Thomas Campion. Ad Themesin (1595): English Propaganda Myth of the New World as Hades

It's possible to name the corporations of empire: America for Europe, Spain for England, Greece and Troy for Rome and Carthage, Babylon for Assyria and not lose much. Empire encompasses mythological and religious overtones in the epic conventions of poetry where deaths, victories and defeats are a measure of divine favor, "for in the whole of the Aeneid, no great event ever occurs without Virgil reminding us that it is the will and work of the gods...the great men of this world are merely their tools...who send storms and destruction upon ships...it is they, not the Greek forces, who destroy Troy...the Trojans are overcome by a higher power" (Richard Heinze. Virgil's Epic Technique, 11). 

 

Thomas Campion's Latin poem Ad Thamesin (1595)  joins the English defeat of the Spanish Armada of 1588 with the English, Spanish contest for the new world. The imagery of storms in the poem, “A gloomy storm  and unseasonable night,” suit both the storm that wrecked the Armada and the storms of the Indies. The translator, Walter R. Davis says, "The confrontation between Dis and Oceanus, and the resulting storm, is reminiscent of the opening of the Aeneid (and also of the Tempest, as Prospero guards his secret island)" (9). Campion divides America between Neptune and Dis in a kind of mockery of the Treaty of Tordesilla (1494) where Spain and Portugal divided  worlds. The lands to the east would belong to Portugal and the lands to the west to Spain. 

 

Campion says that Neptune takes the side of Britain against Spain because Britain is descended from Troy, referring to the Trojan kings of England out of Nennius' Historia Brittonum (9th century), an odd argument if we remember that Neptune caused the fall of Troy in the first place, where the two serpents rise from the sea to strangle Laocoön, priest of Neptune who was strangled by his own god. England is a nation of the sea so the Thames is called to witness how the Spanish "have deserted your ports in panicked flight. / For father Neptune refused to bear the Spanish as they followed their cruel standards / And the very waves were furious with foam."

 

 Ad Thamesin  describes the other journey, saying that America is poetically Hades, home of "the unseen" Greek god of the underworld. The literal sense of the gloss “Americae poetica descriptio” appended to the lines says,

“There is a place in the west sacred to Dis hidden in the waves, which the blessed Nereus and Oceanus, taking pity on men, concealed.”

[He concealed it out of pity that if they found it it would be to their destruction.]

At first the consecrated place appears to be “hidden” in the waves, secluded from discovery “beneath the unknown waters,” but it emerges from the sea as Dis complains,

“Why does this island remain unseen? The earth groans with its weight, with shining gold ripened in its fertile womb.”

(Tr. Walter R. Davis,The Works of Thomas Campion, (New York, 1967)

According to Campion, the attempted Spanish invasion was motivated by the Spanish because in their travels they looked too long into the fountain of envy in hell, where Dis entertained them, and became jealous of England, the land of “white cliffs,”  “the island which sparkled with white rocks in the spring.’ The two islands, England and America are compounded because the Spanish threaten both, thus the poem spans two worlds of fortune, old and the new. The island of Dis is invisible, “remains unseen,” both for its concealment by the underground lord and for the fact that it remains undiscovered. Dis would have the Spanish newly plant civilization, and since the Spaniards seek a place “sacred to Dis” he [Dis] asks Oceanus to give them smooth passage. The phrase "gold ripened in its fertile womb" joins gold with the human womb, which was a common association among the English and the Spanish. Copying older writers they found trees with roots like mines which yielded literal  gold  "walnuts" or nuggets as much as they could find gold "as big as the head of a child.' These images of America do not seem as bizarre in the naive "golden" sense that C. S. Lewis uses to describe the best of Elizabethan poetry. He means golden as an easy grasp of the image, but there is no ease about the underpinnings of Dis. For all the good fun of the Renaissance, most knowledge of Dis came from no knowledge, otherwise it would be said as Campion does at the start, that it would be altogether "another" voyage.

Dis and Oceanus opposed each other that the Hesperians, the Spanish – should be first to discover America. Oceanus argues for the British are more worthy, being descendants of the Trojans, the virtue of the British, and of their Queen, Elizabeth.  Thus Oceanus gives the Spanish a freshening east wind to sink their fleet on the shoals, only diverting his plan when "he realized that you, Drake, would bring destruction to the Spaniards, and noble Frobisher of outstanding daring, and likewise the wealthy Cavendish bringing back rich spoils to his native shores from new successes; for fortune favors bold hearts."


Such blatant English propaganda was everywhere in the discovery writings. The Spanish were then examined by Hyperion, who "wondered what new colonist had come into unknown lands." Dis cast a spell on the Spanish youth: "The Hesperians were mourning not out of respect for the bard but because they were indeed wracked by the vision of the noxious fountain." Good stuff, this fountain of envy, along with the many fountains in the Faerie Queene. "The Spanish youth greedily flooded their eyes with the waters," is the stated cause of the failure of the Armada in 1588. Finally "the diseases of Phlegethon and raving madness, unwelcome pain, and Erinnys lauding her own death sent the Spaniards down under black Tartarus." Thus America (Hades) seems to swallow up the Spanish so that Britain can occupy, while at the same moment the Armada is defeated. Tartarus and Elysium,  two levels of hell, are both realized in that the Spanish do down under Tartarus while the British go on to Elysium. Fare thee well.

Commmenting on l. 15 Davis says, "The hellish inhabitants of the Americas are associated with the Spanish, also protected by Dis: Catholic and pagan are thus aligned as the forces of darkness in comparison to the light and grace of the Protestant British, beloved by Oceanus." This of course part and parcel of the displacement of the pagan for the Christian that preoccupied the pilgrims, but whether it was enough to supplant the darkness was always an off and on battle.

