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Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers
Pasquale Morabito
The rose of silence: Violence and
secret in Apuleius Metamorphosis
Email - Profile - Subtheme # 3 - Abstract
Nel giallo de la rosa
sempiterna,
che si dilata ed ingrada
e redole
odor di lode al sol che sempre verna,
qual è colui che tace e dicer vole,
mi trasse Bëatrice, e disse: Mira
quanto
è lconvento de le bianche stole!.
Dante,
Paradiso, XXX
Hen to sophón.
Heraclites
Religion is
tied up to violence as well as to its secret. A secret that is hiding and mystification,
but also mystery and initiation. Secret, silence and mystery are all characters
that cannot be parted from the sacred. These aspects are, traditionally represented through
symbols, that directly postpone to the cults and the rites in their inexpressible
dimension. Among the typical symbols that are reached up to the Christian
tradition by the paganism, the rose is, surely, one of the most meaningful, and
it will be the starting point for a reflection on the archaic themes and on the
consequent operation of demystification
that Christianity operates with respect to the violence hidden by the pagan
cults.
Sub Rosa meant, in the Middle Age, under the secret of confession.
Confessionals used to bear a rose with five petals as an ornament to face out
the sacramental secret.
However, since the Dionysian rites roses were symbol of silence: with
them the participants were crowned to mitigate the effect of wine and to keep
them from saying too much. This esoteric and mysterious character of the flower,
present is in oriental cults is in those of archaic Greece, it is still alive
near the Latin: in the famous initiate path of the Metamorphosis, Apuleius makes Lucio able to complete the
decisive transformation from donkey to proper man when he eats a roses
garland.
Roses ancient meanings and different contents - religious, esoteric,
heraldic, pictorial are referring to what we could define as an iconic
symbol.
As for iconic symbols - Giulio Chiodi writes we can
think about some animals, or vegetables, about masks or recurrent figures of
other nature in varied traditions, often adopted with apotropaic functions, as
an amulet. Iconic symbols are ones of the most considered endowed with clearer
ownership, more implied, independent from use or even from the interpretations
that gives. Among these signs there am some of it, from the cross to the eagle,
from the lion to the dragon, to the rose, to heraldic emblems, that have
achieved consolidated meanings and easily comprehensible to the more, thanks to
rooted cultural customs[1].
Senses and meanings, therefore, in traditions,
cultures, rites, different in time and in space: the effort of this paper is to
discover a recurrent motive around the symbol of the rose.
Two are the plans of reflection and analysis, intersecting inside the
horizon of the investigation: the first one, phenomenological, to attempt
symbols affinities and differences of the in several contexts, spatial and
cultural[2]; the
other, reductionist, to seek the common base, in the meaning of knowledge
given by Heraclites, when he writes: Hen
to sophón.
Symbol of death and regeneration
into the mysteries, the rose is symbol of mystical rebirth near the oriental
religions, assimilated in a living cycle that links all the beings, the animal
world and that vegetable: Its necessary - Mircea Eliade writes - that human
life consumes itself completely to exhaust all the possibilities of creation or
manifestation; if it is brusquely interrupted by a violent death, it tries to
be prolonged under another form: plant, flower, fruit[3].
Roses initiating character (esoteric symbol deriving from the cults of
Isis and Aphrodite), is assumed by the Christianity after the Pentecost. The
advent of the Holy Spirit in the community of the Apostles is also called Pasqua Rosata.
Dantes rose, the symbol of purity and discretion is a shared Christian topos. As shared and recognizable it is
the rose window in Romanic and Gothic churches façades.
One of the traditional invocations to the name of Mary, the mother of
the Saviour, is that of Rosa mystica.
In the Legenda Aurea of Jacopo from Varagine the rose represents the
martyrdom[4].
The colours of white and red dominate the ordinary iconography of the
flower. The white of the purity is accompanied to the red of the blood of the
martyrdom: Dante, almost at the end of his trip in Heaven, will describes so
the martyrs' crown:
In forma dunque di candida rosa
Mi si mostrava la milizia santa
Che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa[5].
The silence of which the rose is sign could be read, in ritual key, as
the cessation of the songs and the dances that precede the sacrifice, of which
the Dionysian party is the celebration and the memory for the community[6].
Anyway, the reference to Dionysus, to the masks of the imitation, to the
transgression of the prohibitions, to the violent indifferentiation re-created
by the rite, as analyzed by René Girard, it situates in immoderate passions and
bestial appetites.
Differences annulment is linked to violence and conflict. The silence
following the sacrifice push us back therefore to the silence probably spreads
after the orgiastic crises, that ritually repeat the mimetic crises of groups
and community.
The apparent festive aspect of a roses garland is transformed shortly
in an accessory of tragic.
The feast that takes a bad fold[7], the
bacchanal - in its tragic representation of the Euripides Bacchants - is the decisive event for the understanding of violent ground
on archaic religions. René Girard writes that archaic and pagan divinities,
well distant from the being games, are funereal. Our epoch would have had to
meditate one of the more striking Heraclites mottos: «... the same God is Hades and Dionysus» (22 Bs Diels-Kranz). Dionysus
is, in short, the same that the hell, the same that Satan, the same that the
death, the same that the lynching. Its the violent mimicry in what has more
destructive[8].
