PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 Rewriting the Promethean Theft of Fire in L’Autre Monde; ou Les États et Empires de la Lune M ICHAEL T AORMINA (H UNTER C OLLEGE , CUNY) Songez à librement vivre. In the televised program Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, which aired in the United States on PBS in the late 80s, the great scholar of mythology observes that stories of fire-theft are found in cultures all over the globe. Campbell offers two accounts for such ubiquity. Either these old stories spread through encounters between cultures, or they sprang up sui generis, independently of one another, from the psychological needs of the human mind. The inspiration for Campbell’s scholarship, following in the footsteps of Bastian and Jung, has been not the differences but the striking resemblances of stories that come from vastly different historical periods and unrelated cultures. Campbell calls such stories myths, and he takes myths to be inflections of the powers of life as mediated through human experience. In traditional societies, myths used to have important functions (pedagogical, ethical, cosmological, and mystical), and they often addressed questions which used to surpass (and sometimes still do) our human capacities for understanding. One question addressed by the myth of firetheft, Campbell explains, is the origin of the colorful markings of birds and other animals. In many cultures, he recounts, blue jay steals the fire and passes it on in a relay race to the various animals: their colorful markings result from being burned. While this particular version of the story may be unfamiliar to readers of Western European literature, we are well acquainted with the use of story to explain the causes of natural phenomena. The Bible and Ovid’s Metamorphoses are full of etiological myths. Such stories used to serve sociological and cosmological functions, telling us why things are the way they are and how we fit into the scheme of things. Of course, the other Michael Taormina PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 56 question which the fire-myth attempts to address, more difficult and perhaps unanswerable, is that of the origin of human civilization itself. The tragedy by Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (fifth century BCE), deals with this issue directly. Yet Campbell insists that this explanatory power of myth is not really what myth-making is about. Rather, what such stories really aim at is the transformation of consciousness: a person has been thinking in one way, and then a new stage of human experience requires that he or she think in another way. This dramatic reorientation of thinking can be moral and/ or intellectual. Typically, the mythological hero or heroine undergoes this transformation by going through trials or by experiencing revelations. In traditional societies, members of the community used to undergo these transformative acts by participating in the rites and rituals that enacted their foundational myths. “It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward,” writes Campbell, “to conduct people across difficult thresholds of transformation that demand a change in the patterns not only of conscious but also of unconscious life” (Thousand Faces 6-7). For Campbell, the real story of every myth is the human story, or some threshold of it encountered in the arc of our lives. He reads myths as if they were clues to the potentialities of a human life. They can tell us where we’ve been, what is up ahead, and most important, how to proceed. “Looking back at what had promised to be our own unique, unpredictable, and dangerous adventure,” writes Campbell, “all we find in the end is such a series of standard metamorphoses as men and women have undergone in every quarter of the world, in all recorded centuries, and under every odd disguise of civilization” (Thousand Faces 8). The myriad stories of mythology invite and enable individuals to join their own unique story to the larger human story. It is into such a mythological context that Cyrano de Bergerac invites the reader to place L’Autre Monde, ou Les États et Empires de la Lune (1657) (which I will refer to as Voyage dans la lune). Not only does Cyrano authorize the reader to do so, but the narrator’s journey to the moon and back clearly follows the basic pattern of all mythological adventures. Cyrano’s second novel, Les États et Empires du Soleil, the other half of Cyrano’s cosmic odyssey, will not be discussed. The reason is that both novels were rewritten and censored after the novelist’s death. However, many years later, two original manuscript copies of the Voyage dans la lune were rediscovered. No original manuscript of the second novel has survived. Les États et Empires du Soleil, consequently, has been aptly described as hermetic, as if a key to the allegory were missing. Voyage dans la lune, on the other hand, acquires an allegorical consistency when interpreted from Campbell’s mythological perspective. The novel’s hodge-podge of discourses, which continues to delight and to mystify