“Our perfect secret-keeping”: Mysteries hidden and revealed in Joanna Newsom’s Time, as a Symptom
It’s been several years, but like all great art, Joanna Newsom’s Divers continues to yield new discoveries and interpretations with each listen. I thought I’d share a few notes here, in case they serve to open up new paths for others to explore.
Have you ever done a crossword puzzle, and you have a good guess for the DOWN clue, but you don’t feel ready to write it in until you check that the ACROSS answer lines up? Sometimes I feel that way when I’m exploring the warp and weft of interwoven images, allusions, themes, and tones of Divers. Back in 2015, I wrote a piece on “Sapokanikan” without having listened to any other songs on the album. It felt a little far-fetched at the time, following threads of Emma Lazarus and the biblical Lazarus. But afterwards I heard the other songs, and the connections were only strengthened. In particular, the line in “Time, as a Symptom”:
A cave, a grave, a day: arise, ascend.
The image of Jesus calling Lazarus out of his grave (a cave) shimmers there. Even clearer is the resurrection of Jesus, rising from the dead, coming out of the cave/grave, and eventually ascending to heaven.
I’m not saying anything others haven’t pointed out before, in then drawing a parallel between those Christian myths and the ancient Greek myths surrounding the goddess of agriculture and grain, Demeter, and her daughter Persephone. Persephone was abducted by Hades (god of the underworld) to be his queen, and while Demeter searched for her missing daughter, the plants on earth failed to produce and became a waste land. Ultimately, Persephone is reunited with her mother, but must spend part of the year in the underworld. From that, the arrival of seasons, the cycle of the year, the barrenness of winter and the bloom of spring.
The place where Demeter retreated in her grief at losing Persephone was called Eleusis, and the nearby fields where grain and corn sprouted upon the girl’s return were the Rharian plain. So, building on the line above, we see:
A cave, a grave, a day: arise, ascend.
(Areion, Rharian, go free and graze. Amen.)
Again, others have already pointed this connection out, and I’m simply building on it. The cave and ascension here are connected to Persephone’s arising from the underground (a grave).
Just a few miles from Athens, Demeter’s sanctuary in Eleusis also gave birth to a spiritual movement, called the Eleusinian Mysteries. The Oxford Classical Dictionary gives a helpful summary, and speaks of the main ceremony:
In a famous fragment, Aristotle insisted that initiation did not teach […] but rather conveyed an experience […]; this experience was based on both seeing and on hearing. Texts that praise the initiation, starting with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter […], insist on the importance of seeing as the way to receive the initiation: “Happy is he who has seen this” […]; and the hierophant is “He Who Shows the Sacred Things.” Later inscriptions praise the voice of the hierophant — and the architectural structure of the mystery hall with its density of interior columns leads one to think that hearing was at least as important as seeing. According to a writer cited by Hippolytus of Rome, at the high point of the rite, the hierophant — in utter silence — showed a cut sheaf of wheat.
Another account shares similar but slightly different details:
towards the end of the rites, the hierophant struck a gong to conjure Persephone […], announced a divine birth […], and displayed an ear of corn which, with all the [temple] watching in rigid silence, he cut in half. Dances, a sacrifice, and a feast followed, with the pouring of libations while people looked up and cried “Rain!”, before looking to the earth and crying “conceive!” — or, in Greek, the rhyme “Hue! Kue!” (pronounced “hoo-eh, koo-eh”).
In “Time, as a Symptom”, just before the stanza mentioning Rharian, Newsom sings:
And in our perfect secret-keeping:
One ear of corn,
in silent, reaping
On a scale from speculative to pretty certain, I’d venture to say Newsom intended to allude quite clearly to these Mysteries. I’ve written before about cycles and spirals in Divers, and even quoted the expert on mythology and also on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Joseph Campbell’s view on cycles. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he writes:
Full circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come: an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us, like the substance of a dream. And, looking back at what had promised to be our own unique, unpredictable, and dangerous adventure, all we find in the end is such a series of standard metamorphoses as men and women have undergone in every quarter of the world, in all recorded centuries, and under every odd disguise of civilization.
