Traditional and Initiatic Symbolism in the Alexander Romance, Part II
Further meditations on the initiatory meaning of a half-forgotten text…
In the previous article, I attempted to explain some of the traditional and initiatory symbolism that appears in the so-called Alexander Romance, specifically the earliest Greek recensions of this popular medieval tale, which were likely composed in the intellectual milieu of Hellenistic Alexandria, not long after the death of the great conqueror himself.
Modern scholarship typically dismisses the Romance as merely a kind of proto-novel or adventure tale, and adduce the weird incidents and encounters of Alexander the Great as the inspiration for later adventure-tales in the Byzantine, Arab, and even early modern periods. This sort of reductionism and intellectual obtuseness is to be expected; however, a closer reading of the text discloses numerous traditional and initiatic symbols, some of which I have attempted in my inadequate way to explicate in these essays.
We left off in the previous article with Alexander reaching “the end of the world,” in the far north or arctic regions, where he sought the “Land of the Blessed,” which in this case may be securely identified with Thulé or Hyperborea, or even the “White Island” or “Avalon” in other legends…in other words, the Center of the World, the supreme source of the primordial Tradition in our present cycle or Manvantara.
Alexander and his men were warned away from the island by supernatural voices, which is in keeping with initiatic symbolism, for the Supreme Center remains hidden and inaccessible to the uninitiated during the Kali-Yuga, and will only appear again to the vulgar and profane at the end of the cycle, when the rectification occurs and the next Manvantara ensues.
Now, what happens next in the Romance is important, for it is pregnant with much esoteric imagery. Ignoring the disembodied voices and their commandments, some of Alexander’s men attempt to swim toward the mysterious island and essay a landing anyway.
But they are soon attacked by giant crabs which surface and drag the hapless men underwater. Alexander and his soldiers return to the shore, where they behold a gigantic crab emerging from the sea. The soldiers slay the monster and, upon cracking open its shell and disclosing its innards, they discover therein seven enormous pearls.
Believing this to be a sign of the incredible wealth to be gleaned from the depths of the sea, Alexander commands his men to build him a large glass jar within an iron cage. This is the famous “diving bell” or “bathyscaphe” of Alexander the Great, which figured so much in medieval illustrations of the Alexander Romance; at the bottom of the jar is an opening for collecting objects from the seafloor, and Alexander has himself lowered into the water, tethered to the shore by an immense chain that is nearly two-thousand feet long. The intrepid world conqueror descends into the abyss three times, and on the third occasion his bathyscaphe is clenched in the jaws of an enormous fish, which drags it a mile away before crushing the apparatus and casting it ashore. Alexander escapes, barely, and vows to abstain from the hubris that caused him to attempt the impossible: the conquest of the ocean depths.
This strange episode is usually considered merely an amusing side story in a larger narrative; most moderns think of it as a kind of proto-science fiction story. It is nothing of the sort. The esoteric meaning is very clear to those with eyes to see: after being rebuffed, as must all mortals, from the mysterious Island of the North, Alexander (the initiate) is tempted with a vision of the wonders and the wealth of the material world. This comes in the form of the crab, an ugly and frightening monster, within which is concealed the “seven splendid pearls.”1
These pearls tempt Alexander, who wishes to explore the waters to see what other wonders and treasures they may conceal. Now, the use of the waters as a symbol to represent the material world—the physical world of flux and change and chaos and evolution that forms our waking world of everyday experience—is a very ancient one; cf., for instance, the “face of the waters” in Genesis.2 Alexander the scientist and disciple of Aristotle (that is to say, the materialized as opposed to the transcendent initiate) seeks to plumb this material world and grab of its secrets, but he fails, and scarcely escapes with his life.
This is a lesson and a warning to the initiate to avoid becoming immersed in the material world, and to not become ensorcelled by its novelty and never-ceasing wonders, which can only lead in the end to total destruction and the ruin of the soul. Even Alexander the Great, the Ruler of the World, failed to master the secrets of the material dimension; it is a counsel against scientism, and materialism, and a too-eager acceptance of the evolutionism that even the ancients knew and, for the most part, rejected.
