A One-footed or One-Legged American God

Guest post by John M. J. Gretchko 

 

From the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer via Mexicolore

A One-footed or One-legged American God 

Herman Melville explored the mythologies of many nations, from India to Egypt to classical Greece and Rome. Would he have ignored North American mythology? Chapter 36 “The Quarter-deck” of Moby-Dick suggests he may have significantly dabbled in it. 

Melville writes of Ahab: 

“Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints--the foot-prints of his one unsleeping ever-pacing thought” 

-- Moby-Dick Northwestern-Newberry Edition page 160. 

True, these metaphorical footprints on Ahab's forehead are not real---or are they? In the ancient lore of North Americans, footprints, appearing on the bodies of figures, symbolized the invisible presence of Tezcatlipoca, the chief god of the Toltecs or the Aztecs (Séjourné, Burning Water pages 174-6). This was the Lord of the Smoking Mirror, often depicted with one good leg and with the other missing a foot or a leg bitten off above the knee by Cipactli, the Aztec sea monster. 

Cipactli was a crocodile, or according to the American Researches of Alexander von Humboldt, a whale with a horn in his forehead (Volume 1 page 338). Cipactli was tempted to the surface when the god used his foot as bait (Burland and Forman, Feathered Serpent and Smoking Mirror page 55). Tezcatlipoca in place of his torn appendage bore a mirror. Would the medallion-shaped tablet on the upper part of Ahab’s ivory leg be comparable? 

The grandiose work, Antiquities of Mexico (1831-48) by Lord Kingsborough in nine monstrous volumes, each a labor to lift, holds drawings of this one-footed god from the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, shown with an amputated right foot or leg. The Literary World of 7 April 1849 discloses that the Astor Library had acquired all nine volumes. Unfortunately Tezcatlipoca is not so identified in the text of Antiquities, nor do these volumes tell his story.

Today, images of Kingsborough's facsimile Codex Fejérváry-Mayer are accessible via The British Museum

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am1902-0111-1 is accessible 

The manuscript Codex is held by the World Museum Liverpool.

Although the name of the god is certainly not a household word, it was not unfamiliar in Melville’s day, having appeared as early as the sixteenth century in José de Acosta’s writings, later translated by Samuel Purchas. 

Comical wordplay involving the Captain's performance of a "feat" on foot occurs later in The Quarter-Deck when Stubb whispers punningly “that Ahab must have summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat.” As overheard by Ishmael, Stubb makes an awfully good pun in reference to Ahab’s pacing on deck. 

In chapter 19 The Prophet, Elijah calls Ahab "Old Thunder." In the "Quarter-Deck" chapter, Ahab “looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up” (Northwestern-Newberry Edition page 161). In chapter 119, “The Candles,” Starbuck, amidst the thunder and lightning of an approaching typhoon and in “profound darkness,” hears a voice by his side and asks “Who’s there?” Ahab replies “Old Thunder” (Northwestern-Newberry Edition page 505). Apparently, Ahab speaks of himself. Then in chapter 124, “The Needle,” Ahab notices that his compasses are misreading: “I have it! It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night’s thunder turned our compasses—that’s all” (N-N page 517). Here when Ahab says “thunder,” he means “lightning.” But this was accepted usage. Both Webster’s 1841 American Dictionary and John Ogilvie’s Comprehensive English Dictionary (London, 1864) in second definitions state: 

“Thunder is used for lightning, or for a thunder-bolt, either originally through ignorance, or by way of metaphor, or because the lightning and thunder are closely united.”

Figuratively speaking, is Ahab thunder or lightning or both? 

Back in chapter 36, with a storm approaching, Ahab warns, “Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck” (N-N page 164). Is Ahab alluding also to himself, as a metaphoric hurricane? Could the image of one sapling metaphorically represent or suggest a leg? 

Tezcatlipoca is a first rate atmospheric god and rules all weather conditions, as the popular writer Lewis Spence observed one hundred years ago in The Gods of Mexico, pages 113 and 115. Others have noted that Tezcatlipoca resembles and may be identical with the Mesoamerican Mayan god, Huracan (Guilhem Olivier, Mockeries and Metamorphoses page 106). In Melville's century lexicographers derived the word hurricane "from the Indian word hurica, which signifies the devil."

As paraphrased by Dennis Tedlock, Eva Hunt on page 242 in The Transformation of the Hummingbird (Cornell University Press, 1977) depicts Hurakan as

"both one-legged and a causer of hurricanes."

According to Hunt and others, the Mayan name Hurakan literally means "one-legged." 

Did Melville fashion the "ungodly, god-like" Ahab with Tezcatlipoca in mind? 

Works Cited

Burland, C. A. and Werner Forman. Feathered Serpent and Smoking Mirror. New York: Putnam, 1975.