The thaumaturgyc quality of the rose would be therefore nothing but the
ruling mechanism of the inner violence through the rite, in tied up once still
to the human sacrifices. The silence mystifies but together it justifies the
community for killing an innocent victim.
Flowers red colour is referring to the blood of Christ and the martyrs
is placed side by side - as the red of the wine of the bacchanalias recalls the
blood of the sparagmos, the ritual
cutting of victim.
Greek tragedy is the nearest memory[9] of
the ritual murders disregarding, and the silence brings to an anthropological
dimension of the sacred as base of the human culture[10].
Not by chance, near the Greeks, the word truth is express with a-letheia, where the depriving alpha upsets the meaning of lethe, from the verb lantano, what is secret, what is veiled.
Leté, from lethe[11],
it was the river of the terrestrial Heaven - set by Dante on summit of
Purgatory - in which the souls bathed him to forget their sins.
The walk of human community, represented by Greece, is unraveled so in
this continuous search to remove the veil from the silence, to the
forgetfulness that burdens on the innocent victims. The rose, then, sends back
to other archetypical forms, from the wheel, to the spiral, to the labyrinth.
In these figures, as perceived by an expert of genesis of Greek culture
as G. Colli, there is an hidden enigma[12].
The áinigma is, literally,
also a challenge, a trap: it is defined, in fact, griphos, the net[13].
The Greek enigma is to the origin of the western philosophy and points out us
the origin of all of our logical and mental categories, a religious origin
specifically, cultual and not metaphysics[14].
The centre of the enigma, of that labyrinth that is the rose, it is to
seek really in the silence. The centre of all the meanings (...) it is the silence,
the silence of the killed victim, that interrupts the noise of the mimetic
crisis turning it into order[15].
In Baroque
epoch, the Spanish Jesuit Balthasar Gracián, seemed to know this process: in
his allegoric book, the Criticón, it
tells that the donkey of Apuleiuss Metamorphoses
se curò de comer la rosa del silencio[16].
The silence is meant by Gracián as sign of wisdom,
reason and prudence, interpreting in an allegoric way the roses crown eaten by
Lucio during an initiated rite in honour of Isis, thanks to which the
protagonist, from the condition of donkey, becomes a human being.
The footstep is subsequently commented in the chapter
LVI of the Agudeza, from the title About composite acuteness in the pretences,
particularly.
Speaking about metamorphoses and about transformations
in rhetorical and literary figures, the
Spanish Jesuit writes: It is an example of it the gold donkey even if,
not having intended its latent teaching, many have underestimated him,
considering it as a story the old men hand down to their children. In it, the
clever African narrates some similarity among a vicious man, and therefore
foolish, with the more coward of the animals, and although its bestial
appetites and its passions turned it into beast, the wisdom and the silence
symbolized in the rose that he ate, and that really for this the ancient ones
administered to the beginning of a banquet, it will again dictate him human
semblances[17].
This metamorphosis, more than a simple allegorical
reading of the passage, discloses us the anthropological wisdom of art and
political science in XVII century. The ethical and ruling aspect of the rose of the silence is given by the prudentia: for the man that tries to
free him from the passions and from the feral instincts, better a prudent
silence that a hasty judgment.
The silence is interpreted by Gracián as sign of
wisdom, of reason and of prudence, allegorizing the crown of roses thanks to
which the protagonist, from the condition of donkey, the human form will be
brought to.
Baroque art, in
its process of recovery of mythical elements, proposes the silence in a
mournful key, through the representations of the Friday Saint, in the Trauerspiels as in the Autos Sacramentales of the Easter Celebrations[18].
Evidently, the
figure of the donkey postpones the image of the victim in the sacrificial rite
and its double value: first, this figure is represented as a monster, as animal
with bestial appetites; then, it regains a human shape, almost deified.
In Christian
tradition, silence recalls besides those three days when the Christ was closed
in his sepulchre: in fact, the liturgy of the Easter triduum foresees the end of any noise, music, songs, bells. In the
liturgy of the Eastern Church, during those three days of silence, Christ hoes
down to hell to set the dead free, before going to die himself. Fake human
wisdom is transfigured by the silence of Jesus sepulchre and by his sacrifice
on the cross.
As Dante, from that moment the man becomes able to drink from the Lete,
or to eat petals of rose, loosened the enigma. The ancient pagan symbol of the
forgetfulness assumes a different meaning. The man that forgets means in
reality that is God to forget: God doesn't remember anymore the man's sin. I
cancel your misdeeds, for respect to me I don't remember your sins anymore
(Isaia, 43, 25)
Everything is erased, washed by the blood of the last and definitive
sacrifice, as in the verse of the Psalm Miserere
sung by the angels, heard by Dante in the Purgatorys
XXXI canto.
The inexpressible dimension of the secret of the rose turns him into a
song, inexpressible to the point of not an inability to be remembered, neither
written.
Quando fui presso a la beata riva,
Asperges me sì dolcemente udissi,
che nol so rimembrar, non chio lo scriva[19].
Pasquale Morabito
Università
di Messina
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