Eve & Sin In Media Res: the Epic Sex of Paradise Lost

“Those male, these feminine.
For Spirits when they please
can either Sex assume, or both ” 

Paradise Lost
John Milton

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Introduction to English Literature 1 
A Genealogy of Gender and Genre 

In this course, we explore gender and genre through literature produced in and around the early British Isles, from the elegiac poetry of the Anglo Saxons to the Epic poetry of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this survey of medieval and early modern texts, we trace how forms of narrative were informed by and acted on the construction of concepts of sex and sexuality. We study how debates around nature and nurture, essential and artificial, eternal and mutable came to produce later notions of transgender, queerness, disability, race, and religious difference.

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Between Heaven and Hell

Narrative at once works to explain bodies according to specific genders and genres and as a creative project also helps shape them. In this way, gender and genre are more than etymologically linked but can share a direct causal relationship. What then does an "epic" gender look like? By examining the characters of Paradise Lost through the epic narrative trait of writing in media res (in the middle of things), we can see how its key female characters, Eve and Sin, become defined by a fundamental indeterminacy, caught between roles of submission and independence, daughter and mother, heavenly spirit and hellish sinner. Although Paradise Lost centers around its male characters, Satan and Adam, it is only through the agency of women that the plot is able to move forward. Indeed, not only do women mirror the masculine power over shapeshifting, they potentially exceed the men in their mutability. The inconstancy of women functioned as a characteristic of female inferiority, but as the epic in media res of the epic demonstrates, all bodies share a common instability between choices, roles, and trajectories that open up a critical space between the tyranny of assumed origins and predestined conclusions.

Paradise Lost begins in media res, just after Satan has fallen from heaven but before he becomes the biblical Satan who temps Eve and then Christ (a point which draws a stronger connection for Christ as a second Eve rather than as a second Adam), yet as events unfold it becomes clear that the whole epic is structured by the sense of indeterminacy offered by existing in the middle of things. Indeed, the realization of the perpetual tension between possible truths, potential trajectories, and multiple desires is what sparks Satan's decision to become the inconstant tricker and tempter. "Me miserable!" he confesses before entering Eden, "which way shall I flie / Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire / Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell" (IV.73-75). The wrathful truth of heaven or the despair of meaninglessness in Hell are both impossible choices for him. They exist as poles that he finds himself temporally and geographically located in between and between which he constantly moves. This is his power and his curse: mutability. There is no escape from the indeterminacy of his post-fallen state because, like it or not, it defines him as a creature ever caught in media res.

 In his first famous speech, concluding with the call for his defeated forces to "awake, arise, or be forever fallen" Satan rouses the sense of a perpetual revolution of form and power by affirming a sense of cosmic mutability. "The mind is its own place," argues Satan, "and in it self / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n" (I.254-255). One change has already happen, the fall, materialized in the shift in heavenly to infernal settings. Yet more changes may take place. By calling on the spirits to embrace a change of mind, they may exercise power by changing the meaning of their circumstances. "Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n," Satan asserts (I.263). Likewise, the bodies of the spirits will soon change in turn. The text provides a general sense of the new names and features of the fallen angels but admits that this too is not fixed. There “Those male, these feminine," the text narratives, but adds that they can not only shift between mental states but sexes as well. "For Spirits when they please / can either Sex assume, or both ” (I.422-424). This statement occurs briefly in the first book yet transforms how we read the rest of the epic. While most of the main characters present as male, they are no more stable or fixed in their position or embodiment of gender than its female characters: Sin and Eve.

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Satan and Sin

Featuring characters who can assume the state of "either sex" or "both" at once, it is perhaps not surprising that the key male characters of the epic find themselves in the trans position of being pregnant men, each in turn giving birth to indeterminately gendered children. The first birth in Paradise Lost we discover in media res, as Satan meets his daughter at the gates of Hell. Realizing that he, and the reader, are not aware of the gestation that had just taken place, Sin describes the circumstances of her own birth. As Satan was in the midst of battle, she tells him, "All on a sudden miserable pain / Surprisd thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzie swumm / In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast / Threw forth, till on the left side op'ning wide" (752-755). By the work of heaven, Satan body opens up (like Adam's left side in Eden and later Eve's body after her fall) giving it an organ for reproduction. "Likest to thee in shape and count'nance bright," Sin describes, comparing herself to Satan, "Then shining Heav'nly fair, a Goddess arm'd / Out of thy head I sprung" (756-758). Gesturing at once to Athena's birth from Jove's head and Eve's creation from Adam's left side, Sin springs fully armed. She describes herself as a mirror image of Satan in form and force. Sin is a bright spirit and a warrior with the same potential as Satan to take on a feminine role as mother and a masculine role as revolutionary. 

