Lancasters Laughing Place-Spirits
Spirits
The Odyssey by Homer, again Titania is invoked and an insertion is included "What sounds are those that gather from the shores, the voice of nymphs that hound the sylvan bowers, the fair-hair'd dryads of the shady wood, or azure daughters of the silver flood"
While contemplating, John Milton chose these words. "Faeries than famed of old, or fabled since of faerie damsels met in forest wide, by knights of Logres, and of Liones, Lancelot or Pelleas, or Pellenore."
And again in Romances, by D'Isreali "Their port was more than human as they stood; I took it for a faerie vision of same gay creatures of the element, that in the colours of the rainbow live and play i' thi' plighted clouds."
While writing Paradise Lost, John Milton has a dream in which Titania compels him to write and record in his writing the following. (Titania as a name is now a form within itself) "...A wandering fire, compact with unctuous vapour, which the night condenses, and the cold environs round, kindled through agitation to a flame, which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends, hovering and blazing with delusive light, misleads th' amazed night-wanderer from his way to bogs and mires, and oft through pond and pool."
Many more will follow, for thus it has been said - thus it is written, so that our minds may be opened, our hearts unhardened, and our souls lifted to loftier heights into realms where The Keeper will dwell.
Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) lectured on "Mediaeval Prolegomena" ("Introduction to Medievalism") at Oxford University, was a close friend of J.R.R. Tolkien, and an respected Christian academic. Lewis used giants, dwarves and the World Ash Tree from Norse myths, and faerie creatures from the legends his Irish nurse told him as a child. His "dufflepuds" from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader are the sciopodes described in Shakespeare's Othello. Many of the creatures and images in Narnia draw from Aesop's Fables from Ancient Greece, including "The Man and the Satyr" and "The Lion and The Mouse Who Returned a Kindness."
"The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie, broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding of the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams."
Emerson is making reference to these seemingly disparate places in order to make a two-fold illustration. First is that he "will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous” by using the movement of the celestial bodies to conquer them in feeling—the way “Nature satisfies the soulwithout any mixture of corporeal benefit." The sunrise empowers him, “deifies” him.
Secondly, Emerson is using a technique he employs over and again, which is to make reference to as many of his influences as possible in one sentence. Here he moves from antiquity to modernity, from Homer and Plato to Spenser and Shakespeare and then to such philosophers as Johann Fichte. Assyria was a vast, ancient empire, strongest from 730-650 BC, when it controlled the Middle East from Egypt to the Persian Gulf; it was known as Mesopotamia to the Greeks, who worshipped Aphrodite at Paphos, an ancient city they founded on Cyprus. Moving to faerie, he invokes the land inhabited by characters from Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as being a region highly regarded and mythologized by Britons during the Middle Ages. Finally, the reference to Germany as a place of philosophy is a representation of the Idealist theory he later explains. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a student of Kant’s who did not agree with his division of the world into two parts—objective and subjective—developed this theory in the late 1700’s.