Rewriting the Promethean Theft of Fire in Les États et Empires de la Lune PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 57 readers, has traditionally been placed within one of two frameworks: 1. the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, at once heliocentric, atomist and mechanist; or 2. the exploration of the new world, whose many travel narratives inspired both fiction and nonfiction. In addition to drawing from these types of writing, Cyrano clearly borrows from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the creation story of Genesis, ancient philosophy, esoteric literature, and the comic novels of his contemporaries. But the advantage gained from reading Voyage dans la lune from a mythological perspective is that a deeper purpose emerges alongside the delightful mischief and mayhem. It may be that this little novel was intended as a vehicle to propel a seventeenth-century reader’s psyche beyond the confines of established values, authoritarian politics, and dogmatic opinion. The novel is certainly a tall tale mixed with social satire, but it is also a timeless blueprint of the quest of the human spirit. In Hero with a Thousand Faces, drawing on a vast trove of myths and stories told all over the world, Campbell works out the basic underlying pattern of the hero’s adventure. In its simplest form, the sequence consists of departure, fulfillment, and return. So constant are the segments that constitute the pattern that, if one of them is missing from a given story, “it is bound to be somehow or other implied” (Thousand Faces 30). But numerous variants occur within each segment. For instance, the hero can resist the call to undertake his journey (Moses). Similarly, during the stage of trials, he can willingly submit to them (Telemachus), be killed or destroyed by them (Phaethon, Icarus), or attempt to skip them altogether (Prometheus). As for the return, he may need to be rescued or resurrected (Osiris, Christ), and sometimes the gift for humanity he brings back with him vanishes or remains incommunicable (Orpheus). Whatever the specific configuration of the pattern, as Campbell observes to Bill Moyers, the hero always gets the adventure he is ready for. Some heroes perform physical deeds, while others accomplish a spiritual feat. The physical hero saves a life, or gives his own life for the sake of another. The spiritual hero learns or discovers a way to experience some intellectual or mystical truth beyond the range of the normal human experience - and returns to communicate it. “A hero properly,” says Campbell in the interview with Bill Moyers, “is someone who has given his life to something or someone bigger than himself, or other than himself.” Prometheus fits this definition of a hero. He both performs a physical deed and imparts a spiritual gift to humankind. Similarly, albeit in a comic mode, Cyrano’s hero, Dyrcona, travels to the moon, undergoes an adventure of the spirit beyond the normal range of human experience, and comes back to tell of it. Cyrano clearly signals that the myth of Prometheus is the controlling archetype for the narrative of the journey to the moon. In the novel’s opening sequence, the narrator invokes Prometheus as a precedent to justify the Michael Taormina PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 58 decision to undertake such a bold adventure: “Prométhée fut bien autrefois au ciel dérober le feu” (32). Later, having arrived on the moon with a crashlanding in the Garden of Eden, the narrator learns that Adam and Prometheus are one and the same: “les Hébreux l’ont connu sous le nom d’Adam, et les idolâtres sous le nom de Prométhée, que leurs poètes feignirent avoir dérobé le feu au ciel, à cause de ses descendants qu’il engendra pourvus d’une âme aussi parfaite que celle dont Dieu l’avait rempli” (45). The reader is further informed that Adam-Prometheus, wanting to escape any further retribution by his Creator, levitated by sheer power of imagination from the moon to the earth (which was his moon). Cyrano deftly reconciles the Judeo-Christian and the pagan traditions. That this outlandish story is intended to have an allegorical meaning we know from the narrator’s own gloss of Prometheus-Adam’s fire-theft. The fire is Prometheus-Adam’s perfect soul, and the theft is its conveyance to earth. Thus the act of stealing fire (“dérober le feu”) is a metaphor. This figural meaning of fire-theft dates from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, where the Prometheus says: “I hunted out the secret spring of fire / that filled the narthex stem, which when revealed / became the teacher of each craft to men” (109-111); “I found them witless and gave them the use of their wits and made them masters of their minds” (442). Here the issue is not the colorful markings of animals, nor even the origins of human civilization through the technological mastery of fire by our ancestors. Prometheus is speaking of the ignition of thought: it is the fire of the mind that tames physical fire and leads to the birth of the arts and sciences. The bestowal of fire-thought on human