No sooner was Sin born than Satan shifted back into a paternal role, as if to reassert his masculinity, he places sin in a subordinate female role by penetrating her and making her into a mother. "I pleas'd, and with attractive graces won / The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft / Thy self in me thy perfect image viewing / Becam'st enamour'd," she confesses, "and such joy thou took'st / With me in secret, that my womb conceiv'd / A growing burden" (762-767). Underlining her similarity to Satan, Sin demonstrates how this union is not merely incestuous its practically masturbatory. This has implications for Sin's pregnancy. That Satan becomes the father and Sin the mother is not predestined. Given their spiritual nature and Satan's evident ability to bear and issue forth life from his both, either might take on either role. While the plot follows reader's expectations of Satan as masculine and Sin as feminine, the text nonetheless stresses this likeness to suggest a mutual sexual indeterminacy.

Indeed, Sin fights and falls beside Satan as a comrade in arms, gaining her name along with him and then taking on a co-rulership over Hell. He becomes marked as Satan, the Enemy, in battle. She becomes marked as "Sin" when "All th' Host of Heav'n back they recoild affraid / At first... and for a Sign / Portentous held me" (759-761). Sin's appearance suggests the eruption of mutability, change, and revolution that Satan's opposition has generated. No long is eternity fixed but now open to many more falls and transformations. While Paradise Lost focuses on Satan's fall, it is not an isolated event, but one collaborated by Sin's fall. "Driv'n headlong from the Pitch of Heaven," narrates Sin, "down / Into this Deep, and in the general fall / I also;" (772-774). Adding "I also" just after the split not only highlights the importance of the fall as a collective ("general") event but stresses the start of the next line, "I also" just before it ends with a semi-colon. Sin shared in Satan's form, sexuality, battle, and defeat. Satan in turn becomes a prince of hell, tempting more to enter through its gates, yet even he must submit to Sin's power over the liminal space of the gate. Arriving in Hell, Sin is given her position of power, "at which time this powerful Key / Into my hand was giv'n, with charge to keep / These Gates for ever shut, which none can pass / Without my op'ning" (772-777). She determines who enters and who leaves. In turn, her body will become the womb of Death and by him many more children. Sin generates possibilities for mutability. This involves death but also change. Likewise, as gatekeeper of Hell, she uses her position in media res to control others, including men, even Satan.

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Adam and Eve

In Rabbinical lore, some hold that Adam was a hermaphrodite. As in Aristophane's myth of the three sexes and three sexualities in Plato's Symposium, a male-female pair logically comes from dividing a body composed of both genders. Indeed, of the many ways that two humans could have been formed, creation through division is suggestive conclusion for the authors of Genesis and Paradise Lost. In one sense, the division changes (and thus creates) both Adam and Eve. Each are made of the original flesh yet not identical to it. In another sense, if one wishes to stress Adam's relative constancy through the generation of Eve, at very least Adam functions like Satan as a mother's body that is opened up to reproduce life. In Book VII, Adam recounts just how this happens. "Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape [God] / Still glorious before whom awake I stood," recounts Adam, Who stooping op'nd my left side, and took / From thence a Rib, with cordial spirits warme, / And Life-blood streaming fresh" (463-467). Like the loss of blood in childbirth, and Satan's birth of Sin, a part of his body is taken through a hole in his left side produced by heavenly forces. Although held up as humanity's father, in this moment, before any other children, he (or at least his body) takes on the fleshly shape and role of a mother.

