#dinessa

[argentvive]

The Furnace Man, the Mermaid, Lyra, and the Alchemist - pt 3

Part 2 is here:

https://argentvive.tumblr.com/post/640601164102107136/the-furnace-man-and-the-mermaid-pt-2

V. Chemical Wedding

Lyndy Abraham’s definition of a Chemical Wedding:

The philosopher’s stone cannot be created until the lovers have died and their bodies putrefied in the mercurial waters. (p. 37)

Rosarium philosophorum, “Coniunctio”

Pullman gives us all three components of a Chemical Wedding--Van Dongen, Dinessa, and a wave of water, i.e., the Mercurial water.  And the lovers die.  

When Van Dongen comes down the stairs and sees Dinessa, everything in the alchemist’s laboratory changes.   This is surely Pullman’s most extraordinary run-on sentence in the entire series:

At once a tumult broke out. The stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling twisted in its chains, and writhed and lashed its tail and roared; a row of dusty glass bottles, gallon-sized or larger, containing strange specimens, fetuses, homunculi, cephalopods, glowed with light as the dead creatures inside beat their fists on the glass or sobbed with fury or hurled themselves from side to side; a metal bird in a dusty cage sang raucously; the water in Dinessa’s tank shrank away from Van Dongen and rose up in a great wave to stand suspended and trembling in the air, with the water dæmon inside, like an insect trapped in amber, though she saw her man and reached both arms out of the water and into the air, calling, “Cornelis! Cornelis!”

 All of this release of energy happens before Van Dongen and Dinessa unite, which they do immediately. thereafter.

It was all happening too quickly for anyone to stop. Van Dongen, crying “Dinessa!” hurled himself at the standing wave, and Dinessa burst out of it and into his arms.

      They came together in an explosion of steam and flame. For a second Lyra could see their faces, lurid, enraptured, pressing themselves together in a final embrace. Then they were gone, and something was happening among the machinery above the tank. Jets of superheated steam were forcing their way into the cylinders and slamming the pistons to and fro, making the connecting rods swing backwards and forwards as they turned a gigantic wheel, everything moving with the smooth ticking of lubricated machinery. (pp. 386-7)

The Chemical Wedding starts the alchemist’s steam engine, but Cornelis and Dinessa are “gone,”  Did the alchemist kill them?

  Lyra and Kubiček could only stand back in shock. Then she turned to the sorcerer, who was shutting his book with the air of having completed a long and arduous task.

What was that task?  What have we just seen?

VI. Homunculus or Golem?

Lyra asks Agrippa what’s he done, and he gives a shocking answer.  

“They are both fulfilling the destiny they were created for.”

  “They weren’t created for this!”

  “You know nothing about it. I arranged for their birth, I brought the dæmon here for this work, but her boy escaped. No matter. I arranged for you to find him and bring him here. Now your part is over, and you can leave.”

  “Their father betrayed them, and you did this to them!”

  “I am their father.”

In other words, Cornelis and Dinessa are homunculi, artificial human beings that some alchemists claimed to be able to create.  Paracelsus even provided an instructional manual in De natura rerum. Here’s an example of a homunculus from a 19th century illustration from Goethe’s Faust (Faust was an alchemist):

The story Cornelis tells Lyra of his birth and life in the Dutch Republic is not real--artificial memories for an artificial being..  We know that Agrippa can create homunculi because he has some in his Prague laboratory and they become active--”beat their fists”--when Cornelis appears (see quote above).  

Agrippa has now achieved (his version of) the Philosopher’s Stone--starting his engine but also transforming his menagerie of animals and birds:

  Lyra was dazed. The machinery was working faster now. She could feel the whole cellar trembling with the force of it. The crocodile had fallen still, apart from the slow swing of its tail; the homunculi in their bottle had stopped screaming and banging on the glass and were floating contentedly in the fluid that contained them, which was now glowing a faint and steady red; the metal bird in its cage, its golden feathers now gleaming with rich enamels and precious stones, was singing as sweetly as a nightingale. (p. 387)

Red and gold are the colors of the Philosopher’s Stone.  

