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Presents
Volume 2038

Tarzan and Nemone of the City of Gold
by
Cristian Sildan

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Forever Tarzan by Paul Privitera
Staggering symbolism this story has! And when I think I was reluctant to read it, as I thought that later Tarzans are just commercial stuff! Idiot me.

I'll endeavour to analyze this novel from the symbolistic point of view, and this essay is going to be really serious. Until now, I was like 40% serious, 50% playing and 10% joking. Now I'm gonna be 90% serious. Because, everyone must realize that, it's a crime to handle a symbol in an inappropriate way. It can be downright satanic. You can polarize negatively the souls of your listeners/readers, by opening to them the universe of the abyssal truths, which are so delicate and fragile, and then poison their depths with wrong connotations.

So I will start by asking for forgiveness, since I'm a bit rusty after years of non-use of my symbolistic knowledge, and ask to be pardoned for my omissions and errors. Please take all that follows with a certain distance and a grain of salt, and do your own research if you want to go deeper.

Pal-ul-Don too is very symbolistic, I realize that only now, after being smitten by Nemone. I still ask myself how I could miss that, after all we have a cargo of a clue, after all Jad-Bal-Ja is Tarzan's alter-ego and he's named in connection with Pal-ul-Don.

But there the symbolism is less conspicuous than here, so when I analyze that it will need more preparation.

I've always known ERB was a bit of a symbolist, it was part of his A-Lur, sorry, allure for me. But not to this level. I'll explain myself as follows, very shortly:

There are good authors – poets, scenario-writers or novelists – who know how to describe aspects of life, or to invent attractive fantasies. Here go Hemingway, Proust, Tolstoi or as fantaisists, Dumas or Jules Verne or Asimov. One good, another exceptional, as it goes. Kafka is somewhat intermediary, and others like him too. And then there are true authors, those who know the true art is to encrypt the ideas and truths in symbols and archetypes. You have hundreds, if not thousands, of good authors in this world, during its history. But you only have a small hundred of the second category, for the whole human history. Take France for example, with all its admirable literature, I haven't succeeded to discover one single “true” author among its thousands of good and exceptional ones – except for the author of the Round Table, but this one obviously worked for the Norman dynasty of Britain. Another that touched the theme would be Perrault, but he was just a compilation-doer, and by compilating the old folk-tales he mostly messed them up by trying to make them palatable to the Parisian salons. Rimbaud had some ideas about the poet as medium, but that's about it. Britain is much more fortunate, with Shakespeare, Coleridge, Lewis and others. Ancient Greeks and Hindus were extremely fortunate also, as a matter of fact they were THE Fortunate Ones. My place is very fortunate too, but that's another matter. Anyway, America has ERB, and he's among the best. Melville and Poe are big too.

No joke here, nor am I some adolescent who sees gods in all the grunges and gangstas. I can see well that, literary speaking, ERB is just "good enough for literature in general, very good for pulp". But being a "true" author doesn't have anything to do with your analytical-psychological depth, and style, and language. Linguistically, Clark Ashton Smith is a giant compared to ERB. But ERB is much better than him at codifying eternal images, having to do with the deep abysses of the collective and personal conscious and unconscious, into new and attractive intrigues, often with very formative and positive role. It's enough to see how his creation withstood the apparition of the superheroes and space opera.

I'm one of these who think there is a primordial tradition, easy to observe for those who read the world's myths and poems – the "true" ones – and this legacy is really there and is not just some mumbo-jumbo of metaphors invented by some bored Atlanteans. That there is depth and truth in these images is easily verified by how deeply they move souls, once heard. Any idea expressed through these formulas "carves" the spirit of the one who assimilated it. And few individuals, few artists can handle this Tradition and take the images from it and put them into their creations. But these who succeed, they create new archetypes. Their creations become fixed into the community's psyche. Because their work has touched the innermost chords of the public's soul. And when other, apparently much better literary works, just fade away in time, their "mediocre" creations surprisingly defy time.

You must read Rene Guenon if you want to delve into that. But, don't take even him too seriously…

Enough with that, for now. So here we go. Please fasten your seat belt … sorry, your rope to the branch…

Location first.