The generation of Eve as a woman, then, occurs at the same time that Adam is affirmed as a man, a synchronicity that affirms the shared likeness and indeterminacy of the two. "[W]ide was the wound," continues Adam, "But suddenly with flesh fill'd up and heal'd: / The Rib he formd and fashond with his hands; / Under his forming hands a Creature grew, / Manlike, but different sex" (468-470). At the same moment that Adam's flesh is being knit together, Eve's body is also taking on a new shape. Indeed, the double meaning of calling Eve "manlike," signifying both a common humanity and gender with Adam, that adding the tag "but different sex" seems to add clarification. In fact, it tells us little about who is the more conventionally masculine or feminine in body or appearance. Although there is a differentiation of nouns and pronouns, neither's bodies are described (in the Bible or Paradise Lost) until after the fall of humanity. The text gives qualities which are common to both and abstract rather than defining the shape of their flesh, "so lovly faire, / That what seemd fair in all the World, seemd now

Mean, / or in her summ'd up, in her containd" (471-473). We learn of Eve's beauty, which is to say her aesthetic value and sense of wholeness; a totality which seems to include all things and thus by extension all genders. 

In many ways, the text does more to affirm their likeness than there difference. Eve is describe as consubstantial to Adam by Adam, "Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh, my Self / Before me; Woman is her Name, of Man / Extracted; for this cause he shall forgoe / Father and Mother, and to his Wife adhere; / And they shall be one Flesh, one Heart, one Soule" (495-499). By the end of the description of Eve's birth, Adam has all but convinced the reader that their bodies share more than hold apart. Properly, one should consider them together rather than separate one as existing prior or above the other by their relation to "Father and Mother." Who after all is this Father and Mother? It could be God, parent of all, in which case the divine becomes associated (like all Spirits) as both masculine and feminine. And/Or, God could be like flesh, and Adam made in His/Her image. The Adam that exists prior to the divide could be considered both Mother and Father since he reproduces asexually. Or, yet again, Adam could be the Mother that bears the creation of God (here figured as a Father). In any case, Adam and Eve constitute a whole but indeterminate body that seems able to slip between the forms and positions of sex.

Like Satan, as soon as Adam gives birth to Eve and witnesses their likeness, he immediately asserts his sex (qua masculinity) by taking a dominant position in sex (qua intercourse). "To the Nuptial Bowre / I led her blushing like the Morn" (510-511). Eve's blushing and need to be led by Adam supposedly signifies the natural passivity of her sex and sexuality. From this Adam proposes that despite their like appearance, Eve is in fact secondary in creation and station. "For well I understand in the prime end," Adam admits of Eve, "Of Nature her th' inferiour, in the mind / And inward Faculties, which most excell, / In outward also her resembling less / His Image who made both, and less expressing / The character of that Dominion" (540-546). Again, both Adam and Eve are now products both of a hermaphroditic first creature and/or Creator. Yet, Adam differentiates between his body which lacks a rib and hers which was made of that rib. In the beginning they are the same and "in the prime end" they are different. Yet what of that transformative middle space, in media res, where they are formed and seem to continue to transform together?

Once Adam lets go of Eve sexually, and they get on to other business, she begins to assert her like powers of self-governance and her ability to chose (for better or worse) the many potential changes she may undergo and influence. "Let us divide our labours," she begins on morning, "thou where choice  / Leads thee, or where most needs, whether to wind  / The Woodbine round this Arbour, or direct / The clasping Ivie where to climb, while I / In yonder Spring of Roses intermixt /With Myrtle, find what to redress till Noon" (214-219). Each of them have been created to work Eden and while Adam pushes for them to work together like they do in bed, mutually and yet with him on top, Eve asserts her own ability to control her body and the world it can shape. Adam tries to instill in her fear over the vulnerability of her body, yet Eve presses back with an affirming of her own masculine-like constancy. "Let us not then suspect our happie State," Eve asserts, "Left so imperfet by the Maker wise, /  As not secure to single or combin'd. / Fraile is our happiness, if this be so, / And Eden were no Eden thus expos'd" (337-341). Like Satan who asserts that he embodies Hell, Eve claims that she embodies Eden. If Eden is a place of constancy, then so is she; as much as Adam. If, however, Eden now exists in a state of mutability, where change has happened and may occur again, positioning Eden and its occupants in media res, then both Adam and Eve are open to many potential futures. Whatever those futures may be, Sin and Eve become gatekeepers to unleash further change for the cosmos. Thus, while women become dually responsible for the fall of humanity, so too are they mothers and fathers of all the new things that take shape in the course of all that follows: more falls, salvation, and the indeterminacy that allows for the possibility and power of choice.

