down hecate's chain: infernal inspiration in three of poe's tales

Down Hecate's Chain: Infernal Inspiration in Three of Poe's TalesAuthor(s): Michael CliftonSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Sep., 1986), pp. 217-227Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045139 .

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Down Hecate's Chain: Infernal Inspiration in Three of Poe's Tales MICHAEL CLIFTON

E of the most striking images in "The Fall of the House of Usher" is Rod-

erick's strange painting, which the narrator describes as present- ing

the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.'

Oliver Evans dubs the odd lighting of Usher's painting "infernal illumination," cites additional appearances of this phenomenon in Poe's other writings, and concludes: "It is apparently original with Poe, and the fact that he was concerned with the subject throughout the thirteen most productive years of his career suggests an obsessive interest in it. On the conscious level, he exploited it as a dramatic device to heighten the atmosphere of horror and

? 1986 by The Regents of the University of California

'Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols. (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969-78), II, 405-6. Further references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

217



218 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

supernaturalism."2 But Poe actually develops the motif of infernal illumination to a far greater extent than Evans indicates. A close look at Poe's writings reveals an intricate pattern of infernal inspiration linking together his fears concerning the creative subconscious, the images that evoke these fears (e.g., the moon, the vortex, the prison), and elements from classical mythology. Three of Poe's stories, "A Descent into the Maelstrom," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Pit and the Pendulum," embody this concept of infernal inspiration, "The Fall of the House of Usher" most subtly and destructively.

"The Duc de L'Omelette," however, contains the key to this motif and is Poe's first short story employing it. During his short sojourn in Hell the Duc notices that the Devil's apartment has no ceiling "but [rather] a dense whirling mass of fiery-colored clouds" into which disappears a "chain of an unknown blood-red metal," containing at its lower end a "large cresset" that holds a "ruby" (II, 35). This chain and its jewel are the opposite of those to which Richard Wilbur draws our attention in the following lines from Poe's "Al Aaraaf":

A dome, by linked light from Heaven let down, Sat gently on these columns as a crown- A window of one circular diamond, there, Look'd out above into the purple air, And rays from God shot down that meteor chain And hallow'd all the beauty twice again....

(I, 106)

Wilbur comments that "what comes down the chain from heaven is the divine power of imagination."3 He and Poe clearly intend at least a Christian-like deity, but the more ancient and traditional god of poetic inspiration is, of course, Apollo, whose light the Duc's infernal chain definitely does not shoot out. The hellish ruby instead pours out "a light so intense, so still, so terrible" that "Mus- sulman never dreamed of such when, drugged with opium, he

2"Infernal Illumination in Poe," Modern Language Notes, 75 (1960), 297; see also pp. 295-96.

3Richard Wilbur, "The House of Poe," Library of Congress Anniversary Lec- ture, 4 May 1959; rpt. in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1829, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1966), p. 273.



DOWN HECATE S CHAIN 219

has tottered to a bed of poppies, his back to the flowers, and his face to the God Apollo" (II, 35). Reverting here to the more traditional divine patron of the arts, Poe says, in effect, that the most imaginative poet-even with his imagination chemically en- hanced-could never envision such a light as the ruby pours forth, at least not through Apollonian inspiration.

But if the infernal chain and gem function in the same manner that Wilbur claims for their opposites, then some deity must be the source of the light blazing from the ruby. If it is not Apollo and his sun, then perhaps it is the moon of his sister Artemis, a goddess closely linked with Hecate, who is both lunar and infernal, and who is described in one source as "terrible both in her powers and in her person-a veritable Fury, armed with a scourge and blazing torch."4 Certainly this goddess is sufficiently hellish to be the symbolic source of the ruby's light.

Poe strengthens the identification of Hecate as the patroness of those who explore their own subconscious with two comments from his Marginalia. The first has to do with the writing of a "very little book," the title of which is to be "My Heart Laid Bare," a book that will never be written because "no man dare write it. No man ever will dare write it. No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen." In speaking of the inmost recesses of the poet's heart (i.e., mind), Poe introduces the image of flame, recalling both Hell and Hecate. Addressing the creative subconscious more directly in the second of the comments, a slight revision to his ending of "The Premature Burial," Poe writes in Marginalia that "the Imagination of Man is no Carathis, to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful; but... they must sleep, or they will devour us-they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish."5 Mabbott's note to this passage identifies Carathis as the Greek "wicked old witch" mother of William Beckford's hero in his Gothic romance Vathek (III, 971-72, n. 20). Carathis is thus a type of Hecate, since

4Mark P. 0. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon, Classical Mythology, 2nd ed. (New York: McKay, 1977), pp. 126-27.

5Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia, introd. John Carl Miller (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1981), pp. 150, 201.