Abyssinia … ERB said Abyssinia? The "country of the Sun-burned"? The projection of Hyperborea under the Tropics? Because this is what it is, you know. And the white hidden peoples there, of Masonic mystery … ethiopian means the one directly under the sun, where the light is perfectly perpendicular to the earth, meaning place where sky meets earth. But it's also the Pole … Masonic literature has a lot of jumbling of white and black when it comes to Ethiopia. Now they are a primeval white race, now they are black and ancestors of the Egyptians, now they are mixed like the Yin and Yang. It's all metaphorical, bearing little resemblance to any real thing. Being sun-burned in the symbolic register means being divinely illuminated, inspired, and being black means being yet undefined but rich in potential, and being white means being an initial archetype, a pure root-abstraction.

Remember Andromeda with her whiteness that made Thetys the sea-foam jealous? She was queen of Ethiopia, as it is said. And Flavius Josephus said Ethiopia was in Gaza … As we see, the Pole North, the Equator and the country of the Sun (Syria) were all the same in the ancient times…

Tarzan's purpose of being there is not important, nor do we know when it happens, and besides we know squat about his family and friends at that time….hmmmm. As by coincidence, except for Jad-Bal-Ja, himself present only at distance - until the end… it's almost as to say "once upon a time, in an enchanted land", to me … No other Tarzan novel was that atemporal, and that u-topian: we see no names for the places either, except the names the natives give to their enchanted lands, which fact doesn't constitute a clarification. And of course, we know the Nile is close and that we are in the Kaffa region, but these are very much a mythical reference as well, at least for the far-away reader to whom they evoke charms and legends more than real spots. The other places through which Tarzan passes might be imaginary too, but they are more like "fantasy" geography, they have a certain consistency, because they are better described. Not so the land of Athne and Cathne. That one is "sacred" geography.

This story is not really about having an adventure, it gets more and more obviously so with the novel unfolding. It's about archetypally described self-building, self-maturing.

Tarzan passes through bandits and beasts and mazes of rock, to arrive to the hidden valley illuminated by the volcano – myth of the quest and of the labyrinth revisited here, common as it is to so many stories old and new. We see no well-kept gate though, and no personally defined Guard, this time.

Oh, but Tarzan's alter-ego, Jad-Bal-Ja, does at the same time, as by coincidence, meet a guard of the land: the bull he slays with its calf; that's the Minotaur and the sacrifice of the innocent, while the cow escapes – this is all a glimpse of the purpose of the whole story, the masculine will is asserted while both the undefined force of chaos (symbolized by the bull, as in many mythologies), and the bad feminine initiative, are negated.

Plus, Tarzan finds alone the road, just with a bit of precision from Valthor – one more indication that he's already an archetype, he's searching parts of himself, but not his own essence – that one is already more than well defined.

Valthor and his ivory valley is in fact a big personification of Tarzan himself, to be put in opposition with the valley of gold and its Queen – Rod Hunziker (who did some archetypal analysis on Tarzan too, in the ERB fanfic site) is totally right, what we see here is the battle between two archetypes.

Another possible image is that, if I'm not wrong, the valley of Cathne is "vertical" on the map, North-South, whereas Athne is horizontal, East-West. The one who masters the four directions (verticality and horizontality of his own psyche) becomes both King and Priest, meaning he finds the royal equilibrium between his spirit and his soul. Tarzan has no adventure in the horizontal valley – this is the part of his physical and intellectual side, which doesn't need much improvement or testing. His whole ordeal goes on in the vertical valley which is the projection of his vertical dimension, his soul.

When I fall upon symbols I have a tendency to push the analysis very far and this time I can't resist this urge: Athne and Cathne seem like a bit of a riddle to me: Athne just might come from “Athman” – “self” in Sanskrit – whereas Cathne is Athman with a "C" in front of it. I say the C is really a "K", the symbolic letter of the force and of the warrior. What if Cathne is the "spirit of the warrior"? The two valleys intersect as an inverted L but, since they really are two spiritual dimensions, they are really infinite and therefore, they form not an L but a cross. With a volcano as the center. Heavy image. The cross is, besides its many meanings given by Christianism, the eternal symbol of equilibrium between the contrary tendencies, and the point where the contradictions are solved. In this case, in the crater of Xarator, where the North-South meets the East-West just in the middle of the Down Below-Up Above. The cauldron of the Transmutation. The "X" of Xarator is also a cross by the way, the cross of sensible qualities. Together with the big cross it forms the 8-pointed star of the planetary cycle – one more image of the eternal destiny and of transformation. The 12-pointed star is the full Zodiac, it's pure destiny, but the 8-pointed one has to do with alchemy.