beings by Prometheus is figured as fire-theft because it is a transgression, that is to say, a movement from the divine realm onto the earthly plane, where it spreads like a conflagration, repeating the vertical leap but now along a horizontal axis. That the benefactor of human kind must be punished for this transgression speaks to the powerful and dangerous potentialities unleashed by the ignition of thought. The dangerous power of this event resides in its repetition - not like an echo, but like a celebration which multiplies the transgression to the nth power. This complex comparison, in which the narrator’s journey to the moon is likened to Prometheus-Adam’s journey to his moon (our earth), establishes an implicit analogy, such that the less familiar, more obscure story being told by Cyrano de Bergerac becomes more clear and intelligible through the better known stories of Prometheus and Adam. But Cyrano’s Voyage dans la lune, despite transgressions of moral and intellectual orthodoxy, never approaches tragedy. As Patrick Dandrey has observed, Cyrano’s satire, in exposing the relative and arbitrary nature of human certainty, maintained with such dogmatic authority by the powers-that-be, fuels a wild and joyful adventure Rewriting the Promethean Theft of Fire in Les États et Empires de la Lune PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 59 that dramatizes the pursuit of freedom in thought and expression (Dandrey 28-29). To rewrite the theme of fire-theft in a comic mode, Cyrano turns many elements of the myth upside down. Whereas one might expect the hero of such an adventure to display bold initiative, strong commitment, and resolute action, Dyrcona does almost nothing for himself while on the moon. Granted, he initiates his own journey, but events have a way of transpiring contrary to, or despite, his best intentions. First the hero gets himself kicked out of the Garden of Eden most unceremoniously, then finds himself imprisoned on the moon for being a two-legged animal. The lively and free-thinking Dyrcona also becomes strangely passive as he witnesses the inverted social customs of the moon people and listens to their philosophers’ paradoxical arguments. The daemon of Socrates is the active principle in Cyrano’s story. He rescues Dyrcona, protects him, and has to explain nearly everything to him. If Dyrcona steals any fire of the mind or ignites any thought, it is quite by accident. Any revelations that he brings back to earth for the benefit of humankind are the fruit of a comedy of errors. Even the narrator’s final admonition - that God has done humanity a service by confining that bunch of atheists to the moon - is hilariously ironic, since Dyrcona’s telling of his story has let the cat out of the bag. Having established that the narrator of Voyage dans la lune is a comic avatar of Prometheus-Adam, it remains to be seen how Cyrano’s narrative conforms to the pattern of the hero’s adventure and the ways in which it departs from it. The novel’s organization could not be more simple. The first part of Voyage dans la lune, just a few pages really, recounts the narrator’s inspiration for going to the moon, his failed first attempt (which lands him in New France), and his accidental lift-off into space. The novel’s remaining bulk is devoted to the narrator’s voyage through space, to his arrival on the moon, and then to the sights, customs, and conversations Dyrcona experiences there. This lunar sojourn is broken down into three parts: 1. his brief stay in the Garden of Eden; 2. his life as a caged animal, performing tricks like a trained monkey for the lunar court and public, during which time he has two crucial encounters, one with the daemon of Socrates, the other with the Spaniard, Gonzales, also a trained pet; with this imprisonment culminating in an inquisitorial-like tribunal to determine the species of our hero; and 3. the dinner party for philosophers held in a private estate to which the daemon of Socrates takes him, after saving him from lunar justice. Five short paragraphs return the narrator to earth and bring the story to a close. There is not much action. The novel could almost be reduced to its many philosophical dialogues and paradoxical speeches, and these have indeed preoccupied critics, as they are full of controversial and speculative opinions, as well as social satire ranging from the outrageous to the merely whimsical. But what elevates this Michael Taormina PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 60 assemblage of speeches and descriptions to the level of myth is the arrangement of specific elements of the plot, since they repeat the basic pattern of the mythological adventure. In the novel’s opening scene, there are two signs that Dyrcona gets the adventure that he is ready for. As he and his friends walk home on a moonlit night, each takes turns showing off his wit by inventing poetic conceits for the moon. Dyrcona’s proposal that “la lune est un monde comme celui-ci, à qui le nôtre sert de lune” (31) is met with guffaws of derision. This conceit, however, which, like nearly all