the voyage |
The voyage to Ogygia was suggested to Panurge while he was discussing with Epistemon his desire to get married, and his fear of being made a cuckold. Epistemon pined for the advice of the ancient oracles, those of Jupiter in Ammon, those of Apollo in Delphi, Praenste, and elsewhere. But he feared they had all been “struck dumber than fish by the coming of our Saviour and King.” Besides, he warned, many people were deceived by the oracle's reply. Panurge claimed knowledge of an oracle that predicted in plain language what destiny the Fates have spinning: the oracle of Cronus, in the Ogygian Isles. On the westernmost of the four, Cronus lies, bound by his son Zeus to the hollow of a rock with fine golden chains. This is fit fate for Father Time, who shaved off the balls of his own father before him. Cronus is fed on ambrosia and divine nectar by the same crows that later fed the apostle Paul in the desert. Epistemon called the story of Cronus an obvious imposture, a fabulous fable, and a hoax; he vowed not to go on the journey; but go he did. Panurge’s urgency to visit the oracle was redoubled after his audience with Triboulet, the court fool of Francis I. Among the offerings which Panurge brought to Triboulet was a bottle of wine. Taking hold of it, Triboulet started to shake and his head started to wobble, which reminded Panurge of the Pythoness at Delphi, shaking her laurel branch. Without warning, the fool gave Panurge a great punch between the shoulders and a tweak on the nose - “That will signify some little fooleries my wife and I will get up to, as all newly married couples do,” thought Panurge. When Triboulet shoved the bottle back into Panurge's hand, Panurge renewed his vow to “wear spectacles on my cap and no codpiece in my breeches, until I have the Holy Bottle's answer to my question.” Panurge knew a discrete fellow, a close personal friend, who knew the place, the land, and the country where this temple and oracle were. The voyage occupies Books Four and Five. “On the tenth black night the gods brought me to the isle, Ogygia, where the fair-tressed Calypso dwells, a dread goddess.” So Odysseus recalled the seven years he spent on Ogygia, after his ship and all his comrades were lost in a sudden storm; the first thunderbolt brought the mast down on the helmsman's head. Odysseus placed the isle “far off in the sea;” Plutarch, in On the Face in the Moon, said that the island was in the vicinity of Atlantis, about five days west of Britain; Kepler, sniffing geographical clues in the Timaeus of Plato, identified Ogygia with Thule, or Greenland; Brewer locates it in Upper Egypt, near Cathay; Barbeau thinks it was fast by Canada; Panurge, who prompted the expedition there, said the group of islands was near the port of Saint-Malo; others locate Calypso’s island in the Carribean, where lampoon and doggerel echo off tin roofs in the tropical night. Every thirty years, when Cronus’s star, which we call Saturn and the Ogygians call Night Watchman, enters the sign of the Bull, the inhabitants of the fragrant isles of Ogygia send forth expeditions to settle in foreign lands. « PANTAGRUELION » |