Ouf! After reading that, any of you can say I'm just raving and making things up. And I may well, if the novel wasn't so obviously symbolistic. But with the richness of meanings that hit me in the face, meanings of a quality not encountered by me in any Western literature since my lecture of Coleridge or Meyrink, prompt me to explore these possibilities. And procedures like these above are frequent in initiatic literature. Was ERB conscious of what he was doing? Maybe yes maybe not, maybe partially, but one thing is certain, he was deeply inspired when he was doing it.

The city of Cathne has a golden bridge, and this is obviously initiatic too, for a bridge of gold is totally impossible physically, and it's clearly said it's made of gold not just gilded – it's one more indication that we talk archetypes not facts. The bridge in cases like that is like the rainbow with the treasure buried at its base by Lugh, the gate to other levels of consciousness, and the door to initiations that can prove dangerous; the statues of lions guarding it bear witness too, as of the whole "narrow gate of dangers" character of the thing.

Tarzan is the King of the whole Opus, and here the King is brought to the next stage of his existence by a river, swollen by the "storm god", yes, yes…

The Storm god is best manifested through the THUNDERBOLT - which is the way ERB found, without being too openly fantastic, to make Tarzan reach the City of Gold by… riding the dragon, for the thunderbolt is the celestial dragon – as the river by the way, since it too is secreted by the celestial waters, a projection of them upon earth. Dragons are fire and sky but also, under certain circumstances, the personification of humidity.

The river is not to be fought but to take advantage of it, until it really wants to destroy you and so you must trust it just to let it take you to the place you, in fact, seek; the river is the destiny, bringing the soul to the place of its testing – the palace of the princess of course, where else?

The city has gold first and foremost, but ivory too; this mixing is another clue of the whole story as archetypal metaphor of the discovery of the hidden King – in this case, Tarzan's inner equilibrium. Statues of kings and gods were many of them chryselephantine … gold is the pure self, it is seen as "divine blood buried within the earth" and symbolizing what's divine in one's soul; and ivory is purest bone, sending the thought to the marrow, essence, structure – is this a hint to the "visualization of the skeleton", common to so many initiatic traditions? Maybe so, especially since Tarzan first sees Valthor, the "fragile" self of his, covered in ivory. That's first stage initiation, easily… Becoming conscious of his own fragility. After all, he's soon going to feel a bit disoriented by Nemone, isn't he?

Nemone… nemo-ne: "nobody" in Latin, nobody personified and feminized. She really is the undefined Anima of his.

The whole intrigue is hardly about a new woman. Symbolically and spiritually speaking – and it's the only reality for him since he's an archetype – Tarzan already has his Blonde Princess, as any respectable Prince does. Besides, she's named Jane, Jana, and he's John –Janus, of course. The perfect match is already united, no question about that. Because their couple is perfect, and not only because they are both athletic and brave and smoking hot, but because their names statute this perfection. In the plane of the archetypes, the "Word" is law, so if the names lied, these books would be simply satanic. Janus-Jana signifies not only the total completion, but also the interior equilibrium, the separation of the pure and impure, the placing of the soul in the right place in the sacred geography of the spirit. It's about the discovery and harmony of the inner King and Priest, also, whether in one or as a couple. As for Jack-Korak, he might draw parallels to Jacob-Israel, not so much biblically as symbolically-universaly: the primordial match has given birth to the elected people (even if for now just as a potential in one individual), and so they are a fixed item no matter what, through their descendance that has inherited their sacredness. Nemone is about the Eternal Princess, the harmony between masculine and feminine, spirit and soul, within oneself. Tarzan is a very – and eternally – conflicted individual: he's a modern archetype of the primeval. A savage English lord. A living contradiction. Maybe that's why he's so often killing lions – images of his savage self. No wonder he searches for a modus vivendi with his restless and melancholic Anima, whose pacifying would traduce into an interior archetypal hyerogamy.

Gold is the gift of the gods, and together with the massive presence of the lions, its abundance defines the kingdom of Cathne. The lion is the King as it's well known, but also the Sun God. The whole construction of the picture we have of Athne-Cathne sends us to the God-King imagery.