There are further tests for the initiate. For instance, there is the test of wisdom and reverence for tradition, when Alexander orders only young men to accompany him into the dark and desolate region of the “Land of the Blessed.” The aged father of two of these young men knows that his counsel will be needed, so he disguises himself and accompanies the adventurers in contravention of Alexander’s order; the conqueror is later compelled to rely on the old man’s wisdom in order to escape this country at the End of the World.
Then there is the celebrated story of Alexander’s cook, Andreas, who inadvertently discovers in this country the Fountain of Life.3 The cook tells no one, but secretly drinks of the Fountain and keeps some of this life-giving water in a silver vessel. Afterwards, Andreas gives some of this water to Alexander’s daughter Kalē (“the Beautiful One”). When Alexander learns of this, he banishes them both; his daughter he renames “Naraida” (a corruption of Nereida, from Νηρηíδες, the sea-nymphs who were daughters of Nereus) because she is now an immortal spirit, her inhuman longevity obtained through drinking the Water of Life; she is condemned now to be a deathless, nonhuman being that haunts the inaccessible places of Greece—the Beautiful One of the Mountains, just the sort of realm where such creatures are traditionally believed to reside. Andreas he similarly banishes, condemning him to live as a sea spirit in a far corner of the ocean—again, a remote place beyond the ordinary scrying of men.
The obvious initiatic meaning of this episode is that immortality is not to be achieved through shortcuts during one’s life on earth, in the material world; it may only be obtained through hard and deliberate work, and the preparation of the soul, and only after death has occurred—whether the conventional kind, or the initiatic kind. To obtain immortality in any other way is to become a kind of elemental spirit, a non-human creature, which it is the duty of Alexander (as of the initiate) to banish from the world of men—even if that creature had once been his own daughter, symbolizing the dreadful seriousness of this injunction against initiatory shortcuts.
The world conqueror, believing himself to have reached the Polar Seat, or the Hyperborean country, then has a great arch constructed, bearing the inscription: “‘If you want to get to the Land of the Blessed, keep to the right, or you will get lost.’”4 To those who are versed at all in the language of magic and initiation, it’s hardly necessary to explain the obvious meaning of this formula—viz., that the so-called “right-hand path” is the surer road to Deliverance or initiatory realization than the “left-hand path,” which is a far more difficult undertaking. In erecting this “great arch” with its admonitory epitaph, Alexander the consummate initiate—the one who has explored both the right-hand and the left-hand paths—is advising those who would follow which is the more arduous but less dangerous path to transcendence.
I pass over the episode of Alexander’s attempt to ascend to heaven in a “capsule” of sorts yoked to two great white birds; the initiatory symbolism here is obvious, with deliberate parallels to the story of Bellerophon and Pegasus, save that Alexander is admonished by a “flying creature in the form of a man” (an angel), and ordered to cease exploring the heavens, and continue his conquest of the material world. Again, the metaphors and symbols here are quite obvious, as it is really the reverse of the same initiatic coin whose obverse is the tale of Alexander’s descent into the sea.
In this case, the initiate is advised to set his affairs in the material or physical world aright ere he makes any attempts to essay the spiritual realm in earnest; whereas the parable of a descent into the sea warns against becoming too immersed in the material realm, the parable of the ascent to heaven warns against spiritual hubris when one has yet to master one’s physical world.
Far more important from the initiatic perspective is a rather fleeting episode that closely follows Alexander’s attempt to ascend to heaven. This is where Alexander slays an enormous fish that attacks him after he wades into a strange lake whose water “was like honey.” Alexander orders the fish to be cut open so that he may inspect its internal anatomy (the pupil of Aristotle seems here to be laboring under the influence of his celebrated master):
“When this was done, a gleaming stone was seen in its belly, as bright as a lantern. Alexander took the stone, set it in gold and used it at night instead of a lamp.”5
It’s a peculiar part of the Romance, almost a non sequitur, or a random kind of incident that—to the uninitiated—passes as but another weird episode among a bewildering succession of such; the gleaming stone is never mentioned again. But there is much more to it, naturally.
It was pointed out by Julius Evola that this strange light-giving stone may be assimilated both to the Grail of medieval legendry, as well as to the Ring of King Solomon:
“…I will recall that Alexander, like Seth [the son of Adam], allegedly came close to the primordial center here on earth, to the earthly paradise, bringing back from it a stone with the same characteristics as those of the Grail, which Seth had previously taken from the same place: the stone is as bright as the sun, bestows an eternal youth, and grants victory.