conceits of the seventeenth century, is a commonplace, shifts the ground of the conversation. It is not just a metaphor, but an idea, a problem that presupposes a new concept of space, a new model of the universe, and the loss of the privileged position of the earth within it. Dyrcona attempts to win a more favorable reception for his witty remark by appealing to the authority of Pythagoras, Epicurus, Democritus, Copernicus, and Kepler, but the company’s laughter only redoubles. This mockery shows that Dyrcona belongs to an intellectual elite. In virtue of his knowledge, he has become eligible to make the passage from an earth-centered finite universe to an infinite universe with a plurality of worlds. The other sign that Dyrcona gets the adventure he is ready for is the quasi-miraculous event that greets him when he arrives home. He finds the works of Cardano open on his desk - and he did not place it there, he says. The passage which his eyes happen to fall on relates Cardano’s conversation late one evening with two elderly gentlemen from the moon who floated through the locked door of his study. Dyrcona speculates that the same pair must have put the book there for him to find. (Socrates’ daemon later confirms that it was indeed himself who spoke to Cardano.) Such other-worldly beings belong to the typical circumstances of that segment of the mythological journey that Campbell dubs the call to adventure. To give the works of Cardano so prominent a position in that call, moreover, is to place Dyrcona’s adventure under the sign of heterodoxy, that is, a collection of disparate and incompatible doctrines that fall outside officially sanctioned doxa. There are many instances of heterodoxy in the novel, but one in particular deserves mention for the surprise it springs in the narrative and for its equally surprising source. During Dyrcona’s flight to the moon, when the momentum of his crude rocket ship fails, he continues to rise without it due to an occult sympathy between the moon and the ox-marrow that he had rubbed on his skin to soothe the cuts and bruises he received following an earlier failed attempt to reach the moon. The link between marrow and moon suggest that Cyrano was familiar with Gnostic thought, as in the Apocryphon of John (second century CE), which draws from Plato’s Timaeus (73B-76E) to elaborate the occult correspondence between parts of the universe (macrocosm) and human body Rewriting the Promethean Theft of Fire in Les États et Empires de la Lune PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 61 parts (microcosm). Indeed, throughout the rest of Voyage dans la lune, the tensions between different kinds of explanation - divine providence, occult sympathies, or random accident - will never be resolved. They are simply left to coexist side by side. Dyrcona’s first stop on his attempt to reach the moon is New France. Initially, our hero fitted out a suit with numerous small vials of morning dew, so that when the sun rose, the rise of the dew would lift him into the sky. What a beautiful conceit! However, when he found himself heading toward the sun and not the moon, he decided to descend back to earth, which he did by breaking a few vials. Upon landing, he is surprised to learn that he is no longer in France. (According to Dyrcona, the earth had rotated while he was aloft - which explanation, we know now, is false, since Dyrcona would have had the same momentum as the earth - but this concept of physics was not yet available.) In a funny sequence, our would-be astronaut fatuously suffers the shock of native American Indians unaccustomed to seeing a man, outfitted in vials, whose feet float just above the ground. When a company of French soldiers accosts him, wanting to know who he is and how he got there, given that no ship had recently arrived in the harbor, Dyrcona’s mocking reply leads to his detainment for questioning by the governor of New France. As luck or providence would have it, the governor also happens to be a gentleman and an amateur of the new science. In their ensuing dialogue, Dyrcona relishes the chance to play the free-thinking gadfly, pushing the boundaries of thought with his speculative arguments regarding the rotation of the earth, heliocentrism, the infinity of space, and the plurality of worlds. What New France represents in the scheme of Campbell’s mythological journey is the jumping-off point, that place on the edge of the known universe just before the hero crosses into the unknown. While New France announces the coming estrangement of Dyrcona’s journey, it still affords social privilege and cultural dominance to Dyrcona, who displays self-centeredness and ethnocentrism in his encounter with the Indians: “j’étais le premier, à ce que je pense, qu’ils eussent jamais vu habillé de bouteilles. Et pour renverser encore toutes les interprétations qu’ils auraient pu donner à cet équipage, ils voyaient qu’en marchant je ne touchais presque point à la terre” (33). As if such a thing had even been seen anywhere by anyone! The point here is that Dyrcona will forfeit such privileges on the