Tarzan sees lions both free to roam on the streets and pulling chariots – what double anomaly! They seem to be held in great esteem but they are really castrated: the king multiplied as a pure collection of heirlooms. Only by stuffing them and putting their desiccated corpses into display in a museum would the outrage be greater. Traditionalists and symbolists regard the museums as pure satanic stuff, where living culture is set to display into dead heaps of broken, frozen memories. Truly precious things can have a value as collections, but only if they are displayed in their manor/temple of origin, by their rightful owners and for a selected audience, and in some ritualistic way. Same with the lions: as gadgets they are worthless, Tarzan doesn't even start to think about Nemone’s temptation to offer him 100 of them. In fact by drowning him among perverted gifts, Nemone really wanted to make him a display as well. The soul-Nemone wants to make the spirit-Tarzan a slave of its whims and ever-multiplying narcissistic emotions.

M'duze is Medusa, of course – the one who freezes you to stone if you don't go further along your path of life , and she is also known as Kali the black, Baba Yaga, Hecate, Morrigan… you name her. If it's Medusa then it's also the Dark Sun, the Dark side of the Celestial Lion in another words. She and Belthar are one thing, especially since Belthar has a white tuft in his mane: it's the way of saying Yin and Yang, many legends and rituals speak of animals marked by the supernatural by a certain spot, or a tuft; but in this particular case we have one of the worst and most infra-terranean aspects of the Yin.

Maybe I'm overdoing this but M'duze looks like a negation of the "Parque" – the Fate goddess of the Greeks – whom instead of threading the thread of destiny upon the spindle she just measures the present – frozen present – with her stick hitting the floor like a sinister tik-tak. The Parque should be seen in the temple, or Heaven. M’duze therefore , as anti-Parque, would necessarily need a more infernal setting, so is her positioning in the quite cozy throne room wrongly depicted? (Remember we talk “real” literature here, and symbols might have many forms but they must make very rigorous sense.) No, not really since… isn't the throne room a temple after all? Belthar is the true god of the story, not Thoos. The temple of the town is the one for everybody's eyes, the place of the old impotent god, which has only the purpose of diverting the worship of the masses and of keeping buried the true Monarch. It's also the place where the true king is hidden; like a museum it is a depository of vehicles of spiritual concepts that are really dead or expecting to die. Its three stories, by the way, are they the three stages of initiation? Maybe …  anyway, as long as Nemone is queen, her throne room is the true, if perverted, temple. The people really worship her, the religious fervor being converted into fascination for her. As for her, she worships herself and her misery – and therefore she annulates the love that comes to her by the worship. Her divine manifestation is Saturn, the Prince of Melancholy and Time the Destroyer – the Dark Sun, signified by M’duze, and also by Belthar. Of course she's mad and moody all the time. M’duze is the bad sacrality.Belthar is the bad authority. Nemone is the bad soul that perverted the good intellect. Negative trinity of inverted aspects of the archetypal anti-ruler. The throne room is the antitemple of the antitrinity. M’duze is very well placed there as anti-Parque.

Speaking of M’duze, is Nemone her daughter? Genetically this is almost impossible, but we are in an archetypal setting here, and in this setting we keep having hints of duality: in the Hindu mythology we have composite black-white entities like Krishnarjuna, who signify the community of purpose and spirit of different energies and planes of existence, and the inferior and superior converging, one by elevating himself and the other by mercifully descending to meet the first, in order to fulfill together some mission - Arjuna being a king and Krishna a god, and both having to fight at Kurukshetra. But here it's a sort of a negative Krishnarjuna we have, since we talk an interaction between a soul and a downright malefic state of mind, with the consequence of freezing the existence of the whole valley.

Nemone kills the girls that look more beautiful – and by this aspect of the Evil Queen she just perfects and confirms the filiation of her symbolism: the stepmother of Snow-White is the self-reflecting/self-absorbing saturnian sun too, and the seven dwarves are the seven planets of destiny, the seven alchemic metals etc. And it's one more proof on how informed/inspired ERB was on these things.

She seems to say 'I'm goddess" … he answers "I'm Tarzan" – I'm the archetype, you're an aspect of me, I'm the spirit which has no problem and it's crystal clear, you are my conflicted self, you belong to me, not the opposite. Yes, Tarzan is fascinated by her but doesn't tolerate the Shadow in his life – on all that, I have no more to add to the ideas of Rod Hunziker. Anyway it is exactly as the noble soul is supposed to react to the provocation of the temptation of the self-etalating hysteria of his wronged Anima.

Lions roaming free are seen as image of the corrupted authority of the nobility, and not as image of the nobility itself - yes, true again. And we must add to that, the relation Nemone-Belthar is true too: by being so self-absorbed, she really got assimilated by the dark sun, and him by her …

One very deep and well conceived part of the novel, among the most profound parts I'd say, is the scene when Nemone kills M'duze – apparently the gesture is very welcome, one waits eagerly for the happy end and the redemption of Nemone …, but then, it's the opposite that happens: only afterwards, is she really showing her craziness – why? Well, it's one of these scenes of anthology, like Dorian stabbing his portrait, or like Snow White's step mom if she had eaten her mirror … the poor soul, in fact, ingested its shadow. Had she really wanted redemption, she would have enlisted the aid of Tarzan – the well positioned Self of the story. Acting on the symbolic plane, she should have tied M'duze and Belthar together with Tarzan's rope and then drown the whole package into the river, and by doing so, accomplishing her ritual purification. We'll delve in future essays on the symbolism of the weapons of Tarzan …

Once the hag and the lion were dispatched – in fact her own shadowy parts being "baptized" – she and Tarzan should obligatorily have had wild sex – in harmony with their common animalistic side. That is, if Tarzan was not already mated - otherwise things would've rather been made unclear by such an act, and that is anathema to the symbolical plane; symbolically it would've been even desirable for them to have intercourse if she was the first to appear into his life; but Jane is already in the central place of it and Tarzan, on his side and despite having elements of them, is not the "trickster" or the "dyonisiac" type of hero, not predominantly anyway – so the sex part just wouldn't fit with his structure. Had Tarzan been a more "cheap" archetype, as Conan the Barbarian for example, then it's the seducing – even the rape – and then even the subsequent abandon of Nemone that would have been mandatory … As we can see, it's far from being only a question of ERB's society and mores and time. This symbolistic business is almost as rigorous as mathematics, we must keep that in our minds all the time when we analyze works like this one.

The rival of Nemone is named Doria – the divine gift, the golden one maybe; she seems to be similar to her, maybe because she's the light manifestation of her; their relation is not one of real rivalry, but a mirror-image to show what Nemone could be if redeemed.

Her rival is to be thrown into the volcano – her light side is to bear the bad use of the union between earthly fire and sky – more indication of bad polarity of Nemone; usually mountain and cave are places of elevation, volcanoes places of energizing, sacrally speaking: Fuji is the most sacred mountain in Japan, Mauna Kea in Hawaii still has apparitions of its goddess, as some say … here, the good aspect of Nemone is to be cremated. Her perversion is about to defile the middle of the symbolic cross of the story. Boy, Tarzan's soul is really on the brink to be messed up big time! Fortunately though, he – his spirit – is always in control of the situation. Finally it's the lover of Nemone – Erot, maybe the parody of Eros? – who gets to be roasted. Yes the faux love tried to kill the real soul but got burned by the focal point of the equilibred energies of the self, under the careful and discrete doing of the Spirit.

Seems like the valley of the warrior spirit has a mine to the south and the volcano to the north – the underworld and the sky are united by the actions of Tarzan as he moves along this spiritual plane, "the field of lions", his savage tendencies, to restore the inner order. Significantly enough, the mine is called "of the Rising Sun", one more clue that we talk high initiation here, not just pulp. The netherworld is bathed by the Sun – through the gold (and the name too, for the readers thick enough not to see it), both mine and volcano really are connected to the sky, the elevated plane.

The road to the volcano is similar to a last stage of a state of mind, as the kingdom is Nemone's domain: there's no more place to go, she reached the climax and still didn't change for good; it is after the volcano episode that Tarzan gets totally rid of his fascination; in the old tales the moment when the fairies/wise men upon dragon reach the elevation/volcano, they can only go to the sky afterwards. Yes, what am I saying here, Tarzan doesn't ride any dragon when he goes to Xarator. But he did ride the Dragon-storm-and-river, and since the whole action is in his soul, it means everything is atemporal, never-existing and perpetual at the same time like all spiritual things, until it all ends and settles as the new state of mind.