[…]
“[The] ring of King Solomon is in turn a facsimile of the stone that Alexander the Great allegedly found in a huge fish and that, like the Grail carried by the Fisher King, has luminous properties, manifesting itself as a great light in the night.”6
The stone that Alexander finds in the great fish is therefore to be likened to the lapsit exillis—that is, the stone fallen from the crown of Lucifer when he was cast out of heaven.7 The meaning of the fish as the bearer of this magical stone is also highly significant: as René Guénon observes in his essay “Some Aspects of the Symbolism of the Fish,”8 the fish frequently appears in the role of a “Savior,” or as a transmitter of the primordial tradition at the beginning of a new cycle or Manvantara.
The symbolism, then, of the great fish bearing within it the “Grail” or lapsit exillis in the Alexander Romance is very suggestive; all the pieces come together, with the great fish as the conveyer of tradition at the commencement of a future Golden Age after the exhaustion of the present Kali-Yuga, and the “gleaming stone” representing the Tradition itself, which is taken up by the King of the World and used to throw back the darkness that has gripped the earth.9 “As above, so below”—as it is with Alexander, the Golden Age or Hyperborean hero redivivus, so it is with the initiate, who reads in the adventures of the Great Man the very same tests and trials that he must undergo.
To wrap up this analysis, let us look at the initiatic symbolism of one final and very famous episode, which is the shutting up of the Unclean Nations behind the Caspian Gates. This is where Alexander chases a vast multitude of nameless races into the north for fifty days, until they pass between “two mountains in the unseen world, which they called the Breasts of the North.”10 Alexander constructs immense, brazen gates in the narrow defile between the two mountains; these gates are said to be indestructible, and will hold the numberless hosts until the end of the world. Listed among the Unclean Nations are “Goth” and “Magoth,” which are obvious corruptions of the Biblical Gog and Magog.
The symbolism here, which endured well into the Middle Ages (the legend of the Caspian Gates and the stemming of the hordes of Gog and Magog appears often in the books of medieval geometers), is twofold. On the one hand, Gog and Magog represent the triumph of the teeming, unclean masses; in other words, it is the triumph of the lowest caste in Evola’s “Regression of the Castes,” which is held in many traditions to herald the end of a cycle, and is represented in our age by the spread of liberalism and democracy, and the eclipse of quality and a true aristocratic or monarchic system among the governments of the world.
On the other hand, it symbolizes the initiatic shutting away and stemming of the hordes of inferior subtle forces that seek irruption and entry into our world, as explained by René Guénon in the twenty-fifth chapter of The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times, in connection with the spreading fissures in the “Great Wall” that formerly kept these entities at bay.
“In the Islamic tradition [Guénon writes] these ‘fissures’ are those by which, at the end of the cycle, the devastating hordes of Gog and Magog will force their way in, for they are unremitting in their efforts to invade this world; these ‘entities’ represent the inferior influences in question. They are considered as maintaining an underground existence, and are described both as giants and as dwarfs; they may thus be identified, in accordance with what was said earlier on the subject, and at least in certain connections, with the ‘guardians of the hidden treasure’ and with the smiths of the ‘subterranean fire,’ who have, it may be recalled, an exceedingly malefic aspect…”11
It is the role of the Hyperborean hero, the relict of the Golden Age (as Alexander is here taken to be), and of the initiate, to restore the integrity of the Great Wall that wards off the subtle inferior forces, both in the exterior (material) and interior world. The sundering of that Wall, and the irruption of the unclean hordes into our world, must needs occur at the end of time…but ere then, it is the job of the initiate to keep the evil hosts at bay.
This material is all very esoteric, with innumerable initiatic symbolisms present in its catalogue of weird places, creatures, and encounters; to the uninitiated, it is merely an adventure tale, but to those with eyes to see, the text is riddled with veiled references to hidden things.
There is more, of course…much more. The episode, for instance, of Alexander’s meeting with Sesonchosis, the former King of the World who—as with the wounded or sleeping king of the Grail in the legend-cycle of the Sangreal—awaits his replacement so as to pass on the mandate of his rulership, is pregnant with much initiatic symbolism. There are others as well, such as the encounter with the Amazons, or Alexander’s conversations with Candace queen of Meroë, or the exploration of the Crystal Country, or even the battle with the wingéd women of Africa, that contain a greater-than-surface-level meaning.