moon, and his self-congratulatory free-thinking will be challenged by strange customs and radical ideas. At the same time, the stop-over in New France also alerts the reader that the journey to the moon is not literal - and not just because it was physically impossible. New France is France with a degree of estrangement. It is what happens when we impose the familiar on the strange. Cyrano’s moon, it turns out, is also France, but it is France through the looking glass. It is France estranged from Michael Taormina PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 62 itself. It is what happens when the familiar becomes strange. This radical estrangement is due not to geographical distance or cultural difference, but to the movement of thought. It has often been remarked that the early modern move from an earth-centered finite universe to an infinite universe with a plurality of worlds represented a seismic shift in the ground of thought. Pascal’s libertine looks on the eternal silence of infinite space with fear and trembling. Not so Cyrano, who seems to relish this intellectual revolution as a joyous opportunity to rethink everything from the ground up: physics, language, politics, justice, warfare, sexual orientation, and the existence of God. The moon is what the earth becomes when one starts thinking - that is to say, an undiscovered world - one of many undiscovered worlds lying in wait right under our feet. If we still have any doubts about the mythological nature of this journey to the moon, Dyrcona’s crash-landing in the Garden of Eden should remove them. This is an extremely rich and evocative episode, to which I cannot really do justice here. Similar to the earthly paradise with which we are familiar, it is a locus amoenus guarded by celestial beings. However, whereas the moon and the earth represent reversed worlds in the phenomenal universe, this lunar Eden appears to embody the mythical place where the pairs of opposites are born. In particular, two descriptions of the landscape - 1. the towering oaks whose prodigious height makes it impossible to tell whether they reach into the firmament or hang from it; and 2. the fountain whose reflecting pool makes it impossible to tell whether it is day or night, whether the stars of the firmament are above or below - suggest that this garden is the womb of the universe, the cleft where the phenomenal world plunges into the noumenal world. This Eden, like the other, also contains the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. The whole episode is fraught with potential transgressions. Dyrcona seems somewhat out of place in a sacred grove where only Adam, Eve, Elijah, Enoch, and Saint John the Evangelist have ever set foot; indeed, his very presence casts the lunar Garden of Eden in a heterodoxical light. This Eden, though guarded by angels and inhabited by Elijah and Enoch, two figures of Old Testament righteousness, appears to partake of a self-creating nature endowed with animating power. Furthermore, according to Elijah, all who have traveled between the earth and the moon have done so not by abrogating the laws of nature, but by some natural cause. Dyrcona and the all-knowing Elijah seem to agree that if God is at work in the universe, He works through secondary, natural causes. Yet when Dyrcona mocks the apocryphal story of Saint John the Evangelist’s bodily assumption to heaven - a pure miracle and a point of Catholic dogma - Elijah becomes filled with righteous anger, denounces Dyrcona as an atheist, and expels him from the Rewriting the Promethean Theft of Fire in Les États et Empires de la Lune PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 63 lunar Eden without letting him taste the apple of the Tree of Knowledge. Of course, Dyrcona manages to steal a small one on his way out - except his pangs of hunger cause him confuse it with other pieces of fruit stored in his pockets, and so he bites into the miraculous fruit without peeling it. As Elijah had warned, eating the rind causes ignorance. Only the meat of the apple confers omniscience. Immediately, Dyrcona’s vision of Eden vanishes. This expulsion repeats the Biblical exile in a comic mode. First, the exile to the moon seems an inappropriate punishment for someone accused of being an atheist. Not only does Elijah’s denunciation seem excessive and reactionary, it strikes a false note when the reader compares Dyrcona’s irreverence toward the Catholic dogma of assumption to the aggressive denials of the existence of God by the young man on the moon, Dyrcona’s double, whom our hero will meet much later at the dinner party on the private estate. Second, what has our hero really lost by this exile? His partial ignorance, or partial enlightenment, has not changed: “je me suis figuré,” he remarks, “que cette écorce ne m’avait pas tout à fait abruti, à cause que mes dents la traversèrent et sentirent un peu du jeu de dedans, dont l’énergie avait dissipé les malignités de la pelure” (54). And third, our hero’s exile to the moon releases him into a world where he is a two-legged “freak,” where he will encounter