Campion's logic that Oceanus/Neptune supports the sea power of British Troy is contradictory.  When the sea serpents kill Laocoön and his two sons to confirm the fall of the city and the introduction of the horse into it, the serpents are an agency of Oceanus/Neptune that confirms the lie of Sinon, deceiving the Trojans.  That they slither up to Athena's shrine in Troy for shelter, after crushing Laocoon and his family, makes the Trojans believe they were intended by the gods to take the wooden horse into the city because the priest  has been silenced. 

That the forces of Neptune silence the priest of Neptune indicates a deeper game. One way around Neptune opposing himself is to attribute the sea serpents to Minerva, who, according to tradition, helped build the wooden horse. She killed Laocoön and his sons because she wanted the Trojans to believe that Sinon's story was true and fool the Trojans. But sea serpents coming from the sea to crush the priest and his sons in their coils is a sign that Neptune does not agree with what Laocoön is trying to tell the Trojans. Virgil is the only ancient source to say that both sons and Laocoön were killed (Pearson, et al. The Fragment of Sophocles, III). The culpability of Laocoön to Apollo and Athena in the matter of disrespect and his sons has a lengthy history before Virgil gets it. Laocoön against the powers and authorities of the kingdom empires is made to seem "a scoffer who ridiculed the notion of divine interference" (Spivey) that is, an atheist against the gods, practical hero like Abraham say, but not a truth teller and prophet, rather the opposite, a disgraced man who defied the gods and was broken (Pearson, 41).

The word “poetical” in the sense of a “poetical description” of America should be understood  as a poetical device or interpretation of Elysium wherein ancient poets held that Elysium was in Hell, as opposed to philosophers who thought Elysium was the Fortunate Islands and theologians who thought it was the dark side of the moon. In calling Hades an island Campion may be thinking of the America of naive geography, an impediment around which to seek passage for India; but it is also there that Bermuda served as a model for Dis’s home in its reputation for storms and devils, already well known.

  

See Oceanus; or Neptune Copy after Hendrick Goltzius, 1598-1600 Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Restitution of the original, the Golden Age, takes from Jewish Messianism the return of all things to their origin. This is accompanied with nostalgia and affinity for traditional peasant communities which especially appeal when celebrity interprets reality for the world. States are not countries they are businesses, the strip mall of the world with its anchor stores China, India, Merica thinks to protect its gain of market share to bring the ideal world to profit, which is as much a sham as that idea that utopia is a secular humanist dream. It is religious.

Reexamining  Restorations (1975) in this light, such sentences occur to the effect that  “Europe reduplicated Greek mythology exactly in the new world, finding fictional parallels of Ophir and Hades in the Indies. The American voyage represents a descent into hell, an Orphic event. Such a drift toward the underworld was evidently what Columbus wished for his critics at home when he proposed ‘another journey’ for them: ‘Let the habitual critics and fault-finders sitting safely at home ask me now: ‘why did  you not do this in those circumstances?’ I should like to have had them there on that voyage. But I truly believe that another journey of a different character is in store for them if there is any reliance to be placed upon our Faith.”

Harry Levin and anthropologists who tout the noble savage myth of this were never aware it was a messianic restoration and a Zionist apocalypse. The new order has elements of the old, of the past, but they are transformed. In the re-establishment of the past ideal state, Zion, a radical new state is formed that never existed before, a New Jerusalem. Ancient Judaism  was revolutionary when it posited a world and an earth history destined to be replaced by  Messiah. One can emphasize the overthrow of the old political and social systems in this revolution, or the establishment of the new, which accounts for the  alternate flags of satire and lyrical romanticism it flies under. No wonder then the similarity of radical anarchisms with chiliasm, utopian with millennial consciousness. Those zen forces and spiritual guides that think to establish an unconscious  grid and make a collective Messiah show the lengths  to which the  the historical fights against the new order.

There are many new orders, but that rational utopia, the evolving social state opposes the revolutionary apocalypse of Messiah. Trutheers hold that the original makers of hybrid slave man are coming back, being the Annunaki, to terrorize the elite who have so bungled their governance when they were left in charge. These hold variously that Enki-Lucifer, in alliance with Sirius and reptiles opposed to the original nonagenarians of the belt of Orion, is about to be kicked off the planet or start a new war. Going so far afield to see this everywhere in Genesis to Revelation is not necessary however. There is no progress in history leading to redemption, only a transcendent breaking in. Colossal uprooting, total destruction of existing order don't make a lot of friends among a society constantly benefiting from that order. That they do not see the need is obvious. Don't rock the boat, even if it comes to totally eliminating the microbiologists and starting French camps everywhere.  Messiah comes only when the world has prepared itself with utter corruption, amid boasts of contagious singularity, mutation, superman. But as it is a past and a transformed past, redemption is historical and public, private and personal, a spiritual process and inward transformation as well as a visible event in the world.


No need to speak of Marduk when we have Zeus, but it's not any way comforting to learn that the Golden Age is a stooge for these Novus Ordo Seclorum new/old world orders. What name in government, business, science and art isn't pushing a prepackaged Golden Age after life from Hesiod and Homer, that Virgil transferred to the present life? Virgil invented the golden age as it came to be understood, as likewise he was later hijacked by entertainments of the Italian Renaissance to make it further gold and absurd. Before Virgil something older than occurs in Hesiod that is not at all Greek or golden. The Greeks Pergamon Altar replays a similar antagonism between ancient forces that embody the competitions of empires. So whether it is Set and Osiris or the Titans and Chaos, older myths do not promise earthly bliss, they promise you will be eaten by the gods.