The Anathemata
Rite and Fore-time (continued)
in the humid paradises
of the Third Age?1
But who or what, before these?
Had they so far to reach the ground?
and what of the pelvic inclination of their co-laterals, whose far cognates went-—on how many feet?—in the old time before them?
For all WHOSE WORKS FOLLOW THEM2
among any of these or them
dona eis requiem.
(He would lose, not any one
from among them.
Of all those given him
he would lose none.)
David Jones notes
1 ‘It was no doubt in the . . . Tertiary Age . . . that the earliest forms of man first came into existence’ . . . ‘Thus it was probably only after the expulsion of man from the Paradise of the Tertiary World . . . that he made those great primitive discoveries of the use of clothing, of weapons and above all of fire, which rendered him independent of the changes of climate . . .’ Dawson, Age of the Gods, 1929.
2 See ‘. . . opera enim illorum sequuntur illos’ in the Epistle for the Third Mass of All Souls’ Day. Apocalypse xiv, 13. These opera are of course those that follow supernatural faith whereby the doers gain supernatural benefit. But I suppose it is permitted to use the same words analogously of those opera which we call artefacts, which man alone can cause to be.
The dictionary defines artefact as an artificial product, thus including the beaver’s dam and the wren’s nest. But I here confine my use of the word to those artefacts in which there is an element of the extra-utile and the gratuitous. If there is any evidence of this kind of artefacture then the artefacturer or artifex should be regarded as participating directly in the benefits of the Passion, because the extra-utile is the mark of man.
For which reason the description ‘utility goods’ if taken literally could refer only to the products of sub-man.
additional notes
a Cf. John 6:38-39: ‘For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. And this is the Father’s will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day’. See also John 18:9: ‘That the saying might be fulfilled, which he spake, Of them which thou gavest me have I lost none’.
comments
So did man worship before the Tertiary age?