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More lesson plans from 

the Genealogy of Gender & Genre

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Blood Economies in the Spanish & Revenger's Tragedy

“Fortunes flow to you -
what will you be, a girl?” 
Revengers Tragedy 2.1 167-68

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the Body Politic’s “Woman Problem” 
in the Revenger’s Tragedy

If the Body Politic is built on the politics of bodies, then we see in the Revenger’s Tragedy a battle to purge and police the polis against “incontinence” (as expressed by Steven Mullaney in the Place of the Stage: London, Play and Power in Renaissance England) coded through gendered movements of ebb and flows. If the city has been poisoned and is being or is to be punished for its sins, then the Revenger’s Tragedy demonstrates the evils of simply bleeding or flushing out the bad, instead taking issue with the over-flow of wealth, booze and bodies in and out of the city: in short, the body politic has plumbing problems which means, genders the language of the play. They have a woman problem.

By coding men as solid and women as liquid (a concept also expressed in Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Body: Towards a Corporeal Feminism), the problems of the city all come back to the feminine problem of things flowing red: blood, wine and the hot, blushing bodies of women who play the role of “bri(d/b)es” so men may inter-penetrate each other and thus perpetuate their material existence and their fantasies of wholeness.

“In the midst of all their joys they shall sigh blood” (5.2.22) 

Blood for blood is the motivation of the play’s keys players which is condemned by the tragedy’s literally damning ending, suggesting that continence and restraint of the body would be the more virtuous program. This over-flow of blood is itself constantly pinned to women by painting them as the reason for initial transgressions providing that the seductive beauty of a woman cannot be resisted by men and they are compelled to rape or murder them if women do not give over what their beauty has inspired desire for. Likewise women are the intermediaries by which such seductions or manipulations of justice are brought about, leading to the spurring on of vendettas to settle what the law did not. Furthermore, the very act of men penetrating men with their phallic swords, suggesting homosexuality is here tacitly coded as feminine as well and against nature. Murder is a kind of sodomy and the penalty for sodomy is death. Men are not to become women, they are not to flow, as the bodies of women are to be policed.

“I was begot of impudent wine and lust” (1.3.190)

Booze, specifically wine, is a lubricating agent which literally flows into the bloody/bodies of men and women spurring them on to acts deemed sexual incontinence and to murder. The play warns that an intoxicated man is more disposed to do evil but when women are present or even worse are themselves drunk then sin is sure to happen. Once again drink makes a man’s body flow (both in movement as well as through the expulsion of sweat, vomit, defecation and pending his further actions: blood and semen) and thus resulting become disgracefully feminized.

“the blush of many women, whose chaste presence

would e’en call shame up to their cheeks 

and make wanton sinners have good colours” (1.4.7-9)

Blushing is repeated throughout the play as a point in which the virtue and virginity of a woman can be tested. We can see in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish the history of how the body was investigated in such a way as to surrender visible signs of truth when the person’s words could not otherwise be taken as honest. In another of Foucault’s works, the Birth of the Clinic, he discusses how the body, particularly the bodies of dominated/marginalized persons are interrogated for signs of disease. In this case, there is a spiritual disease (sin) but also potentially a physical disease (syphilis) which is being investigated based on the preoccupation with women’s sexuality and flow (as syphilis itself was understood to increase and be spread by flow)---this coded theme of a syphilis ridden London in Early Modern drama is treated in depth in Jonathan Gil Harris’s book Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England.

Then there is the un-virtuous flow of the seed into the woman (such as by infidelity via cuckolding or incest) of which the resulting child is a sign of her presumed sexual incontinence; again, it is stressed that even in the case of rape she is implicated by her attractiveness (she somehow “was asking for it”) and that her chastity was somehow so directly tied to the literal state of her body/vagina that even in a case of forced penetration she is dirtied. The resulting child itself, displayed in the play via the discussion of “bastards” are living signs of incontinence and are treated as such; leading them to act out their designated station as incontinent, even flowing feminine bodies (i.e. they spend, drink, seduce and kill).

“Men have no power, angels must work you to it” (2.1.86)

The presumed solitude and impermeability of men proves a problem in a world which needs ties to be made and goods exchanged, thus women are treated as the penetrable and movable middle where males can enter into a pact together; the exchange of a wife, daughter, sister for marriage is seen as a proper way in which men can affirm their physical relationship while neither of them having to physically or metaphorically enter each other. The wife is “one body” with her father and then her husband and so she is used to “bind” the male bodies together through a kind of extra-personal intercourse. In the case of cuckolding and rape, however this “one body” of the man’s is penetrated by another man without his consent and thus feminizes him. The woman is reduced to being the husband’s vagina by which he can issue out children but also himself be taken by another man; thus her benefit and peril to him.