wild and whimsical customs, and where he will have to contend with doctrines far more radical than his own. Indeed, he will find himself defending Aristotelian physics, falling back on dogmatic appeals to authority, and poking fun at the unfamiliar customs of the moon. Having shot to the bulls-eye of his quest and landing at the source of all being, Dyrcona is not able to take advantage of this “miraculous accident,” as he calls it. At this stage, the mythological adventure misfires: the hero does not unlock the liferenewing forces of the transcendent middle beyond opposites. Instead, he darts to heaven, steals the apple with the spark of omniscience, but flips to the other side of the mirror, the reverse of the world he knows. One would expect the moon’s intellectual freedom to be a dream for a libertine like Dyrcona. The daemon of Socrates says that “les hommes y sont amateurs de la vérité, qu’on n’y voit point de pédants, que les philosophes ne se laissent persuader qu’à la raison, et que l’autorité d’un savant, ni le plus grand nombre, ne l’emportent point sur l’opinion d’un batteur en grange [grain-thresher], si le batteur en grange raisonne aussi fortement. Bref, en ce pays, on ne compte pour insensés que les sophistes et les orateurs” (57-58). Truly the opposite of what we know on earth! The Spaniard, Gonzales, has the same high praise: “ce qui l’avait véritablement obligé de courir toute la terre, et enfin de l’abandonner pour la lune, était qu’il n’avait pas pu trouver un seul pays où l’imagination même fût en liberté” (66). The moon is the only country for a patriot of free intellectual inquiry like Gonzales. Michael Taormina PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 64 But the moon turns out to be a nightmare. Its renowned intellectual freedom is attended by all too familiar vices: lunar anthropocentrism and the intolerance of difference. “Il y a du vulgaire ici comme là qui ne peut souffrir la pensée des choses où il n’est point accoutumé,” explains Socrates’ daemon, “Mais sachez qu’on ne vous traite qu’à la pareille, et que si quelqu’un de cette terre avait monté dans la vôtre, avec la hardiesse de se dire homme, vos docteurs le feraient étouffer comme un monstre ou comme un singe possédé par le Diable” (55). Small consolation for Dyrcona, who has been caged and put on a leash to perform monkey tricks for the public because he is smaller, walks on only two limbs, and is blond. Meanwhile, the authorities inform the royal court that the female (Dyrcona) of the queen’s “petit animal” (Gonzales) has been discovered (i.e. the blond must be the female to the male brunette). Socrates’ daemon will come to the rescue, but not before our beleaguered hero will have stirred up a theological controversy in learning to speak moon language - “le clergé fut contraint de faire publier un arrêt, par lequel on défendait de croire que j’eusse de la raison” (74) - and will subsequently appear before a tribunal assembled to determine whether he belongs to the same species as the moon people. Although Dyrcona enjoys tremendous intellectual freedom on the moon, as compared to earth, discussing, for instance, the sensible basis of all knowledge with Socrates’s daemon, or debating the existence of a vacuum with Gonzales, paradoxically his lunar sojourn renders him helpless, even passive. Socrates’ daemon does everything and arranges everything for him, transferring Dyrcona from the mountebank’s cage to the royal cage at court (where Dyrcona, it is implied, mates with Gonzales), and winning the prisoner’s freedom with brilliant arguments before the lunar tribunal. When the judges question Dyrcona directly about his philosophy, he no longer has any bold theories to offer. In this reversed world, our hero is for the most part reduced to the figure of a passive Socratic interlocutor, a straw man who asks questions and listens to the wild theses, paradoxical speeches, and burlesque sociology of his lunar counterparts. Real transgressions of thought are occurring all around him, and yet he seems unable to partake fully, falling back on the dogma with which he is most familiar. Dyrcona has come to resemble one of those classical figures of mythology separated by a curse from their deepest desire: Tantalus, whose burning thirst cannot be quenched; Midas, whose greed is thwarted by his golden touch; or Prometheus, immobilized by his transgression. Perhaps Dyrcona’s passivity and helplessness, analogous to the immobility of Prometheus, are the punishment for his transgression in the lunar Eden. The daemon of Socrates, Dyrcona’s tutor and protector, is the one who treats both hero and reader to the transgressive arguments that invert the established values and officially sanctioned opinions of seventeenth-century Rewriting the Promethean Theft of Fire in Les États et Empires de la Lune PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 65 France. For example, though God-fearing and restrained, the daemon presents clever arguments that turn the patriarchy upside down. The occasion for this paradoxical speech is the dinner party at the private