Page 18 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

As I do thee; -- and with my knowledge grew The thirst of knowledge, and the power and joy Of this most bright intelligence, until 3⁄4”
[I met Astarte]
(Manfred, II, 2, 79-96)
In his self-sufficiency and exercise of free will, Manfred gazes at the forms of eternity and rejoices in his nascent knowledge and powers, though limited, to command the spirits of nature. Like Adam and Eve, he sins by defying God’s will and immediately discovers his terrible mistake. He learns his freedom is only a finite freedom: he can never be as grand as God. He has obtained a practical knowledge of the possibilities of good and of evil but in a way that his creator never intended, through a life of pain and spiritual bondage, which is ever a continual frustration of the true greatness for which God made him. Thus, Manfred falls into his double infinity, his twice- mistaken fall after the original fall by adoring a pagan goddess,24 by conjuring supernatural spirits, journeying to the underworld, by rejecting the Abbot’s salvation, and by his last delusion: that he is own destroyer and hereafter.
24Astarte controls Manfred’s fate as much as Ishtar controls beloved Dumuzi’s fate and his demise. Ishtar returns from her journey into the underworld with a host of daemons. She needs a substitute for her in the Underworld, and unleashes a gang of daemons on Dumuzi who, unlike Manfred, did not mourn for her. These daemons kill him. That daemons also appear before Manfred perishes indicates that Byron, a classicist, might have had this story in mind with certain implications worthy of further study.
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