Sword: Difference between revisions

“Alas, alas, my son,” exclaims the wise Muphti, of Aleppo, to his son Ibrahim, who choked himself with the head of a huge fish. “When will you realize that your stomach is smaller than the ocean?” Or, as Mrs. Catherine Crowe remarks in her Nightside of Nature, when will our scientists admit that “their intellects are no measure of God’s almighty designs?”

We will not ask which of the ancient writers mention facts of seemingly-supernatural nature; but rather which of them does not? In Homer, we find Ulysses evoking the spirit of his friend, the soothsayer Tiresias. Preparing for the ceremony of the “festival of blood,” Ulysses draws his sword, and thus frightens away the thousands of phantoms attracted by the blood of the sacrifice. The friend himself, so-long-expected Tiresias, dares not approach him so long as Ulysses holds the dreaded weapon in his hand. Aeneas prepares to descend to the kingdom of the shadows, and as soon as they approach its entrance, the Sybil who guides him utters her warning to the Trojan hero, and orders him to draw his sword and clear himself a passage through the dense crowd of flitting forms....