Page 17 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

antithesis of evil: he exercises arête:22 that which enables, first of firsts in the etymological rivers of meanings, origin that illumines Manfred’s insatiable curiosity and his leap into the hermetic arts of the forbidden and obscure, what secret alchemist, daemonic spirit, searching for the Elysian mysteries, though to no avail, until he meets Astarte, goddess of fertility and love, associated with Baal,23 giver of life or death:
“...And then I dived,
In my lone wanderings, to the caves of Death, Searching its cause in its effect; and drew
From withered bones, and skulls, and heaped up dust, Conclusions most forbidden. Then I passed
The nights of years in sciences untaught,
Save in the old-time; and with time and toil,
And terrible ordeal, and such penance
As in itself hath power upon the air,
And spirits that do compass air and earth,
Space, and the peopled Infinite, I made
Mine eyes familiar with Eternity,
Such as, before me, did the Magi, and
He who from out their fountain-dwellings raised Eros and Anteros, at Gadara,
22 This highlights Byron’s complex agenda in his works where socio-political excess is reviled.
23 Goddess Athtarath, an Egyptian goddess (Papyrus 19th dynasty), bride claimed by the tyrant sea. From a certain passage in the sage of King Keret among the Ras Shamra Texts, where the king invokes a curse in the name of “Athtarath-the-Name-of-Baal” we see that the goddess, at least in the heroic past, was associated with Baal as the giver of life or death. Later, in Babylon, she came to be associated with Ishtar. Buttrick, George. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962.
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