Since she is a “middle-man” and a commodity, it may then be little surprise that the flow of money is also condemned in the same breath as women in the play. Both (as well as booze and blood) are seen to be pleasures which are to be held onto and not spread around (as merchants are want to do it, it is suggested, on all those fronts). Thus the question of money/bribery which threatens to sway the law and the rise of gallants to sway the cultural/courtly life of those whose fortunes are “set” and not based on the “flow” of merchandise becomes a central dilemma in the play. It can be read that the gallants (like the often feminized sailors or actors) are read as the false and incontinent imposters which are a living sign of a diseased economic/estate system. The economy of the city has syphilis; it has a feminine problem with flow, but without women or flow, there would be neither men nor London.

“Wipe your lady from your eye” (1.4.72)

All these issues with feminine inconstancy, it is suggested can be solved if women act as virgins, exemplified by the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. Their bodies flow is to be policed both regarding what enters it (including booze and phalluses) and what leaves it (blood and bastards). If this can be done, if men can avoid becoming women and flowing themselves, the play seems to suggest that virtue and justice may win out.  Of course, the concept of a male body which is totally continent and impenetrable, as well as the failure to address issues in the male homosocial by projecting their dilemmas of incontinence and penetrability, even hybridity onto women is doomed to fall apart. Likewise the premise of Virgin Queen which all women should strive to imitate is doomed to fail as well for the same reason as for men. The city flows and had always done so; materially, conceptually, financially it has always been an ecology. The growth of London may compound and introduce many problems but also develops many of the benefits which many of the flow naysayers may project or root in an idealized past which never existed or into a future Utopia which can never exist.

This tendency to long for an imagined pre-existing impermeability , a desire for a kind of Edenic “lost” wholeness which will one day we will be “restored,” a filling up of a “lack” so as to be whole again is a central concern for psychoanalysis. The Revenger’s Tragedy’s disposition towards women is systemic, in this reading, of some Londoner’s desire to “return to womb,” not in the literal sense but rather to an imagined a time and state of virgin perfection that never existed. This tension, Busse goes on to argue is what propels the fascination with women, flow, blood, booze and blushing even as they wish to be rid of them all: “they body forth abjection even as they attempt to contain it.” In this reading, the bodying forth of the feminized male form (with all its corresponding incontinences) is captured in the female characters performance by cross-dressed male actors. The city is becoming female, as are its citizens.

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Blood Economies in the Spanish Tragedy

As in the Revenger’s Tragedy, Kyd sets up a repeated exchange of blood for blood in his play. This exchange seeks to justify the loss of life by sacrificing another body (against its will--- but is willingness the necessary component of a sacrifice or is it not a sacrifice if it is desired?). The result of this exchange is further exchanges of blood, creating an ongoing network of bodies being forfeited for one another.

We can see in the language surrounding these living, dead and undead bodies the anxiety surrounding the unknowability of their worth, the “standard” which serves as the foundation for their being. Without a known standard, the death of a body leaves others uncertain as the exact value of the loss and the proper (or possible) repayment for it. Through the play, three epistemologies of blood (as thing) are performed:  the death-drive (being as nonbeing), blood economies (being as network), and black boxes (being as retreating object).

“To absent yourself and give his fury place” … 

“To love, and fear, and both at once” (III.x.72/93)

Afoot in the play is a shifting game identifying with bodies (as family, friends and fiefs) and alienating them (as villains, monsters and murderers). The identified body is held close as a part of the self or when separate/resistant is spoken of as a love object which will one day be integrated into the self (such as in the case of a lover). The alienated body is cast out, destroyed, imprisoned or murdered. This distinction however is troubled throughout the play because of the failure for the qualities of self and other to ever extricated from one another. Bodies play the role of both other and self, to the self (including and especially ones own body). Thus one can never be sure, for long, whether one loves, or hates a body, or make peace while perceiving both.

