To teach your grandmother how to suck eggs’.
‘La Reine Pédauque’, the Goose-footed Queen, is above all associated with Toulouse (as in the tale of Anatole France). Her toes were webbed.]
They all die of hydropic gaseous extension of the abdomen, the men, farting, the women gently breaking wind, so that their souls leave via their bums.
cock a snook
Swink.
Toil
The devil, upon seeing that monstrous solution of continuity in all its dimensions, exclaimed, ‘Mahoun! Demiourgon! Megaera! Alecto! Persephone! He’s not getting hold of me! I’m running away double quick! Selah! I quit the field.’
For he does have bollocks, the Holy Father. We find that in our beautiful Decretals. Otherwise he could never be pope. So there follows this necessary consequence in the subtleties of Decretaline philosophy: “He is a pope: therefore he has bollocks.” When this world runs out of bollocks this world will run out of popes.’
that very special privileged ecstasy by which Saint Paul was caught up to the Third Heaven (II Corinthians 12:2).
Third heaven is a branch of the Tree
And yet the Decretals are neither willingly learnt nor acknowledged by those devils of heretics. So burn ’em, claw ’em, lop ’em, drown ’em, hang ’em, skewer ’em, bash ’em, rip ’em apart, gut ’em, carve ’em, fry ’em, roast ’em, chop ’em, crucify ’em, boil ’em, broil ’em, quarter ’em, squash ’em, tear ’em limb from limb and grill ’em: wicked heretics, decretalifugitives, decretalicides – worse than homicides, worse than parricides – the devil’s own decretali-slaughterers.
O, good my God, whom I adore yet have never seen, open for us, by special grace – at least in the article of death – the most sacred treasure of Holy Church, our Mother, of which thou art the Protector, Guardian, Custodian, Administrator and Distributor.
Goddess First
With the word ‘catastrophe’, already taken from Erasmus, Rabelais again emphasizes the dramatic, farcical conception of these chapters.
It may be relevant that Plutarch states that the Pythagoreans called the equilateral triangle Minerva, that is, Athene, the goddess of Wisdom, and so a powerful symbol for the source of the Christian truths revealed in this episode (On Isis and Osiris, 381 F). Cf. the flying pig in Chapter 41
Some of those ‘Words of Truth’ drip down on to this world ‘like catarrh’ (a comparison taken over from the end of the Cratylus). A scriptural example of such a dripping of divine Truth into this world is the account of Gideon’s fleece (Judges 6: taken by many to foretell the fecundation of the Virgin Mary). The key lies in the last words of the Risen Lord at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel: ‘I am with you always, even until the consummation of the Age.’
Truth snot?
‘I have read that a philosopher named Petron was of the opinion that there are several worlds so touching each other as to form an equilateral triangle at the core and centre of which lay, he said, the Manor of Truth, wherein dwell the Words, the Ideas, the exemplars and portraits of all things, past and future. ‘And around them lies the Age. ‘And during certain years, at long intervals, part of them drops down like catarrh on to human beings and as the dew fell upon Gideon’s fleece, whilst part of them remains where they are, kept until the consummation of the Age.
Sap from the Tree
after the Thracian women had ripped Orpheus to pieces, they hurled his head and his lyre into the river Hebrus, which swept them down into the Black Sea as far as the isle of Lesbos, ever floating together upon the waters.
And from that head there continually poured forth a mournful song seemingly lamenting the death of Orpheus, whilst, with that song, strokes from the winding winds made the chords accord.
The whole world is taken up with serving him; the whole world toils for him. And in return this is the good he does for the world: he invents all the arts, all the tools, all the skills, all the instruments, all the crafts. He even teaches brute beasts arts denied them by Nature: ravens, jays, parrots and starlings he turns into poets; and magpies into poetesses, teaching them to talk, to sing and to utter human speech.
Gaster
he recently invented canons, serpentines, culverins, bombards and basilisks which, by means of an horrific compound of powder, can project cannon-balls of iron, bronze and lead weighing more than great anvils, at which Nature herself was aghast, confessing herself beaten by Art,
For Pythagoras cf. Erasmus, within adage I, I, II, and for the obscurity of the numbers of Pythagoras see adage III, VI, XXXII, ‘More obscure than Platonic numbers’ (which is also important for Pythagoras).