estate. Dyrcona expresses astonishment at the deep bows of reverence made to the young man by the other guests who are his elders. On the moon, the old show honor and deference to the young, and fathers obey their children! Opposing vitality to experience, the daemon reasons a fortiori that the qualities most necessary for governance - strength, judgment, imagination, enterprise and boldness - are most vigorous and active in the young, and so it is only right that children who have attained the age of reason be given authority over their elders. The other argument supporting the custom that children owe their fathers nothing rests on a more radical premise, namely that souls transmigrate from body to body: “Vous ne tenez, ô mon fils, que le corps de votre architecte mortel; votre âme part des cieux, qu’il pouvait engainer [to sheathe] dans un autre fourreau [scabbard]. Votre père serait possible né votre fils comme vous êtes né le sien” (85). In other words, a father is merely a secondary cause and so can take no real credit for the birth of his children. The soul being immortal, God ultimately decides which soul passes into what body and when. The soul and the body belong to two distinct orders of reality. Although the daemon argues that the phenomenal order, the order of nature, is too frequently shortchanged, too narrowly circumscribed by earthlings who classify as “spiritual” or “nonexistent” whatever their scant five senses fail to perceive, he nonetheless clearly believes that the noumenal order is above or behind it, infusing it with its own inscrutable causality. Most transgressive of all is the young man at the dinner party, the socalled “son of our host.” This lunar free-thinker shares the daemon’s atomist theory of matter but develops far different consequences from it. Radical even by moon standards, the young man aggressively denies the immortality of the soul, miracles, the resurrection, and the existence of God. This lunar libertine is perhaps the most important character of all those encountered on the moon because he is clearly Dyrcona’s doppelganger. We know this not only because he is an atheist, an accusation for which Dyrcona was himself expelled from the garden. But also, the daemon’s description of the young man sounds strangely familiar: “ce serait un second Socrate s’il pouvait régler ses lumières et ne point étouffer dans le vice les grâces dont Dieu continuellement le visite, et ne plus affecter l’impiété par ostentation” (82). Dyrcona displays the same brilliance and the same vanity. Indeed, this description of the young man fits a whole category of young aristocrats in France, known as “esprits forts,” whom Molière satirizes a decade later in Dom Juan (1665), and whom Pascal targets in Les Pensées (1670). As we know, Pascal’s unfinished masterpiece of Christian apologetics aims not at believers but at unbelievers, trying to shake Michael Taormina PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 66 the confidence which young libertines have in themselves and their freethinking. Similarly, persuaded of his own intellectual brilliance and animated by vanity, Dyrcona finds himself drawn to the young man. Although Socrates’ daemon invites Dyrcona to consult him whenever the young man’s arguments might shake Dyrcona’s faith - and he must do so on one occasion - our hero becomes more and more entangled in the young man’s philosophical nets in the attempt to “convertir à notre religion une âme si fort élevée au-dessus du vulgaire” (109). In their final dialogue, during which the two free-thinkers debate the existence of God, Dyrcona presents an argument that we now call Pascal’s wager: “s’il y a un Dieu, outre qu’en ne le croyant pas, vous vous serez mécompté, vous aurez désobéi au précepte qui commande d’en croire; et s’il n’y en a point, vous n’en serez pas mieux que nous” (115). The young man refutes this logical bind by using two lines of argument. First, if God does not exist, he says, “vous et moi serons à deux de jeu” (115). The expression “à deux de jeu” comes from the lexicon of jeu de paume, the forerunner of racket ball and squash. It indicates a tie score, as when in tennis one says “deuce.” Figuratively, it is said of two people who have done equal harm to one another, as in “we’re even,” or of two people who suffer equal mistreatment, as in “we’re in the same boat.” However, such an outcome, or so the young man implies, will in fact be better for the unbeliever who during his lifetime refuses the moral and intellectual shackles of religion while gaining no advantage for it after death. The second line of argument is far more transgressive. If God does exist, says the young man, it is God who has failed to give us any means of knowing him. “Si la créance de Dieu nous était si nécessaire, si elle nous importait de l’éternité, Dieu lui-même ne nous en aurait-il pas infus à tous des lumières aussi claires que le soleil qui ne se cache à personne? ” (115-116). If this is true, disbelief cannot be a sin, since to sin one must do so knowingly or willingly. Furthermore, to claim that one must search