"after Euripedes has Medea admit that Hecate was her patroness in the black arts, she becomes prominent in literature as a leading witch and an inhabitant of the sulfurous infernal regions."6

Poe's comments, therefore, closely identify hellishness and a Hecate-like figure with the probing of the deepest parts of a person's mind, seemingly a fearful process one should avoid at all costs. Yet it may be a thing more choosing than chosen: the narrator of "Berenice," for example, has such a strong hereditary gift for reverie that the ordinary relation between dreams and reality is for him reversed: "The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, not the material of my every-day existence, but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself' (II, 210). His propensity "to muse for long unwearied hours" (II, 211) first becomes habitual, and then-the cause for the warning to let the subconscious sleep in the Carathis passage quoted above-it becomes permanent, imprisoning him, in effect, in his own subconscious.

Like the moon, then, the presence of which must be inferred at the upper end of the chain that De L'Omelette sees in Hell, the prison that one's subconscious tends to become for those chosen to explore it must also be inferred, at this point, as the second of the three main images of Poe's motif. The third, however, that of the vortex connecting the other two, actually appears to the Duc, first, as a literal chain, and second, as a "dense whirling mass of fiery-colored clouds" into which the chain rises. To place this chain/whirling mass in the dark ocean as Poe does in "A Descent into the Maelstrom," for example, is simply to make its form and function clearer: it is the means by which, under the influence of the moon, one is allowed (or perhaps, condemned) to explore one's own psychic depths.

The action one must take to prevent these depths from be- coming a prison is admirably demonstrated by the narrator of "A Descent into the Maelstrom," a story in which all the images of infernal inspiration are actually present. There is, to begin with, the moon: as he and his brother approach the raging vortex, the

6Philip Mayerson, Classical Mythology in Literature, Art, and Music (Waltham, Mass.: Xerox College Publishing, 1971), p. 151.



DOWN HECATE S CHAIN 221 narrator describes how, almost overhead, "there burst out, all at once, a circular rift of clear sky-as clear as I ever saw-and of a deep bright blue-and through it there blazed forth the full moon with a lustre that I never before knew her to wear" (II, 587). And inside the Maelstrom proper, the narrator observes that the rough water surrounding it disappears, that he is consequently "rid of these annoyances-just as death-condemned felons in prison are allowed petty indulgences, forbidden them while their doom is yet uncertain" (II, 589). Under the light (and guidance) of the moon, in other words, and once inside the vortex, intimations of that third image of the motif appear.

The reason that intimations only and not a literal prison appear to this narrator and type of the artist is contained in his particular vision: he and his boat, that is, appear to be

hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose per- fectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss. (II, 590)

Because he is only "midway down" the vortex rather than at its nether end, as is the Duc, for example, the moon's light is not that infernal red; it shines instead with a "golden glory," about which Poe's underlying ambivalence begins to surface, as in the phrase "gleaming and ghastly radiance": whereas the first term echoes that positive perception of the light inherent in his dubbing it a "golden glory," the second evokes both the narrator's very real danger and a more conventional reaction to the infernal deity under whose influence he has fallen.

Although, during these moments, the narrator/artist sees the "inmost recesses" of his subconscious (a phrase characterizing the unusual clarity experienced in such states), he must not continue to descend into them; those who do so are lost, as the fate of the narrator's brother symbolizes. He was overcome by the horror of the internal chaos into which Hecate guided him, did nothing, and was destroyed. In order not to be destroyed by such an ex-




perience, the artist must retrieve what he sees in his subconscious vortex and bring it into his conscious mind, where he can put it to proper use. This is precisely what the narrator does: he observes that cylinders descend very slowly into the Maelstrom, that the water cask he grasps is both empty and a cylinder, and he links these facts-unconnected in the vortex-in a conscious manner to achieve his own salvation. And this process is the one about which Poe speaks so triumphantly when he declares that he is able to convert the "fancies" he observes in a semidreaming state to conscious memory and thereby employ them in his art.'

The process of capture and conversion from the subconscious into the conscious mind also occurs in "The Pit and the Pendu- lum," but only after the poet/narrator experiences two descents (or vortexes), with yet another to endure before his escape is achieved. This difference between the two stories helps to explain the concept of infernal inspiration. The first descent down a dis- guised vortex occurs when the prisoner faints at his trial and his judges' voices connect themselves in his mind with the "idea of revolution" (II, 681). Consequently, he sees the candles at the trial in the same ambivalent sense as the narrator in "A Descent into the Maelstrom" sees the infernal light of the moon. They first appear to him as "white slender angels" from whom he expects help but change to "meaningless spectres" with "heads of flame" (II, 682). His ambivalent vision not only recalls Poe's attitude to- ward the artist's exploration of his subconscious in the Carathis passage in Marginalia, but its infernal aspect very closely resembles the burning torch Hecate carries. Ironically, the narrator thinks he can expect no help from the hellish candles, whereas they are actually emblematic of the very deity through whose help he undergoes the experiences he is recounting. Hecate's appearance- through-her-symbols precipitates what seems to him a "mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades" in a second swoon, his second descent down a vortex (II, 682).

