Gods, Ghosts, and Shelley’s ‘Atheos’

Pointing to the persistence in the Romantic Enlightenment of even the minor pagan gods, the essay focuses on the function of the genius loci in Shelley's 'Mont Blanc', both its subtle presence and its ghostly, quasi-theophanic intervention at the end of stanza 2. Shelley uses features of the 'Great Ode' to express his own type of religious feeling in the face of the sublime of Nature, while making of Mt Blanc a counter-Sinai. Though close to trance, he rejects the traditional response of abjection and affirms 'my own, my human mind' in a poem that is a remarkable instance of the transformed minor genre of the nature inscription and deepens our understanding of his atheism as a refusal to name the unknown power he acknowledges. Why did even the minor Classical deities retain for so long their hold on the god-making process, the theopoesis of European poetry? Why would the great Romantic poets not allow these mythical figures—often just decorative names—to 'slumber, and die in autumn umber', as Wallace Stevens mock ingly suggested more than a century later in 'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction'? Paganism permitted a deus multitude>, also in the form of a huge and variable mesocosm of semi-divine beings. 'The death of one god is the death of all' Stevens intoned. But that proved not to be the case. The theme itself of the death of God, or the twilight of the gods, attracted, in all its pathos, Continental European poetry. Not only were 'Ossian' and the non-Classical 'Northern Antiquities' very influential, not only did Shelley's Prometheus Unbound rewrite a Greek tragedy dealing exclusively with gods and lesser divinities as its on-stage protagonists, while Keats in England took up the twilight of the gods in his two Hyperion fragments,1 but the fanciful mesocosm I have men tioned, joined to folklore, gained a new and multiple infusion of life.2 I am initially interested here in the survival of this mesocosm, or lesser species of supernatural figures. By the time of the Romantic Enlightenment an airy, earthy, fiery, watery pantheon (or pandemonium) of 'middle spirits' was readily available, free of any but poetic censure, free also to be newly Literature & Theology © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press 2010; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: joumals.permissions@oxfordjoumals.org I The Author 2010. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 06:00:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms GODS, GHOSTS, AND SHELLEY'S 'ATHEOS' 5 minted or augmented. Middle spirits are multitudinous minor deities, as immortal or mortal as their function; and that depends on the element or person with which they form a bond. Ghostly agents, they can be likened to good or bad angels, whether of Oriental or Classical/Pagan origin. They are beings often with fixed character or mission, except we may not always be certain about their trust-worthiness, provenance, shape, sex, or even longev ity. Named the 'machinery' for their literary usefulness3 or perhaps after the notion of deus ex machina, they include the elemental nature spirits of Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner' as well as post-Spenserian giants and faeries exploited, for example, by Blake, but also largely dismissed by him at the end of Vala's 'Night the Ninth'. Middle spirits are often merely inflated allegorical personifications. They tend to be as rampant as cherubs or cupids, from medieval Romances to Pope's 'Rape of the Lock'. They were contemptuously denounced by Coleridge as 'godkins and godesslings'. Yet, we cannot bad-mouth them when they are used as aptly as in Shelley's Adonais, where Keats's orphaned dreams and thoughts are personified in pastoral-elegiac terms as a flock of 'Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations' mourning their dead poet.4 And while Coleridge's verse, like Wordsworth's, usually shuns such leftover daimons, especially in their decorative neoclassical and vers de societe usage—Wordsworth, indeed, formally banished them (for a time) as belong ing to an otiose 'Poetic Diction',5—the 'Ancient Mariner' retrieves something of their deeply human, sensory and imaginative rationale. So, starting with the epigraph quoting Thomas Bumet, that there are more invisible than visible beings in the universe, to viewing the Albatross as the emissary of the Polar Spirit (a guardian genius loci), and creating an uncanny sense of the danger of trespass in this poem's heterocosm—from such effects a polytheistic crime and punishment nightmare unfurls in 'The Ancient Mariner'. The crime committed is, basically, against the genius loci, its hos pitality. The fit punishment, therefore, is homelessness: eternal, restless wandering. One mythic poetic notion that outlives the Christian expurgation of pagan ism, is 'genius' as a daimon bonding with person or place, and marking specific spots as a source of inspiration or revelation. Such genii were a kind of soul, a special sensitivity or consciousness assigned, possibly via the stars, to inani mate as well as animate beings. Genii were also associated with the marriage bed—with fertility—and probably through that with creativity. Indeed, the 'parting Genius', which Milton (adapting Plutarch) depicted lamenting as it fled its haunts on the morning of Christ's nativity, never really This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 06:00:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms