Classical Images of Edgar Rice Burroughs
Part I by Alan Hanson
Tarzan and John Carter are the literary blood brothers
of Odysseus, and Edgar Rice Burroughs is the incarnation of Homer. So it
is that Erling B. Holtsmark would have us believe. In his two books, “Tarzan
and Tradition” (1981) and “Edgar Rice Burroughs” (1986), Professor
Holtsmark contends that Burroughs patterned, plotted, and packaged his
stories in the format of classical mythology. To the average Burroughs
fan, the good professor’s arguments range from convincing to far-fetched
to unfathomable.
Though Holtsmark’s discussion may be beyond the comprehension
(not to mention the interest) of the blue collar Burroughs reader, even
those who read ERB only for escape purposes, must realize that the author
did indeed have extensive knowledge of Greek mythology. His works are riddled
with dozens of references to “Herculean strength,” Stygian darkness,” “Titantic
struggles,” and the like. These images, and there are several hundred of
them scattered throughout ERB’s works, are indicative of wide-ranging classical
knowledge. References are there to the mythological story of creation;
to the many Greek gods, both the greater and the lesser; to the often told
stories of love and adventure; to the great heroes before the Trojan War
and on down through the time of Homer and the wanderings of Odysseus.
Leaving plotting and patterns to Professor Holtsmark,
it is the purpose here to look at Edgar Rice Burroughs’ use of specific
mythological terms and characters in creating images in his stories. ERB
used these images usually to make comparisons and to give color to his
settings. These images will be surveyed in mythological order, from the
dawn of creation down to the time of Odysseus.
Creation
The mythological story of creation consists of many stories,
some of which contradict others. Two of the characters from the early days
most well known to the Greeks were Prometheus, one of man’s greatest benefactors,
and Pandora, one of his greatest curses. Although he was a Titan, Prometheus
sided with Zeus and his brothers in their war of supremacy with the Titans
led by Cronus. After their victory, Zeus and the other gods of Olympus
delegated to Prometheus the task of creating mankind. Prometheus had little
to work with, however, for his short-sighted brother, Epimetheus, had already
created animals and given them all the best gifts—strength, swiftness,
courage, cunning, wings, and fur to protect them from the cold. To make
man superior, however, Prometheus gave him an upright shape like the gods
and brought him a torch lit at the sun to provide fire, a protection far
better than any animal had.
In “Lost on Venus,” Burroughs made a rather extended
reference to this benefactor of man. Wandering lost in a wild land, Carson
Napier realized that his greatest handicap to survival was his lack of
Prometheus’ gift. He sought to get it by futilely rubbing two sticks together.
When Duare asked the frustrated Carson if he were going to give up, he
responded, “Of course not. It’s like playing golf. Most people never learn
to play it, but very few give up trying. I shall probably continue my search
for fire until death overtakes me or Prometheus descends on Venus as he
did on Earth.” Duare asked, “What is golf and who is Prometheus?” Carson
replied, “Golf is a mental disorder and Prometheus is a fable.” When sparks
suddenly flew to start his fire, Carson exclaimed, “I apologize to Prometheus.
He is no fable.”
Zeus was so upset that Prometheus had treated mankind
so well that he swore to get revenge on humans. He sent a great evil for
man in the form of a lovely and sly maiden named Pandora, from who sprang
the race of women. The gods presented Pandora with a box but forbade her
to open it. Of course, her curiosity caused her to lift the lid, and out
flew plagues, sorrow and misery for mankind. The box was not entirely a
curse, however, for from it also emerged Hope, which would be man’s only
comfort in times of misfortune.
In “The Moon Maid,” Julian 3rd must have felt both
misery and hope as his off-course ship approached the moon, for at that
time he made reference to the myth of Pandora. “I presumed that one of
the greatest thrills that we experienced in this adventure, that was to
prove a veritable Pandora’s box of thrills, was when we commenced to creep
past the edge of the Moon and our eyes beheld for the first time that upon
which no other human eyes had ever rest upon—portions of the two-fifths
of the Moon’s surface which is invisible from the Earth.”
Cimmerian Darkness
The Greeks believed that the newly created mankind emerged
on the Earth forged in the shape of a round disc, around which flowed the
river Ocean. On the farther bank of Ocean was a misty, cloud-shrouded land
hardly ever visited. Here lived the Cimmerians, who knew only perpetual
night, for the sun never shone upon their land. From these melancholy people,
Burroughs drew the term “Cimmerian darkness.” It is a term more descriptive
of a gloomy mood that it is indicative of intense darkness. For instance,
in “Tarzan the Untamed,” after Xujans captured Tarzan, Bertha Kircher,
and Lt. Percy Smith-Oldwick, ERB used the term to reflect the captives’
state of mind as they were led through the forest. “Once beneath the over-arching
trees all was again Cimmerian darkness, nor was the gloom relieved until
the sun finally rose beyond the eastern cliffs.”
Another gloomy captive was James Blake in “Tarzan,
Lord of the Jungle.” As he was being led through a rocky tunnel toward
an unknown destination, the depression brought on by the absence of sunlight
set upon him. “Even the haunting mystery of the long tunnel failed to overcome
the monotony of its unchanging walls that slipped silently into the torch’s
dim ken for a brief instant and as silently back into the Cimmerian oblivion
behind to make place for more walls invaryingly identical.
Still another captive who knew the gloom of Cimmerian
darkness was John Carter. In “The Gods of Mars,” during the monthly
rites of Issus in the depths of Omen, the warlord toppled into a pit behind
the throne of Issus. A polished chute deposited him in a dimly lit room
far below the arena above, and there an angry Issus addressed him from
outside heavy bars. “Rash mortal! You shall pay the awful penalty for your
blasphemy in this secret cell. Here you shall lie alone and in darkness
with the carcass of your accomplice (Carthoris) festering in its rottenness
by your side, until crazed by loneliness and hunger you feed upon the crawling
maggots that were once a man.” Following this unpleasant condemnation,
John Carter told the reader, “That was all. In another instant she was
gone, and the dim light which had filled the cell faded into Cimmerian
blackness.” It is another example of Burroughs using the term “Cimmerian”
to signify not only the absence of light, but also fading of light from
a captive’s spirit.
The Olympian Gods
The Greeks had many, many gods, but supreme among them
were the 12 great Olympians, who ruled Earth from their peaceful mountaintop
above the clouds. In the following list, the Latin name for each god is
in parentheses after the Greek name. ERB usually used the Latin versions.
The divine family included Zeus (Jupiter), the leader; his to brothers,
Poseidon (Neptune), ruler of the sea, and Hades (Pluto), king of the underworld;
their sister Hestia (Vesta), Goddess of the Hearth and Home; Hera (Juno),
Zeus’ wife; their son Ares (Mars), God of War; Athena (Minerva), Goddess
of the City; Apollo (Apollo), God of Light and Truth; Aphrodite (Venus),
Goddess of Love; Hermes (Mercury), messenger of the gods; Artemis (Diana),
the huntress; and Hephaestus (Vulcan), the God of Fire.
In his fiction, Edgar Rice Burroughs mentioned half of
the Olympians by name. Tarzan was compared in appearance to two of them.
In “Tarzan the Invincible,” Nkima “rode upon the shoulder of a bronzed
Apollo of the forest.” Again, in “Tarzan and the City of Gold,”
Tarzan is described as, “tall, magnificently proportioned, muscled more
like Apollo than like Hercules.” However, the best description of Tarzan
in mythological terms, appears in “Tarzan and the Golden Lion.”
“Not as the muscles of the blacksmith or the professional strong man are
the muscles of Tarzan of the Apes, but rather as those of Mercury or Apollo,
so symmetrically balanced were their proportions, suggesting only the great
strength that lay in them. Trained to speed and agility were they as well
as to strength, and thus, clothing as they did his giant frame, they imparted
to him the appearance of a demi-god.” A demi-god is literally the offspring
of a god and a mortal, but more likely ERB was trying to suggest here that
the ape-man had an aura of god-like qualities in his appearance.
Other than these descriptions of Tarzan, ERB’s references
to
the Olympian gods is confined to his two novels set in Roman societies—“Tarzan
and the Lost Empire” and “I Am a Barbarian.” In the Tarzan novel,
only Jupiter is mentioned, and then only in exclamations, such as “By Jupiter,”
“May Jupiter strike me dead,” and If you were the son of Jupiter himself.”
In “I Am a Barbarian,” more substantial images of the gods appear.
To justify his decision to marry his own sister, the mad Caligula cited
the precedent set by the leader of all the gods. “It is only fitting that
it should be thus,” explained Caligula, “since a god is to wed a goddess,
even as the great Jupiter wed his sister, Juno; and who can deny the divinity
of the Julian family?” Later, Caligula, who imagined himself no less divine
than the Olympians, took to communicating directly with the mighty god.
“Often he pretended he was conversing with Jupiter, and, after speaking
at length, he would cock his head on one side and listen to the god’s reply,
pursing his lips and nodding his head in simulation of complete understanding.
At such times he would often get into violent arguments with Jupiter, ending
up by threatening the god with annihilation.”
While never carrying through with his threat against Jupiter,
Caligula did claim a battlefield victory over one of the great god’s brothers.
To the bewilderment of his admirals, Caligula had them line up all the
ships of their fleets to form a bridge. When the road was completed, Caligula,
“rode across it in full armor, followed by troops with their standards,
proclaiming that he had conquered an enemy—Neptune!” Later, on the coast
of Gaul, Caligula ordered his army to gather the spoils of war. When his
generals seemed confused, the emperor screamed, “The shells! The shells!
The treasures of Neptune, who has defied me!”
Ironically, Caligula was also closely aligned with Venus,
the Goddess of Love. The Julian line, from which Caligula sprang, took
great pride in the fact that their family was supposed to have been descended
directly from the Goddess of Love. However, the slave Britannicus spoke
critically of this relationship. “But why that have been anything to boast
of, I do not know. Had I been descended from Venus, I should have kept
the matter very quiet. She had been a notoriously loose woman, appalling
promiscuous.” Britannicus may have been thinking primarily of Venus’ affair
with Mars as described in the “Odyssey.” Her husband, Vulcan, caught them
together in his own bed and trapped them there with a net until Poseidon
promised to compensate him for the wrong that his unfaithful wife had done
him.
Lesser Gods and Mortals
Beneath the great Olympians were dozens of lesser gods,
such as Demeter, Dionysus, Eros, Pan, and Iris. With one exception, Burroughs
chose to ignore these lesser gods in his fiction. The one exception was
Morpheus, the son of the God of Sleep. The abode of Sleep was near the
dark land of the Cimmerians, and the only sound heard in his valley was
the gentle flowing of the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. When
the gods wished to communicate with a human, they would contact the God
of Sleep, who would rouse and send for his son Morpheus to manipulate mortal
dreams.
Burroughs used the image of Morpheus a couple of times.
At the beginning of Part 2 of “The Mad King,” Barney Custer heard
a conservation going on in a room next to his at a Serbian inn. “Barney
paid only the slightest attention to the meaning of the words that fell
upon his ears, until, like a bomb, a sentence broke through his sleepy
faculties, banishing Morpheus upon the instant,” reported ERB. What Barney
heard was Peter of Blentz and others plotting the demise of King Leopold
of Lutha. On another occasion, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the narrator (as opposed
to the author), might have suspected he was entertaining Morpheus. It happened
on the night that Carson Napier’s vision startled the author out of a sound
sleep at his Tarzana home in “Pirates of Venus.” Although not prone
to hallucinations, Burroughs could not convince himself that he had dreamed
of the ghostly figure and the words she spoke. “In fact I was so wide awake,”
wrote Burroughs, “that it was fully an hour before I successfully wooed
Morpheus, as Victorian writers so neatly expressed it, ignoring the fact
that his sex must have made it rather embarrassing for gentlemen writers.”
On the whole, rather than the Greek Gods, ERB was more
fond of using images of the great mortal heroes, such as Jason and Hercules,
and their stories of love and adventure. One of the earliest of such stories
was of Io and Argus. The maiden Io had the misfortune of having the great
god Zeus fall in love with her, and when Zeus’ wife Hera was about to catch
them together, Zeus disguised Io by changing her into a lovely white heifer.
Hera was not fooled, however, and asked her husband to give her the heifer
as a present, a request that Zeus could not deny, since a refusal would
be admitting the affair to his wife. Hera knew that Zeus would try to retrieve
the heifer, and so she put Io under the care of Argus, the great watchman.
Argus had 100 eyes, and while many of them would close in sleep, there
were always some that remained open, making Argus a symbol of eternal vigilance.
Burroughs used this image to point out an analogous situation
in his story “The Rider.” Ordinary American Hemmington Main sought
the hand of Miss Gwendolyn Bass, daughter of multi-millionaire Abner Bass.
While the girl was willing enough, her mother was determined that her daughter’s
marriage bring a title into the family. In search of such a title, Mrs.
Bass took her daughter to Europe, where their travels finally brought them
to Demia, the capital city of Margoth. Main had followed them there, and
in Demia he met M. Kargovitch, who offered to help Main. The American explained
his predicament in mythological terms. “Gwendolyn would marry me in a minute,”
Main lamented, “if we could get her away from her mother long enough to
have the ceremony performed; but mama has Argus backed through the ropes
in the first round when it comes to watchfulness.” After Kargovitch came
up with a plan to have the marriage performed, he told Main, “Now go and
learn if you can when Argus and Io leave Demia, and the road that they
will take.” Just like Zeus’ plan to retrieve the original Io, the plan
to give Main his Io failed miserably, leaving matters worse than they had
been before.
Another love story to which Burroughs was fond of referring
is that of Adonis. His classic manly beauty wounded the hearts of many
women, even the goddess Aphrodite and the queen of the underworld Persephone.
None would possess him, however, for he was destined to die a mortal death,
gored by a wild boar. Every year the Greek girls mourned his death and
rejoiced at the blooming of his flower, the blood-red anemone.
ERB used comparisons to Adonis to symbolize perfection
of manly beauty. No strength or agility is inferred in his image, just
the perfectly cut and symmetrical physical features that women find irresistible.
In “Tanar of Pellucidar,” for example, Burroughs called Doval of
Amiocap “the Adonis of Paraht. In all Amiocap there was no handsomer youth
than Doval. Many were the girls who had avowed their love for him, but
his heart had been unmoved until he looked upon Stellara.” Unlike the original
Adonis, however, Doval was resistible, as Stellara demonstrated by encouraging
him to win the love of another.
The Adonis of Mars was the Black Pirate Xodar. He is described
as “a handsome fellow, clean limbed and powerful, with an intelligent face
and features of such exquisite chiseling that Adonis himself might have
envied him.” Another Burroughs Adonis is Jimber-Jaw, the prehistoric man
brought back to life in “The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw.” Pat Morgan,
who found the frozen cave man, used scissors and a safety razor to prepare
him to enter civilization. “The transformation had been astonishing,” recalled
Morgan, “from Man-Mountain Dean to Adonis.” In “The Son of Tarzan,”
Meriem in her thoughts envisoned Korak as a “giant Adonis of the jungle,”
but it is interesting that Tarzan was never described as an Adonis. Rather,
Burroughs chose to compare the ape-man to the less beautiful but more athletic
god Apollo.
The Underworld
The kingdom of the dead in Greek mythology was called
Hades after the god who ruled it. The way to it led across the river Ocean
and over the edge of the world. Erebus was the division of the underworld
into which the dead passed as soon as they died. There to ferry souls of
the dead across Acheron, the river of woe, to the gates of Hades was the
aged boatman Charon. Separating the underworld from the world above were
three other rivers, among them Styx, the river by which the gods swore
their unbreakable oaths.
ERB used several images of the underworld and each carried
the impression of despair and impending doom. In “Tarzan and the Leopard
Men,” Old Timer was being transported downriver by night surrounded
by 30 canoes carrying warriors of the Leopard God. The captive knew not
where he was headed, but it seemed to him like he was passing into the
mythological world of the dead. “The river itself was mysterious,” ERB
noted. “The unwonted silence of the warriors accentuated the uncanniness
of the situation. Everything combined to suggest to his imagination a company
of dead men paddling up a river of death, three hundred Charons escorting
his dead soul to Hell.” Abner Perry believed for a moment that he had actually
arrived in Hades when the prospector first broke through into Pellucidar
in “At the Earth’s Core.” As they gazed upon the unearthly landscape
of the inner world, David Innes asked Perry, “Do you think that we are
dead, and that this is heaven?” The old man pointed to the “iron mole”
and replied, “ But for that, David, I might believe that we were indeed
come to the country beyond the Styx.”
When the dead passed through Erebus, the light of life
passed forever from their souls. ERB used the term “dark as Erebus” to
bring forth the image of such a sudden ending of light faced by some of
his characters. For instance, in “Tarzan and the Forbidden City,”
D’Arnot and Helen and Brian Gregory convinced Ashairian priest Herkuff
to show them a secret trail out of Tuen-Baka. He led them far beneath the
lake down a dim corridor, where a secret, touch opened a doorway in the
lava walls. “Suddenly it swung toward him, revealing the mouth of an opening
dark as Erebus.” In “At the Earth’s Core,” Sagoths escorted their
captives David Innes and Dian as they approached a range of mountains.
“When we reached them, instead of winding across them through some high-flung
pass, we entered a mighty natural tunnel—a series of labyrinthine grottoes,
dark as Erebus.” In another example, Tarzan and Nkima sat upon the roof
of the Temple of the Leopard God in “Tarzan and the Leopard Men.”