The effect of these two descents is to plunge him farther down the moon-vortex-hell chain than the one descent of the pre- vious narrator, and, therefore, deeper into his own subconscious hell. He is in a dangerous position, but he is also closer to the

7Poe, Marginalia, pp. 98-100.




source of his own poetry, as he explains by reflecting that the person "who has never swooned is not he who finds strange pal- aces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view" (II, 683). His visions after eating drugged food are more than sad, however, when he awakens in his underground cell to find that a "wild, sulphurous lustre" enables him to see the "extent and aspect of the prison" (II, 688). His ambivalent perception of the candles' light is gone at this point, since he is trapped in his subconscious and knows it: the sulphurous lustre by which he now sees is an entirely hellish light.

The most striking thing he sees by this infernal illumination is a huge, bladed pendulum overhead, descending gradually upon him as he lies strapped in its path; it will eventually cut and kill him. The pendulum is a nightmare version of the stopped watch that the fisherman in "A Descent into the Maelstrom" discards when he realizes that no normal time exists in the vortex, and the nightmare quality of the pendulum represents the distortion of things perceived in the subconscious. The instrument by which man orders his rational, waking life becomes a destructive mon- strosity, yet the vision of it contains a truth: each swing of a clock's pendulum is a symbolic scything, a cutting away of our lives. This process is imperceptible in a waking state, but it is only too ap- parent to the narrator trapped in his psychic cell. He must act to save himself, and he does so by means of the fisherman's process of retrieval into the conscious mind of things perceived but unconnected in the subconscious.

The narrator notices the rats in his cell, their hunger for the meat he has been given, and the bandage that straps him in the pendulum's path. The struggle is hard at the depth to which he has sunk: the connection occurs to him first as a "half-formed thought" that perishes "in its formation" (II, 691). But he writes later that the "unformed half of that idea of deliverance" "flashed" into his conscious mind, so that the "whole thought was now present-feeble, scarcely sane, scarcely definite-but still entire" (II, 693), whereupon he rubs the bandage with the meat. The rats chew through the bandage and effect his escape from the pendulum but not from the cell. He has reached such a depth in his own mind that willful effort is useless to return him to full con-




sciousness. Since he cannot rise, he must sink further into the vortex. The reappearance of Hecate's light triggers his descent.

For the first time he notices "the origin of the sulphurous light which illumined the cell," while the demon eyes of the figures painted (or enameled) on the walls of his cell begin to gleam "with the lurid lustre of a fire that I could not force my imagination to regard as unreal" (II, 695). He finally sees the color Hecate's light assumes at the lower end of her chain-the ruby's light De L'Om- elette sees in Hell-as a "richer tint of crimson diffuse[s] itself over the pictured horrors of blood." The undiluted color of infernal inspiration appears because he is about to be plunged into the bottom of the vortex, which is revealed by the "glare from the enkindled roof" that illumines the "inmost recesses" of the pit at the center of his cell (II, 696). The types of movement-inward and down-as well as Poe's syntax and description of the last stages of these movements confirm the identification of the walls as vortex: "And now, flatter and flatter grew the lozenge, with a rapidity that left me no time for contemplation. Its centre, and of course, its greatest width, came just over the yawning gulf" (II, 696-97). The narrator has no time for contemplation; his conscious mind is denied him as he begins to descend to the "bottom" of his subconscious to his destruction. He is saved from this fate only by outside intervention, the reappearance of the normal world in the form of Napoleon's soldiers, whose rescue of the prisoner is like that of a person shaking a sleeper from his nightmare.

The ending of "The Pit and the Pendulum" makes clear Poe's fears about the process of infernal inspiration: it is possible-and probable, if the poet stays too long in this state-to sink from the point of semidreaming, in which conscious retrieval of things perceived is still possible, to a point or depth at which the poet can no longer will consciousness but remains locked in his fancies, having lost or forgotten the way out. This is the condition in which the main character in "The Fall of the House of Usher" finds himself from the very beginning.

Roderick Usher is the type of the infernally inspired poet who has remained too long in the distorted fancies of his subconscious and is therefore trapped in it. This story thus becomes a study of such a poet and his inevitable fate, recounted by a narrator outside




the vortex, in other words, by one who represents the conscious perspective. Roderick's appeal to him for help is both a recognition of his own condition and, so to speak, a cry for Napoleon's soldiers to rescue him from it. The narrator responds to the appeal but necessarily misunderstands a great deal of what he experiences, since he writes his record from the conscious "half" of his mind. His record is nonetheless revealing.