The assumption here, among other rationale based on the decision that things which one identifies with (as subject) deserve life and those which is alien deserve death (as object). This is justified based on the further assumption that subjectivity has a standard of being which objects lack. Anxiety (literally “the feeling of death”) arises out the inability the distinguish between subject and object, especially as they relate to the self. The erotic game of sex and murder are then failed attempts to resolve the tension, serving only to defer the revelation of that “standard of being” indefinitely. This anxiety in psychoanalytic terms is the lack, the desire for blood (eros and thanatos) is the death-drive and the “standard” which is not there is the petite object a. What is clarified in these terms is not only that the self erotically desires the destruction of others and the self, but does so out of a desire for a state of “un-death” a return to a baseline “nothingness” which will resolve the tension of being (Zizek: the Monstrosity of Christ).

“for blood with blood shall, while I sit as judge, 

be satisfied, and the law discharged” (III.vi.35-36).

Looking back and closer into the identification and alienation process of the exchange of bodies (both human and non-human, organic and inorganic) we see how they are made of a constant of exchange of things. Money, land, titles, clothes, scarves, armor, swords and humans come together to form a person and are then exchanged to others to keep the ecology of selves alive. At times this exchange is done through friendly gifts, at other times through violent seizures or as court ordered reparations. In any case, things do not stay in one place very long but constantly move between bodies, acting on them as they are acted on (be they inspiring desires, killing, providing courtly pleasures or simply keeping the gears of economic and bodily digestion running).

In this sense, rather than being as the deferral of an inherent nothingness, beings become things through the constant ecstatic motion of exchange. The bodies become a blood economy. While the blood for blood flow in the play may not be “the best” ecology one can imagine, it IS an ecology of things that form a network of relations moving on one another. The blood-exchange keeps things moving and bodies get what they “need” from one another. In this case, the distinction between “living” and “not living” or “subject” and “object” is dissolved, so as the blood in the veins and the blood on a sword (or the sword itself) are revealed to share stations are “actors” in the network. The loss of human life does lose its privileged role but in ecology all things serve as the standard of agency-in/as-being. In other words: blood running through the veins of Horatio or running through the streets/veins of the body politics exemplify different frames/modes of ecological life; with different ethical implications.

“Show him this box, tell him his pardon’s in’t, 

but open’t not, and if thou lovs’t thy life, 

but let him wisely keep his hopes unknown” (III.V, 71-74).

To conclude and bring in a third model for blood-standards, I will dwell on the scene in which Pedrigano is being threatened with torture in order to (a) reveal in his body the truth of his claims and (b) to either purge his sins or reify the tortures of hell he will suffer after his execution (see Foucault’s Disapline and Punish). It is as this time that a messenger carrying a [black] box that is said to hold the T/thing that will save/justify his life; of course they are not able to open and make it disclose this final truth [see Serres/Latour’s black-boxes].

Here we have two objects with contain an unseen truth, a being which is inferred through suggestion and belief, a source at once deep inside and from without (be it in the body or box, or from heaven/hell or sent from the court). The thought in both cases, is that opening these objects would reveal the truth, but in both cases they do/can not. This may be that the standard does not exist or exists in the search for the standard; or it may be that it exists but further in, ever retreating into the body/object [see Harman’s Retreating Objects]. A person can keep digging, keep opening boxes within boxes and bodies within bodies but they will ever be left with both.  The body and the box stand forefront in the scene, visible but not fully present; suggesting but not disclosing their standard of value, being and truth. In this object-oriented ontology reflects the plays captivation of the audience, these things arrest the gaze of onlookers who peer in waiting for a reveal which is not totally differed (insofar as they DO get/see something) but which is never fully present.

So, blood as a queer object: death-drive, blood economy or black box?

Perhaps we have in a sense a trinity or simply three options. One offers an unmoved mover, the second a moving mover and the third a way to mediate between both (at the heart is the retreating object and between these objects a go-between which suggests its present and acts on others).

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Blood and Water in the Lusiads

"One of the soldiers with a spear pierced [Christ's] side,

and forthwith came there out blood and water" (John 19:34)

The image that struck me most in my reading of the Lusiads was the repeated dying of rivers and oceans with blood. These scenes cluster within the narrated histories and prophecies of Portugal's conquest. A total of 13 such references exist in Canto Three; 4 times in Canto Four; and 2 notable times in the Divine Predictions in Canto Ten (to name a few).