A homunculus is not the only artificial human.  What about the Golem--should we consider that as an alternative inspiration for Cornelis?  According to the Jewish folktale, a medieval rabbi of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, created a humanlike creature from clay, the Golem.  There are three hints in the Furnace Man chapter that point to a Golem.  First, the chapter takes place in Prague.  Second, Agrippa is reciting “what might have been a spell in what might have been Hebrew.” Third, Agrippa is referred to not just as an alchemist, but as a sorcerer and a magician--though never a rabbi.  

For my part, I don’t think those small clues outweigh all the references to Agrippa as an alchemist, to the typical alchemical apparatus in his laboratory, and the specific mention of homunculi.  But I’m sure Pullman is aware of the Golem legend and wanted to acknowledge it in some way.  

So, finally, what role does this experience play in Lyra’s story?

Part 4.....

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[isabellaclarissa]

2017.01.28 Randy and Dinessa (at Maxi's Resto)

[argentvive]

Have you done an any analysis of Ch. 20 (The Furnace Man) of The Secret Commonwealth? Maybe its too on the nose, but I would love to read your thoughts on it, and the symbolism there. I've heard a shocking amount of people say that they thought that was a pointless chapter that had nothing to do with the plot and I'm like are you kidding???

I wrote about Agrippa here:

https://argentvive.tumblr.com/search/Agrippa

Agrippa obviously engineers a Chemical Wedding between Van Dongen and his daemon Dinessa, but he also serves as an alchemist to Lyra.  He answers several important questions about her quest and tells her where she must go next. In the process of her encounter with the Furnace Man, Lyra, like all alchemy protagonists, suffers a serious injury: her hand is burned.  In alchemy there is “no generation without corruption.” In other words, no transformation without pain or injury.  The final paragraph in the chapter restates this maxim:

Five minutes later she was inside a sleeper cabin, alone, exhausted, in some pain from her burned hand, but alive and exultant, with a destination and a clear purpose at last (The Secret Commonwealth, p. 393).

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Lyra is “exultant”:  Exaltation is the Tenth Gate in George Ripley’s Twelve Gates of the alchemical process.  Pullman is subtle in his use of alchemical words and symbolism, much more subtle than George R R Martin or J K Rowling, but he deploys alchemy to wonderful effect.  

[argentvive]

The Furnace Man and the Mermaid: pt 2

Part 1 here: https://argentvive.tumblr.com/post/640436092935520256/the-furnace-man-and-the-mermaid-a-terrifying

III. Cornelis Van Dongen

Here’s the illustration of him from the chapter opening.

He’s described as

a man in rough clothes who gave off such heat that she couldn’t go close. He was like a furnace. She could see his gaunt face, alive with anguish, and she had to gasp as two little flames broke out from under his eyelids, to be dashed away like tears by his angry hand. His eyes were glowing like coals: black over a flaring, breathing red. (TSC, p. 375)

It’s as if Pullman decided one day to do as literal a depiction of a Chemical Wedding as he could think of--a Male Principle who is literally “fire” and a Female Principle who is a denizen of “water.”

Recall:  

Sulphur is the Male Principle and corresponds to fire and air, hot and dry, Red, Red King, Sol/Sun, heart

Mercury (Argentvive) is the Female Principle and corresponds to water and earth, cool and moist, White, White Queen, Luna/Moon, mind.

I could find very few depictions of Sulphur in the alchemy literature, but here’s one, from Quinta Essentia, which applies better to Lord Asriel than to Van Dongen.  Van Dongen is no devil, but he IS gaunt.  

For the purposes of Lyra’s alchemical journey, the most important thing Van Dongen does is accidentally burn her hand--the coagula of the chapter:

Van Dongen...was beating  his hands together, striking sparks our of himself that whirled in the air like tiny Catherine wheels. One of them flew all the way to Lyra’s hand and stung like a needle thrust. She gasped and slapped it out, and stepped away hastily. (p. 381)

In describing Lyra’s injury as stinging “like a needle,” Pullman is following the literary alchemy convention of using piercing weapons as a stand in for fire.  

There are a couple more references to Lyra’s burned hand later in the chapter, as well as one to her hair being “singed” by “a gust of flame” (p. 386)  So far in the HDM universe none of Lyra’s injuries has been permanent--she has suffered no dismemberment, unlike Will, for example.  Will that change in the final book?