Seen as a linear progression from birth to death, life can be daunting. The attraction of a cycle that continues past death and back to birth or some kind of rebirth, gives hope. Life after death — isn’t that the promise of Jesus’ disappearance from the grave? Persephone’s descent and return from the underworld make her a privileged figure, someone who has experienced death and returned to tell the living about it. Similarly, religions were formed in ancient Greece around the figures of Dionysus and Orpheus, who both descended into Hades to retrieve a loved one.
I won’t do it justice, but I’ll try to distill a few books into a paragraph. More scholarly folks have already traced connections from the Eleusinian Mysteries to the Dionysian Mysteries, and the Orphic Mysteries were an offshoot of the prior. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras, of triangle fame, followed the Orphic religion, and became known for his religious leanings. Pythagoreanism, in turn, influenced the thinking and writing of the famed philosopher Plato. Plato’s Republic (which includes the Allegory of the Cave) ends with a story that shows its Dionysian/Orphic/Pythagorean influences. The story, referred to as the Myth of Er, tells of a soldier who dies in battle and goes to the underworld, but comes back to share his experiences. He encounters souls going to their judgment, either heaven or the underworld: “there were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them and had bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the heavenly way on the right hand; and in like manner the unjust were bidden by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand; these also bore the symbols of their deeds, but fastened on their backs.” Then, he sees souls returning from serving their thousand-year time in both places, who are presented “samples of lives” and then choose their next life:
And not only did men pass into animals, but I must also mention that there were animals tame and wild who changed into one another and into corresponding human natures — the good into the gentle and the evil into the savage, in all sorts of combinations.
Whether intended or not, I hear echoes of this theme of souls and bodies, reincarnation and metempsychosis, in Divers. In the song “Divers”, we hear:
But how do you choose your form?
How do you choose your name? How do you choose your life?
And in “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive”, we hear:
And I rose, to take my shape at last,
from the dreams that had dogged me, through every past,
when, to my soul, the body would say
You may do what you like,
as long as you stay.
And in “Anecdotes”:
“When are you from?” said he
Let’s return to the surface for a minute. We were talking about the line “(Areion, Rharian, go free and graze. Amen.)”… we know that the Rharian plain is near Demeter’s temple. And others have already noted that Areion was a horse born to Demeter, so it would make sense that the horse would want to graze, right? This wouldn’t be the first time Joanna Newsom mentioned a horse in one of her songs!
I think it’s worth telling a little more of the story, though. The writer Pausanias shared this:
When Demeter was wandering in search of her daughter [Persephone], she was followed, it is said, by Poseidon, who lusted after her. So she turned, the story runs, into a mare, and grazed with the mares of Onkios; realising that he was outwitted, Poseidon changed into a stallion and enjoyed Demeter. At first, they say, Demeter was angry at what had happened, but later on she laid aside her wrath and wished to bathe in the [river] Ladon . . . Demeter, they say, had by Poseidon […] a horse called Areion.
So Areion isn’t just the horse/son of Demeter, no. She was raped while she was fruitlessly searching for her lost daughter. For me, this puts into a different light the opening lines of “Time, as a Symptom”,
and the task was the hardest thing she’d ever do.
But she forgot,
the moment she saw you.So it would seem to be true:
when cruel birth debases, we forget.
Of course the line could refer to many forms of cruel birth. But this seems to be one of them, and it’s deeply touching to think of the mother’s love for a child, despite the circumstances.
I have an admission to make. In the passage from Pausanias above, I removed an important piece of the story (maybe a bit like the transformation from newspaper story to song in “Sapokanikan”?). I’ll add it back here:
Demeter, they say, had by Poseidon a daughter, whose name they are not wont to divulge to the uninitiated, and a horse called Areion.
That second daughter was called Despoina, which means “maiden”. Like Newsom’s Colleen (which means “girl”), Despoina is a placeholder name, where the true name is not to be spoken. Her name was only revealed through the ceremonies of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
I feel a little like a broken record, but once again in Divers, we have a hidden figure emerging. What fascinates me in this case is that the records were suppressed on purpose. The penalty for revealing the rites of the Mysteries was death, and so unsurprisingly little was recorded. We’re left with a text that “will not yield”, and records that are “cryptic at best”, as Newsom sings in “Sapokanikan”.