Humboldt, Alexander von. Researches Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America. Trans. Helen Maria Williams. 2 vols. London, 1814.

Kingsborough, Edward King, Viscount. Antiquities of Mexico: comprising fac-similes of ancient Mexican paintings and hieroglyphics. 9 vols. London, 1833-48.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. Edited by Harrison Hayford,  Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Volume 6 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988.

Olivier, Guilhem. Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God:Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror.” Trans. Michel Besson. Boulder: U P of Colorado, 2008.

Séjorné, Laurette. Burning Water: Thought and Religion in Mexico. Translated by Irene Nicholson. Berkeley: Shambala, 1976.

Spence, Lewis. The Gods of Mexico. London: Unwin, 1923.

Tedlock, Dennis, translator and commentator. Popul Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. Revised edition. New York: Touchstone, 1996.

Gansevoort Melville in Richmond, Virginia--dining with Calhoun, Lamar, and Thomas Ritchie

J. C. Calhoun via NYPL Digital Collections

The developing story here is Thomas Ritchie, "Democratic editor of the Richmond Enquirer from 1804 to 1845, and of the Washington Daily Union from 1845 until 1851." As indicated in the Melvilliana post on Favorable Melville notices, old Ritchie's sons Thomas Ritchie, Jr. and William Foushee Ritchie succeeded their father in the editorship of the Richmond Enquirer. While I break to savor Carl R. Osthaus's chapter on The Editorial Career of Thomas Ritchie in Partisans of the Southern Press, go ahead and enjoy this item placing Gansevoort (with Ritchie, as evident from the New York Herald letter from "John Jones," also quoted below) in the company of John Caldwell Calhoun and General Lamar (Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar).

In March 1845 Calhoun was passing through Richmond on his way home to South Carolina, staying at the Exchange Hotel. While in Richmond he invited Gansevoort Melville and Lamar for dinner, a more private affair in lieu of the grand public dinner which he formally declined. Calhoun had just completed his year-long service as Secretary of State. Gansevoort's younger brother Herman was close to starting his first book, Typee (1846). In his third book Mardi (1849) Herman would lampoon Calhoun as the cadaverous politician Nulli. In Subversive Genealogy, Michael Paul Rogin finds in the pro-slavery politics of Calhoun a model for Ahab's monomania.

Image Credit: World of Edgar Allan Poe

Gansevoort's dinner with Ritchie, Calhoun, and Lamar at the Exchange Hotel in Richmond took place on Wednesday, March 12, 1845. From the Richmond Enquirer, March 17, 1845:

MR. CALHOUN.

The distinguished and retiring statesman—“retiring from the field of his fame”—(as the first toast in his honor called him)—had a small but agreeable dinner with a few of his friends on Wednesday last, and declined the honor of a public dinner, as the following correspondence shows. There were at the table, as guests, General Lamar of Texas, Gansevoort Mellville, Esq., of New York, the eloquent and accomplished champion who distinguished himself at various points of the late campaign, &c, &c. Mr. Calhoun is rapidly improving in his health, and is returning from Washington with the most liberal feelings towards the present Administration. He left Richmond on Thursday, having been waited upon by several persons.  --Richmond [Virginia] Enquirer, Monday, March 17, 1845; found in the online Newspaper Archives at Genealogy Bank.

Portrait of General Mirabeau B. Lamar / Image Credit:
Texas State Library and Archives Commission

As noted in the Melvilliana post Tall after all,

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2012/05/tall-after-all-gansevoort-melville-tall.html

Gansevoort's presence in Richmond is happily confirmed by correspondent "John Jones" in a letter to the editor of the New York Weekly Herald, dated March 13, 1845 and published March 15, 1845:

"Mr. Melville, the tall democratic spouter, par excellence, from your city, is also here, probably looking up political influence for some valuable appointment for services rendered. Should he be disappointed, it would be a pity, as he is pretty much of the opinion, I understand, that Mr. Polk could not have been elected had it not been for his disinterested exertions during the canvass—Nous verrons."

In the first part of his letter to the Herald editor, John Jones reveals a bit more about the dinner for Calhoun. The presiding "Napoleon of the press" is Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Richmond Enquirer:

DEAR BENNETT—
What can I communicate, that can possibly interest the readers of the Herald, from this dull quarter of the globe, except mere matter of fact? I will attempt to give you a few items, by way of killing an hour.

First. Mr. Caloun created a little stir among his friends here, by staying over one day on his way South, which was taken advantage of by giving him a private and recherché dinner, at the Exchange, by about twenty of his most ardent friends, the Napoleon of the press in these “diggings” being invited to preside, with Mr. Calhoun on his right, and Gerneral Lamar (of Texas) on his left. Some excellent toasts and sentiments were given, and the party separated at an early hour, to attend a select party at R. G. Scott’s, where the evening was spent in the most convivial manner by a set of as choice spirits as can well be congregated together in this region.   

