A Look at H.D.’s Trilogy Part 3 by Gabriel Hartley

 Aaron’s Rod  Hermes’s Staff (Caduceus)  Christ’s Cross (Rood)  The bombed and charred tree now flowering in the old garden square FLOWERING = RESURRECTION

The Homeric hymn to Hermes relates how Hermes offered his lyre fashioned from a tortoise shell as compensation for the cattle he stole from his half brother Apollo. Apollo in return gave Hermes the caduceus as a gesture of friendship. The association with the serpent thus connects Hermes to Apollo, as later the serpent was associated with Asclepius, the "son of Apollo". The association of Apollo with the serpent is a continuation of the older Indo-European dragon-slayer motif. Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (1913) pointed out that the serpent as an attribute of both Hermes and Asclepius is a variant of the "pre-historic semi-chthonic serpent hero known at Delphi as Python", who in classical mythology is slain by Apollo. CADUCEUS

 Jesus and three of his apostles, Peter, James and John, go to a mountain (the Mount of Transfiguration) to pray. On the mountain, Jesus begins to shine with bright rays of light. Then the prophets Moses and Elijah appear next to him and he speaks with them. Jesus is then called "Son" by a voice in the sky, assumed to be God the Father, as in the Baptism of Jesus. TRANSFIGURATION

In Christian teachings, the Transfiguration is a pivotal moment, and the setting on the mountain is presented as the point where human nature meets God: the meeting place for the temporal and the eternal, with Jesus himself as the connecting point, acting as the bridge between heaven and earth. SIGNIFICANCE OF TRANSFIGURATION

The term magi refers to the priestly caste of Zoroastrianism. As part of their religion, these priests paid particular attention to the stars and gained an international reputation for astrology, which was at that time highly regarded as a science. Their religious practices and use of astrology caused derivatives of the term Magi to be applied to the occult in general and led to the English term magic, although Zoroastrianism was in fact strongly opposed to sorcery. The King James Version translates the term as wise men, the same translation is applied to the wise men led by Daniel of earlier Hebrew Scriptures (Daniel 2:48). The same word is given as sorcerer and sorcery when describing "Elymas the sorcerer" in Acts 13:6–11, and Simon Magus, considered a heretic by the early Church, in Acts 8:9– 13. THE THREE MAGI

Myrrh is the aromatic resin of a number of small, thorny tree species of the genus Commiphora, which is an essential oil termed an oleoresin. Myrrh resin is a natural gum. It has been used throughout history as a perfume, incense and medicine. It can also be ingested by mixing it with wine. MYRRH

THE BIBLICAL MARYS

 The religious serves in the poem to tell us something about the nature of the poetic experience; as we come to recognize shifting depths of myth or of mystic doctrine in the images of the poem we begin to feel the world as H.D. does, as a ground of such depth. Life itself is revealed to the poet as to us in light—the immediate flash—of a particular reality, where metaphor, multiple reference, rime and melody, quicken and organize time and the spatial world in which the reality exists.  — Robert Duncan, The HD Book THE RELIGIOUS DEPTH OF THE POEM

"So, for the poet, for the man already transformed in making some work of art, for the carpenter, the meaning of the crucifixion scene is not the unhappiness of a lynching party nor the mere suffering of a passion, but it belongs to a poem in the actual world, the fulfillment of a prophecy or story-form. There is in the man and in the god a perfume and a radiance, a flower that portends; and in the passions of the two in One upon the cross or tree, we see the ripeness of what the story demands, the mystery of the whole thing in which nails, blood, and the cry, the Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani are designed to fit, to charge with meaning to the utmost degree, the crisis of the poem enacted." — Robert Duncan, The HD Book