Van Dongen tells Lyra his tale, about his separation from his daemon Dinessa and Agrippa’s experiments.  This is straight up alchemy, which I suspect everyone who’s been reading my blog recognized right away.  It’s too much to retype it all, but here are a few key phrases:

--”I am all fire, and she is all water.”

--”he [Agrippa] worked on his magnum opus, which was the isolation of the essential principles of matter”

--”One day he spoke to us about the elements of fire and water.”

--”My father was interested in change....In one thing becoming another.”

--”he assimilated our essential self to the elements: me to nature of elemental fire, her to that of elemental water”

--”Then he found he could not undo the operation....once we were transformed in that way.”

Van Dongen begs Lyra to help him find Agrippa and reunite him with Dinessa.  

IV. Dinessa 

Dinessa is Cornelis Van Dongen’s daemon--and a “water sprite,” i.e., a mermaid.  

Mermaids are not that common in alchemy stories, but they do crop up from time to time, e.g., in the Second Task in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  Del Toro even switched things up and gave us a merman in The Shape of Water. What’s unusual with Dinessa is that iirc all the other daemons in universe are animals--sentient and talking, to be sure--but animals.  Dinessa is half-human.  

Here are a couple of mermaid images from alchemical works:

Cabala mineralis.

Solidonius manuscript, 18th century, Bibliotheque de l”Arsenal, Paris. 

Dinessa is briefly described:

She was beautiful, and naked, and her black hair streamed out behind her like fronds of the most delicate seaweed. 

She is as anxious to reunite with Van Dongen as he is with her.  Their Chemical Wedding is extraordinary and terrifying.  

Part 3.....

[argentvive]

“The Furnace Man”: Thoughts and Speculation (pt. 5)

Some random thoughts about this pivotal chapter in TSC.

--The novellas are absolutely integral to the story.  Agrippa mentions Sebastian Makepeace as having written Agrippa’s name and address into Hassall’s notebook.  You really need to have read “Lyra and the Birds” to understand who Makepeace is and his relationship to Lyra--and why she is so shocked at this news.

Once TBOD is finished, we may get an alternative “canon” order for the HDM series.  Something like:

1. La Belle Sauvage

2. Northern Lights

3. The Subtle Knife

4. The Amber Spyglass

5. Lyra’s Oxford (which includes the story “Lyra and the Birds”)

6. Serpentine

7. The Secret Commonwealth

8.  [something about roses]

(I’m not sure where Once Upon a Time in the North would fit.)

Ironically, this would be similar to the debate over the order of the Narnia books--do you begin with the first one written--The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe--or with the first one chronologically--The Magician’s Nephew?  

--Are we ever going to find out why Lyra is so special?  Why all the communities opposed to the Magisterium leap to her aid at every opportunity?  Gyptians, witches, Oakley Street, now even the most eminent alchemists?  Why Lyra falling in love saves Dust and saves the multiverse?  And why only she can save it again?  (Ionides: “There is a great treasure, and she is the only one who can get it.” p. 631)

--Does Cornelis and Dinessa vaporizing into nothingness but pure energy in their Chemical Wedding foreshadow anything for Lyra?  Surely not but...

--Agrippa gives Lyra a pretty big hint that she will reunite with Pan when he tells her how she and her daemon can reach Lop Nor together by traveling apart.  She wouldn’t need that information if she continues to travel without him.  In fact, Agrippa provides a pretty clear outline for the last book: find Pan in Syria and then travel on to Central Asia to solve the rose oil mystery.  Unstated is what role there might be for Malcolm and--always hoping!!!--Will.  

--What else is Agrippa working on?  What is the “next stage” of his work?  Will he show up again?  If nothing else, I expect to see another alchemist appear--maybe a woman this time.  There were prominent women alchemists:  Maria Prophetissa, for example, or Eusebeia of Panopolis.  

One thing I am confident about is that we will see Brother Mercurius again, given his name.  Who will Mercurius bring together, mediate between?  

[isabellaclarissa]

2017.01.28 The Wedding of Julius and Yulie | Reception with Dinessa (at Maxi's Resto)