After “Muzimo” saw what he was looking for, he “launched himself into the
foliage of a nearby tree, and as The Spirit of Nyamwegi (Nkima) followed
him the two were engulfed in the Erebusan darkness of the forest.”
Stygian Darkness
One particular reference to the underworld, that of “Stygian”
darkness, is the most common of all mythological images in the works of
ERB. “Stygian” refers a likeness to the river Styx, whose black waters
rose on the earth’s surface and flowed down into the underworld. ERB used
the image in several forms, including “Stygian blackness,” “Stygian night,”
“Stygian darkness” and “Stygian gloom.” All were used to indicate intense
and impenetrable darkness.
One place to which Burroughs often referred in terms of
“Stygian” darkness is Tarzan’s jungle. Normally, it is hard to imagine
anywhere on the open surface of the earth where darkness could be so intense,
but considering the absence of artificial light and the denseness of vegetation
ERB described, one can begin to imagine how extreme could be the darkness
along a jungle trail on a moonless night. Consider this description from
“Tarzan of the Apes.” “Here and there the brilliant rays penetrated
to earth, but for the most part they only served to accentuate the Stygian
blackness of the jungle’s depths.” Now try to visualize, feel and even
hear the darkness in this passage from “The Beasts of Tarzan.” “Through
the luxuriant, tangled vegetation of the Stygian jungle night a great lithe
body made its way sinuously and in utter silence upon its soft padded feet.”
Of course, growing up in such an environment, Tarzan’s
very survival depended on adapting to the jungle darkness. In “Jungle
Tales of Tarzan,” ERB tells the reader, “long use of his eyes in the
Stygian blackness of the jungle nights had given to the ape-man something
of the nocturnal visionary powers of the wild things.” On many occasions
in his adult life, this ability to sense through, if not see through, intense
darkness held Tarzan in good stead. For example, in “Tarzan the Terrible,”
when darkness limited the ape-man’s use of vision, his other senses kicked
in to compensate. After making the long journey to Pal-ul-don to find his
lost wife, Tarzan finally heard Jane’s voice coming from a room in the
temple of A-lur. After knocking the iron bars from a window, Tarzan entered
the room to find it plunged into darkness. Still, the ape-man was not helpless,
for his nose could work in the dark as well as in the light. “Again and
again he called (Jane’s name), groping with outstretched hands through
the Stygian blackness of the room, his nostrils assailed and his brain
tantalized by the delicate effluvia that had first assured him that his
mate had been within this very room.”
If Tarzan had the ability to function with little impairment
in “Stygian” blackness, other ERB characters found being thrown into such
darkness a harrowing experience. Take Thandar in “The Cave Girl.”
Toward the end of the story, he and Nadara had been captured by pirates
and put in separate huts. During the night Thandar saw a “huge, dark hulk
of a man” crawling into Nadara’s hut. Thandar followed to save his mate,
and the two men faced each other in a fight to the death in impenetrable
darkness. “Then commenced the struggle within the Stygian blackness of
the interior of the hut … The heavy breathing of the two rose and fell
upon the silence of the night — that and the scuffling of their feet were
the only sounds of combat … At last, with a superhuman effort, the night
prowler broke away from Thandar. For a moment silence reigned in the hut.
None of the three could see the other. For moments that seemed hours the
three stood in utter silence, endeavoring to stifle their breathing.” Thandar,
of course, eventually emerged victorious from the struggle, but the fact
remains that it was only through luck, and that, unlike with Tarzan, the
intense darkness of the situation neutralized any advantage in strength
and cunning Thandar might have had over his opponent in the daylight.
In ERB’s works there is a whole race of people who do
not function well in the intense darkness. They are the Pellucidarians.
In “Tanar of Pellucidar,” when Tanar and Jude escaped from the deep
underground cavern of the Coripies, they made their way down a tunnel in
which the absence of light was absolute. “Groping his way through the darkness
and followed closely by Jude, Tanar crept slowly through the Stygian darkness.”
After an interminable time traveling down the black corridor, the two finally
came to a cavern filled with the subdued light of phosphorescent rock.
There Jude exclaimed, “At least I shall not die in that awful darkness.”
ERB went on to explain the extent of relief in that statement. “Perhaps
that factor of their seemingly inevitable doom had weighed most heavily
upon the two Pellucidarians, for, living as these people do beneath the
brilliant rays of a perpetual noonday sun, darkness is a hideous and abhorrent
thing to them, so unaccustomed are they to it.”
~Concluded in Part II: ERBzine 6618