out a God who has hidden himself from human beings is to construct an incoherent image of the divinity. God would have to be either stupid or malicious, says the young man, “vu que si ç’a été par la force de mon génie que je l’ai connu, c’est lui qui mérite et non pas moi, d’autant qu’il pouvait me donner une âme ou des organes imbéciles qui me l’auraient fait méconnaître. Et si, au contraire, il m’eût donné un esprit incapable de le comprendre, ce n’aurait pas été ma faute, mais la sienne, puisqu’il pouvait m’en donner un si vif que je l’eusse compris” (116). So, the implication here is that the unbeliever is no worse off than the believer, since God is responsible for this state of affairs. Dyrcona is recoiling in horror at these arguments when he notices for the first time some disturbing features in the young man’s appearance: “ses yeux Rewriting the Promethean Theft of Fire in Les États et Empires de la Lune PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 67 étaient petits et enfoncés, le teint basané, la bouche grande, le menton velu, les ongles noirs” (116). Dyrcona takes these demonic features to be signs of the young man’s damnation and thinks he may even be the Antichrist. Despite his admiration for his intellect, and the friendship he feels for him, Dyrcona loses his composure in the heat of argument, threatening him with damnation. Just then, there is a knock at the door. A dark, hairy man enters, takes the young man by the waist, and heads for the chimney - a folkloric portal between the hearth and the heavens. Moved by pity for the young man’s fate, Dyrcona tries to wrest him from the grip of the “Ethiopian,” but this maneuver succeeds only in sweeping Dyrcona up the chimney with the devils. Dyrcona thinks he is going to hell, but in fact falls back to earth, just missing the fiery Etna on reentry and landing on a heather-covered hill somewhere in Italy. The other two, apparently, went up in smoke! Dyrcona’s journey on the other side of the mirror is over. This hero’s return, however, is ironic. The obscure, demonic powers of the universe have sent our hero back a changed man - attested by the fact that all the dogs in the town where he is taken in by peasants surround him and bark at him - but he does not grasp the significance of his adventure. The transformation of consciousness represented by the loss an earth-centered finite universe, and with it, self-directed thinking, and by the attainment an infinite universe with a plurality of worlds, and with it, other-directed thinking, simply does not happen. In fact, our hero draws an ironic conclusion: “J’admirai mille fois la providence de Dieu, qui avait reculé ces hommes, naturellement impies, en un lieu où ils ne pussent corrompre ses bien-aimés et les avait punis de leur orgueil en les abandonnant à leur propre suffisance” (118). This irony is twofold: 1) Not only does our hero revert to the dogmatic certainties of his original belief system, but 2) his publication of his journey to the moon defeats God’s sequester of the impious lunatics. One could argue that Cyrano, the author, is covering his tracks by having his narrator renounce his freethinking ways. But what reader could not see past such a trick? On the contrary, the novel’s ironic ending sets up Dyrcona as a counter-example. The gift, or mythological boon, which the hero confers on human kind upon his return is accomplished in spite of Dyrcona’s intentions. In imagination we have taken the journey with Dyrcona. We have also returned to earth. But it no longer looks the same. The reader’s exposure to the reversed world of the moon, its inverted customs and transgressive doctrines, has opened a breach in the ideological fabric of authority and the self-centered complacency of our beliefs, through which may now flow the revivifying powers of thought and “the wild and careless, the inexhaustible joy of life” (Thousand Faces 21). Everyone dies - but while we live, which of us knows how to live freely? The Michael Taormina PFSCL XLVIII, 94 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0004 68 question which spurred Dyrcona to visit the moon - “pourquoi non? ” - cries out to us, rekindling the fires of our minds. Works Consulted B ERGERAC , Cyrano de. Voyage dans la lune. Paris: Flammarion, 1970. C AMPBELL , Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato, California, New World Library, third edition, 2008. D ANDREY , Patrick. “L’Autre Monde de Cyrano, ou le sens de la ‘mythosophie.’” Un autre dix-septième siècle: mélanges en l’honneur de Jean Serroy. Paris, Champion, 2013: 27-40. D ARMON , Jean-Charles. “L’Imagination de l’espace entre argumentation philosophique et fiction: de Gassendi à Cyrano.” Études Littéraires 34.1-2 (Hiver 2002): 217-240. G IGLIONI , Guido. “Girolamo [Geronimo] Cardano”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http: / / plato.stanford.edu/ archives/ sum2013/ entries/ cardano/ >. J OUSLIN , Olivier. “Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 268: Seventeenth-Century French Writers. Ed. by Françoise Jaouën. New York, Thomson Gale, 2003: 103-113.