Let’s once again resurface.
In 1921, writer Colin Still published a book titled Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: A Study of The Tempest, which outlined the ways in which The Tempest and its famous play-within-a-play represent the initiation rites in the Eleusinian Mysteries. The story of shipwreck, magic, dreamstates, love, and treachery culminates in a play directed by the father Prospero to bestow advice and future wishes on his daughter and her new beloved, Ferdinand (a prince, of course!). Prospero secretly arranged the relationship, too. Anyway, his characters are the goddesses Juno (queen of the gods), Iris (messenger goddess), and Ceres (the Roman name for Demeter). After a little back-and-forth of salutations, and some concern from Demeter that Hades’ co-conspirators might be at the party, Demeter agrees to meet with Juno and bestow a marriage blessing on the couple.
Earth’s increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty,
Vines and clustering bunches growing,
Plants with goodly burthen bowing;
Spring come to you at the farthest
In the very end of harvest!
Scarcity and want shall shun you;
Ceres’ blessing so is on you.
The image of “Plants with goodly [burden] bowing” evokes healthy plants, wealth and good harvest, along with the metaphor of human fertility for the soon-to-be-wed couple. For me, that image of plants bowing also brought to mind Newsom’s line “bow like the field”. I had to take another look:
Where I know that you can yield, when it comes down to it;
bow like the field when the wind combs through it:
Certainly, the image of flexibility and resilience are there, with the wind pushing through the field. “I know that you can yield” — you can persevere! But, ever the master of polysemy, Newsom has planted another gem. The image of a field bowing under the weight of its bounty, its fruit, its creation… this puts the word “yield” in another light. The word doesn’t just mean surrendering, it also means providing. Just like Demeter herself provides the abundance of the earth, and teaches people agriculture to turn barren land into fields that yield.
Prospero’s play breaks off in a hurry — he forgot that someone was trying to kill him, so he needs to deal with that! With the help of his magical fairy servants on the island, he brings the various characters who’ve been wandering around the enchanted island together, and reveals the truth to them. Before summoning them, he gives a speech:
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back;
which is itself a reference to the ancient Greek story of Medea invoking magic. Shakespeare would have read that passage in Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hilles, of Brookes, of Woods alone,
Of standing Lakes, and of the Night approche ye everychone.
Through helpe of whom (the crooked bankes much wondring at the thing)
I have compelled streames to run cleane backward to their spring.
Once you look past the olde-timey English, a familiar image emerges.
But stand brave, life-liver,
bleeding out your days
in the river of time.
Stand brave:
time moves both ways
The river, and therefore time, moves both ways. Like Medea’s ability to compel streams to run backward to their source. I know this connection is tenuous, but it felt worth sharing in light of other imagery we see from ancient Greek myths. And Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular resonates with the transformation we see so often in Divers.
Speaking of changes… after the shipwreck in The Tempest, the magical spirits of the island sing a song to the young man Ferdinand, in what is perhaps the best-known passage of the play. Ferdinand remarks how “This music crept by me upon the waters”, and then hears the tune again:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
We see it etched on Percy Shelley’s gravestone. We hear it in Sylvia Plath’s poem, and the “shelled bed I remember”. Pete Seeger sang it as an anti-war protest song. Hitchcock made a movie referencing it. And “sea change” has entered the litany of English idioms traced back to Shakespeare.
In light of Newsom’s Divers, the image of a body at the bottom of the ocean, its eyes transformed into pearls, brings to mind “Divers” with its “bed of shining pearls”, and “the depths of this arid world”.
It’s worth mentioning another writer who was drawn to these lines. At two points in his famous poem, T. S. Eliot quotes the line:
Those are pearls that were his eyes
In 1930, Eliot acknowledged reading Still’s book about The Tempest and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Some scholars surmise that Eliot had read it in 1921, as he was writing “The Waste Land”. Regardless, the Fisher King myth shares a lot in common with the Demeter and Persephone myth, particularly as it relates to fertility of the body and of the land. Perhaps a path worth following on another day…
Spring has arrived, and I should get myself outside. Thanks for reading. I hope this provides another thread to trace your way along the labyrinth!
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