Page 12 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

reminiscent of Comus, is omnipotent, all-encompassing,15 oniric and mysterious.
In this sense, Lady Chastity represents everything that Comus is not. She defines Comus in terms of the other: never as an ever-changing and ever-flowing Heraclitean river, but as a disturbing contrast in differentiation and opposition. Lady Virtue, an Apollonian mirror of the sun prevalent in Indo- European patriarchy, affirms her intellectual and moral superiority over Comus, the Dionysian mirror of the moon of pre-Indo-European matriarchy. Whereas Comus symbolizes the chthonic or telluric, moira or natural destiny, mother- matrix and matter, mythos and being, existence and accidents, sensibility and natural necessity, communalism and the indefinite, origins and cyclic time, Lethe-oblivion, night, wine, and all things liquid,
Lady Chastity epitomizes the celestial or ouranic, nomos or convention, father-patria and form, logos and to be, essence and substance, reason and logic necessity, the absolute and supra-sensible, individualism and the definite, telos and linear
15 This term signifies the Dionysian collective or community as oral and ecstatic in contrast to Apollo’s principium individuationis. Apollo’s individuation principle, in which the individual 3⁄4 as described in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, remains calm in the midst of turmoil as if he were a fragile ship in a tempestuous sea 3⁄4 is destroyed and crushed by the Dionysian realm. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ed. Edmund Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Chapter 16.
• 12 •