--New York Weekly Herald, March 15, 1845

Thomas Ritchie
via The Library of Virginia

It's unthinkable that Gansevoort did not make one of those eloquent toasts to Calhoun. Ooh that would be fun to find in a Richmond paper.

UPDATE: No toasts located so far, but I did find news of Calhoun's informal dinner with friends at the Exchange Hotel, published in the Richmond Enquirer on the day after:

Richmond Enquirer, March 13, 1845

William & Mary, Earl Gregg Swem Library, Special Collections Database lists two letters from Gansevoort in London to Thomas Ritchie, filed with the Ritchie-Harrison Papers. In Gansevoort Melville's 1846 London Journal, ed. Hershel Parker, Gansevoort mentions his writing to Ritchie on January 3, 1846. As he regularly did for friends and family, Gansevoort also sent newspapers to Ritchie in February and early March 1846. Parker correctly identifies Ritchie as editor of the Washington Union without noting Ritchie's ties to Richmond.

First American Edition of Mardi by Herman Melville
Owned by Thomas Ritchie (1778-1854), with his signature
19th Century Rare Book & Photograph Shop

NO! in thunder

What did Melville mean when he proclaimed that Nathaniel "says No! in thunder"? To Hawthorne himself Melville wrote that, in one of those long loving endlessly quoted letters from Arrowhead to Lenox:

• https://books.google.com/books?id=OLg5AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA388&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

Without a second thought I always took Melville's meaning to be Hawthorne was so far from being a soulless YES-man that he aggressively shouted, yelled, roared, thundered his NO! to conventionality and conformity. Protesting loud as thunder, as the capitalization and exclamation mark graphically confirm. (Julian Hawthorne printed NO!)

So I uncritically supposed until reading a footnote to the introduction of Geoffrey Sanborn's Whipscars and Tattoos (Oxford University Press, 2011) citing William Dillingham in Melville's Later Novels (University of Georgia Press, 1986). Sanborn agrees with Dillingham that Melville's "in thunder" means in the middle of a thunder-and-lightning storm, not in a loud "thunderous" voice.

Here's how Dillingham explains "No! in thunder":

Melville wrote Hawthorne in a letter that he admired him for saying “NO! in thunder.” By “in” Melville meant during or in the midst of, and he used thunder as he frequently did to mean lightning. He was complimenting Hawthorne not for writing thunderous prose which expressed a rebellious no, but for a refusal to seek shelter when, figuratively, lightning is striking all around. The lightning-rod salesmen of the world advise us to fear lightning, to run and hide from it, and to cringe in the knowledge of one’s own impotency. It might strike you if you are not prudent and methodical in your precautions. The extraordinary few say no to the fear, and no to the message of purposelessness, and they continue to say no—almost impossible though it is—even after they are struck. So it is with Ahab, though he has to fight mightily. 

-- Melville's Later Novels page 73

Ooh is that good. Making the same connection to Ahab as "Old Thunder" Sanborn highlights warrior pride,

"the feeling that enables one to say "No!" in the midst of a ship-splitting thunderstorm, and to discover, in the act of utterance, that one is speaking in unison with a wide world of other beings, objects, and processes--that one is, in fact, speaking in unison with the thunderstorm." 

-- Whipscars and Tattoos, page 15.

Wow! Thundering in a thunderstorm. So by the time we get to Ahab in the Candles chapter of Moby-Dick we have Hawthorne's "No! in thunder" realized every which way, in every sense. And this (remember?) is also Byron's romantic stance in those stanzas on the alpine storm from canto 3 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Ahab is Byron's "live thunder" personified.

But have we not heard "No in thunder" somewhere before? Well there's a Civil War poem, Our Country's Call by John Pierpont:

Like a whirlwind in its course,
Shall again a rebel force,
Jackson's foot or Stuart's horse,
Pass our sleepy posts;
Roam, like Satan, "to and fro,"
And our Laggard let them go?
No! in thunder answer, "No! 
By the Lord of Hosts!"  -- Rebellion Record

Aha, in thunder answer No! Way before Pierpont, a poem called Weeping Mary:

O one look of comfort give me,
Into pity's arms receive me,
From this heavy load relieve me.
Or in thunder answer—no.
-- The Kilmarnock Mirror

Maybe we need our Bibles now... Psalms, hymns...