Doria is hidden in the gold mine of the Rising Sun – again a clue on how everything in the novel is connected and has a participation in making sense of the whole work. Of course the good part of the Anima, the loving and noble side of it, is hidden in the recesses of the soul, and has light in it.

Tarzan is to be executed for rejecting the fascination for Nemone – the spirit refuses to bow to the emotive part of the soul – and he receives a golden collar before the execution. Would this be something similar to the halo of the saints? And maybe there's more to that: the intellect, the spirit and the body form a trinity and so does he, geometrically speaking, with the nobles holding him by the chains … Is this the proof he succeeded in remaking the royal inner trinity good? Maybe so. I'm convinced ERB was good enough to pull that on.

His lion kills Belthar – his will triumphs definitively upon its tendencies of destructive sensuousness and anarchy – and the Sun tramples over Saturn.

Here in a traditional story he could have been killed and then his lion would have resurrected him – but ERB was writing for the 20th century public, which was not that metaphysic and metaphorical, as a matter of fact the Americans are known as pragmatic. Maybe it's a reason why ERB adopted this brisk and pranky style of his – it adheres more to the nature of his public. Anyway Tarzan was the winner since his final refusal of Nemone, since she was only his dark side. The death of her and Belthar was in fact pure formality. Jad-bal-ja is his volition, and he could only have been there, this is no coincidence at all. It's like saying that if lightning strikes you when you hold a big iron bar, up on a hill,  during a big storm, is coincidence.

Alextar becomes king – and has a weird name: it just might come from alex (greek) and tara (irish) – "defender of the elevated place"; he's interned in the temple, under Thoos – he's the hidden monarch, sleeping like Arthur in Avalon, the inner mature self and also the best manifestation of the ethos of a community; he may seem quite helpless, but not as a symbol, for the symbol is powerful as long as it is embodied in someone; arthur too was imprisoned and freed by merlin if I remember well.

Order is reestablished. The kingdom of Cathne might be symbolic but even if the main intrigue is not that happy ended, order must be made and has been made, the spirit has won one more step toward perfection.

Nemone is buried by Tarzan, the soul sheds its parasitic emotions and the spirit reigns; still it's sad – the shadow is rejected, but not by integrating the conflicting emotions into self, but by destroying them: there's a deeply felt regret of loss of big potentiality, no internal fulfillment is really found. There's no contemplation of the water monsters like for the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge. Tarzan burries in fact a hint of plenitude.

"She has found happiness at last" – that's another weird thing to say, after all she died by her own hand, miserable and desperate, so according to all mythologies and religions such an end hardly takes one to Heaven… unless this is a new hint of interior reintegration of what was desequilibred inside oneself. Still, it's the happiness of resignation, the conflicted nature is to be felt through the rest of the life.

And now a bit of geography, economy and demography

As I've already shown, this is impossible and totally imaginary geography – it's not even attempted to seem real.

Clothes are not described except for the ivory items, nor is the architectural style: of course, it's all in Tarzan's soul.

There's just no way one can raise "herds" of elephants in a valley 300 sq km big, and even less so herds of lions. Nor is there a mine so rich, nor is it possible to have such thriving community in such a small setting; and we don't see any agriculture…

Anyway, just for the sake of the image, the town seems 4 sq km big, around 30000 individuals might live inside it, it is divided into 3 parts, maybe 100-150 noble families exist, judging by the approximation that around 100-150 residences fit the 1 sq mi of the Noble neighborhood, since the area also contains the palace and bearing in mind that the residences have rather big gardens.
This analysis can make us discover new meanings in the symbolic register: for example there are many golden domes around, or the buildings are said to be low, so what are the domes for? It seems like another absurdity, no one builds big domes on low buildings. Yes but, the dome is the maternal womb, the Athanor, and the divine cupola of the secret garden, the sunny pleasure dome of Coleridge's Kubla Khan…

Yep, and with this, that's about it folks. I hope I've messed up your senses pretty well.

What more could I say?

Oh yeah… Gnothi seauton!

Cristian Sildan

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Interior illustrations by J. Allen St. John