The Anathemata
Sherthursdaye and Venus day (continued)
Calling to mind the ancient precept
the night-mandate
to the wanderer-duke
the fidella alien-sire fideliumb
he, nemorensis,c between the maritime flats and the foot-hills
on his ordeal-night
when it was said to him
out of Bersabee night-vault:
Take the lamb that you do love
—his mother’s boy
get north-east by north
by way of Liknites’2 cave of bread, past anemone-
dell
David Jones notes
2 Cf. the O.T. narrative: ‘And Abraham planted a grove in Beer-sheba (Vul. plantavit nemus in Bersabee) and called on the name of the Lord. . . . Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac whom thou lovest and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.’ (Gen. XXI, 33 and XXII, 2, A.V.) For ‘get thee into the land of Moriah’ Vulgate reads vade in terram visionis ; this ‘land of vision’ is the ‘high place’ of the Jebusites, called Mount Moriah, that is to say part of the site on which Jerusalem subsequently stood and to get to it from Beersheba one would, and the ancient track did, go via Bethlehem (House of Bread, or with equal significance Beit Laham, House of Flesh), a place sacred to Adonis for whom Es Sitt, ‘the lady’ (in this case Ishtar), weeps. The anemones in part of Palestine are still said to be red with his blood that was shed by the boar’s tusks. The name Liknites was applied to Dionysius and other cult-figures and could signify ‘crib-born’.
additional notes
DJ note 2: Adonis, the lover of the Babylonian mother-goddess Ishtar, was killed by a wild boar. The death and revival of Adonis is seen as another foreshadowing of the Christian mystery.
‘Liknites’ is trisyllabic.
see also
semantic structures
glossary
a fidell: man of faith [?; not in OED].
b fidelium: of the faithful people (genitive plural, following ‘sire’).
c nemorensis: of the grove (which he had planted).
comments
The story of Abraham and Isaac prefigures the Crucifixion.