So why does de Camoes insist on remembering histories where "swords smoked with blood" when "battle became massacre/with deaths, shrieks, blood and stabbing/such a myriad of people perished/that the very flowers changed color" (Canto 4:39-44) or future visions that "the sea will churn/with blood, fire and iron resistance to "make blood run knee-high/in the enemy ships" (Canto 10: 29-33)? Because in looking at Portugal’s past and "future," in order to describe the present, de Camoes finds the immortal thread which runs through them all: fluids.

In some ways, water and blood are natural symbols for the Portuguese: they are the conquerors of the sea. As de Castanheda writes, the old imperial conquests of Persia, Greece, and Rome "were all by land...but this of the Indies was done by sea" (Travel Knowledge 128). De Camoes and the Portuguese could see that the game of empire had changed so that the old game of the land based army and forts were giving way to ships and control of naval routes. By forcing all merchant ships to pass through their barricades and through their ports, the Portuguese squeeze out a hefty profit. Of course this type of conquest and extortion does not come peacefully, as Shankar Raman observes, "the use of force was in fact an implicit assumption from the very beginning" (Travel Knowledge 144).

But the fact of Blood and Water meant more than just a lot of both, as a pair of Transcendental Signifiers, it was through fluid use of rhetoric and Structure that de Camoes and the Portugese claim authority. It's so fluid it smacks of deconstruction. The way in which de Camoes interweaves the past and present empires into his narratives corresponds to how he mixes Greek and Christian divine powers. Greece and Rome are constantly being invoked in relation to Portugal. Likewise Bacchus genuflects to the image of the Holy Spirit. Venus and Hermes each inspire visions of Eden and Christ. Not only is there a kind of implicit emergence happening but merely in their constant grouping, signs are working together to build a flood of associations. Try to map the direct cause and effect and you might come up short, but passively read through the verse and you may find yourself drawn, perhaps because of distraction, into a belief that "yeah, those goes together."

Of course, Christ is himself a potential Bacchus-figure who himself is embodied in the wine of a destroyed (and fermented body) leading to an ecstatic state; and, along with the Holy Spirit, as a kind of Mercury figure situated as a shifting go-between. The mixture of fluid divine bodies, Greek/Roman/Christian, further demonstrate how even divinity may not be transcendent (above) but rather flowing between things.

This fluid movement of authority and narrative (which is characteristic on one level of the Epic, with all its windings) also allows de Camoes to rewrite histories and nature for the Portuguese. Not only do the "oceans quake spontaneously" (2:46) for them, as if in orgasmic excitement for their approach but the winds bow to their command "as it is now the custom of the sea, the sails unfurled, we bellowed: 'God's speed', and the north winds as usual/heard and responded" (5:1).Raman in fact, sees the whole project of telling the history of Europe and Asia from the Portuguese perspective as a kind of white-washing, which "begins to replace ‘native’ histories with its own representations of these histories" (Travel Knowledge 143).

The bait and switch happens in what Raman describes as "rejection of the signifier in favor of the signified" wherein de Camoes rewrites the icons/religions/books/gods of other cultures as shadowy images of the True God that could correctly signify Christ if only they had eyes to see it (Travel Knowledge 139). This is what the critic calls "the gap between the image and what it represents...to expose the blindness of the pagan to the hidden truth [and]...to convert intended evil into good" (Travel Knowledge 139). This sleight of hand (or rather the eye) is exactly how the Portuguese sailors in the Lusiads avoid numerous dangers, seeing the signs of treachery and transforming the circumstance to their benefit. Likewise, it allows for the appropriation of cultural, economic, political and religious systems for "proper" colonial use and conversion.

This disjunction between sign and signifier allows for the justification of Catholic teaching on scripture and religious icons by the Portuguese as another form of instilling authority. A prominent Reformation criticism of the Catholic Church was the worship of idols. In this rereading of signs and signifiers, it is evident that icons, relics, treasures, Cathedrals and the like are all fine, so long as they point to God and are not worshiped for themselves. According to a form of dialectics (which what John Milank suggests is the mode of Protestant/Enlightenment dualism) this would mean worshipping, or justifying one’s self to the “lack” of a transcendent signifier. As a paradox (which Milbank suggests is the traditional Catholic mode) the use of physical, subconscious (or unconscious?) modes of worship in which the mind is allowed to wander or to be changed through acts on the body which the mind is only lightly engaged in, inter-actions of mediation and slippage is allowed to flow. Without full subjective comprehension, one might wake up from the effects of holy water and wine to discover oneself carried in the flow of Portugal's religious currents.

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