The law is looked to for salvation, but the soul is brought to feel that it is in vain that he looks any where else than unto Jesus. "I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me: no man cared for my soul. I cried unto thee, O Lord, I said thou art my refuge, and my portion in the land of the living. Attend unto my cry, for I am brought very low." When the law is appealed to, it answers, "No," in thunder; and it is well the wretch can return and seek another refuge.
-- David Charles, Sermons 

Let's keep looking. Ho, what is this? Thomas Heywood, The Foure Prentices of London:

Soldan. Should Jove himself in thunder answer I [that is, Aye = Yes]
When we say no, we'd pull him from the sky.  --The Ancient British Drama

Jove himself!

And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot. --Moby-Dick Chapter 7, The Chapel

The context from Heywood is very much in the vein of Melville in that letter to Hawthorne, and more so in the figure of Ahab. Having the audacity to treat great powers of the universe as equals. Anybody that bold speaks in thunder, like Jove the god of thunder. Now I'm wondering did Melville read Thomas Heywood's Four Prentices or would he only have to have seen Alexander Dyce's footnoted comment on Tamburlaine in the preface to The Works of Christoper Marlowe? More later... (delivered at Hawthorne and Jove in thunder). 

Related posts

• Hawthorne and Jove in thunder
• Heywood's The Four Prentices of London  
• Childe Harold's live thunder and Ahab in The Candles

Childe Harold's "live thunder" and Ahab in "The Candles"

Major influences coalesce in "The Candles" chapter of Moby-Dick, where Ahab dares defy the power behind the flaming corposants and terrifies his crew.  Ahab's Promethean defiance of Heaven is "Aschylean" (Newton Arvin); and Satanic as well, since the imagery (Ahab's harpoon as "fiery dart") and rebellious speech recall Milton's eternally unyielding Satan in Paradise Lost (Henry Pommer, Clare Spark, Robin Sandra Grey).

And Faustian (Charles Olson, John Joseph Staud), and Shakespearian (Macbeth and Lear), and Byronic.

Scholarly discussions of the Byronic element in "The Candles" chapter have focused on Byron's dramatic poems especially Manfred and Cain (Wyn Kelley; Robert Milder).

Henry A. Murray cited the huge influence of Childe Harold on Melville's early works, but I do not find much in print anywhere on Childe Harold and Ahab.  I would be glad to know of any mention of Canto 3 in connection with the characterization of Ahab in "The Candles."  In the three consecutive stanzas quoted below, what interesting correspondences "leap" to mind!  The scene is Lake Geneva or Léman in Switzerland and France, located between the Alps and Jura ranges where the romantic speaker experiences a thrilling mountain thunderstorm (depicted in stanza 92).

From Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 3:

XCI.
Not vainly did the early Persian make
His altar the high places and the peak
Of earth-o'ergazing mountains, and thus take
A fit and unwall'd temple, there to seek
The Spirit, in whose honour shrines are weak,
Uprear'd of human hands. Come, and compare
Columns and idol-dwellings, Goth or Greek,
With Nature's realms of worship, earth and air,
Nor fix on fond abodes to circumscribe thy pray'r!

XCII.
The sky is changed !—and such a change! Oh night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,
Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light
Of a dark eye in woman! Far along,
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among
Leaps the live thunder! Not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!

XCIII.
And this is in the night:—Most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,—
A portion of the tempest and of thee!
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!
And now again 'tis black,—and now, the glee
Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth,
As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth.

Before the storm, in stanza 91, Childe Harold alludes to mountain-top worship by "the early Persian"; Ahab begins his famously defiant speech by introducing himself as a formerly obedient "Persian" worshiper.

 “Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship.... 

--Moby-Dick Chapter 119: The Candles

 Ahab comes in with the thunder, naming himself "Old Thunder" (Elijah too, back in Nantucket had called him that):

At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.
“Who’s there?”
“Old Thunder!” said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed lances of fire.
--Moby-Dick Chapter 119: The Candles

The leaping of Childe Harold's "live thunder" seems transferred to lightning, to the corposants in their leaping responsive flames, and to Ahab/Old Thunder himself who leaps out of the lightning and up with the flames:

Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!
...
Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!”  -- Moby-Dick, Chapter 119: The Candles

Finally, the mood in stanza 93 turns happy, joyful--the echoing thunder sounds to the speaker as if the mountains were celebrating "a young earthquake's birth."  Perhaps Byron's juvenile earthquake (itself inspired by lines from Shelley's "Mont Blanc") suggested Ahab's reference to "my earthquake life."  Has that figure (Ahab's "earthquake life") ever been satisfactorily explained in Melville criticism?

"I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute unconditional, unintegral mastery in me."  --Moby-Dick Chapter 119: The Candles

Commentary by Sir Walter Scott:

"... the "live thunder leaping among the rattling crags" — the voice of mountains, as if shouting to each other — the plashing of the big rain — the gleaming of the wide lake, lighted like a phosphoric sea, — present a picture of sublime terror, yet of enjoyment, often attempted, but never so well, certainly never better, brought out in poetry."