As he approaches the house, oppressed by an atmosphere which mystifies him, he observes that Usher's "very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art" (II, 398-99). Usher comes from a line of artists, but it is precisely this heritage that puts him in his desperate condition. The narrator later remembers that his boyhood friend had always had a remarkable face, one of the most remarkable features of which is "an eye, large, liquid, and luminous beyond compar- ison" (II, 401). Along with his inherited luminous eyes, Usher suffers from a "family evil" of extreme hypersensitivity (akin to that experienced by the prisoner in the pit) and what the narrator calls "that silent yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him-what he was" (II, 402, 408). This influence, hinted at by the "miraculous lustre" of Roderick's eyes, is Hecate's, and its effect is to cast "an excited and highly distem- pered ideality ... a sulphureous lustre over all" (II, 405).

Roderick lends this hellish lustre a graphic reality in his odd painting, described at the opening of this discussion. Usher's painting of a long, white vault or tunnel, without openings, and bathed in intense light that rolls throughout and bathes "the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor" (II, 406), represents his vision of the inmost recesses of his subconscious and his entrap- ment in it: the only way to picture the scene is from inside, and he has painted no way out. The vortex image appears in the roll- ing movement of the light; the vault is obviously cell-like, and the light itself-which Maurice Beebe sees as "radiating" from Usher's mind8-originates from Hecate. Usher captures his condition per-

8lvory Towers and Sacred Founts (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964), p. 124.




fectly. The narrator, though, refers to the light as "ghastly and inappropriate." Though it may well appear ghastly, it is certainly appropriate given Usher's personality and condition, a condition the narrator is unequipped by his very nature to understand. Nor does he realize the full significance of the "red-litten windows" (II, 407) in Roderick's allegorical poem, "The Haunted Palace." The narrator does recognize the poem as an allegory of Usher's loss of sanity, but he recognizes neither the cause for that lack of reason (a permanent stay in the realm of unreason, the subconscious) nor the portentous change in the color of Usher's allegorical eyes to red, anticipating his final slide into Hell and destruction.

The means by which this final descent is accomplished, oddly enough, is the Lady Madeline, who certainly does not seem to be destructive in her initial appearance in the story. But she is Rod- erick's twin and therefore shares the familial traits that place him in the position he is in. She too is under Hecate's influence, and her illness symbolizes this in its series of cataleptic or deathlike states, each of which is a descent farther down into her own subconscious chaos, and finally into (what seems like) death. At this point, the special oddity of the twins' relationship becomes ap- parent, for at her death the strange luminosity of Roderick's eyes vanishes. Nor does the moon reappear until Madeline, who is Roderick's inspiration, reappears in a distinctly infernal manner and form. Even during the storm of Usher's final night, the narrator writes that everything around them is "glowing in the un- natural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation," and he adds that "we had no glimpse of the moon" (II, 412). Although this is partially due to the presence of a whirlwind that is driving clouds around the ancient mansion (and the images of vortex and infernal illumination imply Hecate's active influence), it is Madeline's reappearance from the tomb that precipitates the moon's reappearance. Madeline's bloody description this time lends her a definite infernal quality, as do her actions when she falls upon her brother and both die. She returns as a hellish escort for her brother and thus embodies the goddess Hec- ate, an identification the ending passage of the story supports.




The narrator is fleeing wildly from the house, when suddenly,

there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened-there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind-the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight-my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder-there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters-and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "House of Usher." (II, 417)

With Madeline's reappearance, the storm inside Roderick's mind, as well as the storm outside the house, breaks, and the moon appears in its wholly infernal color. As the bloody Madeline appears, the bloody moon appears, and both signal the final descent: Rod- erick slides down to death in Madeline's company; the mansion slides into the tarn, which in the opinion of both Richard Wilbur and G. R. Thompson represents the subliminal or subconscious mind.9 Thus, the disappearance of the mansion into the tarn is equivalent to Roderick Usher's final descent into the subconscious chaos of his mind, and hence into death.

Usher's terrible fate signals implicitly that Poe's warnings in these stories and in his Marginalia are serious: the poet, he feels, must explore the innermost recesses of his mind for his art's sake, but he does so at the risk of his health, his sanity, and his life. The unwary artist could well end, like De L'Omelette's hypothet- ical Mussulman, hypnotized by the bloody light of the ruby blazing in the lower end of Hecate's chain. Or, like Usher, he could end by making the final descent into death.

California State University, Fresno

9Wilbur, introd., Poe: Complete Poems, ed. Richard Wilbur, Laurel Poetry Series (New York: Dell Publishing, 1959), p. 26; Thompson, Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1973), p. 92.



down hecate's chain: infernal inspiration in three of poe's tales

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