But I think that is enough to discuss for now.
The important thing is to understand that this neglected and nearly forgotten text, The Alexander Romance, is a rich vein of traditional and initiatic symbolism that ought to be delved by those who are interested in such things. The key, of course, is to sift the wheat from the chaff, and to recognize the esoteric kernel hidden within an exoteric shell, and that is not often an easy thing to do…
Aside from the obvious esoteric significance of the number seven, the “seven splendid pearls” may also represent the septem triones or “seven ploughing oxen,” which are the seven stars that make up the asterism of the Big and Little Dippers—in other words, the constellations of the Greater and Lesser Bears, which are synonymous with the North (septemtrio or septentrio signifying “north” in Latin). Moreover, the seven pearls may be related to the seven celestial spheres or seven heavens, and their presence within the crab may allude to the occulted nature of the spiritual realm during the Kali-Yuga, which it is the role of the initiate or transcended man to disclose.
“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Gen. 1: 2). Also: “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so” (Gen. 1: 6-7).
Incidentally, due to the misunderstanding and lack of comprehension of those uninitiated who read and enjoyed this, admittedly, quite fascinating and exciting adventure tale, the episode of the Fountain of Life or Youth in the Alexander Romance was taken quite literally by the profane audience of the Middle Ages, leading to many fruitless searches for it by European explorers, from Marco Polo to Juan Ponce de León. It is a vivid illustration of the dangers of permitting esoteric or initiatic symbols to come before the profane or unprepared.
The Greek Alexander Romance, trans. Richard Stoneman (London, England: Penguin Books, 1991), pg. 122.
Ibid., pg. 124.
Julius Evola, The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1997), pp. 87, 102.
Cf. René Guénon’s essay “Lapsit Exillis” in Symbols of Sacred Science, pp. 279-83.
In Symboles fondamentaux de la Science sacrée (Éditions Gallimard, 1962) [Symbols of Sacred Science (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001) pp. 145-150.]
There is another version of the Alexander Romance, of ultimately non-Greek and probably Jewish origin, known as the Iter ad Paradisum (“Journey to Paradise”), and which includes another mysterious gem or stone. In this tale, we learn of Alexander arriving at the bank of the Phison River, one of those whose origin can be traced to the Garden of Eden; with his men, Alexander embarks on a vessel and travels up the river on a voyage that lasts thirty-four days and entails much hardship. They eventually come upon an immense walled city, and Alexander demands admittance; he is refused, but is given “a gem of wonderful brilliance and colour, which in size and shape exactly reproduced the human eye.” Alexander leaves the vicinity of the strange city (which we later learn is the Paradise Terrestrial, the abode of souls awaiting Judgment Day), and eventually presents the gem to a learned Jew in Susa, and inquires the meaning of the episode. The sage learns that the gem cannot be counterbalanced by all the weights and riches of the world; but if a little dust is sprinkled over it, even the lightest feather outweighs it. Thereat, the learned Jew interprets the meaning of the gem as a warning to Alexander and a reminder to mankind: it resembles the human eye, and desires ever greater wants in accordance with their satisfaction; but once the “vital spark” of the eye is removed, and it is buried under the element of earth (in other words, once it dies), it becomes worthless. The initiatic symbolism is here, once again, very clear; the eye-shaped gem is another version of the Lapsit Exillis or Sangreal (cf. M. Esposito, “A Mediaeval Legend of the Terrestrial Paradise” [Folklore, Vol. 29, No. 3: 1918], pp. 193-205).
The Greek Alexander Romance, pg. 186.
René Guénon, La Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945).[The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001), pg. 173.]
"It is the role of the Hyperborean hero, the relict of the Golden Age (as Alexander is here taken to be), and of the initiate, to restore the integrity of the Great Wall that wards off the subtle inferior forces, both in the exterior (material) and interior world. The sundering of that Wall, and the irruption of the unclean hordes into our world, must needs occur at the end of time…but ere then, it is the job of the initiate to keep the evil hosts at bay."
A call to action for our times, if ever there has been one.